Reader corrects story on pioneer

Barry Deakin of Wellington has knocked on the head any notion that a young gentleman who was featured in a photo used in our Pictures From The Past slot might have been the great Shropshire electrical pioneer Thomas Parker.

Our photo showed a group outside Severn House - nowadays the Valley Hotel - in Ironbridge. And, as Severn House was Parker's home, we speculated whether the gentleman on the left of the group might be him.

Comparing him with a picture in our archives of Parker in later life, our "office jury" was divided on whether it might be the same person.

But Barry has come up with evidence which seems to disprove it.

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"Thomas Parker was a distant uncle of mine, so I have got quite a bit of information on him," he said, adding: "In 1891 he was living at Newbridge House, Tettenhall. He then moved to Manor House, Upper Green, Tettenhall, on the corner of New Hampton Road West and Tettenhall Road.

"His company went into liquidation in 1908 and he retired to Severn House with his family where he died in 1915. He is buried in St Michael's Church, Madeley."

In other words, Parker was quite an old man when he moved in to Severn House, so cannot be the person on the picture. Born at Lincoln Hill, Ironbridge, in 1843, he went to work at the Coalbrookdale Company at the age of nine. A visit to the Great Exhibition in London in 1863 fired his imagination.

He invented steam pumps, gas engines and the like, and managed the engineering portion of the foundry, before leaving in 1882 to set up in business in Wolverhampton.

Among other achievements, he constructed the first continuous electrical dynamo; the first electrical tramway machinery in England, at Blackpool; and the world's first hydro-electric scheme, at Portrush, Ulster.

He was behind the electricity infrastructure of Oxford; the first electric locomotive (at Bournbrook); and the South Staffordshire overhead tramways. The first large electrical railway in the world was in Liverpool - yet another of Parker's achievements.

See more Shropshire nostalgia pictures here nextpage

Thomas Parker, centre, in an early electric car outside Severn House - nowadays the Valley Hotel - in Ironbridge.

The picture we thought might show the great Shropshire electrical pioneer Thomas Parker, standing on the left of the group.

See any similarities? A portrait picture of Thomas Parker.