Wilfrid Newton
businessman
Sir Charles Wilfrid Newton (11 December 1928 – 28 November 2012) was the managing director of Hong Kong's Mass Transit Railway Corporation (MTRC) in the 1980s and chairman of London Regional Transport in the 1990s.
History
Charles Wilfrid Newton was born on 11 December 1928 in South Africa, and was educated at schools in Johannesburg and the University of the Witwatersrand. Starting out as an accountant in industry, he became group managing director, and subsequently the chief executive of Turner & Newall.
Hong Kong and MTR
In March 1983, Newton left Turner & Newall to join the Hong Kong's Mass Transit Railway Corporation (MTRC) as chairman and chief executive. The MTR was founded in 1975 as a government owned statutory corporation to build and operate a mass transit system for the then British colony. The MTR had just opened its first railway line connecting Hong Kong Island to Kowloon in 1979.
Newton led the building of a new line on Hong Kong island itself – the Island line, which connected the Central district to Chai Wan. In May 1985, Newton presided over the opening ceremony of the line at Tai Koo, with a plaque unveiled by the Governor of Hong Kong Sir Edward Youde. Following this, a second harbour tunnel to carry increased numbers of passenger traffic opened in 1989.
Thanks to high ridership and property development including shopping malls and development built over railway depots (such as Telford Gardens), the MTR was being run without government subsidies.
“Wilfrid Newton” enters the record as businessman. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Wilfrid, Newton and businessman can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Wilfrid Newton” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.