The saddest blow he had to bear, while still at a relatively early stage in his career, was the long illness and death of his wife Fanny. They’d had several very happy domestic years together since moving from Newcastle to their London house in Haverstock Hill. She was a strong personality, much stronger than any of George’s wives, and Robert leaned on her heavily. ‘She ruled her husband,’ says Jeaffreson, ‘without ever seeming to rule him, and was much liked by all his friends.’ She was fond of social occasions and took an equal part in entertaining Robert’s distinguished friends, such as Professor Wheatstone, the co-inventor of the electric telegraph. She was obviously a rather lively lady – and so was a young girl cousin of hers who stayed with them for some time. In a long, rather boring letter to one of their mutual relations Robert had said that ‘we are all tolerably well at Hampstead’. She had grabbed the letter and added a much more pertinent PS.
My dear Uncle, – Cousin Fanny would have filled up this part but she is in bed with a sick headache. Tell Mr Hardcastle Mr G. Stephenson’s brother Robert is dead, the new groom has been thrown from his horse and both horse and man are at presently perfectly useless. This is what Mr Stephenson calls being tolerably well at Hampstead.
Robert always worked very hard, doing two hours’ study every morning before breakfast, reading the latest scientific magazines and books. Under his wife’s direction, he took an interest in poetry and collecting works of art, but scientific subjects were always his first interest. On Sundays he accompanied her to the parish church in Hampstead and in the afternoon walked with her on the Heath. Not long after they came down to London she persuaded him against his real wishes, to apply to the College of Heralds for a coat of arms. The family was traced, rather indirectly, to some Scottish Stephensons who’d once had arms and having been dished up with a crest and other garnishings, Mrs Stephenson had them painted on dishes and other objects. Jeaffreson recounts how, long after his wife’s death, Robert was still regretting being pushed into such snobbery. ‘Ah, I wish I hadn’t adopted that foolish coat of arms,’ he said, his eye chancing to fall on an object ornamented with his arms. ‘Considering what a little matter it is, you could scarcely believe how often I have been annoyed by that silly picture.’
Perhaps if she had lived longer she might have persuaded Robert to have accepted the knighthood when offered, though by then she might have agreed that he was successful and famous enough not to need a title, compared with the days when they first arrived in London and she was trying to find a social position.
She died in October 1842, after two years of great pain, bad years for Robert anyway as he had been facing near bankruptcy through the Stanhope disaster. The bad headaches had been finally diagnosed as cancer. ‘My dear Fanny died this morning at five o’clock,’ wrote Robert in his diary. ‘God grant that I may close my life as she has done in the true faith and in charity with all men. Her last moments were perfect calmness.’ Her last request to Robert was that he should marry again. He was only thirty-eight. Fanny had been unable to have any children and it had been a great disappointment for both of them. Robert would have loved a son to take on the family concerns. He knew that his own success had given his father boundless pleasure throughout life.
Robert never remarried and instead looked for solace elsewhere, most of all in work but also in drugs. Once his wife died, he couldn’t bear to remain in their Haverstock Hill house and moved almost at once to a house in town, nearer his office, at Cambridge Square, Hyde Park. He had scarcely moved all his furniture in when a fire destroyed much of the new house and he himself had a narrow escape from the flames. The drugs are never mentioned by name but one assumes it might have been opium, a popular escape used by some of the intellectual classes of the day. It could have been cocaine, which was what Sherlock Holmes injected himself with.
He was habitually careless of his health [wrote Smiles], and perhaps he indulged in narcotics to a prejudicial extent. Hence he often became ‘hipped’ and sometimes ill. When Mr Sopwith … succeeded in persuading Mr Stephenson to limit his indulgence in cigars and stimulants, the consequence was that by the end of the voyage he felt himself, as he said, ‘quite a new man’. But he was of a facile, social disposition and the old associations proved too strong for him.
F. R. Condor says that very early on Robert was addicted to calomel, a form of mercury, which he took during the anxious days on the London and Birmingham. Condor was the engineer who worked with Robert and he gives several personal observations of him in his memoirs.
Robert Stephenson, in those days, almost lived on the line, and the personal appearance of that fortunate engineer is not unfamiliar to many of those whose eyes never rested on his energetic countenance, frank bearing, and falconlike glance. It is rarely that a civilian has so free and almost martial an address; it is still more rare for such features to be seen in any man who has not inherited them from a line of gently-nurtured ancestors. In the earlier days of Robert Stephenson, he charmed all who came in contact with him. Kind and considerate to his subordinates, he was not without occasional outbursts of fierce northern passion, nor always superior to prejudice. He knew how to attach people to him; he knew also how to be a firm and persistent hater. During the whole construction of the London and Birmingham line, his anxiety was as great as to lead him to very frequent recourse to the fatal aid of calomel. At the same time his sacrifice of his own rest, and indeed of necessary care of his health, was such as he would have soon destroyed a less originally fine constitution. He has been known to start on the outside of the mail, from London for Birmingham, without a great coat, and that on a cold night; and there can be little doubt that his early and lamented death was hastened by this ill-considered devotion to the service of his employers, and the establishment of his own fame.
When his fame was finally established, Robert treated himself to a yacht, his one great luxury which gave him much pleasure in his last years and was the only real sign of his millionaire status. He never had a country home preferring, as a widower with no family, the company of friends at his London club, or on his yacht. His first yacht, the Titania, was launched in 1850 and his second, with the same name, in 1853. She was 184 tons, ninety feet in length, and had palatial sleeping quarters. He took large parties of friends for long cruises. To keep the crew occupied, and to help a friend he once allowed it to be used for a scientific expedition. It was highly suitable for such a trip as Robert had it fitted with every scientific device.
An old school friend, a Mr Kell of Gateshead, who was a guest on one voyage, gives a very glowing description of life on board in a letter of October 1857.
My old friend and school fellow came down in his schooner yacht, Titania, with a crew of sixteen men, a good cook and a first rate cellar. We had an ample supply of astronomic and mathematical instruments and one person on board, at least, knew how to use them. We made repeated observations at one place in Loch Ness at a depth of 170 fathoms.… At Hollyhead, we devoted a day to the Britannia Bridge. Judge Keogh gave us some amusing reminiscences of his discussions in the smoking-room with Bright, Cobden, Stephenson and other friends from both sides of the house. There was a capital library on board, and a gimbal lamp at each bed head and each man before going to bed selected a book. At seven in the morning a cup of coffee was served in bed to each man, who then read or snoozed till nine; when the decks having been washed, the brass hand-rails and passages all cleaned, he dressed and came on deck.
Robert felt free from his business worries once on board, from meetings and from people queuing up to see him. ‘I find nothing gives me actual freedom from attack but getting out of the way of the postman. The sea is my only alternative. Ships have no knockers.’
He frequently took guests round home waters as well as the Mediterranean. Going round the north of Scotland he would point out places he’d visited on expeditions as a student at Edinburgh. Round Wales he would sail past the Menai bridge and go over the drama of its construction. Sailing down the eas
t coast of England he would stop at Sunderland, perhaps going ashore to retrace old steps.
On one occasion he took his guests to visit Wylam, as his father before had done, and to Killingworth to look at the sundial and then round Newcastle. When he heard that the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Institute, scene of his boyhood studies, was £6,200 in debt he paid half the sum on condition that they lowered their subscription from two guineas to one. This grand gesture might indicate that he was all for educating the poor and underprivileged but from his House of Commons speeches he appears highly reactionary, opposing the education reforms of Lord John Russell. ‘It is all nonsense Lord John preaching education for the working classes. What the artisan wants is special education for his own particular speciality.’ Brunel was even more extreme, declaring that he preferred his enginemen illiterate as it stopped their minds wandering from the job in hand.
While in London, Robert’s favourite clubs were the Athenaeum and, being a strong if independent Tory, the Carlton Club. He was also active at the Geographical Society and the Royal Society Club. His last visit to the latter was in August 1859 when he had dinner with Rowland Hill.
Robert’s last long voyage was at the end of 1858 when he went on his yacht with a few friends to Egypt as a guest of the Pasha, grateful for his bridge work on the Nile and for the railway he’d built from Alexandria to Cairo in 1856. They took their time getting there, stopping at Malaga, Algiers and Malta. In Cairo he met up with his old friend Brunel who was on holiday and, despite poor health, rushing round the town on a donkey. The two of them had Christmas dinner at the Hotel d’Orient, Cairo, in 1858, the last time the two great engineers of the Victorian age dined together.
On his return, Robert’s health grew worse. He hated going home to his large house in the evening, always lingering in his club, always wanting ‘a little more talk and just another cigar’. His spacious home was hung with fine paintings by Lucas and Landseer, furnished with marbles he’d purchased from the Great Exhibition, but his memories were all in the past. ‘It is the Robert Stephenson of Greenfield Place [Newcastle] that I am most proud to think of,’ he told a lady visitor who complimented him on his London house.
Jeaffreson says that his natural good temper had begun to give way to a ‘passing peevishness and irritability on trivial provocations’. Those who knew him put it down to bad health. ‘Few suspected how he struggled against melancholy and how he looked forward to death. The quiet of his house, when it was without guests, he could not endure. Often he walked about the lonely rooms and sat down to yield to sorrow which in the presence of others he courageously suppressed.’
In a photograph of Robert, taken towards the end of his life, one can see how tired and aged he looked, his eyes baggy, his brows furrowed. His father was at least spared the indignity of being photographed.
Brunel died in September 1859, and Robert followed him a matter of days later, dying at his home in Gloucester Square on 12 October 1859, four days before his fifty-sixth birthday. It was said at the time that never before had the death of a private person struck so deeply into the feelings of the country. He was given the ultimate honour, for a British subject, of being buried in Westminster Abbey. The queen expressed her personal regrets and in consideration of Robert’s ‘world wide fame’ and ‘the country’s great loss’ she gave permission for his funeral cortege to pass through Hyde Park to the abbey, another unusual honour, never before given to someone not a member of the royal family, let alone a commoner. It was almost as if the Establishment were putting old George in his place once and for all, accentuating by comparison the humbleness of his provincial burial, or perhaps it was the nation making up for it, turning on the pomp and circumstance to mark the end of the Stephensons. Whatever any subconscious reasons, the funeral became a public occasion. Everyone of any note, in politics and science and society, crowded into the abbey – two thousand tickets were issued but three thousand people crammed in – and the entire route was lined with silent worshippers. Joseph Locke, the old rival of George’s, and now president of the Institution of Civil Engineers, was one of the distinguished pall bearers. On the Thames, Tyne, Wear and Tees, shipping lay silent with flags at half mast. Throughout Tyneside, all business ceased at midday and the fifteen hundred employees of Robert Stephenson and Company marched silent through the streets to a memorial service at St Nicholas.
When his will was proved, Robert was found to have left just over £400,000. Most of it went in legacies to his engineering friends and colleagues, to his relations, and to worthy institutions, particularly in Newcastle, such as £10,000 to the Royal Infirmary and £7,000 to the Lit. and Phil. There was one bequest of £2,000 which, rather surprisingly, considering his lack of interest in the church, went to something called The Society for Providing Additional Curates in Populous Places.
His grand funeral was doubtless seen as the end of an era, coming as it did so quickly after the death of Brunel, but in comparing it with George’s more modest final rites it has to be emphasised that Robert was a national figure and was genuinely loved by all his contemporaries. A public testimonial had been raised for Robert as early as 1839, £1,250 being subscribed in a matter of days. (And George Hudson wasn’t even on the committee.) George Stephenson’s own testimonial came much later.
Jeaffreson explains the difference in popularity between them as being a matter of north and south.
The fine old man, whose kindest teacher had been adversity, was not duly appreciated in the metropolis. His manners were rugged and far from prepossessing and his personal connections were for the most part in his ‘old country’. For one inhabitant of London who visited the Liverpool and Manchester line, ninety nine were familiar with the works of the London and Birmingham Railways. It is therefore easy to account for the fact that the Father of the Railways system saw his son publicly honoured whilst he himself had been comparatively unnoticed.
Robert had complete universal acclaim in his lifetime, though he would no doubt have preferred a more humble domestic happiness. His acclaim was justified, but it is an acclaim which is now almost totally forgotten. George, however, came into his own not long after his son’s death.
It took about ten years, after Robert himself had died, before the George Stephenson industry moved into full force, and it was probably Samuel Smiles who gave it the first big push. His 1857 biography was an instant success with the public. It came out eventually as part of his series on the lives of the great engineers, The Life of George Stephenson being volume 3. (The first two volumes included the lives of Sir Cornelius Vermuyden and Sir Hugh Middleton who presumably must have been known to at least some Victorians.) Smiles travelled extensively for his Stephenson book, going back to Wylam to interview old school friends, old associates like Edward Pease and old friends like John Dixon. He didn’t interview Nicholas Wood because Wood demanded a present worth £3,000. (Wood’s information, says Smiles in his own autobiography, ‘was not worth 3,000 farthings’.) Robert Stephenson had been surprised at the idea of a biography, saying that nobody in the literary world would be interested, but he gave every assistance, read the manuscript and added a weighty and lengthy appendix on the state of the railway system in 1857.
The book was obviously greatly influenced by Robert, unwittingly or not. When he sent a bundle of letters about William James to Smiles he added a covering note.
There is a bundle of James’s which characterise the man very clearly as a ready, dashing writer but no thinker at all on the practical part of the subject he had taken up. It was the same with everything he touched. He never succeeded in anything and yet possessed a great deal of taking talent. His fluency of conversation I never heard equalled, and so you would judge from his letters.
Smiles produced a comprehensive piece of journalism, over five hundred tightly packed pages, and it was immediately attacked by some of George’s old rivals for being a white wash, painting a glowing account of his character and giving the Stephenson side on almost ev
ery technical issue. The public, however, loved it and it was reprinted many times and sold one hundred thousand copies by the end of the century. It appeared in several guises including an abridged version called The Story of the Life of George Stephenson. The facts of George’s rise to fame, his perseverance and self-help were irrefutable but Smiles made the most of them to prove his own philosophy of life which he outlined in his even more successful book Self Help. This had been turned down before he wrote the Stephenson book but his publisher now jumped at it and it sold 250,000 copies, becoming a moral bible for the Victorian age.
The Band of Hope was one of the first organisations to see the moral appeal of George’s life and they were issuing potted histories of his life and hard times at a penny a sheet from 1859. One of the most popular paintings in Victorian times shows George as part of a beautiful family group. It still sells well today – the Science Museum has post cards of it – but it is a completely false picture as hardly any of the people were alive together at the same time in real life. Little Fanny, who died at three weeks, is shown looking about five years old, standing with her mother, who also died young, with George’s next wife, his mother, his father and Robert as an adult, all of them striking suitably lyrical but impossible poses.
So great was George’s new-found popularity, now that everyone knew the full and wonderful story, that there was a movement to have his remains removed from the little church in Chesterfield to Westminster Abbey. This so incensed William James’ daughter that it appears to have been the main reason why she published her vitriolic attack on him in 1861. His body, however, was not removed.
The various subscriptions, and talks of subscriptions, which had occurred just after his death, all came to life again in the 1860s, having either fizzled out or disappeared. A handsome statue of George, which had been talked about immediately after his death, was finally erected in Newcastle in 1862, almost outside the Literary and Philosophical Society, not far from the High Level Bridge. In Chesterfield, they didn’t get their memorial completed until 1879 but it too was suitably handsome – a large red brick building in the centre of the town, the Stephenson Memorial Hall. An appeal had been launched for some sort of memorial twenty years previously, to build a home for miners, but had failed. This time the subscription list was terribly impressive, headed by the Duke of Devonshire (£500) and the Duke of Rutland (£100). It included George’s former secretary, F. Swanwick (£100), who still lived in the area.
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