Sir John Cargill, 1st Baronet

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Sir John Traill Cargill, 1st Baronet (10 January 1867 – 24 January 1954) was a Scottish oil businessman and leader of the Burmah Oil Company. He was born in Glasgow, the second son of David Sime Cargill, founder of Burmah Oil, and Margaret Traill, who died when he was five. He studied at Glasgow Academy (1878–1883), then went to Burma in 1890 to work in his father’s Rangoon office and returned to Glasgow in 1893.

In 1904 he became chairman of Burmah Oil and its related companies, a role he held until 1943. Through Concessions Syndicate Ltd he helped finance and equip the effort to extract oil in Persia, where oil deposits were found in 1908. A new company, Anglo-Persian Oil Company, was set up in 1909. He also chaired Scottish Oils from 1922 to 1943, and later acted as the ceremonial head while managing directors ran the businesses day to day. He was a director of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company and the Assam Oil Company, and served on the Glasgow Chamber of Commerce, as a governor of the Royal Technical College, and on the Court of the University of Glasgow.

Cargill was made a baronet, of Glasgow, in the 1920 New Year Honours. He was a Deputy Lieutenant of Glasgow and received an honorary Doctor of Laws from the University of Glasgow in 1929. In 1895 he married Mary Hope Walker Grierson; they had a daughter, Allison Hope Cargill (born 13 August 1896), but no sons, so the baronetcy ended with his death. Mary died in 1929, and in 1943 he retired to a nursing home in Edinburgh, where he died in 1954. He was buried in Hillfoot Cemetery, Glasgow. He left large bequests to the University of Glasgow and the University of Rangoon.