A protégé of his uncle John Josiah Guest MP, who ran the world’s largest ironworks in Wales, Hutchins joined his family in business and politics, though his talents never quite matched his ambitions in either.
Hutchins was the eldest son of Guest’s younger sister Sarah, who in 1809 married Edward Hutchins in Bristol but by 1828 was widowed.
By now, however, Hutchins was keen to make his own mark in business. After much persuasion, Guest agreed to lend him £5,000 for a partnership in a troubled ironworks at Blaina in Monmouthshire. Guest’s wife Lady Charlotte feared Hutchins lacked ‘firmness and forethought enough to do any good’ with the two elderly partners, but conceded that ‘responsibility on his own account may improve his character’.
Resuming his work for Guest, whose business partner Lewis had died the previous year, Hutchins now began to look for a parliamentary seat. In December 1839 the Liberal chief whip Edward Stanley informed Guest of a vacancy at Penryn and Falmouth, where Hutchins might be returned for £1,500. Hutchins initially demurred, fearing his tenure would be cut short by a dissolution, but after Guest promised to ‘bear the expense’ of another election if the parliament did not last two sessions, Hutchins came forward.
At the ensuing by-election Hutchins stood as a ‘reformer’ and a ‘man of business’, praising the recent introduction of the penny post and urging the necessity of a railroad from Falmouth to London to boost local trade. His reliance on his ‘notebook’ during his hustings speech provoked much ridicule, but after a notoriously venal contest, in which his agents allegedly paid £4 a vote, he secured a clear majority.
A regular but silent attender in his first parliament, Hutchins gave steady support to the Whig ministry in the lobbies, voting alongside Guest on most major issues, such as Irish registration and municipal reform, and backing free trade motions. He only rarely broke ranks, voting with the radicals for the abolition of capital punishment, 5 Mar., 15 July 1840, and differing with Guest by dividing for printers of parliamentary papers to be protected from libel, 6 Mar., and by opposing the funding of new Anglican churches out of the river weaver tolls, 19 May 1840. He and Guest jointly brought up a petition against the Taff Vale railway amendment bill, 25 Mar. 1840, but in a telling reminder that petitions and their presenters did not always concur, both men backed the measure in the lobbies, which repealed restrictions on track speeds and profits.
Hutchins had advised his agents as early as April 1841 that he would quit his constituency at the next dissolution.
Although a Liberal petition against the Tory victory was successful, the investigation unearthed too much corruption on both sides for Hutchins to be awarded a seat.
Hutchins had returned home by 1846, when the Guests gave him possession of their mansion Dowlais House and management of the ironworks during his absence.
Hutchins was eventually returned for a vacancy at Lymington in 1850, as a ‘staunch free trader and financial reformer’. Backed by the outgoing MP, the local Reform Association and the marchioness of Hastings, he declared himself to be ‘a radical in the strongest sense of the word’, citing his support for an extension of the franchise and the ballot. ‘Our clubs adopted the same principle and it was known to work well in America’, he explained, dismissing objections that secret voting was ‘un-English and unmanly’. He also contended that in fairness to taxpayers, the state should either fund all religious communities or none.
By now his relations with the Guests were becoming strained, with Hutchins increasingly insistent about taking full control of the Dowlais works.
The protracted negotiations that ensued, according to Lady Charlotte, ‘vexed’ and ‘worried’ her husband so much that he ‘made himself ill’. Eventually in July 1851 Hutchins, after a ‘most monstrous’ rejection of one valuation, accepted £58,000 for his shares. From this was deducted £8,000, the amount he had ‘overdrawn his account’, and ‘about £20,000 which he owed Mr. Lewis’.
Following Guest’s death later that year Hutchins became more conspicuous in the Commons, venturing into debate and becoming an occasional critic of government spending. In his first known speech, 20 May 1853, he took issue with the Aberdeen ministry’s preferential treatment of the Anglican college of St. David’s at Lampeter, objecting to its proposed funding when the grant to the Catholic seminary at Maynooth was to be cut, as seemed likely. He spoke and voted steadily against Protestant attempts to reduce the Maynooth grant thereafter.
Hutchins’ other main concern was railways. A long-serving director of the London and South Western line, the leading rival to Brunel’s Great Western Railway in the so-called ‘gauge wars’, he actively defended its extension westwards, backing the relevant bill in the Commons, 8 Feb. 1855, and speaking in similar terms at company meetings, on one occasion even telling a disgruntled shareholder, ‘If you want to make a personal quarrel of it, we’ll soon settle that (Order!, Order!). I am not afraid of you, either in public or in private’.
This was significant because during the recess of the previous month Hutchins had ‘embraced’ Catholicism, attracting what one paper termed ‘world-wide publicity’.
Hutchins’ membership of the freemasons, which he had joined in 1831, is well documented, but there is little indication that it influenced his parliamentary career, despite him telling his lodge that he hoped to ‘be useful to the craft’ and promote the ‘principles of our order’ on becoming an MP.
In later years he became an ‘active member’ of the Roman Catholic Poor School Committee and in 1870 was part of a ‘very influential’ group of Catholics that met with the duke of Norfolk to lobby the Gladstone ministry on the elementary education bill.
Hutchins died childless at 47 Eversfield Place, St. Leonard’s-on-Sea, near Hastings, in February 1876, ‘after a lingering illness’.