Cochrane the Dauntless

by David Cordingly

  Below the dilapidated walls and foundations of the abbey the land falls steeply away and a narrow road leads down to the cobbled streets of Culross which is a remarkably well-preserved example of a small Scottish town of the seventeenth century.1 The picturesque collection of small houses with roofs of weathered red pantiles and Dutch gable ends extends along the waterfront. At the height of the town’s prosperity in the 1600s there were sometimes as many as a hundred merchant ships anchored offshore waiting to transport locally-produced salt and coal from the Culross mines to Scandinavia and the Low Countries. There is little activity on this section of the river today; at low tide the foreshore becomes a vast expanse of mud with gulls and oystercatchers picking their way among the pools left by the receding water.

  The Cochranes can be traced back to the eleventh century and beyond but it was William Cochrane, first earl of Dundonald, who founded the fortunes of the family. He was born in 1605 and became the Member of Parliament for Ayrshire in 1641. He was a great landowner with estates at Paisley and others in Renfrewshire and Ayrshire. His staunch support for the Stuart cause was rewarded by King Charles I who created him Baron Cochrane of Dundonald in 1647. He continued to represent Ayrshire in Cromwell’s parliament of 1656 but in 1660 he was one of the lords who supported the return of Charles II to England and his restoration to the throne. In 1669 he was created earl of Dundonald and Lord Cochrane of Paisley and Ochiltree. He died in 1685, aged eighty, and was buried at Dundonald, some twenty miles south-west of Glasgow.2 A fine portrait in the Dundonald family collection shows a man of commanding presence with the prominent nose and cleft chin characteristic of many of his descendants.

  The family fortunes suffered a steady decline during the succeeding generations. Taxes, marriage provisions requiring handsome dowries for daughters, and large sums spent on improvements to houses and gardens, were a constant drain. Instead of making money from their lands, or investing in overseas colonies, many of the Cochranes joined the army – a noble enough profession but not a lucrative one. Three members of the family were killed in Marlborough’s wars. The seventh earl joined the army of General Wolfe which was despatched to Canada to drive the French from Quebec and the settlements along the banks of the St Lawrence River. He died in 1758 during the assault on the fortress of Louisbourg in Nova Scotia. Following his death the Paisley estates were sold and Major Thomas Cochrane, who became the eighth earl, inherited little more than the Culross Abbey estates and the surrounding lands. His unwise investments and extravagant bequests further diminished the family fortunes, which did not bode well for the man who would succeed him as the ninth earl of Dundonald. This was Archibald Cochrane, the father of Thomas Cochrane whose adventurous life would lead to him becoming the most famous member of the family.

  Archibald Cochrane was a man with a genius for invention but a fatal inability to control his finances.3 He was born in 1748, the second child and eldest son of the nine children of Major Thomas Cochrane. At the age of sixteen he went into the army as a young officer in the 3rd Dragoons but after a while he left the army and joined the navy. His voyages took him as far as the Guinea coast and he rose to the rank of acting lieutenant but the long and dreary months at sea did not suit his active and enquiring mind. He returned to the family home at Culross to devote himself to civilian pursuits. In October 1774, at the age of twenty-six, he married Anna Gilchrist, the nineteen-year-old daughter of Captain James Gilchrist, a distinguished frigate captain. The Gilchrists lived at Annsfield, Hamilton, in Lanarkshire, a few miles south-east of Glasgow. There is a moving letter from Captain Gilchrist to his friend George Marsh, a commissioner in the Navy Office in London, which describes the feelings of his wife and himself at the thought of losing their daughter. It was written from Annsfield on 10 October 1774, a week before the marriage was due to take place:

  Culross in the late seventeenth century, viewed across the Firth of Forth. Culross Abbey and the Abbey House can be seen on the hill above the town.

  Dear George,

  I wrote to you the week before last and intended to have mentioned an event that was likely to happen but Mrs Gilchrist’s heart failed her… She is set down with tears in her eyes to tell you that we are in one sense to lose one of our dear girls in a few days and I really don’t know what I shall do without her as she is truly a fine sweet girl yet can have no objections as I hope its for her good to be joined for life to so good and worthie a young man as Lord Cochrane who I look upon as none such in this deprived age being certainly possessed of every amiable quality and I flatter myself she is possessed of every disposition capable of making a man happy. Its my youngest daughter Annie who [by] way of addition to her goodness everybody reckons handsome… They are to be married here Monday next week [at] Culross Abbey which is his house near 40 miles from this.4

  The marriage would be tragically cut short by Anna’s death ten years later but while it lasted it seems to have been an extremely happy one. Archibald Cochrane worshipped his wife and described her as ‘the handsomest woman in Scotland’. His brother John said, ‘she was an angel of a woman. Her firmness and resolution never left her.’5

  For the birth of her first child Anna left Culross and went to stay with her parents at Annsfield and it was there that Thomas Cochrane was born on 14 December 1775. He was in good company that year. Jane Austen was born two days later at her father’s rectory in Hampshire; with two brothers in the navy she would take a keen interest in naval affairs, and the life of Captain Francis Austen would cross the path of the future Captain Lord Cochrane on more than one occasion. The year 1775 also saw the birth of Charles Lamb, the essayist, and J.M.W. Turner, England’s greatest painter of landscapes and seascapes. The war with North America began that same year: a minor skirmish at Lexington in April 1775 lit a fuse which led to the full-scale Battle of Bunker Hill in June. The following year, on 4 July 1776, the United States of America formally declared their independence. The war would drag on for eight years and two of the young Thomas Cochrane’s seven uncles took part in the campaign. His naval uncle Alexander was a junior lieutenant in the 74-gun ship Montague and was wounded in Rodney’s action against the French off Martinique in April 1780. Colonel Charles Cochrane, the second son of the eighth earl, who was serving as an aide-de-camp of General Cornwallis, was killed during the siege of Yorktown, Virginia, in the autumn of 1781. The siege ended with Cornwallis surrendering his army to General Washington, an event which effectively marked the end of Britain’s struggle to retain her American colonies.

  The Cochrane family at Culross were kept informed of events in North America by occasional letters from Alexander Cochrane to his eldest brother Archibald who was now head of the family.6 The eighth earl had died on 27 June 1778 and Archibald, at the age of thirty, had inherited the title and the house and estates of Culross Abbey. His eldest son Thomas, who was three years old when his father became Lord Dundonald, now assumed the courtesy title of Lord Cochrane.

  Given the mass of material preserved in the Dundonald family archives it is disappointing to find that so little has been recorded of the childhood of Thomas Cochrane and his younger brothers Basil, William and Archibald. However, it is evident from Cochrane’s autobiography that they had little or no formal schooling. The parlous state of the family finances discouraged Lord Dundonald from sending the four boys to any of the fine schools in Edinburgh, and he seems to have been too busy with his own projects to have paid much attention to the matter. ‘Perceiving our education imperilled,’ Cochrane recalled, ‘the devotedness of my maternal grandmother, Mrs Gilchrist, prompted her to apply her small income to the exigencies of her grandchildren.’7 Thanks to her efforts the boys received the rudiments of schooling from a series of tutors, none of whom appears to have been very satisfactory. It was an upbringing that taught them to be self-reliant and practical. They had the run of the rambling great house at Culross, the churchyard and the abbey ruins, and the thick forest of Scots pines which covered the slopes to the east. Accordin
g to family tradition Cochrane was an adventurous boy and there are tales of him climbing trees, descending a disused coal shaft to look for a nest and sailing a boat on the Forth with bed sheets for sails.

  On 15 November 1784, when Cochrane was nearly nine, his mother died in the house of his uncle John with her husband by her side. Lord Dundonald was overcome with grief: ‘Life itself is a misery to me since my Dearest, Dear, Dear Annie breathed her last in my arms,’ he wrote in a letter to her mother. ‘Her last words to me were Take care of the bairns, Farewell, Farewell. Her dying look will never be effaced from my mind, recommending herself to God.’8 We can only speculate on the effect which her death had on her children because there are scarcely any references to her in their later correspondence. Fortunately for the young family their grandmother, Mrs Gilchrist, stepped into the breach and took charge of the household at Culross. She seems to have been a warm and capable woman. Many years later Cochrane’s wife would testify that he often referred to the days of his youth in Scotland and ‘the happy days with his grandmother’.9

  The south front of Culross Abbey House as it looked in the 1780s during the boyhood of Thomas Cochrane. The tower of the Abbey church can be seen on the left.

  It is significant that most of the brief chapter which Cochrane devoted to his boyhood in his autobiography is devoted not to his own upbringing but to his father and his scientific experiments. He admired his father, he learnt much from him and later in life he would prove equally inventive, but he could not forgive him for embarking on one ruinous venture after another: ‘… his discoveries, now of national utility, ruined him, and deprived his posterity of their remaining paternal inheritance.’10 While Thomas Cochrane was still in his teens the entire Culross Abbey estate was put up for sale and later passed out of the family for ever.11 The irony of the situation was that if the estates had been well managed they would have brought considerable wealth to Dundonald and his heirs. Beneath the 2,000 acres of land lay rich seams of coal, iron, fire clay and brick clay; above ground the estate included nearly 1,000 acres of Scots pine ‘now fit to be cut for waggon-way rails, sleepers and pit-timber’.12 This was at a time when the Industrial Revolution was gathering momentum and such raw materials were very much in demand.

  Lord Dundonald was aware of the riches on his land. He was abreast of the latest developments of the industrial age and was in touch with some of the best scientific minds of the day: Joseph Black, Professor of Chemistry at Edinburgh and a man often regarded as the father of modern chemistry, was a family friend; and so was Matthew Boulton, the partner of James Watt, the Scottish designer of the first commercial steam engine. But Dundonald believed he had made a discovery which would yield riches far greater than any profits to be made from selling timber or extracting iron or fire clay from the Culross estates. He had carried out experiments by heating coal in a kiln and found that this produced a number of useful by-products including coke, ammonia and coal tar. The coke could be sold to the newly established iron works in the region, and the ammonia could be sold to calico printers, but it was the coal tar which he believed to be the most promising. He was aware from his time in the navy of the damage caused to the bottoms of ships by the teredo worm, particularly in tropical waters. He believed that coal tar could be used as an effective anti-fouling and protection against the teredo worm. The navy already used great quantities of Stockholm tar for a variety of purposes: for coating the standing rigging of ships and for sealing the seams of planks after they had been caulked with oakum; and tar diluted with oil was painted on to the topsides of ships as a preservative varnish. But Stockholm tar had to be imported from Scandinavia (it mostly came from the pine forests of Finland and was exported via Stockholm). It was expensive and in times of war there was always a possibility that the supply might be cut off. There were obvious advantages in producing tar from British coal, and if British ships adopted it as a form of underwater anti-fouling, it would be needed in vast quantities.

  Dundonald took out a patent for his particular method of extracting coal tar and by 1783 he had established four kilns at Culross which were processing some twenty-eight tons of coal a week. In 1785 he published a paper entitled Account of the Qualities and Uses of Coal Tar and Coal Varnish and he decided to expand production by setting up the British Tar Company. Among his partners in this venture was his cousin John Loudon Macadam who, many years later, would become famous as the pioneer of road building – his name for ever associated with ‘tarmacadam’, or tarmac. Initially the tar-making venture went well and among the admirers of the process were a number of eminent Scots including Professor Black and Adam Smith, the economist. This support prompted Dundonald to set about raising large sums of money to establish kilns at Newcastle and elsewhere. He wrote to his uncle Andrew Cochrane, ‘We are encouraged to proceed in establishing the manufacture upon a very large scale in different parts of Great Britain… but a capital of thirty to forty thousand pounds will in the course of a few years need to be expended.’13 He succeeded in raising £22,400 based on the assumption that there would be a clear annual profit of £5,000.14

  A later generation would recognise the advantages of having a home-grown source of tar but, as is so often the case with inventors, Dundonald was not the one to profit from his new process. He had assumed that the Admiralty would welcome his discovery but the navy had been experimenting with copper sheathing to protect the bottoms of ships. The experiments had proved so successful that between 1779 and 1783 the Admiralty issued orders which resulted in the entire fleet being coppered. It was an expensive and labour-intensive process and had some serious drawbacks, but the Admiralty was committed to coppering and was not interested in Dundonald’s cheaper alternative. His efforts to persuade the builders of merchant ships to use tar were similarly rebuffed. Cochrane accompanied his father on some of his visits to London and recalled a visit to a shipbuilder in Limehouse. ‘My lord,’ said the shipbuilder, ‘we live by repairing ships as well as by building them, and the worm is our best friend.’15 Dundonald received a similar response from shipbuilders in the provinces.

  Discouraged by his failure to win over the Admiralty, as well as the merchant shipbuilders, Dundonald lost interest in his coal-tar project and began to experiment with the manufacture of salt and sal ammonica. His friend Professor Black paid a visit to him at Culross and warned him against embarking on other projects. ‘I endeavoured to dissuade him from the pursuit of these for the present, and advised him to attend to the branches of his manufacture which had already succeeded and were bringing in money.’16 Dundonald did not heed the warning and continued with his experiments.

  His financial situation had been slightly improved by his second marriage. In April 1788, at the age of forty, he married Isabella Raymond, a wealthy widow. Thomas Gainsborough painted her portrait and an engraving based on the picture reveals a good-looking woman with fine features and an abundance of dark hair. Thomas Cochrane was twelve at the time of the marriage and he was now despatched to London with his brother Basil. Their father was determined that they should both join the army and for several months they attended Mr Chauvet’s military academy in Kensington Square. Lord Dundonald’s agent provides us with a glimpse of their appearance as they set off for London: ‘I have just seen the young gentlemen off by the coach. It is true they have not had very much education, but they are strong and fine to look at and very sensible, and will get on anywhere.’17 Another source described Thomas around this time as ‘a tall thin youth with locks somewhat tending to an auburn tinge’.18 There is a portrait of him as a boy of around twelve or thirteen in the Dundonald family collection. He looks intelligent and thoughtful and is shown with long, reddish-brown hair, blue eyes and a fresh complexion.

  After the years of roaming wild in the vicinity of Culross Abbey it must have been difficult to adjust to the schooling and the surroundings of central London. The military academy provided him, albeit briefly, with the foundations of an education which he would later build on
but he was already clear that an army career was not for him. He wanted to follow the examples of his uncle Alexander and his grandfather Captain Gilchrist and join the navy. His father, who had not enjoyed his time at sea, ignored his wishes and procured him a commission in the 104th Regiment of Foot. Thomas never took up the commission. He did not like the military training, he hated the military uniform he was compelled to wear, and he returned to Scotland, telling his father that he wanted to go to sea with his uncle. His father was furious and remained adamant that a military career was the only option. There now occurred a curious hiatus in the young Cochrane’s life. ‘Four years and a half were now wasted without further attempt to secure for us any regular training.’19 At an age when boys destined to be naval officers were at sea learning the ropes, Cochrane embarked on a course of self-tuition at home. ‘Knowing that my future career depended on my own efforts, and more than ever determined not to take up my military commission, I worked assiduously at the meagre elements of knowledge within my reach.’20 Exactly what form this self-education took is not known but presumably he studied any books to hand that would help him in his longed-for naval career. It was during this period that the threat of financial ruin looming over the family became a reality.

  His father continued with his experiments, turning from one project to another. He set up a factory to produce alum or alumina for silk and calico printers, and discovered a method of producing a form of gum which could replace imported gum senegal. He accidentally discovered that coal gas could be used for illumination but he never followed this up and it was left to others to make their fortunes from gas lighting. He took out several more patents, and published a paper entitled The Present State of the Manufacture of Salt Explained. In 1790 he joined the Losh brothers to produce synthetic soda from salt and together they set up a works near Newcastle where Dundonald had already established a tar distillery. Within a few years the partnership was dissolved and the Losh brothers went on to develop a profitable chemical business on their own. Dundonald had borrowed heavily to finance his various projects and the moment came when his creditors lost patience with him. In 1793 he was forced to put the Culross estate up for sale. He wrote and published a detailed description of the assets of the estate which ran to seventy-five pages. He recorded the history of the estate, stressed the value of its mineral deposits and pine forests, and sadly admitted that ‘nothing but the Proprietor’s pecuniary inability to proceed farther, could make him wish to part with such a property, on which he had expended so much money to render productive, and struggled so hard to retain’.21