Sir Edmund Beckett, 4th Baronet

He was a son of banker Sir John Beckett, 1st Baronet (1743–1826), and his wife, Mary, whose father was Christopher Wilson, Bishop of Bristol.

Beckett became chairman of the Great Northern Railway (GNR), which proposed a direct line from London to York via Peterborough and Doncaster, with a loop to serve Lincolnshire.

Bitterly fought by Hudson and Huish, because it would take away their traffic, the GNR prospectus was opposed by the railway department of the Board of Trade, and faced a petition alleging that its list of subscribers was inflated.

The dispute went to arbitration under W. E. Gladstone, whose rulings mostly favoured Beckett, by awarding the GNR at least as high a proportion of the revenue as it claimed from most of the routes it contested with Huish's confederation.

When Beckett retired in 1864 the GNR constituted, as it subsequently remained, the southern end of the fastest route from London to north-east England and Scotland.

At his death even the local Tory paper, in its obituary, described him as "brusque in his manner, impatient to a degree of human vanity in all its ugly shapes, and with little trace of sentiment or poetry of any description".