Henry Tennant

Henry Tennant (1823–1910) was a British railway manager who served as General Manager of the North Eastern Railway from 1871 to 1891 and as the presiding chairman of the NER's Locomotive Committee throughout that period, an administrative figure whose name was attached to the Tennant Class 2-4-0 express locomotive of 1885 — designed and ordered during the interregnum between the retirements of Edward Fletcher and the appointment of T.W. Worsdell as Locomotive Superintendent.

Born at Hetton, County Durham on 4 December 1823, Tennant began his railway career as a clerk on the Stockton and Darlington Railway in 1843 — the world's first public steam railway, which by Tennant's early career had been absorbed into the NER's predecessor companies. He rose through the accountant's department to become NER General Manager on the death of William O'Brien, holding the post for twenty years and overseeing the NER's development into one of the largest and most prosperous British railway companies of the Victorian era.

The Tennant Class 2-4-0 was the product of an unusual administrative situation: with Fletcher retired and the locomotive department without a superintendent, Tennant and the Locomotive Committee took the practical step of ordering a simple, capable express engine from the railway's own Gateshead Works to cover the gap. The resulting locomotives were sound and reliable machines that served the NER's East Coast expresses well, and the naming of the class in Tennant's honour was a mark of his colleagues' appreciation of his practical intervention. He retired from the NER in 1891 and lived in retirement in Yorkshire, dying on 4 April 1910.