George Stephenson (30 page)

Up in Liverpool, once the litter had been cleared from the streets, the railway got down to the serious business of railwaying. Here again, unlike Darlington, the effects were immediate and spectacular. By December 1830, fourteen coaches had been withdrawn from the turnpike roads leaving only twelve in operation. The
Manchester Guardian
said the future for coaches was very bleak. In November, the railways had already taken over as the main carrier of the mails between Liverpool and Manchester, a development which heralded the many later improvements in communications directly connected with railways, such as the Penny Post and the electric telegraph. In December the rail passenger trade was doing so well that they decided to reduce fares, bringing first-class fares down from seven shillings to five, and second-class from four to three and sixpence. The total number of passengers for 1830 – which means only the first three and a half months of operation – was 71,951. In 1831 the total was 445,057.

At the end of December the company announced that in their first few months of operating they'd made a net profit of £14,432. In the doldrum days of 1826 and 1827, when things had looked bad for George and for Liverpool, the railways £100 shares had slumped to £2. The month after the opening the same shares were back to £100.

In its second year of life the Liverpool railway moved on from passengers, cotton and coals to livestock. In May, forty-nine Irish pigs were despatched from Liverpool at a cost of one and sixpence each and arrived safely, if rather noisily, in Manchester. In October, sheep at ninepence each were introduced and then cows. Very soon fresh food, fish and vegetables followed, opening up not just new commercial and economic possibilities but a complete new diet for the industrial masses. Edward Pease had had the poor in mind when he wanted his railways to reduce the price of household coals. The effect of railways on the eating habits of Victorian England has to this day not been properly accounted. As for farmers, who to a man had feared for their pregnant cows and their unborn cabbages with the arrival of railways, completely new and enormous urban markets began opening up for their produce.

George Stephenson had always known their fears were groundless, but nobody had listened to him. Now they were all rushing to his door. The next ten years were the busiest of his whole life as railway promoters besieged him with requests, at home and abroad. Even George was rather startled by the rate of progress. From as early as December 1830, when he wrote this letter (in his own inimitable style) to Michael Longridge, there begins to creep in the first signs that events were beginning to move on without him.

Liverpool Dec: 1830

My Dear sir,

I expect to be able to get off to Scoetland on tuesday next – it would give me great pleasure if I could have you with me. I posiably may take Swanwick with me as I intend to draw up my reports before I return – if I do not see you in Scotland I will return by (way) of Bedlington – It is rely shamefull the way the countrey is going to be cut up by Railways we have no less than eight Bels for Parliament this sissions.

Yours truly,

GEORGE STEPHENSON.

The following year he is even beginning to sound like some of those vested interests who had opposed and thwarted him in the past. In a letter to Nicholas Wood in November, 1831 – a letter dictated to his secretary – he tells how the Liverpool board is trying to keep rivals at bay. ‘The Report made by the Directors to the last General Meeting was made as unfavourable as it could with any appearance of truth, in order to throw a damper upon a rival scheme, the L'pool and Leeds Railway, but notwithstanding their attempts, they will not long be able to keep them back.' The ruse was harmless, compared with the tactics he'd personally had to face from the canal companies, but he was obviously getting ready for the scrambling for position which was about to take place.

George himself took pride of place, right until the end of his days. It wasn't in his nature to sit back quietly and let other engineers do it their way. The new engineers might be racing on, cutting up the country, but George was always the first name which any new railway board wanted. With George as the engineer, or as consulting engineer, or even with only a Stephenson pupil at the helm, railway directors knew they had a good chance of getting the necessary backing. George had made a fortune for those Quaker backers in Darlington, Norwich and the City of London who'd invested in his Darlington line and even more for the Liverpool merchants. These Liverpool backers, who followed George's judgements as he moved south through the Midlands, were to prove the most important single lobby amongst all the railway lobbies over the next two decades. One of George's first concerns, after Liverpool, was the Leicester and Swannington Railway (opened 1833) for which the Liverpool party, as it came to be known, put up a third of the capital.

George accepted almost every offer he could, though never for purely financial reasons. He hated to see anyone else doing the job. But, with hindsight, it has to be said that Liverpool was his peak. After that, it was the turn of the younger engineers, notably his son Robert, his pupil Joseph Locke and then Brunel, to make the next great leaps forward.

The leap forward by Locke wasn't without some acrimony. As with the relationship between George and William James, the details are still not clear and probably never will be. Smiles avoids any suggestion of a row but he has to admit the fact that Locke secured a job which George had wanted, and there is a strong indication of a certain coldness which had first appeared during the building of the Liverpool line.

The line in question was the Grand Junction, a line which was to connect Birmingham with the Liverpool–Manchester Railway. There were many ways of doing this and George had been approached by one interested party and had sent Locke, his star pupil, to survey a possible route. Other routes were surveyed by rival promoters but it was Locke's route which in 1833 won parliamentary approval. Locke, naturally enough, hoped to be made engineer, and it looks as though the Grand Junction board thought the same, till George started making angry possessive noises. Locke, in disgust, threatened to back out completely. To keep everyone happy the board decided to divide up the honours, making George engineer in charge of the southern half of the line and Locke in charge of the northern half.

George, as usual, was rather imprecise with his system of estimating and tendering, leaving too much to untried assistants, fully confident that when it came to the actual building he would personally overcome every problem. It was this blind faith which had led him to grief in parliament over the Liverpool estimates. Locke, having benefited by first-hand experience of George's rather haphazard paper work, did beautiful precise estimates and had all the contracts lined up before George, rushing round the country on other jobs, had scarcely begun. The board became impatient and the upshot was that in 1835 George resigned and Locke was left, engineer in chief of the whole line.

Locke went on to build many thousands of miles of railways, in Britain and in France, notably the Paris–Rouen, but from then on he was estranged from the Stephenson camp. (Though he did eventually make it up with Robert after George's death.) Their professional rivalry was well known and fairly heated but the personal feelings, on either side, can only be guessed at. Robert himself had to make that rather dramatic escape to South America before he could come to terms with his father, and with himself, and they had a bond which was never broken. Locke, without the advantage, or disadvantage, of any blood bond, had absolutely no intention of returning once he'd made the break from George's domineering control.

There is an interesting fragment of a letter, which has recently come into the possession of the Chesterfield Public Library, written by Locke to George in December 1832, before the split finally happened. Between the lines, a feeling comes through of young pupils carefully handling a rather difficult master. George, apparently, had failed to turn up at a dinner party at the Adelphi Hotel, Liverpool, to the puzzlement of Locke and Allcard. Allcard, it will be remembered, was another of George's pupils, the one who drove
Comet
at the Liverpool opening while Locke was on
Rocket
.

I don't know at this moment where you dined [wrote Locke] and was ignorant until this morning that you felt hurt at our apparent neglect. I beg to assure you that Allcard and myself would have gladly availed ourselves of your company, that we were both disappointed at not seeing you, and that we came purposely on the following day to make up for that disappointment. After that explanation, l am sure you will acquit us.

One of the reasons why George failed several times to get a line he wanted, such as the London–Brighton in 1836, was the fact that he had become rather unbending in his methods. Despite criticism, his initial surveys were always rather superficial. (He surveyed the London–Brighton line by flying visits on a postchaise.) He lost this line to his deadly rival from earlier battles, Sir John Rennie. To the end of his life he always insisted on lines being laid out as flat as possible, as Fanny Kemble had noted, even if this meant going miles out of the way, following valleys rather than going straight up and over the hill. Locomotives were making such advances, in power and speed, that the younger engineers were well aware that they could now tackle the direct routes.

In 1839, in a report on a proposed railway from Lancashire up to Carlisle, George recommended a highly circuitous route to avoid the Lake District mountains, going all the way round Morecambe Bay and West Cumberland. ‘This is the only practicable line from Lancaster to Carlisle. The making of a railway across Shap Fell is out of the question.' He didn't get the job and a railway was made successfully, although using very steep gradients across Shap to Carlisle – and it was made by Joseph Locke. The line is there for everyone to see today and so are George's thunderous assertions as he tried to lay down the law, neatly filed away in the bowels of the Public Records Office (British Rail division) amongst a thousand other reports about our early railways.

To George, the Grand Junction, the London–Brighton and the handful of others, were no doubt little more than minor irritants. He was being offered far more jobs than he could possibly do, many of them far more important. Between 1835 and 1837, so Smiles estimated, George travelled twenty thousand miles by postchaise. His secretaries now began to travel with him to take down his thoughts and his commands in transit. Smiles interviewed one of George's secretaries from this time who said that at the height of the work, George was dictating thirty-seven letters a day. In one session George dictated reports and letters non-stop for twelve hours, till the secretary collapsed with exhaustion.

George's major lines after Liverpool were the North Midlands from Derby to Leeds, the York and North Midland from Normanton to York, the Manchester and Leeds, the Birmingham and Derby, the Sheffield and Rotherham. There were many others, most of them with their own individual histories, lovingly recorded by railway writers over the generations. Lovingly, but rather boringly, at least for the general reader. George's thirty-seven dictated letters a day were all factual, full of prices and figures and measurements. It was only rarely that he dashed off anything personal in his own hand. These individual railway histories are excellent on bridge dimensions, who built which cutting, the size of the first engines, but rather lacking in human detail.

George's own business interests began to widen after Liverpool, which was another reason why he could well afford not to worry too much about his pupils and their own railway successes. Having defeated the established civil engineers, and others who'd doubted his mechanical skills, he now moved on to conquer another field which had loomed large in his boyhood and early days. He became an Owner. He might not have been as grand as the Grand Allies, not in the way of speech and deportment, but he became just as powerful, controlling the lives of hundreds of miners just as his own early life, and the lives of his neighbours, had been controlled by the Tyneside colliery owners.

During the excavations on the Leicester–Swannington line Robert had noticed rich coal seams, all still untapped. Along with two of his Liverpool gentlemen friends, Joseph Sandars and Sir Joshua Walmsley, George purchased a large estate at Snibston in Leicestershire and started to dig for coal. After a lot of problems, the mine proved a big success. Edward Pease wrote to him from Darlington in 1834, calling him ‘my friend George, old and tried', congratulating him on the success of his Leicestershire mining and saying how he still cherished ‘so warm an interest in thy happiness and prosperity'. In a postscript to this letter, Edward's son, Joseph Pease, adds a request for employment for a friend who has failed in the iron trade. George had certainly progressed from his Darlington days.

At the end of 1831, excited by the prospect of his Leicestershire mining and Midlands railway interests, George gave up his Liverpool house in Upper Parliament Street and moved into a large mansion called Alton Grange, near Ashby de la Zouche. He lived there for seven years, building a village and a church for the miners beside his Snibston colliery, but the house itself doesn't seem to have occupied his mind very much, not compared with the mansion which he was later to buy. Throughout these seven years he was charging round the country or Europe, spending at least three months every year in London.

The Stephensons, father and son, acquired a London office in 1836, firstly in Duke Street and a year later at 24, Great George Street, and from then on this became the official centre of all Stephenson operations. In that year parliament had passed bills for the building of a total of 214 miles of new railway lines, all under the Stephensons' direction, involving a capital outlay of over five million pounds.

With the opening of the London office Robert took over the main running of the family railway interests, making them much more efficient and streamlined, making sure that all surveys were efficiently carried out. From 1833 he was resident in London, moving down from Newcastle that year with his wife, taking a house in Haverstock Hill, Hampstead. The immediate reason for Robert's move to London was his appointment, in September 1833, as engineer-in-chief of the London and Birmingham Railway. His salary was to be £1,500 – which was increased by £500 not long afterwards when it was discovered that the projected Great Western Railway had appointed an equally young engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, at a salary of £2,000 a year.