Benjamin Shaw
1835-37 Chairman of the Great Western Railway
1837 October 9th. Resigned as Chairman
1839 Resigned from the Board of the GWR
The GWR Comes to London - Why Paddington? by David Hodgkins [1]
Shaw of Cornhill, London, was a London director and the first chairman of the company — according to MacDermot, ‘a shadowy figure of whom little more than his name is recorded.’ His other claim to distinction is that with two other City figures he purchased and donated the land for University College, London when it was founded in 1826 (The Survey of London, 21, 87-90). He was a director of the Equitable Gas Company whose works were adjacent to the first terminus proposed for the GWR (The Times, 8 Feb. 1830) and had chaired the abortive London, Portsmouth and Southampton Railway in 1825.