When shares did start falling Robert urged his father to sell out the ones he did have and at least get his money back. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I took my shares for an investment and not to speculate with and I am not going to sell them now because folks have gone mad about railways.’ Smiles, in a rather endearing chapter heading, describes Stephenson as ‘Essentially Unsordid’. It would appear to be true.
George married for the third time in February 1848, just six months before his death. It was to his housekeeper, Ellen Gregory, daughter of a Bakewell farmer. They had obviously been very fond of each other for some time as is shown in a letter in his own hand, now preserved in the Science Museum in London. (They have a transcription which says the letter begins ‘My dear Glen’, which of course should be my dear Ellen, but the handwriting is very bad.)
24 Great George Street,
Westminster, 1847
My dear Ellen,
I have just got Mr. Marks letter which gave me much pain to hear your illness I do hope you are better. I shall not leave here until Tuesday morning so that I can have a letter before [leaving?] London to say how you are. you cannot write in time for me here I shall hear from you at Tapton if you are no better I will come down to to [sic] you but do not let me come unless you feel very ill.
I shall be home to be with you by the end of the week.
I am my dear Ellen
Your loving friend
GEO. STEPHENSON
Summerside was surprised by news of the marriage and says in his book that he never remembered seeing Ellen on his frequent visits to Tapton.
I learnt from her brother that which very much surprised me, viz, that after the death of her husband, although the furniture, plate, etc, and £800 per annum were left to her, she found it too little; and even contemplated coming to Matlock to reside, in order to economise. She wrote to her step-son, Mr Robert Stephenson, for an increase of her allowance, but he significantly referred her to his solicitor. I only name the above by way of contrast, knowing that it will strike all the intimate friends of his second wife who would know that her watchword was frugality, economy and saving.
Three wives, then, and very little to say about any of them, nice or otherwise: Fanny was older, was always ill and died early: Elizabeth was a Methodist who kept bees and for twenty-five years was a frugal but very retiring wife: Ellen arrived late, was much younger, and liked his money.
George Stephenson died at midday in his bedroom at Tapton House on 12 August 1848, after a severe attack of pleurisy, a recurrence of the illness he’d contracted in Spain. He was sixty-seven. He was buried at Holy Trinity, Chesterfield, the church where his second wife Elizabeth had been buried, beneath a simple stone slab. Later, his name was added to a tablet bearing his wife’s name and Robert presented a memorial window in his father’s honour to the church.
According to the Derbyshire Courier of 18 August 1848, the funeral was an exceedingly impressive occasion with all the Chesterfield shops closed from midday for the cortege as it came down the hill from Tapton House, followed by ‘hundreds of people, including some who’d come a long distance’. The Mayor of Chesterfield and the Archdeacon of Derby were present, plus many local councillors, but looking through the names there were no national figures, apart from Robert Stephenson. Even George Hudson didn’t turn up. He was very busy that day trying hard to explain to irate shareholders why he couldn’t pay them any money. He managed to quieten them, for a few minutes at least, by calling for silence in his great grief at the sudden loss of his dear friend.
Someone who did make the effort to come a long way was Edward Pease, now aged eighty-one, and he recorded his impressions of George’s funeral in his diary.
Wednesday, Aug. 16 Left home in company with John Dixon to attend the interment of George Stephenson at Chesterfield, and arrived there in the evening. When I reflect on my first acquaintance with him and the resulting consequences my mind seems almost lost in doubt as to the beneficial results – that humanity has benefited in the diminished use of horses and by the lessened cruelty to them, that much ease, safety, speed and lessened expense in travelling is obtained, but as to the results and effects of all that Railways have led my dear family into, being in any sense beneficial, is uncertain.
Thurs. Aug. 17 Went in the forenoon to Tapton House, late G. Stephenson’s residence, and received from Robert a welcome reception; had a serious friendly conference with him, under a feeling expressed to him of my belief that it was a kindness to him his father was taken, his habits were approaching to inebriety; his end was one that seemed painfully to feel no ground, almost, for hope. I fear he died an unbeliever – the attendance of his funeral appeared to me to be a right step due to my association with him and his son. I do not feel condemned in doing so, yet gloomy and unconsolatory was the day. In the church I sat a spectacle with my hat on, and not comforted by the funeral service.
It’s hard to know what Pease meant by George’s ‘Inebriety’. Smiles always insists how sober George was, though to a Quaker like Pease, anyone who took drink would be a drunkard. (To a true Quaker, anyone who condemned anyone else, as Pease was doing, was also sinning.) Perhaps he was referring to George’s general character. When the obituaries appeared, there were indeed constant asides to his well-known faults (‘And who will pretend he was without them,’ as the Derby and Chesterfield Reporter observed), but few went into exact details.
One paper said that the cause of his death was ‘spending too many years in the impure air of a hot house in a praiseworthy but imprudent rivalry with the Duke of Devonshire in the cultivation of certain exotics. Whether peer or commoner, Stephenson could not bear that any man should be his superior or equal in whatever he undertook.’
The Civil Engineer and Architect’s Journal ran an enormous obituary–biography which came out in installments. It generously praised his achievements, though it recognised that he hadn’t been a friend of theirs. ‘From prejudice against some of the members, he refused to belong to the Institution of Civil Engineers.’ They referred to his feud with Brunel as being bitter:
To those who applied to him for countenance for new projects he was not always so considerate; he was wrapped up in his own schemes and looked upon others with ill-will. His feelings towards Brunel were shown with a warmth and bitterness unbecoming, and it extended to all the supporters of the atmospheric system. The locomotive was his cherished idol, and woe to those who interfered with its worship. A very coarse scene took place when Mr. Hudson brought before him a plan of Mr. F. W. Beaumont, the engineer, for common road locomotives; and many more might be quoted. His temper was too apt to give way, unless he had the field wholly to himself.
His plainness of mind and speech as often verged on simplicity as on coarseness, and he ever had more respect for the man than the coat, an example more uncommon in those who have risen from the ranks than it is even among those of higher birth. He was never ashamed of his own works and of his fellow-workmen, and was most proud that he had been a working-man and not a lazy man.
After the final chapter appeared, they printed at great length a letter of correction, sent anonymously, saying that Edward Pease was the true Father of Railways and that it was ‘his patronage and support that brought George Stephenson before the public’.
In all the public references to him, then and for the next few years, there was a general feeling of unforgiveness about his faults which could explain the lack of any real stars at his funeral. But what the Derby and Chesterfield Reporter said about him, in their final summing up, was certainly agreed by all. ‘Take him for all in all, we shall not look upon his like again. Nay, we cannot, for in his sphere of invention and discovery, there cannot again be a beginning.’
16
AFTER GEORGE
George Stephenson left £140,000, almost all of which went to Robert his only son. Robert had little need of it by then. In financial terms, Robert became wealthier than his father had ever been. Smiles at one stage talks about him
as the first engineer to become a millionaire, though there is no proof that he ever had such an amount of money. Jeaffreson, Robert’s biographer, says that at his height he earned £30,000 a year as an engineer. In terms of prestige, popularity and social position, Robert became better known in his lifetime than his father, which is strange, considering he is hardly known to the public today.
Robert’s career had been very much tied up with George’s, but he went on to specialise in different fields and they were very different in character. He was more concerned with money than George. He worried about it, losing money during Railway Mania and, worst of all, becoming involved, completely honourably, in one of the nastier railway disasters of the day, the Stanhope and Tyne fiasco. This is a long complicated saga stretching over many years which began in 1834 when Robert, as engineer of the line, agreed to take shares in the company in lieu of his £1,000 fee. In 1839, having almost forgotten such a relatively minor railway, the company went bankrupt, £400,000 in debt. Robert, through the vagaries of the company law at the time and through other people getting out well in time, turned out to be the only shareholder with any assets. He felt morally involved, despite what friends told him, and tried to save the company by personally raising £20,000. It meant realising all his own assets, which he’d spent many hard years earning, including £4,000 which he borrowed from his father. George Hudson finally came to the rescue in 1840, doing several sleights of hand with other railway companies tied up in the disaster, and eventually settled the matter. However, it had cost Robert £20,000 and it meant he had to start financially from scratch once again. It also meant he was associated, whether he liked it or not, with many of Hudson’s ventures, repaying his favours.
Hudson, it has to be said, did create and amalgamate some fine railways and commission some fine constructions. He was vice-chairman of the company for which Robert built the High Level bridge over the Tyne, one of his greatest achievements. Robert, like his father, built many railways, from the six-mile long Canterbury and Whitstable line which opened in May 1830 (four months ahead of the Liverpool–Manchester, but its main power was stationary engines) to the 112-miles long London–Birmingham. But he moved on after this to specialising in bridges, for which there was an urgent demand due to the huge increase in railways. The whole problem of bridges had to be rethought, now that they were needed to carry the full weight of heavy locomotives and trains, charging across them at high speed.
The High Level Tyne bridge was opened in September 1849, by Queen Victoria. It was 1,372 feet long, resting on five great sandstone piers, contained 5,000 tons of iron and cost £243,000, and was one of the marvels of the age. It is still in full working condition today. The following year the queen opened another of Robert’s bridges, this time over the Tweed, the Royal Border bridge at Berwick. The Tyne and Tweed bridges were the final links in the London–Edinburgh line and the queen, on behalf of a grateful nation, offered Robert a knighthood. He refused. No doubt he felt that as his father had declined, and as he normally bowed to his father, he must do the same.
The railway company had commissioned John Dobson, Newcastle’s famous town planner, to design the station in Newcastle – still one of the handsomest stations in the country – and this too was opened by Queen Victoria in 1850. An inaugural banquet was given there, on the station platform, in honour of Robert, and his speech was absolutely typical of all his public utterances – quiet, restrained, modest, bending over backwards to thank everyone, mentioning all his assistants by name.
If you would read the biographies of all your old distinguished engineers, you would be struck with the excessive detail into which they were drawn; when intelligence was not so widely diffused as at present, an engineer like Smeaton or Brindly had not only to conceive the design, but had to invent the machines and carry out every detail of the conception; but since then a change has taken place, and no change is more complete. The principal engineer now only has to say ‘Let this be done!’ and it is speedily accomplished, such is the immense capital, and such the resources of mind which are immediately brought into play. I have myself, within the last ten or twelve years, done little more than exercise a general superintendence and there are many other persons here to whom the works referred to by the Chairman ought to be almost entirely attributed. I have had little or nothing to do with many of them beyond giving my name, and exercising a gentle control in some of the principal works.
Robert was also responsible for the famous rail bridge across the Menai Straits, the Britannia bridge. Telford had built his road bridge across the Menai in 1826 and his suspension bridge principle was still the only known method of achieving a large span, but where Robert was planning to cross was 1,511 feet from land to land, too long for a suspension. After many experiments with different models and materials, extensive investigations and research, Robert created what became known as tubular bridges. The bridges consisted of enormous wrought iron tubes, so large that the trains passed through them, with the tube itself providing the main supporting power. The Britannia bridge, opened in 1850, had a highly dramatic completion with sections of the iron tubes having to be floated out at high tide, leaving only an hour for them to be put in position before the tide turned and swept everything away. It was done successfully, just, though Robert himself suffered endless agonies.
Robert did other bridges on the same principle, including one across a branch of the Nile, but the most stupendous of all his tubular bridges was the one over the St Lawrence at Montreal. This had every conceivable problem, the worst being the icing up of the river for six months which threatened every year to destroy the previous year’s work. The navvies sent out by Brassey and Peto got frostbite in winter and sunstroke in summer. It was designed in Robert’s London office, all the ironwork was built in England and then shipped out to Canada. It was a colossal undertaking in every way, being 6,588 feet long, dwarfing all his British bridges, and it cost over £1,400,000. It was opened by the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, in November 1859, six weeks after Robert’s death.
Robert attracted world wide attention throughout all his bridge-building exploits and crowds gathered at every stage and artists did paintings of almost every pier being put in position. They were concentrated miracles, which one could take in at one view, as long as one stood well back, whereas a railway line was somehow diffuse, once the miracle of seeing a steam locomotive had been experienced. Both the public and the professions acclaimed his achievements. The section on Iron Bridges in the 8th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, still produced in those days from his old university town of Edinburgh, was written by Robert Stephenson.
At the height of the drama of floating the tubes across the Menai for the Britannia bridge, Robert was joined by Brunel, who’d arrived to comfort and keep him company during the agonising wait till all had been finished. Robert, in his turn, turned out to be with his friend during the first fruitless attempts to launch Brunel’s famous liner, the Great Eastern. Robert heard of the problems during a dinner party at home but left almost at once to go down to Blackwall where he stood with Brunel all day in deep mud and a freezing wind till the attempt was abandoned. Robert went back to bed, with inflammation of the lungs, and was seriously ill for ten days.
Throughout all the rows, over the gauge and other topics, Robert was on his father’s side, but he never ceased to be a personal friend of Brunel’s, even when they were direct rivals themselves for the same contracts. This endeared them both to the general and to the engineering public. ‘Two nobler adversaries the world never witnessed,’ said Jeaffreson.
After George’s death, Robert took up his friendships with many people who had apparently left the Stephenson camp for ever. Both Joseph Locke and Vignoles gave personal testimonies on Robert’s behalf at various tribunals. In 1846, while George was still alive, William James Junior wrote to Robert and other eminent engineers about a testimonial to his father. Robert signed the testimonial at the head of the list, followed by almost ever
y other distinguished engineer of the day such as Brunel, Locke, Rennie and Vignoles. William James’ daughter, E.M.S.P., prints the full list in her 1861 book. The testimonial never came before the public because, so she alleges, George was so furious when he heard that Robert had signed that he took steps to stop the whole testimonial. (All that Robert managed was a small present, sent through the Liverpool and Manchester Company.)
In October 1848, the Mechanics’ Magazine, George’s old critic, revealed the existence of the document, now that George had just died.
This document assigns to William James that prominent place in railway history which George Stephenson was habitually fond of ascribing to himself (after the death of his precursor) and on it are subscribed the names of nearly all the most distinguished railway engineers of this railway age, including, in a foremost place, that of robert stephenson! Need we press the weight to be assigned to such testimony as this.
The testimonial was never resurrected. Robert presumably had thought better of it, once and for all; having upset his father in his lifetime, he didn’t want to raise the controversy again. George was clear cut in all his hatreds and his likes but Robert, though basically kind and generous, worried about his actions, relationships and decisions.
Robert had every possible honour offered to him, and accepted most of them. He became MP for Whitby in 1847 and served with distinction, though he made few speeches and then mainly on engineering matters. (He pronounced the Suez Canal scheme, having travelled the whole distance on foot, to be impracticable.) In 1855 he was elected president of the Institution of Civil Engineers. The emperor of France made him a member of the Legion d’Honneur, King Leopold of the Belgians made him a knight and in Norway he got the Order of St. Olaf. At home he was an FRS and in 1857 received an honorary degree at Oxford, along with his friend Brunel and Dr David Livingstone, an impressive trio for one day’s ceremony.
George Stephenson Page 30
