THE EARL AND THE HONOURABLE LADY THE NOBILITY AND THE RAILWAYS OF HUDDERSFIELD
The 5th Earl Fitzwilliam owned Wentworth Woodhouse, Britain’s longest stately mansion, and had enormous wealth increasing by the week. The Honourable Lady was his sister-in-law Isabella Ramsden, whose family famously claimed to own the whole of Huddersfield except for one house. Without these two aristocrats, the town would never have had one of the finest of all classical stations.
Born in 1786, the 5th Earl had a spectacular stroke of luck. The Fitzwilliams’ Yorkshire estates – over 20,000 acres in total – were found to straddle the Barnsley seam, the main artery of the Yorkshire coalfield. The discovery coincided with massive demand for coal fostered by the industrial revolution and construction of canals to transport the ‘black diamonds’ to developing West Riding towns.
When the Earl came of age in 1807 he was able to celebrate in a style suited to a mansion that boasted a 600ft long façade and a room for every day of the year. The family gave a party for 10,000 guests with miners and tenants of their land consuming prodigious amounts of strong ale and fine food of every description. The heir had to wait until the dawn of the railway age before inheriting the title in 1833 – and again there were celebrations on a grand scale with some 700 horse-drawn carriages bringing the great and the good for an all-night ball.
Tempering the family circumstances must have been the death three years earlier of his wife Mary, Countess Fitzwilliam, followed by bereavement which struck her sister the Honourable Isabella Dundas. She had maintained her aristocratic pedigree by marrying the son of Sir John Ramsden, 4th Baronet of Byram and owner of virtually all of Huddersfield. All seemed well but life expectancy was then unpredictable and the sudden death of her husband at the age of 48 meant he never held the title. It passed to their son, John William Ramsden, who in 1839 became the 5th Baronet at the age of only seven. The vast family estates now needed careful guidance at a crucial time. It is scarcely surprising that his mother, a widowed Honourable Lady, should turn to a widowed Earl and brother-in-law of even greater wealth. Collectively they proved a formidable force dominating the estate trustees and transforming the fortunes of Huddersfield during the years of ‘railway mania’ that were shortly to engulf the country.
The challenges which lay ahead were only too clear. By 1839 the crucially important Manchester & Leeds Railway linking two of the great centres of northern England was nearing completion. One of the last great projects engineered by George Stephenson, it followed his cherished policy of sticking to minimum gradients even where this meant casting intermediate settlements to one side. For much of its length the new main line clung to the bottom of the Calder Valley, which meant that Huddersfield, set among hills in the tributary Colne Valley, found itself badly placed. It had to settle for a station three miles distant at Cooper Bridge, opened in October 1840 and served by horse-drawn coaches using the turnpike road to Leeds.
Any accusations that the 4th Baronet should have demanded a better rail link failed to recognise
