Samuel Morton Peto

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Sir Samuel Morton Peto

Sir Samuel Morton Peto (born August 4, 1809 in Woking , Surrey , † November 13, 1889 in Blackhurst, Tunbridge Wells, Kent) was an English railway construction company.

biography

Peto was on August 4, 1809 Whitmoor House in Woking in the county of Surrey , the eldest son of the farmer William Peto († 1849) from Cookham , Berkshire, and his wife Sophia Alloway from Dorking born. He attended the village school in Cobham , then the Jardine boarding school in Brixton Hill, Surrey. He did an apprenticeship in London with his uncle who ran a construction business. After his uncle's death in 1830, he and his cousin Thomas Grissell took over the company, which built numerous well-known buildings in London. These included the building of the Oxford & Cambridge Club (1836-38), Charles Barry's Reform Club (1836), the rebuilding of the burned-down Lyceum Theater (1831-34), FW Bushall's Olympic Theater (1849) and St. James Theater in the Palace Street as well as the Nelson's Column (1834), the foundation of the Houses of Parliament and the London sewer made of brick. In 1847 he was elected to the House of Commons as a Liberal MP , in 1859 for Finsbury and in 1865 for Bristol .

In 1846, Peto partnered with Edward Betts . With him he built numerous large railway lines at home and abroad until 1855. These included the South Eastern Railway , the London, Chatham and Dover Railway , the London, Tilbury and Southend Railway and the Grand Trunk Railway in Canada. Together with Thomas Brassey, Peto built a railway connection on the Crimean peninsula in 1854 from Balaklava to Sevastopol , which was used to transport material and people during the Crimean War.

In Germany in 1859 he was able to obtain concessions from four states for the Homburg Railway Company , which other applicants had not been granted despite years of efforts. He was also successful in railway construction in the Duchy of Schleswig and the Duchy of Holstein , which were then subject to the Crown of Denmark. He operated the North and South Schleswig Railways until 1865. In Flensburg , he also built the gas works in Gasstrasse in 1854 . It produced so-called town gas from coal , which was used for lighting . In contrast to the project in Schleswig, in 1859 he did not succeed in obtaining the concession for the Westerwald Railway , which was to connect Cologne and Frankfurt am Main , from the government of the Duchy of Nassau . For his services to railway construction, Peto was raised to the nobility.

The Somerleyton Hall family home

He turned his attention to the town of Lowestoft, on the eastern tip of England, near his grand residence at Somerleyton Hall (Jacobite, redesigned in Italian style by John Thomas in 1843 ), which he connected to the railroad network by a branch line. He expanded the port there for 1000 ships, built several luxury hotels and laid out a beach promenade and parks in this established seaside resort.

The economic crisis of 1866 led to the bankruptcy of his company Peto, Brassey and Betts on May 11th . He had also tried to sell stocks using false information. He was £ 4 million in debt and his banker went bankrupt. He had to give up the seat in Parliament, despite the protection of Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone . In 1863 he had already sold Somerleyton Hall to Sir Francis Crossley, a carpet dealer from Yorkshire. He retired to Budapest, where he planned to regulate the Danube and tried to build railways in Russia and later in Cornwall . In 1884 he moved to Blackhurst in Tunbridge Wells in Kent, where he died after a long illness. He was buried in Pembury .

Peto was married to Mary Grissell (c.1811–1842) for the first time since 1831, they had two sons and three daughters. A year after her death, he married Sarah Ainsworth (1821-1892), the eldest daughter of Henry Kelsall of Rochdale , a textile manufacturer. This marriage resulted in six sons, including the architect and garden designer Harold Ainsworth Peto , and four daughters.

literature

Web links

  • MH Port, 'Peto, Sir (Samuel) Morton, first baronet (1809-1889)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2011 accessed 21 Dec 2013

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Writings of the Society for Flensburg City History (ed.): Flensburg in history and present . Flensburg 1972, page 402
  2. ↑ Flensburg street names . Society for Flensburg City History, Flensburg 2005, ISBN 3-925856-50-1 , article: Gasstrasse
  3. ^ Konrad Fuchs: Railway projects and railway construction on the Middle Rhine 1836-1903 . In: Nassauische Annalen 67 (1956), pp. 158-202 (191).
  4. ^ Somerleyton Hall & Gardens. History. In: visit.somerleyton.co.uk. Retrieved February 20, 2017 .
  5. ↑ MH PortPeto, Sir (Samuel) Morton, first baronet (1809–1889) doi: 10.1093 / ref: odnb / 22042 , version: 6 January 2011, accessed 02/01/2018
personal data
SURNAME Peto, Samuel Morton
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Peto, Sir Samuel Morton (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English railway pioneer
DATE OF BIRTH 4th August 1809
PLACE OF BIRTH Woking , Surrey
DATE OF DEATH November 13, 1889
Place of death Blackhurst, Tunbridge Wells, Kent