From Lismore to Victorian Oban
Academic historian Johnny Rodger identifies McCaig as a crofter’s son from Lismore. His later career in Oban reflected the commercial and civic expansion of the town during the nineteenth century.
Business and civic life
McCaig held an unusually wide range of occupations and public roles. Sources record him as a draper, banker and bank agent, tobacco manufacturer, owner of Oban’s north pier, director of the gas works, inspector of the poor and, for a time, provost of Oban.
Designer, critic and essayist
The inscription at the monument presents McCaig as an ‘art critic, philosophical essayist and banker’. Contemporary reporting treated the design as his own. What architectural training or practical design experience he possessed is not clear from the surviving record, so it is safer to describe him as a self-taught or amateur designer than as a professionally trained architect.
How he should be remembered
McCaig’s motives combined civic provision, personal commemoration and architectural ambition. Reducing him either to an eccentric or to a straightforward philanthropist loses that complexity. The tower is best understood as a public employment project and intended civic amenity that also carried a very personal memorial purpose.