Harrison, one of the opposition’s other leading counsel, didn’t score direct hits like Alderson, but he poked endless fun at Stephenson’s idea of ‘floating’ his railway line across Chat Moss.
It is ignorance almost inconceivable. It is perfect madness in a person called upon to speak on a scientific subject to propose such a plan.… Every part of this scheme shows that this man has applied himself to a subject of which he has no knowledge, and to which he has no science to apply.
Turning to the proposal to work the intended line by means of locomotives, Harrison proceeded:
When we set out with the original prospectus, we were to gallop, I know not at what rate; I believe it was at the rate of 12 miles an hour. My learned friend, Mr Adam … says that they would go at the rate of 12 miles an hour with the aid of the devil in the form of a locomotive, sitting as postilion on the fore horse, and an honourable member sitting behind him to stir up the fire, and keep it at full speed. But the speed at which the locomotive engines are to go has slackened: Mr. Adam does not go faster now than 5 miles an hour. The learned serjeant (Spankie) says he should like to have 7, but he would be content to go 6. I will show he cannot go 6; and probably, for any practical purposes, I may be able to show that I can keep up with him by the canal.… Locomotive engines are liable to be operated upon by the weather. You are told they are affected by rain, and an attempt has been made to cover them; but the wind will affect them; and any gale of wind which would affect the traffic on the Mersey would render it impossible to set off a locomotive engine, either by poking of the fire, or keeping up the pressure of the steam till the boiler was ready to burst.
It was Alderson’s final summing up which completed Stephenson’s humiliation.
This is the most absurd scheme that ever entered into the head of man to conceive. I think I may put it to them fairly whether they ever before saw such an estimate. My learned friends almost endeavoured to stop my examination. They wished me to put in the plan, but I had rather have the exhibition of Mr. Stephenson in that box. I say he never had a plan – I believe he never had one – I do not believe he is capable of making one.… He is either ignorant or something else which I will not mention.… His is a mind perpetually fluctuating between opposite difficulties: he neither knows whether he is to make bridges over roads or rivers, or of one size or another; or to make embankments, or cuttings, or inclined planes, or in what way the thing is to be carried into effect. When you put a question to him upon a difficult point, he resorts to two or three hypotheses, and never comes to a decided conclusion.
Moving to the subject of the Irwell bridge, and all George’s mistakes about it, Alderson kept up his stream of invective.
It was the most ridiculous thing I ever heard stated by any man. I am astonished that any man standing in that box would make such a statement without shrinking to nothing.… Did any ignorance ever arrive at such a pitch as this? Was there ever any ignorance exhibited like this? Is Mr. Stephenson to be the person upon whose faith this Committee is to pass this Bill involving property to the extent of £400/500,000 when he is so ignorant of his profession as to propose to build a bridge not sufficient to carry off the flood water of the river or to permit any of the vessels to pass which of necessity must pass under it, and leave his own Railroad liable to be several feet under water?
He makes schemes without seeing the difficulties, and when the difficulties are pointed out, then he starts other schemes. He has produced five schemes all resulting in one estimate…
And when did Mr. Cubitt make his survey to detect his mistakes? Long before; and Mr. Stephenson has the face to say that he only heard that his levels were not correct. Why, at that time he knew they were incorrect and that Mr. Cubitt had been sent down to ascertain to what extent they were so.
I never knew a person draw so much upon human credulity as Mr. Stephenson has proposed to do in the evidence he has given.
I am told they are going to throw Mr. Stephenson and his estimate overboard and to call upon Hon. Members to decide without his evidence. Now if they attempt that it will be the strangest thing that was ever attempted in the House of Commons.… Upon Chat Moss, I care not whether Mr. Giles is right or wrong in his estimate, for whether it be effected by means of piers raised up all the way for four miles through Chat Moss, whether they are to support it on beams of wood or by erecting masonry, or whether Mr. Giles shall put a solid bank of earth through it, – in all these schemes there is not one found like that of Mr. Stephenson’s, namely, to cut impossible drains on the side of this road; and it is sufficient for me to suggest and to show, that this scheme of Mr. Stephenson’s is impossible or impracticable, and that no other scheme, if they proceed upon this line, can be suggested which will not produce enormous expense. I think that has been irrefragably made out. Everyone knows Chat Moss – everyone knows that the iron sinks immediately on its being put upon the surface. I have heard of culverts, which have been put upon the Moss, which, after having been surveyed the day before, have the next morning disappeared; and that a house (a poet’s house, who may be supposed in the habit of building castles even in the air), story after story, as fast as one is added, the lower one sinks! There is nothing, it appears, except long sedgy grass, and a little soil to prevent its sinking into the shades of eternal night. I have now done, sir, with Chat Moss, and there I leave this railroad.
The bill had little chance after all that. The turning point had been George Stephenson’s evidence. He’d been completely flattened and his defenders could offer no real reply. The first clause of the bill was beaten by 19–13 and the second clause by 23–14, and the bill was withdrawn.
George afterwards confessed that from the first day of Alderson’s attack he had wilted. ‘I began to wish for a hole to creep into. Some members of the committee asked if I was a foreigner, and another hinted I was mad.’
The Times slightly softened the immense blow felt by the railway lobby by accusing four members of the committee of having voted against the bill without having been present during the thirty-seven days of evidence. This was denied, naturally, and The Times was unable to furnish any proof.
The opposition was ecstatic. Thomas Creevey, an MP who’d been at the forefront of their case, famous afterwards for his Creevey Papers, gives a fine picture of their rejoicing.
Well – this devil of a railway is strangled at last. I was sure that yesterday’s division had put him on his last legs, and today we had a clear majority in the Committee in our favour, and the promoters of the Bill withdrew it, and took their leave of us.… We had to fight this long battle against an almost universal prejudice to start with – interested shareholders and perfidious Whigs, several of whom affected to oppose us upon conscientious scruples. Sefton’s ecstasies are beyond, and he is pleased to say it has been all my doing; so it’s all mighty well.
Having been completely humiliated in parliament and in the public reports, there was worse to come: the Liverpool–Manchester board decided to dispense with George Stephenson’s services. They were determined to call for a fresh survey, but this time from another engineer, one more distinguished, properly educated and trained, who wouldn’t let them down. If only young Robert, with his parliamentary experience, had been in England he could have been invaluable to George in his hour of need. George was left alone, dismissed, abandoned and rejected.
10
ROBERT RETURNS
Robert Stephenson arrived in South America on 23 July 1824, thirty-five days after leaving Liverpool. He landed at the port of La Guaira in Venezuela, eight miles from Caracas. According to his diary, his initial impression of South America was poor. ‘Observed with silence the miserable appearance of the town.’ His first job was to look into the possibility of building a railway between the two towns, one of the schemes which the London backers were very interested in, but he finally reported that it would cost £160,000 and would never pay its way.
In October he set off inland on mule-back for Bogota, the capital of Colombia, a jo
urney of some twelve hundred miles, through equatorial forests into the foothills of the Andes. He managed to avoid the many ruffians and cutthroats, says Jeaffreson, and was truly amazed by the wonderful vegetation and manners of the natives he met on the way. They must have been quite intrigued by him. He wore a large hat made of plaited grass, a white cotton suit and a blue and crimson cloak. ‘My cloak is admirably adapted for the purpose, amply covering the rider and mule, and at night answered the purpose of a blanket in the net hammock which every traveller carries and suspends to the trees or in the house, as occasion may require.’ Robert Stephenson sounds very much like one of nature’s boy scouts, though it was eighty years before Baden-Powell got round to christening the species. (Lord Baden-Powell’s christian names, by a coincidence, were Robert Stephenson.)
It was just as well that Robert had not been telling the truth when he said he was going for only a year. If he had, he would have reached the mines just in time to turn round and come back again. As it was, he didn’t start mining till a year and a half after leaving Liverpool. His destination was Mariquita, up the valley of the river Magdalena beyond Bogota, which the London office had led him to believe was a thriving mining town. It had been, under the Spaniards, but revolution, earthquakes and assorted acts of god had reduced its population from 20,000 to 450 and had destroyed almost every building and left every mine deserted and overgrown. Robert decided not to mine in the ghost town and moved to a village called Santa Ana, higher in the mountains, and therefore not so hot, where he built himself a hut of bamboo and palm trees and waited for the miners to arrive. On his way from Bogota he’d kept coming across piles of abandoned mining equipment left by the river side. Mules were the only form of land transport and they had obviously been unable to carry the huge steam engines. He wrote back frantic letters to London, saying there were no roads and therefore no carts, only mule-back, and that in future all machinery should be sent in pieces. The letters either never arrived or arrived too late, for huge chunks of machinery kept appearing to be left to rust by the riverside where no doubt they lie to this day.
The miners finally arrived in October 1825, which was when his troubles really began. They were all Cornishmen and most of them were drunk when they arrived – and stayed that way. They have already commenced to drink in the most outrageous manner,’ wrote Robert in a letter to his firm’s agent in Bogota. ‘I dread the management of them. Their behaviour in Honda has, I am afraid, incurred for ever the displeasure of the Governor.’ He needed the governor’s help in opening up the mines and also for the chance of any social life, hence the white suit. It’s strange to think of the social occasions which Robert did eventually attend, despite being stuck out in the jungle. There were many smart balls, dinners and parties in Bogota, given by rather eccentric but terribly upper class émigré Englishmen who’d gone off to the depths of South America to investigate the flora and fauna, to act as engineers or as the representatives of the many London mining expeditions. It was in South America, meeting so many well-bred Englishmen, that Robert finally lost his Geordie accent.
The biggest trouble with the Cornishmen turned out not to be their ‘detestable vice of drunkenness’ but the fact that to a man they hated young Robert. He was a slip of a boy, just twenty-two, and they refused to believe that he could possibly know anything about mining. ‘They plainly tell me that I am obnoxious to them because I was not born in Cornwall, and although they are perfectly aware that I have visited some of the principal mines in that county and examined the various processes on the spot, yet they tell me that it is impossible for a North-Countryman to know anything about mining.’
One night, when almost all of them were drunk, they surrounded his hut, chanting and singing and jeering, saying they were going to come in and beat him up. In the best tradition of the brave lone Englishman surrounded by unruly natives (in this case, unruly Cornish natives) Robert rose from his bed and came out to face them, half dressed. According to Jeaffreson, Robert stood calmly in the midst of them, drawing himself to his full height and said: ‘It won’t do for us to fight tonight. It wouldn’t be fair, for you are drunk and I am sober. We had better wait till tomorrow, So you better break up this meeting and go away quietly.’
They turned their eyes to the ground, says Jeaffreson, cowed by his coolness, and started slinking slowly away while Robert, with great dignity, went back inside. ‘Robert lit a cigar, and, sitting down in the room, allowed the tipsy scoundrels to see him through the open door calmly smoking.’ Bravo.
Robert did finally gain the confidence of some of them by organising sports, such as hammer throwing and lifting weights, taking part himself to show he might be a northerner but he wasn’t a softie, but he never managed to discipline them completely. Their leaders continually addressed him as the company clerk, sent to pay their wages, refusing to acknowledge that he really was in charge. He later estimated that at any one time at least one third of the hundred and sixty miners in his control were dead drunk. Even the sober ones never managed more than half a day’s work.
The full horror of his situation, which he was perfectly aware of, never seemed to make him want to pack up, though others encouraged him to break his contract. By this time his letters were arriving home in England and he told them about the deplorable conditions. ‘I have my health just now very well,’ he wrote to Longridge in Newcastle. ‘Though I cannot say I am so strong as when I left England. The tropical climates are far from being so unhealthy as is generally supposed by those in northern latitudes. The rainy season is the only objectionable part. It occurs twice in one year.’ In a postscript to this letter he added: ‘May I beg the favour of your attending to the payment of my yearly subscription to the Lit. and Phil. Society? I rather suspect it has been neglected.’
Longridge, in his turn, kept Robert up to date with the latest development in the Old Country, some of which rather perplexed Robert when he wrote back.
In the close of your last letter you mention that the calisthenic exercises have just come into fashion. This puzzled me not a little. I could not find for the life of me any significance for the new-coined word, and therefore I am as ignorant of the kind of exercise which has become fashionable amongst the ladies as I was before I left England and I suppose I must remain so until I return.
But there was soon more serious news from England. The locomotive works at Forth Street were doing badly in the absence of Robert. Longridge had got his own iron works to look after and couldn’t manage to run two businesses. Edward Pease wrote to Robert telling him about the difficulties.
I can assure thee that thy business at Newcastle, as well as thy father’s engineering, have suffered very much from thy absence and, unless thou soon return, the former will be given up, as Mr Longridge is not able to give it that attention it requires: and what is done is not done with credit to the house.
Longridge himself wrote in a similar vein.
I feel anxious for your return and I think you will find your Father and your Friend considerable older than when you left us. Pray take care of your own [health] and let us see you able as well mentally and physically to fill up our stations.
Robert did at last begin to think of coming home early, but he was laid low with a fever and reported that he was ‘completely wearied and worn down with vexations’. Mr Richardson, the Quaker, told him he must stay to see out his contract.
Robert had written to his father and to his step-mother at regular intervals since his arrival in South America, which shows there was no family split. One of his first letters was to his stepmother telling her he was having three-fifths of his South American salary sent direct to his father. Was he now feeling guilty at having gone off leaving the new firm in the lurch?
The worst news of all must have been that of his father’s dismissal by the Liverpool railway company. On 15 December 1825, Robert wrote to Longridge.
The failure of the Liverpool and Manchester Act, I fear, will retard much this kind of speculation; but
it is clear that they will eventually succeed, and I still anticipate with confidence the arrival of a time we shall see some of the celebrated canals filled up. It is to be regretted that my father placed the conducting of the levelling under the care of young men without experience. Simple as the process of levelling may appear, it is one of those things that requires care and dexterity in its performance.
In a letter to his stepmother, in June the following year, trying to comfort them in their difficult times, he shows the affection which rarely disappeared for any length of time.
My dear father’s letter, which I received a few days ago, was an affectionate one, and when he spoke of his head getting grey and finding himself descending the hill of life, I could not refrain from giving way to feelings which overpowered me, and prevented me from reading on. Some, had they seen me, would perhaps call me childish: but I would tell them such feelings and reflections as crossed me at that moment are unknown to them. They are unacquainted with the love and affection due to attentive parents, which in me seems to have become more acute, as the distance and period of my absence have increased.
Meanwhile, the Liverpool board, after George’s failure in parliament and subsequent dismissal, decided this time they must have a national figure and accordingly hired the Rennie brothers, George and John, two of the most respected engineers of the day, sons of John Rennie the Scottish engineer who built the old Waterloo and Southwark bridges in London. Under their direction a young and talented engineer called Charles Vignoles started a new survey. He slightly altered the line, avoiding the estates of the more vociferous opponents. At the same time, the board came to terms with the majority of the previous obstructionists, paying them huge amounts in compensation and in some cases giving them railway shares. The Rennies’ estimate was £500,000, £100,000 more than George’s, but they got their survey and plans carried successfully through parliament. Vignoles was very smooth, cultivated and confident under cross-examination and Alderson failed to find any flaws or inconsistencies in the survey. William Huskisson made a strong speech in favour of the bill but perhaps the most important thing in its favour this time, apart from the absence of George, was the fact that the use of locomotives was played down. Out of two hundred clauses in the new bill, only one contained a reference to locomotives. The railway board well knew that the bogey must be well hidden from the public. The bill was carried by forty-five votes on 5 May 1826.
George Stephenson Page 16
