Sir George Elliot
1893, December 25th
Sir George Elliot, Bart., died at his residence, 17, Portland-place, at 3 o'clock on Saturday afternoon. His family were in town, but only a servant was in the room when he breathed his last. Sir George caught a chill while at Cardiff with Lord Salisbury a few weeks ago, and his death is attributed to acute pneumonia and complications.
Sir George Elliot was one of a very typical class of Englishmen. Born at Gateshead in 1815, and beginning life, as he often proudly boasted, at the bottom of a coal-pit, he worked through every stage of the industry with which his name is so widely connected. He succeeded early in creating for himself a fortune which enabled him to take the place of exercise the influence rightly belonging to energy of character and shrewd, practical intelligence, and during a lifetime which covers the whole span of the commercial development of the century he maintained without diminution his interest in all questions connected with the production of coal. The steps from the position of pitman to that of manager and from the position of manager to that of one of the most extensive colliery owners of the country were for him merely rapid movements in an ascending scale, which presented a well-used opportunity for adding to an intimate knowledge of detail an exceptional grasp of the wider issues connected with coal-mining. His knowledge of engineering, combined with the practical and scientific interests with which he followed the most important mining developments of his day, helped to place him in the highest position that he held as an authority upon all questions connected with the trade ; but possibly he owed as much to a homely northern strain of fidelity to interests which had once engaged his serious attention as to any other single quality. This was in all probability the quality which caused the miners of Durham to give him their allegiance under the good-humoured nickname of "Bonnie Geordie." They returned him more than once to Parliament, where he represented North Durham almost continuously between 1868 and 1880, and East Durham from 1881 to 1885. He sat again from 1886 to 1892 as member for Monmouth district. He was a conservative of the modern type, staunch in upholding the national prestige, believing very firmly in his own right to keep the money he had earned, and consequently in the similar rights of other owners of property, but none the less ready to recognise the claims of the working population to any amelioration of their condition which could be brought within the range of practical politics.
His political work was simply in connection with financial and other subjects falling within the range of his special experience. The Parliamentary control of gas and water supply engaged his active interest, and he formed one of the grand committee to which these questions were submitted. He was created a baronet in 1874 in recognition of his public services ; but next after the coalfields of Durham and South Wales, his true sphere of activity was the city, where, in addition to the great wire-rope works which bear his name, he was intimately associated with many important commercial enterprises.
Of the many designs which occupied his busy life, none was more remarkable than the scheme for the amalgamation of the entire coalfields of Great Britain which he himself regarded as the culmination of his work. This scheme, which is the outcome of more than half a century of personal observation and experience, had been slowly matured in its present form during the last ten years, and was only the other day publicly submitted to the consideration of existing coalowners, and fully described in the columns of The Times. Sir George Elliot was profoundly interested in the scheme. It satisfied the high conception which he had formed of the exceptional value and place of coal among articles of general consumption, and the magnitude of the financial transactions which it involved appealed to his practical ability. No portion of the scheme appears, however, to have engaged his more serious attention than the details by means of which it was proposed to extend some participation in the profits of the coal industry to the miners and to better the conditions under which they worked. The formation of an insurance fund by which an adequate provision could be effected for old age particularly interested him, and not many days before his death he was heard to say that his dearest wish in connection with the scheme was that he might be able to crown the work of his life by leaving the whole body of the mining population better off than he had found them.
His life was not, perhaps, in all respects a model of refinement. He would probably have been the last person to lay claim to any such distinction. His friends recognised in him rather the force of character which makes its own way and dares to remain unmodified by surroundings of its own creation. The public loses in him a man who had the capacity to place himself at the head of important movements and the energy and industry to continue to direct them with success during a lifetime which has lasted for nearly 80 years. So familiar a figure will not be missed from Great George-street without sincere regret.
Sir George Elliot married, in 1836, Margaret, daughter of Mr. George Green, of Rainton, Houghton-le-Spring, Durham, but she died in 1880. He is succeeded by his son, George William, who was born in 1844, was M.P. for Northallerton, 1874-85, and has represented the Richmond Division of Yorkshire since 1886.
Source: The Times
