George Stephenson

by Hunter Davies

  George

  STEPHENSON

  For James Davies of Cambuslang

  George

  STEPHENSON

  THE REMARKABLE LIFE OF THE

  FOUNDER OF THE RAILWAYS

  HUNTER DAVIES

  This book was first published in 1975 by Weidenfeld and Nicolson

  This new revised edition first published in 2004 by Sutton Publishing Limited

  The History Press

  The Mill, Brimscombe Port

  Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

  www.thehistorypress.co.uk

  This ebook edition first published in 2013

  All rights reserved

  © Hunter Davies, 1975, 2004, 2013

  The right of Hunter Davies to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9543 9

  Original typesetting by The History Press

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  1 Early Years

  2 The Safety Lamp Row

  3 Locomotion

  4 Picking up the Peases

  5 Building the Darlington Line

  6 The Opening

  7 Robert

  8 Liverpool: The story so far

  9 George’s Darkest Hour

  10 Robert Returns

  11 Rainhill and the Rocket

  12 The Grand Opening

  13 After Liverpool, the World

  14 George Hudson and Railway Mania

  15 George Stephenson’s Last Years

  16 After George

  Postscript: The George Stephenson Tour

  Appendix

  Bibliography

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I am grateful to Professor Jack Simmons of Leicester University for his help and advice and most of all for agreeing to read through the finished manuscript; to Lord Wardington for access to his collection of books about the Pease family; to Herbert Simon for endless encouragement; to the librarians, staff and officials at Darlington, Newcastle, Liverpool and Chesterfield public libraries; and at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, the Science Museum and the Public Records Office, and all others who made railway and other documents available, and gave willingly of their time. I am also grateful to all those who gave me permission to reproduce material. Not forgetting Samuel Smiles for all his good work.

  INTRODUCTION

  George Stephenson was one of the greatest ever Britons. Such claims are often wildly thrown around, and not always sustainable or deserved, but there are not many people about whom it can be said that he changed the world into which he was born – literally. As the Father of Railways, George Stephenson left the world a totally different place. Since the dawn of civilisation, man had moved at the speed of the fastest horse. After Stephenson, life on the planet was never the same again. Motor cars, aeroplanes, space rockets, might have come along since, and gone faster, further, but mechanical transportation began with the railways.

  Railways affected everything. People lived differently, worked differently, ate differently, had holidays differently. Suburbs were created because people no longer needed to live on top of their work. Fresh fruit and vegetables could be brought hundreds of miles. The Grand Tour for the nobs or a day trip to the seaside for the workers was open to everyone who could afford the fare. The original railways were steam fired, but they created an early form of the electric village, in that communications expanded, local times were standardised into one national time, people were brought nearer to each other, the world began to shrink.

  Would railways have arrived without Stephenson? Probably, in due course, but he was the single most important element. He did not invent the locomotive engine – no one person can truly take the credit for that – but he was the one who created railways in the sense that he perfected the primitive locomotive engines, got them to run on rails which no one had successfully done before, carved out the routes, laid down the tracks, built the bridges, and created the world’s first passenger railway.

  And yet his work, his contribution, continues to be undervalued, underappreciated. Some folks confuse him with Robert Louis Stevenson, thinking he might have written Treasure Island. And if they do get him right, they might remember the Rocket from their school days, but then are likely to imagine him as merely a horny handed engine driver rather than an engineer of genius.

  He didn’t even make the top twenty in a recent poll which the BBC ran to find the Greatest Britons. His great rival Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who was far less influential in the birth of railways, did much better, being voted number two, behind Winston Churchill. Brunel, for some reason, has increasingly emerged over the decades as a much more glamourous figure. He did wear that awful distinctive stove pipe hat, which has helped his image and identification. He was also educated, son of a famous knighted father, southern born and polished while Stephenson was uneducated, Northern and rough.

  This biography of Stephenson first came out in 1975 and has been out of print for the last fifteen years or so, much of course to my personal fury. But I see it as part of a wider slur. The book was meant for the general public, accessible to all, even for those with little technical knowledge or interest. There hasn’t been another general biography of him since that time, as far as I can gather, looking on the internet, checking in Waterstones, though there has been a good biography of his son Robert.

  Part of the problem is that the literary and publishing establishment appears more interested in memoirs of minor literary or aristocratic figures from the Victorian age than its great engineers. You can more easily be commissioned to do yet another biography of Wordsworth, which I myself have done, than any of our great scientists, inventors and engineers. Most of our writers, publishers and literary editors are roughly from the same mould, with an English degree or similar, so they know all about Wordsworth, but try to interest them in a Victorian engineer who never went to school and their eyes are liable to go glazed.

  And yet over the years, while this book has been out of print, I have had so many requests for it. Colin Welland, who wrote Chariots of Fire, came to talk to me about him, very excited at the possibilities of a George Stephenson film. There are some dramatic visual events in Stephenson’s life, as you will discover, such as the death of a famous person at the opening of the Liverpool-Manchester Railway. Some great rows, family feuds, a brilliant baddy in George Hudson, and you could work up the romantic angle with the ever so pretty Fanny Kemble. It could make another British blockbuster for Hollywood, or not. As I write nothing has happened.

  I then had a visit from the actor Jimmy Nail, the star of Auf Wiedersen Pet, who was very keen to do a TV series about Stephenson, with himself, being a fellow Geordie, as George. That project too seems to be dormant, if not dead.

  I also had a visit from the novelist Ken Follett, who was researching a novel set in Victorian England which had a railway element and wanted to know more about Stephenson. That did come out.

  When people do the smallest bit of research about life today, in what we like to think are modern times, they soon realise that the birth of railways, though it happened over 175 years ago, had effects and repercussions which are still w
ith us now. And if they do a little more digging, they will discover that there were some larger than life figures behind the creation and development of railways, notably George Stephenson.

  I must admit I knew very little about George Stephenson when I first started this book. I suppose I must have learnt about him at school, then I forgot about him.

  In 1972 I was walking Hadrian’s Wall and went to look at Newburn Church, a few miles west of Newcastle, to inspect their Roman remains. Like so many buildings either side of the Wall, it contains stones stolen from Hadrian’s Wall. In the records of the church, I saw that George Stephenson had been married there, not just once but twice. They don’t teach you about people’s marriages at schools.

  From then onwards I kept coming across George’s tracks, literally and metaphorically, following the railway lines from Newcastle, following the road that Rocket took on its way to Liverpool for the Rainhill Trials and wondering constantly about what sort of man George Stephenson must have been, and not just because he’d been married twice. In reading about him, I discovered a third marriage, but all of them red herrings, at least as far as scandalous stories were concerned.

  In Carlisle I read old railway records about the days when there were seven rival railway companies in the town, all fighting for passengers, and I began to realise the extent of Railway Mania. I read up on the history of other towns and their railways, about the dramas and passions aroused by the arrival of railways. I hadn’t really realised that in such a short space of time railways had not only arisen from almost nowhere but spread across the face of the world. All of it, or a great deal of it, was due to George Stephenson. I wanted to find out more about him. Not just his railways and his engines but about George Stephenson, the man.

  I spent three years retracing his steps, trying to piece together the elements that formed his character, reading his letters, looking for clues to his actions, attempting to build a picture of him as a human being. Over the previous 150 years his railways had been exhaustively written about, yet the man himself had remained a shadowy figure. Samuel Smiles, in his great biography of Stephenson in 1857, attributed most of the known virtues to him, leaving unstated the many faults which his enemies certainly felt he had, and turned him into a Victorian legend. Since Victorian times, almost every writer on the subject of railways has been specifically a railway writer, an expert writing mainly for other experts, not primarily concerned with the home life of their heroes or even how they felt as they saw their creations cover the world. It was a difficult job to find George Stephenson’s feelings. His letters, for reasons which will be explained, tell little, but even this has been largely ignored by railway writers.

  As an outsider, I did not enter into arguments or even discussions about gauges and blasts and tubular boilers. I have kept railway technicalities to the minimum but I hope this attempt at a biography, though meant for the general reader, will perhaps throw some new light on the personality of the Father of Railways which railway fans might have missed.

  Since the book came out, railways themselves have been disappearing fast as the process of closing branch lines, accelerated by Dr Beeching in the 1960s, came to a climax. In 1948, when British Rail was born, it inherited roughly 19,000 route miles. Today, when British Rail has long gone and we are back to a handful of independent railway operators, for the moment anyway, there are only 10,000 miles. So 9,000 miles of track have vanished. One good side effect of this has been the appearance of new walks and cycle tracks, all over the country, converted from old railway lines.

  But the railway system, despite everything, is as strong and popular as ever, politically and economically seen as vitally important to the nation, if a bit slimmer than it used to be. We now have the Channel Tunnel and Eurostar, whisking us from London to Paris in 2½ hours, which even old George Stephenson could never have envisaged. Billions if not trillions have gone into the new railway terminus at St Pancras, which will open up Europe to even more millions who prefer the train to take the strain.

  Steam is still with us, though in a period, folksy form. The moment steam began to disappear from the network, some fifty years ago, it became an art form. Today, the various railway preservation lines carry a total of nine million passengers a year. And steam itself might come back as engineers are working on something called a 5AT, a steam locomotive which looks a bit like those Stephenson built locos, but without the grime and smoke, more economical and environmentally friendly, yet capable of 200 kph.

  These locos might never get built, steaming no further than the drawing board, but it’s pretty clear that railways are here to stay. The end of the line is not yet nigh. What George Stephenson created is still running. So, I am absolutely thrilled this book is back in print. I hope it will help a new generation to learn something about he did it.

  Perhaps I exaggerated when I suggested he might have been forgotten. In 2004, a life size statue of him, holding a miniature Locomotion No 1, was erected in Chesterfield, where he died, outside the railway station.

  Even more exciting, from 1990 till 2003, we all had the pleasure of looking at his face every day, passing his image over the counters, carrying his name in our wallets. Thank you Bank of England for honouring him on your £5 notes. Now, once again, you can read about the man behind the name.

  Hunter Davies,

  London,

  2004

  1

  EARLY YEARS

  George Stephenson was born in the village of Wylam, about nine miles west of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, on 9 June 1781. It was not a particularly great year for Britain. At home, Lord North’s Tory government was about to fall, after twelve years of power. Abroad, there was trouble in India, in the West Indies and in North America. It was in 1781 that Cornwallis, the British general, surrendered at Yorktown and American Independence was assured. George III refused to believe that the United States could ever survive, and fully expected them to come begging to be allowed back in the Empire, but he soon had other things on his mind, like getting out of his carriage in Windsor Great Park and addressing an oak tree as the King of Prussia.

  Up in Wylam, Britain’s foreign affairs were not a matter of great concern to the villagers, though they would doubtless have enjoyed any gossip about the king going mad, but that was being kept from them for as long as possible. Up in Wylam, life revolved round the pit.

  Taking coals from Newcastle had been going on for centuries, since Shakespeare’s day, but the industrial revolution, now well under way, had greatly increased the demand for coal and the means of providing it. James Watt was still busily improving the simple steam pumping machines, which Newcomen had invented earlier in the century, and these new machines were being installed in all the latest pits. With a steam pump, working at the coal face, you could pump out water and increase the length of the field. With a steam winding machine, set up at the top of the shaft, you could haul more men, materials and coal and greatly increase the depth. Tyneside coal was not only responsible for heating and powering Tyneside but the endless coal boats, sailing from the mouth of the Tyne down the east coast, were providing the heat and power for London, now a city with a population of almost a million.

  Despite the national importance of coal, the colliers were amongst the most deprived of the deprived labouring classes, amongst the last to be enfranchised, the last to be freed from the bonds by which the colliery owners had complete control over their work and their lives. There was admittedly plenty of work, compared with some parts of the country, but an aging collier could easily be displaced, as thousands of agricultural labourers flocked into the new industrial areas. The relief was fortnightly, on pay nights, when according to Smiles, Tyneside experienced a saturnalia of ‘cock fighting, dog fighting, hard drinking and cuddy races’.

  Robert Stephenson, George’s father, was working at Wylam colliery on one of the primitive steam pumping machines. He was officially classed as a fireman, which meant he shovelled on the coals, while the plugman was the man in char
ge. His wage was twelve shillings a week. There was a tradition in the family that originally the Stephensons had come across the border from Scotland, but no one knew for sure. His wife Mabel was a local girl, daughter of a dyer. Like her husband she could neither read nor write and signed her name with an X in the marriage register. They were both of slender build. Robert was described as all skin and bone and his wife as rather delicate. From all accounts, George, the second of their six children (two girls and four boys) was a throwback to earlier generations, being big, strong and healthy.

  Wylam today is a pretty, residential village on the banks of the Tyne. It has been cleaned up, the slag heaps levelled and must now look very much as it did before the Stephensons and the other mining families came to live there. In their day, and for the next one hundred years or so, it was one filthy, industrial slag heap. This transplanting of industry onto a rural scene was very much a characteristic of the early days of the industrial revolution. The advent of industrialisation left the towns virtually untouched but the surrounding villages were ruined, turning into slums almost overnight. Most of the industrial workers had rural origins – in fact out of a population of just under ten million at the turn of the century, well over half were still employed in agriculture.

  The feudal traditions continued in these new industrial communities. The mine and the mill took over from the castle as the centre of power, and the worker was dependent on the master for his cottage, his pub, his chapel, his shop, and of course his job. When a mine was worked out, or it became impossible to exploit it further, the masters would look for a new mine, or winning as it was called, and the whole force would have to up and go. This happened several times to Robert Stephenson and his young family, though for the first eight years of George’s life they remained at Wylam.

  None of the children went to school. The family was too poor. As one of the older children, George had to help from an early age with the younger ones, making sure they didn’t stray on to the wooden train way which went past their front door. His first paid job was at eight when an old widow gave him tuppence a day to keep her cows off the line. Horses pulled the coal wagons along these wooden rails from the pit to the riverside staiths, or loading stations. From there they went into keels, or coal barges, down the Tyne and then into the seagoing coal boats for London. As his father moved around the area, George got various jobs at the different pits. He started about the age of ten driving one of the horses for tuppence a day, becoming a picker at sixpence a day – picking stones and dross out of the coal – until the age of fourteen, when he was employed no longer as a boy worker but as an adult, becoming assistant fireman to his father on one shilling a day.