Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 23.djvu/36



edition (1845). The completest edition is that in four vols. by Mr. Edmund Gosse in 1882.

 GRAY, THOMAS (1787–1848), the railway pioneer, son of Robert Gray, engineer, was born at Leeds in 1787, and afterwards lived at Nottingham. As a boy he had seen Blenkinsopp's famous locomotive at work on the Middleton cogged railroad. He was staying in Brussels in 1816, when the project of a canal from Charleroi for the purpose of connecting Holland with the mining districts of Belgium was under discussion. In connection with John, son of William Cockerill [q. v.], he advocated the superior advantages of a railway. Gray shut himself up in his room to write a pamphlet, secluded from his wife and friends, declining to give them any information about his studies except that they would revolutionise the world. In 1820 Gray published the result of his labours as ‘Observations on a General Railway, with Plates and Map illustrative of the plan; showing its great superiority … over all the present methods of conveyance. …’ He suggested the propriety of making a railway between Liverpool and Manchester. The treatise went through four editions in two years. In 1822 Gray added a diagram, showing a number of suggested lines of railway connecting the principal towns of England, and another in like manner bringing together the leading Irish centres. Gray pressed his pet scheme, ‘a general iron road,’ upon the attention of public men of every position. He sent memorials to Lord Sidmouth in 1820, and to the lord mayor and corporation of London a year later. In 1822 he addressed the Earl of Liverpool and Sir Robert Peel, and petitioned government in 1823. His Nottingham neighbours declared him ‘cracked.’ William Howitt, who frequently came in contact with Gray, says: ‘With Thomas Gray, begin where you would, on whatever subject, it would not be many minutes before you would be enveloped in steam, and listening to a harangue on the practicability and the advantages to the nation of a general iron railway.’ In 1829, when public discussion was proceeding hotly in Britain as to the kinds of power to be permanently employed on the then accepted railway system, Gray advocated his crude plan of a greased road with cog rails. He ultimately fell into poverty, and sold glass on commission. He died, broken-hearted it is said, 15 Oct. 1848, at Exeter.

 GRAY, WILLIAM (1802?–1835), miscellaneous writer, born about 1802, was the only son of James Gray of Kircudbright, Scotland (, Alumni Oxon. 1715–1886, ii. 554). He matriculated at Oxford on 30 Oct. 1824 as a gentleman commoner of St. Alban Hall, but on the death of the principal, Peter Elmsley, to whom he was much attached, he removed in 1825 to Magdalen College, where he graduated B.A. on 25 June 1829, and M.A. on 2 June 1831. While at Oxford he occasionally contributed to the ‘Oxford Herald.’ His account of Elmsley in that journal was transferred to the ‘Gentleman's Magazine’ for April 1825. He edited the ‘Miscellaneous Works of Sir Philip Sidney, with a Life of the Author and Illustrative Notes,’ 8vo, Oxford, 1829 (another edition, 8vo, Boston, U.S.A., 1860). In 1829 he projected an ‘Oxford Literary Gazette,’ of which six numbers only appeared. Gray was called to the bar by the Society of the Inner Temple on 10 June 1831; but ill-health prevented him from practising. His last work was an ‘Historical Sketch of the Origin of English Prose Literature, and of its Progress till the Reign of James I,’ 8vo, Oxford, 1835. He died at Dumfries on 29 Nov. 1835 (Gent. Mag. 1836, i. 326–7).

 GRAYDON, JOHN (d. 1726), vice-admiral, in a memorial dated 12 April 1700 described himself as having served in his majesty's navy for twenty years and upwards. In June 1686 he was appointed lieutenant of the Charles galley ; in May 1688 first 