The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Stories

by Mike Ashley

“Of course no carriage was allowed to upstage the Prime Minister’s! It had Grecian scrolls and balustrades, and gilded pillars that maintained a canopy of rich crimson cloth. The interior had an ottoman seat. It was like a perfect little sitting room, except that it was a peculiar oblong shape, four times as long as it was wide, and it ran on eight large iron wheels!

  “At precisely ten o’clock the Prime Minister himself drove up to the yard in the Marquis of Salisbury’s carriage, drawn by four horses. He was greeted by clapping and cheering, and a military band struck up See the Conquering Hero Comes. His train was to be pulled along by a locomotive called the Northumbrian, which was adorned by a bright lilac flag, and would be piloted by George Stephenson himself. The train consisted of just three carriages, in the first of which would ride the military band, the second the Prime Minister himself and his guests, and the third the railway directors and their guests – one of whom was me!

  “I cannot describe my excitement as I clambered into the carriage, which was decked with silken streamers, a deep imperial purple. I admit I was callow enough to use my nail scissors to snip off a few inches of a pretty streamer which I tied up in my hair . . .”

  I fingered the bit of ribbon that had bound up Lily’s manuscript, and wondered.

  I grew up in a quiet cul-de-sac in a little outer-suburb village a few miles from Liverpool city centre, on the road to Manchester. The cul-de-sac emptied out southwards into the main road.

  Behind the houses ran a railway embankment. It cut straight past the northern end of the road, running dead straight west to east, paralleling the main road in its path from Liverpool to Manchester. We kids were strictly banned from ever trying to find a way to the railway embankment, or to climb its grassy slopes. But we did know there was a disused tunnel under the embankment behind one of the back gardens, from which, our legends had it, robbers would periodically emerge.

  When I was small, steam trains still ran along the line. Great white clouds would climb into the air, and my mother would rush out to save her washing from the soot. The trains were always a part of our lives, sweeping across the sky like low-flying planes. Their noise didn’t bother us; it was too grand to be irritating, like the weather.

  As a kid you are dropped at random into time. That embankment, covered by grass and weeds, was there all my life, a great earthwork vast and unnoticed. I didn’t know we were living in the shadow of a bit of history.

  For the railway line at the bottom of my road was George Stephenson’s Liverpool & Manchester Railway, the first passenger railway in all the world. And, seven years before Queen Victoria took the throne, Miss Lily Ord, great-great-grandmother of my old friend Albert, attended the railway’s opening – and so, maybe, did a much more famous figure.

  “Soon all was ready. The Prime Minister’s train was to run on the southerly of the two parallel railroad lines, so that he might be seen from the other trains, which would all run on the northerly line.

  “At twenty minutes to eleven a cannon was fired, and off we went! Enormous masses of people lined the railroad, cheering as we went past and staring agog at such a sight as they never saw before in their lives.

  “As we left Liverpool we passed between two great rocky cliffs. Bridges had been thrown between the tops of these cliffs, and people gazed down at us, so distant they were like dolls in the sky. I marvelled that all this was the work of man. But the hewn walls were already cloaked by mosses and ferns.

  “Inside our carriage, crammed shoulder to shoulder, we talked nine to the dozen as we glided along!

  “My friend Miss — the actress was a guest of Mr —, one of the railway directors, though what their relationship was I was never absolutely clear. But as the panting iron horses gathered speed, Miss — became distressed. I was forced to exchange seats with her, so she could sit well inside the carriage.

  “I found myself sitting next to a charming gentleman who introduced himself as M. Pierre Venn (or perhaps Vairn). To my surprise he was French! – he was a lawyer from the city of Nantes. It seemed M. Venn had advised one of the railway directors regarding investment from wealthy individuals in France, many of whom have an eye on the railway for a replication in France itself, depending of course on its success. I admit I was surprised to learn that Frenchie money had been used to build an English railway, even so many years after the downfall of Napoleon! But Money has always been ignorant of national rivalries.

  “M. Venn was with another Frenchman, a dark, rather sullen man whom M. Venn introduced as a M. Gyger, but this gentleman had not a word to say to me, or anybody else – quite unlike the voluble Frenchie one expects. He did little but glare about rather resentfully and I quickly forgot him. (Of course I remember him well now! – but I run ahead of myself.)

  “M. Venn was also accompanied by his pretty wife, and their child, their first-born, a little boy of two or three they called Julie, and they were much more fun. That scamp of a boy was decked out in a pretty sailor’s costume, for Nantes is evidently near the coast, and the child was already obsessed by the sea and all things nautical. But he had also discovered a new passion for Mr Stephenson’s railway; I am not sure how he managed it, but even before we set off he was already a bundle of soot, which got all over our clothes and hands! The little boy laughed so much, his joy at the experience of the journey almost hysterical, that I think all forgave him.

  “M. Venn offered me some profound thoughts on the meaning of the marvellous experience we were sharing. ‘Never has the dominion of mind more fully exhibited its sovereignty over the world of matter than today,’ he said, ‘and in a manner which will surely beneficially influence the future destinies of mankind throughout the civilized worlds.’ And so forth!

  “However as well as his interest in the Future of Man M. Venn also seemed intrigued by the Presence of Woman. He complimented me on my accent, which he said sounded Scotch, and the rosewater scent I wore, and the purple ribbon in my hair, before moving on to the colour of my cheeks and the suppleness of my neck. That is the way of the Frenchie, I suppose. Or it may be that Mme. Venn did not understand English.

  “It wasn’t long before we emerged from deep beneath the ground to fly far above it. Over a high embankment we bowled along, looking down at the tree tops and drinking in the fresh autumn air . . .”

  Somewhere among those trees was the site of my future home. And perhaps Lily was able to make out the line of the toll road from which her father made his living.

  The history of my home village has been determined by the fact that it lies on a straight line drawn between the centre of Manchester and the Liverpool docks. As the Manchester cotton trade grew and the port of Liverpool began to expand, it was an obvious place through which to build a road.

  A hundred years before George Stephenson, a consortium of Liverpool merchants petitioned for an act to set up a turnpike road, the first in Lancashire or Yorkshire save for the London trunk routes. They installed one of their gatekeepers at the Toll Gate Lodge, where my old friend Albert was born, and indeed died. The turnpikes were a smart social invention; by making those with the strongest vested interest in the roads, the users, pay for their upkeep, the British road system was massively and rapidly improved.

  The new road was a huge success, and it galvanised the local economy. But by the early 1800s the thirty miles separating Liverpool and Manchester, by now two engines of the Industrial Revolution, were traversed daily by hundreds of jostling horses, wagons and stagecoaches. So the local land agents and merchants began to conceive of schemes for a railway. They were fortunate enough, or wise, to choose George Stephenson as their chief engineer. The success of the railway was a calamity for the toll road, though, and the gatekeepers who made a living from it; Lily’s father had been right.

  The geographical logic endured. In my lifetime yet another transport link, a motorway, was built through the same area. So within fifty yards or so of my front door there were marvels of transport engineering from the eighteenth, nineteenth and
twentieth centuries.

  The trains stopped repeatedly, so that the notables could admire views of cuttings and viaducts and countryside, and lesser people could admire the notables. At one stop, twenty-year-old Lily managed to talk her way into a ride on the footplate of the Northumbrian with George Stephenson himself.

  “I was introduced to the little engine which carried us all along the rails. She (for they call all their curious fire-horses mares) goes on two wheels, alike to her feet, which are driven by bright steel legs called pistons, which are propelled by steam. All this apparatus is controlled by a small steel handle, which applies or withdraws the steam from the pistons. It is so simple an affair a child could manage it.

  “The engine was able to fly at more than thirty miles an hour. But the motion was as smooth as you can imagine, and I took my bonnet off, and let the air take my hair. Behind the belching little she-dragon which Mr Stephenson controlled with a touch, I felt not the slightest fear.”

  I envied Lily; it must have been the ride of a lifetime.

  “Mr Stephenson himself is a master of marvels with whom I fell awfully in love. He is a tall man, more powerfully built than one of his engines, with a shock of white hair. He is perhaps fifty-five.” (Actually Stephenson was forty-nine.) “His face is fine, but careworn. He expresses himself with clarity and forcefulness, and although he bears the accent of his north-east birthplace there is no coarseness or vulgarity about him at all. He told me he is the son of a colliery fireman. He learned his mechanicking working on fire engines down the mines. He was nineteen before he could read or write, and his quest to build his railway was frustrated by the linguistic contortions of the ‘Parliament Men’ who had opposed him. But this was the day of his triumph.”

  Stephenson built his railway, all thirty miles of it, in just four years. It was a mighty undertaking, with cuttings and viaducts engineered by armies of navvies. Stephenson had to build over sixty bridges, including the one behind my neighbour’s back garden. My embankment was three miles long, forty-five feet high and amounted to half a million cubic yards of spoil removed from cuttings miles away.

  “The train passed over a very fine viaduct, and we looked down to see the graceful legs of his mighty bridge striding across a beautiful little valley. I heard a gruff voice which could only have been the Prime Minister’s, emanating from the carriages behind, as he called the spectacle, ‘Stupendous!’ and ‘Magnificent!’ – for so it was.

  “But, it is a strange thing for a man who had proven himself so brave, I thought the Prime Minister didn’t much enjoy the ride. He said that he could not believe sensible people would ever allow themselves to be hurled along at such speeds! And later I heard him say that if Mr Stephenson’s railway caught on, it would ‘only encourage the lower classes to travel about.’ A good thing too I say! . . .”

  Near a station called Parkside, Stephenson again halted the Northumbrian. And it was during this brief stop, as Lily wrote in her girlish hand, “that calamity struck.”

  “I returned to my carriage, where I comforted my friend Miss —, who became a little less queasy now that she could hear the birds sing again. Everybody started to get out of the carriage to taste the air and stretch his legs.

  “Now, you must remember that we were travelling from Liverpool to Manchester, that is west to east, and that the Prime Minister’s train was on the southerly of the two parallel rail lines. So the safest place to alight from our carriage was to our right, for to go left would be to step on to the other track which, though it was clear at the moment, was surely not guaranteed to remain so! Thus M. Venn and his wife alighted safely to the right, M. Venn carrying little Julie on his shoulder. Miss — and I followed.

  “But to my surprise M. Gyger, M. Venn’s sullen and uncommunicative companion, got out to the left.

  “The carriages were quite open and no obstruction to vision, and I could clearly see M. Gyger walk up and down the northern track. He was joined by various lords, counts, bishops and other worthies. I recognized only one of them, a portly man with a damaged arm and gammy leg. This was William Huskisson, Member of Parliament, who had been on hand to welcome the Prime Minister into Liverpool that morning.

  “Both parties, on both sides of the carriage, were drawn as if magnetised to the middle coach of the three, which was the Prime Minister’s. I could see him clearly, that noble nose, the upright bearing of a soldier! I fancy the heavy drapery around his carriage rather baffled his hearing – for if not I imagine what transpired next might have been quite different.

  “Since I must describe the death of a Human Being I will take care to relate what happened in sequence.

  “As I walked with the Venns, I saw that M. Gyger prompted Mr Huskisson to call to the Prime Minister, ‘Oh, do step down, sir, if only for a minute! The gleam of the rail, the billowing of the steam – quite the spectacle, sir!’ And so on. I fancy the Prime Minister would rather have stayed in the comfort of his carriage. But duty called, and he got up rather stiffly and prepared to descend towards Gyger and Huskisson – that is, on to the northern rail.

  “As he did so M. Gyger’s face assumed a most curious expression. I saw it once when my father caught a rascal who habitually skipped around our toll gate: an expression that said, ‘Got you at last, my lad!’ And I saw M. Gyger step back, quite deliberately, away from the rail, leaving Mr Huskisson standing there to assist the Prime Minister to the ground. As I say I saw all this quite clearly, but I did not understand it at the time.

  “Suddenly I was disturbed by a loud but distorted yell: ‘Get in! Get in!’

  “I looked down the track, back towards Liverpool, and saw to my horror that a second train was racing down the northern line towards us. The sky-blue flag it carried told me that the locomotive was none other than the Rocket, Stephenson’s famous victor of the Rainhill trials. That cry came from the engineer who hailed us with a speaking-trumpet, even as he struggled to apply his brakes. Though the Venns and I were quite safe, those who foolishly wandered over the northern track were in grave danger.

  “And the Prime Minister himself, his hearing perhaps baffled by the drapery, was about to step down into the Rocket’s path! All this I saw in a second, and then a great fear clamped down on me and I was unable to move.

  “Fortunately M. Venn was more courageous than I. With a muttered ‘Parbleu!’ he stepped forward – but though we were only feet from the carriage, it was too far for him to have reached the Prime Minister in time. So M. Venn, thinking fast, called out: ‘Wellesley!’

  “The Prime Minister turned at the sound of his name. And M. Venn threw his small son through the air, into the carriage and straight at the Prime Minister!

  “Though he nearly lost his own balance the Prime Minister twisted and neatly caught the boy in his great hands, thus saving the child from a painful fall: the Prime Minister had the reactions of a soldier, despite his age, and an instinct for the safety of others. With the boy in his arms he stumbled backwards into his ottoman – but he remained safely in the carriage.

  “And then the Rocket reached our train. I distinctly heard the Prime Minister call out, ‘Huskisson, for God’s sake get to your place!’ But it was too late.

  “Everybody else had scrambled out of the way, off the track or behind the coaches – everybody but poor Huskisson, who, hampered by a bad leg and general portliness, fell back on to the track. The Rocket ran over Huskisson’s leg. I heard a dreadful crunch of bone.

  “When the train had passed others rushed to help him. George Stephenson quickly took command. One man began to tie his belt around the damaged leg, which pumped blood. Soon the patient would be loaded aboard a single carriage behind the Northumbrian, and hurried off to Manchester. Mr Huskisson, to his credit, did not cry out once, though I heard him say, ‘I have met my death. God forgive me!’

  “As for the Prime Minister, he clambered down from the carriage at last, but to the right hand side. The Venns and I still stood where we had been, I trembling with fear
and emotion.

  “The Prime Minister handed the little French boy back to his father. Then he bowed stiffly to M. Venn. ‘Sir, your quick thinking preserved my life.’

  “M. Venn was quite modest. He ruffled little Julie’s hair. ‘Perhaps you should thank this small fellow.’

  “‘But I scarce thought the day would ever come when I of all people owed my life to one French gentleman, let alone two!’

  “M. Venn said, ‘We are no longer enemies, sir. And I for one would not see a countryman of mine commit such a craven act as an assassination of this kind.’

  “At that the Prime Minister’s formidable eyebrows rose, and I could see that he was thinking through the events of the hour in quite a different light – as was I. But of M. Gyger, who had tried to call the Prime Minister into the path of the advancing Rocket, there was no sign.

  “And little Julie Venn, who had that day ridden faster than any small child in history, and saved the life of a Prime Minister, laughed and laughed and laughed.”

  I checked out some of the details later. The Rocket, perhaps the most famous steam locomotive ever built, really was running that day, alongside seven of her sister engines, including the Northumbrian. And there really was a fatal accident, when William Huskisson MP managed to step out in front of the speeding Rocket.

  I’ve come across no account of a Monsieur Gyger.

  Albert couldn’t tell me why anybody would have wanted to try to kill the Prime Minister that day, French or otherwise. France and Britain were not, at that time, at war. It made no sense – until it occurred to me to check who the Prime Minister actually was.

  Grand, aloof, distrustful of new technology and the working people alike, it was Arthur Wellesley, first Duke of Wellington, victor over Napoleon at Waterloo just fifteen years earlier – a man who many French people would surely have loved to see in his grave.

  The eye-witness accounts of the day say nothing about the Prime Minister holding a small boy at the time. On the other hand, they don’t say he wasn’t. Maybe the incident was hushed up for the sake of international relations – or simply to save Wellington embarrassment.