Belated recognition for Warwickshire's railway pioneer William James
Jan 18 2010 By Chris Upton
The High Street which threads its way through the town of Henley-in-Arden has many striking old houses marshalled along its length.
One of the finest is Yew Tree House which hides, appropriately, behind yews near to the southern end of the street. You might pause to admire it in any case, but more so because of the plaque it bears.
The plaque comes as some surprise. A timber-framed house from the 16th Century is not where you would expect to find a memorial to one of the pioneers of the Industrial Revolution. The Yew Trees was the one-time home of William James (1771-1837). You might call him, as does the plaque, the father of the railways.
If Henley has more claim to him than anywhere else, William James’ connections with Warwickshire are more extensive than a simple accident of birth.
Educated at Winson Green and the King’s School, Warwick, James married at Wootton Wawen in 1793, and spent a decade living in Chestnut Square, Wellesbourne, at the time he was working as land agent for the Dewes family of Wellesbourne Hall.
It was in his work as a land agent in the early 1800s – for, amongst others, the Earl of Warwick, Lord Dartmouth and the Archbishop of Canterbury - that William James makes a bridge between, as it were, the Tudors and the Victorians.
With a background knowledge of geology, James was able to advise his patrons on how they might exploit the mineral wealth that lay beneath their estates, rather than simply making a living from the soil on the top.
Within a few years James had his own coal-mines in Staffordshire, a large house in West Bromwich and enough to wealth (say £150,000) to fuel even greater ambitions.
William James had inherited an interest in communications from his father, who was closely involved in the Stratford Canal.
The son became its major shareholder and saw the scheme to its completion in 1816.
But even by this date another form of communication was beginning to draw his attention.
