Financiers, some who sailed near to or sometimes over the line.

In my exploration of British manufacturing, I have come across many men whose technical expertise advanced the cause of British industry. There were also those who brought a different kind of expertise and perhaps a different outlook on life.

George Hudson - the railway king

George Hudson was one of these. He became a firm friend of George Stephenson and it was said that whilst Stephenson dreamed grand schemes for linking the country by railway, George Hudson found ways to enable such schemes, leaving to Stephenson the task of bringing them into reality.

Railway mania of which Hudson was a part was in many ways like those other kinds of financial mania - the dot com bubble, the crash that led to the credit crunch. The railways created by Stephenson had fired the imagination, so much so that groups around the country were putting together schemes for their own pet project. Those people with money to spare were only too keen to invest. Hudson and Stephenson could see that this mania needed to be tamed in order for a coherent rail net-work to emerge that served the interests of the country. This didn't mean that Hudson eschewed profit, far from it, just that he saw a bigger picture.

We need to take a step back to 1800 and the birth of George to a poor Yorkshire farming family. George was placed as an apprentice to a York grocer from which he went on to run his own grocery business. He married and fortune shone, for George unexpectedly inherited a large sum from a distant relative making him one of the wealthiest men in York. He used his new status to move into establishment circles, the Church and the Tory party. With these new connections he formed a joint-stock bank, the York Union. This led him to further contacts including Glyn's bank in London which was financing railways.

Richard Lambert, in his book The Railway King, researched his many schemes. I recount one of the first for the sake of illustration. The starting point was the London to Birmingham railway and George Stephenson's ambition for this to extend north to either Lancashire or Yorkshire ending up at his home city of Newcastle. As plans developed, the route from Birmingham to Leeds was favoured and here in stepped Hudson who argued for his home of York instead of Leeds. This plan failed to gain favour, but he did manage to secure a scheme to link York to the North Midland Railway which ran from Derby to Leeds. (The London to Birmingham line was linked to Derby via Rugby.) In time the North Midland Railway enjoyed east-west traffic, but Hudson saw on the horizon potential competition from four sequential lines linking Liverpool to Hull via Leeds. He managed to take a lease on the stretch from Leeds to Selby and promptly closed it, forcing traffic through York even though it was a longer journey. Freight could be carried on to Selby and the River Trent. Hudson had hoped to secure the railway from Selby to Hull. His failure to do so led him to re-instate the previous route by water thus crushing the owners of the Selby-Hull line. It was brutal business which caused Hudson to gather pockets of stiff competition to his schemes.

One of Hudson's York contemporaries was Joseph Rowntree who questioned the presentation of annual accounts for the North Midland and York Railway, and he asked that they should be audited. At the time it was only banks and insurance companies which required an audit, so his request was dismissed.

Lambert suggests that Hudson’s attention to four related areas brought to fruition his ambitions. First of all he sponsored individual railway projects. Second, he had to hand the means to finance them and links to brokers who could buy and sell shares to influence pricing when takeovers were required. Third, he owned land in Yorkshire which gave him status, but some of which was also useful in enabling his schemes and blocking those of competitors. The fourth strand was political at both a local and Westminster level, the latter being shepherding his favoured schemes through Parliament.

None of this was illegal, but those who lost money at his hands were naturally unforgiving and his reputation ended in tatters.

However, he was responsible for 1,450 of the 5,000 miles of railway which opened in 1849. He employed many thousands of people and enabled the cheap transport of coal which fired the industrial revolution.

Ernest Terah Hooley

Hooley’s biggest claim to fame, or infamy, was the purchase of the Pneumatic Tyre Company for £3 million and its immediate floatation as the Dunlop Pneumatic Tyre Company for £5 million of which the Economist of 30 July 1898 wrote:

‘On the strength of the Dunlop deal, Mr Hooley came to be regarded as the Napoleon of Finance. At his word, Capital could be created by the million and fortunes could be made as if by a magician’s wand. There have been many successful company promoters, but Mr Hooley was to eclipse them all alike, in the variety of his schemes and in the gigantic profits provided by them not only for the great financier but that everybody connected with him.’

Ernest Terah Hooley was remarkable by any standards. He was the son of a Lacemaker from the Derbyshire town of Long Eaton. He began his career in his father’s business, but moved into stockbroking and, from there, into company promotion. In his ‘golden years’ he floated and made a personal fortune out of two other household names: Bovril and Schweppes. He died in 1947 in small house in College Street, Long Eaton. The obituaries tell of a man who rubbed shoulders with royalty and the good and the great of his time. They also tell of a man bankrupted more than once, and imprisoned for fraud, again, on more than one occasion. The Derby Daily Telegraph of 12 February 1947 said this:

‘From earning 30 shillings a week in his father’s lace mill, he became one of the most powerful financiers of the century, and so wealthy that it was said he owned £10 million worth of land in Great Britain. He owned Risley Hall in Derbyshire and, of more relevance to this story, developed Trafford Park Industrial Estate in Manchester, the first such estate in the country.’

Hooley features on the government insolvency service website as an example of a Victorian Scam.

Harry Lawson

‘He was probably no less scrupulous than many of the other remarkable characters who used other people’s money to amass vast fortunes for themselves in the City of London at the turn of the nineteenth century. On the credit side, those who worked for him said that he was both fair and generous. He was certainly not a greedy man who loved money for its own sake.’ ‘Bunty’ Scott-Moncrieff on H.J.Lawson

Described as ‘the crooked entrepreneur Harry Lawson’; the records do indeed show that he was prosecuted for fraud on at least two occasions (once along with Hooley). However, Lawson was perhaps the unlikely founder of British motor manufacturing, which, in turn, sowed the seeds for motor manufacturing in many countries of the world. I tell the story in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World of how he founded the British Daimler company in a former mill in Coventry.

Dudley Docker

I recall from a Goon Show (a BBC radio programme of the fifties and sixties) a mocking reference to a Lady Docker. I then found that Dudley Docker had master minded the creation of MetroVick. I put two and two together and came up with the wrong answer. Dudley was the father of Bernard, the socialite husband of the renowned lady, and a wholly different man.

Dudley grandfather, Thomas, had been a Moseley brass founder. His father, Ralph, was a solicitor who amassed public appointments in and around Birmingham, so much so that he was styled as ' the Lord High Everything of his district'. These were Victorians on a upward path.

Dudley was born in 1862 at his parent's home, Paxton House, 130 South Street Smethwick. He went to King Edward VI Grammar School, but didn't excel. He joined his father's office, but left two years. In 1881 he joined his elder brother, William, in a varnish business which at that time was a good trader with strong demand from the Birmingham japanning trade. Despite challenges, the business prospered and other brothers joined.

Cricket was the passion of the Docker Brothers. Ludford, known as the Local Leviathan, joined Derbyshire Cricket Club in 1881 and became captain in 1884. Dudley joined the newly created Warwickshire club, then a second division county unlike Derbyshire. Dudley played for them for a number of seasons.

Cricket opened doors, and the business prospered further. Docker Brothers became a limited company in 1899. Dudley amassed shareholdings and directorships in a number of growing Birmingham businesses. He married well. His wife Lucy came from a well connected family and she inherited a significant sum on her father's death. Dudley and Lucy had been living next to the varnish factory, but moved Coleshill House in the Chilterns which had been built by Roger Pratt during the Rule of the Commonwealth. They had one son, Bernard.

In 1902, Dudley and two brothers became directors of one of Britain biggest combines, the Metropolitan Amalgamated Carriage and Wagon company (later known by the initials of its subsequent name Metropolitan Carriage Wagon and Finance 'MCWF') and five years later that company amalgamated with the much smaller Docker Brothers. It was Dudley who had created MCWF by persuading five largely struggling wagon companies to join it in order to achieve Efficiency.

Efficiency was the Edwardian byword. The Boer War had humiliated the nation and so there was a public desire to do better, to become 'efficient'. The amalgamation confirmed that Dudley's vision of large integrated corporations was the right way forward. GKN and Stewarts & Lloyds were others. They were is stark contrast with the defensive amalgamations in the 1890 where companies joined in legal terms, but remained isolated in practice. In the event, the longstanding inefficiencies in the railway companies proved too much of a match for Dudley whose skills lay in finance and publicity.

The MCWF merger created a stir amongst the great and good of Birmingham and Dudley's reputation was riding high. By 1910, he thought he needed a boost and explored another potential merger, this time between BSA and Daimler. He had joined the BSA board in 1906 and had seen it struggle with its young motor vehicle business. He decided that it needed motor vehicle expertise which Daimler clearly had. Again, I write about this merger in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World (HBSTMW) but from a different source which identified further factors that made Daimler attractive: its significant land holding in Coventry. What both BSA and Daimler lacked were cash and management expertise. The merger was not a success. Dudley had created a financial structure that was complex, involving different classes of shares with different rights and, what proved crucial, a whole web of intracompany loans. Yet, Dudley still had more deals in his sights.

He saw that the opportunities which electrical engineering presented were being pursued by the Americans (General Electric and Westinghouse) and the Germans (Siemens and AEG), but not so the British. Here Ferranti and other British companies may have taken issue. In Dudley's view there were three options: create relationships with the Americans or Germans or join a multinational combination. What ever route, the result had to be big.

In the wake of the First World War, the Board of Vickers, the armaments company, could see that their near total commitment to war materiel made them vulnerable, and diversification was the order of the day. I wrote in HBSTMW the story of how Dudley Docker persuaded Douglas Vickers that railway rolling stock and electrical engineering were the coming industries. Vickers and MCWF both invested in the company that would become Metropolitan Vickers to buy British Westinghouse. It was a complex transaction that made Dudley a good deal of money and left Vickers with a combination they couldn't manage. I wrote of its unravelling in HBSTMW.

Dudley Docker went on to advise on international trust arrangements and to chair the first meeting of the General Committee of the Federation of British Industries which would become the CBI. He was an influencer, a deal maker, a publicist, but not a manager. That would be left to people like Ronald Weeks.

Philip Hamlyn Williams - my history of British Manufacturing

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Monday, September 14, 2026