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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 April 2021
FOLLOWING John Gray's death in April 1849, Frederick Davison became sole proprietor as well as manager of Gray & Davison. Whatever the truth concerning Robert Gray's eclipse (above, pp. 253–8), his father had been fortunate in recruiting an energetic and well-connected successor to carry on the business – and one, moreover, who had capital to put into the firm. For his part, Davison may have been glad to have a free hand at last, and within a few years he had implemented major changes which determined the firm's business strategy and tonal philosophy during its Victorian heyday. Under Frederick Davison, the firm maintained its position in the trade until overtaken in the 1870s by younger and more innovative builders such as Henry Willis (1821– 1901), Thomas Hill (1822–93) and Thomas C. Lewis (1833–1915).
It was not only the organ-building trade that was changing. London was changing, transformed by a transport revolution which saw railways tearing through the northern suburbs on their way to imposing termini on the New Road. Charles Dickens described the disruption inflicted on the urban landscape in Dombey and Son (1846–8):
The first shock of a great earthquake had … rent the whole neighbourhood to its centre. Traces of its course were visible on every side. Houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up; buildings were undermined and shaking, propped by great beams of wood. Here, a chaos of carts, overthrown and jumbled together, lay topsy-turvy at the bottom of a steep unnatural hill; there, confused treasures of iron soaked and rusted in something that had accidentally become a pond.
The construction of Euston Station (opened 1837), and later King's Cross (1852) and St Pancras (1867), not only changed the character of the New Road – renamed Euston Road in 1857– but every day brought vast numbers of railway passengers into London from the suburbs who had then to make their way to their place of work. Between 1839 and 1850, the number of London omnibuses more than doubled. As well as carrying passengers, trains increased the flow of goods and agricultural produce into London, which had then to be conveyed by road to warehouses, markets or shops.
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