ROBERT BEAUMONT believes the city of York should be more generous towards

two of its more controversial, yet highly successful, sons.

IT was William Shakespeare who wrote, in his play Julius Caesar: "The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones."

Shakespeare could have been speaking about either George Hudson, the 19th century Railway King, or Rod Hills, until recently the leader of City of York Council for nearly 20 years.

Both men had a huge impact on the development and prosperity of York, yet the city has turned its haughty back on both of them.

Their problem is that their turbulent personal lives, and somewhat skewed morality, has obscured their immense achievements.

There is no doubt that George Hudson, the 19th century railway king, laid the foundations of York as a modern railway city.

Thrown out of his North Yorkshire village of Howsham when he was only 15, for fathering an illegitimate child, he inherited £30,000 in the most dubious of circumstances 12 years later. That enabled him to reinvent himself as the Railway King and become, at the height of his fame and fortune, one of the very richest men in England.

He made his money by forming his own railway companies and, in 1845, he was able to buy the Londesborough estate in East Yorkshire for £500,000. That was a huge amount of money in mid-Victorian Britain.

By 1848 he controlled nearly a third of Britain's rail network and was a Conservative member in the House of Commons. He was three times Lord Mayor of York, and the city basked in his reflected glory as it became the leading railway centre in the north of England.

His fall was as spectacular as his rise - and he ended up first in a debtors' prison and then in France, forlorn and penniless, dependent on his few remaining friends to keep him alive. He died a broken man and was buried only a couple of miles away from his birthplace.

The wheel had turned a full circle, but within that circle is a journey of epic proportions.

York, busily rewriting history, has tried to remove all trace of the Railway King from its civic annals. Our city, it appears, has conveniently forgotten that it owes its position as the railway capital of the North primarily to Hudson.

Today one of the city's ugliest streets, a nasty little road which runs past dingy bus stops, carries his name, while a statue of his great enemy, George Leeman, dominates the station complex. That bears scant relation to the two men's differing legacies to their city.

Moreover the National Railway Museum, which owes its very position in York to Hudson, barely recognises him.

History has yet to pass its judgement on Rodney Hills, one of the great York politicians of the last century, who died in lonely and tragic circumstances earlier this year. But members of his Labour group on the city council, who owe Coun Hills so much, were quick to distance themselves from him when lurid tales began to circulate about his private life.

That is so unfair. I was talking to a senior officer from City of York Council this week, who paid tribute to the immense amount of work that Rodney Hills put in on behalf of York. Crucially, Coun Hills was instrumental in setting up the council's Economic Development Unit in 1984, which enabled the city to cope with the erosion of its manufacturing base and reinvent itself as the hi-tech, scientific centre of the North.

This mirrors George Hudson's achievement of transforming York from a faded Georgian backwater, which was in danger of being consigned to the dustbin of history by the rise of the industrial West Riding, into a thriving Victorian railway city.

Indeed the similarities between Hudson and Hills are striking. They were men of vision and energy, who did not suffer fools gladly. They were both regarded as outsiders by the traditional York establishment, but that simply strengthened their resolve. Certainly they were deeply flawed men, who fell from grace in a spectacular fashion, but they made a difference, unlike most of their detractors.

It is strange, and immensely ironic, that Dick Turpin and Guy Fawkes, two of York's most famous and feted sons, were criminals, while the reputations of two much more substantial men, George Hudson and Rodney Hills, lie in tatters.

It is high time that the city of York rectified this imbalance.

Today George Hudson's grave lies, neglected and overgrown, in a corner of an unkempt graveyard at Scrayingham, near Malton. It would be wonderful if it could be cleaned up. It would also be wonderful if York could honour Hudson with a statue.

At the same time, the council should ensure that the achievements of Rodney Hills are remembered appropriately. He, unlike George Hudson, would have hated a statue. But an understated memorial, emphasising Coun Hills' work, would not go amiss.

Either way it would be fitting, wouldn't it, if Shakespeare's words were transposed and that the good that George Hudson and Rodney Hills did lived after them, while the evil was interred with their bones?

Robert Beaumont, the author of The Railway King, A Biography Of George Hudson (Headline Review, £7.99), defends Hudson's reputation on Making History on Radio Four this Tuesday (September 30) at 3pm

Updated: 11:07 Saturday, September 27, 2003