George Stephenson (9 page)

It's hard to know what Stephenson must have thought about meeting a Quaker. They were looked upon, with some justification, as very odd people. Stephenson never allied himself with any church and doesn't seem to have been interested in religion. Nonetheless, he must have been well aware of some of the myths and legends about the Quakers, perhaps even a few of the facts.

The Quakers arose in England during the civil war, part of the Puritan backlash. George Fox, their founder, was against all High Church and even Low Church ceremonies. He wanted none of it, nor priests, nor hierarchy nor any dogma. He wanted a direct communion with God, even if it took place alone and in silence. His followers called themselves Children of Light. It wasn't until 1650, three years after their foundation, that they became known as Quakers. It started when a judge in Derby referred to them scornfully as ‘quaking with emotion' during their meetings. Soon afterwards the Quakers themselves started using the name, though their official name was and still is the Society of Friends.

They had continuous troubles with judges because one of their obsessions was a refusal to swear any sort of oath. This precluded them from any public office, from going to Oxford or Cambridge, or going into Parliament. They refused to pay church taxes or tithes, to serve in the army, to acknowledge the monarch as being superior to anyone else, to recognise any saints, to call anyone sir or give anyone any sort of title. They called everyone thee or thou. No one on this earth should be more equal than anyone else. But it led them into many dotty ideas and beliefs. They would never take off their hats, either for ladies or the king, as they could take their hats off only for God, not man. A true old style Quaker wouldn't dance, gamble, go to the theatre or have anything to do with music. Such activities, so they believed, could give rise to sensual thoughts.

They shunned gaudy dress, fancy furniture, any ostentation including colours, remaining faithful through the centuries to their black or grey Puritan clothes. They never had their portraits painted because that was vanity. Edward Pease, much later on, was one of the first Quakers to be persuaded to have his likeness captured for posterity. He was finally persuaded that having a photograph taken wasn't a sin. The camera, so it was argued, unlike an artist, doesn't lie.

Their passion for equality led them to the forefront of most reforming movements and they were prominent in all the nineteenth-century campaigns against social ills, as one might expect. The Fry family, apart from being model employers, worked hard for factory reforms, to stop the employment of children and for prison reform. There were Quaker leaders amongst the anti-slavery movement and in 1824, at the height of the Stockton–Darlington railway campaign, Edward Pease was popping back and forward to France, lobbying French MPs and merchants about the slave trade, though he didn't get very far. When Quakers went abroad, like William Penn in Pennsylvania, they tried to create model societies.

It was in business that the Quakers' many virtues were seen at their best. Rather surprisingly they didn't consider it a sin to make money. Idleness, sitting around doing nothing, or even worse, sitting around and enjoying yourself, that was the sin. Making money was honourable, as long as it didn't become an end in itself. The ultimate object of making money was to do good with it. You must never make money by doing bad. Because of this Quakers never dealt in wines or spirits, though they could be brewers. (Beer was harmless, so it was thought, which was true in the days when it was compared with the nation's drinking water.) They never made money by exploiting labour or by involving themselves in anything to do with armaments, though some of the Pease family had managed to fudge the line a bit back in 1744 when they supplied 1600 woollen waistcoats for the Duke of Cumberland's army. The Darlington Quakers, so it was thought in some Quaker circles, were a bit more worldly than some of the others, less isolated, more involved in the community. Even so, Edward Pease himself was a Quaker of the old school. It was his children who were more broad minded.

In 1817 Edward Pease was fifty. In his diaries he was already castigating himself for what he considered his profligate youth, regretting the time he'd spent hunting and following other country pursuits. From then on he allowed himself no pleasures, however innocent, except gardening. Even then, in later years, his conscience began to trouble him about the self-indulgence inherent in raising prize flowers, worrying about the pleasure it was giving him. His diaries are full of his tortured soul searchings.

It is not surprising then that to ordinary pleasure-loving folk Quakers were rather funny people. In the previous century their extreme moral stands had led to persecution. Now they were tolerated, if rather mocked, behind their backs, though in some quarters they were still actively disliked for their prissiness and unrelaxing moral rectitude.

But in business, that was different. There was no one you could possibly trust more than an upright, moralising Quaker. Throughout the nineteenth century the more go-ahead Quaker families, like the Peases, were branching out into the new industrial and commercial enterprises of the local community and becoming model captains of industry. There was almost a Moral Mafia at work, with Quaker biscuit manufacturers being financed by their relations, the Quaker bankers. In a time of quick money, madcap schemes, ridiculous investments, one could be sure that if Quakers were involved, then the venture was sound. The Quaker businessmen were the first to establish the idea of fixed prices for retail goods. They maintained that the ignorance of the public must not be exploited. Often when a Quaker came up with a new invention he didn't patent it on principle, letting the community benefit as a whole. Abraham Darby, who discovered how to smelt iron with coal, never patented his revolutionary system. Many of the Quaker iron and steel masters in Sheffield produced new ideas and processes and gave them as presents to their rivals. As businessmen, the Quakers were irreproachable in their integrity. And this integrity paid good dividends. They built huge businesses which are still household names today – Cadbury, Fry, Rowntree, Huntley and Palmer, Bryant and May. In the City, where they were particularly strong, they founded many banks, two of which eventually became Barclays and Lloyds, two out of today's big Four. The City's biggest present day accountants, Price Waterhouse, owed its success to Quaker founders.

Edward Pease might have been an unknown northern merchant in 1817 but it was the simple fact that he was a Quaker which made people, even those who'd never heard of him, think twice about his strange-sounding scheme. For it was in the year 1817 that he decided to withdraw from fulltime business and devote himself and his conscience to two causes. There was firstly the anti-slavery movement. The fact that from Darlington he managed to obtain interviews with French cabinet ministers in order to castigate them shows perseverance as well as good contacts.

His other project was the railway, a project which would benefit his home area, helping merchants and workers alike. He knew that a new and cheap form of transport between the inland coal mines of South Durham and the sea at the mouth of the Tees would bring down the price of coal for householders and manufacturers and would stimulate industry throughout Teeside. Even at Darlington, which was only twelve miles or so from the collieries and halfway to the sea, the major item in the cost of coal was the carriage.

Tyne coal, further to the north, was dominating the national market and monopolising the London trade, partly due to the fact that so many of their coal mines were situated right on the banks of the Tyne. The inland South Durham coalfield had always been beset with costly transport problems. Cheaper coal, therefore, would not only help the manufacturers of Darlington and Stockton but create a thriving export trade.

Edward Pease wasn't the first to think of a way of reducing the transport costs for coal. As early as 1768 there had been a canal planned from the coal fields across to Stockton, the highest navigable point on the Tees. James Brindley himself had been consulted, the engineer who had designed the Duke of Bridgwater's canal in 1759. A survey was made and the cost was estimated at £63,722. But nothing was done.

In 1810, at a dinner in Stockton to celebrate the opening of a short channel which had been cut to improve navigation on the Tees (a cut only 210 yards long) the whole subject of a canal came up once again. Edward Pease was one of those who argued that a horsedrawn tramway would be cheaper, direct from the coal mouth via Darlington to the Tees. Pease and some of his fellow Darlington merchants present were very keen on a tramway. Stockton, being a port, favoured a canal. Back in Darlington, Pease and his friends got up a committee which eventually asked the Scotsman John Rennie, one of the leading engineers of the day, to report on the best means of communication. Rennie was busy elsewhere building Waterloo Bridge in London and he did not report until 1813. And when he did, he recommended a canal as being best, producing an estimate of £205,618, the highest estimate so far.

Once again, nothing was done, though this time there were good reasons for it. The country was at war against France and the USA and money and materials were very scarce.

In May 1818 some merchants in Stockton decided to finance another canal survey and this time the survey advised a canal direct from the collieries to Stockton, by-passing Darlington. This was admittedly the shortest distance, the previous canal surveys having proposed a loop to take in Darlington, but it naturally didn't appeal to the good merchants of Darlington. They didn't want to be left out. This more than anything else must have upset Pease, being concerned as he was with the good of Darlington, though his exact reactions can only be guessed at. (Unfortunately his diaries are complete only from the year 1838 onwards, thereby depriving the history of railways of one of its most important firsthand sources.)

In mid-1818, Edward Pease and a group of other Quaker merchants in Darlington, most of whom he was related to, decided to get up their own committee to form a public horsedrawn railway, not a canal. It was to be called the Stockton and Darlington Railway. They put the name Stockton first, even though the committee's headquarters were in Darlington, to try to appease the canal lobby in Stockton. All the same, the Darlington lobby itself was for a time divided. Jonathan Backhouse, Darlington's leading banker and by all accounts the single most important citizen of Darlington (having more money than Edward Pease) was in favour of a railway from the collieries to Darlington, then a canal to Stockton. Pease was completely against a broken line of communication and managed, being a man of great strength and determination, to persuade Backhouse to change his mind. Backhouse was a Quaker, which helped, and his mother was a Pease, which also helped. He himself was married to a Gurney from Norwich, the same Quaker family into which Edward Pease's son Joseph married. There were no arguments – just a discussion within the family.

A surveyor was contacted and his early reports were so in favour of a railway line, all the way, that Backhouse's remaining qualms disappeared. This survey was done by a Welsh engineer called George Overton, a relation of one of the promoters and a man with long experience in laying down iron tramways in South Wales. It was he who had built the line at Penydaren, where Trevithick's locomotive had been tried in 1804.

Around the same time as Overton was doing his survey, and for some time afterwards, the committee was also taking advice from Robert Stevenson, the noted Edinburgh engineer. He'd recently built the Bell Rock Lighthouse, which doesn't sound the ideal training for a railway engineer, but in those days, when there was no such profession as a civil engineer, any sort of engineer was looked upon as good enough to give advice on railways. He was, as we know, a railway fan and was in the process of writing the pamphlet on railways, the one in which he wrote about George Stephenson's good work at Killingworth. Perhaps he might have mentioned George's name to Pease, even at this early stage.

In a letter dated 22 December 1818, Robert Stevenson wrote from Edinburgh to say he was ‘much gratified' by the committee's request for his help and described their scheme as one of ‘importance and consequence'. He advised against ‘calling in any other engineer' but to press on as quickly as possible with their present survey if they wanted the bill before the coming session of parliament.

The reference to ‘any other engineer' was presumably a dig at John Rennie, a deadly rival of Stevenson's, who had once again been contacted, even though he still favoured a canal. Rennie was much less diplomatic in his reply to the committee. He was patently annoyed at being suggested in the same breath as Stevenson and considered himself a definite cut above such a trifling enterprise. In his reply dated 26 December 1818, he says that he is far too busy with numerous public works ‘of infinitely greater magnitude and importance than the Darlington Railway'.

Robert Stevenson did come down from Edinburgh to have a look at the proposed Darlington line. It is not known if he ever produced a written report or merely gave his considered opinion. Stevenson and Rennie were national figures, unlike Overton who was doing all the donkey work, so presumably the committee were anxious to involve either of them in the scheme for prestige reasons.

The Overton survey went quickly ahead and was greeted with delight by Pease and the promoters. His estimate of the cost of the railway, to run fifty-one miles in all, including branches, was £124,000. A general meeting of the Stockton and Darlington Railway committee was held in Darlington on 13 November 1818, the date usually looked upon as the official founding date of the company, in which it was decided to open a list of subscribers and go for an act of parliament.

Jonathan Backhouse gave a brilliant speech at this meeting, analysing all the possible revenue but got rather carried away, as did several others, about the likely financial success of the railway. There was talk of a return for the investors of fifteen per cent. Edward Pease, though a less brilliant speaker, insisted that in his opinion the project was perfectly safe but all he would assure subscribers was a return of five per cent. It was his more sober, sounder realism which in the event persuaded many people to subscribe.