This letter was one of a bundle of letters to William James which was first discovered on 13 September 1930, at 5, Rochester Road, Coventry. An attempt was made to transcribe some of the letters at the time, although all of them were kept in private hands. This particular letter was amongst several ascribed to Robert Stephenson, George’s son. Rolt, when using some of the information in the letter, accepted that it was written by Robert the son.
In July 1973, Liverpool City Libraries bought the bulk of the collection at Sothebys for £1,326 when they were stated to be the ‘property of a lady’ (one of William James’ daughters had married and settled in Coventry). In November 1973 I visited the Liverpool City Libraries, in the process of researching this book, and was allowed to read the entire collection which they were still in the process of arranging and transcribing. I noticed that in a bundle marked as being written by Robert Stephenson, George’s son, there was one dated 18 June 1824, Newcastle. I pointed out to Mrs Evetts, who was doing the cataloguing, that young Robert was at that date on the high seas heading for South America so the letter must be from his Uncle Robert, George’s brother. She agreed a mistake had been made and put the letter, which wasn’t at all important, in the correct bundle.
The following year, in writing my chapter on Robert leaving for South America, I was having difficulty in making out certain words in various photostats I’d taken from the William James letters. In particular, the letter from ‘Robert Stephenson’ written on 18 April was very confusing. I could make out the request for ‘a situation’, as Rolt had done, but I couldn’t understand his reference to ‘wife and large family’. Young Robert wasn’t married at this time, though he might for some reason have been referring to his stepmother as the ‘wife’. I wrote to Mrs Evetts to ask if she’d finished transcribing the letters. Not only had she done so but, perturbed by my discovery of the wrongly ascribed Robert letter, she’d gone through every ‘Robert Stephenson’ letter in great detail and had discovered that one other letter had been wrongly catalogued, the one written on 18 April which had been puzzling me.
She had several reasons for deciding that Robert, George’s brother, was the author: 1) The reference is clearly to ‘my wife’. Young Robert, an only child, was not married at the time, while Uncle Robert was and had a family, not to mention his numerous brothers and sisters. 2) The letter is addressed in much more formal terms than the other letters from Robert, the son, to William James, who was an old and very close friend. 3) The signature at the end corresponds to the one already wrongly ascribed, the 18 June letter, and not to the other known letters by Robert, the son. 4) Checking in the Jeaffreson biography she found that Robert was fully occupied in London at the time, very excited by his plans for Colombia, and wouldn’t be likely to be contemplating another English job. For these reasons she reattributed the letter to Robert Stephenson (b. 1788), brother of George.
In checking the authorship of the letter she wasn’t aware that Rolt had placed such importance upon it. When my doubts crept in I’d already begun to re-examine Rolt’s theory, feeling convinced that if there had been a row over James, George wouldn’t have been so cheerful or have kept in such close contact with Robert, seeing him off almost happily at Liverpool. George Stephenson sounds the sort of person who would have cut his son off for ever if there had been a serious row. It was completely by chance that I approached Mrs Evetts with my doubts, just as she herself was deciding the letter had been wrongly ascribed.
There remains the minor mystery of why Robert, George’s brother, wanted to leave the Newcastle works, and his dear brother who’d done so much to help him, and work instead with William James, one of his rivals.
As this Robert Stephenson achieved none of the international fame and fortune which his same-named nephew had, it’s unlikely that many people will be longing for the mystery to be cleared up, though someone one day will doubtless earn himself a Ph.D. by explaining all.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ORIGINAL MATERIAL – Letters, documents, reports, relics.
LONDON
INSTITUTION OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERS: Brandling Papers; Crow Collection; Phillimore Collection; Longridge Letters; Thompson Collection.
INSTITUTION OF CIVIL ENGINEERS: George Stephenson scrap book.
PUBLIC RECORDS OFFICE (BRITISH TRANSPORT RECORDS): Railway Company Records.
SCIENCE MUSEUM, South Kensington: George Stephenson relics; Robert Stephenson and Company records; Rocket.
NEWCASTLE
NEWCASTLE CENTRAL LIBRARY, LOCAL HISTORY DEPARTMENT: George Stephenson letters; Contemporary newspaper files.
NORTHUMBERLAND RECORDS OFFICE: George Stephenson letters; Nicholas Wood diary.
LITERARY AND PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY: Geordy Lamp documents.
NORTHUMBERLAND
WYLAM. GS’s birthplace cottage, owned by the National Trust, open Thurs, Fri, Sat and Sun afternoons, April–Nov. Also does teas. Tel. 01661 853 457.
PERCY MAIN. George Stephenson Railway and Museum – small, preserved railway, just two miles of track, plus loco museum. Open May–Sept. Tel 0191 200 7146.
CHESTERFIELD
Statue of George Stephenson outside the railway station. Tapton House, where he died, is now an adult education college.
DARLINGTON
PUBLIC LIBRARY, LOCAL HISTORY DEPT.: Pease Letters; Stockton and Darlington Railway Company Records.
DARLINGTON RAILWAY MUSEUM, NORTH ROAD STATION: Locomotion No 1, plus other engines and relics, including Hackworth’s ‘Derwent’, 1845.
LIVERPOOL
CITY LIBRARY, RECORDS OFFICE: Liverpool and Manchester Railway documents; William James letters.
YORK
NATIONAL RAILWAY MUSEUM, LEEMAN RD: working replica of Rocket.
BOOKS – Contemporary and Near Contemporary
Booth, Henry An Account of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway (Liverpool 1830)
Bowen Cooke, C. J. British Locomotives (Whittaker 1893) Condor, F. R. Personal Recollections of English Engineers (Hodder and Stoughton 1868)
Jeaffreson, J. C. The Life of Robert Stephenson, 2 vols (London 1864)
Jeans, J. S. History of the Stockton and Darlington Railway (London 1875, reprinted by Frank Graham, Newcastle, 1974)
Kemble, Fanny Records of a Girlhood (London 1878)
Knight, H. C. The Rocket (London 1877)
Mackay, Thomas The Autobiography of Samuel Smiles, completed 1889 (John Murray 1905)
Pease, Sir Alfred (ed) The Diaries of Edward Pease (London 1907)
E.M.S.P. The Two James’s and the Two Stephensons (London 1861, reprinted by David and Charles, 1974)
Pease, Mary Henry Pease (London 1847)
Smiles, Samuel Life of George Stephenson (John Murray 1857 – first edition)
Smiles, Samuel Lives of the Stephensons (John Murray 1864)
Summerside, T. Anecdotes, Reminiscences and Conversations of and with the Late George Stephenson, Father of Railways (London 1878)
Wood, Nicholas A Practical Treatise on Railroads (London 1825)
BOOKS – Modern and Near Modern
Bailey, Michael R. Robert Stephenson, the Eminent Engineer (Ashgate, 2003)
Carlson, Robert The Liverpool and Manchester Railway Project, 1821–1831 (David and Charles 1969)
Coleman, Terry The Railway Navvies (Hutchinson 1965)
Darby, Michael Early Railway Prints (Victoria and Albert Museum 1974)
Dendy Marshall, C. F. Centenary History of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway (The Locomotive Publishing Co. Ltd 1930)
Dendy Marshall, C. F. A History of British Railways down to the Year 1930 (O.U.P. 1938)
Emden, Paul Quakers in Commerce (Sampson Low 1939)
Gard, R. M. Northumbrian Railways from 1700 (Northumberland Records Office, Exhibition Catalogue 1969)
Gard, R. M. and Hartley, J. R. Railways in the Making (University of Newcastle, Archive Teaching Unit No. 3, 1969)
Jarvis, Adrian, George Stephenson (Lifeline Mini Biographies, Shi
re Publishing, 2004)
Lambert, Richard The Railway King, a Biography of George Hudson (Allen and Unwin 1934)
Nock, O. S. The Railway Engineers (Batsford 1955)
Parsonage, W. R. A Short Biography of George Stephenson (Institution of Mechanical Engineers 1937)
Reed, Brian, The Rocket (Loco Profiles, No. 7, 1970)
Rolt, L.T. C. Isambard Kingdom Brunel (Longman 1957)
Rolt, L.T. C. The Cornish Giant (Richard Trevithick) (Longman 1960)
Rolt, L.T. C. George and Robert Stephenson (Longman 1960)
Simmons, J. The Railways of Britain (Macmillan 1968)
Skeat, W.O. George Stephenson, the Engineer and his Letters (The Institution of Mechanical Engineers 1973)
Smith, Denis, ed., Perceptions of Great Engineers (Newcomen Soc., 1994)
Swinglehurst, Edmund The Romantic Journey, the story of Thomas Cook and Victorian Travel (Pica 1974)
Tomlinson, W. W. The North Eastern Railway (Newcastle upon Tyne 1914)
Thompson, L., History of Tapton House (Cranley, 2000)
Warren, J. G. A Century of Locomotive Building by Robert Stephenson and Co. (Newcastle upon Tyne 1923)
Westcott, G. F. The British Railway Locomotive (Her Majesty’s Stationery Office 1958)
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