George Stephenson (12 page)

George recommended to the company that they should put down malleable rails, even though they were expensive and even though he personally would be the loser. ‘To tell you the truth,' so he told the directors, ‘although it would put £500 in my pockets to specify my own patent rails, I cannot do so after the experience I have had.' Smiles in his biography waxes lyrical about George's decision, seeing it as yet another shining example of George's amazing honesty and integrity. And so it was, although it could be said that at the same time he was breaking a moral obligation to Losh, his partner. All the contemporary and later reports give prominence to the same story and Michael Longridge (the owner of Bedlington works), who was given the order for the malleable rails, felt indebted to Stephenson for the rest of his life.

George was determined to have locomotives on the Darlington line. He now realised it could be the biggest project he'd ever been involved in, and he knew from his own experiments that malleable rails were by far the most suitable. A smaller man, interested in short term gain, might well have gone for the quick, easy money. But in the long term it was in his interests to have malleable rails. The canal owners, the turnpike road owners, the landowners, they were all blinded by their own interests in opposing railways. George, with his belief in the future of railways, had no doubts about choosing malleable rails and losing £500 in royalties for himself.

Both Stephenson and Pease were inspired by their belief in railways, even when it went against their own immediate interests. In his letters George is constantly plugging away at the idea of railways being the transport of the future. Judging by the company minutes, it is obvious that Pease was constantly dragging the rest of his directors with him, even at the risk of family differences. There was no unanimity from the board about George's recommendation for malleable rails. Several of them had their own vested interests in cast iron rails. It was with difficulty that Pease got them to agree to compromise, laying down two-thirds of the route in malleable (later it became four-fifths), using cast iron on the rest.

In building the railway George was truly a pioneer, facing problems that had been encountered by no engineer before, making his own rules, creating new professions, making decisions that were to stand for a hundred years – some of them to this very day. For example, the gauge he chose was 4ft 8 ½ ins, the same as it is today in Britain and in most of the world.

There is still some controversy among railway historians about where he got this odd width from, apart from it being the one he'd laid down at Killingworth. At one time it was said that all the early wagon ways were this width, taking it in turn from the width of the average cart on the ordinary roads, but recent research has shown that wagon ways varied in width in different parts of the country. On the Wylam wagon way, outside his home, the width is now thought to have been five feet. There is a nice theory that it was the Romans who first laid down 4ft 8½ ins as a standard cart width – using this width in the entrances to all their forts. As there were forts on Hadrian's Wall not far from George's birthplace, the width could have been handed down without anyone realising.

There is an added minor mystery in the fact that some contemporary documents about the Stockton and Darlington, and the Liverpool–Manchester which followed suit, state the width as being 4ft 8 ins. Yet later on, it was measured and found to be 4ft 8½ ins. No one knows where that extra half an inch crept in. However, there is no argument about the fact that it was Stephenson, in building the Stockton and Darlington, who chose what was to become the world's standard gauge.

George also had to decide about the problem of sleepers. He knew that horsedrawn traffic would still be used in part, if not all, so the rails had to be laid on blocks either side, not on transverse sleepers, allowing an open path down the middle for the horse. They naturally couldn't be expected to jump over the sleepers as if they were in a hurdle race. George did meticulous market research in his quest for the best sleeper blocks, as he did with the rails arid everything else.

He went down to London in early 1822 (his first trip to the capital as far as is known) to inspect and purchase some oak blocks which he ordered to be sent up by sea to the Tees. On the western end of the line, near the collieries, he had decided to use locally quarried stone blocks. Then he went to south Wales to order some cast iron rails which the board were still insisting must be used in part of the line. (His row with Losh over his preference for malleable rails must have been pretty serious to have made him go all the way to Wales rather than obtain them locally from Losh.)

In all the negotiations over prices and types of material to be used, in giving out the tenders and choosing the most suitable, George made all the major decisions. There are several of his letters from this period – dictated to secretaries or assistants – all very detailed, full of the latest prices and suppliers. If only he'd written just a few letters in his own hand we might have been able to see how he felt at this stage in his life. There is no letter to his beloved Robert, not even a picture post card telling him how he found London and the southerners. As for a letter to his wife, stuck at home in the old cottage at Killingworth, she appears to have been completely forgotten. They had been married only two years, after his twelve years as a widower, but in many respects she had become widowed herself, an engineer's widow, left alone as he rushed round the country. There is not one letter in existence either to his first, or his second wife. (And the second was literate, judging by her marriage signature.) The most she ever gets is a hurried reference in the last paragraph if the person George is writing to happens to be a family friend. ‘Mrs Stephenson sends her best respects.' George, like so many self-made men before and since, was married to his work.

Now and again there are hints about the changes in his life, and how he felt about them, especially in the few letters written to close friends. At this time William James was a close friend and there are many letters between the two as George tells him how the Darlington railway is going and James tells him about his Liverpool and other projects.

In a letter dated early 1822 he tells James how by chance he had got on the coach at Darlington to return to Newcastle and found himself sitting beside two gentlemen who were strangers to him.

The gents were in for N. Castle and we had not gone far till they found I belonged to the neighbourhood they were going to. They asked me if I knew one G. Stephenson. I answered that I did. They then enquired very closely after his character. I kept myself unknown till we got to near N. Castle. I soon found their knowledge of railways was very limited. It would take a volume to hold our conversation on Railway Locomotive Engines and Stephenson before I was known to them, however in the end we got very kind and I showed them our Engines and Railways which they candidly confessed were superior to anything they ever saw and far exceeded their expectations.

The letter then goes into long lists of the latest speeds and loads of his locomotives, but this opening anecdote reveals many things. Firstly that his fame is spreading south. (One of the two gentlemen turned out to be Lord Dudley's engineer, looking into the possibility of using Stephenson's locomotives.) Secondly it shows his pride in his own achievements, perhaps superiority, even arrogance. Thirdly there's a trace of cunning, keeping his identity hidden for all those hours, or perhaps it was simply an example of obtuse northern humour. Between the lines, there's also a feeling of him, G. Stephenson, man of the people, against them, the Gents, the educated professional classes, though this might be reading too much into a simple story. It certainly comes out strongly in later letters whenever any of the so-called professional classes dares to cross him. If this feeling was there in the early days, such as during the safety lamp row, it was usually kept well hidden.

In another letter to James he complains that Robert Stevenson is still hanging around, getting in his way. Stevenson had earlier been a patron of George, perhaps patronisingly so, and had patted him on the back on paper telling Edward Pease how marvellous his engines were. Now George has definitely turned against him.

The knowledge of machinery has not yet entered his head, at least I have not seen any remarks of it when in his company. I have heard him make some remarks on Railways which I hardly could have expected from a child. He has collected news like other book makers and setting it off for his own.

One of the roots of the trouble, apart from the obviously impossible position for George of having a consultant in the background, was that Mr Stevenson, the educated and famous gentleman engineer from Edinburgh, apparently thought that the rough, uncultured Geordies were beyond the pale. There is a letter from Robert Stephenson (George's son) to James confirming that he too has gone off Robert Stevenson whom he'd heard remarking that ‘the Northumbrians were only emerging out of the darkness'. He warns James to make sure that Stevenson doesn't muscle into the Liverpool project.

These letters between George and William James show that George has not only become confident enough to run down his enemies but confident enough to dash off a few sentences in his own handwriting, something he rarely seems to have done until now. They are remarkable for their lack of grammar, punctuation and weird spelling. In one he talks of sitting in his ‘wet close' and worrying about ‘the poor of my Engines'. But they have a power (or poor) and a richness of invective which his dictated letters never have.

He was arrogant and headstrong, insisting on his opinions and in choosing his own men and materials, but with good reason. His engines were indeed far superior to anyone else's – in fact everyone else seems to have given up. And if he wanted a railway fit to accommodate them he had to do it himself. No one else could do it for him, Organising such a vast, multidisciplined project needed someone with determination and arrogance. Where Trevithick had failed was in giving up when the ancillary problems seemed insoluble. George was creating his own problems and he made himself responsible for solving them, even at the expense of becoming possessive and accusing others of interfering.

The first rail was ceremonially laid in place on 23 May 1822 at Stockton by the chairman of the company, Thomas Meynell. Stockton seems to have wholeheartedly taken to the project by now and all their civic dignitaries turned out, bells were rung and ships on the river sounded their sirens. There was a procession through the streets and a royal salute was fired as Mr Meynell laid the first stretch of malleable rail. We haven't the benefit of his few chosen words on this great occasion for the simple reason that he didn't choose any. Jeans, in his Jubilee account of the railway, published in 1875, relates that soon after the opening ceremony a boy was heard shouting in the streets of Stockton ‘Speech of Mr Meynell, one penny'. Those who spent a penny found that all the sheets were blank.

At the head of this opening procession were between two and three hundred workmen carrying spades and axes, a species of the human race that was to become familiar, not to say notorious, throughout the industrial world for the rest of the nineteenth century – the railway navvies. Many of these first navvies had probably worked on the canals, drawn to Stockton by the new sort of construction. A lot of their leaders had been hand picked by Stephenson himself, men he'd known personally back on Tyneside, people he could trust and could talk to in their own language. The specialist workmen came from Killingworth, like two of his own brothers James and John. When these workmen left Tyneside they weren't to know that they would probably never go back, that Darlington wasn't simply a one-off job. For decades afterwards Geordie navvies who had worked on the Darlington line turned up all over Europe, following one line after another. The skilled men, Stephenson's assistants, like John Dixon, became eminent railway engineers in their own right. The engineers got the credit and the glory but it was the nameless navvies who did all the work. Navvies, not machines, built the railways. All they had were picks and shovels and horses plus a little gunpowder. While Mr Meynell, exhausted by his formal duties, went off with the other dignitaries to a mayor's reception, the navvies adjourned to the local pub for ale and bread.

There are no tales of drunken orgies amongst the navvies on the Darlington line. No doubt Mr Pease saw to that. The Quaker line, as it became known to the rest of the country, couldn't very well be party to any sort of intemperance. Mr Pease went through the contracts of the outside undertakers (as contractors were called in those days) and made sure that no one was a ‘friend of publicans'. In the contract of a carrier called Thomas Close appear the words, ‘The first time he is seen intoxicated he will be dismissed and the sum due to him as wages shall be forfeited.'

George Stephenson had neither the time nor inclination for drinking, either with the promoters or the workmen. He was too busy. Having got the first rails laid he had to decide how to fence them in. In the old colliery line days there had been no need to fence in the railway – which was why George's first job as a young boy had been to keep the children and the cattle off the line. They were private concerns on private property. The Darlington line was going to be enormous by comparison and would go through towns and villages and through public and private properties. He advertised for undertakers to put up stone walls or in some cases to have lines of ‘quicks' planted (quicks were quick-set hedges).

George himself is credited with designing the first iron railway bridge. This went across the river Gaunless and remains of it are preserved to this day. It was fifty feet long and had four spans. For the bridge which had to be built in Darlington itself, across the river Skerne, he was persuaded to bring in a proper architect, Ignatius Bonomi of Durham. The directors wanted it to be made of stone and look as impressive and imposing as possible, which it did. This is the bridge which is seen in Dobbin's well-known painting of the opening of the railway.