George Beaumont
Sir George Arthur Hamilton Beaumont (1881-1933)
c.1881 Born in Down, Ireland, son of George Howland William Beaumont, Captain Royal Artillery
Major, 60th Rifles
1923 Married Renee Muriel Northey in Epsom
1933 Died in Lambourn, Berks[1]
1933 Historical notes[2]
THE death recently of Sir George Beaumont, of Cole Orton Hall, Ashby-de-la-Zouch, prompts a reference to two of his ancestors. At the end of the sixteenth century, one, Huntingdon Beaumont, was sent by his father, Nicholas Beaumont, who was said to be the then largest coal-owner in Leicestershire, to Germany. Thence, according to William Gray's Chorographia (1649), he brought back "many rare engines not known in these parts, such as ... waggons with one horse to carry down coals from the pits to the staithes on the river." Huntingdon Beaumont was concerned with others in the development of coalfields near Bedlington, in Northumberland. He was spoken of as "of Bilborough, near Nottingham." That place is near Wollaton Hall, the seat of the Middleton family, whose papers were recorded by the Historical Manuscript Commission in 1911. References therein suggest that there was a wagon way from the pits at Wollaton and in the adjoining locality of Strelley to the river Trent as far back as 1597. This implies that Huntingdon Beaumont introduced the wagon-way - the forerunner of the railway - into this country from Germany towards the end of the sixteenth century. The head of the Beaumont familv in the earlier years of the nineteenth century was Sir George, of whom Abraham Rees' Encyclopaedia (1819) said that he was "the owner of the collieries at Cole Orton, to which railways have previously been made at great expense connecting the Leicester Navigation."
See Also
Sources of Information
- Marriage register