The Rich Are with You Always

by Malcolm Macdonald

  By the new electric telegraph from Dover

  Saturday 1 July

  News has just arrived that Mrs. Nora Stevenson, celebrated wife of the renowned John Stevenson, has landed safely at Dieppe, France. Her husband was at hand to conduct her down the railroad he has recently completed to Rouen last year. She declaimed it "very pretty and smooth." Our paternal and maternal oversea correspondents are expected to contribute regular news to these columns.

  [To this Sarah had added:] Do not imagine this last sentence to be a mere statement or wish; it is a command. You must be proud of Winifred, Nora dear. The whole idea for and production of this newspaper is hers; she has certainly inherited your spirit. You must get a governess this autumn. For a child of seven, she is quite outstanding, even if she did copy many of the phrases from the Illustrated London News and the Gazette. There followed several drawings by various hands: a pretty water colour from Winifred showing Sarah's new summer dress; a sketch by Young John of the "hydraulic works" in the garden; a drawing of a hare by Caspar, with the grass scribbled painstakingly in by Clement; and some coloured smudges and fingermarks from Hester. There was another sheet of paper that had been crumpled and straightened again. It was a drawing of scribbled spirals. This one had a note not from Sarah but from Winifred: This is Abigail's drawing. She screwed it up and threw it away because, she says, one of her flowers is drawn bigger than the others. She started a drawing of birds instead, but did not finish it, so I rescued this. Fancy screwing it up after all that work! She howled for an hour. She is mad.

  Nora was most heartened by this letter and she and Rodie laughed over it many times. But it had, for her, one sad aspect. Until recently, her experience and knowledge had, naturally, been greater than any of her children's: She knew everything that they knew and a lot more besides. But now, as Winifred's clever little Latin tag showed (and Latin was a language she had asked to be taught; no one had made her), their world was, in these and those directions, growing bigger than hers and escaping from her. One could say it was growing up and only natural—but that didn't stop its being sad.

  At the end of that week, her rib was still painful, though the swelling was down and she could breathe without discomfort if she did not breathe too deeply. France was settling into its new moderate-republican government and the whole atmosphere was much easier than it had been only a fortnight earlier. Rodie's old humour began to return and Nora now regretted the arrangements that forced her to go back to England. But those arrangements could not be broken. Sarah had accepted an invitation to go to Scotland in August with the Thorntons, who had rented a shooting lodge up there and were making a party with Tom Brassey and Joseph Locke, the engineer once so despised by Hudson. The four eldest Thornton children, Nicholas, Thomas, Albert, and Laetitia, were coming to Maran Hill for ten days, then they and the Stevenson brood were all going up to Yorkshire for two weeks. Lionel Thornton, then just two years old and always an ailing child, was to stay in Bristol with his baby sister Araminta, born last December. For the first time since they were married, both Arabella and Nora were free of pregnancy; it seemed that both families were taking a rest.

  Nora planned to accompany all the children up to London on one of their visits. They could go to the Regents Park zoological garden and see the halffinished Great Hall at Euston, and John, with all his parliamentary friends, could get tickets to see the new clock tower at the Houses of Parliament, and then they could take a boat down to the Tower of London, where the girls could see the royal jewels and the boys look at the old cannons and walk under the Thames Tunnel, so that they could tell Mr. Brunel they had seen it. It would make an instructive and memorable day if it didn't rain.

  She herself had important business in London too. Back in January, Chambers had hired a young clerk called Bernard Bassett—the sort of greedy, bright-eyed, silver-tongued young cockney who makes a good companion but an atrocious friend. He was smart and ambitious, and much too "big" for Chambers to manage. Every day he came with five new ways of improving the London banking system. Nora had noticed him from time to time and had listened to Chambers's complaints as they grew. Then in February, when she had turned in such a big profit on the Wolff fund, Chambers said he was going to let the young man go; she persuaded him to hold on to Bassett until after her confinement. In April, she had come back to London to find poor Nathaniel at the end of his tether. That was when she had offered the young fellow the job of land agent to the Wolff fund. The salary was only fifteen pounds, but if he was as smart as he said, he could earn ten times that on various commissions and bonuses that she offered. She knew the look and smell of greed, and he had both. He leaped at the chance.

  In general, Bassett's job was to do in one area of London what Ferrand had done in Deauille—buy up a big parcel of land and prepare it for development; in this case, he had to clear part of it of its agricultural tenants too. The area Nora had chosen was a long marshy strip of land north of Camden Town and west of Kentish Town. Two rivers, the Fleet, flowing down from Hampstead, and the tributary from Caen Wood, flowing down from Highgate, made it unthinkable for housing—to most people. But Nora had asked John to look at the soil and the fall of the land, and they had concluded that, when properly drained, it would support houses as well as any of the more obvious parts of the capital.

  Having eliminated that element of gamble, Nora took the real risk. John's first response on seeing the land was, "But no one will want to live this far out, surely—I mean, people come out to stay in Kentish Town in the summer to get out of London." She hoped that was the general response. Her aim was to buy the entire block of land, but to build only on the southern portion, against Camden Town. The northern part might lie as farm land for twenty more years yet without harm—her windfall profit on the Wolff fund gave her the breathing space and the audacity to do that. She had similar plans for the green fields on the other side of Kentish Town, right down to Holloway. Bassett could be busy out there this autumn, buying in all he could get his hands on.

  She was remembering the lesson of Alderley Edge, south of Manchester—so far south that when she had bought land out there people had said she was mad. But her instinct had said otherwise. Rich people wanted to live on hills, up in the fresh air, above the marshes and the bad drains and the cholera, where the views were full of distance. Just look at the number of fine country houses called something Hill, like Maran Hill. And where were the hills in London? Hampstead, Highgate, Highbury…That was where the rich would live. But she was sure there was soon going to be a new army of clerks in and around London—men of whom Bernard Bassett was the very type. Thrusting, in awe of money, feeling a cut above the shopkeepers and the tradesmen, knowing a little of how the rich lived and wanting to copy it as closely as possible. It was for that poor, ambitious motley she intended to build. They would be able to say "We live in Hampstead—South Hampstead really," or "We're at the Highgate end of Kentish Town." They would want to say that.

  All one needed to do was to take the grand houses around Grosvenor Square and Berkeley Square and St. James's—all the fashionable squares—and make reproductions of them as small and as cheap as possible. Height was important, she was sure. Give them four floors and a semibasement, even if the area of each floor was ever so mean. Put some imposing decoration on the front, something classical…a little private garden at the back, even if it was overlooked by a hundred neighbours…an impressive staircase to attract the eye (or, rather, to distract it from everything else) as soon as the cheap-but-imposing front door was opened—these were the ingredients of an entirely new kind of house. The people she had in mind would pinch every penny to afford a cook and a maidof-all-work.

  She shuddered briefly to consider the bleakness of life in those tall furnished tombs; but the arithmetic was most compelling. In all, she needed about a thousand acres. They could still be got now for around twenty-five pounds an acre— twenty-five thousand in all. She could cram in, she thought, about thirty-eight houses to an acre at
a building cost of about a hundred and fifty pounds each. The rent would be twenty a year. When all possible charges, deductions, and bad debts were included, the net return on each developed acre would be four hundred and twenty-five pounds—giving a valuation of ten and a half thousand an acre. The cost would be about six thousand, so the Wolff fund could buy a thousand acres and develop forty-five of them without having to borrow a penny.

  In twenty years, they could build, entirely without borrowing, a hundred and fifteen more acres, making the estate worth over a million and a half. Of course, they would borrow, long before that. Her aim was to have the entire estate built over by 1870. Then it would be worth over ten and a half million. And by 1880, it would be free of all charges. One and a half million would be hers. And she would be fifty-eight years old.

  Yes. She was going to have some very grateful, very loving, very respectful grandchildren.

  That was why it was important to see cheeky young Mr. Bernard Bassett and— however well he had done—encourage him to do even better by Christmas.

  Almost his first words were, "Is that true, Mrs. Stevenson, that you was once as poor as wot I am?" And when she said she had been a great deal poorer, he looked amazed and said, "Go on! I 'ad you down for a rich 'un. You act like you always 'ad money. Honest, you do."

  And when her sour skepticism showed in her eye, the torrent of "No, honest… God's truth…Cut me froat…would I lie to you…?" would begin. He did not simply bend truth, he cheerfully outraged it. She soon learned to trust nothing but the actual, formal, legal evidence of title, and the certified draft on the bank. But for all his untrustworthiness, he did well. He got over three hundred and twenty acres on the Hampstead side for eight thousand and seventy and, by Christmas, nearly six hundred and twenty acres on the Holloway side for under seventeen and a half. It was close enough to what she had hoped. In the spring, they could start to build.

  Chapter 47

  These successes came at a poor time for John. He had actually or almost completed all his big contracts except the Great Northern and the Dublin-Cork. That had reached Limerick Junction in June and been opened on 3 July. Stevenson's had failed to get the contracts for the Waterford & Limerick, whose line through Limerick Junction had opened in May as far as Tipperary. John was sure the failure had to do with MacMinimum's deliberate misdirection of him at his first meeting with Cashel Ormond.

  "I want to tell ye something about that," MacMinimum had said. "I had the whole story heelways. The man who told me Captain Ormond was Master of the Tipperary was a monstrous liar."

  "That puts you and me in the same boat," John told him.

  Flynn could offer no explanation for it. John concluded that truth in Ireland was like one of her own mountains, part-hidden in mist; and when the mist lifted, and your spirit said, "At last, now I will see it," you found instead that the mist had settled elsewhere, obscuring a region that was previously clear.

  The hundred and seven miles from Dublin to Limerick Junction had earned a profit of sixty-four thousand. He had given Flynn a bonus of seven thousand and to others, right down to individual navvies, bonuses making a further four. He had bought, as planned, a bankrupt estate of over two thousand acres in County Galway and had given the Friends five thousand to try to turn it into a model estate of the kind the country would need if it was ever going to prosper. His Dublin acquaintances thought him mad; the only place to buy land was in prosperous Leinster or Ulster, on the English side of the Shannon. No good money ever came out of the west. Privately, he thought he was mad too. He almost steeled himself, despite what he had seen of evictions and distress to take the rest of his profit—some thirty thousand pounds—back over the water. God knows he needed it. But Lord George Bentinck's bill had failed, and Trevelyan had substituted a much stricter government measure offering limited aid only to companies that had managed to call up half their capital. And with the famine and epidemics and disorders of the last few years—especially the disorders—such capital was not easily found. In the end, against his better judgement, he put the remaining profit into Irish railway stock, knowing there was scant chance of any dividend.

  One way and another he was coming to hold a fair bit of railway stock, especially in foreign lines. He was, in 1848-49, building over five hundred miles of line in France, Spain, Italy, Bavaria, and Austria. When he looked at his diary for that period, he found that of 380 days, he had spent 274 overseas.

  European lines were, he soon learned, built on very different commercial principles from those in England. England was a sink-or-swim country. If you saw a chance, you took your capital and your courage in both hands and leaped at it. If you failed, no one in government would throw you a lifeline—the very idea would have horrified them. And if you succeeded and the profits were vast, no one in government felt obliged to trim them—that was the other side of the same coin. But these foreign capitalists wanted someone to guarantee success before they put down any real money; and if it also meant that their profit would be deliberately limited, they didn't mind. They were happy to live in a cosy little cartel of capital and bureaucracy. Small wonder that it was English money (nearly nine million in

  1847 and '48) and English engineers and English contractors who were taking on most of the important foreign work. All those foreign countries had words that meant "enterprise" and "risk" and "self-reliance" but very little use for them.

  One result of this was that companies looked to governments for part of their capital, often for most of it. And governments generally were not willing to part with a penny until the line was opened. So the companies had nothing but their own stock to make payments with. Stevenson's went into the year 1849 owning a nominal million and a half pounds' worth of foreign railway stock whose actual cash value, if sold immediately, was no higher than twenty-five thousand—on which the banks were prepared to lend only fifteen. To earn that stock, the firm had put in over a year's work; its actual negotiable value would not pay a weeks wages. It was no way to stay in business.

  So when John came home with the Dresden–Prague line among his trophies— sixty miles at six hundred and eighty thousand pounds, to be paid in stock—his welcome from Nora was not the warmest.

  "It must be the last of these contracts for a long time, love," she told him after she had spent a fraught afternoon on the firm's accounts.

  But he was still cock-a-whoop. "Come on, sweet—the commercial crisis is over. There must be the money out there somewhere. You've just got to work harder to find it."

  She hid her exasperation. "The commercial crisis is not over. The bankruptcies may have stopped but that's all. Trade is terrible. Everyone's just pulling in their horns and sitting it out."

  "That's good, surely! It leaves the field to us. Look—I can build this line for four hundred and eighty thousand. So there's two hundred thousand clear to us in a year's time. That's over forty per cent profit. Now where can we find profits like that in England these days? We can't anymore."

  She still kept her temper. There was no sense in antagonizing him; he had to understand the difficulties. He had to stop working on credit.

  "You can't get profits like that here because there's no money to pay them. Railway investment has dried up—and you can't blame folk for that when you remember how they got burned. Meanwhile, railway income has followed trade down into the pit. But at least you can still get paid in cash here."

  "Piddling little lines!" he sneered. "Ah, but you should see the Dresden–Prague!"

  "Go back, John! Go back and tell them you'll build it for half a million in cash, instead of this worthless stock."

  He really thought she had lost her reason. "What?" He laughed. "Settle for four per cent when I can get forty?"

  "You'd do more good for Stevenson's, I promise," she insisted.

  "Go on! Ye've lost your sense of adventure. No—there's good pickings in Europe. The best. We'll end up worth millions."

  She closed her eyes and sighed. What more could she say
? How could she put it even more clearly? Explanation seemed of no use. Simply state the fact, then: "One more such contract and you will break the firm," she said.

  "Ah!" He dismissed her pessimism with a wave of his hand. "You and Chambers will find the money. Chambers will, anyway. He'd never let us go down. It's not just our business he'd lose. Hudson would withdraw his patronage too."

  "If by this time next year, Hudson has enough patronage left to move a single coal wagon one yard over any English metal, I'll boil and eat my best riding boots!" When he stared at her, not knowing how to express his disbelief, she added, "Hudson hasn't yet realized that this railway age is not the one he grew up in. And nor have you. He'll fall all right. And so will you unless you wake up and face facts. No one is too big."

  But it sobered him only slightly.

  Early in 1849, he was sobered properly when Edmund Denison, chairman of the Great Northern, took a leaf out of the foreigners books and said they would have to pay partly in stock rather than cash for the work Stevenson's was doing. He was only the first of several. It was just as Nora had forecast two years earlier, but she had not foreseen that it would be so sudden or so universal.