George Hudson
The Railway King, 1800-4871. A Study of George•Fludson and the business morals of his time. By Richard S. Lambert. (Allen and Unwin. 12s. 6d.)
WHEN a man goes too far in the way of business he is usually exposed by his competitors, handed over to justice and loudly denounced as a rogue. But there are few who are generous enough to realize the national debt to roguery, or to appreciate the -true greatness of the fraudulent in the vaster fields of industrial speculation. Fraud is a stimulus, perhaps a necessary stimulus, to gigantic enterprise ; and it is for this reason that we secretly admire the greater rogues. It is a question of magnitude. Petty robbery, without the justification of some heroic design, is abominable ; but the cruel robbery of millions, if it leads to a work of national importance—a railway or a big ship—always produces a backwash of real admiration for the robber. And if the rogue is an indispensable accessory to the practice of com- merce, he is also a most valuable accessory to the cause of virtue ; for when he is detected he not only serves as an obvious example or warning, but he also proves, by his own passionate protesting, that virtue and respectability-- in the end—were always his ideals.
Up to the time of his detection George Hudson's life was a life of magnificent rascality. He was a York draper who inherited a small fortune in 1827. A few years later, with technical advice from George Stephenson, he began to speculate in the development of railways. George Hudson never had a private life ; only a railway life. Civic honours and parliamentary honours were his, but the splendour of triumph came upon him on the platforms of rail ay stations or in the boardrooms of railway directors. Men in green uniforms carefully swept the line before the advance of his triumphal coaches ; elegant ladies attended his de- partures and arrivals ; ribbons, flags, festoons encircled the pillars of his termini. The people of York presented him with a silver centrepiece, having three superb figures-- Justice, Truth 'With a Bible, and Civic Hospitalityresting on " a very bold triangular base with the British lion," and -worth £700. Enormous dinners were eaten by ecstatic shareholders who toasted Hudson and his engineer in bumper after bumper. The energy of the man was terrific. He was always leaping into trains or out of trains, or marching over the country to plan a new line, or threatening his miser- able clerks, or pushing his ugly square face into somebody's office, or badgering a landowner. And always thinking, planning, shouting about railways, the inevitable wealth and extension of railways, until he had -worked up the whole populace into a crazy tumult of buying and selling.
And what was going on behind the scenes ? George was fraudulently diverting hundreds of thousands of pounds into his own pocket, and a few casual thousands into the pockets of his allies. He had a wonderful and effective method, not so much of cooking accounts as of neglecting them and making it almost impossible to get them straight. If anyone questioned his method, or wanted to see the accounts, he bullied or blustered in his detestably vulgar way, generally declaring that " he had not made a sixpence out of any of the lines he had bought." Many of the lines, it is true, were not slaking sixpences for anybody ; but George knew how to make money out of paper.
Hudson was a man of uncouth and repulsive manner, entirely without scruples in the use and acquisition of money, and only redeemed from total monstrosity by 'a fitful benevolence. But he was a man of tremendous practical vision. He foresaw (what few could then foresee) the ulti- mate spread of long-distance railways. His ambition, eventually realized, was to control a strategic diagonal of lines running from Newcastle to Bristol, obliging other railways to bargain for terms. That he was enterprising, even stupendously enterprising, is quite evident. Of probity he was absolutely incapable. When he paid his gulls he merely paid them out of their own diminishing capital. He issued thousands of shares to himself (without legality or authority) by a stroke of the pen, selling them again at a staggering premium. When he was exposed, when fraud after fraud was proved in all the companies under his control, when he was execrated and abandoned, his attitude was that of a man who discovers with pain the perfidy, stupidity and insolence of his fellows. At the very end of his life he was living on an annuity of £600 raised for him by a small body of charitable subscribers.
Mr. Lambert has presented the story of Hudson—the moral story of Hudson—in a most ingenious, readable and illuminating book. Railways, a grimy network of iron lines, intricately run through his narrative. Riding the railways, plotting, controlling, always cheating, is the Railway King. It is a profitable narrative ; not only an entertainment, but also a lesson and a warning. The maps of railway develop- ment, showing the control of Hudson, are admirable. The bibliography, on the other hand, is almost wholly devoid of dates and is hardly adequate.
C. E. WILLIAM'S%
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