were necessary after the railway panic in 1866 to maintain the company’s resolve to establish an independent route to the north. The difficulties and expense of the enterprise were immense, and its construction gave Allport more anxiety than any other railway work he had ever undertaken (Railway News, 1892, p. 685). The line was not completed for passenger traffic to Carlisle before 1875. The St. Pancras terminus of the Midland Railway had been opened on 1 Oct. 1868. By the securing of a London terminus, and the creation of a new and independent route to Scotland, Allport’s main purpose was accomplished, and the Midland line was established as one of the great railway systems of the country.
The development of the coalfields in mid-England by means of his line was an object always kept in view by the general manager, and eventually successfully accomplished. The process, however, led in 1871 to a severe coal-rate struggle with the Great Northern Railway, in which Allport’s action in suddenly withdrawing through rates to all parts of the Great Northern system, besides being unsuccessful, proved subsequently somewhat prejudicial to the interests of his company. Competition with the Great Northern was one of the chief reasons which in the first instance caused the Midland board to decide on running third-class carriages on all trains on and after 1 April 1872. But Allport was a firm believer from the first in the eventual success of a course regarded at the time by most railway managers as revolutionary, and in after-life looked back on the improvement of the third-class passenger’s lot as one of the most satisfactory episodes in his career (Williams, The Midland Railway, p. 280). The abolition of the second class on the Midland system from 1 Jan. 1875 was a further development of the same policy; but the change, though now followed on other lines, was not at first approved by public opinion.
Allport retired from his post as general manager on 17 Feb. 1880, when he was presented with 10,000l. by the shareholders, and elected as a director of the company. In 1884 he received the honour of knighthood, and in 1886 was created a member of the royal commission to report upon the state of railways in Ireland. He was a director of several important industrial undertakings. After his retirement he inspected the New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio railway system on behalf of the bondholders, and exposed its mismanagement. He died on 25 April 1892, and was buried in Belper cemetery, Derby, on 29 April. He married in 1832 Ann (d. 1886), daughter of John Gold of Birmingham, by whom he left two sons and three daughters.
[Times, 29 April 1892; Railway News, April 1892; Acworth’s Railways of England, ed. 1900, pp. 31, 55, 206; Burke’s Landed Gentry, 1886; Williams’s History of Midland Railway; and information kindly conveyed by the secretary of the Midland Railway Company.]
ALTHAUS, JULIUS (1833–1900), physician, born in Lippe-Detmold, Germany, on 31 March 1833, was the fourth and youngest son of Friedrich Althaus and Julie Draescke. His father was general superintendent of Lippe-Detmold, a protestant dignity equal to the Anglican rural dean; his mother was a daughter of the last protestant bishop of Magdeburg. He received his classical education at the university of Bonn, and began his medical studies at Göttingen in 1851. He proceeded thence to Heidelberg and graduated M.D. at Berlin in 1855, with a thesis ‘de Pneumothorace.’ He then proceeded to Sicily with Professor Johannes Mueller (1801–1858), and thence to Paris, where he worked under Professor Jean Martin Charcot (1825–1898). Althaus afterwards settled in London, when Robert Bentley Todd [q. v.] gave him opportunities of undertaking the electrical treatment of patients at King’s College Hospital. In 1866 he was mainly instrumental in founding the Hospital for Epilepsy and Paralysis in Regent’s Park, to which he was attached as physician until his resignation in 1894, when he was appointed to the honorary office of consulting physician. He was admitted a member of the Royal College of Physicians of London in 1860. At the time of his death he was a corresponding fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine, and he had received the insignia of the order of the crown of Italy. He died in London on 11 June 1900, and was buried at Woking. Althaus married, in June 1859, Anna Wilhelmina Pelzer, and had three children—two sons and a daughter, of whom the latter survives him.
Althaus was a man of very varied attainments, with great musical gifts. He was greatly interested in the therapeutic effects of electricity. He published:
- ‘A Treatise on Medical Electricity,’ London, 1859, 8vo; 3rd edit. 1873.
- ‘The Spas of Europe,’ London, 1862, 8vo.
- ‘On Paralysis, Neuralgia, and other Affections of the Nervous System, and their successful Treatment by Galvanism and Faradisation,’ London, 1864, 12mo.
- ‘On Sclerosis of the Spinal Cord,’ London, 1885, 8vo; translated into German, Leipzig, 1884, and into French by J. Morin, with a
