Map of a Nation (44 page)

 

 

 

C
HAPTER
T
EN

 

W
ILLIAM
M
UDGE’S DEATH
left a vacancy at the head of what was rapidly becoming a ‘national treasure’. Thomas Colby had played a leading role in the Ordnance Survey for the past eighteen years and reasonably expected to be asked to take charge in Mudge’s place. After a few months of perplexing silence, he steeled himself to write to the new Master-General of the Ordnance to urge the case for his appointment. Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, victor of the Battle of Waterloo that had ended the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, was not entirely persuaded by Colby’s description of how he had

Wellington replied rather cursorily through a secretary, informing the
34-year
-old map-maker: ‘His Grace is now making enquiries, and will let you know whether he will appoint you permanently to conduct the Survey or not. In the meantime, the Master General begs you will continue it, in like manner as General Mudge would have done.’

Wellington summoned before him the charismatic chemist Humphry Davy, who gave his opinion that Colby was by far the best and most entitled person to take over the running of the Survey. Wellington also consulted the ‘very eminent Professor of Mathematics at the Royal Military Academy’, Charles Hutton, who readied himself to offer a panegyric on the map-maker’s merits. He began: ‘No man more so, My Lord Duke.’ But he was immediately
interrupted
by Wellington, who thanked him, saying, ‘that is all I want to know; my time is valuable, and yours, I know, is not less so’. Colby’s achievements in the fields of map-making and other scientific endeavours also spoke for
themselves
. As ‘a Gentleman well versed in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy, and employed on the General Survey of Great Britain’, Colby had recently been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. He had also found time to help establish the Astronomical Society and was an associate of the Institution of Civil Engineers, demonstrating ‘unceasing attention and liberality, in
procuring
for and presenting to the [Institution’s] Library, the Ordnance Maps, and many other valuable documents, as soon as they were published’.

On 10 July 1820 Colby received the long-awaited letter from the Board of Ordnance that gave him the news that ‘His Grace appoints you to succeed the late M[ajor]-General Mudge in the superintendence of the Ordnance Trigonometrical Survey.’ Three weeks later, the
Morning Chronicle
happily assured its readers that ‘the appointment of an officer who has been long engaged in this laborious undertaking, and who has latterly conducted the scientific part with distinguished ability and zeal, is an assurance that this useful and important work will be conducted in the same admirable style that has hitherto marked its progress’.

Upon taking control of the Ordnance Survey, however, Colby was
displeased
and disappointed to find that, beneath its veneer of efficiency, the institution had been left by Mudge in a surprisingly poor state. The type of error that the Admiralty had discovered back in 1811 was repeated on many of the maps intended for its First Series. In 1818 the Interior Survey had begun working in Lincolnshire when the gentlemen of that county, spurred by enthusiasm for images of their estates, had requested that the Ordnance Survey map it before the planned date, offering the incentive of a
guaranteed
purchase of 500 maps. On inspecting the resulting charts of
Lincolnshire after his appointment as director, Colby was dismayed to find them substandard and even ‘most slovenly’ in their topographical accuracy and representation of place names.

At around the same time, the Admiralty got in touch. One of their
hydrographers
, who had been mapping the Bristol Channel using the relevant First Series map for reference, had discovered that ‘the direction of [Lundy] Island as given by the Ordnance Survey is quite incorrect’. Colby swiftly arranged for the island to be resurveyed and then turned furiously on the Interior Surveyor responsible. ‘It was with extreme regret I discovered that your Survey was so erroneous that it was necessary to plane the Island, which had been engraved and published, off the Copper,’ he fumed. ‘The disgrace and expense of the transaction has been very considerable.’ The surveyor defended himself, pointing out that the island had, in fact, been mapped by a trainee under his command, Thomas Compton. Compton had gone on to produce military charts for Charles Lennox, 3rd Duke of Richmond, and then a series of beautiful landscape prints of North Wales, which he designed to function like a guidebook: ‘to point out clearly the route which was
followed
, so that those who may wish to visit the scenes described, will meet with little difficulty in finding them, without any other guide’. But Compton had not distinguished himself in these early days. He had mapped Lundy Island without a triangulation, solely as an exercise, and without ever intending that it should be included on the finished Ordnance Survey sheets. That it had been was a terrible oversight, and although this knowledge did not ameliorate the consequences, Colby was nevertheless somewhat placated. It ‘give[s] me great pleasure … that [the error] does not attach to any person employed now upon the Survey’, he informed Charles Budgen.

Sadly, this type of fault on the Ordnance Survey’s early maps was not unique. Colby soon found inaccuracies to be rife, some a result of human error, but others due to changes in the rapidly altering landscape. The latter were admittedly beyond the surveyors’ control, but their system was not well designed to cope with these alterations. Britain was industrialising
rapidly
in the first half of the nineteenth century and some aspects of the landscape changed beyond recognition in the space of ten years. The Trigonometrical Survey and the Interior Survey made their way across the
nation at different rates and the time lag before their maps were engraved and released to the public usually extended beyond a decade and sometimes even lasted up to a quarter of a century. It is a truism to say that, by
definition
, every map is out of date as soon as it is published, but this was especially the case in the 1820s and 1830s. In the time that elapsed between mapping a county and the Ordnance Survey’s publication of those maps, railways and factories could be built and a relatively minor town, such as Birmingham, could mushroom into an industrial metropolis.

In the first months of his appointment as Superintendent, Colby tried to tackle this desperate situation. It has been said that ‘the idea of tolerable error was foreign to Colby’s nature’ and this obsessive perfectionist became intensely frustrated by the interference of ‘human error’ in the ideal of
flawless
map-making. He instituted a series of reforms of the Ordnance Survey’s working practices whereby maps and plans were rigorously checked,
second-rate
efforts were rejected, mapping executed by trainees or assistants was no longer included on the finished maps, and a systematic process of revision of the already published surveys was set in place. Colby also modified the appearance of the First Series maps, calling for refinements to the depiction of hills, and finer linework throughout, resulting in clearer displays of
settlements
and smaller, denser writing. Under Colby’s care, the Ordnance Survey was transformed into an efficient and systematic national mapping agency.

 

W
ILLIAM
R
OY’S ORIGINAL
proposal for a national survey had pointed out the value of covering all of the ‘British Islands’, but Mudge’s principal purpose had been to oversee the First Series of one-inch maps of England and Wales. In its early years, the Ordnance Survey took little
interest
in a map of Ireland, despite the fact that in 1800 two Acts of Union formally united the nations of Great Britain and Ireland into the United Kingdom. As had been the case with the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707, the 1800 Act of Union was not smooth. It took place just two years after a
republican uprising against British rule in Ireland during which between 15,000 and 30,000 people had died in just three months. Union was
proposed
as one means to suppress separatists who wanted to pull Ireland and Britain apart, but even in this context in which geographical information might help the British government control its neighbour, the Ordnance Survey showed little interest in an Irish mapping project. When a British engineer had suggested in 1805 that William Mudge should form a party to triangulate that nation, he had shrugged it off with the reply that ‘the Irish survey bill has no reference to us’.

In the mid 1810s, the mapping of Ireland became a live issue in Parliament, for reasons of taxation rather than imperialism. The Irish county ‘cess’ tax was used to fund jails and schools, to repair roads and bridges and to pay the salaries of local officials. Theoretically the levels of tax that citizens were expected to pay were calculated according to
individual
means, the assessment of which was partly based on the value accorded to their local districts. ‘Townlands’ are local divisions smaller than parishes, and they formed the basis of the county cess tax valuations. But although the names and rough outlines of Ireland’s townlands were generally known, the precise acreages and values of each division remained obscure. By the nineteenth century’s second decade, this unsatisfactory situation began to worry Ireland’s administrators, who could point to places where the tax was almost ten times as much as in another townland of
equivalent
value. In 1815 a committee urged that ‘some mode should be devised for rendering … assessment more equal, the defect appearing … to arise in a great degree from the levy being made in reference to old surveys … which of course cannot comprehend the great improvements which have taken place in Ireland since the period at which those surveys took place’. At around the same time, the Admiralty was also pressing for an accurate mapping of Ireland’s coastline, particularly the St George’s Channel, ‘for all purposes of navigation’. These calls grew more urgent after 1822 when an English ship was wrecked on an unmapped sandbank off the Wexford coast.

Inspired by this renewed interest in mapping Ireland, Thomas Colby, now Superintendent of the Ordnance Survey, wrote to the Board of Ordnance in
1824, suggesting that the institution under his command was the most apt body to assume such a task. The eldest brother of the Master-General, the Duke of Wellington, was Richard Wellesley, 1st Marquess Wellesley, who had been employed since 1821 as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, the king’s
representative
and head of the Irish executive. Both were descended from an aristocratic Anglo-Irish family and were reputed to entertain a derogatory attitude to many of their fellow countrymen. Richard Wellesley
wholeheartedly
supported Colby’s idea that the Ordnance Survey should map Ireland and wrote to his brother to that effect. Within a week plans for establishing an ‘Irish Ordnance Survey’ were under way. Because of the requirement to map Ireland’s administrative boundaries in detail for the cess tax, Colby
recommended
surveying Ireland on the spacious scale of six inches to one mile, and he estimated that such a map would cost
£
200,000, plus half as much again for a full investigation of its townland boundaries. With these specifications, the project was officially founded in June 1824. It was an evident distraction from the First Series, and one that would ultimately delay proper work on that project by around two decades, but the Ordnance Survey’s sojourn in Ireland would be a colourful saga of imperialism, translation, cultural
nationalism
and local attempts to sabotage the map-makers’ measurements. It was also the context in which Colby developed far greater ambitions for the Ordnance Survey of Britain than he had previously entertained.