Samuel Laing, Jnr

Samuel Laing was born in St Andrews Square, Edinburgh, in the summer of 1811. Named after his father Samuel, he was a nephew of Malcolm Laing and Gilbert Laing Meason. His mother Agnes Kelly died the following year and he spent his early years in England, being looked after by his grandmother and aunt.

When Malcolm Laing died in 1818, Samuel Laing Snr inherited his Papdale estate in Kirkwall and brought his son, and daughter Mary, to Orkney in the following spring, when Samuel was almost eight. He began his schooling at the long-established Kirkwall Grammar School but when the master, David Paterson, deserted his post in 1823, Samuel was sent to a school in Hampshire at the end of the year. His father had "no good opinion of a Scotch education", so after Hampshire, Samuel was sent to Houghton-le-Spring near Durham. He then spent two years at home in Kirkwall studying with a tutor from St John's College, Cambridge.

Samuel Laing Snr described his son’s education as the principal object of his life for many years and the investment paid off handsomely as Samuel graduated from St John’s College in 1832 as second wrangler. This meant he came second in the Mathematical Tripos, regarded as the most important exam in Britain; and not just by the university; the results were given great publicity and published in the Times. Mathematics was considered so important at Cambridge that up to 1851 a student could not obtain a classical degree without passing the mathematics exam. Cambridge described their mathematics students as requiring "breadth of reasoning, readiness to generalise, perception of analogies, quickness in the assimilation of new ideas, a keen sense of beauty and order and, above all, intuitive powers of the highest kind."

Samuel was elected a fellow of the college on 17 March 1834 and won the Smith’s Prize, awarded for the best essay on physics or applied mathematics by a junior BA. In Cambridge at that time, most of the teaching of students was done by private coaches and he stayed on at the university as a coach until 1835. He then took a degree in law and, after surviving an attack of smallpox, was called to the bar in June 1837. That year, Samuel’s brother-in-law, Henry Baxter, died suddenly, leaving him a legacy of £500, with which he could support himself until he was established.

In late February 1839, after months of nervous headaches, he left on a tour of Europe with his father. They visited France, Italy and Switzerland, before Samuel returned to England, where he became private secretary to Henry Labouchere, later Lord Taunton, president of the Board of Trade.

In 1840 Laing was appointed Counsel to the Rail Road Commissioners at the Board of Trade. This was a very important position at the height of the railway boom and carried a salary of £500 per annum, on top of the £300 he continued to receive as private secretary. He lost this position however, in September 1841, when the Conservatives came to power and Gladstone became President of the Board of Trade. In 18 August 1840 he married his second cousin Mary Cowan and they went on to have eight children.

As Secretary of the Railway Department 1842-47 Laing, with William Gladstone, was a member of the Dalhousie Railway Commission that produced the 1844 Railways Act and Samuel is credited with suggesting the idea of Parliamentary Trains. These were trains that had to run at least once a day, in both directions on every line, at not less than 12 miles per hour, including stops. They had to stop at every station and had to provide covered third class coaches at no more than 1d a mile. When these trains were first introduced, third-class passengers were 28% of the total, in 1875 they made up 78% and the parliamentary trains are given most of the credit for this increase.

In 1842 he won the £100 Atlas Prize with his essay, ‘National Distress: its Causes and Remedies’. John Stuart Mill quotes facts from it in his ‘The Principals of Political Economy’, and the essay is quoted several times by Karl Marx in 'Das Kapital'.

The literally unimaginable conditions Laing describes in the manufacturing cities clearly touched and angered him. He wrote, "Anything is better than this, anything better than that the bulk of the population should be ground by want and misery down to a state of contented degradation." He noted that, in agricultural districts, 204 out of 1000 reached the age of 70, in London this number was 104, in Birmingham 81, in Leeds 79 and in Manchester 63.

However, some sentences do mark him out as a man of his time - "The emancipation of the female sex from the regular labour of productive industry, and their appropriation to the domestic duties of life is justly reckoned one of the greatest achievements of European civilization."

In 1845 Laing drew up 240 reports on railway projects for the Board of Trade. He went on another European trip with his father to recover, travelling up the Rhine. That year he gave up his civil service position and began to act as counsel for railway companies submitting projects to the Rail Road Commissioners. He earned £11,000 in 1846.

When Arthur Anderson, Shetlander and founder of P&O, stood as candidate for Orkney and Shetland in 1847, Laing came to Orkney to chair his election committee. He wrote political pamphlets under the name Magnus Troil. Anderson won the seat but only served one term.

Laing was asked to become Chairman and Managing Director of the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway in 1848 and, over the next five years almost doubled passenger numbers. He was still keen to provide affordable train travel for the poor and is credited with introducing day trips.

"The Brighton railway had inaugurated them [cheap Sunday excursions] not many years before with 2/6 day trips to Brighton and 4/- day trips to Hastings and Eastbourne. That company had had the good fortune to possess as Chairman and Managing Director a benevolent philosopher, Mr Samuel Laing, agnostic of the Spencer and Huxley school, moralist and worker of good deeds, author of Modern Science and Modern Thought and other pithy volumes; and it was primarily to him, if I mistake not, that the toilers of London owed this boon."
London and Londoners in the 1850s and 1860s Alfred Rosling Bennett 1924

Laing was Chairman of the Crystal Palace Company from 1852 to 1855 and erected the first pillar when it was moved to Sydenham Hill. Arthur Anderson was another director. The London, Brighton and South Coast Railway were major shareholders in the re-erected Palace. They laid a new line from London Bridge Station and had a railway station in the grounds, connected to the Palace by a glass covered colonnade. A shuttle service charged 3d for the 14 miles.

Crystal Palace was intended to provide education, enlightenment and "healthful exercise and wholesome recreation" protected from the weather. Collections were to be made of items of "high educational character, not only direct instruction but refining influence". It had a concert hall that could seat 4000. In thirty years the Palace had 57 million visitors.

Samuel Laing was Liberal MP for the Northern Burghs 1852-57 and resigned from the railway in 1855. Having lost his seat in 1857, he regained it in 1859 and became Financial Secretary to the Treasury, second in precedence after the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, who is a member of the cabinet. Gladstone was the Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time.

In 1860 he went to India to serve as the Finance Minister for four years. In a lecture he gave to the Kirkwall Young Men’s Literary Association in 1864, he said he had started for India at a week’s notice, presumably on the death of his predecessor Sir James Wilson. He and Sir James Wilson and the Viceroy, Lord Canning, are credited with restoring India’s financial equilibrium after the Mutiny of 1857-58. His budget speech of 1861-62 helped to initiate the present urban local government system, by proposing that local services should be based on local resources.

In his lecture he said that when he arrived in India he "...had just three months in which to prepare, get in from the different departments and local authorities and revise estimates in the minutest detail of every branch of civil and military expenditure of our great Indian Empire". He found a budget deficit of £6,000,000 and unpopular and unproductive new taxes. In three months he saved £5 million out of an annual budget of £28 million and in the next year saved another £2 million. This was largely by reducing army, navy and civil establishments. He recalled that he had been called to the railway company when its finances were at a low ebb and large reductions were necessary and that it had been the same in India. He observed, "What was wanted in each case was simply patience in hearing evidence before coming to a decision, common sense in arriving at a sound decision and firmness and promptitude in carrying it out…Could one battalion, stationed in a central spot and kept in a state of readiness and efficiency be safely trusted to do the work of two…It was done by taking every opportunity of entrusting local affairs to local management and enlarging the powers and responsibilities of provincial governors and chief commissioners."

Without Samuel Laing’s guiding hand, the LSBCR had made unwise investments in new lines and by 1866 they were on the verge of bankruptcy. All of the Board were forced to resign, except Allen Sarle, of Cornish parentage but born at Westness in Rousay in 1828. He had become the company accountant the year before Samuel Laing had resigned as Chairman. Samuel was persuaded to return as Chairman and, with a new board, and Allen Sarle as general manager, he restored the company’s profitability. Laing remained in his post for another 27 years, until he was 82. During that time, the company pioneered electric lighting in their passenger coaches and introduced Pullman coaches.

He was MP for Orkney and Shetland 1873-85.

In 1868, Samuel Laing, with his business partner James Thompson Mackenzie and Philip Rose, an advisor to Disraeli, proposed a trust fund "to give the investor of moderate means the same advantages as the large capitalists in diminishing the risk by spreading the investment over a number of stocks". The Economist wrote, "...exact idea has never been used before. In our judgment the idea is very good." They took the idea to Lord Westbury, an ex-Lord Chancellor, who agreed to become chairman of the Trust. The original share issue raised £16.1 million and The Foreign and Colonial Investment Trust Co is now the largest global growth investment trust in the world, with £129.4 million funds under management in September 2005. The brokerage firm he co-founded, Laing and Cruikshank, was sold by Credit Lyonnaise in 2004 for £160 million.

The year in which he ceased to be an MP, 1885, saw the publication of his first book of popular science, 'Modern Science and Modern Thought'. 'Problems of the Future' followed in 1889 and 'Human Origins' in 1892, when he was 79 and 81, and still chairman of the railway. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in his book, 'Through the Magic Door', wrote, "Talking of popular science, I know no better books for exciting a man’s first interest, and giving a broad general view of the subject, than these of Samuel Laing. Who would have imagined that the wise savant and gentle dreamer of these volumes was also the energetic secretary of a railway company? But that a man with so pronounced a scientific brain as Laing should continue all his life to devote his time to dull routine work, remaining in harness until extreme old age with his soul open to every fresh idea and his brain acquiring new concretions of knowledge is indeed a remarkable fact. Read these books and you will be a fuller man.

I had met someone... who made some remark about the prehistoric remains in the valley of the Somme. I knew about these and showed him that I did. I then threw out some allusion to the rock temples of Yucatan, which he picked up and enlarged upon. He spoke of Peruvian civilization... I cited the Titicaca image... He spoke of Quaternary man... Each was more and more amazed at the fullness and the accuracy of the information of the other, until like a flash the explanation crossed my mind. "You are reading Samuel Laing’s Human Origins!" I cried. So he was, and so, by a coincidence, was I".

Laing lived at Perrymount in Sydenham from 1847 to 1849. The house was a farmhouse built in the 1790s that was extended and enlarged in this period, into a country retreat with a large garden. The house was demolished before WWII (the space is now occupied by 23-25 Queenswood Road) but part of the garden has recently been turned into a community garden for people coping with illness.

A boat with a crew of 16, including four firemen, was named after him and was in Tilbury Docks in 1881. A train was also named after him.

Samuel Laing died on 6 August 1897 at Rockhills, Sydenham Hill and left an estate valued at £96,861.

The following text and cartoon appeared in the Vanity Fair magazine in 1873, as No 151 in its Statesmen series.

A shrewd, practical, hard-headed man is Mr Laing; a man of powerful intelligence, not to be misled by sophistry or by cheats conscious or unconscious; undoubtedly one of the superior order, naturally claiming and inevitably obtaining the leadership of men. Quite a personage is he, yet a disappointing personage withal; for being certain to succeed in any career he might choose, he has deliberately chosen the career of money-making, as being on the whole that which is, in these latter days, best worth an able man’s attention. So that now, at the age of sixty, he is regarded as a second-rate statesman because a first-rate financier, and as one whose life has proved a greater success for himself than his generation; wherein there are perhaps more to assert that he is wrong than to act as though they believed it. Indeed it is no mean thing to have been concerned as Mr. Laing has been, and still is, in the superior direction of some of the most important commercial enterprises in the world; and possibly if all values were weighed in the same balance it would be found that the industrial work done in England under his guidance is more fruitful of results than the political evolutions through which many, vastly his inferiors, have won positions in the State superior to his. He is the king among the financiers. Whenever an enterprise of any magnitude is in more than ordinary difficulties the aid of “the infant Samuel” is certain to be invoked - his mere opinion of a speculation is a guaranty of success; and although he has himself invested much money in venturesome ways, he has seen his wealth increase until he has become what he now is - one of the wealthy men of the country.

He started in life with many advantages. He was a Scotchman. He was Second Wrangler at Cambridge. He was a barrister. He was private secretary to Mr. Labouchere, and subsequently the first Secretary of that Railway Department of the Board of trade to the organisation of which he so strongly contributed. To railways indeed, as to the new great Power then about to be developed in the world, he had given all his attention. He was on the Commission which sat in 1845 in order to bring the monster into harness, and he had the chief hand in its report; but this report being rejected, he became disgusted with public life, and retired to more congenial occupation as Chairman of the Brighton Railway Company. In 1852 he was elected to Parliament for Wick, and he sat for that place until, having become a leader of those Liberal malcontents who in 1867 earned for themselves the name of Adullamites, he was rejected by his constituents at the general election of the following year, nor did he regain a seat till the present Session, when he was returned by his native Islands of Orkney. He is a moderate Liberal, with a determination to think for himself and to subordinate party-allegiance to his own convictions such as is unhappily too rare to avail in keeping immoderate leaders within due bounds. Nevertheless he believes in international arbitration and the Permissive Bill, and he must be fairly tractable, for he was once Financial Secretary to the Treasury for sixteen months, and Finance Minister of India for two years. Should the interests of Party ever allow of his being forgiven for his share in the formation of the Cave, the interests of the country would be served by his being employed again. But a Party does not easily forgive. Moreover Mr. Laing, although a good plain speaker of plain things, is not a graceful orator; and in a country ruled by the ears of majorities no abilities compensate for the want of smoothness of tongue.