The Rise and Fall of the Railway King
A.J Arnold and S.McCartney
The building of the railways in Britain in the nineteenth century was the greatest-ever industrial undertaking in the world to that time. Financed by private enterprise, the schemes to build new lines were characterised by their ambition and their huge need for capital. The most ambitious of all of the individual entrepreneurs, and for a long time the most successful, was George Hudson, the 'Railway King', whose establishment of York as the hub of an ever-growing network of lines brought him huge wealth and great fame
Already a wealthy businessman and Lord Mayor of York before the advent of the railways, Hudson seized the opportunity the railways presented. He became an MP, lived in style and entertained lavishly. While his early lines were profitable, later ones were not. Ever more deeply committed, at a time when accounting standards were lax, he hid inconvenient figures until brought down by a question at a shareholders' meeting in 1849. Disgraced, he fled to the Continent, his name synonymous with fraudulent capitalism at its most brazen. This new biography is the fullest examination to date of an extraordinary and complex man and his career.
'The shares are a penny, and ever so many are taken by
Rothschild and Baring,
And just as a few are allotted to you, you awake with
a shudder despairing.'
-- W. S. GILBERT
