George Stephenson

by Hunter Davies

  When the English engineers moved abroad, as George and Robert Stephenson and Joseph Locke did, their regular contractors and navvies went with them. It wasn’t just British brains which built so many of the world’s railway lines – it was British muscles. Naturally it brought out some vigorous flag waving from the more chauvinistic Victorians, delighted by such British examples of Enterprise and Perseverance. Samuel Smiles, while condemning the navvies as heathens, praised their work rate, showing the frogs a thing or two, especially when it came to loading up their barrows:

  While he [the English navvy] thus easily ran out some 3 or 4 cwt. at a time, the French navvy was contented with half the weight. Indeed, the French navvies on one occasion struck work because of the size of the English barrows, and there was an émeute on the Rouen Railway, which was only quelled by the aid of the military. The consequence was that the big barrows were abandoned to the English workmen, who earned nearly double the wages of the Frenchmen. The manner in which they stood to their work was matter of great surprise and wonderment to the French countrypeople, who came crowding round them in their blouses, and, after gazing admiringly at their expert handling of the pick and mattock, and the immense loads of ‘dirt’ which they wheeled out, would exclaim to each other, ‘Mon Dieu, voila! voila ces Anglais, comme ils travaillent!’

  The facts about such railways, as opposed to the exclamations, spoke for themselves. The Rouen railway was built by an army of 5,000 British navvies and half of it paid for with British capital. Later, when railways opened up in the New World, Brassey sent 2,000 British navvies to Canada, to build the Grand Trunk, and 2,000 for a line in New South Wales.

  Mon Dieu, could George Stephenson have guessed for one moment what he had unleashed when he finished the Liverpool line? The railways, with their navvies and contractors and engineers, all of which George spawned, did at least do a lot of economic good. It can even be argued that one of the reasons that Britain in the 1830s and 1840s escaped revolution, while most of Europe tore itself apart, was that we were all too busy building railways. There was work for everyone, if you were prepared to sweat, and the economy boomed. Socially, the conditions of the navvies might have been appalling, but they were in the fresh air, their own masters, and better paid than the sweat shop factories. Railways reduced barriers, joined people and towns together, opened up new worlds, new horizons and gave new opportunities for every class of society.

  But there was one rather more abstract result of railways, much more bizarre, which was again directly caused by George Stephenson. When people began to talk of Railway Mania, which very soon the whole country was doing, it wasn’t the armies of navvies or engineers or contractors who sprang to mind but the armies of paper speculators. None of them was more bizarre than George Hudson.

  14

  GEORGE HUDSON AND RAILWAY MANIA

  George Stephenson has a lot of things to answer for and one of them is George Hudson. He was a draper’s assistant from York who became the Railway King – a Victorian living legend. At the height of his powers Hudson far outshone Stephenson in public acclaim, public fame and social prestige. The newspapers and magazines of the day referred to him as a Monarch, talked about his crown and his court. London society begged for his favours – and his tips. Nobody was unaware of him – Carlyle, Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës, all refer to him in their private diaries and papers. In the 1840s, during the manic days of railway fever, he became the second most admired man in the kingdom, after the Duke of Wellington. And on one occasion even the Duke of Wellington came creeping to him for a favour.

  It was George Stephenson who made George Hudson – in every way. Contact with Stephenson gave him a vital aura of respectability when he was just beginning. The world of instant railways which Stephenson created gave him his millions. What a pity Samuel Smiles never deigned to get to grips with Hudson’s life. What terrifying morals he could have pointed. But the Victorians, alas, were so ashamed of their own created monster that when he fell they couldn’t bury him quickly enough, vainly trying to hide their own guilt, greed and gullibility.

  George Hudson was born in 1800 in a village near York, the fifth son of a yeoman farmer, which was where his peasant shrewdness was said to have come from. It was never more than shrewdness, unaffected by education or even the gift of the gab. He was always a bad speaker, most people finding him incoherent, except when he started reeling off the figures. His father died when he was nine, leaving no money, and he had to make his own way. At fifteen he left home and made for York, where he became apprenticed to a draper. He did well on the counter, well enough to be accepted at twenty-one into his employer’s family, marrying one of the partner’s daughters, a woman called Elizabeth five years older than himself. When he was twenty-seven, by which time he’d become a partner, he had a stroke of exceeding good luck. He said it was luck, but there were those who said it was his first con trick. A distant relative, a great uncle, became ill and young Hudson immediately rushed to his bedside. The will was made at the bedside, with only Hudson present, and to everyone’s surprise Hudson was left everything, a small fortune of some £30,000. Overnight he moved into York’s bourgeoisie. To leave no one in any doubt, he ceased to be a Methodist, which was how he’d been brought up, and became very staunch Church of England. At the same time, from being of no political opinion, he became a thrusting young Tory, highly active in the local party, making the right friends and helping all the right local nobility.

  In 1833 there was talk in York, as there was in every town in the land, of the coming of railways. Few leading citizens, unlike their counterparts only a decade before, wanted to see their town missed out. A local group was set up to promote the idea of a railway between York and Leeds. Hudson was elected treasurer. An engineer was hired to survey the line and he eventually came up with a scheme using horse power, not locomotives. Despite the success of the Liverpool line, there were still many who thought steam wouldn’t catch on. In early 1834 Hudson went on a visit to Whitby to look at some of his property, part of the loot which had come to him from his great uncle. There, by chance, he met George Stephenson who was looking at a possible railway line. Stephenson fired Hudson’s imagination with schemes to cover the country with a network of railways. Hudson, whatever else he was, had an equally fervent imagination. He was quick to see the immense possibilities and was converted on the spot. Stephenson was highly impressed by Hudson’s breadth of vision and enthusiasm and they became firm friends. Hudson went back to convert the York backers to steam and to build up his local power. He campaigned at the general election for a young local nobleman he’d teamed up with and managed to get him elected. In the process Hudson had distributed around £3,000 in bribes and other inducements. There were accusations in the House of Commons about skulduggery in York but when it came out that Whigs had been no better, hiring thugs to beat up Hudson’s paid voters, it was dismissed as just another example of the corruption of local politics.

  In 1836 Hudson, realising the growing national fame of his friend Stephenson, got the York committee to change the direction of their line. Stephenson was now working on a line directly through the Midlands and Hudson saw that if Stephenson’s line from York could join up with his own line from York they would share in the success of the Stephenson scheme and also get him associated as their engineer. (He tried at first to get Stephenson to change his line, but he wouldn’t, and had to change his own plans instead.) So the York and North Midland Railways was launched, with Hudson as treasurer and one of Stephenson’s assistants as engineer.

  With Stephenson’s name to flash around, Hudson soon raised £300,000 and got the bill through parliament. He became chairman of the company, which helped his status in York as the citizens saw how he was putting them on the map. His work in local politics was crowned when he became York’s lord mayor.

  His reign as lord mayor was noted for its lavishness, mostly out of council funds of course. His banquets were the talk of the north of England as in
turn he fêted the local clerical big wigs, the army, politicians, industrial and society leaders. In his speeches he was for ever boasting of his friendship with George Stephenson. When at one time things were flagging with the construction of the railway, he announced that George Stephenson had put £20,000 of his own money into the company’s shares and was persuading his friends to do the same. (There is no proof that Stephenson did or said such a thing – more likely Hudson had offered him some shares as a present.) But George did become the engineer of many of the other railways which Hudson was soon creating or annexing. His first step was to take over a rival line, the Leeds and Selby, which he did in 1840, immediately closing it so that all passengers had to use his line. In 1840 George Stephenson was persuaded to join the board of the York and North Midlands, finally establishing his respectability.

  In gobbling up company after company, Hudson always seemed to find it surprisingly easy to raise new money and yet keep on paying high dividends on his old companies. His method was simple: he used each intake of capital to pay his old shareholders. Today this would be highly illegal but Mr Hudson, being a new sort of speculator, was making his own rules. He audited his own books, which helped, disguising the fact that many of his companies could not possibly afford the high dividends he was paying. Naturally, if you were receiving a high dividend, you were keen to invest in any new scheme Mr Hudson might announce. Shareholders meetings consisted of loud and continuous cheers for Mr Hudson.

  At the same time he was genuinely cutting costs to the minimum, usually at the expense of safety, and keeping wages low. He was so adept at railway company manoeuvrings that he helped out Robert Stephenson on several occasions. By 1843 he’d become the single most powerful man in railways, controlling lines from York down to Rugby and Birmingham, It was in that year he was first known as the ‘Railway King’, at last throwing off his image as a cheap, provincial asset stripper. Now he was respectable – and feared – if still a bit of a joke behind his back. On 7 October 1843 the Railway Times printed a satirical song about him, saying they were lines to be sung at the grand amalgamation meeting scene of a new opera to be called Midas:

  George, in his chair,

  Of Railways Lord Mayor

  With his nods

  Men and gods

  Keep in awe;

  When he winks

  Heaven shrinks

  When he speaks,

  Hell squeaks,

  Earth’s globe is but his taw.

  In 1844 he came face to face with Gladstone, then president of the Board of Trade, who was against the unrestricted speculation in railways which was convulsing the country and taking up so much parliamentary time. Gladstone got a committee of inquiry set up to which Hudson was called as the most important witness. Gladstone cross-examined Hudson on the possibility of a single powerful capitalist (i.e. Hudson) creating a railway monopoly. Hudson said that amalgamations were good for the country, saving expenses and benefiting each company. The bill which Gladstone was trying to push through, to check railway monopoly, was finally emasculated. Hudson was acclaimed by the railways interests as the victor – beating Gladstone in the House of Commons without even being an MP.

  Both Gladstone and Hudson, in their different ways, were to be proved right. Gladstone wanted some sort of state control, which had happened in several European countries, such as Belgium. Britain, by being first in the field, had proceeded in a chaotic, private-enterprise, free-for-all scramble. But it was private enterprise, in Darlington and Liverpool, which had backed railways in the first place. As for Hudson, the eventual monopoly he envisaged (with him in charge of course) was a sensible course for such vast financial operations, though it was a hundred years before a nationalised monopoly in the form of British Rail came to pass.

  In 1844, when he opened one of his new properties, the Newcastle and Darlington Junction Railway, he chose the anniversary of Waterloo for the opening celebrations, just to add to the pageantry. He brought up train loads of directors and influential shareholders from London for the celebrations, preceded by a ‘Flying Train’ which had the country agog and filled acres of newspaper space because for the first time it brought to Newcastle that morning’s London newspapers. His train had covered the 303 miles in a record time of nine hours, including stops. People lined the route almost all the way to gape in awe and wonder. As usual, Hudson proposed the toast of ‘Old George’ at the final banquet, calling him a genius, the true begetter of railways. George Stephenson was there in person and trotted out what was becoming his familiar speech, going over his boyhood memories, of his twenty years in the pits, of his struggles to educate his son and develop his first locomotive.

  Hudson had by now acquired a large personal circus, investors, contractors, engineers, lawyers, politicians, nobility, who either depended on him for work or, most of all, for the wink and a nod when a new lucrative scheme was in the offing. He was still using the old dodge of calling up new capital to pay old dividends. It wasn’t until 1849, when for the first time a government authorised auditor had to look at all company accounts, that there was any real check on railway directors.

  His circus followed him round the country, travelling free on his trains to pack public or shareholders’ meetings, cheering his every word. In the north the supporters from his home town of York, where a new street had been named after him, became known as the ‘Flying Squad’. One of this group wrote in 1848 that he had sat down to dinner £20,000 richer than when he breakfasted, solely through being in the know about one of Hudson’s plans.

  Fresh capital was rolling in at such a rate that on one occasion he was paying a dividend of ten per cent on one line before it had even opened. In October 1844 he raised the sum of two-and-a-half million pounds to finance three branch lines without disclosing any details about them! No one knew where they were to be, when they were to be built or even had a guarantee from Hudson that he would ever use the money for railways at all. He went round boasting how he’d kept everyone in the dark.

  In 1845 he found himself in a long drawn out campaign against one proposed line that had the audacity to compete with him on his home territory, the London and York Company This was to be a more direct line, via Lincoln, and would be thirty miles shorter than Hudson’s more complicated route which went via the Midlands and Rugby. When the line came before the House of Commons, Hudson did all he could to obstruct it, hiring twelve counsel at a cost of £3,000 a day to discover flaws in his rivals’ proposals.

  The procedure for all new railway companies of the time was that a provisional committee got the line surveyed, got estimates made and produced a list of subscribers showing that at least three-quarters of the necessary capital had already been promised. Naturally, this led to wholesale fiddling of the list of proposed shareholders. Hudson knew all about such fiddles, having done it himself so often, so he brought in an agent called Croucher who went through his rivals’ subscription list. With the aid of some House of Commons notepaper, to which he wasn’t entitled, he wrote to local postmasters asking them to check the existence and means of all the more doubtful looking subscribers.

  As Hudson well knew, a great many of the names turned out to be fictitious. But, even better from his point of view, many of the people who did exist were forced to present themselves before the parliamentary committee. A charwoman’s son was revealed to be liable for £12,000 worth of shares, according to the list. A man in the workhouse was down for an equally large sum. Altogether, £29,000 worth of shares had been applied for by people who didn’t exist and £44,000 was down for people who did exist but had no money or property whatsoever. The Lords was forced to throw out the bill. Another triumph for King Hudson. The monopoly of his Midland Railway was safe, though his obstructionist tactics had cost Hudson well over £ 100,000.

  During the height of this particular parliamentary battle, it was decided that it was about time Hudson had a testimonial. It was later alleged that this decision had been made by Hudson himself, but ther
e is no proof of this. Hudson was nevertheless delighted. The Victorians loved testimonials. The usual practice was that a committee was formed to honour the great man in question and a subscription list opened. The leading subscribers’ names then appeared in large type in the newspapers. The great man would in due course have a statue built or some inscribed silver plate handed over to him at an appropriate ceremony. George Stephenson had recently been so honoured, with Hudson prominent amongst the subscribers.

  The testimonial opened for Hudson was rather unusual. According to well-informed rumours, not only had Hudson himself drafted the appeal, he had also drawn up the list of subscribers. He well knew which engineers, contractors and politicians owed him favours and would naturally love to subscribe. He worked out an appropriately handsome sum for each and instructed his secretary to publish the list in the newspapers before telling the people concerned. ‘Advertise it, that will clinch the matter.’