He soon showed that he had an eye for the main chance. Whilst working at Grahamstown, he hit on a railway scheme of his own. Grahamstown itself was linked to the sea by a 110-mile river trip to Port Elizabeth. A far shorter route was available overland to Port Alfred. Pauling proposed to the government that if they would agree to subsidize the line, he would undertake to raise the rest of the capital in England. The government agreed to put up £1500 a mile and Pauling set off, armed with a photograph showing the harbour at Port Alfred crowded with craft. What the photograph did not have was any indication of scale: the English investors were not to know that most of the ‘cargo vessels’ shown in the picture were scarcely bigger than rowing boats on the Serpentine. In the meantime, Pauling went back to his old mentor, Ralph Firbank, and formed Firbank and Pauling. The scheme was not quite the get-rich-quick affair that Pauling had planned: the government were cannier than he thought and held back until the job was complete. His troubles were compounded when Ralph Firbank died unexpectedly, but Pauling was nothing if not resourceful. He had other irons in the fire. Roller skating had just become a craze, and work on the railway to Port Alfred was, for a time, subsidized by profits from the Pauling skating rink – to be recouped when the final government payments were made. This remained typical of the man throughout his life: if one speculation failed, then, no problem, there was always another ready to hop into its place.
During the construction of the bridge over the Victoria Falls goods and workers crossed by means of a suspended basket: these intrepid tourists are about to take the airy ride.
Pauling was, not surprisingly, frequently at odds with authority. Government engineers preferred day work to contract work, so that their income depended on time spent on a job, while the contractors’ rate was fixed. They insisted on absurd conditions. Station platforms were extended far beyond the length of any train that was ever to use them; stone work for even an insignificant bridge over a dried up water course had to be of a standard that would fit a palace or cathedral. Pauling held out for reasonable economy, and as a result the government inspector issued an edict that no one was to speak to him. It was not a wise decision. Pauling met the man as he was leaving his house.
The completed railway bridge over Victoria Falls.
Mad with rage, I went up to him, and after a few brief but incisive words I knocked him down. He refused to get up. I gave him one or two gentle kicks, just to help him up, when his wife appeared on the scene. I was so enraged that I picked him up off the ground and, although he weighed over twelve stones, I threw him against his wife and both of them fell into the doorway of the cottage.
He then marched across to the engineering staff and told them, ‘succinctly if profanely’, precisely what he thought of them.
South Africa was a troubled region in the 1880s. There had been wars against the Zulus, fought with singular incompetence by the British, and this had been one of the factors that had led the Boers to seek independence from British rule. The Transvaal and the Orange Free State were given a degree of independence, under British suzerainty. There was little love lost between British and Boer. In the normal way of things no Briton could have expected to be awarded a contract in these areas: Pauling was the exception. Some years before, the Boer leader Paul Kruger had arrived at the town of Krankuil where the English-speaking hotelier had refused Kruger and his associates a room. Overhearing the argument, Pauling’s brother Harry had offered them the hospitality of the work camp, not luxurious but with beds, food and, no doubt, a good deal of drink. Kruger did not forget, and Pauling had the pick of the contracts. Some he may have regretted taking, especially the line to Crocodile Point, a wretched spot where fever raged. One of Pauling’s remedies for low morale was to run a nightly lottery on who would have the highest temperature: the winner was frequently too delirious to be aware of his victory.
Pauling stories soon multiplied. A gentleman with the grand name of John Percy FitzPatrick appeared, claiming to have the concession for supplying all goods and provisions for the workforce but providing no written authority. Pauling waited until FitzPatrick had built his store, fitted it out and filled the shelves before sending a note saying that unfortunately Mr FitzPatrick’s new store was on the site selected for a quarry. Blasting, Pauling said, would start shortly. Store and goods disappeared more quickly than they arrived. Again, it was typical of Pauling to hold a sports day at Christmas, when the thermometer read 115°F. He does not, alas, recall how many volunteered for the races. It was on this line to Crocodile Point that the workforce gave him his nickname, The Great Crocodile, beating the fictional Mr Dundee by a century.
Divisions between English-speaking settlers and the Boers deepened in the 1880s and 1890s. A huge expanse to the north of the Cape states, almost half a million square miles, was given by Royal Charter to Cecil Rhodes’ British South Africa Company, and was to become known as Rhodesia. It was largely unexplored and unsettled, and it was soon clear that the key to future success lay in establishing transport routes with the rest of the world. In 1888, Sir Charles Metcalfe surveyed a line northwards from Kimberley, the furthest point on the line from the Cape system to Vryburg in what was then British Bechuanaland. It was a start, but far from satisfactory. Rhodes himself took the long trek north from the railhead to Fort Salisbury by oxcart, and one trip was enough to convince him that the future lay with railways. This view was strongly reinforced in the rainy season of 1890-1 when all wheeled transport was brought to a halt in the spreading quagmire, and several pioneering families were marooned on the open veldt. The most direct route north was difficult for it had to pass through the land of the Matabele whose chief Lobengula was firmly opposed to the European settler and notoriously warlike. An alternative had to be found and the best answer was to ignore the overland route to the Cape altogether and strike out from Salisbury and head for the port of Beira in Portuguese Mozambique. The contract for the 2 ft. gauge line went to Pauling. It was just his sort of challenge combining danger from disease and wild animals, route-finding through virtually unknown territory and a handsome profit for the man strong enough to see it through. The route led through the fetid coastal plain and wound up through the Udz mountains on its way to Salisbury. Disease was rampant, and six white men died of fever in a fortnight; there are no records of how many of those referred to by Pauling as either ‘niggers’ or ‘kaffirs’ succumbed. Supplies for the first part of the line were brought upriver from Beira in lighters hauled by two steam tugs. This worked well for a time, but when the rains came the river overflowed its banks and became one wide lake. The tug Agnes strayed out of the channel altogether and was caught by a sudden drop in level and was literally left high and dry, not even on the bank but seven miles from the normal river course. There it stayed for three years until another flood floated it free.
The local wildlife was regarded as a source of food and sport: Pauling’s cousin shot eight buffalo one morning before breakfast. The wildlife was, however, quite capable of fighting back. Pauling records:
On one occasion, when Lawley, Mr. Moore, who was the company’s engineer, and I were going back from the Muda River ballast hole to Fontesvilla, the road was in a bad condition and the engine had left the rails three or four times in a distance of a few miles. It behoved us, therefore, to travel very slowly and with extreme caution. There was one truck beyond the engine in which we three were accommodated. We were creeping along at about four miles an hour, taking no particular heed of our surroundings, when suddenly the engine driver discovered ahead a herd of lions, lionesses, and cubs, resting in the side cutting which ran alongside the railway bank. It was an awe-inspiring sight, and the driver was for a moment nonplussed. He knew that he dare not increase speed and run the risk of another derailment. There was not a gun on the train. Few men are valiant in the immediate presence of wild lions, and we three ‘passengers’ deemed it expedient to scramble out of the truck and on to the side of the engine away from the herd. With a view to making as much no
ise as possible the driver opened his whistle and cylinder cocks and commenced to creep past the place where the lions were resting. The noise was too much for them for they all bolted with the exception of one stately old lioness, who stood her ground, and snarled at us as we passed. Had we remained in the truck it is not improbable that she would have made a jump at one of us, but she funked the engine and its steam and noise. Having reached a position of security we counted in all thirty-two lions, lionesses and cubs.
Other workers on the line had even more harrowing experiences. On one occasion Pauling set out on an inspection tour on a trolley – in which he nearly bumped into a large lion. He then came to a point where there was a water tower and a small camp for the permanent way gang.
I arrived there about seven in the morning, and was surprised to find nobody about. I therefore shouted, and in response one of the white men emerged timidly from the tent. I spoke severely to him, because the man ought to have been at his work at daybreak. Then I noticed the kafirs beginning to descend from the water tank. I asked what it meant. It appeared that the noise of my trolley and the shouting of my boys had driven away two lions which had been besieging the men in the tent, and the kafirs had escaped into the tank to get out of the way. The white men showed me where one of the lions had been sweeping under the tent with one of his paws, trying to reach them. They had been dodging from one part of the tent to another to avoid the lion’s claws. The marks were quite plain on the floor of the tent, so I refrained from reprimanding these men for not being at their work as early as they ought to have been under normal conditions.
Indian platelaying gangs moving camp on the Uganda Railway in the 1900s.
While work continued on the Beira, there was a return to building in the south. Rhodes promoted an extension of the Cape line to the flyblown border town of Mafeking, a huddle of shacks and corrugated-iron stores. Its character began to change dramatically with the coming of the railways which brought speculators scurrying north, buying up land and building substantial hotels and shops. Now, in 1893, new plans were brought forward for an advance to Bulawayo, and a junction with the Beira Railway – even though there was an obvious problem up ahead where the 3 ft. 6 in. gauge line met the 2 ft. gauge. Other human difficulties were also having to be faced.
Lobengula and the Matabele were active again, engaging in their centuries’ old pattern of raids on the neighbouring Mashonas. This had been the pattern for as long as anyone could remember, but now European values were being applied in the region: such behaviour was an affront to white rule. A punitive mission was sent to Bulawayo, Lobengula’s capital. The leader set fire to the town and retreated. A party following under Major Alan Wilson was trapped by a flooded river and found itself the attacked not the attacker: it was annihilated. Lobengula retired beyond the Zambesi, but both the Matabele and the Mashona continued raiding each other and the settlers. To Cecil Rhodes the answer was clear: the new country he was building needed its railway and needed it fast. This point was dramatically reinforced when rinderpest wiped out a vast number of cattle in the land, bringing wheeled transport to a halt. The ox cart alone was not enough. Rhodes was to bring even more trouble on his own head with his ill-advised attack on Kruger and the Boers. He firmly believed that the Vitlanders, the English-speaking population of the Transvaal, were ready to rise up in rebellion if given the chance. He offered them the chance in the form of an armed raid led by an old crony, Dr Leander Starr Jameson. It was a fiasco: there was no general uprising and not only were the Boers infuriated, but the British government were scarcely less displeased at the prospect of a private citizen declaring unofficial war on a neighbouring state. The conditions were certainly not propitious for orderly railway construction, but Rhodes cajoled the builders to continue as fast as they could with no regard to niceties.
Moving trucks along an incline in the Great Rift Valley on the Uganda Railway.
The Chartered Company of South Africa gave guaranteed interest on capital of £2 million and Pauling took the contract. It was 492 miles from railhead to Bulawayo: Pauling completed it in 500 working days. The instructions had been to create a line that would be ‘capable of effectively conveying traffic at a speed of twelve miles an hour on completion’, but that gradients and curves should be kept to normal main line standards. This meant skimping elsewhere. The line followed the flattest ground so that sleepers could wherever possible be laid with little or no ballast. Shallow gulleys, streams and even rivers were crossed without the luxury of bridges – these could be added later when time was less pressing. In some places rails actually lay just below the water surface, so that trains would edge gingerly down the bank, slide down into the water with a hissing plume of steam and pull out again up the other side. It must have made for interesting travel. It might have been even more interesting to passengers if they had known just how confident the railway company was about this particular system. Weather can change with startling rapidity in Africa, and there was always the possibility that a train having crossed one gulley would find the next one flooded and the one behind filling up rapidly. To cope with this eventuality the company arranged for a supply wagon to be attached to each train with enough food and water for the passengers for one month.
A reverse on the Mau escarpment on the Uganda Railway.
An early, undated, photograph of a train on a trellis bridge on the Uganda Railway
The opening of the line in November 1897 was a triumph, though Cecil Rhodes himself was not there to see it: the Jameson cloud still hung over his head. There was a great deal of jingoism, notably from the British representative of the House of Commons, Colonel Saunderson, whose speech was widely reported.
They had an Englishman making a railway on the Nile; they had an Englishman building a railway to Bulawayo. He would like to know what force on earth could prevent the two joining hands!
This dream – of a continuous route from Cape to Cairo – was to remain unrealized. The local paper was left to sound a more reasonable note.
We have not a London and North Western, or a Midland Railway to work with, but a line which is faulty in many respects owing to the rapidity with which it has been constructed. There is much to be done to it before it can be made a permanent railway. Bridges have to be built, gradients and curves altered and points rectified before the locomotive will run with the smoothness and regularity which are the pride of the English General Manager. Such a consummation could not be expected at this early date, and when the visitors take all the obstacles into consideration it will seem remarkable that the line was constructed at all through miles of country without water or food for man or beast. Water for the engines had to be dragged hundreds of miles, and when Mr. Pauling suggested the speedy completion of the railway many people thought the proposition an incredible one, on account of the country which had to be passed through. Still Pauling Bros, were as good, or rather better than their word and had the line laid before the time they specified.
But with the Bulawayo line open, Rhodes was already dreaming of new extensions and in June 1890, work began on the line to Gwelo. It had scarcely got under way before all such plans had to be abandoned at the outbreak of the Boer War. New imperatives now appeared.
Within weeks of the outbreak of war, Baden-Powell and his Rhodesian Regiment found themselves trapped in Mafeking, and the way south was closed. The gauge break on the Beira Railway at Umtali between the 2 ft. line to the coast and the 3 ft. 6 in. line to Salisbury, which had seemed a minor nuisance, now looked more like a transport disaster. Every effort had to be put into the task of improving the system within Rhodesia itself. In old comic books, characters faced by an impossible situation used to snort ‘this looks like a job for Superman’; at the end of the last century in Africa, they called for George Pauling. It was Pauling and the resident engineer A.L. Lawley who marshalled the forces that went to the relief of Mafeking; and it was Pauling and Lawley who had the entire Beira to Umtali line relaid to 3 ft. 6 in. gauge. They
had a workforce of 7000 men and they managed the whole job by 1 August 1900, without any disruption to the supplies running on the old narrow gauge line. In the process, they even managed to cut twelve miles off the old route.
At the end of the war, dreams of the Cape to Cairo route were revived, and plans were put forward for a very ambitious route that would run all the way up to Lake Tanganyika to link with the proposed Uganda Railway. The idea was shelved in favour of a more modest proposal, a line to the newly discovered coalfield at Wankie. This would have to cross the Zambesi, and Cecil Rhodes proposed that the engineers should make a virtue of necessity and create the world’s most spectacular railway bridge, bringing passengers within sight of the great Victoria Falls. He was to die in 1902, before the work was completed. It was intended to create a rail spectacular; in the process a major engineering headache was also created. It was, at the time, the highest bridge above water in the world – 420 feet above the low water mark – and near enough to the falls for the spray to beat against the carriage windows. All that was needed was to throw a simple span of iron across this mighty rock gorge. The designer was George Andrew Hobson of Sir Douglas Fox and partners. Hobson described how the start was a little discouraging.
Railway Empire Page 23