Map of a Nation (55 page)

In November 1847 the Metropolitan Sanitary Commission contacted Hall and Yolland (who adopted an active deputy role in the project), to request
that the Ordnance Survey make a map of London on the five-foot scale, to help the improvement of drainage in the capital city. The two men
optimistically
estimated that such a survey would take between six and eight months to complete, at a cost of
£
104,000, and that it would cover 900 sheets. It actually took two years. Between 1848 and 1850 the Ordnance Survey’s map-makers made the most minute and accurate survey of London then in existence. Although there were some objections about the expense of such an undertaking, the
Daily News
reported gleefully in January 1848 that ‘the new brooms of the metropolitan sewer commission are at work’. On 9 May, another journalist for the same newspaper offered a breathless account of how ‘a company of Royal Sappers and Miners were employed at the summit of St Paul’s Cathedral, erecting a temporary observatory
immediately
beneath the ball and cross, for the purposes of the ordnance survey of the metropolis’. He continued: ‘the dexterity with which the men pursued their operations at that dizzy height, their only support the architectural ornaments of the building, excited considerable curiosity’. From this elevated platform, a surveyor called James Steel made some 10,000 observations in the four months between May and August with the smaller eighteen-inch theodolite that was used by the Interior Survey. Although on two occasions large pieces of wood were dropped from this great height, one of which hit the pavement with a noise ‘like the booming of a piece of Ordnance’, nobody was harmed in the course of the map-making.

As one division of the Ordnance Survey was working on the London map, further teams were surveying thirty-five towns on the five-foot scale for the Poor Law Commission. Between them, these responsibilities meant that the six-inch mapping of northern England was proceeding very slowly, and by 1850 only twenty-three sheets of Lancashire and Yorkshire had been published and none had been reduced to the one-inch scale of the First Series. The irresolution about the optimum scale on which the maps should be conducted soon became farcical, in what is now referred to as the ‘Scales Dispute’. When the Board of Health was formed in 1848, it
recommended
that the five-foot scale of the town maps was, in fact, much too small to cope with the multiple demands of the Industrial Revolution, and advised the adoption of a scale twice as large, at ten feet to the mile. The
Tithe Commissioners also weighed in, and called for the entire nation to be remapped on a scale of 26⅔ inches to a mile. Over the next four years, amid a babel of recommendations from various Select Committees, the only constant was an almost ubiquitous assertion of the need to complete the First Series of one-inch maps of England and Wales as soon as
possible
, which was still widely accepted as the best scale for a ‘general map’ of the nation. The Treasury eventually despaired of the Ordnance Survey’s indecision and took the matter into its own hands, asking a variety of landowners, authorities and institutions for advice on the matter of scale. A preference emerged for the one-inch scale for general purposes, and a scale of between twenty-four and twenty-six inches to the mile for civil purposes.

 

I
N
1854, L
EWIS
H
ALL
left the Ordnance Survey to take up a
command
in Corfu. His resignation occurred just two years after the sudden death at sixty-nine of Thomas Colby, who had been living in New Brighton, near Birkenhead, with his family. A colleague described how ‘with little or scarcely any warning, the Spirit, yet active, was summoned from the Body, yet firm and hale and … he passed from the scene of so much bodily and mental exertion to rest and peace eternal’. After his death his widow was awarded a life pension by the government, in recognition of his
achievements
. There could not have been two more different superintendents than Thomas Colby and Lewis Hall. While the first was obsessively committed, eccentric and skilled, the latter was indecisive, inexperienced and
unimaginative
. Hall’s directorship had been characterised by confusion and false starts, and the comparison with Colby that the latter’s death must have
provoked
was not flattering. An obituary of Thomas Colby in the
Memoirs
of the Institution of Civil Engineers celebrated the Irish Ordnance Survey as ‘really the great work of his life’, where he had brought ‘into harmonious action, the labours of about forty observers and of several hundred surveyors and draughtsmen’, not to mention the shared invention of the Compensation Bars which ‘would alone suffice to give to their author a claim to a high place
in the list of improvers of geodetic science’. It had been Colby who ‘was not only fully aware of the direct advantages of an accurate survey of the
country
, but was the first to point out the collateral benefits, to be derived from combining with it searching investigations into the geology, mineralogy,
natural
history, statistics, and antiquities of the country’. The obituary ended by reflecting that ‘his life was a course of scientific research, and his name will hereafter be inseparably connected with the history of the Ordnance Survey’ and ‘it might be said of him, that few men were more sincerely regretted’.

Few, on the other hand, were sorry to see Hall go, and the limited nature of his achievements is perhaps signified by the fact that he has no entry in the
Dictionary of National Biography
beside those of his predecessors, Roy, Mudge and Colby. He was replaced by Henry James, who had worked on the Ordnance Survey for twenty-eight years, mostly in Ireland (with a brief interlude of four years away from the Survey, in which he was employed
variously
by the Admiralty and a commission for investigating the use of iron in railways). At the beginning of James’s directorship, his employer, the Board of Ordnance, which was under the Master-Generalship of Lord Raglan, experienced devastating disgrace during the Crimean War. The first Russian winter of the war, 1854–5, was extremely harsh; the Board found itself
woefully
unprepared and failed to supply adequate provisions. Many of the British Army’s modes of transport and supply broke down, and the hospital arrangements were notoriously bad, as a result of which many died from the cold, lack of food and their injuries. Blame was laid at the door of the Board of Ordnance and Lord Raglan, who wrote: ‘I am charged with every species of neglect.’ In 1855, this 400-year-old institution was abolished by an Act of Parliament. Control over the Artillery and Engineers, and the Ordnance Survey too, was passed to the War Office, a department of the British government that had been responsible for administering the British Army since 1684. The Secretary of State for War replaced the
Master-
General
as the Ordnance Survey’s chief.

While adapting to this new regime, James launched himself into the
ongoing
Scales Dispute. He decided that a 1:2500 scale (roughly twenty-five inches to a mile) would be adopted as the basic scale in Scotland, to replace the six-inch scale on which its maps had hitherto been constructed. The
Treasury agreed but stipulated that the six-inch scale should be retained for uncultivated areas, and it again pleaded with the Ordnance Survey to
please
,
at last
complete the First Series. Over the next five years, more committees bombarded James with a variety of conflicting recommendations regarding scale, but he continued to survey on his favourite scale of 1:2500, although he depicted some major Scottish towns at 1:500 (about ten feet to a mile). He implemented the 1:2500 scale in the northern counties of England too and recommended that southern England be remapped on this basis. By 1859 the survey of Scotland was nearly finished on both the six-inch and the 1:2500 scales.

At the end of the 1850s James forecast that the First Series might soon be completed. Acutely aware of its iconic status, he had issued instructions immediately after his appointment that, as soon as an unmapped area of England was surveyed, its maps should be reduced to the one-inch scale and engraved as a matter of urgency. The public was starting to gripe at the colossal amount of time it was taking for the First Series maps to appear. On 17 September 1862,
The Times
carried a letter from an anonymous
correspondent
called ‘Surveyor’, who described his expectation that ‘the Ordnance Survey of England would … furnish me with a correct and accurate plan of the country as it exists at the present day, with all the late additions of railways, alterations, and increase in the neighbourhood of the rising towns &c.’ This man then proceeded to relate his disappointment ‘on receiving’ maps of Plymouth, south Devon, Dorchester and Weymouth,

Henry James drafted a measured reply to this correspondent, which
The
Times
printed on 22 September. Although he pointed out that ‘Surveyor’ had mistakenly been provided with old unrevised impressions of the maps of Plymouth and Dorset, he admitted that ‘no one is more conscious than
I am of the fact that the old Ordnance maps do require a very extensive revision to bring them up to what they ought to be’. But, he added
hopefully
, ‘half a loaf is better than no bread’. James proceeded to explain the rationale behind the decision to resurvey the entire nation on a much larger scale. Even though it would take a little longer than a straight revision of the one-inch maps, mapping on a large scale would still ‘give us the means of correcting the 1-inch map without incurring the expense of sending
surveyors
specially for that single object’. The poet and cultural critic Matthew Arnold wrote a piece in the
London Review
shortly after James’s letter to
The Times
, reflecting on the gravity of the Ordnance Survey’s undertaking. ‘A Government’s first and indispensable duty in the way of map-making is to provide a
good
map of its country, not to provide a
cheap
one,’ Arnold emphasised. ‘Let [Sir Henry James] clearly understand what is expected of him.’

By 1863, only eight sheets of the First Series remained to be published. In his letter to
The Times
the previous year, James had promised that ‘this year I shall be able to get the survey of the north of England finished, and
complete
the 1-inch map of England and Wales’. But many of his readers had heard similar promises before and, like its forerunners, James’s assurance failed to materialise in the time he had predicted. The reason for the delay, however, was unprecedented. Between 1864 and 1869, Ordnance Survey map-makers were sent to the Middle East, to Jerusalem and the Sinai Peninsula. The recently completed large-scale map of London that had been made for the Metropolitan Sanitary Commission had so impressed the Dean of Westminster, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, that he had called for a similar survey to be made of Jerusalem, ‘to improve the sanitary state of the city’ and protect pilgrims from water-borne diseases. The Palestinian territories were then under the rule of the Ottoman government, who voiced no objection to the presence of British surveying parties in the area. And the War Office may have seen in the proposed survey an opportunity to spy on French engineers’ construction of the Suez Canal, which, despite fierce hostility from the British, was under way in Egypt. But it is hard in
retrospect
not to grow a little exasperated with the Ordnance Survey’s easy distraction from the task in hand, even if such digressions were the result of
an admirable intention to engage with geography in its fullest sense and piece together a complete image of the world in which we live.