Welsh Journals

holds of Kings George III and IV. Their son, Captain Joseph Robert Hownam, was adopted by Princess Caroline of Brunswick of Wales. He was at the siege of Copen- hagen and the blockade of Toulon and commanded a frigate at the age of 19. He eventually became secretary and equerry to the Princess of Wales. He married Martha Jane Martin.66 Marie Jeanne, wife of W. B. Buddicom, was their daughter. The Buddicoms had five children Martha Louise, wife of Edward Napier (7 children), Ellin, wife of Lennox Naper (5 children), Walter Hownam, first husband of Rose Bankes, Jeanne Caroline, wife of Frank Garnett, Harry William, who in 1892 married Sophia Digby. William Barber Buddicom was apprenticed engineer with John Phillips Mather and William Dixon, civil engineers, Liverpool, on 1 July 1831. 6fl 'W. B. Buddioom was a leading man among the first generation of railway engineers those I mean who followed the pioneers like George Stephenson, and established railway engineering as a profession. He figures less prominently in the English works on the subject than he should, because so much of his life was spent abroad. But that too is very im- portant, for Englishmen played an overwhelmingly powerful part in developing the railway in its early days on the Continent and further afield. This too has been inadequately appreciated.'67 Such is the opinion of Professor Jack Simmons, and the Penbedw Papers corroborate his view. At the end of the eighteenth century landowners had turned lordship into owner- ship, and it was this freedom to do as they pleased with their land which was to have a great effect on the coming of the Industrial Revolution and on the building of the railways. Canals were more profitable than the railways down to the middle of the nineteenth century, for in 1838/9 the railways were paying 3% — 6% on dividends, whereas the canals were paying 8% — 30%. This picture was to change radically by 1867, for by then the railways had eclipsed the canals as goods carriers and created a traffic in passengers which the latter could not bave coped with.68 Another Liverpool-Flintshire family, the Gladstones, first began to show interset in railway construction because they were incensed at the monopoly of transport to their principal market for corn and raw cotton by the Allied Waterways (Bridgewater Canal and Mersey and Irwell navigation).69 The Railway Age began on 15 Sept. 1830, the day on which the Liverpool and Manchester Railway was officially opened this was the first modem railway, although the first public railway was the Stockton and Darlington railway, opened in 1825. W. B. Buddicom began work as Resident Engineer to the Liverpool and Man- chester Railway in 1836.70 In charge of the Grand Junction Railway's Locomotive Works at Edge Hill, Liverpool, was Alexander Allan, who designed and serviced the IIFor whose family firm at Rouen see below. «D/B 104. 971n a letter to me 15 Jan. 1971. "Based on H. Perkin, The Age of the Railway (1970), pp. 36, 37, 102. MIbid, p. 83; also a letter to W. B. Buddioom from Murray Gladstone, D/B 174. *«D/B 160; G. M. Young, Early Victorian England (1934), Vol. H, pp. 285ff and 290ff; G. Chandler, Liverpool (1957), p. 350 for a picture of Edge Hill Station in the early 19th Cent.; p. 349 for a picture of Lime Street Station in 1836 and p. 349 for a picture of' Experience Railway Co — a first olaes carriage in 1830, all on this railway.