Andrew Carnegie: The man who gave it all away

“It was a pretty horrendous journey,” explains Angus Hogg, chair of the Carnegie UK Trust.

“But apparently Andrew Carnegie was one of the few who didn’t suffer from sea-sickness on the journey, so starting to show his entrepreneurial skills, he started to pick up jobs on-board ship, which bought them little favours in terms of their accommodation and their food and so on.”

After they arrived in America, Andrew Carnegie, aged 13, started out as a bobbin boy in a textile mill, and became a telegraph operator.

Later, he was involved in the railroads, organising transport and communications during the American civil war.

He then amassed enormous wealth building up a steel business.

When he sold his Carnegie Steel Company in the early 1900s he got $480m for it and used the money for his philanthropic career.

“It came from social values rather than religious values,” says Eric Homberger, emeritus professor at the University of East Anglia.

He remembers the Carnegie library in his hometown in New Jersey, one of the few opportunities for cultural enrichment which existed there.

“Many of his (Carnegie’s) biographers trace it back to the experience of having been the son of a Scottish weaver, who absorbed from that family a set of values; a belief in democracy and a belief in a ‘society that provides opportunities for everyone’ and not just the super-rich.