Sir Charles Henry Augustus Frederick Lockhart Ross, 9th Baronet (
4 April 1872 –
29 June 1942) was an inventor and commercial entrepreneur who invented the innovative and often controversial straight-pull actioned
Ross Rifle.
Ross was born at Balnagowan Castle, the son of Sir Charles William Frederick Augustus Lockhart-Ross, 8th Baronet and his second wife, Rebecca Sophia Barnes of Tufnell Park. He inherited the
Baronetcy on the death of his father in 1893 when he was aged 11. He was educated at
Eton College and while he was there his mother's indulgences on him included "a magnificent ocean-going steam yacht, a large sailing yacht, the most superbly appointed and biggest steam launch for river use on the Thames, and a coach and four". When he came of age he instituted a lawsuit against his mother for having, during his minority, spent more of the revenues of his estates upon than she was entitled to by law or by the terms of the will. He was then at
Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1894 he rowed in the
Cambridge boat in the
Boat Race. He was known as a capable
sharpshooter and big game hunter.
Ross became a lieutenant in the 3rd Battallion, the
Seaforth Highlanders and served in the
Second Anglo-Boer War. He designed the Ross rifle, which was initially used by his own Machine Gun Battery during the Boer War. He was a captain in Lovat Scouts Yeomanry from 1904 to 1913. He was an advisor on small arms to the Canadian Government and he designed and built the plant of the West Kootenay Power and Light Co. on the
Kootenay River at Bonnington Falls. During
World War I his Ross rifle was mass-produced for the
Canadian army. Sporting rifles bearing the Ross name were also popular for a time after the First World War, as was the .280 [approximately 7 mm] Ross sporting rifle cartridge.
Ross was said to have been Britain's largest landowner, possessing Scottish lands extending to an estimated , with 3,000 tenants. At one point, in an attempt to evade United Kingdom taxation on the income from his arms manufacturing, Ross declared his Easter Ross, Scotland
estate of Balnagown to be a territory of the
United States of America, which led to his being branded an outlaw for a time by the
British Government.
Ross married thrice: first to Winifred Berens (marriage dissolved in 1897); then to Patricia Ellison, who divorced him in 1930; and, in 1938, to his American secretary
Dorothy Mercado, who inherited
Balnagown Castle on Ross's death.
Balnagown Castle, not far from the north shore of the Cromarty Firth near
Invergordon, and adjacent part of the once-extensive Ross estate of Balnagown have been owned since the 1980s by billionaire businessman and
Harrods owner
Mohamed Al-Fayed, who has restored the castle. He also underwrote the production and publication of an account of Sir Charles Ross's life and achievements, and his family's history - Von Schulenberg, Fritz :
Balnagown: Ancestral Home of the Clan Ross - A Scottish Castle Through Five Centuries (Brompton Press (formerly Harrods Publishing) 1998)
See also
