George Stephenson (13 page)

While they were pressing on with the construction of the railway line, for which they had been given permission by their act of parliament, they were at the same time applying for an amended bill to allow them to make some changes suggested in Stephenson's survey. Most of all, they wanted the act changed to allow them to use locomotives. The first act had made no mention of any sort of engine, referring only to wagons being drawn by ‘men or horses'. Pease and Richardson had been suitably impressed by George's work at Killingworth, where he'd demonstrated his locomotives, and by now the Hetton locomotives were successfully working for all to see. The board were therefore persuaded to ask this time for power to use ‘locomotives or movable engines'.

George went down to London with Francis Mewburn, the solicitor, and other officials to see the act through and was there for eight weeks, gaining his first experience of parliamentary lobbying. According to Mewburn, they had some trouble explaining to people the nature of a ‘locomotive'. ‘Lord Shaftesbury's secretary could not comprehend what it meant; he thought it was some strange, unheard of animal and he struck the clause out of his copy of the Act.' Mr Brandling, the MP for Northumberland, and George were sent to explain what a locomotive was.

George never had a high opinion of the aristocracy and definitely didn't think much of Lord Shaftesbury even though he was a highly important person and chairman of many committees in the House of Lords. Mewburn later wrote to him in Darlington when it looked as if he might have to come back to London once again and George's reply is rather tart and to the point – one of the few letters where George's personality shines, or perhaps glowers, through.

Your letter by this day post has cut me most sadly. How to set off to London at short notice I do not know as I am hemmed in with so much business and indeed I am not in a state of health for such a journey however I suppose I must go. Lord Shaftesbury must be an old fool. I always said he had been a spoilt child but he is a great deal worse than I expected. I have not seen Mr Edward Pase nor yet Joseph and I suppose I shall not see them till tomorrow night. If you get this in time to give me a line back by the same coach saying whether there is any possibility of postponing my journey I will have some one at the Coach office at night to receive it from the guard.

Apart from the revealing remarks about Lord Shaftesbury (father of the factory reformer) it is interesting to note how a high-powered engineer of the day managed to speed up the postal system.

Lord Shaftesbury's ignorance in the end didn't matter. Their new act became law on 23 May 1823, making the Stockton and Darlington Railway the first public railway in the world able to employ locomotives. The unheard of animal was about to become known.

6

T
HE
O
PENING

R
ailways, as the public know them, began with the Stockton and Darlington Railway, but railway historians get very cross unless you define your terms exactly. All ‘firsts' in connection with railways have to be very carefully worded.

There were railway acts before the Stockton and Darlington Railway got its railway act, but they referred to railways in their strict, literal sense, meaning a way laid out with rails. No mention was ever made of locomotives because, as Lord Shaftesbury's secretary well knew, it was horses who provided the pulling power.

Strictly speaking, you can't call the Stockton and Darlington the first public railway because the Surrey Iron Railway, opened in 1803, has that honour. It was a railway and was open to the public, but it was with horses pulling the wagons. You can't even say that the Stockton and Darlington was the first steam railway. George had been using steam on rails at Killingworth and at Hetton long before the Darlington opening. It takes quite a mouthful to give the Stockton and Darlington its true and correct niche in history. You must include the three vital elements. It was a railway. It was public. It was going to use steam locomotives.

After the act had been passed allowing locomotives, they had to decide who was going to make them. The company kept everything above board by looking around at the market, even though their engineer appeared to be the only person building locomotives. The Leeds manufacturers of the Blenkinsop locomotive, the ones with cogged wheels, were approached but were unable to help, replying that they hadn't made any locomotive engines for eight years.

In June 1823 the two Stephensons, Edward Pease and Michael Longridge (whose works were making the malleable rails) decided to open their own locomotive works. Once again, Stephenson and Pease between them had shown their faith in the future of steam locomotion. They were later accused of having carved up the locomotive business, establishing their own monopoly, but the truth was that they had no alternative. The history of the first hundred years of this firm was published in 1923 by J.G.H. Warren and it shows clearly that most of the money was put up by Pease. The initial capital was £4,000 with Pease putting up £1,600 and the other three £800 each. It later came out that Pease had loaned young Robert £500 towards his share.

George knew that his engines were good, even though he had only been making them on a small scale at his colliery workshops, but it shows great faith on the part of Edward Pease to have put up so much money. He had no technical understanding of the machines, his railway had yet to open and there was still a majority of engineers convinced that locomotives would never work. Perhaps the most surprising thing about their brave new locomotive works was that they were to be called Robert Stephenson and Company. Robert, George's nineteen-year-old son, was appointed managing partner. We might suspect such an arrangement today, looking for some tax device, believing that an inexperienced lad of nineteen must be a front. His father, as engineer of the railway company, perhaps didn't want to be seen ordering engines from himself. The very fact that Pease was a Quaker is enough to put a stop to any cynicism. And yet, were they all absolutely convinced that a slip of a boy could run such a firm? Or was perhaps old George pushing them a bit?

Robert had certainly had a lot more experience than his age might suggest. He'd assisted in two railway surveys, at Darlington and at Liverpool, and after his father had called him back from helping William James he'd been sent for six months to Edinburgh university where he'd been studying natural philosophy, chemistry and natural history. He was coming almost straight from the academic world of Edinburgh to the practical job of setting up a factory and turning out locomotives, but there is not the slightest suggestion of any of the partners thinking he was perhaps a bit young for such a job. We know their confidence was not misplaced from Robert's subsequent career but it was a brave gesture all the same.

A site was bought at Forth Street in Newcastle, men were hired and the Stockton and Darlington Company ordered two locomotives at a cost of £500 each,
Locomotion
and
Hope
. George and his wife moved from their cottage home at Killingworth into Newcastle to Eldon Street to be near the works and keep an eye on progress. Though Robert was in charge of the works George was providing the plans for the new engines as well as pushing on with the completion of the railway itself.

During 1824 progress was slowed down by bad weather, by several cuttings and gradients being more difficult than expected and by a few little local legal problems. Two gentlemen who were trustees of the road between Stockton and Darlington objected to the way in which the railway was going to cross their road. They issued a summons against some of the company's workmen for trespassing. The workmen were fined forty shillings each by the magistrates – who turned out to be the same two gentlemen who'd objected.

The legal case which kept County Durham agog for quite some time was the one brought by a Mr Rowntree, a shareholder of the company, who refused to accept the price offered for his land. It was only just over an acre, and eight independent land surveyors put its value at between £200 and £320. He wanted £700. The case went to the sessions in Durham and lasted seven hours during which his counsel argued that the ‘locomotives, or as they had been called, infernal machines, would go so near to Mr Rowntree's house as to render the premises useless'. The judge awarded him £500.

The anti-locomotive lobby were filling the newspapers, and the courts, with scare stories about the highly dangerous speeds of the locomotives, alleging they would go at ten or even twelve miles an hour, which the Company denied. Even Nicholas Wood, that great railway advocate, scolded the speculators who were talking of twelve miles an hour calling it ‘ridiculous expectation'. Mr Lambton (later the Earl of Durham) admitted that the railway would not be seen even from the highest point of his house ‘but that the noise would be heard in every room of it'. Lord George Cavendish wrote that he would ‘not have the country harassed and torn up by these infernal machines'. Lord Eldon wrote, ‘As to railways, and all the other schemes which speculation, running wild, is introducing, I think Englishmen who were wont to be sober, are grown mad.'

The protest was being raised in many counties, not just in County Durham, because for the first time there was a genuine wave of national interest in locomotives. Now that the Stockton–Darlington line was nearing completion deputations – such as Lord Dudley's – were catching the coach up to the north east to find out what all the fuss was about. Promoters who'd been planning a horsedrawn line were being forced at least to consider locomotion. The Liverpool–Manchester promoters sent across a party to look at Stephenson's infernal machines and so did groups from Birmingham, Sheffield and Gloucester. One of the reasons why progress was relatively slow in 1824 was that the company's engineer was suddenly being besieged by offers from elsewhere. George brought in Timothy Hackworth from Wylam, who had also been doing pioneer work on locomotives, to help at Forth Street and then to be locomotive superintendent for the Darlington company. Many of the railway projects being discussed never came to anything, or at least they decided to wait and see what happened at Darlington, but it meant a great deal of travelling and discussions for George, who could never resist any railway venture.

George made constant trips to Birmingham, Liverpool and elsewhere, looking at proposed lines, and also went further afield on behalf of Robert Stephenson and Company seeking possible buyers for their locomotives. In late 1823 he went with Robert to London and Bristol to sell their boilers and stationary locomotives. They then crossed to Dublin, going by road to Cork. Robert was pleased to see new parts of the country but for George, with so many projects on his plate, it was extremely time consuming. He managed to write a few letters back to Michael Longridge at the Forth Street works, all very hurried, dashed off to catch the coach, all of which show his hectic life:

Swann Inn, Birmingham, 8 August 1824

I shall leave this place tomorrow for Newport, where I may be a couple of days. From thence I will go to Stourbridge where I will remain also two days: from the latter place to Newcastle under Lyne where I may spend the remainder of the week. I will endeavour to be at Liverpool on the Sunday where letters will find me, I have an invitation from Boulton and Watt to dine with them today.

As a piece of name dropping his last remark couldn't have been smarter. By this date both James Watt and Matthew Boulton had died, but their Birmingham engineering works were still the most famous in the land.

In a letter from Liverpool on 11 July 1824, George gives an example of the problems of contemporary travelling.

I expected to have set off with the mail this night but was detained by my horse breaking down on the road in passing from the Birmingham line to this quarter. This disaster put me too late for the Mail. The poor horse's knees were broken in such a desperate manner that I did not know how to venture home with him. I had a fine kick up with the inn-keeper when I did get home. The only apology I could make was by proposing to buy the horse at its value.

Stephenson had by this time been commissioned to do some work for the Liverpool line and was spending more and more of his time travelling, but he was desperate to get the Darlington line finished and opened and let the whole world see what he could do.

Given the nature of the times, it is surprising to realise how much of the world had already been to see Stephenson at work. A notable American visitor, William Strickland, was in England in early 1825 on a fact-finding mission on canals and railways sent by the ‘Pennsylvania Society for the Promotion of Internal Improvement', a very fine sounding body indeed. He watched Stephenson's locomotives at Hetton and noted how Stephenson recommended the use of six wheels not four to distribute the weight better. He watched very carefully, notebook in hand, as the Darlington rails were being fixed, jotting down details of the workmen's tools, all of which he later published in his report.

This was the first American visitor to look at English railways as far as can be gathered, but French, German and Russian visitors have already been mentioned. Newspapers at the time were writing very little about locomotives so it must point to the wide circulation of the technical magazines and pamphlets which were now being brought out.

Despite all the attention, Pease was finding it necessary once again to call up more money to complete the line on time. The books show that they were running up considerable debts, such as £9,342 to the treasurer (Jonathan Backhouse) who had personally paid off some troublesome landowner. Several promoters were worried that they might not now get their 5 per cent which Pease had promised. Pease was continually issuing announcements to keep everyone happy. ‘No circumstances have arisen to induce the board to alter their opinion of the great public benefit to be derived by all classes of the community from this undertaking and that a fair and reasonable return will be made to the proprietors for the capital invested.'