by Tony Pollard
I gave him an incredulous look.
Tarlow picked up my hat and examined it. ‘A quality topper, to be sure. Distinctive, too, because of the slight kink in the band just here. You were carrying it along with your coat that first time we met. I also saw it on the washstand of one of Miss Hamilton’s girls when I questioned her this morning. I am sure she will have told you of my visit. A very handsome young lady, if you don’t mind me saying so.’
The kink in the hatband had been made by the card on which Brunel had written his note of thanks and to the layman’s eye was all but invisible. But I was in no mood to be congratulating the inspector on his impressive powers of observation. ‘I wasn’t aware that my private life was under investigation by the police.’
Tarlow replaced the hat. ‘I am not here to pass judgement on your personal life, doctor, just to warn you to be careful. The perpetrator of these crimes seems to have an interest in surgery and is intimate with prostitutes. You wouldn’t want people to draw the wrong conclusions.’
I couldn’t have agreed more.
7
Brunel’s gift may have caused some embarrassment but it also served as a reminder of the plight of those men at the yard who had suffered such terrible injuries in his service. Thanks to intelligence from William I had learned that several of them were still patients at St Clement’s hospital in Mile End. Telling myself that I was motivated purely by a professional interest in the long-term effects of trauma, which in part it was, I decided to pay them a visit. But there was also another reason – the incident still troubled me, and I wanted to reassure myself that my intervention had been of some worth; you might say it was a case of my pride following someone else’s fall.
Not wishing to incur Sir Benjamin’s wrath again, this latest excursion was to be made during my off-duty hours, on one of those rare days when my time was my own.
Sporting my muffler against the winter cold, I took a cab across town. At St Clement’s I asked a porter for the duty surgeon, but he was busy and so I was taken directly to the men’s ward to see the patients. I could have been in my hospital, so similar was the arrangement of beds against the grey walls, only here the rooms were smaller than at St Thomas’s, some of them no larger than my own parlour, but still containing half a dozen beds or more. There must have been about forty beds in the main ward, and every one of them occupied. Some patients sat up, chatting with their neighbours, while others appeared to be sleeping or unconscious. It had been weeks since the accident and only the two most badly injured victims were still bedridden.
The porter led me to a man sat with his back cushioned against the wall by a thin pillow. I recognized him as one of those who had been knocked cold by the impact of his fall; his face had obviously been badly bruised but was now beginning to return to what I guessed to be its normal ruddy pallor.
I introduced myself and he shook my hand warmly. ‘Good to see you, doctor, they tell me here I’d be pushin’ up daisies if it weren’t for you actin’ so quick. The name’s Walter, Walter Turner.’
‘How are you feeling, Walter?’
‘Not bad, sir. Should be out in a couple of days. Feel as though I’ve been in this bed for a lifetime. God know’s when I’ll be able to get back to work though, if ever. Broke hip and both legs, I did. That’s on top of the nail that went through my lung. The old lady ain’t too pleased, I tell you, she’s goin’ to have to work extra to keep us fed.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘Still, not as bad as Frank over there.’ He pointed to a bed on the other side of the room. ‘Been slippin’ in and out of it since we arrived. Not sure about Frank, they’re not. Poor sod. Bash on the head, nasty, very nasty.’
I looked over at the inert form of Frank; his head was covered in bandages and he lay still as a corpse.
‘But the company will see you all right?’
‘Guess they’ll pay us a few bob, though they won’t be ’appy about it.’ He reached forward to rub a leg and said bitterly, ‘Sometimes I think they prefer it when we’re killed outright so they can forget about us.’
‘Accidents happen a lot then?’
‘Christ, yes – there must have been at least ten deaths and dozens of injuries since we first started work on that big bitch of a ship. You know, I’ve seen injured men wait for more than an hour before someone thinks to get ’em to hospital. The bloody bosses are usually more concerned about the damaged equipment and time lost than the broken men.’ He paused and looked over at Frank again. ‘But as my wife says, you can’t make a cake without breakin’ eggs. An’ I’ve got to ’and it to Mr Brunel, the man puts himself at as much risk as the rest of us. Got to respect ’im for that.’
‘I don’t recall seeing him flying through the air,’ I declared, recalling how Brunel had insisted on an immediate return to the launch so soon after the tragedy.
‘Oh he has, he has,’ muttered Walter.
I was intrigued, but the man was clearly in need of rest and so I said goodbye, stopping briefly at the end of Frank’s bed on my way out. Walter’s reference to eggs and cakes brought to mind Miss Nightingale’s comment about the cost of progress. Were these broken men really the price we had to pay?
My departure was delayed by the late arrival of a doctor, who was just about to commence his rounds. Once introductions were made he was happy to discuss his patients. Not surprisingly, Frank’s prognosis wasn’t at all good. His skull had taken the full force of the blow from the flying beam and if he pulled through at all it would be without many of his mental faculties. I was also saddened, but equally unsurprised, to hear that Walter would never be capable of manual labour again. Broken eggs, both.
While we were talking my attention was caught by someone else entering the ward. He was wearing a workman’s jacket and his hobnailed boots clattered on the wooden floor as he walked between the beds before coming to a halt at the foot of Walter’s. There was an exchange of words but he was too far away for me to make them out. I guessed him to be a fellow labourer come to visit his injured work-mates, and so returned to my conversation with the doctor. I was vaguely aware of the new visitor moving from Walter to Frank. As I had done, he hovered briefly before returning in our direction. As he drew closer to the door I was astonished to recognize Ockham, the well-dressed young man from the Lazarus Club, his eyes hidden beneath the peak of a shabby cap and his wiry frame now clothed in a suit, which looked to have been scavenged from a rag man’s cart.
Naturally, my usual first reaction would have been to call out in greeting, but his appearance had come as too much of a surprise to permit a normal reaction and so instead I kept the doctor between myself and Ockham, hiding as best I could. Why on earth would a man of obvious means now choose to dress like a lowly labourer, and indeed mix among them?
My colleague must surely have thought my behaviour odd as, after bobbing up and down before him, I brought the conversation to an abrupt close and set off in pursuit, following the sound of Ockham’s boots as they echoed along the corridor and then stamped off down the street. He walked with no apparent hurry and seemed entirely relaxed in his working man’s garb, at one point stopping to purchase a bag of chestnuts. He ate them as he walked, dropping the shells on to the pavement for me to crunch underfoot as I followed in his train moments later.
We headed south through the sprawl of Limehouse, passing through West Ferry and continuing on towards the Isle of Dogs. I was now in familiar territory, having walked down this road with Brunel after abandoning his carriage before the launch. With the river flowing sluggishly along to my right, there could be little doubt that Ockham was making for the shipyard.
After two miles I was starting to flag, but if anything Ockham, his destination in sight, had picked up the pace. There was Brunel’s great ship, its towering funnels cutting the skyline long before the hull hove into view. She seemed slightly closer to the river’s edge than when I’d seen her last but still had a long way to go.
I was relieved
to see the gates to the yard, and had to resist the temptation to stop and take much-needed refreshment at the public house strategically positioned just outside them. Ockham walked through unmolested, with me no more than thirty paces behind him, hoping I would not be stopped. I needn’t have worried. The man on the gate was busy shouting at the driver of a huge wagon stopped half in and half out of the entrance loaded with hydraulic rams.
‘I don’t give a tinker’s cuss how much of an ’urry you’re in, mate!’ the gatekeeper roared to the driver as I used the wagon and its six horses to cover my passage into the yard. ‘I need to find out where you’re to unload before I can let you in. It’s bloody busy in there and the last thing we need is you and your filthy big rig adding to it.’
Without the crowds of people swarming everywhere the area in front of the ship now seemed like a vast open plain, gently sloping down to the daunting iron escarpment on the horizon. In the far distance dozens of workmen ducked in and out of view among the cradles and beams along the underside of the hull. Others moved along the deck of the ship, and a small but constant stream of men passed in both directions on the stairway in the siege tower. Winches and cranes hauled payloads of all shapes and sizes up the face of the hull and on to the deck.
Closer to where I stood, at the top of the slope, a pair of heavy horses pulled on a length of chain towards the ship, its double links raising dust as it was dragged noisily down the slipway. The sound of metal hammering against metal issued from the high-roofed sheds to my left and right. Outside one of them a tenement-sized stack of wooden crates awaited opening or removal, I couldn’t tell which. Just in front of me five men pulled on a rope attached to what looked like a hangman’s scaffold as they lifted an iron beam on to the back of the trolley on which they would wheel it down to the ship. Three men dragged a similar empty trolley back up the hill, having delivered their load at the foot of it.
I took all of this in as I looked for Ockham, who since getting in through the gate before me had disappeared from sight. I wandered around for a while at the top of the slope and was just about to give it up as a bad job when I spotted a tell-tale fragment of chestnut shell on the ground, and then another a little further ahead. The trail led me down a roadway to the right of the gate, terminating at the huge sliding door of one of the sheds. The big door was closed but cut into it was a much smaller, man-sized aperture.
Light shafted in through windows high up in the walls to illuminate a scene of the most intense industry. Vast pieces of machinery sat everywhere, and the entire floor was covered with steel wheels, rods and cylinders. The noise was now almost deafening, as each component was tended by a man, most of whom were beating away at their charge for all they were worth. Chains hung from girders in the roof and from these more examples of the engineer’s art were suspended. I followed a path through this maze of iron, looking at each man as I strolled by, my muffler pulled up to my nose in attempted disguise.
While some men hammered others polished, rubbing metal with oily rags until it gleamed like the surface of a mirror. I turned a corner and came across three men pulling down on the long shaft of a mighty spanner, turning a nut the size of a lady’s hatbox. Another chestnut shell crunched under my foot.
Ockham sat on a stool, rasping away with a file, looking for all the world like a blacksmith crouching before the hoof of a horse with a newly fitted shoe. But this was no horse. He sat beneath a many-spoked wheel, its great rim cogged with triangular teeth. The wheel hung in the air, attached to an axle set into an A-frame. He worked one tooth at a time, filing away the burr left by the casting to create crisp edges. Every now and again he stood up and, taking hold of the spokes, turned the wheel on its axis, bringing another batch of untreated teeth into reach.
Now I had found him I wasn’t sure what to do next. Should I tap him on the shoulder and say hello? I wanted him to turn round and see me, to remove my freedom of action, but he was too deeply engaged in his task.
As it happened, it was I who felt a tap on the shoulder. Brunel gestured for me to follow, unwilling to raise his voice against the din.
‘Couldn’t stay away, eh?’ he said, once we had stepped back out into the daylight.
‘I just thought I’d come along and take a look at how things were going. I wanted to know whether you’d managed to get her in the water yet.’
He turned away to watch the wagon, which had by now entered the yard and was being unloaded. ‘We’ve managed another twenty feet or so.’ He seemed genuinely pleased with progress and gestured to the wagon with his cigar. ‘I’ve ordered in just about every hydraulic ram in the country. We were under-powered, that’s all.’
‘You think they’ll shift her?’
‘They will if we can keep the chains from snapping.’ He took off his hat, which prompted me to thank him again for his gift.
‘Think nothing of it,’ he said. ‘You did a good job with the men.’
‘I just did what any doctor on the spot would have done.’
‘That may be, but you were on the spot.’
While he was being candid I turned the conversation towards the real reason for my visit. ‘I see that Mr Ockham is employed here as a labourer. I would have thought a man of his obvious standing would occupy a position of some responsibility.’
Brunel replaced his hat and was about to speak when the sound of one of the rams crashing to the ground redirected our attentions to the wagon. ‘MacKintyre!’ he yelled. ‘I’ll have your hide if you break that ram before we have the chance to use it!’ Then he turned to me. ‘Forgive me, Phillips, but I’m going to have to supervise this delivery myself, things are a bit heated at the moment. Perhaps we can talk another time.
‘The hat looks good on you, my friend,’ he said, before returning to work, shouting orders and slapping backs. With any chance of repeating my question lost, I made my way back to the gates.
I was soon to discover that the Isle of Dogs, which, shipyards notwithstanding, is really nothing more than a fetid marsh populated by a cluster of dilapidated windmills, is not the best place to catch a cab. With no option left but to walk back to town, I set out to wear down more shoe leather. After only a few paces a carriage pulled into the side of the road ahead of me.
‘Dr Phillips, isn’t it?’ called out the man who stepped halfway out of the vehicle. ‘Can I give you a lift?’
‘That is very good of you, Mr Whitworth,’ I replied. ‘I was not relishing the idea of tramping back into town.’
‘A pleasant surprise for both of us then. Come aboard.’ Whitworth grabbed a hand and pulled me up on to the step. The door closed and the carriage lurched forward. ‘Tell me, doctor, what brings you to this godforsaken part of the world?’
Not quite sure of the answer myself, I told him I was on my way home after a meeting with Brunel. ‘And you, sir, have you been visiting the yard yourself?’
Whitworth nodded. ‘A little business with Mr Russell.’
‘Didn’t Sir Benjamin say you build machines?’
‘That’s right, everything from machine tools to cannons. In fact, I make the machines that make the cannons. I have always felt that diversification is the key to success.’
‘Didn’t Mr Darwin say something along those lines?’
Whitworth grinned. ‘I do believe he may have done. In truth, though, I can barely remember what has been said at those damn talks from one day to the next. But I usually learn a thing or two and, in any case, the meetings provide a useful opportunity for the odd piece of business.’
Whitworth glanced out of the window, where the ship’s false horizon was disappearing from view. ‘I had been hoping to equip Mr Russell’s yard with a new steam press, but I am not sure he is in the market for such an expensive piece of equipment at the moment.’ Then he returned his attention to me. ‘It sounds as though Mr Brunel has picked the right man to be our secretary. I hope that you are going to accept the position?’
‘I have still to make a decision on that. I am
afraid that the hospital makes considerable demands on my time.’
‘Well, you have my vote anyway. We could do with some new blood.’
‘Thank you,’ I replied, before seizing on an opportunity while I had it. ‘Mr Whitworth, could you perhaps tell me how the Lazarus Club got its name?’
‘Now that I do remember,’ he said with a laugh. ‘Why, we have Mr Babbage to thank for that. I think it was he, along with Brunel and young Ockham, who first started the thing. Then others joined. Russell and Bazalgette were early recruits, them having crossed paths at the Great Exhibition back in ’fifty-one. After that, new technology and feats of engineering became all the rage, but Brunel and Ockham, in particular, were interested in all manner of subjects, including medicine’ – he nodded at me to stress this last point – ‘and so Sir Benjamin was invited along. The usual practice was for members to give presentations on subjects that interested them, usually relating to their own work, and then once everyone had done that, they began to invite guest speakers along, and at times encourage them to join, which is how I ended up there.
‘Not long after I became a member Babbage gave a talk, in which he introduced us to the idea of the difference engine.’
‘I’ve been wondering about that. What exactly is a difference engine?’
‘My dear chap,’ said Whitworth wistfully, ‘we would require a journey from Edinburgh to London for me to fully explain that, and even then we’d probably need to take a detour to Brighton and back to answer your question. In any case, I think he intends to give us a talk on his latest work in the near future. Much better from the horse’s mouth, as they say.’ I was already regretting my interruption – we were fast approaching Limehouse and I was determined to discover why the Lazarus Club was so called before leaving the carriage.
Whitworth began again in an almost apologetic tone. ‘That would be if I could remember the details about the damn thing. Complicated blighter it is, went straight over my head at the time, but I pestered him about it long enough to get the gist.
