N.G.P. Productions Ltd

NGP Productions
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'NGP Productions is a video production company based in the North West of England. We produce high quality work for international broadcast and corporate clients.'

David Clapham,
Managing Director
NGP Productions

The Last Link
Background
NGP's latest project is 'The Last Link - Charles Tyson Yerkes, An American Buccaneer'. The project is being developed by David Clapham and Miriam Cornes.
Updated: January 2002

The Last Link
The story of the London Underground is a transatlantic tale of greed, decadence, political corruption and sexual intrigue at the turn of the century. We can attribute the story of the Underground network to one man, an American multimillionaire called Charles Tyson Yerkes, born in 1837, died in 1905. His Underground system for London would: "transport passengers from Manchester, changing in Kentish Town for Paris". With this aim, $15 million and some highly questionable business methods, Yerkes spent five years fulfilling his dream only to die before it was completed.

Yerkes' story starts with a poor uneducated Quaker farm boy and leads to the making and losing of three, multi-million dollar empires. His story also encompasses lavish collections of paintings and literary and artistic friends including Henry James, Mark Twain and Rupert Brooke. Beautiful women, including two wives and a lover of forty years his junior, feature in his remarkable life.

When he died bankrupt in 1905 Yerkes' great estate included the Metropolitan, District, Bakerloo, Piccadilly and his swan song the Great Northern Underground lines of central London. His English portfolio included vast amounts of land purchased around the then suburbs of London, including Hampstead, Golders Green and Highgate.

Despite Yerkes' major influence on the Underground, very little is known about his extraordinary story which is mixture of Jekyll and Hyde machiavellianism in which Yerkes appears either as one of the great unsung heroes of our day or as one of the most cunning entrepreneurs of this century.