“Do you think we could build a railway here, Mr Tonks?”
“Powered by a winch for the steep stretch, sir. More than one winch and steam engine, bearing in mind the distance to be travelled. Then a line down the dales towards Leeds could be laid, sir, but it would have little traffic, I fear.”
It was a great pity. For George really wanted to build a railway, with his own locomotive engine running along the tracks. He was going to name it ‘Shooting Star’, one day.
John Star was becoming reconciled to life in Botany Bay, so he said loudly and often when the free settlers and functionaries could hear him. A free man could make a good life for himself in the new colony, so he announced.
He had taken up a land grant only two months after being put ashore, had a huge acreage thirty miles north of the convict settlement, its fields ideal for wheat and sprawling either side of a freshwater creek. He had been given the use of a convict gang, camped out under canvas, with its own overseers to build his farm and fence his vast fields and dig irrigation ditches across them.
After a few weeks, when all was in hand and the men were settled in, he began to talk to the convicts. At first he simply identified those who had useful skills, building a forge for the two who had almost completed apprenticeships to village smiths and ensuring that the five stockmen he found were assigned to the plough horses and the half a dozen of milk cows he had laid his hands on. Later he discovered men who had been foresters and assigned them to logging in the hills to his north, cutting straight trunks and hauling them down to the saw pits he had dug.
At the end of a twelvemonth he had a sufficiency of beams and boards to set a pair of carpenters to work and three months later he presided over the launch of a thirty ton sloop, which was, he said, to carry his wheat harvest down to the wharves at the port. He had shacks built from the remaining timber and put the discarded tents to the use of an ex-naval sailmaker. Cordage for the rigging was less easily obtainable but he managed to get into town at intervals and buy a coil of rope here and hanks of twine elsewhere; men working with a will did all that he needed then.
He talked more with his convicts and had them come up with names of men still in the settlement who could be of use to his new endeavour. Over the weeks the selected transportees mostly slipped away from their work gangs and made their way through the bush; the bulk of them had been seamen, but a few had other tradesman’s skills.
During the same period he sent his wagons into town to purchase rations – navy biscuit mostly and a few kegs of lemon and lime juice. He bought some sides of bacon as well but made no attempt to get hold of salt beef or pork, arousing no suspicions among the authorities.
There was a trade now between Botany Bay and Singapore and India, one or two ships sailing each month, except during the height of the Monsoon when merchant ships preferred to stay in port. Eighteen months after arriving George took the helm of his little sloop and conned her out of the river mouth and turned her head southwards for ten miles before closing the shore and dropping anchor.
The information given him was that a merchant brig of some two hundred tons, the Carnatic, was to leave the Bay on the afternoon’s tide. With a little luck she would hold a course within reason close to the shore to take her due north and then to the Islands where she traded for pearls and gold dust on her return voyage to Singapore. George had no firearms of any sort, the authorities keeping a close control of muskets and pistols, and had to choose a target that he could close and board unseen.
There was less than half a moon, and Carnatic expected no trouble. There were pirates off the waters of the Spice Islands and they might have to fight at any time then, but that was a thousand miles north, a week off.
The sloop was small enough to use sweeps – long oars – and crept up quietly, overhauling the brig in the light winds. They were not seen until the last few seconds before they boarded and the brig’s crew were unable to man her few cannon or even load a musket in time. The convicts swung hatchets and felling axes and pickaxe handles and made short work of the few who showed fight, then ran below decks to take or kill the off-watch officers and men.
The chief of the overseers, an ex-convict who had recently completed his sentence and been given a job as a reward for good conduct, a ‘ticket-of-leave’ man, reported to John as he climbed aboard, still less nimble than he had been.
“Killed a dozen, Mr Star, and got as many again tied up.”
“Ask them if they want to join us free-booting, or if they want to be put into a small boat.”
Five minutes later he was told that only three had asked to join them; ten had decided to take the boat back to the harbour.
“Good. Untie the three, Terence. Knock the others over the head, weight them down and heave them over the side.”
“But you said…”
“Gullible, weren’t they? Do you want to join them?”
Terence picked up a pickaxe handle in response.
They sailed into the creek in the morning and loaded their rations aboard. At high tide the pair of vessels left the wharf and pointed their bows northward, waving their farewells to the men they had left behind.
“Won’t they go straight into town, sir, and raise the alarm?”
“Not them, Terence. They’ll scrag their overseers and then some of them will sit on their backside until the rations run out, and others will try to make a run for it into the bush. It will be a week at least before the Governor’s people get word of anything wrong, probably longer, and quite possibly a month before they finally work everything out and send word to Singapore and India to look out for us. By then, we shall be well into the Islands and looking about for a new home. Rajah Star is back, Terence, and I shan’t make the same mistakes this time!”
“We have taken on another two skilled metalworkers, Sir William; boilermakers by apprenticeship. That brings us back to the same number as we had before the Cholera, sir.”
Most of the shipyard’s men had lived in the terraces and courts close to the river, and they had been among the hardest hit by the plague that had killed so many in London. More than half of the workers had died and replacing them had been a slow job; in the end the yard had had to place advertisements in provincial newspapers offering wages of thirty shillings a week to journeymen metalworkers.
Few smiths in the rural areas could expect to see as much as a pound a week and their assistants barely one half of that; there had been a steady trickle of young men walking through the gates. Many of them had left again within a few days, unable to knuckle down to the discipline of manufacturing work. A smith working in his master’s forge did not have an easy time, but he could step back and rest his back or brew up tea whenever the mood took him; in the shipyard he needed the foreman’s permission to stop for as much as a minute and he took his breaks when ordered. Additionally many of the men were still ex-navvies from the gangs that had built the yard, hard men with no tolerance for those who could not keep up to their pace.
“Bloody disaster, the Cholera was, almost closed the yard down, Mr McGregor.”
“Next time it may, Sir William.”
“You think there will be a next time, Mr McGregor?”
“Why should there not be, Sir William? The disease is here now and may well be no more than lying dormant, waiting to spring out again.”
“I fear you may be right, but perhaps those who have experienced the ailment and survived may be salted against it… I do not like to rely on ‘perhaps’, you know. We must press Mr James Andrews, I think.”
James was doing his best, in fact, endeavouring to persuade the few permanent public officials that ‘something should be done’ about the Cholera. The salaried men, long sat in their dusty offices, knew very well that nothing could be done about anything; they saw their main function as to ensure that government was not permitted to ‘interfere’.
Interference consisted of doing anything new.
James pressed for the formation of a Board of Public H
ealth; the functionaries responded by creating a committee to discuss what the remit of such a Board might be. The committee had not yet sat as its membership had still to be agreed.
James was currently in converse with five of the most senior men in an endeavour to discover who among them might have responsibilities in the field. The discussions were not progressing well, due to the functionaries’ inbred distaste for taking responsibility for anything.
Two hours of cut and thrust debate had achieved nothing at all and James finally accepted that he was to be thwarted. Government would take no action at all. He stood and made a brief bow.
“Thank you for your time, gentlemen. I shall place a notice in the columns of The Times newspaper, informing interested parties that a public meeting is to be held to form a Charitable Trust with the function of securing an improvement of the health of the people of London. I shall specifically invite a number of leading figures to attend and sit upon the platform. Lord Shaftesbury, the Archbishop, Earl Grey – there may be others whose names will occur to me and who will be very glad to be associated with so important an endeavour. I shall inform His Grace of my intention and beg him to state his approval of the enterprise.”
He observed the five scowls with some satisfaction; they hated enthusiastic amateurs who believed that it was possible to do things. The result would almost inevitably be legislation and an expansion of the government’s role in the business of the country – and that was always a mistake. Perhaps they could compromise.
“It might just be possible, Mr Andrews, to establish a Board for the environs of London exclusively. A body that could investigate the supply of clean water and the building of sewers, perhaps, sir.”
James sat down again, glancing surreptitiously at the clock. He rarely ate during the working day, relying on breakfast and a good dinner instead; he knew that the public servants invariably repaired to their favourite chop-house at twelve-thirty and rarely returned before two. It was noon and if he kept the discussion going for another thirty minutes they would become restless; three quarters of an hour and they would promise him anything to avert starvation.
He returned to his office with a written memorandum outlining the Board that was to be established within the month. A Minister of the Crown; two permanent officials; four of ‘interested’ gentlemen drawn from the community of Londoners; they were to sit at least once a week until they had come up with an interim solution to the epidemics that were expected. It had been agreed that James should be the Minister and that Sir William Rumpage must be one of the interested gentlemen; he needed now to find three more active and reliable men who would come up with the required answer.
“Sewers, Mr James, I can think of no other solution. We must make a start on moving the waste out of our streets and further down the river. Millions of bricks, sir, but necessary as a start.”
“Who must sit on the Board, Sir William, as well as you and I, that is?”
“One of the Watneys would be wise, sir – they must wish to see the water of the Thames cleaned before it reaches their breweries. A Whitbread as well would make sense, for the same reason. Who else, I wonder? An Alderman of the City of London, perhaps?”
James promised to make contact with the appropriate Members of Parliament – both of the great brewing families were prominent in the House. He could write a letter to the Lord Mayor of London regarding the services of an Alderman.
“As well, Mr James, you might make contact with my lord, your brother. Was we to need bricks by the million then it might be thought sensible to possess our own brickworks, sir.”
That was a logical thought, James concurred. He would write that letter first of all.
Robert received the letter from James and sat down to consider the best response. If there was to be a demand for a specific type of bricks, ‘by the million’, then it must be wise to be the supplier for them; that was indisputable. The method, however, must be carefully considered. There seemed to be three possibilities.
The obvious one was to build a new brickworks on the banks of the Thames, probably on the Essex shores where there was clay in plenty and the colliers could ship in coals. Equally practical was to buy out an existing works; there were some in London itself and literally dozens on the canals leading in from the Home Counties, Bedfordshire particularly. The final route was to become a partner and to make an investment in a small brickworks for the building of another set of kilns, a massive expansion of its capacity; this had the advantage of using the expertise of the current owner, who might be presumed to know the trade.
Robert was inclined to the third course; if the venture proved successful then the original owner could be squeezed out, at minimum pushed to one side, and all quite lawfully.
He needed a source of advice – what were these different types of bricks that James was referring to? Perhaps Captain Hood could be persuaded to look into the matter for him – he would no doubt find an extra fee to be useful to him, his new estate must need more money poured into it. Joseph had taken an interest in the construction of Mr Stephenson’s damnable railway; he still could not approve of the infernal machine, but there had been a need to build bridges across a number of waterways, which must have used bricks. Joseph would have discovered much of what was to be known about bricks in the ordinary – to him – course of events.
He commenced letters to the pair.
Joseph had no time for bricks and kilns and money-making in general; he had a disaster on his hands.
He had decided that it would make simple and good sense to build a branch railway from the new Roberts Works to the old and then to connect with the Manchester and Liverpool. He already manufactured parts for the locomotive engines used on the line, and cast rails and the spikes that held them to the sleepers, and there were designs for new trucks and passenger coaches on the drawing board in his offices. A connection to the line was almost a necessity and could only become increasingly important over the years.
His line was planned to be very short, no more than eight miles of track in total allowing for doubling it in parts and laying sidings in the works themselves.
Most of the line was to be laid on the flatlands and needed no more than a pair of bridges across canal and river, but there was one section that must cross a ridge, an outlier of the hills between St Helens and Wigan. The locomotive engines could not mount such steep slopes and Joseph had considered emplacing a stationary engine to power winches, but that was not the way forward, that was not what the new railways were meant to be. He wanted a stretch of line which his wagons could pass quickly over without the delays of unhitching and rehitching them to their engines.
The ridge stood one hundred and fifty feet high and perhaps half a mile wide; the rock was hard and apparently fairly much unfaulted. It was possible to bore a tunnel, or to dig out a cutting and there were arguments for either course.
A cutting could also in effect act as a quarry, the hard stone spoil to form the permanent way for the railway tracks, and that would save a vast deal of carting of stone miles across country, and reduce costs noticeably.
The decision was taken; a cutting it would be.
Joseph had decided not to use a contractor but to hire on a couple of gangs of navvies and supervise them himself. They would start from opposite ends of the ridge and when they had met in the middle they would turn round and work out towards the two ends of the line, so ensuring that they never came too close to one another with all of the potential for fighting that would have entailed.
Joseph had watched as they started work, lining up on the posts the surveyors had planted for them.
Men with sharp-bladed spades had led the way, cutting down through the thin turf and digging out the sod, laying the whole turfs to the side to be used as roofing for the brushwood and heather shelters they had made for themselves and in which they would live for the duration of the contract. A gang came behind them with shovels, digging down to the rock, normally less than a foot below th
e surface. The earth was heaped to the side of the line of the track to form a bank which could act as a boundary.
The exposed stone was then surveyed for cracks and faulting and, where possible, it was broken up by sledgehammers and wheel-barrowed away to the nearest patch of soft land that needed infill. The process left a series of small diggings, ranging down to six or seven feet deep and maybe twenty feet wide; in between were pillars of hard rock that showed resistant to the sledgehammer.
Masons came next and worked with lump hammer and chisel or bolster to undercut the hard stone, making little caverns no more than two feet deep and a hand high. When all of the pillars in a stretch had been undermined a blaster took over, packing the holes with black powder and joining each with a match of cotton string impregnated with flammable spirits.
The chargehands would call their men back and count them off, waving the all clear to the foreman. The foreman then raised his red flag and gave a loud yell of ‘Firing’. The blaster lit the end of his fuze and ran to the cover he had prepared for himself.
A series of more or less loud explosions and the pillars cracked and fell, throwing debris perhaps fifty yards. Before the navvies were allowed back the blaster walked the length of the cut and checked every hole to be certain it had blown.
It was a system that had been worked out over years of canal and turnpike building, and it worked while every man played his proper part. One who cut corners could cause all to fail.
The cutting could have almost vertical sides as it was made through hard and normally dry rock. It was to be wide enough to take a double track and with a margin on either side for a work gang to take refuge in if need arose. Forty feet was more than sufficient.
The navvies cut in from the edges, the sides of the cutting slowly rising above them, the front face becoming taller every day. By the time the walls were twenty feet high they were unable to use the pit and pillar method of excavation and were forced to cut in a series of steps, blowing the face and then throwing the spoil behind them until it was loaded into wagons at the bottom level. Two gangs worked on trimming the sides of the cutting, finishing the rock face so that it was square and solid with no loose material that would eventually fall.
Virtue’s Reward (A Poor Man at the Gate Series, Book 11) Page 23