Stephens was the son of
Frederic George Stephens,
Pre-Raphaelite artist and
art critic, and his wife the artist Rebecca Clara (née Dalton). He was named after his father's friend and former tutor, the painter
Holman Hunt, although the two later fell out. He was a great nephew of the naturalist, explorer and biologist,
Charles Darwin. Stephens was apprenticed in the workshops of the
Metropolitan Railway in 1881. He was an assistant engineer during the building of the
Cranbrook and Paddock Wood Railway, which opened in 1892. In 1894 he became an associate member of the
Institution of Civil Engineers, which allowed him to design and build railways in his own right. He immediately set about his lifetime's project of operating
light railways for rural areas, mostly planned and built under the
Light Railways Act 1896 (
59 & 60 Vict. c. 48). His first two railways, the
Rye and Camber Tramway and the
Hundred of Manhood and Selsey Tramway, predated this, but he built the first railway under the act, the Rother Valley Railway (later the
Kent and East Sussex Railway). The railways were planned, and some later run, from an office at 23 Salford Terrace in
Tonbridge, Kent, which Stephens had rented in 1900 and purchased in 1927. Many of his railways stayed independent of the larger systems created in the Grouping under the
Railways Act 1921. Stephens had no close relatives and never married. He had few interests outside of railways other than voluntary military service and
Liberal Party politics, having befriended MP for Caernarfon
David Lloyd George during Stephens' period as Manager of the
Welsh Highland Railway and
Ffestiniog Railway between 1925 and 1931. In 1916, during
World War I, Stephens attained the rank of
Lieutenant-Colonel in the
Territorial Army (TA) with which he had been associated since the 1890s. He continued to support the TA throughout most of the 1920s. When he died in 1931 aged 62, the management of his railways was taken over by his assistant and life partner
W. H. Austen, who ran them until they closed or were incorporated into the national system in 1948. A museum devoted to his life and achievements is at
Tenterden Station in Kent. == The railways ==