Victorian Dawn (A Poor Man at the Gate Series, Book 12)

by Andrew Wareham

  The four agreed that they could not expand as they wished for lack of able men.

  “It is not that they are idle, Sir William, or even unwilling, they are simply unlearned! To make matters worse, those who do go to school and who would be capable of taking up a skilled trade are taught to wish to ‘better themselves’, to work clean. They leave their classrooms firmly believing that it is better to earn twelve shillings a week wearing a white collar than to take home thirty shillings and have to wash their dirty hands at night!”

  They had all met up with this phenomenon, commonly among their own tradesmen who would go to great efforts to ensure their own sons did not follow them into the yard. Manual labour, even of the most skilled sort, was ‘low’, and should be avoided at any price.

  There was a need for colleges to provide a training in engineering and construction skills, that was obvious. It was equally clear that they could not fund such institutions from their own profits; there must be a tax on all firms equally to pay for technical training in every large city. There was not, they knew, the faintest possibility that government would even discuss such a proposal; it was contrary to the whole ethos of Laissez Faire which the politicians so naively believed in.

  “Would it be possible to add a classroom or two at the Institute for Boys, Sir Matthew, so that grown men, or more likely youths, could spend a month or two at a time there to learn their letters and numbers? Having once gained a knowledge of the basics there could be classes of an evening, perhaps, in which they could improve themselves.”

  Evening classes existed, they were informed, but there were few teachers for them, and very few training colleges where willing men could learn the teacher’s skills, and no sign that the government wished to invest in more. Most of the evening schools that existed were more concerned to teach the Bible than to produce engineers and artificers, so that there was little to be gained from encouraging the men to take advantage of them.

  “The best answer for us is to shut down our yards and open new on the River Clyde in Scotland, gentlemen. Boys in Scotland almost all learn their letters and numbers and are far better employees as a result.”

  “Could we not make that very point in Downing Street, Sir Matthew?”

  “They would not listen to us, Sir William, mostly because they believe that illiterate workmen will not come to read revolutionary pamphlets and will therefore be more tractable. It is increasingly the case that our political masters see ordinary folk as a potential enemy, to be kept in their place and certainly not encouraged to be rational, thinking, learned people.”

  Fear of the Mob was growing among the landowning classes, they agreed – one had only to read the headlines in the newspapers to see that it was so. It was a pity, for it was strangling the growth of the new industries.

  “What of progress in the production of steel, Sir Matthew? Wrought iron has its limits in terms of strength and the size of plates that can practically be made. Was we to have steel frames and plates then we could fabricate far larger, and more powerful, ships. Greater capacity in the holds and larger engines to push the ships faster, and probably using less coal in a day as well. Everything, I believe, depends on steel.”

  Sir Matthew shook his head; there had been some innovation in the field, but very little as yet. There were reports of experimenters in the Germanies, and in France, and he knew personally of six separate scientists and engineers examining the metal in Britain, but so far the solution had escaped them. It was possible that there was no answer, that steel simply could not be produced in the tens of tons at a time and that flat plates could not be fabricated from the metal. Was that to be the case, then they must consider a different alloy, but he could not imagine what it might be.

  He brightened up as he recounted the tale of a local inventor who had come to him only the previous month.

  “Concrete, gentlemen! He was of the opinion that the way forward was to build the framework of a hull from wrought iron rods, all neatly interwoven and welded together to form something like a willow basket. Then, so he quite seriously proposed, one should construct a wooden form, or mould, inside and out, and pour builders’ concrete to encase the ironwork. The concrete would, he said need be wetter than might be used when setting the drains on a building site! Otherwise, it would not flow properly and might even leave air pockets!”

  The three from the south roared with laughter, slapping their knees with glee.

  “He told me as well, gentlemen, that the wooden form should be left in place and used as the anchor for the decks and holds and engine room, it being easier to drill and set bolts into wood than concrete. He showed me a model, some three feet long and one deep. It floated, to my amaze, with a freeboard of less than an inch, the hull empty. He informed me that his calculations had shown that on a hull of two hundred feet length there would be a significantly greater degree of buoyancy. I recommended him to find another and perhaps less commercially-minded sponsor for his invention!”

  “Tell me, Sir Matthew, did he calculate just what weight of concrete would be required, and just how many men with shovels it would take to knock it up? And of course, just how many wheelbarrow loads must be run unceasingly to keep the flow of concrete going?”

  Sir William, the ex-navvy, seized upon the simple practicality of the scheme. Concrete might, or might not float – he had no opinion on that - but he knew something of shifting great tonnages of stone in all of its forms.

  “We have shifted away from wooden construction, gentlemen, and must now seek something better than iron. I am at a stand – I do not know what. Until we discover that new material, our ships can hardly grow larger than they are now. Mr Brunel has his ambitious plans for great ships, but their practicality, and profitability, seems dubious. I do not propose to emulate Mr Brunel. Mr Joseph Andrews has read of his plans and is unconvinced, and his opinion will do for me.”

  The four agreed that they were in the business of making a profit; Mr Brunel, a remarkable man, was more concerned to build a reputation.

  “A choice of cash or glory, Sir Matthew! I regret to say that I am a businessman, and more concerned to pile up the pennies than to rub shoulders with the nobs and fish for a lordship! It may be said that I am a lesser man than Mr Brunel, but I will lay a wager that my bank manager likes my ways better than his!”

  They chuckled, all of them now men of substance in their own terms, and picked up their tall hats to go out to inspect the yard itself. Their shiny, gleaming, sixteen-inch stovepipe hats immediately identified them as senior, important figures. The junior managers in their low-crowned, curly-brimmed round hats in turn stood out from the skilled hands in flat caps and the labourers in various woolly, knitted head-coverings – it was possible to tell status at a glance – a convenience that they none of them noticed as out of the ordinary, for every man in the world must cover his head and none would dream of stepping out of his proper place by wearing the hat of a senior. Almost none, that was – vagabonds made do with any hat they could lay their hands on, but even they would not be seen bare-headed.

  The three visitors made polite comments and observed carefully, but there was little new for them to observe, except that there was now a railway line leading into the yard and evidently connecting to the main line to Liverpool and Manchester, and thus to all of the local towns and London itself.

  “I do wish we could do the same, Sir Matthew – but I cannot imagine that we would be permitted to drive a line along the banks of the Thames to reach the yards around Euston. There is no line to Southampton yet, but I would expect there to be a direct connection to the docks when one eventuates. I am not at all sure that we will be able to continue building ships on the Thames for many more years – but the problems of thirty years from now may be dealt with by the next generation, assuming they survive the stinks of London!”

  Sir Matthew farewelled his visitors from the yard, having organised a passenger carriage on his little line that would take them to the station wh
ere they could change for London. It was rather flash, ostentatious indeed, but it pandered to their sense of importance, and his own. He returned to his office and to the question of the slate mine and quarries, reading the report from Bethesda with no satisfaction at all.

  On his return from the small Welsh town he had borrowed the services of a manager of one of the family’s coal pits and had sent him to inspect the slate workings and make recommendations based on the best of modern practice. Now he had to deal with his findings.

  The problem was, as so often, that of transport costs. The slate, once dug out of the ground and split and trimmed to size, must be taken out of the mountains and along the coast to the towns and cities where it would grace the tens of thousands of thousands of roofs erected every year. Canals and mountains did not mix, so water transport was impractical for more than part of the journey, and that was the cheapest option ruled out. Railway lines would work along the valleys, but not up the steep slopes.

  Existing practice was to lower the loads by means of rope haulage on near-vertical trackways, powered commonly now by steam although there were some ingenious uses of falling water to work lifts by counterweight or direct wheel propulsion. Then, at the bottom of the slope, it was transfer the slate to wagons or to small barges if there happened to be a handy river. Reaching the coast, the slate was manhandled aboard ship to go to Liverpool or Bristol and then be transferred yet again to wagon or barge or railway. Every single slate would be handled four or five times, and men must be paid to do so on each occasion.

  Slate often cost more to transport than to dig and dress.

  “Cut the transport costs and there will be room to increase the miner’s wages. Simple!”

  It might be possible to build a railway line up to Bethesda – narrow-gauge, winding, switchback, rack-and-pinion even – but it would not be cheap and there were other, more attractive prospects for the money-men to support. Logically, there would then be another line along the coast so as to avoid the costs of shipping.

  The costs would be high, and other traffic would be minimal – the slate would have to bear the whole burden. The population was thin – few towns and them small in North Wales.

  It could be done by a government concerned to open up the land for the benefit of its people; it was not practical for a businessman.

  Shut down or sell out? There was no other sensible alternative.

  Matthew was sorry for the people of the little town, but not so sorry as to empty his own purse while trying to do something for them. He pulled paper and ink from the drawers and wrote a letter to Mr Farlow; he was to sell the firm’s holdings in the slate industry, negotiating with the partners and securing the best price consonant with a quick sale. Mr Farlow was to understand that the quarries and mine were currently returning a small profit but that future expectations were bleak, in the extreme – it would be well to get out very rapidly.

  Farlow was just the man for such a commission, Matthew reflected – he was a rogue of the finest water, one who would tread the tightrope of legality with consummate skill, achieving an almost-criminal result by narrowly less-than-criminal means. Any prosecution would inevitably result in a not guilty verdict, and a bad taste in the mouth.

  Matthew wondered whether he should write a letter to the minister in Bethesda – but he had forgotten his name and could not be bothered to search through his files to find it. He had better things to do with his time. He gave the letter to an office boy and went home early.

  The deputation arrived at the yard nearly a month later; eight men, all in the cheapest of store-bought working clothes, jean-cotton and bleached but undyed wool and old, well-worn brown boots.

  “Come from Bethesda, we ‘ave, Sir Matthew. Word is what the quarries, and the underground, is to be shut, like. Nothing for any of us else, only slate. Want to talk about it, see?”

  Matthew could not recognise any of the faces from his one brief visit to the town; he thought he would probably remember the minister. These had to be ordinary workers from the quarries, made the journey out into the unknown; from all he had gathered, probably the first time they had ever left the immediate vicinity of their little town.

  “There is not a lot to say, I am afraid. You have just travelled all the way from Bethesda to Liverpool, and so you know what the problem is. Transport! How did you come here?”

  “Walked, Sir Matthew. No money for a carrier’s cart.”

  “So you know what the country is like; the roads are poor and the hills are high. If the slate is to come to Liverpool, and be taken from the port to the inland towns where the houses are being built, then it must come by sea – loaded onto a ship and then taken off again and put into barges or wagons or onto the railway. That costs money.”

  “Good slate, Sir Matthew, as fine as any what comes out of whole country.”

  “It is. But, too expensive.”

  “Nothing else in Bethesda. No work at all. As it stands, the boys leave their school and ‘ave nothing to do, most of them, except spade over the little bits of garden what we ‘ave. If the men as well ‘ave got no work, then what do we eat?”

  Matthew shook his head, pityingly; the man’s words suddenly struck him.

  “School? Do all of your boys go to school? How can you afford that?”

  “Every chapel ‘as its school, like, Sir Matthew, and every one of the children is to attend, for how else can they read their Bibles like is proper. It is not to be paid for! Do not you have such ‘ere, sir?”

  “Some chapels have a free Sunday School, sir. But not many, and I believe none of the churches as such.”

  They shook their heads in unison; very bad!

  “The minister teaches school every day in Bethesda, see? All of the boys on one side and the girls on the other until they are eleven or even twelve. All the chapels, and all of the children, not that they can all learn the same, like. They read and they write and they get their number, see? And some learn a bit more besides. Counting and sums and such.”

  “Then, gentlemen, you have something to sell. I need workers. Young men with the education to learn engineering and metalworking in the yard here, and in London and in Southampton.”

  There was an intermission while he explained where and what Southampton was; they had heard of London, and of Babylon, but knew almost no other foreign towns.

  “The Roberts Ironworks as well needs men to train. Hard work, but very well paid – my best hands in this yard take home thirty shillings a week, for six days. My steam engineers all earn at least five times as much. Every man of them started off as an unskilled labourer with just one advantage to their names – they could read and write and learn their mathematics! Ah, sums, that is.”

  The slate paid at best a shilling a day.

  “Young boys, sir, to leave their own ‘omes and go foreign, away from all they know? On their own in lands where they might, unprotected like, be exposed to sin and vice and drink and singing and dancing on a Sunday and who knows what else, like? There might be… there might be wickedness, what they could be exposed to, sir!”

  The repetition of the word ‘exposed’ suggested to Matthew exactly what form ‘wickedness’ might take; it seemed very probable to him, having spent his youth in the Navy, that young men with money in their pockets would find any number of ways of exposing themselves, normally with enthusiastic assistance from other young people with empty purses.

  “Well, yes, I can see that might be a difficulty… But, I am quite certain it could be overcome. Perhaps it could be arranged that the boys should live together in boarding-houses, supervised by some respectable person. I am sure that your ministers from the chapels could write to local pastors, who would then take an interest in the boys. From all I hear, in fact, pastors are very often interested in young boys!”

  Matthew regretted that comment as soon as he had made it, but fortunately the innocent gentlemen from rural Wales did not catch his implication. He had been lucky; he must watch his tongue –
he was no longer a sailor, had not been for twenty years, and must eschew vulgar wit. It was still funny, though.

  “Where are you gentlemen sleeping while you are here?”

  They had expected to start their return journey immediately; they had been able to beg overnight accommodation in the barns of farmers on the way, producing a letter from their ministers which they had shown in chapels they had passed, the local people offering them Christian charity in response.

  They looked thin and weather-beaten, Matthew thought, but eight men would be costly for poor villagers to feed. Probably they had all done their best.

  “I can arrange rooms and meals for a couple of days, and perhaps transport for your return. You will wish to see the yard and look at the ironworks and get some idea of where your boys would live while they were here.”

  They agreed this would be very desirable, but it was perhaps straying from the main point.

  “All very well, Sir Matthew, and glad we shall be to see the boys in work and with a bright future to come, but what of Bethesda and the slate?”

  Matthew thought quickly; he had all of the figures to hand and knew that to increase the men’s earnings to a tolerable minimum, the level of a farm labourer in England, say, would cost more than one hundred pounds a week. On top of that there would be the need to invest in the roads or build a railway… Perhaps he could speak with the other owners of quarries and mines and persuade them to take shares in a railway along the coast. It would be expensive, but not as much as trying to provide teaching for his own hands, to build schools in Liverpool and then find other employers poaching his educated boys as soon as they started work.

  “While youngsters come to the yard and ironworks here, it will be worth my while to look after Bethesda. I will keep the two quarries and the mine open, and will promise a wage of not less than two shillings a day. I shall as well examine the possibility of having a railway built along part at least of the coast.”