Sir George Elliot, 1st Baronet, JP (18 March 1814 – 23 December 1893) was a mining engineer and self-made businessman from Gateshead in the North-East of England.
At the age of 9, living in Shiney Row, he was a trapper boy at Whitefield Pit at Penshaw where underground he would open the doors when the miners came along with the tubs.
[2] and in about 1832 he was apprenticed to Thomas Sopwith, a leading Tyneside mining engineer and land surveyor, and was involved in investigating coal resources in the Forest of Dean and surveying the line of the Great North of England Railway between Darlington and York.
Shortly before his death in 1893 he proposed the amalgamation of collieries into a massive semi-public enterprise monitored by the Board of Trade, which would control output, fix prices, pay fair wages, and establish a miners' welfare fund.
He was a financial adviser to the Egyptian Khedive (the viceroy under the Ottomans), and also received an honour from the King of Portugal – the grand cross of the military order of Our Lady of Villa Viciosa.
As an MP made arrangements for the new tongue of Big Ben, in Westminster, London, to be forged at Hopper's Iron Foundry in Houghton-le-Spring.
[13] Elliot and Hugh Taylor (MP) were both friends of Hudson so when by 1871 he was deeply in debt, in bad health and living in exile they started a subscription fund which they launched with a donation of 100 Guineas each.
Margaret died in 1880, and he never remarried, but he was involved in a well-publicized breach of promise case ten years later when he was sued by Emily Mary Hairs, a professional singer, for £5000 damages, but her claim was rejected by a jury.
Elliot owned substantial estates in Monmouthshire and at Whitby, where in the 1870s he further developed the West Cliff area and had a house called "The Crescent" built.
The obituary in The Times claimed 'the public loses in him a man who had the capacity to place himself at the head of important movements and the energy and industry to continue to direct them with success during a lifetime which has lasted for nearly 80 years.