SCOTT, Robert (1803-1856), of Stourbridge, Worcestershire; The Red House, Great Barr, Staffordshire

A Unitarian barrister and Black country landowner with railway and canal interests, Scott was a staunch Liberal free trader, who secured legislation to facilitate the annexation of detached parts of counties to the counties in which they were situated. His father, the Reverend Charles Wellbeloved (1769-1858), was principal and professor of theology at Manchester College, York, 1803-40.1Burke’s landed gentry (1879), ii. 1426. After completing his legal training, Robert Wellbeloved acted as a barrister on the Oxford circuit and later served as a commissioner of the court of bankruptcy until 1842.2Gent. Mag. (1856), i. 428; F. Boase, Modern English biography, supplement (1912), iii. 536. After his marriage to the daughter and heiress of John Scott, whose family had possessed land in Stourbridge, Worcestershire, since the seventeenth century, Wellbeloved adopted his father-in-law’s surname in lieu of his own patronymic and succeeded to the estates in 1832.3Burke’s landed gentry (1879), ii. 1426.

As a committed free trader and local notable, Scott lent his support to the Anti-Corn Law League’s president John Benjamin Smith at the Walsall by-election in February 1841, having coveted the seat himself.4Robert Scott to J.B. Smith, 14 Jan. 1841, Greater Manchester County Record Office, MS 923.2 S336, V, f. 78. Scott got his opportunity shortly afterwards at the 1841 general election, when he avenged Smith’s defeat by beating a Conservative. During his campaign, which rested largely on opposition to the corn laws, Scott told supporters that ‘no interest could long thrive by monopoly’ and condemned the sliding scale of duties as producing a ‘constant see-saw’.5Morn. Chro., 23 June 1841; Staffordshire Advertiser, 3 July 1841. He also described Sir Robert Peel as ‘too slippery a gentleman for straightforward, well-meaning, plain, simple people’.6Morn. Chro., 23 June 1841.

Scott’s maiden speech, 27 Sept. 1841, drew attention to petitions from Walsall complaining of distress and, like other MPs sympathetic to the Anti-Corn Law League, he called upon Parliament not to prorogue without proposing remedial measures, namely a revision of the corn laws.7Hansard, 27 Sept. 1841, vol. 59, cc. 860-1. ‘A zealous Reformer’, the following session Scott opposed Peel’s revised sliding scale on corn, 9 Mar. 1842, 7 Apr. 1842, and argued that the proposed reintroduction of income tax ‘was to be traced to a wish to maintain monopoly’.8Gent. Mag. (1856), i. 428; Hansard, 22 Apr. 1842, vol. 62, c. 1040. He expressed a preference for a land or property tax to create revenue to allow taxes on consumption to be reduced.9Ibid. Scott spoke against extending the powers of the troubled Cheltenham and Great Western Union Railway, 6 Apr. 1842, as it was unlikely to complete the line.10Hansard, 6 Apr. 1842, vol. 61, c. 1343. Acting as a spokesman for the Black Country’s extractive industries, Scott called for Lord Ashley’s bill to regulate mines and collieries to be postponed to the following session, 22 June 1842. Although he agreed with the prohibition of females working in the mines, Scott maintained that ‘it was generally considered a remarkably pleasant and cheerful employment’.11Hansard, 22 June 1842, vol. 64, cc. 424-5.

Scott backed Sharman Crawford’s motion for a radical reform of the electoral system, 21 Apr. 1842. On economic and social issues, he often voted alongside Radical free traders. For example, he opposed a ten hour day in factories, 22 Mar. 1844, and resisted any legislative interference in the working hours of adult factory workers, 3 May 1844. In the same year Scott supported Cobden’s unsuccessful motion for an investigation of the effect of the corn laws on farmers and agricultural labourers. A supporter of religious liberty, Scott cast votes for a non-denominational system of education, 18 May 1843, for the 1845 Maynooth bill, and further Catholic relief, 24 Feb. 1847.

In 1843 Scott introduced a bill to annex detached parts of counties to those in which they were situated, but due to the lateness of the session it made no further progress.12PP 1843 (540), i. 811-12; CJ, xcviii. 549. The following year he again proposed the measure, which, after being referred to a select committee, was passed as the Detached Parts of Counties Act (7 & 8 Vict., c. 61).13PP 1844 (418), i. 705-10; CJ, xcix. 169, 214, 391, 433, 443, 477, 497, 541, 552, 614. However, Scott’s 1845 bill, to facilitate the transfer of landed property bequeathed by will in cases where the probate was granted in a diocesan rather than a prerogative court, was defeated in a thin House, 7 May 1845.14Hansard, 7 May 1845, vol. 80, cc. 242-4; PP 1845 (213), i. 293; CJ, c. 252, 415. In the same year he backed the Australian waste lands bill, which was opposed by the ‘monopolising jealousy of the New Zealand Company’.15Hansard, 31 July 1845, vol. 82, c. 1297. Scott supported the repeal of the corn laws in 1846, and backed Mark Philips’s motion criticising the Mexican government’s treatment of a British merchant, 10 Mar. 1846.16Hansard, 10 Mar. 1846, vol. 84, c. 926.

By this time, Scott was increasingly preoccupied with his business interests. He was chairman of the Birmingham Canal Company, having probably initially acquired a shareholding through marriage.17W. Scott, Stourbridge and its vicinity (1832), 55. As a central part of the route between London and the north west, the Company had a ‘very large traffic and important interests’, with annual revenues of over £100,000 in 1843-5.18PP 1846 (275), xiii. 160; Midland Counties Herald, 15 Jan. 1846, qu. in The Times, 22 Jan. 1846. Scott told an 1846 select committee that canals could compete with railways, but he believed that they had been badly managed and had not received ‘fair play’.19PP 1846 (275), xiii. 160. He opposed railway companies taking over canals to run them down and believed that the two forms of transport could complement each other in the right circumstances.20Ibid., 161-6. To this effect, Scott was instrumental in attempts to connect the Birmingham canal to the Birmingham, Wolverhampton and Stour Valley Railway and the Trent Valley, Midland and Grand Junction Railway, the last company chaired by George Anson, Whig MP for South Staffordshire 1837-53.21The Standard, 19 Aug. 1845, 6 Sept. 1845. However, this placed him at odds with the influential Littleton family, barons Hatherton, who had supported Scott at the 1841 election, as they backed a competing railway line.22Edward Richard Littleton to Lord Hatherton, 3 Aug. 1847, Staffordshire Record Office, D260/M/F/7/5/27/17. This probably contributed to Scott’s retirement at the 1847 general election, although he did propose Anson at the South Staffordshire nomination.23Ibid.

On Scott’s death from pneumonia in 1856, a local obituary said that as a parliamentarian he had been ‘unremitting in his attention to public business, and the same remark will apply in reference to his connection with railway and canal companies’.24Berrow’s Worcester Journal, 21 Feb. 1856. His ‘knowledge of law, his calm and even temper, and his eminently judicial mind’ made him well suited to his magisterial duties.25Gent. Mag. (1856), i. 428. Scott was succeeded by his only son John Charles Addyes Scott, who also inherited the ‘contiguous estates of Ratlinghope and Norbury’ in Shropshire, which his father had purchased in 1845.26Burke’s landed gentry (1879), ii. 1426.