This was a biography of Edward Watkin, one of the great men of the Victorian era who surprisingly has received little recognition over the centuries. His achievements were numerous and included: advising on railway systems in England, Canada, Africa, and India; transforming the bankrupt Grand Trunk Railway in Canada into one of the longest railways in the world- which was probably directly responsible for the creation of Canada as a unified country as we know it today; he supported giving women the right to vote more than 60 years before it would actually happen; he was an MP, knighted, and eventually made a baronet for his actions; he helped raise money for Manchester to have parks for the average citizen to enjoy. If he is known today it is mostly as a railway baron for his incredible efforts to build railways across England and ensure their success. Or for his failures, which included trying to build a tunnel under the English Channel to France for train travel instead of ferry. Apparently this caused incredible panic about French invasion after the project began, and was eventually stopped for political reasons, not lack of feasibility.

It should have been a fascinating book about a fascinating man but the writing kept getting in the way for me. Highly repetitive, I also found it a bit choppy. Most of the book focused on his work (although never even mentioned the advising on railways in Africa and India except in lists of things he did. I still don't know if he travelled or just wrote to companies advising on their rail problems or how he might have helped) on the railways- which is what he is best known for. Little space is given to his family life until the end when we learn that apparently his wife was important to him. It was an odd push and pull of only seeing the professional man yet the author wanting us to see the man behind the professional, yet little written records remain of that man in the form of letters of journals to help find him. Some heavy editing might have helped make a leaner book where the human behind the railway baron was more visible, which I think was what the author was trying to do.

Overall, a little known story that clearly needs to be better known, and this book makes you want to look into Watkin more, but leaves you muddled on its own.

I received an ARC of this book from NeetGalley in exchange for my honest opinion

I saw a talk by Geoff Scargill to the Railway & Canal Historical Society a few week ago. It was superb. I didn’t know anything about Sir Edward Watkin (1819- 1901 – exactly the same years as Queen Victoria) but by the end of the talk, I was hooked. I can see why a Watkin Society has been formed.

Geoff’s book – Victoria’s Railway King – is as good as the talk. The book’s subtitle is Sir Edward Watkin, One of the Victorian Era’s Greatest Entrepreneurs and Visionaries. And it’s accurate. We should thank Watkin for the five-day week. He persuaded business owners to close at lunchtime on Saturday and let their staff have a half-day off – the first step towards us having Saturdays off for relaxation as well as Sundays for church-going. In his twenties, he collected the money to buy the land for the first parks in Manchester – again, to improve the world for the working classes. He started the first Channel Tunnel. Parliament ordered him to stop after two miles had been excavated. When the current tunnel was being built in the ‘80s, the new tunnel breached Watkin’s 100-year-old tunnel. It was still bone-dry, a century after being boarded up.

In 1861, Watkin went out to British North America to rescue the inefficient Grand Trunk Railway from bankruptcy and closure (while he was on sick leave from his main job as General Manager of the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway). He sacked an engineer who asked to work nights so he could carry out his own experiments during work time. The engineer’s name was Thomas Edison – you may have heard of him? The British Cabinet asked Watkin to carry out a small job on their behalf whilst he was overseas. They asked him if he could persuade the six colonies that comprised British North America to form one country/dominion. He worked his charm on the colonial governments and the result was Canada – and that was in between doing his day job, paid by the Grand Trunk.

The trouble is that Watkin could be very direct and focussed on getting stuff done. He could charm people when needed, e.g. the colonial governors of British North America, but he usually expected people to be rational intelligent grown-ups who would immediately see the benefits of his plans without him having to explain the details. Sadly, many were neither intelligent nor rational. The Government stopped Watkin’s Channel Tunnel because they were scared of French soldiers invading Britain via that route. One field marshal later admitted that if Watkins’ tunnel had been built, it would probably have shortened WWI by two years. Think how many young men would have lived and how different the twentieth century might have been.

My only objection to the book is a sad nerdy one: Watkin was chairman of eight railway companies in Britain and a director of thirteen more. (Oh, by the way, another of his achievements was to build the last main line railway into London until HS1.) I wanted to know detail about the challenges facing senior railway management in Victorian times – but there wasn’t room in the book for trivial things like that!

This is an excellent book, telling us about a big man with big ideas, who was thwarted by pygmies. Read it and weep.
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Hmm. My father is a railway enthusiast and would probably love this. I do like Victorian biographies - and the fact that so many of them wrote diaries. It is also spectacular to read how far ambition can take you even with all the challenges they had in those days - the achievements represent true grit.
But... I struggled to stay interested. There's not enough excitement - and the book does feel like a translated diary a bit too much.
Having seen the Amazon series Hell on Wheels this unfortunately, being true just cannot compete.

Such a great, informative read. Fantastic insight on parts of history previously unexplored in depth! Loved it and definitely recommend it.