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Robert Beaumont, Yorkshire-based historian, author and journalist, has been fascinated by the extraordinary life of George Hudson, the Railway King, from a young age.

Hudson, the poorly educated son of a Yorkshire yeoman farmer, became one of the richest men in Victorian England and created the modern UK railway network. But, thanks to his unscrupulous business practices, he lost everything and died in penury.

Harrogate was an integral part of Hudson’s plans to create a local, as well as a national, railway network and his vision was for the town to become as well-connected and prosperous as York. He managed to this vision into reality, just before he fell spectacularly from grace in 1848.

Robert charts this life with clarity and sensitivity, but will let the audience decide whether Hudson was a hero or a villain.


Robert Beaumont was born in Wakefield in 1954 and educated at Marlborough College and St Catherine’s College, Oxford, where he studied Modern History and was, unfortunately, an exact contemporary of Peter Mandelson. After Oxford, and a short period as a private tutor and a gas meter reader, he joined the Yorkshire Evening Press newspaper in York in 1977. He rose to become assistant editor before leaving in 1998 to launch his own public relations company, Robert Beaumont Associates, which he still runs today. His interests include reading, with favourite authors Evelyn Waugh, Martin Amis and F Scott Fitzgerald, rock music, politics, cricket and York City Football Club. He is married with two children and two grandchildren.