William Woodall

Who was William Woodall?

William Woodall, was a British Liberal politician, philanthropist and supporter of women's suffrage.

Woodall was the elder son of William Woodall, of Shrewsbury, and his wife Martha. He was educated at the Crescent Congregational Schools, Liverpool. He thereafter trained as a gas engineer at the works of the Liverpool Gas Company. By 1857 he had become a gasworks manager for the Burslem and Tunstall Gas Company and, since the company never actually operated in Tunstall, this works must have been in Burslem. In this early industrial career in gas he followed his father and two of his uncles, who had also worked in the gas lighting industry. Woodall was the first to discover that by replacing the glass top of a gas street lamp with a white porcelain top, the quality of the lighting would be improved via downward reflection of the light.

Woodall married Evelyn, daughter of Burslem china manufacturer James Macintyre, in 1862. They lived at Longport in the 1860s, where Woodall was a Sunday School teacher. Woodall was later taken into a business partnership by his father-in-law, who operated a china works at the Washington Works at Burslem.