9
GEORGE’S DARKEST HOUR
George was soon to find how very different the Liverpool folk were from his dear North Easterners. Having seen Robert off on his boat he started immediately on the survey, living rough in lodging houses and farmhouses, ‘rising at 3.30,’ so he said in a letter back to Longridge in Newcastle, ‘some days working fourteen hours without bread or water.’ But it was the strength and violence of the opposition which alarmed him.
We have sad work with Lord Derby, Lord Sefton and Bradshaw the great Canal Proprietor, whose grounds we go through with the projected railway. Their ground is blockaded on every side to prevent us getting on with the Survey. Bradshaw fires guns through his ground in the course of the night to prevent the Surveyors coming in the dark. We are to have a grand field day next week. The Liverpool Railway Company are determined to force a survey through if possible. Lord Sefton says he will have a hundred men against us. The Company thinks those Great men have no right to stop a Survey. It was the Farmers only who have a right to complain and by charging damages for trespass is all they can do.
The canal company, with Bradshaw representing the duke’s trustees, had by now realised that the railway committee was in earnest and could become a serious rival. They reduced their rates by twenty-five per cent for freight between Liverpool and Manchester. The Mersey and Irwell Navigation people followed suit, but it was too late to impress the uncommitted or to halt the railway committee. Their propaganda campaign nonetheless helped to whip up the antagonism of many ordinary people along George’s route. They issued pamphlets which claimed that steam locomotives would cause women to miscarry, stop cows grazing, cause hens to cease laying, country inns to close, kill birds in the air, destroy farm land, burn down farmers’ houses, pollute the air, remove foxes and pheasants, extinguish horses as a species and make oats and hay unmarketable. In Manchester, posters appeared in shop windows showing poor, half-starved horses looking over a fence at the monstrous passing trains. In the captions they were telling each other that their lives had finished. To avoid being attacked by the mob or shot at by the gentry, George was frequently forced to take levels in the moonlight, sending men to some other spot to set off guns in an effort to confuse the landowners.
In May 1824, the month that George was appointed engineer, the committee formally registered itself and became a company with a young man of thirty-five called Henry Booth as its treasurer. His father had been on the provisional committee two years previously and he too was a corn merchant, like Sandars. Henry Booth much preferred the excitement of the new railway company and threw himself into every aspect of railway work. Not only did he show a flair for organising support and raising the initial capital of £300,000 but he also wrote all the prospectuses and most of the reports issued by the company from 1824 to 1830. He became the company’s official historian, but, even more surprising, he turned out to have an inventive and mechanical turn of mind. He was a strong and knowledgeable supporter of Stephenson’s engineering and in the end proved to be the source of one vital engineering development.
The progress of the Liverpool line, now that it was moving forward once again, was creating a lot of national interest. With the Stockton and Darlington well on the way to its opening, there was a spate of railway projects up and down the country, though they were mainly colliery lines. It was nothing like the railway rush that was to follow some years later but at the time the handful of schemes that were being floated seemed a lot to George. He was involved with many of the schemes – scheme being the word, judging by the amount of scheming that was going on. He wrote in November 1824, from Chester to Longridge at the loco works in Newcastle, telling him about the busy time he was having. He sounds rather bossy and, despite his apparent moans, obviously enjoying being so much in demand, perhaps even being carried away slightly by his new found success.
Chester, November 16, 1824
Michael Longridge, Esq.
Dear Sir,
There are nothing but railways and rumours of Railways in this country. I am desired to examine Lord Crew’s Coalworks in the neighbourhood of Newcastle under line and give a report thereon; as I can make it convenient to do so. Several other Coal owners in this neighbourhood desire me to give similar reports. How I shall get all ends to meet I do not know. I think your words will come true. I shall have to work until I am an old man. I have a bag full of news to tell you on the defects of your rails. You have got your friends in the north as well as myself. The indirect secrets are getting out. It is astonishing the deep schemes that men contrive for the overthrow of their neighbour: and how often does it fall upon their own heads. I assure you I have been twisted backwards and forwards as I think few poor fellows ever were. Notwithstanding all those difficulties my spirits are still up, and I think I have got four times as much face as I had when I inhabited the north. I am sometimes obliged to use my tongue like a scolding wife.
My kind respects to Mrs. Longridge and your family: also to Mr. and Mrs. Birkinshaw: not forgetting my friend Mr. Gooch. It is now eleven O’Clock and a great deal of work yet to do. I cannot get to bed at your time.
I am Dear Sir,
Yours very sincerely
GEO. STEPHENSON
In a letter to Joseph Sandars in December 1824, George comes back to the same theme. ‘The rage for railroads is so great that many will be laid in parts where they will not pay.’ The rage turned out to be very small scale – only one railway act was passed by parliament in 1825 – but George’s prediction eventually came true.
George completed his Liverpool–Manchester survey by the end of 1824 and in February 1825 produced an estimate of all costs – construction and rolling stock – of £400,000. This was £100,000 more than anticipated during the James survey but the company was pleased to have hard facts and costs at last and immediately announced they were going for a parliamentary bill. They launched a publicity campaign in the local papers, to which the rivals answered back, and for months the letters columns were full of ‘Yours Disgusted’ letters with ‘Veritas’ arguing with ‘Liverpoolian’. To keep it all as scientific as possible the company organised some public demonstrations at Killingworth showing off the strength and speed of George’s engines. The Mersey and Irwell Navigation Company, not to be outdone, did river tests, loading two horsedrawn barges at Liverpool, sending them up to Manchester where they were unloaded and sent back, doing the round trip in twenty-four hours. They did the test again the next day to prove it wasn’t a fluke or a fiddle. The railway company, unimpressed, steamed on.
When the company’s parliamentary application was announced it was seen by all how much progress they had made in acquiring support in London. Of the potential shareholders (who had to be listed under parliamentary law) most came from Liverpool, with 164; but London wasn’t far behind with 126. The Manchester shareholders numbered fifty-four. It augured well for a safe passage at Westminster,
First there was some opposition in Liverpool which had to be settled. A strong element on Liverpool Council was against the company bringing the nasty steam locomotives into the boundary of the city. ‘The vilest nuisance that ever the town had experienced,’ so it was said at a council meeting. Despite the arguments of Charles Lawrence, who’d been mayor the previous year and had become the company’s first chairman, the railway lobby had to agree that they would use stationary engines, not locomotives, at the Liverpool end. The local papers examined the hundred-page draft bill in great detail. The Liverpool Mercury was worried by the ‘vomiting forth of long and black smoke at the places of rendezvous for the engines’. The use of the word rendezvous makes them sound very suspicious, as if locomotive engines – which of course people in Lancashire had yet to see – were in the habit of congregating secretly together and then ganging up on unsuspecting humans. But the Mercury on the whole still seemed to be in favour of the railway, though the arguments continued to rage in its correspondence column. The editor finally announced that because some letters were so obviously pe
rsonal and biased they would in future be regarded as advertisements and the writers would be charged for their insertion. (A novel idea which would no doubt appeal to many of today’s correspondence column editors.)
The debate on the bill started in parliament in March 1825. During the preliminary speeches William Huskisson, president of the Board of Trade, who spoke as a Liverpool MP and not as a member of the government, came out in its favour. He said if he listened only to all the private individuals who had approached him and to those with their fortunes tied up in the canal then he should oppose the bill. He personally had no interests in either the canal or the railway company but for the sake of the public good he was convinced that the railway promoters had aims above the mere accumulation of profit. The whole trade of the area, he said, would prosper with the railway. William Peel, brother of Sir Robert Peel, also supported the bill.
For several months the opposition had had expert engineers analysing every comma in Stephenson’s survey. Once the bill entered its committee stage one hundred and fifty different petitions suddenly appeared, ranging from poor spinsters, impoverished reverends to the trustees of the Bridgwater canal, all with detailed and lengthy objections to the railway. The committee examination of all of the relevant papers and witnesses began on 21 March and sat for thirty-seven sessions in all, ending on 31 May.
The opponents of the bill had hired a total of eight counsel to present their case and it was the cross-examining of George Stephenson by Edward Alderson, their leading counsel, that was to prove the most vital.
George himself wasn’t called for some time. The first eleven days were taken up with the proposers of the bill taking their own local witnesses through their grievances against the canal and river boards. Three corn merchants testified that it took them from eighteen to twenty-four days to get their goods dispatched from Liverpool to Manchester. Others described queues of forty merchants waiting at the canal office to be served. The frequency of bad weather – ice, frost, high tides – was gone into and the ensuing delays on traffic. For six days, expert engineers were called, such as Nicholas Wood, all of whom were handled rather gently by Alderson and his colleagues, though he did permit himself a bit of sarcasm when one engineer couldn’t answer a question: ‘Read a little upon it.’
George was called on Monday 25 April and started off confidently enough, being examined quite mildly, on the general feasibility of railways and locomotives. This was his home ground and no one knew more about it than he, after all his experiences at Killingworth and Hettan. Since 1813, he stated, he had built fifty-five steam engines, sixteen of them locomotives. He’d been briefed by one of the railway counsel, Henry Brougham, on no account to overstate his case. Beforehand, George had wanted to mention a speed of twenty miles per hour, which was no more than the truth, but Brougham said he must mention a much lower speed ‘or he would be regarded as a maniac fit for Bedlam and damn the whole thing’. When Alderson put the question in the committee Stephenson committed himself very soberly to a speed of between four and eight miles per hour – then he damned himself by blurting out, ‘I am confident that much more might be done.’
This enabled Alderson from then on to cleverly and continually refer to the proposed locomotives as going at twelve mph, thus confirming everyone’s worst suspicions and fears. It has to be remembered that the bulk of even intelligent opinion in 1825 could not believe that any machine could travel at over ten miles an hour without disintegrating and killing everyone in sight. Even supporters of locomotives were worried about speeds. A writer in the Quarterly Review of March 1825 (which came out during the hearings) admitted that he was in favour of the Liverpool–Manchester Railway but only if the speeds were kept within reason.
What can be more palpably absurd than the prospect held out of locomotives travelling twice as fast as stage-coaches! We trust that Parliament will, in all railways it may sanction, limit the speed to eight or nine miles an hour.
In May 1825, again during the hearings, Nicholas Wood’s great Treatise on Rail-Roads appeared, and he too warned against excessive claims.
It is far from my wish to promulgate to the world that the ridiculous expectations, or rather professions, of the enthusiastic speculists be realised, and that we shall see them travelling at the rate of 12, 16, 18 or 20 miles an hour; nothing could do more harm towards their adoption, or general improvement, than the promulgation of such nonsense.
Alderson, by encouraging George in the committee to predict speeds much higher than eight mph, had therefore done great psychological damage on a national scale to the railway case. He went on next to ask George about the rate of accidents and if at twelve mph and other high speeds a locomotive could cope with smooth rails, (An old chestnut which had worried even locomotive engineers for years until Killingworth had proved them wrong.) George was able at least to answer such a technical question with care and confidence. He even provoked a smile when one member of the committee broke in to ask what would happen if a cow strayed on the line in the way of an engine doing ten mph. ‘Would not that, think you, be a very awkward circumstance?’ ‘Very awkward,’ replied George. ‘For the coo.’
Alderson at length moved on to the survey itself, for which George as engineer was responsible. Almost at once George’s credibility and confidence collapsed. In managing to complete the survey on time he had allowed subordinates to take vital measurements, many of which were soon proved in the committee to be completely wrong.
Worse than that, George didn’t even have any figures at all for many vital parts of his proposed railways.
Q: What is the width of the Irwell there?
A: I cannot say exactly at present.
Q: How many arches is your bridge to have?
A: It is not determined upon.
Q: How could you make an estimate for it then?
A: I have given a sufficient sum for it.
As a sample of his answers, that was fairly typical. Alderson went on and George was reduced more and more to answers like ‘I do not recollect’, ‘I did, but I do not recollect’, ‘It may, I cannot speak of it’, or ‘It was a mistake’.
To call Alderson’s questions a cross-examination is putting it politely. Poor George was annihilated. Alderson, who’d at one time been a law reporter, later to become a judge and a baron, won his fame by his handling of George Stephenson.
It need hardly be said that George was out of his depth, untrained and ungifted in presenting himself verbally, unable to master his thoughts or arguments and for most of the time unable to make himself understood through the thickness and incoherence of his Geordie accent. His remark about the coo became a society dinner table joke for months. Notwithstanding, and trying hard to avoid too much sob stuff or easy sympathy, it has to be said that George had rather left himself wide open to attack.
George was forced to admit error after error. It was stipulated, for example, that the railway should cross the Irwell at a height which would provide a minimum headroom of 16 ft 6 ins for navigation, yet the plans showed a rail level only ten feet above the water and three feet below maximum flood level. Having established this damning fact, Alderson’s relentless cross-examination continued by proving that Stephenson had estimated the cost of this Irwell bridge at £5,000 without any idea as to its dimensions or form. ‘So,’ he concluded scathingly, ‘you make a bridge, perhaps 14 ft high, perhaps 20 ft high, perhaps with 3 arches and perhaps with one, and then you boldly say that £5,000 is a proper estimate for it?” I think so,’ answered Stephenson lamely, and, turning to the committee, ‘I merely set out the line for other surveyors to follow.’ ‘Did you not survey the line of the road?’ asked Alderson. ‘My Assistant did,’ replied Stephenson.
As Alderson had by now established that there were numerous errors in the levels of anything up to ten feet, he next put the obvious question. ‘What,’ he asked, ‘was the original base line on which all your levels are calculated as marked on the section?’ ‘Near the Vauxhall Road in Liverpool,�
�� came the reply. ‘Whereabout?’ pressed Alderson. ‘I think,’ answered the unhappy Stephenson, ‘about 150 yards from it, but I am not quite sure.’ Pursued further, it became obvious that George had no idea how the base line had been determined.
The final confrontation went like this:
Q: Then it is possible you may be out at other parts?
A: It may be, but I do not think so.
Q: You do not believe you are out on your levels?
A: I have made my estimate from the levels which I believe are correct.
Q: Do you believe, aye or no, that your levels are correct?
A: I have heard it reported that they are not.
Q: Did you take the levels yourself?
A: They were taken for me.
Q: Other people have taken them for you and upon their estimate you have made your estimate?
A: Yes.
An eminent engineer, William Cubitt, who had been employed by the railway company to check certain levels, was forced to admit Stephenson’s mistakes. You have not found Mr Stephenson’s level correct at any one point?’ ‘I have not found them correct in any point that I have taken.’
Stephenson’s counsel, Mr Spankie, tried to defend him, explaining how the landowners had refused many levels to be taken, but he too was forced to admit mistakes. ‘It will be said on the other side that Mr Stephenson, having been guilty of one error, the whole credit of his estimate is shaken. But the truth is that Mr Stephenson, on a datum given by others, calculated it would cost so much to make the Railway.’
The opposition, having revealed countless flaws in the survey methods, went on to take the estimate itself to pieces. One of their experts, the engineer Francis Giles, said that Stephenson’s proposal to take his railway across Chat Moss, a large marshland wilderness, was ridiculous. He personally would never attempt it, but if it were tried, the railway should estimate not £400,000 but a figure closer to £1,500,000.
George Stephenson Page 15