God is an Englishman

by R. F Delderfield

  Tybalt came to him with the almanack idea on his first day back at the yard, soon after he had signed his five-year lease and despatched Henrietta, gibbering with glee, about the business of packing their belongings for transport into rural Kent. The clerk appeared in his office carrying a stack of grubby, paper-bound books that looked like an assortment of railway timetables, and when Adam asked if they were Bradshaw guides Tybalt replied, “No, sir, almanacks, county almanacks. I have been accumulating them by post, and I have a conviction that a great deal might be learned from them.”

  Tybalt addressed everybody in this fashion, rarely using a short word or an idiom if he could avoid it, and Adam formed a theory that it was a habit he had developed a long time ago in order to compensate for his insignificant appearance and lack of inches. The clerk went on to explain that every county in England now had its own almanack and that, whereas this had been so in the earliest days of the century, the scope and format of these brochures had been greatly enlarged by the spread of railways. Nowadays, he said, they were not issued for the benefit of the man of means travelling across unfamiliar country but offered information that was needed by the penny-a-mile, fare-paying passenger, and the commercial traveller humping his skip up and down the country. Most of them contained classified lists of local business houses, summaries relating to agricultural yields, commentaries on local monuments, road-systems, geological strata, the personnel of county notabilities, and, indeed, everything relevant to a specific shire.

  “I have no doubt, sir,” he went on earnestly, “that some of the facts published here have already found their way into your diary but nothing can be lost by verification. It was with this in mind that I compiled a detailed list of all the established businesses in two of the five areas under review for expansion. I chose, for reasons I will explain, the er…the ‘Western Wedge’, and the ‘Southern Square.’”

  Adam smiled when Tybalt mentioned the two territories by nickname, knowing that he would have preferred to call them what they were named on the ordnance maps.

  “It sounds as if you have been putting my absence to good use, Tybalt,” he said. “Let's see what you extracted from those almanacks,” but he was quite unprepared for the spate of information written on a sheaf of foolscap sheets covered with Tybalt's copperplate handwriting.

  It was astounding how much information Tybalt had milked from the pages of dry-as-dust guides issued by Hampshire, Wiltshire, Dorset, Devon, Somerset, and Cornwall. Here was everything that mattered, set down in precise, alphabetical order. The cereal, fruit, and dairy areas in the Hampshire plain, the milk-processing plants and bacon-curing factories further west, the cider apple output, the fish tonnage landed at a string of points between Poole and Mevagissey, the flower-growing districts and tin mines of the Cornish peninsula, and a couple of pages devoted to the china clay industry and the staple product of beef on which Adam realised he must depend in most isolated districts. It was all there, with the names and addresses of men involved in each industry, and Adam's sole doubt concerning the indispensability of the breakdown rested on the belief that many of these producers must have established their own transport links with the nearest railhead. Tybalt, however, had foreseen this and said, with a tincture of superiority, “I did not include the front-rank men, sir. Producers in a fair way of business would have their own carts and carters, but if you succeed in establishing a faster and more reliable service, linked to goods trains running over the main lines, you could soon under-cut monopolists in most areas. Look at it this way, Mr. Swann. A has his own transport and B , in a much smaller way of business, depends on local markets, with no chance of selling in Covent Garden, Billingsgate, or the like. With our service, timed to the minute if I might emphasise that, sir, B's products will be in London before A's, and A will come knocking on your door the moment he is aware of this.”

  The logic made instant appeal to him, and it seemed to him that Tybalt should be given credit for some very original thinking.

  “I’ve gone over this ground very thoroughly and made what I thought an exhaustive survey,” he admitted, “but it's a very inadequate one compared to yours. I discounted the smaller men, assuming that everything they produce would find its way on to the stalls of local markets. But how could we possibly make personal contact with all these smallholders and cottage craftsmen? It would take a team of men a two-year canvass, wouldn’t it?”

  “By direct approach it would, Mr. Swann, so there remains the postal service. To break new ground in any of these counties would mean a postal canvass, stating our rates and schedules and that, of course, is what I had in mind when I compiled the list.”

  “You can’t undertake a job of that size. Are you saying we should sign on some junior clerks?”

  “Why, yes, sir, but not from outside. There are two or three of Mr. Keate's van boys who could be taught something more useful than swinging on a tailboard rope. I…er…took the liberty of discussing the matter with the waggonmaster. He has at least one lad I can lick into shape, and two or three others who have expressed a desire to improve their education.”

  “Damn it all, man, none of those urchins have ever been near a school. Hardly one of them can write his own name. Why not advertise for a couple of trained clerks and start ’em off at a pound a week?”

  “If you have no objections, sir,” said Tybalt, huffily, “I prefer to train youngsters in my own methods.”

  “Very well. Get Keate to assign them to you from today. How can I argue with you when you produced a scheme as good as this? But wait a minute, come over here with me and take a look at the maps. To begin with, why did you choose those particular areas?”

  “They were two of the five earmarked for expansion. The other three, if you recall, sir, were The Polygon, north of the cotton belt, The Mountain Square in Wales, and The Bonus embracing, I take it, the Essex and Suffolk coast.”

  “Have you done a breakdown on all those areas?”

  “Yes, sir, and I suggest we should find a substitute for the last of them. That is, if you still intend to open four depots instead of three, as I believe Mr. Keate prefers. He has had no success in finding a waggonmaster for that east coast area, although the lists show the potential is there. The fact is, it is too near London and we’re likely to meet stiff competition.”

  Adam conceded this but added that there was another good reason for a switch. “You’ll have heard I’ve just settled myself in north-west Kent? I’ve made some useful contacts through the agent and the solicitors I’ve been dealing with. We’ll shelve The Bonus for the time being and set up a depot at Tonbridge to serve the Kentish Triangle. I daresay, once we’re established, we shall need a sub-depot at Horsham or thereabouts. You’ve studied these maps, Tybalt?”

  Tybalt said he had used the maps extensively when compiling his lists and had no quarrel with their boundaries, or the siting of depots. Together they searched the areas again, applying a slide rule to the distances between individual producers and the nearest railheads and making detailed notes on contours and river obstacles that would have a bearing on time schedules. It was this task, a complicated one involving a good deal of guesswork, that was directly responsible for the birth of Frankenstein.

  He was calculating the distance between Bristol and Bridport, the dividing line between the Southern Square and the Western Wedge, when it struck him that there must be an easier way of arriving at a figure equating time, distance, and the quality of available roads. He said, suddenly, “What we need, Tybalt, what we must have, if we’re to make full use of your almanack material, is some kind of ready reckoner, something that helps us to make on-the-spot decisions by comparison. Can you dredge something more from that dome of yours before we start the canvass?”

  Tybalt admitted readily that he could not, having already wasted a great deal of time checking distances and railway timetables when they were planning their suburban runs in and around the capital.

  “An index is what we need,” Adam
said, “but it has to be one that doesn’t involve trotting to and fro between ledgers, invoices, maps, and Bradshaws. What we want is something we can use to give us an approximate answer to any one set of queries. Go and clear the ground for that canvass in the areas we’ve selected and steal those boys of Keate's while you’re about it. I’ll think of something, if I have to walk round this belfry all night.”

  And this, in fact, was what occurred, for the dawn mists were over the Thames when he descended the spiral staircase from his eyrie, peeled off jacket and shirt, and washed under the stable pump, to the astonishment of the night-duty stableman, one of Keate's elderly derelicts, who came out of the hay store and stopped to stare at his employer spluttering under the jet. He said, disapprovingly, “Lord ha’ mercy, Mr. Swann. I ’eard splashing an’ woulder bet it was one o’ they loafers who’d climbed the fence to steal forage. I was just gonner fetch my scatter-shot gun,” but Adam said, cheerfully, “I’ve been working overtime, Hoskins. Now I’m going down to London Bridge station for coffee and a bacon sandwich. Throw me a clean horse cloth, there's a good fellow!” Hoskins handed him the cloth and watched him towel himself, pondering the caprices of the gentry who, with money in the bank, preferred to work through the night within close range of a stinking tannery when they might have been home in bed with wife or light-o’-love. He said, “Any special instructions for Mr. Keate when I go orf dooty, sir?” and Adam said, “None for Mr. Keate but a word to Mr. Tybalt. Tell him I’ve invented the ready reckoner. No more than that—‘Mr. Swann has invented the ready reckoner.’ And by the time I’m back make sure the carpenter is available. I’ve got a special job for him.”

  The carpenter, a part-time employee responsible for running repairs on the short-haul waggons, was awaiting him when he returned and so was Tybalt and Keate, both hoping to be introduced to Frankenstein. It meant very little to them on the drawing board, but the carpenter grasped the idea readily enough and undertook to assemble a prototype by noon, providing he wasn’t disturbed.

  It was really no more than a large, slabsided frame mounted on a turntable, and the idea had developed from Adam's comparison between a terrestrial globe and Mercator's projection. It had four faces, each fitted with spring clamps capable of holding smaller frames, and each frame could be lifted out to expose one below. The faces were designed to provide a summary of the four component factors of a long haul, the type of goods likely to be handled in a specific area; the roads and natural hazards within that area; the equipment and personnel available at any one base; and, finally, the time schedules of goods trains running over the railways in the territory under review. The whole thing was designed to spin according to requirements, and there was a set of frames on each face relevant to the area concerned. By standing beside it, and spinning it in full circle, it would be possible (providing his calculations were correct and the material on the frames up-to-date) to reduce the nature and weight of a haul to a formula in relation to distance travelled, time consumed, type of waggon and team employed, and the flow of goods traffic across the twelve areas on the master map.

  Tybalt was captivated by it, declaring that once the result of a canvass was analysed Frankenstein would prove invaluable to the person charged with the task of arriving at an estimate. Unable to wait for the carpenter's prototype he persuaded Keate to give him details of equipment and personnel likely to be allocated to Exeter, capital of the Western Wedge. Then he set about calculating the profits of a ghost haul from Moretonhampstead, in the railway-free fringe of Dartmoor, to the Exeter goods sidings. Soon he had enlisted Adam in a trial run of two frigates, each carrying a load of milk churns consigned for Bristol. The result, they found, was very encouraging. They could do the run at a competitive price and still have the milk aboard an eastbound goods train within two hours of loading. Another two hours, with wholesalers to meet it, would see it arrive at Bristol dairies. The prospect of such a swift passage between cow and customer impressed him, giving him the impetus to begin work on a Western Wedge canvass that same day.

  In the event it was by no means as simple as he had supposed. The summarised material required to fill forty-eight frames demanded concentrated research that kept Adam office-bound for ten days at a stretch, and even when it was assembled, and indexed for easy reference, scores of minor adjustments were seen to be necessary. By the time Frankenstein was ready to spin he was desperate for fresh air and exercise, and with the new target date fixed for July 1st, he took time off to prospect the Kentish Triangle on horseback, basing himself at Tryst in order to superintend his domestic upheaval but paying far more attention to a follow-up of Tybalt's postal canvass of the area.

  Replies were coming in now, first in a steady trickle, later in a stream amounting to an overall result of around forty per cent of the whole. Browsing through them, and preparing quotations, Adam had indisputable evidence of the blight that had struck the national road haulage system since the completion of a mainline railway system within the last few years. Short-run haulage was booming, as his own London returns proved, but medium and long-distance transport had undergone a dramatic decline. In many rural areas no regular waggon service for heavy goods or produce existed, so that he sometimes wondered how all these teeming cities were fed and how difficult it must be for some of the locally based craftsmen to seek markets beyond their doorsteps. It was as though, with the arrival of the gridiron, the British had been segregated into categories of first, second, and third class citizens, like the passengers they whirled from one end of the country to the other. At one end of the scale were big manufacturers, city merchants, and well-established tradesmen, who could transport products at a speed undreamed of only twenty years before. At the other end was an agriculture drained of its labour force and communities living in small towns and villages that were as isolated as Crusoes if they happened to live far from the main arteries of the railroad companies. Spurs were entirely dependent upon population. The big companies saw no reason to waste mainline profits by opening up cross-country lines to serve a limited or scattered community.

  It was a state of affairs, however, of which he had no reason to complain. With something like eight hundred contracts written into his ledgers he was tempted to take an even bigger gamble, by opening eight or ten depots, instead of confining himself, for the time being, to four. He held back, however, inhibited partly by staffing problems, partly by a reluctance to put more strain on the shoulders of the indefatigable Tybalt and his apprentice clerks.

  Avery seldom appeared in the yard more than once a week. The partnership that existed between them was absurdly loose and, in actual fact, Adam was never really clear as to the extent of his reserves, for they had nothing in writing and their financial arrangements continued to rest on mutual confidence, apart from the fixed rate of interest for the two initial advances.

  His books told him that the necklace had so far yielded him a little over five thousand pounds, but he could never make up his mind whether this was wholly or partly Avery's money, or how many of the stones representing their reserve capital had been disposed of by his intermediary. It seemed to him a very weak link in what was becoming a solid chain of enterprise, but when he raised the matter, suggesting that they should have a proper agreement drawn up, Avery flatly declined to enter into any such arrangement, pointing out that the less lawyers knew about the source of the money the better. Adam, he said, could draw on his account if he needed fresh capital at any time, and Avery expressed himself wholly in favour of more and more expansion. Aware that inquiries concerning the source of capital might be awkward, and might even put the whole venture in jeopardy, Adam followed his advice and let this side of the business drift. In this respect, he told himself, he was in the fashion. Every day now he crossed paths with merchants in a very big way of business, who blithely borrowed what seemed to him astronomical sums from banking houses and from one another in order to invest in all kinds of dubious ventures, both here and in faraway places where men like Rober
ts were opening up new and apparently limitless markets.

  2

  Adam Swann was probably the first city merchant to institute what later generations of businessmen learned to call the weekly conference of heads of departments.

  It grew out of need to correlate the day-to-day work of Keate, responsible for personnel and rolling stock, Tybalt, immersed in his gigantic canvass, as well as the income and outgoings of the parent yard, Blubb, the ex-coachman, who was a kind of quasi-sergeant-major of the London waggoners and their apprentices, and himself, as the man who had elected to drive this unlikely team across half England.