George Stephenson

by Hunter Davies

  When James received this letter, he himself was running into financial troubles, which makes Robert’s request all the more surprising, unless he was doing it deliberately to help James who had taken on too many ventures, financing many of them out of his own pocket. James’ health was poor and he’d been very slow to produce the necessary survey and plans for the Liverpool promoters. Robert had already heard about James’ problems the previous year and had written him a very revealing letter in August 1823, just before he had set off with his father on the Irish trip.

  It gives rise to feelings of true regret when I reflect on your situation; but yet a consolation springs up when I consider your persevering spirit will for ever bear you up in the arms of triumph, instances of which I have witnessed of too forcible a character to be easily effaced from my memory. It is these thoughts, and these alone, that could banish from my thoughts feelings of despair.… Can I ever forget the advice you have offered me in your last letters? and what a heavenly inducement you pointed before me at the close, when you said that attention and obedience to my dear father would afford me music at midnight. Ah, and so it has already. My father and I set off for London on Monday next, the 1st, on our way to Cork. Our return will probably be about the time you wish me to be at Liverpool. If all be right, we may possibly call and see what is going on. That line is the finest project in England.

  It would appear from this letter that Robert must have been moaning about his father to James, saying he was fed up, in despair, and wanting to get away but had decided to follow James’ advice and stick it out. Certainly James wasn’t encouraging any rebellious feelings, despite what George may have thought.

  When James eventually gets the letter from Robert Stephenson asking for a job he is unable to give one because of his own dire situation which has now led to bankruptcy. But the worst blow for James comes just a month after Robert’s letter about a job. In May 1824, George Stephenson is given the job of surveying the Liverpool line, displacing poor old James.

  For many years the James family kept up a bombardment on George, accusing him of bringing about James’ downfall and his bankruptcy, intriguing to get the Liverpool job from him. As late as 1861 a book was published called The Two James and the Two Stephensons by someone simply signed E.M.S.P. – later revealed to be Mrs Ellen Paine, William James’ daughter. She attacks George for pinching James’ glory. ‘He has taken the credit for so many inventions from a cucumber to a lady’s frilled petticoat.’

  There now seems to be not the slightest doubt that George acted fairly in getting the Liverpool job, but the relationship between him and James is certainly rather clouded in mystery. According to Rolt, Robert was very upset, seeing the James affair as a matter of principle. James had been an early supporter of George and had helped him a great deal, publicising his name and his engines, introducing him to the right contacts. They had been business partners, taking out a patent together, though nothing much seems to have happened to it, and intimate friends, addressing long letters to each other. Then of course the business of James taking young Robert under his wing at Liverpool, originally with George’s full support, shows their confidence in each other.

  But when times turn bad for James, not only does George do nothing to help him, he takes the bread from under his nose by accepting the job which James desperately needed. Even if it was James’ own fault that he lost the Liverpool job, Robert might well have thought that his father should have at least refused. This then is Rolt’s theory – that it was the treatment of William James, the usurping of his Liverpool job by George Stephenson, that finally turned Robert against his father, convincing him he had to get away. When James couldn’t give him a job, he took the next one which came along, which happened to be in Colombia.

  There is no evidence in any letters to show or even suggest that Robert and his father had an argument over James, but what we know of Robert’s character indicates he was a young man of high principle and what we know of George’s character indicates that he wasn’t a man to feel himself eternally grateful to those who’d helped him in the past. Many years later when James died, Robert put his name to a testimonial to him and got the Liverpool Manchester board to grant his widow £300. George did nothing, and is supposed not to have been pleased with Robert’s actions. In none of his speeches in later life did George give James any credit.

  The time scale fits in neatly – Robert leaving for Colombia almost straight after the news that George has got the James job. We know that Robert had been very close to James. Surprisingly, there is no reference in Jeaffreson or the 1857 edition of Smiles to Robert working with James on the Liverpool line. Had Robert forgotten or did he not want his friendship with James to be mentioned? It would certainly appear that George was jealous of James’ influence on Robert.

  However, there is one mistake in the evidence which Rolt mustered in support of his thesis that it was George taking James’ job which made Robert leave. The only known connecting link at this stage between Robert and James, in fact the vital connecting link on which Rolt bases his whole supposition, is the surprising letter of 18 April 1824, the one in which Robert Stephenson asks William James for a job. This letter, so it has now been agreed, was written by Robert Stephenson, George’s brother, not Robert Stephenson, George’s son. Young Robert never asked James for a job nor had he any known connection with James after he lost the Liverpool position.

  The confusion between Robert Stephenson and his uncle Robert is easily made. Both were involved in the Mexican scheme so the reference in the letter to Mexico no doubt convinced Rolt he had the right Robert – especially if he was already looking for a connection between young Robert and William James. The letter, which was bought by the Liverpool Library from Sotherbys, ‘the property of a lady’, in 1973 has now been recatalogued – under Robert the brother, not Robert the son. (For a fuller explanation of the background to the letter see Appendix.)

  Rolt’s theory might still be right – that young Robert was upset by the treatment of James – but the most important element in his proof now collapses. All the same, whether or not there was a row about James, Rolt was the first to suggest that Robert went off to South America not for his health but because for some reason he wanted to get away from his father.

  I don’t personally believe there was any row, or even a specific difference of opinion over James or over any other subject. It was simply that young Robert, to put it in its simplest terms, was fed up with his father. He didn’t need a pretext. He just wanted to get away. And the reasons why he wanted to get away are surely archetypal. The symptoms of an intense, claustrophobic father–son relationship can be traced back many years and, as so often happens, the son finally decides to make a break. The strong, domineering father has brought up his only son to take over the family business (in this case to help him make the family business) till the equally strong minded son, having doted on his father as a youngster, starts to rebel as a teenager. The son feels he’s been used and bossed around, and decides at length to cut free and for once to be himself.

  The picture we’ve always been given of Robert as a schoolboy is very endearing, the two of them together in the evening lamplight, the son testing the father’s knowledge. It was a story beloved by the later Victorians. In Jeaffreson’s biography he relates that Robert’s earliest memory is of sitting on his father’s knee ‘watching his brows knit over the difficult points of a page’. How Robert felt throughout these years can only be guessed at but there are several anecdotes in Jeaffreson where Robert is being forced to stay indoors and study when he clearly wants to go outside. Spurred on no doubt by all the physical hardships that George endured as a boy, and later boasted about, in fact quite soon boasted about, Robert himself wanted to be out doing robust things with the other lads in the mining village. He wants to go out, for example, and help his aunt Nelly at harvest time and then again to help take the men’s picks to be sharpened (a job George himself did as a boy) but George tells him to �
�mind his buiks’ instead. The neighbours thought George was too strict, forever saying that his son must ‘wark, wark, wark’.

  George was very pleased with himself when Robert was sent to Dr Bruce’s Academy but Robert doesn’t appear to have been all that happy, perhaps beginning to revolt against his father’s insistence on endless study. None of Robert’s contemporaries interviewed later by Jeaffreson remember Robert as being anything special academically. ‘Goading him to work harder,’ says Jeaffreson, ‘gave him a transient distaste for subjects to which he was naturally inclined.’

  As in many father–son sagas, George naturally wanted Robert to have all the advantages he’d never had, especially the education. He wanted his son to be a skilled, trained, professional engineer, a profession for which Robert had definite talents, but was against him studying anything on the arts side. He wasn’t concerned with him getting the Latin, which George also had missed, or being a cultured gentleman.

  George probably made Robert even more aware of his poor health than was necessary, using it as one of the arguments why he shouldn’t be out playing in the street or helping the men, but inside studying his books. The nature of Robert’s ill health isn’t clear, though it was assumed he had inherited his mother’s consumptive tendencies. Having lost his wife so early – and having had her an invalid for two years earlier – it’s not surprising George should be so worried about his only son’s health. According to Jeaffreson, Robert as a boy was ‘afflicted with profuse nightly perspirations to obviate which the doctors made him sleep on a hay mattress. He was liable to catch cold and the tendency it had to strike at his lungs made his father apprehensive that tubercular consumption might attack him.’ Could the nightly perspirations have been psychological?

  Robert always had a strong liking for the outdoor life, perhaps to counter this closeted childhood, perhaps to prove he was as strong and healthy as his father. Bearing this in mind, it could be that Robert’s insistence in one of his letters that South America would be good for his health was a half-joke, turning George’s old argument back at him. Having been forced to live with decisions supposedly good for his health, he was now turning his health to his own advantage.

  As for examples of teenage revolt, there is admittedly no evidence, but some of George’s actions would indicate that George was deliberately keeping him happy, perhaps to counter signs of unrest if not open revolt. In a contemporary situation the father lavishes fast cars and other material presents on the son to keep him at home. The attractions which George put Robert’s way were much worthier, as befitted a worthy father who wanted the best training for his worthy son, and would certainly please a son who was genuinely studious at heart, but they nonetheless smack of paternal peace offerings.

  It is noticeable how many interesting jobs and visits George regularly contrived for Robert. There are omissions and confusions in both Smiles and Jeaffreson, which have obscured for many years the sequence of events in Robert’s early life, but it is now clear from his letters that he was receiving treats since his early teenage days. For example, during his apprenticeship years with Nicholas Wood, George paid for him to have a holiday in London on his own. He went to see the usual sights, like St Paul’s, plus some others which show his scientific bent, such as the London Water Works and one which was the talk of the town at the time – a model of an Egyptian tomb which had been sent to London by Belzoni – which with hindsight would indicate Robert’s early interest in foreign places.

  As we have already seen, he was taken away prematurely from his apprenticeship in October 1821 to help his father with the Stockton–Darlington survey. George even put Robert’s name on the plans as engineer, though it was only on a later branch line that he was in charge. From a tender age he took a leading part in the London parliamentary lobbying for the Darlington railway. Exactly a year later, in October 1822, he’s off on another survey, this time with James on the Liverpool line. He then went directly, if briefly, to Edinburgh university which, according to his letters, he was attending from November 1822. (Smiles wrongly says that Robert went to Edinburgh in 1820, straight from his apprenticeship.) Next of course came the founding of the loco works in his name and then the numerous exciting trips round the country, to Ireland with his father in September 1823 and with his uncle Robert to Cornwall and Devon in February and March, 1824.

  Unlike his father, Robert was educated and literate and wrote amusing and informative letters, all in his own hand, describing the places he was visiting, These letters provide some of the best insights into the character of Robert and of the relationship with his father. Naturally, they tend mainly to be technical, as that was the reason for the trips, reporting back on locomotive possibilities, and in the past it has been mainly the technical side which has been deemed of interest. Even Rolt, for all his good work on the James affair, wrote as a trained engineer and his interests were

  obviously on the mechanical side.

  From letters written during his six months or so at Edinburgh, Robert emerges as a self-assured young man, rather critical of his lecturers. He appears much older and more worldly than his years – at the time he had just turned nineteen – but perhaps his practical experience in the coal mines and on railway surveys made him feel superior to those students who’d come straight from school. Should it be true that George had pushed him up to Edinburgh to free him from James, then this could explain some of

  the cynicism.

  This early letter from Edinburgh was written to Michael Longridge back in Newcastle, his father’s business partner and a lifelong friend of both Robert and George.

  Edinbro’ 4, 1822

  SIR, – I would have sent my Lectures ere now had they contained anything new. Mr. Jameson’s Lectures have hitherto been confined chiefly to Zoology, a part of Natural History which I cannot say I am enraptured with; nor can I infer from many of his Lectures any ultimate benefit, unless to satisfy the curiosity of man. Natural historians spend a great deal of time in enquiring whether Adam was a black or white man. Now I really cannot see what better we should be, if we could even determine this with satisfaction; but our limited knowledge will always place this question in the shade of darkness. The Professor puzzles me sadly with his Latin appellations of the various divisions, species, genera, &c., of the animal kingdom. He lectures two days a week on Meteorology and three on Zoology. This makes the course very unconnected.

  I have taken notes on Natural Philosophy, but have not written them out, as there has been nothing but the simplest parts, and which I was perfectly acquainted with. Therefore I thought I might spend my time better in reading. I shall send you them when he comes to the most difficult parts. Leslie intends giving a Lecture on Saturdays to those who wish to pursue the most abstruse parts of Natural Philosophy. I have put my name down for one of those: he gives questions out every Friday to answer on the Saturday. I have been highly delighted with Dr. Hope’s Lectures. He is so plain and familiar in all his elucidations. I have received the books all safe.

  There’s a rather curt letter several months later, on 11 April 1823, again to Longridge, asking for some money which his father hasn’t yet sent.

  Edinburgh: April 11, 1823

  SIR, – I wrote home. on the 5th, but from yours it appears my father would be set off for London before the arrival of my letter, in which I desired him to send me a bill for £26. I should feel obliged if you will send me it at your first convenience, as I am rather in want of it at present.

  The Natural History finishes next Tuesday. The Natural Philosophy on Friday the 18th. Chemistry finishes on the 27th or 28th.

  I have been fortunate in winning a prize in the Natural Philosophy class, for some mathematical questions given by Professor Leslie relative to various branches of Natural Philosophy.

  I remain, Sir,

  Yours very sincerely,

  ROB. STEPHENSON

  Mich. Longridge, Esq.

  At the end of his term at Edinburgh, Robert went on a geological
expedition led by Professor Jamieson round the north of Scotland. He enjoyed this enormously and in later life often talked about it. The students went with knapsacks on their backs and as Jeaffreson observes, ‘led the same sort of vagrant life which Robert had more than a year before enjoyed during the railway survey’.

  George was no doubt delighted to have a son at university – though that prize Robert mentions was apparently not a competitive prize open to all students but a book award given by his professor to the student who had done the best work. It was an award, nonetheless, and George must have been pleased with

  Robert’s progress.

  In one of George’s rare personal letters he can be clearly seen to be boasting about his son. This letter is quoted by Jeaffreson in his 1864 book, though I have been unable to trace its whereabouts today, nor is it in Skeat’s 1973 collected letters of George Stephenson. From the poor spelling it would seem that George wrote it himself. (Some punctuation has been added to make it easier to read.) He is writing to an old friend, William Locke, who has left Killingworth colliery to work in the south:

  March 31, 1823

  DEAR SIR, – From the great elapse of time since I seed you, you will hardely know that such a man is in the land of the living. I fully expected to have seen you about two years ago, as I passed throw Barnsley on my way to south Wales but being informed you was not at home I did not call. I expect to be in London in the course of a fortnight or three weeks, when I shall do my self the pleasure of calling, either in going or coming. This will be handed to you by Mr. Wilson a friend of mine who is by profeshion an Atorney at law and intends to settle in your neighbourhood, you will greatley oblidge me by throughing any Businness in his way you can conveniently can. I think you will find him an active man in his profeshion. There has been many upes and downs in this neighbourhood since you left. you would no doubt have heard that Charles Nixon was throughing out at Walbottle Collery by his partners some years ago. he has little to depend on now but the profets of the ballast machine at Willington Quey wich I darsay is verey small. many of his Familey has turned out verey badley. he has been verey unfortunate in Famaley affairs. If, I have the pleasure of seeing you I shall give you a long list of occurences since you and I worked together at Newburn. Hawthorn is still at Walbattle. I darsay you will well remember he was a great enamy to me but much more so after you left. I left Walbattle Collery soon also after you and has been verey prosperous in my concerns ever since. I am now far above Hawthorn’s reach. I am now concerned as Civil Engineer in different parts of the Kingdom. I have onley one son who I have brought up in my own profeshion he is now near 20 years of age. I have had him educated in the first Schools and is now at Colledge in Edinbro’ I have found a great want of education myself but fortune has made a mends for that want.