George Stephenson (3 page)

George meanwhile bounced back very quickly and started going out with another farmer's daughter, though their family farm was much smaller than Hindmarsh's and this time there was no dowry to add to the attractions. Her name was Ann Henderson and she was a domestic servant in the farmer's house where George had taken lodgings. George made her a handsome pair of leather shoes – one of his many spare-time occupations to make more money – which she accepted, but she refused his marriage proposal. He then proposed to her older sister Frances, who worked as a maid at the same farm. Fanny, as she was called, was twelve years older than George, who was just twenty-one, and she was already thought of as an old maid.

Fanny had worked as a servant in the farm for over ten years, before in fact the present owner had taken over. He'd inherited her and her reference which told him: ‘Frances Henderson is a girl of sober disposition, an honest servant and of good family.' Some years previously she'd been engaged to the village school master in Black Callerton but he'd died when she was twenty-six leaving her, so the villagers thought, with no prospects of getting married. She jumped when young George offered and they were married on 28 November 1802, at Newburn Church. Mr Thompson, the farmer who employed her, promised his young lodger and his faithful servant that he would be their witness and that they could have their wedding breakfast back at the farm.

Newburn Church, a handsome Norman building, was in those days the centre of a large and affluent parish. The couple were married by a curate, not the vicar himself, but they did both sign the marriage register, though George may have signed Fanny's name as well. George's own signature in the register is badly smudged and endearingly child-like.

Not long afterwards, they moved to Willington Quay, this time east of Newcastle, where George was to be brakesman in charge of a new winding machine that had just been installed. It was here, in their one room in a cottage by the Quay furnished out of Fanny's savings, that their only son Robert was born on 16 October 1803. Fanny was considered in those days almost too old at thirty-four to have a first child, and she was ill for some time afterwards. The miners' cottages, owned by the colliery, were continuously being divided up as more families moved in, until several families were crowded together into one cottage. At Wylam, for example, the Stephenson family of eight had been crowded into two rooms with unplastered walls and clay floors, while three other families shared the rest of the cottage.

As George was now reasonably well paid for a working man, he managed to hang on to his one room and was soon able to afford two and then three rooms in the cottage, but he was always very canny and never threw his money around. He was still making shoes to supplement his earnings as well as mending clocks for the pitmen. Having a clock was a great status symbol, and of great use for a shift-working pitman.

Samuel Smiles continually stresses how sober the young George Stephenson was, so much so that one almost suspects he was a drunkard. It has to be remembered that in the early nineteenth-century, drink was the mass escape. There were scores of gin and beer rooms in all these new industrial slum villages. Working as they did twelve, sometimes sixteen, hours a day, six days a week, all the year round except Christmas Day and Good Friday, worrying constantly about the rising price of bread, unable to strike or press for better conditions for fear of terrible reprisals, thanks to the Combination laws, it was hardly surprising that so many took solace in drink, the cheapest and almost the only form of escape. The stern Victorian morality with its continual theme of temperance from people like Smiles might today seem rather extreme. It was extreme because the problem was extreme.

George was certainly sober. He could hardly have had time for boozing with working on his engines, making shoes, mending clocks and doing his homework. While most pitmen did spend their spare time drinking, or watching prize fights, or cock fighting, George was one of the new breed of self-made mechanics who were consumed and excited by the wonders of the modern world, especially all the new inventions, and wanted to know more about them.

One of the newest wonders of the world was the canal. Since 1761, when the Duke of Bridgwater's canal halved the price of coal in Manchester, canals had been spreading throughout the country. By 1815 there were 2,600 miles of canals in England, most of them built by sweated Irish labour, the land navigators as they were called, because they directed the passage of ships across the land, later to be known universally as navvies. Crowds gathered to watch canals being opened across hills like the Pennines, wondering at man's ingenuity, forgetting of course that the Romans had first built canals in East Anglia over 1,500 years previously, though the secret had died with them.

At the same time, roads were being greatly improved by engineers like Telford and McAdam. The newspapers were full of the new speeds achieved by the flying coaches on the new improved turnpike roads. In 1754 it had taken four and a half days by coach from London to Manchester. By 1788 this had been reduced to twenty-eight hours. But it wasn't cheap. The working man couldn't afford it. Sir Walter Scott, when he travelled down from Edinburgh to London by coach, reported that the price was £50. That was a year's wages for someone like George Stephenson. When George and his wife Fanny set up home, they were lucky enough to borrow a farm horse to get themselves the fifteen miles to their new cottage at Willington. Normally George, like every other working man, walked everywhere. Or he stayed at home.

The local wonder of the day, which was what attracted George in Willington, were the attempts by colliery engineers to use the stationary steam engines, so far used for pumping and winding, for drawing the coal wagons to the riverside. Steam engines were being placed beside any hilly bits of the tramways and used to pull the coal wagons on ropes or chains up the hill, letting them roll down the other side by gravity. On the flat, horses still pulled the wagons.

There was one such machine at Willington, built by a well-known Tyneside enginewright, Robert Hawthorn, who had recommended George for the job as its brakesman. Like Nicholas Wood, the educated viewer, Hawthorn was an early patron of Stephenson's, recognising his talent and giving him great help, though George gave him little thanks. He liked to think he mastered everything on his own. Stephenson felt that Hawthorn was jealous but as the latter was the boss he took care not to quarrel.

In 1804 George moved to yet another pit, this time at Killingworth, seven miles north of Newcastle, again as a brakesman. Fanny's health for a time improved and it was here that she gave birth to a daughter, also called Fanny. The baby died after three weeks and Fanny's own health deteriorated again. She died of consumption the following year, at the age of thirty-seven. George was a widower of twenty-five, left with a two-year-old son to look after. By all accounts he was devoted to the baby, but not long afterwards he set off alone for Montrose in Scotland, on foot, to work on a new Watt engine. There is little record of George talking much about this expedition to Scotland in later life, though he often regaled people with the hard times he'd had at Killingworth. Smiles says he was invited to Montrose, which is surprising considering he was an obscure Northumbrian mechanic. Other Victorian writers, trying equally hard to preserve the image of George as some horny-handed saint, have said that he was so heartbroken by his wife's death, distraught by all the sad memories in the little cottage, that he just had to get away. But in fact no one knows what his precise motivation was, and an attempt to draw nice morals from his every action is unnecessary. Perhaps he'd lost his job, through quarrelling with Hawthorn, and had been forced to seek work further afield. Someone like Hawthorn had influence throughout many Tyneside collieries. George was an ambitious young man and off he went, feeling sad about having to leave Tyneside, for whatever reasons, but no doubt feeling excited about the prospect of new experiences.

He came back after a few months, walking home with the large sum of £28 which he'd managed to save. He'd left his baby Robert at home with a neighbour who acted as housekeeper. He found his cottage deserted on his return, much to his surprise and alarm. In his absence the neighbour had married one of George's brothers and had taken the baby with her. George moved back into his old cottage and soon his unmarried sister Eleanor moved in to look after him and his son Robert. It was Eleanor who brought Robert up, and he referred to her always as Aunt Nelly.

Nelly was three years younger than George and had been badly disappointed in love. She had gone to London to work as a domestic servant till a boyfriend back in Northumberland wrote and asked her to marry him. She sailed home to the Tyne, after a long passage which cost all of her savings, to find that the boyfriend had married someone else. She developed a passion for Methodism, taking young Robert to chapel with her, though failing to interest George. She sounds a bright cheerful soul and took Robert on many outings into the country. His aunt Ann (sister of his mother Fanny, the one who accepted George's shoes but not his proposal) had married a farmer and lived in some style. Robert always remembered that when he visited her house he got a whole boiled egg to himself, not just the top of his father's, plus a little butter.

On his return from Scotland George also found that his father had met with an accident. While mending an engine a fellow workman had suddenly let out the steam and the blast had blinded his father. His sight never returned and he was forced to leave work. Since the accident he had run up many debts which George paid off on his return. He moved his father and mother to a cottage near his at Killingworth and supported them until their death. George's savings finally disappeared when not long afterwards he received another blow – he was drawn for service in the militia. Britain was waging war single-handed against Napoleon, and in 1808 Lord Castlereagh ordered local militia to be drawn up in every town, amounting to a total of 200,000.

Press gangs went round strong-arming or bribing men into the navy while the army recruited its men by ordering a quota from every district. If you were drawn there was only one way out: you could pay someone else to go in your place, if you had the money. As long as the correct number was made up, the recruiting officer was happy. George paid for a substitute and that was the last of his Scottish savings. Not unnaturally he was rather miserable and depressed around this period. What with his family problems and his lack of money, his engineering ambitions seem to have been temporarily halted, though fortunately he was taken back as a brakesman at Killingworth. He said later in a speech that he'd seriously considered emigrating. ‘Not having served an apprenticeship, I had made up my mind to go to America, considering that no one in England would trust me to act as engineer.'

It wasn't uncommon to leave for America – his other sister Anne, who'd married a John Nixon, had recently done so. (She had six children but records of them have not survived, though other branches of the American Nixons did reasonably well.) George settled down again at Killingworth and his career once more moved forward. His capability with every sort of machine, running or repairing them, eventually brought him to the personal attention of the owners of the pit, a group of masters known as the Grand Allies.

One of George's more important triumphs, lovingly related by Smiles, concerned a Newcomen pumping machine that had been installed in a new and expensive pit at Killingworth but for a year had given endless trouble. George used to walk across in spare moments and look at it, boasting that he could get it working if asked, though he was just a common brakesman. Eventually when the engine was deemed a failure, the head viewer, Mr Dodds, came personally to George, saying that as everyone else had failed he could try. George's only condition was very characteristic – he wanted to select his own workmen. The men on the job, all older and more experienced than George, weren't pleased, but Dodds told him to go ahead. For three days and nights George and his team worked on the machine, taking it to pieces and getting it working, clearing out the water and sending the men to the bottom of the pit for the first time. Dodds presented George with £10 and promised him promotion.

In 1812, at the age of thirty-one, he was made colliery enginewright, in charge of all the machines, at a salary of £100 a year. He not only looked after the Killingworth machines but built and supervised stationary engines for the Grand Allies at their other pits – even being permitted to do freelance work for other collieries. At the same time, thanks to his increased income, he was devoting his attention to the education of his son Robert, perhaps one of the most interesting phases of his early years at Killingworth.

For a long time he'd realised that his own lack of education was a serious handicap. Perhaps it was this which brought out the aggressive and dogmatic side of his nature, a quality which never left him. He thought he knew as much as, if not more than, the educated engineers and viewers who were his bosses, though his knowledge had been of necessity picked up by trial and error. He hated them flaunting their academic knowledge and, worst of all, telling him something he didn't know. At the root of his aggression no doubt lurked an element of inferiority. It wasn't simply that he wanted Robert to have all the advantages that he himself had missed, the age-old ambition of the self-made man, whether a property tycoon sending his son to Eton, or a jumped-up mechanic wanting his son to go to grammar school. George Stephenson's other aim was that his son Robert should be the tool of his own self-improvement. Through Robert's education, he too would be educated.

Robert was sent first of all to the village school at Long Benton, one and a half miles away from their Killingworth cottage. He was a sickly child, inheriting his mother's physique rather than his father's, but he grew up wiry and resolute. The school fees were only fourpence a week and many of the children came barefooted. When he was eleven, Robert was transferred to Dr Bruce's private academy in Newcastle. This was considered much smarter even than the Newcastle Royal Grammar School. It was very much a middle-class establishment and at first Robert was rather teased for his broad Northumberland accent and his pit village manners. But over the next four years he lost most of his country dialect and could pass for the son of a Tyneside gentleman, like his other school fellows. Later on, Robert was able to mix easily in every society, but his father never lost the broad Northumberland accent, which most people outside the area found on first hearing almost unintelligible.