Francis Neilson

Francis Neilson (26 January 1867 – 13 April 1961), was an accomplished actor, playwright, stage director, political figure (Member of the British House of Commons), avid lecturer, author of more than 60 books, plays and opera librettos, and the most active leader in the Georgist movement.

Born as Francis Butters, the eldest of nine siblings, in the Claugton Road, Birkenhead, England, he was the son of a Shropshire father, Francis Turley Butters and a Scottish mother from Dundee, Isabella Neilson Hume. Several accounts explain that because of his large family, Neilson left school at the age of fourteen and moved to the United States at the age of eighteen. Nevertheless, the British Census of 1881 records the Butters' household as having 12 people, including 8 children and two maids.

During his days in Liverpool, Francis Neilson attended the Liverpool Institute for Boys. The census also records Francis Butters (Neilson's father) as a restaurant keeper. The same 1881 census records Neilson's paternal grandparents, Richard Butters (born in Market Drayton, Shropshire) and Sarah Turley (born in Snedshill, Shropshire), living at Cemetery Road in Wellington, Shropshire.

In the United States, after arriving in New York City, and paying fifteen dollars for a hansom cab ride from the docks to his guest house, Neilson worked several odd jobs which included a longshoreman, a labourer in Central Park (years later he lived at the Savoy-Plaza, overlooking that same park), and some clerical work. After meeting an African-American man surnamed Johnson, who because of his color worked as a porter despite of his college degree, Neilson became fascinated with education and at times "…went hungry to buy books". This fascination led him to Henry George, of whom he became a devoted follower.

During his stay in the United States, he married Catherine O'Gorman; they had two daughters, Isabel and Marion. Isabel Neilson, an accomplished sculptor, married Prince Hermann Carl Bernhard Ferdinand Friedrich von Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach in 1932 and became Princess Herman of Saxe-Weimar, and Marion Neilson married Captain Hugh Melville, Sam Browne's Cavalry.

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