George Hudson: The Rise and Fall of the Railway King

* The Robert Maxwell of the nineteenth century

* Victorian England ’s greatest capitalist

* Brought down by a shareholder ’s question

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.