George Stephenson

by Hunter Davies

  Not only were the majority of the local landowners against any terms, their more vociferous members happened to be active members of the House of Lords who were personally going to see that the bill wasn’t passed. The two strongest opponents were the Earl of Darlington (later the Duke of Cleveland) and Lord Eldon. Lord Darlington wrote to the company in February, 1819, to say that their scheme was ‘harsh and oppressive and injurious to the interests of the country through which it is intended that the railway shall pass’. What he was really worried about was that the railway would go right through his fox covers.

  Lord Eldon also happened to be lord chancellor and he went through the bill very carefully, making copious notes in the margin, most of them showing that he didn’t quite understand what a railway was. Earl Grey, later prime minister, noticed him one morning during prayers in the House of Lords on his knees but with one eye open, making notes on his copy of the bill.

  In February 1819, Edward Pease and five other promoters came down to London to canvass members of parliament. At night they went out in pairs to call on MPs at their homes. In later life, one of the promoters, a man called William Chaytor, who was not a Quaker, used to relate that his canvassing partner was Benjamin Flounders, one of the diehard Quakers who refused to accompany him to people’s houses because he said that Chaytor’s clothes were scruffy and his old beaver hat too seedy.

  Mr Mewburn, in charge of all the legal work, wrote later that ‘the difficulties, pains and anguish which I endured during my sojourn in London while soliciting the bill can scarcely be conceived’. He did manage to get a brief interview with Lord Eldon the lord chancellor but had to report to Edward Pease that it was fruitless. ‘He is too sly an old fox to give his consent to one line or another.’

  But the very fact of a group of such obviously solid and respectable and eminently sensible Quakers being in town on such a strange but intriguing errand began to convince several neutral members that their scheme might not be as daft as it sounded. The Earl of Darlington was so convinced that the bill hadn’t a chance that he’d decided to stay at home, but the day before the second reading, his London solicitor sent an urgent message to say that ‘the Quakers had made more ground’ than anyone had expected and that he should come at once. He was out hunting when the messenger arrived and servants had to go on a cross-country jaunt to find him. He caught the overnight postchaise, swearing and cursing, and at four the next day was seen canvassing support in the lobby of the House of Lords.

  The bill was defeated by 106 votes to 93, a majority of only thirteen, much much closer than anyone had expected. One lord was heard to remark later that ‘if the Quakers in these times when nobody knows anything about railways can raise up such a phalanx as they have done on this occasion, I should recommend the country gentlemen to be very wary how they oppose them.’

  The Quakers were very greatly encouraged and George Overton was induced to do a second survey. He wasn’t at first very keen, never having had such drawn-out troubles or parliamentary squabbles over his colliery wagon ways back in South Wales. Also he was displeased when he heard that once again the company had sought the advice of Robert Stevenson in Edinburgh. However, he agreed to prepare a second survey for a fee of £120, payable whether or not the bill was passed.

  This time Overton’s survey route avoided most of Lord Darlington’s land, and his beloved fox covers, and the company managed to come to a financial understanding. They were a bit worried to find that in by-passing Lord Darlington’s land Overton was planning to cross the estate of another noble Lord, Lord Barrington, but he too was eventually bought over. It was obvious that with the first attempt being so close, the second had a good chance of being passed, so many landowners decided to extract as high a price as possible while they were still in a position of strength. The company even had to buy up two local quarries from the Misses Hale, which they didn’t want, because they insisted that the railway would place their collieries ‘in a state of inferiority as compared with other collieries’, whatever that meant. The turnpike road commissioners also had to be persuaded not to raise any opposition.

  The company produced a handsome prospectus with a tinted engraving of the line by Thomas Bewick, the famous Newcastle engraver. (Newcastle, after London, was producing the country’s best wood engravings at this period.) It was one of the many extra expenses of the new bill, most of which went in legal fees and settling the landowners. Just before it went before the House in 1821 (having been delayed a year due to the illness and death of George III) Mr Mewburn found that he was around £10,000 short. Parliamentary standing orders of the day required that four-fifths of the share capital of a company should be subscribed before a bill went into committee. Mr Mewburn went back to the Gurney bankers in Norwich, but they would advance no more money, neither would anyone in the City. He wrote to Pease in Darlington, saying he would have to return home unless he got the money in three days. No one else in Darlington or Stockton was prepared to advance any more money. So Edward Pease, out of his own pocket, gave the necessary £10,000, saving the railway at the last hour. In the minutes for 21 March 1821, it is recorded that it was up to Mr Pease whether he looked upon this sum as ‘a loan or as further shares in the intended railway’.

  The bill, sixty-seven pages long, received its royal assent on 19 April 1821, by which time Edward Pease was virtually the head of the Stockton and Darlington Railway. He’d always been the strongest and most determined personality amongst the promoters. Now he had proved himself the largest single shareholder and the one who’d saved the company’s future when all others had refused.

  It was also on 19 April 1821 that George Stephenson came to visit Mr Pease at his home in Darlington.

  This historic meeting later assumed legendary proportions and was much loved by Victorians. Popular magazines hammed up the story, making out that George was some sort of barefoot pitman who’d walked all the way from Newcastle to Darlington in order to try to see Mr Pease, the stern old Quaker. In some versions of the saga, Mr Pease won’t see poor George at first, but comes down just as George is getting depressed and ready to go home, and grants him a short interview in the kitchen. He’s rather suspicious of this burly, illiterate, broadly spoken, ill-dressed workman but is completely won over when George talks of his wonderful invention. Locomotives! At once old man Pease, having thought only of horsedrawn wagons up till then, is won over. And railways are born! The magazines and broadsheets of the 1850s and 60s even had drawings to go with the story, showing George with the Pease children, helping them with their tapestry. (George, being clever with his hands, is supposed to be showing them some new stitches.)

  Samuel Smiles, with his 1857 biography, is usually blamed for all these exaggerated stories and it has to be admitted that some of the conversations he reports as having taken place between Pease and George Stephenson on their first momentous meeting do sound a trifle suspicious, owing as much perhaps to hindsight as to reality.

  Mr Pease liked the appearance of his visitor. ‘There was,’ as he afterwards remarked, ‘such an honest sensible look about him and he seemed so modest and unpretending. He spoke in the strong Northumbrian dialect of his district and described himself as “only the engine-wright at Killingworth.”’

  But Mr Pease was scarcely prepared for the bold assertions made by his visitor, that the locomotive engine with which he had been working the Killingworth railway for many years was worth fifty horses. ‘Come over to Killingworth,’ said he, ‘and see what my Blucher can do. Seeing is believing, sir.’ And Mr Pease promised that on some early day he would go over to Killingworth and take a look at this wonderful machine that was to supersede horses.

  On Mr Pease referring to the difficulties and opposition which the projectors of the railway had had to encounter, and the obstacles which still lay in their way, Stephenson said to him ‘I think, sir, I have some knowledge of craniology and from what I see of your head, I feel sure that if you will fairly buckle to this railway, you
are the man successfully to carry it through.’ ‘l think so too,’ rejoined Mr Pease; ‘and I may observe to thee, that if thou succeed in making this a good railway, thou may consider thy fortune as good as made.’

  After Smiles’ book had been published, Nicholas Wood came out with his version, saying that Smiles was wrong to say that the meeting had happened out of the air, all unarranged and spontaneous. According to Wood, who accompanied George on the famous day, an appointment had been made and Mr Pease knew they were coming. Wood also denies that they walked from Newcastle but said that in fact they caught a coach. He also adds the rather surprising detail that the coach took them to Stockton, not Darlington, and that they then proceeded to walk the twelve miles to Darlington along the line of the projected railway. It sounds a long and slightly unnecessary walk if they really had an appointment already made with Mr Pease in Darlington.

  Mr Pease’s own recollection of the meeting is not known, not until his missing diaries turn up, and it is not known what he knew of Stephenson prior to this meeting, if anything. It’s difficult to believe he hadn’t heard of Stephenson’s engineering skill, with his closeness to Tyneside, or about the eight-mile Hetton colliery line which Stephenson was building at that time. Robert Stevenson, the Edinburgh engineer, might even have spoken of him. In the three years since the Darlington scheme had begun, George Stephenson’s reputation had greatly increased and so had his locomotives and rails.

  From the company’s minutes it looks as if Pease had become unhappy with Overton and his survey, despite its success in parliament, and that Overton was becoming disenchanted by the project, despite having put up a large subscription himself of £2,000. Whatever the reason, once George Stephenson appeared on the scene, Overton is heard of no more.

  The barefoot pitman image was of course all wrong at this stage. Stephenson was by now a highly experienced engine-wright with a leading group of colliery owners, with a good salary as well as financial interests in patents and other concerns, including by this time a colliery. (In December 1820 George took a twenty-one year lease on a colliery called Willow Bridge, he and a partner each putting up £700. It sounds as if he might have been using his £1,000 safety lamp prize money.) Both he and Wood, the colliery manager, were extremely busy men. It is unlikely they would have trailed to Darlington, or Stockton, purely on spec. Perhaps Pease had made it known he would like to see George, if only as an up and coming engineer whose advice might be worth hearing, just as he had previously contacted older and more established engineers like Robert Stevenson and Rennie.

  Further complications about this first meeting have been added by some notes, dictated by George Stephenson, which have recently come into the hands of the Northumberland County Record Office (first published in 1973 in W.O. Skeat’s book of Stephenson letters for the Institution of Mechanical Engineers). These notes, which contain several factual mistakes, certainly look as if they were dictated by George in his old age. In these notes George says that he applied to the Darlington company on the advice of his friends, having heard about their railway. He took the coach with Wood to Stockton (which agrees with the Wood version) where they tried to see Raisbeck, one of the company’s solicitors. (As we know, Raisbeck was of minor importance but someone outside applying for a job was not to know this.) Raisbeck wasn’t at home so they walked in the dark to Darlington to see Mr Pease and Mr Backhouse, the two leading directors. They saw Mr Pease next day and Stephenson handed over some letters of recommendation and explained the power of his locomotive engine.

  This in many ways brings us back to the Smiles version – of Stephenson arriving out of the blue. Smiles had the cooperation of Robert Stephenson in writing his book and no doubt he had heard his father’s account of the first meeting.

  The true background to the meeting – how much of it was chance, accident or design – will probably never now be known, but it was as a result of this meeting that Edward Pease, the socially conscious Quaker, found a way of doing some permanent good to Darlington, and to the world.

  5

  BUILDING THE DARLINGTON LINE

  The meeting between Edward Pease and George Stephenson only became momentous in retrospect. At the time George was much busier elsewhere with other projects, as his letters show, and whether or not he harangued Pease with the brilliance of his locomotives, the official intention of the Stockton and Darlington Railway promoters was still plainly to use horsedrawn wagons. The line was perhaps going to be longer than any previous one, all of twenty-five miles, if it was ever built. It was planned to be public and open to all, thanks to the altruism of its Quaker backers, but to all intents and purposes it was just another horsedrawn colliery wagon way.

  There was no sign that Pease had been instantly converted to locomotives but there is every sign that he’d been instantly converted to George Stephenson. The very next day, 20 April, he wrote to George at Killingworth telling him the good news that the bill had been passed and asking if he would be free to consider doing a survey. He was writing in his private capacity and this letter has not survived, but George’s reply has been preserved and is still in Darlington, in the town’s library. Its highly efficient and business-like tone suggests that perhaps George had hired himself a secretary by this stage instead of using assorted friends to cover up for his lack of writing skill.

  Killingworth Colliery

  April 28th, 1821

  Edward Pease Esq.,

  Sir,

  I have been favoured with your letter of the 20 Inst & am glad to learn that the Bill has passed for the Darlington Rail Way.

  I am much obliged by the favourable sentiments you express towards me: & shall be happy if I can be of service in carrying into execution your plans.

  From the nature of my engagement here and in the neighbourhood, I could not devote the whole of my time to your Rail Way, but I am willing to undertake the survey & mark out the best line of Way within the limits prescribed by the Act of Parliament and also, to assist the Committee with plans & estimates, and in letting to the different Contractors such work as they might judge it advisable to do by Contract and also to superintend the execution of the Work. And I am induced to recommend the whole being done by Contract under the superintendence of competent persons appointed by the Committee.

  Were I to contract for the whole line of Road it would be necessary for me to do so at an advanced price upon the Sub Contractors, and it would also be necessary for the Committee to have some persons to superintend my undertaking. This would be attended by an extra expense, and the Committee would derive no advantage to compensate for it.

  If you wish it, I will wait upon you at Darlington at an early opportunity when I can enter into more particulars as to remuneration &c &c

  I remain yours

  respectfully

  GEO. STEPHENSON

  George went to Darlington and in turn Pease, accompanied by Thomas Richardson (the London Quaker banker) went to see George’s engines and rails at Killingworth. One of the first results of George’s arrival on the Darlington scene was that he persuaded Pease to consider the sort of smooth metal rails which were being laid down on the Netton line. All George’s locomotives had the flanges on their wheels and it was obvious that if he hoped eventually to persuade the company to use locomotives, not horses, he had to have the right sort of rails. But the main reasoning at this stage was that good metal rails rather than the old style wooden ones – a subject which provoked endless discussion and letters – would be longer lasting, for horsedrawn wagons or for anything else.

  Most of the company were still thinking of horses and had always agreed with Overton, their previous surveyor, that locomotives would never be any good. Overton had witnessed the failure of Trevithick’s locomotive at Penydaren and as late as 1825 he was writing: ‘An engine on a public railroad would be a

  perpetual nuisance.’

  On 25 May 1821, the company formally adopted a corporate seal, a drawing of a horse pulling four wagons along a ra
ilway line, and a company motto ‘Periculum privatam utilitas publica’, meaning private risk for public service. The choice of motto reflected the Quaker influence and the company trademark showed publicly that they were well and truly wedded to horses.

  Pease had become privately interested in the possibility of locomotives, ever since meeting George, but at this stage there was no apparent advantage in them as far as speed went. George’s colliery engines did little more than four miles an hour, which was about half the speed the new steam boats were doing down the coast from London to Newcastle. (George’s sister had taken one when she was rushing home to Newcastle, thinking she was about to be married.) One of the main objects of the Darlington railway had always been to get the coal to the coast as quickly as possible and into the steam boats. The sea, not road or canal or rail, was still the quickest way to get goods from the north east to London. George did put up his speeds during his many demonstrations at Killingworth for William James or for the Darlington promoters, but his biggest concern was to prove to visitors, by plying them with facts and figures compiled by Wood and himself, that his locomotives, however ungainly and strange they might look, were four times cheaper than horses.

  In July 1821 George was officially appointed by the company to survey their line. Edward Pease sent him a copy of the company’s decision along with his letter telling George the news. As usual, it was in the Quaker style, using thee and thou, and with the number not the name of the month at the top of the page:

  Darlington, 7th mo. 28th, 1821.

  ESTEEMED FRIEND, GEORGE STEPHENSON, – Annexed are some resolutions passed at our last general meeting. We beg thee to take them into consideration, and so soon as thou can’st name thy charge for effecting all they contain which attaches to thee as engineer, drop me a line. The resolutions are so definite and comprehensive, it does not seem needful to add more, than to request that as soon as the crops are off the ground, no time may be lost, provided nothing can be done in the meantime. In making the survey, it must be borne in mind that this is for a great public way, and to remain as long as any coal in the district remains. Its construction must be solid, and as little machinery introduced as possible – in fact, we wish thee to proceed in all thy levels, estimates, and calculations, with that care and economy which would influence thee if the work was thy own; and it would be well to let comparative estimates be formed, as to the expense of a double and single railway, and whether it be needful to have it only double in some parts, and what parts; also comparative estimates as to the expense of malleable or cast iron. We shall be glad to hear from thee soon, and I am, on behalf of the committee, thy assured friend