William Madocks
| William Madocks | |
|---|---|
W. A. Madocks ca. 1812
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| Born | 17 June 1773 London, England |
| Died |
15 September 1828 (aged 55) Paris, France |
| Spouse(s) | Eliza Gwynne |
| Parent(s) | John Madocks MP, Francis Whitchurch |
| Engineering career | |
| Discipline | Civil engineer |
| Projects |
Traeth Mawr reclamation, Tremadog, Porthmadog Harbour |
William Alexander Madocks (17 June 1773 – September 1828) was a landowner and Member of Parliament (MP) for the town of Boston in Lincolnshire from 1802 to 1820, and then for Chippenham in Wiltshire from 1820 to 1826. He is best known, however, for his activities as an agricultural improver in Gwynedd, especially around the towns of Porthmadog and Tremadog, both of which he founded.
William Madocks was born in London on 17 June 1773 to middle-aged parents. He had two older brothers, John Edward, and Joseph, but his parents had suffered the death of two further infants after Joseph's birth, who was ten by the time William was born. His father was John Madocks, a barrister at Lincoln's Inn, who would go on to become an eminent King's Counsel, and his mother was Frances. When he was christened at St Andrew's Church, Holborn, he was given the name William after his grandfather, and Alexander after Alexander the Great, rather than because it was a family name. Frances was the daughter of a London merchant called Joseph Whitchurch, who came from Loughborough in County Down, Ireland, although her mother was English and they lived at Twickenham.
The Madocks family had long associations with Wales, traceable back to the time of King Henry II, and William's father inherited property at Llangwyfan and near Wrexham. As he rose to prominence in the legal profession, the family moved to a substantial Jacobean house with its own private theatre in North Cray, Kent, as the Welsh properties were too far away. At the age of eleven, he went to Charterhouse boarding school, and spent five and a half years there, but left in December 1789, when it appears that the Founder's Day celebrations got out of hand, and William refused to submit to a flogging of the whole class. His father backed his stance, and he worked briefly in a country solicitor's office before going to university at Oxford. His father hoped that he might also pursue a career in the legal service.
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