George Stephenson

by Hunter Davies

  There were many other lesser known colliery engineers working away, mostly unsuccessfully, trying to produce their own forms of steam locomotive. In Whitehaven, where the local collieries had been amongst the first to use the Newcomen engine, a locomotive was built in 1812, known locally as the Iron Horse, but this, like so many before and after, tore up the rails.

  News travelled fast between engineers in rival collieries and when it didn’t, owners had no scruples about sending out spies. Once when Sir James Lowther, owner of the Whitehaven mines, thought that the north-eastern lads had got ahead he sent across his leading engineer, Carlisle Spedding, disguised as an ordinary pitman going under the name of Dan. Unfortunately he was injured by an explosion of fire damp. Sir James naturally ordered the best medical advice in Newcastle to attend him – which was when it was realised Dan was no ordinary miner.

  The north east remained the home of most new developments in the mining industry and it was here in 1812 that William Chapman invented a self-hauling chain engine which pulled itself along. William Brunton, another north-easterner, produced an even more eccentric engine which ‘walked’, at least it trundled itself along on sticking-out legs. Neither was successful. By around 1813 most colliery engineers were beginning to give up, sticking in the main to horses plus fixed engines for the hills. Even as late as 1830 the mainstream of the engineering and scientific professions were of the opinion that the iron horse had no future.

  They had good reasons for thinking so. Since Trevithick’s first attempts nobody had really solved the many technical problems – certainly not in one engine. The basic problems were the lack of sufficient steam power, the jerky motion caused by the roughly made gear wheels which made most engines fall to pieces, the difficulty of regulating the valves and gears to put an engine into reverse, the overall heaviness of the machine, its slowness, the brittle nature of the cast iron rails. It needed a man of vision and action and perseverance even to attempt to solve any one of these problems.

  In 1814 George Stephenson was thirty-three years old. He had worked his way slowly but steadily up to the position of enginewright in charge of the engine work for his employers, the Grand Allies. He was living in his cottage at West Moor, beside Killingworth Colliery. His son Robert, who was still being looked after by his sister, was eleven and by now had just started at Dr Bruce’s Academy.

  Other local colliery owners, like the Brandlings and Blackett, had already allowed their enginewrights and viewers to experiment with a locomotive, so it was natural that the Grand Allies should do the same. It was in 1814 that George Stephenson produced his first locomotive, a little late considering so many local engineers had already tried, and a little bit like most of the locomotives they’d already produced. But a commendable effort, considering he was a late starter, a self-taught engineer, with none of their educational advantages.

  He called his engine the Blucher, which one must presume took its name from the Prussian general who was at that time helping the British to turn the tide against Napoleon. All the same, it’s a surprisingly foreign name for Stephenson to have given his first engine. Perhaps it was christened by Sir Thomas Liddell, the Grand Ally who encouraged Stephenson to start its construction. In later Northumbrian dialect, ‘Blucher’ became a term of passing contempt for anything big, awkward and brutish.

  It first ran on 25 July 1814, on the Killingworth colliery wagon way outside Stephenson’s West Moor cottage, and quite a crowd turned up to watch its progress. No contemporary drawings exist but Nicholas Wood, who wrote about it later, described it as having two cylinders, a boiler eight feet long, flanged wheels and ran on smooth edged rails. It pulled eight wagons, weighing thirty tons, at the rate of four miles an hour.

  George’s elder brother James was the first driver of the Blucher. He seems to have followed George round the various collieries as George progressed over the years. George named one of his stationary engines the Jimmy after him. Like George, he lived in a cottage beside the Killingworth wagon way with his wife, a large, buxom woman called Jinnie. According to one Thomas Summerside, who knew the Stephensons at the time and some fifty years later wrote a delightful memoir of those early days, Blucher used to break down frequently on its journey up and down the line. Jinnie was usually the one called out to give it a shove, ‘Come away Jinnie and put your shoulder to her,’ so her husband would shout. Then she would go back to her work beside the track, cutting the grass to feed her cows. She must have been a busy woman. It was also her job first thing in the morning at four o’clock to get up and light a fire in Blucher’s grate to get the steam going.

  The Blucher was constantly developed as George Stephenson thought of new improvements. To try and get up more power and to lessen the noise of the escaping steam he turned the exhaust into the chimney and produced what became known as the blast pipe. Arguments raged for many years amongst the experts about whether this was Stephenson’s own idea, or if he had seen someone else doing it, or whether perhaps he’d discovered it by accident, not realising it would increase the steam power.

  Other developments on Blucher included new types of valves and the introduction of connecting rods on the wheels which solved some of the problems caused by having so many roughly made gears. This was the first use of such a system, a system which became a familiar sight on all steam engines for decades. Stephenson himself later abandoned it.

  Two other locomotives soon appeared incorporating the new devices, both with equally impressive names. One was named Wellington, for obvious reasons, and the other My Lord. This wasn’t a piece of religious genuflecting by Stephenson, who was never a churchgoer despite what many Victorians later liked to think. He was simply keeping in with his boss, Sir Thomas Liddell, who’d just been made Lord Ravensworth.

  Unlike so many engineers before him who had tended to concentrate on one side of locomotive making and give up when ancillary problems arose, Stephenson was all the time trying to develop suitably strong rails. His own engines, despite being lighter and faster, were still tearing up the track. His bosses allowed him to spend two days a week at a local Newcastle ironworks run by William Losh where he experimented on producing new types of rails. Together he and Losh patented their own make of cast iron rails and the whole of the Killingworth wagon way was relaid with them.

  Losh was a highly cultivated gentleman, a friend of Humboldt, the great German naturalist and explorer who was currently being read and followed with great excitement by most of England’s educated classes. Losh was known throughout Tyneside and was one of the leading gentleman defenders of George during the safety lamp row. For George’s two days a week at his ironworks Losh paid him £l00 per annum – which didn’t affect George’s £100 a year from the Grand Allies, though it reduced his time with them. George had therefore good reason to be grateful to William Losh.

  The success of his Killingworth engines and his Losh–Stephenson rails led to a demand for similar lines elsewhere. Over the next five or six years Stephenson built sixteen engines at Killingworth, most being used locally but some going to Scotland in 1817 for the Duke of Portland’s wagon way from Kilmarnock to Troon.

  The first entirely new line laid out by George Stephenson was begun in 1819 at Hetton colliery, near Newcastle. It was eight miles long and three fixed engines provided the motive power over a hilly one-and-a-half-mile stretch, self-acting planes for three miles and the rest consisted of locomotives. There’s a most elaborate description of the Hetton line by two German engineers who devoted twenty-two pages to it in a book they brought out in 1826. (A French translation came out in 1830.) They not only quoted Stephenson’s measurements for each length, they paced each section out by foot to make sure he was right.

  Engineers were soon coming from all over the country to see the Killingworth engines. Robert Stevenson, grandfather of Robert Louis, an eminent civil engineer in Edinburgh, wrote in 1818 that ‘Some of the most striking improvements in the system of railways are the patent inventions of Mr Stephenson o
f Newcastle, particularly of his Locomotive Engines.’

  It’s interesting to note, despite the difficulty of stage coach travel, how quickly engineers in Russia, France, Germany and elsewhere got to know about scientific developments. Stephenson had begun to corner the market in the use and production of colliery locomotives, all of it rather primitive and experimental, but there were enough people still interested in the subject to come and see his progress. He was late in the field, compared with someone like Trevithick. When George started in 1814 others had given up, leaving clues for him to see but no definite guidelines. From 1814 until 1826 there are no records of anyone but Stephenson building any new locomotive engines. He produced his at such speed, each with a new development, that others waited and wondered, most either refusing to believe the stories they were hearing or convinced that it would all end in disaster once again.

  Despite the mass of books and pamphlets which have been produced on the early history of railways, these vital years in George’s development, when he produced those first sixteen engines at Killingworth, are still shrouded in some mystery. From 1814, with the appearance of Blucher, to around 1820 or 1821, no one has yet been able to tabulate exactly the stages in George’s locomotive designs. Years later he did go on at great length about his Killingworth days but it was usually the same old story about his hard struggle with everyone against him. He himself seems to have forgotten how each process was reached. It was all a matter of native, brilliant genius, according to George in later life, and according to the Smiles’ accounts. In reality, his progress was probably extremely rough and ready, like his safety lamp experiments, with a lot of hammering one way, then hammering the other way, till he found one way went better than another.

  It was a period when George was on his own, a rather eccentric colliery engineer working away in comparative isolation. We have to rely on foreign visitors for odd details and reports, foreign engineers doing their technical grand tour, drawn to Killingworth by rumours of this odd character and his odd machines, hoping for an amusing interlude before going on to study the work of the truly great engineers of the day like Rennie and Telford, who were well known throughout Europe.

  Yet there was a large lay audience willing to watch any new spectacle, if just for the chance of seeing a few accidents or other excitements. Crowds had always gathered for any new or strange inventions. To cater for the better informed of the general public there began to appear on the scene several writers propagating and publicising the ideas of railways, in England, Europe and in North America. Fortunately for Stephenson, one of them was his closest friend and supporter, Nicholas Wood. He kept minute records of all George’s experiments, lectured and wrote extensively on the subject, but it wasn’t until 1825 that he produced his massive Practical Treatise on Rail-Roads.

  Stephenson was fortunate in several ways, though he was the last person to admit such a thing. He was able to build on what had gone before, to see the mistakes of others and correct them. He was fortunate in being born in the north east, the hub of colliery wagon ways and the home of many locomotive pioneers whose experiments he must have seen at first hand. And most important of all, he benefited from the many improvements in boilers and rails which others had made in the ten years or so since Trevithick’s first attempts.

  However, the vast majority of those who did know about locomotives looked upon them as a purely local phenomenon, a specialist means of private transportation, confined completely to the colliery areas. Until 1825 nobody had attempted a public railway using locomotives. Until 1825 Stephenson’s ten years of continuous locomotive developments had failed to produce any real national interest. His work was known locally to the colliery public in the north east but nationally only to those few interested in colliery engineering.

  The growing band of writers on the subject were looked upon as dotty as the engineers themselves. Thomas Gray devoted twenty years of his life to writing about railways but was considered slightly touched and died in poverty. None of his ideas were ever put in practice, though we now realise that most of them were eminently sensible. The idea of these funny colliery engines covering the whole country came to him suddenly in 1816 and he rushed to put pen to paper, shaking with the brilliance of his own genius. ‘He shut himself up in his room, secluded from his wife and relatives, declining to give them any information on the subject of his mysterious studies, beyond assurance that his scheme “would revolutionise the whole face of the material world”. The result was a pamphlet which came out in 1820. Amongst other things, he drew a rail map of Britain with the big towns connected which looks little different from today’s rail maps, and schemed out six lane tracks on the main lines and created turntables.

  One of his motives was to relieve the suffering of horses on the fast postchaise routes. He quoted a coach proprietor as saying that on average one horse was lost every two hundred miles. It was very common, so he stated, for the legs of horses to be snapped in two while being whipped on to keep up the timetables and beat the rival coach proprietors. This cruelty to horses was immediately to be forgotten once railways did take over and the old coach era was instantly glamorised and enshrined for ever. The romance lives on in Christmas cards. The reality of the horsedrawn coach was cruel, uncomfortable, slow, cumbersome and expensive. In his pamphlet, Gray worked out that the upkeep of the 500,000 horses then employed on the turnpike roads cost a total of £173 million over a twelve-year period. By comparison he estimated that 10,000 steam engines could be run on the same routes for only £35 million.

  Gray’s plans for national railways were good, but unfortunately when it came to deciding which type of locomotive engine should pull them he picked a loser. He was a fan of Blenkinsop and his racked engine long after Stephenson had proved that his engines were much more efficient. He couldn’t believe, along with so many others, that smooth wheels could run on smooth rails.

  The trouble with most of the literary advocates of railways was that they could well see the benefits of railways – reducing unemployment was always mentioned, plus bringing fresh vegetables to the big towns – but they all differed, or were very hazy, about the precise mechanical means. They waxed romantic about locomotives easing the strain on horses and hay caused by the long drawn out Napoleonic wars, but they argued as to which locomotive would bring about the miracle. The miracle was needed because sending goods by the new canals, the only form of bulk transport, was proving slow and crowded. One minor advantage of locomotives over canals, which was seriously put forward in the 1820s, was that railways would cut down the pilfering. Apparently there was fiddling on a mammoth scale from the bales of wool as they lay in the barges. The trick was to steal half a bale and then let in some water which would be absorbed to make up the original weight.

  One writer who did pick the winner, and for many years was at the forefront of railway promotion, was William James. He was a solicitor from Henley-in-Arden who became a highly successful London land agent and entrepreneur. He was forever setting up schemes for bridges, canals and railways and toured the country giving speeches, looking at sites, meeting engineers. He came to see Stephenson at Killingworth in 1821, having been to see Blenkinsop’s racked engine at Leeds and many others, and was extremely impressed. Nicholas Wood was already Stephenson’s technical Boswell, noting his engines in great detail, but James had a more popular and national following, He knew members of the royal family and had done jobs for the Archbishop of Canterbury. George was very impressed.

  Public interest in railways had taken a long time to grow, but by the 1820s more and more people outside the purely colliery world were becoming seriously intrigued by its possibilities. One of these was a wool merchant in Darlington called Edward Pease, who had his own little plans for a railway. No one knows exactly how George Stephenson first came to Edward Pease’s attention, though William James later claimed to have started it all. Certainly he wrote a glowing letter to Pease, after he’d been to Killingworth, in which he praised all Steph
enson’s works.

  The Locomotive Engine of Mr Stephenson is superior beyond all comparison to all other inventions I have seen. Next to the immortal Watt, I consider Stephenson’s Merit in the invention of this Engine.

  It was certainly high praise and no doubt Mr Pease was greatly encouraged by it, but Edward Pease had already come across Stephenson himself. Mr Pease was neither one of the romantic school of railway writers, nor yet another colliery owner trying to cut his costs. He was rather a strange figure indeed to be caught up in railways, but the major credit for backing George Stephenson and for the birth of what was to become known as the world’s first public railway must be given to Edward Pease of Darlington.

  4

  PICKING UP THE PEASES

  Darlington is a small town some thirty miles due south of Newcastle and in 1825 it had a population of just over five thousand. It was known in the north east as a thriving little wool centre, with a good line in flax spinning, but as far as the nation went nobody knew or cared much about Darlington. How on earth then did it organise itself together and become the home of the world’s railways?

  Steering the necessary bills through parliament, as the canal builders had found, was a job which called for a great deal of money, the best lawyers and the best establishment, parliamentary and aristocratic contacts. Why wasn’t the job done by Birmingham, by Manchester or Liverpool or Glasgow or Edinburgh, large towns with influential industrialists, wealthy merchants and famous MPs? Come to that, what was London doing?

  Bailey, in his history of County Durham in 1810, speaks of Darlington as ‘having long been famous for its huckaback diapers’. The fame of its huckaback diapers, alas, doesn’t draw many tourists to Darlington today. The use of the word diaper is interesting, at least to Americans, but in 1810 it referred simply to table napkins not to babies’ nappies. Huckaback was a high quality linen. Behind the huckaback diaper trade was a group of Quakers. Behind the introduction of the railway was a group of Quakers. The Quakers, in a word, were the reason why Darlington beat every other town in Britain; managed despite its smallness to conquer parliament and raise the money, and made Darlington the only true begetter of the world’s railways.