William Lindley, Esq.
(1808-1900)
[This portrait does not appear in the Silvy daybooks in the archives of the National Portrait Gallery. The sitting probably took place between July 1863 and June 1864, the period covered by the missing volume of the daybooks.]
An inked inscription recto in the lower margin identifies the sitter as 'William Lindley, C.E.' This is the civil engineer William Lindley. An inked inscription verso, presumably in the sitter's hand, reads: 'Thomas Scott, Esquire / with W. Lindley's / best respects.'
Born on 7 September 1808, the son of Joseph and Catherine Lindley, he was baptised on 11 October 1808 at St George the Martyr's in Southwark, South London.
On 6 April 1853 at Hamburg he married 'Julia, only child of M. Heerlien, Esq. of Hamburg' (Morning Post, 12 April 1852). The marriage produced at least two sons and a daughter.
William Lindley died on 22 May 1900.
'LINDLEY — On the 22nd inst., at 74-Shooter-Hill-road, Blackheath, William Lindley, Mem. Inst. C.E., FGS, in his 92[nd] year' (Lewisham Borough News, 31 May 1900).
His death was widely reported and many regional newspapers carried a short obituary. 'Mr William Lindley, a well-known engineer, has just died at Blackheath at the age of 92. He was born in 1808, and was the younger son of Mr Joseph Lindley, of Heath, Yorkshire, some time assistant to the Astronomer Royal at Greenwich. With Mr Giles he helped to design some of the earlier railways in the United Kingdom, such as the Newcastle-Carlisle line, the London and Birmingham railway, and the London and Southampton railway. Mr Lindley was also employed in the regulation of the river Mersey, various drainage works, and is connected with the works of the first Thames Tunnel.
'About this time he becamme acquainted with Telford, the two Stephensons, the elder Brunel, and other celebrated engineers. In 1837 he was employed on railway work in Italy and Germany, and on the formation of the Hamburg-Bergedorf Railway Company. Mr Lindley was appointed engineer-in-chief. A great fire broke out in Hamburg in May, 1842. It least three days and nights, and destroyed a considerable part of the town. Mr Lindley was asked by the city authorities to help in checking the outbreak. He suggested the blowing up of a number of buildings with gunpowder in order to stop the further progress of the flames. The work was carried out under his personal direction, but owing to rumours spreading among the populace that Mr Lindley was the chief agent of a plot among the English to blow up and destroy the port of Hamburg, his life was in danger. The Senate entrusted him with the work of preparing the designs for the rebulding of the city. From 1844 to 1848 he was occupied building the new Hamburg waterworks, one of the first undertakings in which the system of constant supply was adopted. The Hamburg gasworks was also a work which was entrusted to Mr Lindley, as well as the large public baths and washhouses for the poor. He retired from the active duties of his profession in 1879. How long he outlilved his contemporaries is shown by the fact that in addition to the engineers above named, Mr Lindley also enjoyed the personal friendship of Cobden, John Stuart Mill, Mr Fawcett, Sir Rowland Hill, Professor Wheatstone, Sir Charles Lyell, Liebig, Sir Gilbert Scott, Sir John Hawkshaw, Sir Joseph Whitworth, and other men of equal eminence' (Staffordshire Sentinel, 2 June 1900).
He left an estate valued at a remarkable £139, 497.
He has a short entry in the Dictionary of National Biography which covers most of the same ground as the above obituary. According to this, he was 'engineer-in-chief to Hamburg and Bergedorf railway, 1838-1860; designed Hamburg sewerage and water works, and drainage and reclamation of the 'Hammerbrook' district; consulting engineeer to city of Frankfort-on-Main, 1865-79.'
His son William Heerlein Lindley (1853-1917) also became a civil engineer was knighted in 1911.