Notable bearers
Other Burnses
One paragraph each, and only where there is something worth saying. The poet takes up so much room that the rest of the name gets forgotten, including a cousin of his who came to a spectacularly bad end in Kabul.
The Scots
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Robert Burns
1759 – 1796
Poet
The reason you are reading this page. An Ayrshire tenant farmer who wrote the best songs in the language, spent his last years as an excise officer in Dumfries, and died at thirty-seven owing money. Thirteen of his poems are in the library here.
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Sir Alexander Burnes
1805 – 1841
Explorer and political officer
Born in Montrose, and a kinsman of the poet: his grandfather was a brother of William Burnes. He learned Persian and Hindustani, travelled to Bokhara through country no British officer had crossed, and came home a celebrity as "Bokhara Burnes". Then he went back out as the political officer in Kabul, misjudged the mood entirely, and was hacked to death by a mob outside his own house in November 1841, in the opening act of Britain's worst nineteenth-century military disaster. He kept the old spelling of the name.
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Sir George Burns
1795 – 1890
Shipowner
A Glasgow merchant who, with Samuel Cunard and David MacIver, founded the steamship company that became the Cunard Line. If you have crossed the Atlantic on a Cunarder, a Burns helped put it there. His family later took the title Inverclyde.
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John Burns
1858 – 1943
Trade unionist and Cabinet minister
Born in Lambeth to Scottish parents, an engineer by trade and one of the leaders of the great London Dock Strike of 1889. He became the first man of working-class origin to sit in a British Cabinet. He resigned from it in 1914 rather than support the war, which cost him everything and which he never regretted.
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Robert Burns
1869 – 1941
Artist and designer
A different Robert Burns, and an unlucky name to work under. An Edinburgh painter and decorative artist, and one of the earliest Scottish exponents of Art Nouveau. Genuinely good, and permanently filed under "not that one".
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Tommy Burns
1956 – 2008
Footballer and manager
Glasgow. Played over three hundred games for Celtic, managed them, came back to coach them, and played for Scotland. Held in a kind of affection that has very little to do with trophies, which is the rarer thing in football.
The name abroad
Emigration and admiration both spread the name. Some of these are Scottish by descent and some have no connection whatsoever, and the honest version of a surname page says which is which.
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Robert Burns Woodward
1917 – 1979
Chemist
American, named after the poet by parents who had never been within three thousand miles of Ayrshire, and awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1965 for the art of synthesis. A fair measure of how far the name travelled: it became a first name.
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Ursula Burns
b. 1958
Chief executive
Raised in a housing project on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, trained as a mechanical engineer, and in 2009 became chief executive of Xerox and the first Black woman to run a Fortune 500 company. No Scottish connection at all, which is exactly the point of including her.
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Ken Burns
b. 1953
Documentary maker
American. Has done more than anyone alive to make still photographs move, and gave his name to the slow pan every video editor in the world now applies by default.
And one who was not a Burns at all
George Burns, the American comedian who lived from 1896 to 1996 and smoked cigars for about ninety of those years, was born Nathan Birnbaum on the Lower East Side. He picked the name off a coal company sign, by his own telling.
He is here because he is the most famous George Burns there has ever been, because a surname page that pretends everyone bearing the name inherited it is lying by omission, and because he would have enjoyed the footnote.
And some who are not real at all
Jack Burns is a Sector Seven agent in Bumblebee (2018), played by John Cena. He spends most of the film hunting a yellow Volkswagen, takes the word of two Decepticons over the evidence in front of him, works out his mistake, and ends by letting the Autobot go with a salute. That is a better arc than the surname usually gets on screen.
Elsewhere in the same franchise there is an entire Burns family. Chief Charlie Burns runs security on Griffin Rock in Transformers: Rescue Bots, alongside four children called Kade, Graham, Dani and Cody, a brother, Woodrow, and a grandfather, Zachary.
The two are unconnected: different continuities, different decades, and two sets of writers who each reached independently for a plain surname that sounds like it belongs to somebody dependable in a crisis. Which is roughly the argument this whole site is making. The name turns up over and over, in unrelated places, carried by people with no connection to each other. Fiction does it too.
Both are documented at greater length, and with far more patience than I could manage, on the Transformers Wiki.
Almost certainly. This is a short list kept by one person, not a reference work, and the bar for inclusion is having something interesting to say rather than having a Wikipedia page. Suggestions welcome by way of the colophon.