William Huskisson

The contemporaries of William Huskisson would have marvelled to think that posterity would remember him only as the first man killed on a railway.

Lord Melbourne declared him the greatest practical statesman he had known, and the one who best united theory with practice. Canning pronounced him the best practical man in England. Yet his ideas had been largely formed abroad.

 

Born in Warwickshire and left motherless, he was taken to Paris in 1783, and educated by a kinsman who had been physician to the British Embassy. Huskisson eventually became a secretary at the Embassy, saw the coming of the Revolution, associated in a famous club with the French philosophers, and was present at the fall of the Bastile.

The Revolution drove Huskisson home, and for a generation he played an increasingly important part in Parliament, finally in the Cabinet as President of the Board of Trade.

One of the first Free Traders, he is thought to have lost the race with Peel by resigning out of loyalty to Canning whom he ultimately succeeded as Member for Liverpool. With a powerful, analytical mind, he had great gifts of lucid and attractive exposition, and was voted the first man who had ever made silks and shipping interesting to the House.

He fought valiantly in getting through a hostile and diehard Parliament an Act for the Manchester to Liverpool Railway, and when the Act was passed and the line opened he went, as Member for Liverpool, to the inauguration, which was attended by Peel and the Duke of Wellington.

Halfway between Liverpool and Manchester the train stopped to enable the engine to take in water. Passengers descended on to the line. Huskisson saw Wellington, from whom he had been estranged, but who now made him a friendly gesture.

Permanently lame from an accident to an ankle, and maimed by the third fracture of one of his arms, Huskisson went to the duke's carriage to shake hands with him through the window. At that moment an engine was seen coming down the next line and Huskisson was in the way. His lameness caused him to fall, and the engine passed over him.

George Stephenson picked him up and drove him, on an engine, 15 miles in 25 minutes to Eccles, where on the night of the same day, September 15, 1830, he died at the vicarage.

In that fatal train there travelled young Alfred Tennyson, who by some misunderstanding thought the wheels ran in grooves and from this error sprang his immortal lines:

 

Let the great world spin, for ever Down the ringing grooves of change.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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