Life
1806-85; b. 11 March, Sandymount, Co. Dublin; eldest child of Thomas James [q.v.] and Mary [née Field]; b. Catholic, with four brs. and two sis; ed. TCD; studied botany and engineering, ceasing due to financial problems; worked as draughtsman for Francis Johnson and John Semple; converted to Church of Ireland; joined Ordnance Survey under Richard Griffith, 1826; m. Alicia [nee Winslow] of Fermanagh, dg. of substantial Catholic landowner, 1832, with whom a son and three dgs.; moved to Board of Works, 1835 to join the Shannon Navigation Commission, apparently summoned by John Fox Burgoyne with who he drafted the Drainage Act, 1842; managed the Erne-Shannon canal;
appt. District Engineer for Lower Shannon, 1839, but ultimately forced out of the Board by local landlord politics relating to costs and made the target of ann adverse committe report chaired by Earl of Rosse; retired on pension at 53 and travelled to Belgium, 1854; invited there by Michael Corr to investigate his unprofitable mines in Gelsenkirchen, nr. Bochum, in the Ruhr Valley, and reported vast underground coal veins fit for exploitation (“these people don't understand what they have here”); organised consortium to fund deep-shaft mining, opening the Hibernia mine with Corr and two Irish-Quaker investors (James Perry and Joseph Malcomson), on St. Patrick's Day, 1855;
also fnd. the Shamrock Co. nr Herne, and engaged William Coulson, Newcastle shaft-miner, to conduct operations; his firm became celebrated for the speed of drilling; employed 357 men to mine 18,000 tons of coal in 1855, rising to 1,001 and 315,000 by 1861; a third mine, Erin, went bankrupt during economic depression in 1877, terminating hopes of great wealth; d. 30 Oct. 1885; commemorated by Mulvanystrase in Gelsenkirchen and Shamrockstrase in Herne; a great-grand-son Hans-Christoph Seebohm served as transport minister in five cabinets of Konrad Adenauer, 1949-63.
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Criticism
See Olaf Schmidt-Rutsch, William Thomas Mulvany: An Irish Pragmatic and Visionary in the Ruhrgeblet (Cologne: RWWA 2005), and feature-review by Derek Scally in The Irish Times, Weekend (18 June 2005.)
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Reference
James Dooge, ‘William Thomas Mulvany’, in Dictionary of irish Biography (RIA 2009), notes that another brother, John Skipton Mulvany (qv) (1813–70), was architect to many of the important nineteenth-century railway companies and was responsible for designing railway stations of elegance at Broadstone in Dublin, at Kingstown (Dún Laoghaire), and at many other places throughout the country, while a young brother Thomas John Mulvany (1821-92) worked with William on the Shannon navigation and later joined him in the Ruhr. (Available online; accessed 19.09.2024.)
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