Cochrane (3 page)

However great their distaste for English public life, the decline of the family estates left the Cochranes with little choice but to seek their fortunes through it. As patterns for the young Lord Cochrane's future, his childhood world was haunted by the dim and often downright shady figures of his paternal uncles. Uncle Charles, of course, had died for King and Country at Yorktown, but his surviving brothers were energetically involved in different public pursuits.

The Honourable Basil Cochrane had chosen the service of the East India Company, where his nephew might one day make money in considerable quantities. Unhappily, when the boy was eight years old, news reached Culross of a great misfortune in Uncle Basil's life. In his zeal for justice, he had been so unfortunate as to flog two Indians to death, or so it was alleged. They had been guilty of falsifying the account books at Negapatam, where Basil Cochrane was in charge of John Company's affairs.
The keeper of accounts, Vydena
dah, refused to produce the books so Basil Cochrane had him tied to the balustrade and flogged by a team of sepoys to persuade him of his error.
⁶

Of the two "murdered" Indians, one Ramah Naig, was found to be alive and well. But Vydenadah had certainly died several days after the beating, from whatever causes. The East India Company in Madras was obliged to hold an inquiry. The next year,
1786,
the Court of Directors in London read the report and dismissed Basil Cochrane from their service. They would have preferred to see him removed from India altogether but he remained as a merchant, victualling the ships of the Royal Navy at Madras on the basis of a one per cent commission. He knew too much about the secrets of the East India trade for the directors to risk public warfare with him. He was ready to tell the world, for example, the story of "condemned provisions". These cases of rotten food were put ashore from ships and written off. They were then resold to other ships, as fresh supplies, and in due course put ashore somewhere else. Dumped and sold repeatedly, the putrifying cargoes sailed the Indian Ocean "at the expense of the public".
⁷

The East India directors made their peace with Basil Cochrane, who spent the next forty years screwing every last penny from the Victualling Board of the Admiralty, on whose behalf he operated. Once, at least, they thought they had the measure of him, reckoning that he owed them over
£9000.
They should have known better. There was a ten-year dogfight in the Court of Exchequer, in Parliament, where Cochrane presented petitions against them, and in the press. When it was over, the Victualling Board had not seen a penny of their money and found themselves, by the vagaries of Exchequer, con
demned to pay Cochrane almost £1
ooo.
⁸
It was unlikely that the East India Company would receive Basil Cochrane's nephew with much enthusiasm.

A more hopeful avenue was opened by the career of a more distinguished uncle who was to win 'high naval honours, Alexander Cochrane, then a captain in the Royal Navy. The
9th
Earl of Dun
donald disliked the navy, having tried it for a short while himself, so Uncle Alexander acted independently. He had fought with distinction under Admiral Lord Rodney and his influence was sufficient to allow him to enter little Thomas Cochrane's name, as midshipman, on the books of four Royal Navy ships: the
Vesuvius,
the
Caroline, La Sophie,
and the
Hind.
Of course, it was not intended that the child should go to sea at an unreasonably tender age. Uncle Alexander was merely ensuring that if his nephew was allowed to choose the navy, then his seniority as a midshipman would date from the time his name was entered on the ships' books.

Apart from such figures as Basil and Alexander, the six Cochrane uncles contained one man who was the "black sheep" of the family in the grand manner. As a scoundrel and a fraud, Colonel Andrew Cochrane-Johnstone, as he called himself, was to play the most important role in his nephew's life. He was a profiteer and slave-trader who had entered the army and risen to the rank of colonel by
1797.
Then he was appointed Governor of Domenica, a post which he reasonably regarded as carrying a licence to pilfer and embezzle to his heart's content. As for his slave-trading interests, the government could not have been more helpful. The
8th
West India regiment was put under his command and he quickly set them to work for his private use, building a fine estate to house the harem of girls whom he collected as a hobby. He seemed the archetype of the Victorian "bounder" or "cad". As he watched the parade of slave women with a connoisseur's eye, or observed the flogging of a recalcitrant subject, it might seem that this easy existence could not last. For this contingency, he had a well-laid plan. When, in
1803,
the great investigation began, the acts of embezzlement and misappropriation had been so arranged that they all appeared as the work of his subordinate, Major Gordon.

The court-martial, however, was a match for Cochrane-Johnstone. Its members heard the evidence, acquitted John Gordon, and indicted the ex-Governor of Domenica himself. Still he eluded their vengeance. As time went by and the law delayed, it grew more difficult to prove the case. To the disgust of George III, the prosecution failed. Yet in the general brevet promotion of army officers in
1803,
Cochrane-Johnstone was passed over. Indeed, he was made to resign his commission. He wrote to the Prince of Wales saying that he had heard his resignation was to be cancelled and that he was to be made a major-general. A cold official reply informed him that if he had heard anything of the kind, he was sadly in error. Cruelly misjudged, he sat in the comfort of his Harley Street house, describing himself, moist-eyed, to all who would listen as "an innocent man, who had devoted his life and fortune to the service of his King and Country". In order to be immune from arrest for debt and to turn unreservedly to "speculation", he bought the parliamentary seat of Grampound. The constituency was so notoriously corrupt that even an anti-reform House of Commons made an exception and abolished it a decade before
1832.
When the authorities chose to topple Thomas Cochrane from a hero's pinnacle, the rogue uncle was a handy instrument.
⁹

The
9th
Earl himself exercised the most direct influence over his son's development. Quick-tempered, anxious, unpredictable, he was crotchety with good reason, tight-fisted because he had nothing to give. He harped querulously on the "res angusta domi", that convenient Latin tag conditioning his family to frugality and parsimony. In politics he was a Whig, approving progress and emancipation at a future date which seemed to recede infinitely. When he ventured out of Culross, to visit Edinburgh or London, he returned complaining tetchily, "This is an age of sentiment, novels, and overstrained refinement." He despised those who tried to sail "with the tide of the
popular".
While disliking political oppression, he deeply suspected men like William Wilberf orce whom he saw parading their "misguided phrenzy or opinion, making a bustle about Slave Trade,
Freedom,
and emancipation of Negroes, while they will turn their eyes from scenes of domestic and national misery". In fact the young Wilberforce's evangelical enthusiasm embraced the suppression of Sabbath-breaking, drunkenness, and indecent literature at home, as well as slavery overseas. To the Earl, he seemed just the type to become the dupe of violent revolutionaries. "He surely does not foresee the consequence of
ill-timed
alterations."
¹⁰

Even before the death of his young wife, the Earl himself turned away from politics to the immediate question of the "res angusta domi". It was both a corroding anxiety and, at the same time, the spur to achievement. He vowed to redeem the family fortunes, perhaps to hand on to the young Lord Cochrane a flourishing estate whose wealth would be greater and more enduring than that of his ancestors who had built Culross. The new fortunes of the Cochranes would not lie in war, nor in the corrupt ministerial favouritism of Westminster and the "places" found for political sycophants. The riches would be those of the new age which was dawning in Europe, the wealth
of reason and the rewards of enli
ghtenment. The
9th
Earl of Dundonald would be remembered as a great scientist, inventor and manufacturer of his day.

It was less absurd than it might seem. As a young man, the Earl had spent a short while in the navy. During this period, he had noticed the ravages of worms on the bottoms of ships, where they ate into the structure of the hull. The replacement of so much rotten timber was a considerable drain on the resources of the Admiralty. A few ships were "hobnailed", the bottoms covered with large-headed iron nails, but this was far too expensive a method to be undertaken often. The
9th
Earl, pondering this problem, thought of the coal on the Culross estate. It was only mined in a small way, the Earl's philanthropic principles forbidding the use of colliers' wives and daughters as "beasts of burthen" in hauling the coal to the surface. He had undertaken some simple experiments of his own with coal, in a kiln. When it was "reduced" to coke, a thick black substance was given off, known as coal tar. The coke was readily bought by the new ironworks. But might not the coal tar be refined in such a way that it could be used to coat the hulls of ships ?
^u

When his son and heir was six years old, the Earl turned almost exclusively to the pursuit of his scientific dream, being granted a patent for his "coal tar". In the following year,
1782,
he pacified his creditors with promises of future riches and set up "The British Tar Company" at Culross. He was not alone in the venture. Matthew Boulton, who had successfully marketed James Watt's steam-engine was a family friend. Joseph Black, "the father of modern chemistry" and Professor of Chemistry at Edinburgh, was a friend and enthusiast. Sir John Dalrymple, a parliamentary lawyer, surveyed the company's financial obligations and reported favourably to the Earl's creditors. By
1783
there were four furnaces at Culross, processing twenty-eight tons of coal a week. The Earl was delighted and thought only of expanding the project. Adam Smith as well as Black and Dalrymple became an admirer of the new process. Now was the time to raise vast sums of capital and the Earl wrote hopefully to his uncle Andrew Stuart urging him to invest at such a propitious moment. "We are encouraged to proceed in establishing the manufacture upon a very large scale in different parts of Great Britain . . . but a capital of thirty to forty thousand pounds will in the course of a few years need to be expended." Such an outlay was staggering, it was far more than all the accumulated debts of all the Cochranes in history.
£22,400
was invested with a promise of an annual clear profit of £5ooo.
¹²

The delighted Earl was within reach of his ambition. He had, after all, achieved an easy and cheap answer to the problems of worm-eaten vessels. Dalrymple hardly exaggerated when he claimed that "from a Naval Nation Lord Dundonald deserves a Statue of Gold". The Earl travelled to Birmingham, taking young Thomas Cochrane with him, and talked to the great James Watt of this and other inventions which had either been proposed or were thought desirable. Young Lord Cochrane remembered how they discussed the problem of finding some source of lighting for the streets of towns and cities. The man who could invent and patent such a process was assured of wealth and honours. The solution seemed far away. On the Culross estate the Earl was preoccupied with the distilling of coal tar and had no leisure to consider other men's problems. He was concerned over the vapour which was given off in the process, since it was inflammable and possibly injurious. Near the house itself, he had an experimental kiln which he decided to adapt in order to get rid of the unwanted fumes. In darkness, he fitted a gun barrel to the outlet pipe, carrying the vapour to a safe height. Then, as the process of extracting coal tar began, he held a light to the muzzle. Three miles away, on the other shore of the Firth, the inhabitants stared in amazement as the dark waters and distant coast blazed with light. But the Earl's head was bent to examine the dark and glossy coal tar on which he had set all his hopes. Above him, the gas lighting, which he had invented without realising it, blazed unheeded. It was William Murdoch, an employee of James Watt who saw the possibility latent in the one invention which might have saved Cul-ross. He developed it and it was later patented by Frederic Winsor in
1804.
¹³

But the Earl still had his coal tar and, taking young Lord Cochrane with him once more, he set off for London. He was about to present his great discovery to the Admiralty and their ship-repairers. It was not too much to hope that wealth and honour would be his at last.

The Admiralty seemed disinclined at first to take any notice of the coal tar invention. But they relented and agreed to coat one side of a buoy at the Nore with the Earl's patent mixture. However, they insisted that it was to be done at the Earl's own expense, the Navy Board was not to be committed to any financial outlay. The inventor agreed and the buoy was prepared. He waited impatiently during the trial period and then went to receive the verdict of the Admiralty. Yes, the experiment had been a complete success, protecting the side of the buoy against the worm while the other side had rotted. No, the Admiralty was not interested in the invention.