George Stephenson (2 page)

But the railway system, despite everything, is as strong and popular as ever, politically and economically seen as vitally important to the nation, if a bit slimmer than it used to be. We now have the Channel Tunnel and Eurostar, whisking us from London to Paris in 2½ hours, which even old George Stephenson could never have envisaged. Billions if not trillions have gone into the new railway terminus at St Pancras, which will open up Europe to even more millions who prefer the train to take the strain.

Steam is still with us, though in a period, folksy form. The moment steam began to disappear from the network, some fifty years ago, it became an art form. Today, the various railway preservation lines carry a total of nine million passengers a year. And steam itself might come back as engineers are working on something called a 5AT, a steam locomotive which looks a bit like those Stephenson built locos, but without the grime and smoke, more economical and environmentally friendly, yet capable of 200 kph.

These locos might never get built, steaming no further than the drawing board, but it's pretty clear that railways are here to stay. The end of the line is not yet nigh. What George Stephenson created is still running. So, I am absolutely thrilled this book is back in print. I hope it will help a new generation to learn something about he did it.

Perhaps I exaggerated when I suggested he might have been forgotten. In 2004, a life size statue of him, holding a miniature Locomotion No 1, was erected in Chesterfield, where he died, outside the railway station.

Even more exciting, from 1990 till 2003, we all had the pleasure of looking at his face every day, passing his image over the counters, carrying his name in our wallets. Thank you Bank of England for honouring him on your £5 notes. Now, once again, you can read about the man behind the name.

Hunter Davies,
London,
2004

1

E
ARLY
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EARS

G
eorge Stephenson was born in the village of Wylam, about nine miles west of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, on 9 June 1781. It was not a particularly great year for Britain. At home, Lord North's Tory government was about to fall, after twelve years of power. Abroad, there was trouble in India, in the West Indies and in North America. It was in 1781 that Cornwallis, the British general, surrendered at Yorktown and American Independence was assured. George III refused to believe that the United States could ever survive, and fully expected them to come begging to be allowed back in the Empire, but he soon had other things on his mind, like getting out of his carriage in Windsor Great Park and addressing an oak tree as the King of Prussia.

Up in Wylam, Britain's foreign affairs were not a matter of great concern to the villagers, though they would doubtless have enjoyed any gossip about the king going mad, but that was being kept from them for as long as possible. Up in Wylam, life revolved round the pit.

Taking coals from Newcastle had been going on for centuries, since Shakespeare's day, but the industrial revolution, now well under way, had greatly increased the demand for coal and the means of providing it. James Watt was still busily improving the simple steam pumping machines, which Newcomen had invented earlier in the century, and these new machines were being installed in all the latest pits. With a steam pump, working at the coal face, you could pump out water and increase the length of the field. With a steam winding machine, set up at the top of the shaft, you could haul more men, materials and coal and greatly increase the depth. Tyneside coal was not only responsible for heating and powering Tyneside but the endless coal boats, sailing from the mouth of the Tyne down the east coast, were providing the heat and power for London, now a city with a population of almost a million.

Despite the national importance of coal, the colliers were amongst the most deprived of the deprived labouring classes, amongst the last to be enfranchised, the last to be freed from the bonds by which the colliery owners had complete control over their work and their lives. There was admittedly plenty of work, compared with some parts of the country, but an aging collier could easily be displaced, as thousands of agricultural labourers flocked into the new industrial areas. The relief was fortnightly, on pay nights, when according to Smiles, Tyneside experienced a saturnalia of ‘cock fighting, dog fighting, hard drinking and cuddy races'.

Robert Stephenson, George's father, was working at Wylam colliery on one of the primitive steam pumping machines. He was officially classed as a fireman, which meant he shovelled on the coals, while the plugman was the man in charge. His wage was twelve shillings a week. There was a tradition in the family that originally the Stephensons had come across the border from Scotland, but no one knew for sure. His wife Mabel was a local girl, daughter of a dyer. Like her husband she could neither read nor write and signed her name with an X in the marriage register. They were both of slender build. Robert was described as all skin and bone and his wife as rather delicate. From all accounts, George, the second of their six children (two girls and four boys) was a throwback to earlier generations, being big, strong and healthy.

Wylam today is a pretty, residential village on the banks of the Tyne. It has been cleaned up, the slag heaps levelled and must now look very much as it did before the Stephensons and the other mining families came to live there. In their day, and for the next one hundred years or so, it was one filthy, industrial slag heap. This transplanting of industry onto a rural scene was very much a characteristic of the early days of the industrial revolution. The advent of industrialisation left the towns virtually untouched but the surrounding villages were ruined, turning into slums almost overnight. Most of the industrial workers had rural origins – in fact out of a population of just under ten million at the turn of the century, well over half were still employed in agriculture.

The feudal traditions continued in these new industrial communities. The mine and the mill took over from the castle as the centre of power, and the worker was dependent on the master for his cottage, his pub, his chapel, his shop, and of course his job. When a mine was worked out, or it became impossible to exploit it further, the masters would look for a new mine, or winning as it was called, and the whole force would have to up and go. This happened several times to Robert Stephenson and his young family, though for the first eight years of George's life they remained at Wylam.

None of the children went to school. The family was too poor. As one of the older children, George had to help from an early age with the younger ones, making sure they didn't stray on to the wooden train way which went past their front door. His first paid job was at eight when an old widow gave him tuppence a day to keep her cows off the line. Horses pulled the coal wagons along these wooden rails from the pit to the riverside staiths, or loading stations. From there they went into keels, or coal barges, down the Tyne and then into the seagoing coal boats for London. As his father moved around the area, George got various jobs at the different pits. He started about the age of ten driving one of the horses for tuppence a day, becoming a picker at sixpence a day – picking stones and dross out of the coal – until the age of fourteen, when he was employed no longer as a boy worker but as an adult, becoming assistant fireman to his father on one shilling a day.

He had set his heart on working on a pumping engine with his father and there are numerous stories about the hours he spent as a boy making scale models in clay of his father's engine and of the other engines he had seen at work in the collieries. From his father he developed a great love for the countryside. It was very easy to get quickly out of the colliery into open unspoiled fields and woods. But you had to be careful. Disturbing game, let alone trying to capture any, was an offence which could result in transportation, if not hanging. There were 220 offences for which the death penalty could be imposed, ranging from sheep stealing and pickpocketing to murder. (It was only in 1808 that pickpocketing goods to the value of one shilling or more ceased to be a capital offence.) The landed gentry clung to their estates and their privileges, making life for the poor very harsh, terrified that the workers would be influenced by the revolution which had begun in France.

George was eight when it began and he grew up whilst England was at war with revolutionary France and then Napoleon. He and his three brothers were now at work full time in the mine with their father, and bringing home their extra incomes, but they were well aware of the effects of the war. The price of wheat shot up and corn riots were frequent. In his biography of Stephenson, Samuel Smiles relates that by 1800 the price of wheat had become 130 shillings a quarter whereas in 1795 it had only been fifty-four shillings.

George spent all his spare time working on the engine, even though he was only the assistant fireman, taking it to pieces after his work was over and putting it together again. The pit where he and his father both worked soon failed and around sixteen George went to a different pit on his own, as a fireman in his own right. When he was seventeen, George met up with his father once again at a new winning at Newburn – this time with George as plugman.

George's eagerness to learn was not limited to the pumping machines he worked on but extended to all of the machinery in the mine. At the age of seventeen he had already got further than his father had done in a lifetime, but he was not content to be simply a plugman, even though he was now in charge of the pump and his father. (When the water level went down in the pit and the suction stopped, it was the plugman's job to go to the bottom of the shaft, plug the pipe and get the suction I started again.) He was constantly being called to mend other machines, such as the winding engine which controlled the cage up and down the shaft, a job considered much more important and difficult than manning a pump. He managed to persuade a friend to let him have a go at being the brakesman, the man in charge of the winding machine, so called because the most difficult part was stopping the machine at the exact time. The established brakesmen were annoyed and one of them went so far as to stop the working of the pit, saying that not only was young George untrained, he couldn't do the job properly and would break his own arms stopping the machine and bump all the men in the cage. But George, our hero, managed to persuade the viewer of the pit, as the manager was called, that he could do the job properly. Soon afterwards he was promoted to being a fully fledged brakesman.

At Black Callerton, the colliery where in 1801 he was made a brakesman, there was a pitman called Ned Nelson who complained about the way that George, as brakesman, drew him out of the pit. He challenged George to a fight after work and George agreed. From an early age, he had been proud of his strength, wrestling with village boys, but no one thought that he would have a chance against the much older and tougher Ned Nelson. George hammered him. Another triumph.

It is to Samuel Smiles' biography, which appeared in 1857, that we are indebted for these touching early stories of George as a pit boy growing up. Every anecdote finishes with a long homily about George's virtues, such as bravery and fortitude. Smiles went back to the pit villages in the 1850s and picked up these stories from old miners, still working away, and set great store by them in his biography. There is no doubt about George's great ingenuity and aptitude as an engineman, but reading between the lines his character could be interpreted in different ways from the same stories. We have to take Smiles' word for it that Ned Nelson was ‘a roystering bully, the terror of the village', but from the way George was going around doing other people's jobs, telling them how he could do it better, he must have struck many older pitmen as a real know-all, too cocky by half. Even though he was certainly clever at repairing engines, a certain humility might have been more suited to his years.

Until the age of eighteen he was completely illiterate. He was a grown man, earning around £1 a week, the top pay in the colliery for an untrained mechanic, but he realised that he could never improve further, least of all call himself a skilled mechanic, unless he could read and write. It wasn't that he wanted to be up to date with Miss Austen's amusing novels, Sir Walter Scott's romantic epics, or Wordsworth's lovely poems that the gentry were currently enthusing over; he realised the simple fact that there was an easier way of discovering the principles of engines than taking them to pieces. People like Nicholas Wood, a young viewer who was soon taking a great interest in his work, pointed out that it was all written down in the books, Wood was a properly qualified engineer, in other words his middle-class parents had been able to pay not just for his schooling but for his apprenticeship to an established colliery engineer, the men who designed and built the engines, leaving them to the likes of George Stephenson to run.

George began night classes with a man in the nearby village of Walbottle, going three nights a week at a cost of threepence a week, practising his pot hooks on a slate in spare moments at work. A local farmer gave him extra coaching and by the age of nineteen, much to his pride, he could write his own name. Sums came easier than writing. He hired boys to rush back and forward with his slate full of homework to have it corrected. By about the age of twenty or twenty-one, he understood the simple elements of reading and writing. They never came easily to him. Even from the earliest days he paid or persuaded other people to write letters for him and read to him from books. Many letters and documents belonging to George Stephenson have come to light since Smiles' day, and still more are being found, but it is rare for them to be in George's own hand.

Having become an engine mechanic and desperately if belatedly trying to become educated, he now managed to find some time for courting. His first recorded girl friend was Elizabeth Hindmarsh, the daughter of the largest farmer in the Black Callerton parish. He met her secretly in her father's orchard and she seems to have had a fancy for him, but the family would have none of it. They had no intention of allowing their daughter to marry a poor, uneducated pitman, even if he was trying to better himself; and they certainly were not going to let him better himself at their daughter's expense. She was being prepared for a much smarter catch. The romance was forcibly broken off by the Hindmarsh family, to the disappointment of Elizabeth herself. She declared she would never marry anyone else – and she didn't.