Frederick Williams, early railway historian

[Tony Whittaker]

I was glad to find both of Frederic Williams' early books on railways as free ebooks on archive.org. They provide contemporanous accounts, sometimes quote from major players of the time who he would have known, and a serious of etchings of infrastructure and equipment. He does not appear to attribute the etchings to a named artist. They are all of a similar style. I wonder if he is in fact the artist. Does anyone know?

Our Iron Roads: Their History, Construction and Administration, by F S Williams, published in various edition revisions up to 1888 by Bemrose. Page 191 shows the two Bugsworth viaducts, the only known image. Pages 118-119 illustrate building of the Dove Holes Tunnel. Other illustrations throughout the book show Midland Railway locations in Derbyshire and around the country. Free ebook on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/ourironroads00will

The Midland Railway: Its Rise and Progress. A Narrative of Modern Enterprise, by F S Williams, Strahan & Co, 1876. Frederick Smeeton Williams (1829–86), was a Congregational minister, college English tutor and pioneering railway historian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Smeeton_Williams By the 1880s he was living at 20 Forest Rd East, Nottingham. Both his books are especially valuable as he knew many of the railway engineers and operators, and had access to both witnesses and contemporary records. This book is available secondhand, as a Cambridge University new reprint, and also as free ebook on the Internet Archive. An early and often firsthand account of the Midland Railway. There is a detailed account of both the construction of the Dove Holes Tunnel (pages 415-418), and the Bugsworth landslip, with considerable quoted speech from witnesses, lacking in the newspaper reports of the time, pages 419-421:
https://archive.org/details/midlandrailwayit00will/page/418

 

[Senex]

It's good to see appreciation of Williams's work. He has long been regarded as one of the best and most informative of the early railway historians and enjoyed as a very readable writer. It's a pity he doesn't give a lot more detail of sources, but then given that much of what he writes is clearly on the basis of access he had to senior management in the Midland company and internal documentation, that's perhaps not surprising. And he seems to have had access to various work-sites whilst things were still happening. The Midland book too appeared in several editions with updating. In another class altogether from Stretton's (later) Midland history.