Tom Nickalls


Tom Nickalls was a stockjobber on the stock exchange and one of the founding members of London Rowing Club. He was known as the "king of the American railroad market" after making his fortune in American railway shares.

Biography

He was born in 1827, the son of Patteson Nickalls and Arabella née Chalk and brother of Patteson Nickalls and he married Emily Quihampton. As a boy he was sent to America to work for an uncle who had a livery stables in Chicago, where he gained a first hand knowledge of the surrounding terrain and an understanding of which routes would be of strategic importance for developing railways - information which proved invaluable when he returned to England work as a jobber on the London Stock Exchange. Another soubriquet was "The Erie King", following his successful speculation in shares of the Erie Railroad during the Erie War.
A keen sportsman and for many years a Master of the Surrey Stag Hounds, , Tom Nickalls had a hunting lodge in Norway. In 1893 he sent four pairs of Norwegian skis as a present to his daughter Florence and son in law William Adolf Baillie Grohman who lived in the Austrian Tyrol - one of the earliest recorded uses of skis in Austria.
He died in 1899.