Railway Empire

by Anthony Burton

  There seem to have been two distinct types of involvement. First there was involvement in old, developed countries with industries which, if not as well developed as those of Britain, were at least firmly set in place. Mostly these were centres with centuries-long and well-established patterns of settlement. In Europe, countries took from Britain just as much as they needed to kick-start their own systems. In young, self-confident America there was no more than a quick look at the British experience before the locals decided they could manage on their own and would make their own way down different paths. It was in the parts of the world which were coloured red, the lands of the Empire, that the British were to stay longest and achieve most, though even here there were subtle divisions. There were the lands such as Canada and Australia where the indigenous population was pushed aside or, if they resisted, annihilated. Here the settlers rapidly took on a fresh identity as citizens of a new country and, as often as not, began to resent the ties that held them to the mother country. In other cases, and India is the prime example, the British came not as settlers but as rulers. They had no doubt as to their identity, nor where their loyalties lay. Yet despite the differences there runs through this early railway building a current of Britishness, sometimes admirable, sometimes objectionable and occasionally mildly absurd.

  There was always something suspect in the notion of exporting British solutions as solutions to fundamentally different problems abroad. It was absurd to manufacture thousands of tons of ironwork to send to Canada to build bridges in the middle of enormous forests. It was absurd to construct cast-iron ‘Moghul style’ temples in Britain and then send these crude pastiches out to the country which had invented the style: yet Moghul decorations cast in British foundries did grace the railway bridges of India. It was absurd to send out navvies to countries in South America where they were ravaged by tropical diseases, when there was a huge local workforce available completely immune to them. The examples are countless. In part this attitude to the outside world reflects a sense of superiority among the British, confident that no foreigner can do anything as well as they can. In part, at least in the early years, it reflected a nervousness among the overseas backers faced by a, for them, new and untried technology. The British were, of course, usually convinced, and often with justification, that they were the best. Their attitude to foreigners, even when those foreigners were their employers, was not necessarily designed to win friends. An Italian committee who got together to consider Brunel’s proposals for the Piedmont Railway received the full Brunelian broadside. He wrote to Babbage, his man on the spot, in 1844:

  It is all so contemptibly childish that it requires some patience to answer it … They go to work as if I had been an operative employed by them to furnish sections & plans of the various lines of Country for them to select and direct – instead of the case being that I was called as a person assumed to be more experienced & more competent than they are, and their business only to see on the part of the Govt, that the proposed line is acceptable …

  Not an attitude likely to endear him to the Italians.

  Not every British engineer had the arrogance of Brunel, nor did every British engineer show the supercilious low regard for the ‘native’ that was all too evident among some of the pith-helmeted pioneers. It is all too easy to denounce the easy sense of superiority, but these were men of their age. They often took with them their wives, who were also of their age, ignorant, very often, of the world into which they were moving, but stalwart and ready to put up with almost any privations to keep their family together. Many suffered badly, bringing up children in a distant land only to see them succumb to one of the many diseases that attacked the British pioneers. Mary Angus, wife of the Scots engineer David Angus, was destined to spend many years in South America, but she set out for Argentina in clothes made of camel hair! Over the years she was to endure a great deal. En route to Paraguay with husband and children, the journey began with a 600-mile passage up the River Parana to Asuncion, then continued by rail with the family packed into a goods wagon. This was followed by a night in a filthy hotel with a madman rushing about outside, threatening to kill them all. The next stage was by slow bullock-cart which involved sleeping rough and passing through swamps where the drivers regaled them with cheerful stories of the boa-constrictors which were over 20 feet long and capable of swallowing a bullock. Eventually after days of arduous travel they arrived and were all able to sit down to ‘a nice rice pudding’. The women, such as Mrs Angus, were often true heroines, even if their husbands may have been flawed heroes. Few questioned the rights of Europeans to rule over other races, but in this the railway builders were neither more nor less liberal than the majority of their fellow citizens. We should not judge the attitudes of a century ago from the moral standpoint of today. If we do, this whole story becomes one of unbridled commercial imperialism and we lose sight of what were without doubt outstanding achievements.

  Britain brought railways to the world. Whatever the motives might have been, the systems they built are a reality that have long outlasted them. The faults of the British were no doubt great, their attitudes sometimes deplorable, but nothing can take away from two irrefutable facts: the labour was enormous; the achievement was immense.

  Appendix

  It would not be possible, in one book, to list every railway in the world to which the British contributed. But to give at least an inkling of just how wide this network spread, the following list, abstracted from Helps’ biography, lists the overseas projects for which Thomas Brassey was the contractor. It includes the names of his partners and of the engineers with whom he worked. Brassey was not necessarily personally involved in each of these contracts. Sometimes, as in Australia, the work was entrusted to one of his agents. It is, nevertheless, a remarkable record and eloquent testimony to the worldwide influence of just one great contractor.

  Acknowledgements

  I should like to offer special thanks to Mary Murphy and Mike Chrimes of the Institution of civil Engineers and Theo Dunnet of the Radciffe science Library for their help in researching this book, and to the following institutions for permission to use the illustrations on the pages indicated below.

  Cité du Train, 50;Crown agents, 192, 193, 194, 212; DB Museum im Verkenersmuseum, Nurmberg, 53;Institution of Civil Engineers, 38, 44, 102, 108, 112, 117, 146, 148, 202, 203, 230, 233, 234, 242, 245; John Scott Morgan, 73, 124, 126, 154, 157, 158, 159, 160, 163, 164, 166, 167, 168, 190, 219, 238, 241; Milestone 92½, 76, 83, 84, 178, 185, 186, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 247; Museu del Ferrocarril de Catlunya, 56, 59; Patrick Giraud, 70; Royal Commonwealth Society, 170, 198, 201; Science & Society, 25; Smithsonian, 94; Stanley Museum, 128; Tyne & Wear Archives, 189

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6

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