The Science Museum is government run and staffed by civil servants and is the sister museum to the big new national railway museum opened at York in September 1975, around the time of the 150th Stockton and Darlington celebrations. This has taken over British Rail’s transport museum which used to be at Clapham, and a smaller museum which was already in York. The new York museum is very much an entertainment museum, catering for family parties, plus research, leaving the Science Museum to be more technical. But York does have a working model of the Rocket, unlike the Science Museum.
CHESTERFIELD
Robert is still lying in state in Westminster Abbey, if you can fight your way through the crowds. He has a large brass plate on the floor and it’s always thronged with people. Not because of Robert but because next to him lies the most popular single person in the abbey, so an usher told me – David Livingstone. They did meet in real life, getting their Hon. degrees together that day in Oxford, but Livingstone, like George Stephenson, went on to be a Victorian legend while Robert, to most visitors, is just another name on the floor.
To see George’s final resting place, however, it is necessary to go back north to Chesterfield. I had a lot of difficulty getting into Holy Trinity Church, Chesterfield, to look at his grave. I was misdirected first of all by a know-all passerby who took me to a gravestone at the front of the church and pointed to the name, George Stevenson. He’d taken many a visitor to look at it, so he boasted. George’s spelling was bad, but it wasn’t that bad. The dates of this wrong George, by a further coincidence, are almost the same dates at the real George Stephenson, who lies inside the church.
I could hear an organ playing so I gently tried the church door handle, in case there was a service in progress. It was locked. I pushed and then banged. I went round other doors and they were all locked, with the organist playing louder and louder. I found the vicarage and the vicar’s son came out and he too banged at all the church doors and shouted ‘George, come out!’ George, he said, was the young assistant organist and often got carried away on his organ. I’d better come back later, say in about three hours.
The church, when I did eventually get inside, still has a Methodisty air about it, which was what Mrs Elizabeth Stephenson liked – whereas the parish church, the one with the crooked spire, is still exceedingly High. George is buried under the holy table at the east end of the church, the simple stone grave slab, ‘GS 1848’ being obscured by a cloth hanging down from the table. Above is the east window, decorated with the initials GS, which Robert presented. On a wall is a plaque to George and his wife.
The Clay Cross Company, which George founded, has now closed. They had many mining records from his day and took pleasure in calling the company magazine The Rocket. Most of their archives have gone to the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in London.
The Stephenson Memorial Hall is still standing, red brick and solid, right in the heart of the town. Nearby is Stephenson Place. Few people in the town refer to it as the Stephenson Memorial Hall as it is now occupied by the museum. The local library has several letters from Joseph Locke to George and one from Edward Pease, but very little original matter relating to George himself, though they have one letter in his handwriting which looked interesting but was hard to read. It was to a local lady who had written to him complaining about her coal supply and with it he’d enclosed a letter which he said was the sort of letter she should have written to him, if she really had a complaint about his coal.
They have a form of passport signed by Lord Palmerston, dated September 1816, which is simply a letter introducing George Stephenson, the celebrated Engineer, hoping he will be helped when visiting Munich. The dates are about right for such a trip but the letter looks very amateurish and badly written, without any Government or foreign office stamp. Perhaps George wrote it for himself.
They also have a massive genealogical table of the Stephensons which someone has done for them, naming hundreds of descendants of George’s brothers and sisters, many of them in the USA. This table states that George’s father was definitely Scottish, either born in Mount Grenan, Ayrshire, or in Jedburgh.
Chesterfield’s museum has a few dafter things, like a sleeping bonnet, said to have been worn by George Stephenson, though there was a long correspondence from people saying an important man like G. Stephenson wouldn’t have worn a bonnet in bed. There are three of his waistcoats and a table from Tapton House, not on display but in a storeroom.
The other half of the Stephenson Memorial Hall is today Chesterfield’s Pomegranate theatre. There was a rehearsal in progress but the stage manager stepped out to tell me that he, and four other grown men, had recently heard footsteps along an empty stage and saw, with their own eyes, a heavy door swing open and close, yet nobody was near it. ‘Lots of strange things happen in this theatre, and I know who causes them. George.’
The strangest, and nicest, Stephenson object in Chesterfield today is Tapton House. It was a school and is now an adult education college. Tapton House is much as it was when George lived there – a large, handsome Georgian mansion, standing on a hill in its own lavish grounds, completely unspoiled, uncluttered, unaltered. The grounds consist of a thirty-acre public park, Tapton Park, and are also used as the school playing fields. It was given to Chesterfield Corporation in 1931 by the last owners, the Markham family, and a highly enlightened education director at the time, a Dr Stead, decided to turn a school into the house, not a house into a school, which is what usually happens when a council gets lumbered with a stately home.
Each room has been left as it was, each Georgian window exact, the plaster decoration in the corridors untouched, the wedgwood blue decorations in the front hall are exactly the same, the polished wooden stairs all gleam. Rooms in a Georgian mansion, being naturally large and rectangular and spacious, lend themselves to classrooms, but they’ve kept classroom apparatus to a minimum. School inspectors with a passion for visual aids must be very shocked. I toured the twenty classrooms when it was still a school with Mr Pearson, the headmaster, and saw few signs of it being an educational establishment, apart from the desks. There are few maps on the walls, no diagrams, no charts, the classrooms have no names or numbers written on them and even the headmaster’s office has nothing on the door to signify its use. Most surprisingly of all, there is no graffiti, either inside or outside the school, and I looked in the boys’ lavatories. Does he beat them all?
‘You couldn’t transpose this sort of school into another building and expect it to work. We have a tradition which has been built up over many, many years and everyone understands and respects it. I never call it a school. Nobody does. It’s a House and we try to keep it like a home. Directions and labels and notices would ruin it. It would turn it into a shop at sale time.’
Each classroom had a number, though every child has to memorise it, and there is one room known by a name, the Stephenson Room, now a first year classroom and the room in which George died. A few years ago his sixth form girls restored it as it must once have been, borrowing a four-poster, some antique furniture and Victorian clothes. The school has only one George Stephenson letter – a note to his friend Paxton, the gardener at Chatsworth, who wanted George to arrange an introduction to George Hudson, the Railway King. They have one Robert Stephenson letter, again to Paxton, this time about a dinner engagement. They have a couple of paintings and a bust but few other Stephenson objects. What Mr Pearson was trying to do was keep alive the spirit of the house as George left it. George would be very pleased. In 2004, at long last, a statue of George Stephenson went up outside Chesterfield Station.
DARLINGTON
In 1975 the celebrations to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the railway put Darlington once again on the railway map of the world, but in a normal year, Darlington as a town is pretty bored by railways. Their football team, which the rest of the country tends to look upon as a bit of a joke, as they’re usually around the bottom of the Third Division, is known locally as the ‘Quakers’
. It’s doubtful if many of their fans today know much about Edward Pease. At one time the railway-men’s galas were the social events of the year, but the last railway works has closed. Their railway history now means little to the man in the street, despite the activities of certain officials who’ve been trying to drum up some enthusiasm for many years.
But the success of Darlington’s Railway Museum, opened in 1975, situated at the old North Road Station, has brought in a lot more railway fans and people on the George Stephenson trail, for it is here you will find Locomotion No. 1. For many years it used to stand on the platform on Darlington Station, confusing all those who queued up, trying to get on, or waited for it to depart. Locomotion was the first locomotive on the world’s first public railway. It’s much bigger than one might expect, gleaming black and rather fierce looking. There are horse-like stirrups at the side where the driver climbed up and then perched on top, on a little platform running beside the boiler, right amongst the works. It must have been very perilous, completely exposed to the elements, easily brushed off by any obstacle or a high wind, or perhaps caught up in the cogs and cranks or burned by the boiler. The fireman was relatively safe, hanging on at the back and much lower down. In front of the driver, as he crouched on top of the engine, was a rope attached to a brass bell at the front, so he could warn the public of his approach.
Beside Locomotion is another engine, Derwent, which is painted green and black, and dates from 1845. You can see how much engines developed in just twenty years. Derwent looks very much the sort of loco which became the prototype for the following fifty years.
In the middle of the town in Tubwell Row, was a small, rather homely museum which had a room devoted to the Stockton and Darlington Railway. It has now closed and the contents transferred to the Railway museum.
One of Darlington Railway Museum’s best possessions, and one which is reproduced in many books on the history of railways, is the well-known painting by John Dobbin of the opening of the Stockton–Darlington Railway on 27 September 1825. It’s a pretty work showing groups of fine ladies and gentlemen standing by their coaches and horses, looking up as the packed train, pulled by Locomotion, goes over a viaduct. It’s meticulously done, loaded with rather lush detail and probably a bit too glamorous to be true. Dobbin was too young to have done the painting on the opening day and is thought to have done it several years later, perhaps from rough sketches, helped by hindsight and a good imagination. But it’s a fine work. I wanted to buy a print or even a post card, but they hadn’t got one. Even the smaller provincial museums sell post cards of their best treasures. I tried across the road in an art shop but they hadn’t got one either, though they wished they had.
I then went to Northgate, looking for number 73, the house where the momentous first meeting took place between George Stephenson and Edward Pease. Northgate was a fine Georgian row of merchants’ houses in the 1820s, judging by contemporary drawings, and Mr Pease’s was about the last one on the way out of the town. Today it’s just another small town high street, dominated by Woolworth’s, British Home Stores and other chain stores. Above a cafe called El Vino’s, a cafe rather less salubrious than its noted London namesake, just beside an army recruiting centre, there is a plaque which notes the site of Pease’s house.
There’s only one member of the Pease family still living locally. All the rest have long since departed with their peerages to their grand country estates in the south. Most of them are not even Quakers now, though they’re still strong in their traditional City pursuits. Lord Wardington, one of the present Peases, is a stockbroker.
In Crown Street stands Darlington’s Public Library, very well organised and with many records of the Stockton and Darlington Railway, and of the Pease family, all beautifully catalogued, far better arranged than many a library in a town four times its size. The guide book to their collection of S. & D. material is twenty pages long – more impressive in fact than some of the actual material.
The most expensive single undertaking for the 1975 celebrations was to renovate the old North Road Station, originally built in 1833 as the first station on the Stockton–Darlington. It was rebuilt ten years later and today is still one of the finest examples of early Victorian railway architecture. It had been unused for the last ten years, having ended its days as an unmanned halt, with railway enthusiasts having stolen any railway bits of note and vandals destroying most of the rest. The cost of refurbishing it, making it the home of Darlington’s new railway museum, was estimated at £250,000.
In 1925, Locomotion had once again been at the centre of celebrations, but they did a bit of cheating. Smoke came out of the chimney, as it should, but it was caused by an oily waste burning in the chimney. The motive power came from a petrol engine hidden in the tender. For 1975 they decided to build a fullscale working model of Locomotion. It was then realised it would cost £30,000, but Mike Satow, coordinator of the 150 Joint Committee, said he would organise it personally – and get it done for nothing. Mr Satow is a retired ICI executive, formerly managing director of ICI in India, and an expert on Indian railways. He turned the project into a vast training scheme for engineering apprentices and talked twenty-eight different firms in the north east into letting their trainee engineers produce different bits of the engine. By the end of 1974 he couldn’t get into his garage, as all the bits had started to arrive, but by April 1975 it was ready for a public assembly.
The new Locomotion proved to be the star attraction of the 1975 opening ceremonies, pulling many vintage coaches and coal wagons.
LIVERPOOL
Until the 150th celebrations in 1980, Liverpool hadn’t been very much interested in George Stephenson. Yet Liverpool figured highly in the family saga. It was from Liverpool that Robert sailed to South America and then, three years later returned. And of course it was at Liverpool docks that the Rocket arrived by sea from Carlisle, all ready to be assembled for Rainhill and its journey into history.
Liverpool’s Central Library, in its local records office, has a fine collection of Liverpool–Manchester letters and documents which are visited by railway scholars from all over the world, especially America. It’s a collection that’s growing all the time. Unlike some local libraries, they’re always interested in buying more documents about their past. In 1968 they acquired that remarkable original handwritten letter from George to his son Robert at the mines in Columbia. In July 1973 they bought at Sotheby’s a collection of letters by and to William James, the original surveyor of the Liverpool–Manchester line.
The 1980 Liverpool celebrations made local people aware of their unique railway history and one of the many tangible results was the rehabilitation of Edge Hill station. Some of the buildings were restored and it was hoped to make it a permanent Visitor Centre and a Rail Trail. The buildings, for so long overgrown, are incredible, a memento of the lavishness of the railway age, and well worth a visit.
As with the 1975 celebrations in Darlington, Mike Satow organised the building of replicas – three in all for the Rainhill Trials’ reconstruction run in May 1980. On a smaller scale, souvenir manufacturers produced thousands of little replicas. There were the usual commemorative plates, medals and mugs, just as there had been in 1830. Any old junk produced back in 1830 for the original opening is now of course a valuable antique, prized by collectors everywhere. By 2030, for the 200th anniversary, anything from 1980 will have a charm and a price. So hold on to everything, even this book…
APPENDIX
THE MYSTERIOUS LETTER FROM ROBERT STEPHENSON TO WILLIAM JAMES
The original of the letter, now in Liverpool, is very faint and difficult to read. The following is a transcript of the entire letter, for which I am grateful to Naomi Everts of Liverpool City Libraries (who have kindly allowed me to reproduce the letter).
Newcastle 18th April 1824
Mr. James.
Sir,
I beg leave to inform you that I have for some time back been in treaty with one of the Mexico Mining Co
mpy as Engineer and the Superintendence of a Railway, having had perhaps more general practice than any other person in that line in the Kingdom, but in consequence of the great disapprobation of my Wife and large family, which must ever be my chief care I am obliged to relinquish the very liberal offer which has been made me, in consequence of this alteration taking place, it has for the present left me in want of a situation. I therefore take the liberty to inform you, that I consider myself fully competent as an Engineer, and have lately made some useful discoveries in the Locomotive Engine, and should you be in want of assistant, I flatter myself, I could be very useful and should be glad to engage with you, should this meet your approbation shall produce the strongest testimonial proofs of my assertions.
Your reply will much oblige
Sir
your most Humble Servant
(Signed) ROBT. STEPHENSON.
Thomas’s Court,
Forth Street.
Rolt assumed that this letter was written by Robert Stephenson, George’s son, and refers to it in his book (George and Robert Stephenson, Longman, 1960, page 96), using it as an important piece of evidence to support his theory that Robert, the son, was being loyal to James and was upset by George getting James’ job on the Liverpool line.
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