Welsh Journals

reached on those occasions would have been welcome. But it is good to know that the Lancaster-Copenhagen research project on European identities is continuing. The present volume is the second to have come from this enterprising partnership and it is to be hoped that further instalments will follow. HUGH DUNTHORNE Swansea GEORGE HUDSON: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE RAILWAY King. By Brian Bailey. Alan Sutton, Gloucester, 1995. Pp. 186. £ 16.99. The development of railways produced a number of men who became prominent in the history of Britain: names like Isambard Kingdom Brunei, Robert and George Stevenson, Thomas Brassey and Thomas Bouch and, in Wales, Thomas Savory and David Davies, Uandinam. Often these were self-made men who came from a very poor background and overcame the disadvantages of birth, background and lack of formal education to flourish in the climate of innovation and entrepreneurship which nineteenth- century Britain created. Such a man was George Hudson. The uneducated son of a Yorkshire yeoman, Hudson inherited a substantial sum of money when he was thirty years of age and used this to speculate during the period of the railway mania in England to become a millionaire and to earn the title 'the Railway King'. His skills were not in engineering, as were those of Stevenson and Brunei, but rather he had a natural talent for business, for persuading and cajoling people to invest in his ventures. He also had the plausibility of the confidence trickster. Hudson became prominent in the city of York and was instrumental in bringing the railway to that city. He was three times lord mayor of York and later became the Conservative member of Parliament for Sunderland, where he won the votes of the electors by his support for the port development. Even after his fall from grace, Hudson had endeared himself to the electors of Whitby through his railway interests to such an extent that he was elected Conservative MP for that constituency. At the height of his fame, Hudson was a millionaire. He bought properties in Yorkshire and London, entertained on a lavish scale and kept company with the aristocracy of his day. Brian Bailey traces the rise and fall of this self-made man in fascinating detail. On his way up, Hudson's rustic manners, rough speech and the eccentricities of his wife were tolerated and indulged. After his fall, he and