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Alterations by Walker and Beattie 1885. George James Walker was born in 1835 or 1836, the son of Robert Walker, farmer and his wife Margaret Gordon. Nothing is known of his training or early career. He was a distant relative of David Walker who was in partnership with the Aberdeen architect, civil engineer and garden designer James Forbes Beattie in the 1820s and 1830s (see separate entry for the earlier Walker & Beattie practice). George James Walker formed a second Walker & Beattie partnership in 1877, the year of the death of James Forbes Beattie, with the latter's son James Alexander Beattie. The younger Beattie had been born to James Forbes Beattie and his wife Jane Byres Copland about 1846. He seems to have been an apprentice or assistant in his father's office and at some point in or before 1874 had been taken into partnership as James F Beattie & Sons. This practice had probably continued until his father's death on 10 January 1877 at Ecclesgreig, St Cyrus, Kincardineshire when he left heritable estate of £27,833 16s 11d. It is probable that the new firm of Walker & Beattie inherited the practice of James Forbes Beattie. In about 1888 or 1889 (not 1913 as Muriel Barnett writes), the Walker & Beattie partnership was dissolved. Walker subsequently merged his practice with the essentially similar one of Thomas Duncan, perhaps the better to compete with Jenkins & Marr, another firm specialising in agricultural business which was also formed from the merger of two separate rural practices. The new partnership was known as Walker & Duncan. Beattie worked on his own thereafter until his death aged 68 on 20 February 1914. Coincidentally George James Walker died on the same day. George James Walker was the seventh-generation owner of Portlethen farm and was a fine breeder and judge of Aberdeen-Angus cattle and a crack shot, representing Scotland on more than one occasion.
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Historic Environment Records (HER)