[RAILWAYS] Hon. Lawrence Dundas of Aske, North Yorkshire (2nd Baron Dundas): autograph letter signed, re. an intended railway in his local district, 19 November 1829.

Manuscript in ink, 1 page, quarto (250 x 200 mm); headed ‘Aske, 19th Nov: 1829’, the letter is addressed simply ‘Dear Sir’, and is signed at the foot ‘Your faithful humble servant, Lawn. Dundas’; original folds, annotated at lower margin in the hand of Jane Emma Murphy (see below) ‘Earl of Zetland 1766-1838’ [sic]; verso docketed ‘Hon. L. Dundas’; original folds, remnants of hinges at each corner from where the letter was once mounted in an album, otherwise very well preserved.

The Hon. Lawrence Dundas (1766-1839) of Aske, near Richmond, Yorkshire, was educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1794 he married Harriot, daughter of Gen. John Hale of Tocketts, Yorkshire. In 1820, on the death of his father, he became 2nd Baron Dundas. He served as Lord Mayor of York in 1811, 1821, and 1831. A staunch Whig supporter, he had served in the House of Commons prior to succeeding to his father’s peerage in 1820, representing constituencies including Richmond and York as a Whig politician, pledging to resist any ‘unnecessary infringements of the liberties of the people’. He remained a stalwart Whig and was rewarded with promotion in the peerage in the coronation honours of 1838, when he was made 1st Earl of Zetland. He died in February 1839 and was succeeded by his eldest son, Thomas Dundas.

‘Dear Sir,

I have this day had the honour to receive your letter on the subject of the intended Railway. Mrs. Dundas has communicated the contents of your letter to her sisters. If I receive any answer from them I will acquaint you with it. Believe me Dear Sir, Your faithful humble servant, Lawn. Dundas’. 

It is not clear as to which ‘intended railway’ this previously unpublished item of correspondence might refer, but one way to interpret the letter is to understand it as Dundas’ acknowledgement of an initial enquiry from an unidentified business speculator regarding whether permission might be given for a proposed line to pass through land belonging to the Dundas and Hale families. Both Aske, where Dundas had his estate, and Tocketts, where his wife’s sisters were possibly still living, are situated within a short 30 km radius southeast of Stockton; and the Stockton and Darlington Railway, the world’s first public railway to use steam locomotives for passengers and goods, had opened scarcely four years earlier, on September 27, 1825. However, the first railway line to serve the area of Aske (near Richmond in North Yorkshire) did not open until September 10, 1846, as part of the Eryholme-Richmond branch line, while the first railway line to reach the Tocketts area (near Guisborough in North Yorkshire) would not be built for almost another fifty years (it was opened in 1875). It is possible, therefore, that the ‘intended railway’ referred to in the letter was never built, although one would imagine that Dundas was, like the majority of Whig politicians and voters in the north of England, in favour of industrialisation and the promotion of trade and commerce.

Provenance: Autograph album compiled by Jane Emma Murphy (Balcombe) (1854-1924), “The Briars”, Mornington, Victoria, philanthropist, socialite and suffragist; à Beckett family, Melbourne (by descent).