George Hudson: The Rise and Fall of the Railway King

Summary

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 rather than the state, the schemes to build new lines were characterised both by their ambition and by their need for huge amounts of capital. The most ambitious of all of the individual entrepreneurs, and for long 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 they presented with both hands. 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.