ELLIS, John (1789-1862), of Belgrave, nr. Leicester, Leics.

A successful Quaker businessman, Ellis voted with Cobden and other radicals in the division lobbies, and expressed support for modest, improving legislation, although he could speak with vehemence on matters affecting his railway interests or his faith. Descended from south Yorkshire farmers, his father Joseph Ellis (1755-1810) moved to Leicestershire in 1782 to lease Sharman’s Lodge farm and by 1807 the family had added the nearby Beaumont Leys farm, which was run by John Ellis.1I. Ellis, Records of nineteenth-century Leicester (1935), 36-37; A. Moore, Ellis of Leicester: a Quaker family’s vocation (2003), 8-9; E. Powell, Notes of one branch of the Ellis family in Yorkshire and Leicestershire, with appendix and pedigree (1905), pp. iii-v, and see also the pull out ‘pedigree chart’ (which is unpaginated). An enterprising farmer, by the 1820s Ellis also operated a corn dealing business with his younger brother Joseph (1790-1857).2E.H. Milligan, Biographical dictionary of British Quakers in commerce and industry 1775-1920 (2007), 166. On Joseph Ellis, a successful businessman in his own right, who established the coal merchant firms Joseph Ellis & Sons and Ellis & Everard, which maintained family connections until the 1970s, see Moore, Ellis of Leicester, 39-66. In 1828 he was approached about promoting a railway between Leicester and the coalfields in the north-west of the county, and secured George Stephenson’s involvement in the project. The resulting Leicester and Swannington Railway was completed in 1832.3He met Stephenson through James Cropper, a Liverpool Quaker merchant, whose wife was the aunt of Ellis’s second wife. As Stephenson was too busy with other projects it was agreed that his son Robert would be the chief engineer: Milligan, Biographical dictionary, 166; F. Williams, The Midland Railway: its rise and progress (1877, 3rd edn.), 5-6. Around this time, Ellis established a coal and lime merchant firm, John Ellis & Sons, which made use of his stakes in the Coalville and Whitwick collieries.4Moore, Ellis of Leicester, 13. In 1842 he became a director of the Midland Counties Railway and two years later deputy chairman of the newly amalgamated Midland Railway.5He was also a director of the London and Birmingham, Birmingham and Gloucester, Manchester and Buxton, and London and North Western Railways: ibid. His quick thinking and decisive action secured the Bristol and Birmingham Railway for the company in 1845, ensuring the supremacy of the narrow gauge rather than the broad gauge of its rival, the Great Western, and in 1849 Ellis took over from the disgraced chairman, George Hudson MP, and put the company on a stable, prosperous footing.6C. Miller, rev. A. Griffin, ‘Ellis, John (1789-1862)’, www.oxforddnb.com; Moore, Ellis of Leicester, 14; Williams, Midland Railway, 85-87, 166-68. For Ellis’s account of his coup see PP 1845 (360), xi. 155-60. In the meantime he had become a partner in a Leicester worsted spinning business in 1844, and disposed of his farming interests in 1846.7The worsted spinning firm was Whitmore & Ellis: Milligan, Biographical dictionary, 166; Moore, Ellis of Leicester, 15-16. A Liberal in politics and member of Leicester town council since 1837, in 1848 Ellis was brought forward by local Reformers after the unseating of the borough’s MPs and returned unopposed alongside the veteran businessman, Richard Harris.

In the division lobbies, Ellis was a regular supporter of radical reforms, and repeatedly voted for Hume’s ‘little Charter’ of triennial parliaments, the ballot, household suffrage and more equal electoral districts, and Locke King’s motions to equalise the borough and county franchises.8House of Commons Division Lists, 1849 session, 5 June 1849; ibid., 1850 session, 28 Feb. 1850, 9 July 1850; ibid., 1851 session, 20 Feb. 1851; ibid., 1852 session, 23 Mar. 1852, 27 Apr. 1852. Seconding Henry Berkeley’s annual ballot motion in 1851, he argued that ‘the voter could not be protected unless Parliament extended to him the shield of the ballot’, and that it was especially necessary to safeguard tenant farmers and tradesmen.9Hansard, 8 July 1851, vol. 118, c. 367. In 1849 he supported Cobden’s motion to reduce government expenditure to the 1835 level, voted for the repeal of the navigation laws, and served on the inquiry into the schools of design established in 1836, endorsing Milner Gibson’s report which was not uncritical, but generally encouraging.10House of Commons Division Lists, 1849 session, 26 Feb. 1849, 23 Apr. 1849; PP 1849 (576), xviii. 2-32, 46. Usually, Ellis’s contributions were brief comments in favour of practical, improving legislation, such as the 1850 small tenements bill which he thought ‘would be highly beneficial’.11Hansard, 20 Mar. 1850, vol. 109, c.1190. For other examples see ibid., 7 June 1850, vol. 111, c.883; ibid., 19 Feb. 1851, vol. 114, c.834; ibid., 24 Mar. 1852, vol. 120, c.50. The following year he supported Milner Gibson’s bill to allow county ratepayers to exert more control over expenditure, arguing that ‘taxation and representation ought to go together’.12Hansard, 12 Mar. 1851, vol. 114, c.1286. Some issues were viewed with less detachment, however, and he strongly opposed the 1851 audit of railway accounts bill, complaining that it was unnecessary and promised that he ‘should do his best to destroy it’.13Hansard, 28 May 1851, vol. 117, c.116. He expressed the hostility of his constituency to the 1852 militia bill, and recalled from his youth the ‘arbitrary and unjust’ imprisonment of his younger brother for refusing to serve in the militia on conscientious grounds.14Hansard, 10 May 1852, vol. 121, cc. 476-77; qu. at ibid., 17 May 1852, vol. 121, c.728.

He was an active member of the committees on the investments for the savings of the middle and working classes in 1850, and on the law of partnership the following year, both of which provided cautious support for limited liability. He particularly sought to draw out from witnesses the point that the current law did not favour the working classes, but he was also interested in the experience of limited liability in other countries, such as France and the United States.15PP 1850 (508), xix. 173, 186, 187, 217; 1851 (509), xviii. 2, 83, 87, 133, 138, 143; J. Savile, ‘Sleeping partnership and limited liability, 1850-1856’, Economic History Review (1956), 2nd ser., viii. 418-33 (at 421); J. Taylor, Creating capitalism: joint-stock enterprise in British politics and culture, 1800-1870 (2006), 148. He also served on the 1851 committee on church rates, whose membership and witnesses were mainly dissenters.16PP 1851 (541), ix. 2, 107, 110, 124, 198-99, 200, 213, 280, 353-55, 526, 536; J. Ellens, Religious routes to Gladstonian liberalism: the Church Rates conflict in England and Wales, 1832-1868 (1994), 104.

Ellis retired at the 1852 general election, in favour of the members unseated in 1848, and during the remainder of the decade he sided with the moderates in the internecine disputes amongst Leicester Reformers.17He nominated the moderates’ candidate, John Dove Harris, at the 1857 election: Derby Mercury, 1 Apr. 1857. On retiring as chairman of Midland Railway in 1858 he was voted 1,000 guineas, for a full length portrait, which adorned the shareholders’ room at Derby station for many years, and a collection of silverware.18He originally retired in 1857, but due to the illness and then death of his successor he carried on until 1858. The painting is now in the National Railway Museum, York: London Friends’ Institute, Biographical catalogue of the lives of Friends and others whose portraits are in the London Friends’ Institute (1888), 199-201; Moore, Ellis of Leicester, 82. Ellis died in 1862, and John Ellis & Sons passed to his only son from his first marriage, Edward Shipley Ellis (1817-79), who was also chairman of the Midland Railway from 1873 until his death and heavily involved in municipal politics, and his half-brother Alfred (1821-79).19He was cllr. 1841-61; ald. 1861-73; mayor in 1873, and for a time chairman of Leicester board of guardians: Ellis, Records, 42-43; H. Hartopp, Roll of the mayors and lord mayors of Leicester, 1209 to 1935 ([1936]), 206-07; Moore, Ellis of Leicester, 17-20, 24-26; G. Searson, The Leicester municipal, borough, and county poll book (1883), 24-25, 61-64. The former’s son, John Edward Ellis (1841-1910), was Liberal MP for Rushcliffe, 1885-1910.20A. Bassett, The life of the Rt. Hon. John Edward Ellis MP (1914).