George Stephenson (35 page)

The year 1848 was a year of disaster for England and Europe generally. There was a massive trade depression, the potato crop had failed in Ireland, cotton was short from America, the repeal of the corn laws had brought in cheap foreign corn which was bankrupting English farmers, banks were collapsing and shares were tumbling. In Europe, of course, it was the year of the revolutions. Hudson, and all the railway speculators, were being blamed for most of the ills of the home economy. He himself was seriously ill and, even worse, Lord George Bentinck, leader of the Conservatives, resigned, and with him went Hudson's chief parliamentary ally. Disraeli took over. Even though he had occasionally been a visitor to Albert Gate, he'd never cared for the uncouth Railway King.

Yet at the close of 1848 Hudson was, on paper, at the very height of his powers. There were in all 5,007 miles of railways in operation in the United Kingdom, no less than 1,450 of them being under the direct control of Hudson. His empire stretched on the east from Berwick through Cambridge to London, on the west it went to Maryport, in the Midlands it extended to Rugby and in the south west he had one line reaching Bristol. Hudson had by now created three of the greatest railway systems which were to dominate the nineteenth century – the North Eastern, the Midland and the Great Eastern. It was estimated that Hudson had spent a total of £30 million acquiring his 1,450 miles of railway. But now, at long last, he could find no fresh capital.

The exposure of Hudson began on a relatively harmless scale. Two London stockbrokers called Prance and Love, both of whom had lost a lot of money in the York and North Midland line, Hudson's first creation, went up to York and minutely went through the accounts. They found that the company had bought the shares of another company, the Great North of England, at a rate higher than they'd ever been on the stock exchange. At the shareholders meeting in York they revealed that £23 10
s
0
d
had been paid for shares which at no time had been worth more than £21. And the owner of these shares had been no other than their own chairman, Mr Hudson. Hudson made the mistake, a mistake no good con man should ever make, of admitting that it had happened, though he added hurriedly that it wasn't his fault, another director had done the actual buying. Now that it had been revealed, he promised to pay back the profits he had unfairly made. A few years earlier, in times of affluence when he was the nation's hero, he could have laughed it off, been forgiven for a minor slip. In financial terms he'd made £9,000, a relatively minor amount, but the principle of deceit had been established. The meeting broke up in turmoil, but not before Prance and Love had insisted on a committee of investigation. News of the York meeting soon spread to London and shareholders in every Hudson company started asking awkward questions and demanding committees of enquiry.

A meeting of the Eastern Counties shareholders turned out to be even more sensational than the York confrontation. The chairman of their investigation committee was a Quaker called Mr Cash who asked Hudson if he'd ever altered any figures in the annual accounts.

‘Well, I may perhaps have added a thousand or two to the next account,' said Hudson.

‘Didst thou ever add £10,000?'

‘I cannot exactly say what may have been the largest sum I carried to the following account.'

He was asked if he'd ever added a sum of £40,000. Mr Hudson said he wasn't sure. Later, when the full report of the investigative committee was published it was revealed that between 1845 and 1848 the company had paid out dividends of £545,715 even though the total sum earned had been only £225,142. And under the headings ‘Secret Service', which Hudson maintained meant payments for parliamentary service, sums ranging from £2,000 to £9,000 had gone without trace. If it had gone into his own pocket, that was embezzling. If it had gone on paying MPs, that was even worse.

From then on the flood gates were open and it became a Victorian witch hunt, with some melodrama from a B movie thrown in for effect. Hudson's brother-in-law, his front man on many deals, committed suicide by drowning.

The charge of bribing MPs became official and he was called before his fellow members in the House to explain his conduct. Hudson's stumbling speech of apology, saying he hadn't meant it, that it had all happened accidentally, was received in silence.

Further revelations from his railway companies showed that he'd paid £40,000 out of the Newcastle and Berwick's account into his own bank, paying himself for land he didn't own. When the lists of his many cases of embezzlement were finally totted up it came to £598,785. That was the sum which was provable.

The Times
didn't rejoice in its own righteousness. Now that Hudson was down and out, they concentrated their attack on the system which had made Hudson.

It was a system without rules, without order, without even a definite morality. Mr Hudson, having a faculty for amalgamation, and being so successfull, found himself in the enjoyment of a great railway despotism, in which he had to do everything out of his own head and among lesser problems to discover the ethics of railway speculation and management. Mr Hudson's position was not only new to himself but absolutely a new thing in the world altogether. We think the King and his subjects are much of a piece. If they deserve indulgence for their losses, he also must be excused for his difficulties.

But most Victorians were not as kind. Thomas Carlyle called Hudson in his
Latter Day Pamphlets
a ‘gambler swollen big' and Macaulay in 1849 described him as a ‘bloated, vulgar, insolent, purse proud, greedy, drunken blackguard'.

His home town of York, which he'd worked so hard and so successfully to put on the map, almost immediately turned against him. His name was erased from the Aldermanic Roll and Hudson Street, which had been named after him by a grateful populace, was hurriedly changed to Railway Street.

The whole wrath of Victorian England was brought to bear upon George Hudson but it can at least be said in his favour that he never lied, not once the scandal was revealed. He admitted everything and sold up his northern estates and his London house (which was bought by the French ambassador) to pay as many of his debtors as he could. He was laughed at and jeered, but he carried on till he was forced to flee to Paris, leaving his wife in lodgings, to escape his remaining debtors.

There is an interesting chance encounter in Paris which Dickens records in 1863. He noticed a familiar face by the quayside, ‘a shabby man of whom I had some remembrance but whom I could not get into his place in my mind'. It was only on the boat home that a friend told him the man was Hudson, looking for some friend to buy him a dinner. Dickens had remembered Hudson's face from the early days on the
Daily News
when Hudson had been one of the important backers.

In 1868, after twenty years of a pauper's existence in France, a north-eastern MP, deciding he'd suffered enough, opened a subscription for him. It raised £4,800, enough for an annuity of £600, and Hudson returned to England; he died in 1871, and was buried in his home village of Scrayingham, ten miles from York, where he lies to this day. The inscription on his gravestone, near the entrance to the churchyard, can just be read, but with some difficulty.

George Hudson was big and fat and ugly, a most unattractive figure with no charm and no social graces, with no apparent talent for anything except buying and selling railway companies. But he was never a drunk, despite what Macaulay had said, and he was faithful to his wife, as far as was known. Sex scandals at least didn't figure in his life. Most of all, when his fall came, though millions of shareholders, large and small, lost a great deal of money, he never dragged down any of his former associates, neither politicians who'd gained from him nor company officials who'd been his knowing stooges. This can't be said for many of our modern monsters.

In 1971, after over a hundred years in which York had tried guiltily to deny all knowledge of their notorious son, it was decided to change the name of Railway Street, once again, to Hudson Street. The ceremonial unveiling of the reinstated street name was carried out by Dr Coggan, now the Archbishop of Canterbury. At the same time, a pub called The Adelphi was rechristened The Railway King, again in Hudson's honour, all part of what was described at the opening as ‘the visual redemption of George Hudson'.

Hudson was the first in a long line of manipulators of the industrial system. Wheeling and dealing from scratch an empire worth £30 million must make him one of the biggest ever. Railways, when George Stephenson introduced them to the world, arrived with a bang and its villains arrived on an equally colossal scale. Meanwhile, our hero and only begetter had been perfectly content to watch the antics of King Hudson from a seat in the wings.

15

G
EORGE
S
TEPHENSON'S
L
AST
Y
EARS

G
eorge Stephenson took a rather stately seat in the country, a large, red brick Georgian mansion called Tapton House, near Chesterfield in Derbyshire. He moved into it in 1838 and there he spent the last ten years of his life, though it was only in his final three or four years that he led the life of a retired gentleman, tending the gardens, looking after his estate. Until then he was still rushing round Britain and Europe as a businessman and as a railway engineer, but retirement had obviously crossed his mind as early as 1837, judging by a letter to Michael Longridge.

I intend giving up business in the course of two or three years when I shall be able to devote more time to my Friends. I have had a most delightful trip amongst the Cumberland Lakes, I should like to have remained a month to fish, I intend going again next year if I have time and have a large party with me. I hope you will accompany us. I want to take in 30 or 40,000 acres of land on the West Coast of England. I think it will be a good scheme.

George by this time could have well afforded such luxuries, but it was business not pleasure which brought Tapton House to his notice. Once again, as with Alton Grange, he'd been working in the area on part of Hudson's Midland Railway and had noticed several rich coal seams during work on Clay Cross tunnel. He had already realised the potential of the district for industrial expansion, with iron and lime in close proximity, all of which could be exploited with the help of the new railway. With four partners, he decided to develop a coal mine and ironworks at Clay Cross, lime quarries at Crich and limeworks at Ambergate. The partners included Joseph Sandars from Liverpool and his new and very good friend, George Hudson, who at the time had recently become lord mayor of York.

Tapton House and its private grounds of around a hundred acres appears to have been included in one of the many leases George took over, buying his way into the district, but when George saw it he fell in love with it and decided to make it his own home. It stands on a hill, high over the town of Chesterfield, about a mile from the centre, a most impressive, imposing mansion, handsome rather than beautiful, elegant rather than ornate, the sort of solid, defiant house that would appeal to George. Today it is a school housing six hundred pupils, which gives some idea of its size.

When his sister Nelly, the one who'd brought up Robert, came down to visit her famous brother the first thing that amazed her were the number of windows. She counted ninety – eighty-nine more than their whole family had had when they'd slept, all of them, in one room at Wylam. It seems a ridiculous size for a canny northerner, with only a wife to help him occupy it, but by now he had rather a large domestic staff, including an old farmer from Killingworth who in earlier years had helped him read and write. He'd been brought down to be in charge of the stables. The house was on top of his business, right beside his railway and therefore in reach of anywhere and, given time, he intended to take up his boyhood country pursuits and develop its large, if neglected, park land.

The views from Tapton House are spectacular, not unlike the views from the Northumberland hills looking down into the Tyne valley, a mixture of unspoiled sylvan greenery and then suddenly, in a huddle, an ironworks or coal mine, a strange chimney belching grey smoke, and then the eye moves on again, up to the untouched Pennine uphills. The good citizens of Chesterfield like to call themselves East Midlanders, but to an outsider their accent is Yorkshire which makes them Northerners at heart. George must have felt at home. The thought of moving south, like Robert, seems never to have crossed his mind. Was he afraid or self-conscious or defiant? Or just happy where he was?

The most striking part of the view from Tapton, then as well as today, is Chesterfield's main, perhaps only, claim to national fame, the crooked spire of its parish church, St Mary and All Saints. The spire went crooked not long after the church was built, back in the fourteenth century, bending itself almost eight feet to the south, as a result of the builders using green timbers which warped in the heat of the sun. They were covered in lead sheets, arranged in a herring bone pattern, which, to the amazement of every architect who has ever looked at them, didn't fall off but rearranged themselves in the new, crooked shape. That's the scientific explanation. The folklore story, which George no doubt was told, as outsiders are usually told, is that one day a virgin was getting married in the church and the spire, never having seen a virgin in Chesterfield before, leaned over to have a better look.

All George's mineral developments prospered and, allied with his railway, account for the industrial success of the district until this day. He built model homes for the miners with garden plots attached, and at his height had one thousand employees working in his Chesterfield companies.

It was from Tapton House that George fought and won two final battles, both vital, both of which would have undermined if not destroyed his entire railway creations. The skirmish with Joseph Locke had meant little, and anyway he'd by now let Robert take the lead in building new railway lines. The two new battles were personal attacks on George's philosophy, which was something he could never take, and both came from Brunel.