Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 3.djvu/612

 and acted as one of the secretaries of a committee which raised money for the opening of three public parks in Manchester and Salford. In the same year he joined in founding the 'Manchester Examiner.'

Watkin soon became partner in his father's business, but in 1845 he abandoned the cotton trade to take up the secretaryship of the Trent Valley railway, which line was afterwards sold at a profit of 438,000l. to the London and North Western Railway Company. Watkin, who had ably negotiated the transfer, then entered the service of the latter company. On recovering from a breakdown in health he paid his first visit to America in 1851, and in the following year published an account of it entitled 'A Trip to the United States and Canada.' In 1853 he was appointed general manager of the Manchester, Sheffield, and Lincolnshire railway, and entered on an intricate series of negotiations with the Great Northern, the London and North Western, and Midland railways, three lines whose hostile competition threatened disaster to his own company. At the desire of the Duke of Newcastle, secretary of state for the colonies, he undertook, in 1861, a mission to Canada in order to investigate the means of confederating the five British provinces into a dominion of Canada, and to consider the feasibility of transferring the Hudson Bay territory to the control of the government; the last was accomplished in 1869. Another object was that of planning railways designed to bring Quebec within easier reach of other parts of Canada and of the Atlantic.

On returning home Watkin resigned his appointment as manager of the Manchester, Sheffield, and Lincolnshire Company, through disagreement with his directors, who had come to terms in his absence with the Midland railway, and he became president of the Grand Trunk railway of Canada. Within two years, however, he resumed, in 1863, his connection with the Manchester company, first as director and from January 1864 as chairman. In that position, which he retained till May 1894, he did his chief work. With this office he combined the chairmanship of the South Eastern company from 1866–1894, and of the Metropolitan companies from 1872–94. For a short time he was a director of the Great Eastern (1867) and Great Western (1866) companies. Other enterprises also occupied him. He carried out a scheme for a new railway between Manchester and Liverpool, that of the Cheshire lines committee, which was opened in 1877, and he was actively interested in making the Athens and Piræus railway. He projected the practical union of the Welsh railway system by linking up a number of small lines with the object of forming a through route from Cardiff to Liverpool, thus bringing South and North Wales into direct railway communication with Lancashire by means of the Mersey Tunnel, opened in 1886. To this end a swing bridge over the river Dee at Connah's Quay was built (1887–90) and fines to Birkenhead completed.

Despite these varied calls on his attention, it was to the three railways of which he was chairman that Watkin long devoted his main energies. As chairman of the Manchester, Sheffield, and Lincolnshire railway, now the Great Central, he met with great difficulties by the competition of both the Great Northern and Midland companies, but he greatly improved its affairs. His chief aim was to form a through route under a single management from Manchester and the north to Dover. With that end in view, he projected the new and independent fine from Sheffield to Marylebone, London. At the time the Manchester company's trains ran over the Great Northern line from Retford. The proposed Great Central fine was strongly resisted by Watkin's competitors, but he had his way after a long struggle, and the line was opened for through traffic to London on 8 March 1899.

It was from a desire to extend his scheme of through traffic that Watkin long and ardently advocated a channel tunnel railway between Dover and Calais. This proposal was first made in 1869. A channel tunnel company was formed in 1872, and under Watkin's direction excavations were begun in 1881 beneath the seashore between Folkestone and Dover. At the instance of the board of trade the court of chancery at once issued an injunction forbidding Watkin to proceed, on the ground of his infringement of the crown's foreshore rights. Next session Watkin, who long sat in the House of Commons, introduced a private bill authorising his project; after consideration by a joint committee of the two houses, which pronounced against it by a majority of sixty-four, the bill was withdrawn. Subsequently in 1888, and again in 1890, Watkin reintroduced a bill authorising his experimental works without result, and it was finally withdrawn in 1893. In 1886 Watkin, on receiving a report from Professor Boyd