Aylesbury & Buckingham Railway Company, £25 Preference £5 Per Cent Share certificate, printed in black with mauve underprint, no.405, in the name of Sir Harry Verney, Bart, of Claydon House, Winslow, entered 18 August 1867; embossed seal at lower left. Very fine and very rare; a most interesting association item (£90-120)

This lot was sold as part of a special collection, The Preston-Morley Buckinghamshire Collection: Paper Money.

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Provenance:
M Veissid Mailbid Auction, June 1995 (173). See Colour Plate VI.

Sir Harry Verney, 2nd Bt (1801-1894), country gentleman and reforming landlord; educated at Harrow; was one of the earliest cadets at Sandhurst Military College, 1818-19; served with the 7th Fusiliers, the 72nd and 52nd Regts and the Grenadier Guards; inherited the Claydon House estate from his female cousin, 1827; travelled in South America, 1828-9; in the wake of a cholera outbreak in 1832, he helped to establish Aylesbury’s first hospital; Liberal MP for Buckingham from 1832 until the disfranchisement of the borough in the Reform Bill of 1885; member of the Royal Geographical Society and a founder-member of the Royal Agricultural Society, 1838; became a Privy Councillor, 1885. His first wife, Eliza Hope, was the daughter of one of Nelson’s captains at Trafalgar; his second wife, Frances Nightingale, whom he married in 1858, was the sister of Florence Nightingale, whose work he was always at pains to promote. Verney was a model landlord who knew George Stephenson and ‘made himself personally acquainted with the working of the new system of railroads and, with more foresight than his neighbours…welcomed railways on his estate when other landowners were ordering their gamekeepers to warn off the surveyors or to put an end to their operations by force.’ Further biographical details are sold with the lot