George Stephenson (31 page)

Robert Stephenson was still not thirty. Anyone who might have doubted his capabilities, believing perhaps that his father had been responsible for his rapid rise, was soon to see that Robert in his own right was one of the country's greatest engineers. The London–Birmingham Railway was the biggest engineering achievement that the world had ever seen, at least that's how all contemporary accounts described it. Samuel Smiles, by calculating the man hours and the cubic feet of stone involved, went to great lengths to show that the Pyramids were by comparison a decidedly puny undertaking. George's achievements at Darlington and Liverpool were in their own way much more significant, but in terms of scale, everything about the London–Birmingham turned out to be bigger, better and more breathtaking. It was when the Liverpool line was opened that the penny handkerchiefs and the mementoes started appearing. On the London–Birmingham line, the market was flooded with new views, new souvenirs, after almost every new brick was put in place. It was Robert who built the London–Birmingham line and, as our present hero is his father, only the more significant stages need be outlined.

The idea of an assault on London had been discussed well before the opening of the Liverpool line and George himself had taken part in many meetings and outline surveys, but everyone held back, waiting for the Liverpool promoters to test the water. It took them only three days to make up their minds for on 18 September 1830, George and Robert were commissioned jointly to survey a line from Birmingham to London, though it was Robert who took charge of the survey.

When London heard what was being planned there was an immediate cry from the backwoodsmen, though this time the metropolitan variety, incensed as much as anything by the idea of some uncouth northerners planning to alter the face of London and its environs. Most of the London papers and magazines were apprehensive, devoting leaders or letters to the subject, coming out with the usual worries about pregnant cows and bolting mothers that George and Robert had heard many times in the north east and in Lancashire. There were a few new variations. An anonymous opponent calling himself ‘Investigator' brought class into the arguments. ‘No one of the nobility, the gentry or those who travel in their own carriages, would, by any chance, go by the railway. A nobleman would really not like to be drawn at the tail of a train of waggons in which some hundreds of bars of iron were jingling with a noise that would drown all the bells of the district.' A certain Colonel Sibthorpe, MP, declared that he ‘would rather meet a highwayman, or see a burglar on his premises, than an engineer'. As in Lancashire, Robert had to use subterfuge to survey the necessary lands, doing a furtive Sunday morning visit on one occasion to the estate of a hostile clergyman, knowing that he was busy in church. And once again, the old enemies, the canal and turnpike trusts, were ready to fight to the end. The roads to London from the Midlands, only relatively recently improved by Telford and McAdam, and the canals, such as the Grand Junction, both represented millions of pounds of investments.

Samuel Smiles has a firsthand account, given to him by Robert himself, of the difficulties of persuading one landowner to change his mind.

I remember that we called one day on Sir Astley Cooper, the eminent surgeon, in the hope of overcoming his aversion to the railway. He was one of our most inveterate and influential opponents. His country house at Berkhampstead was situated near the intended line, which passed through part of his property. We found a courtly, fine-looking old gentleman, of very stately manners, who received us kindly and heard all we had to say in favour of the project. But he was quite inflexible in his opposition to it. No deviation or improvement that we could suggest had any effect in conciliating him. He was opposed to railways generally, and to this in particular. ‘Your scheme', said he, ‘is preposterous in the extreme. It is of so extravagant a character as to be positively absurd. Then look at the recklessness of your proceedings! You are proposing to cut up our estates in all directions for the purpose of making an unnecessary road. Do you think for one moment of the destruction of property involved by it? Why, gentlemen, if this sort of thing be permitted to go on, you will in a very few years
destroy the noblesse
!' We left the honourable baronet without having produced the slightest effect upon him, excepting perhaps, it might be, increased exasperation against our scheme. I could not help observing to my companions as we left the house, ‘Well, it is really provoking to find one who has been made a “sir” for cutting that wen out of George the Fourth's neck, charging us with contemplating the destruction of the
noblesse
, because we propose to confer upon him the benefits of a railroad.'

Despite everything, the bill passed through the Commons at its first attempt, though the Lords delayed it for a year. It was finally passed by both Houses in 1833. The company's legal expenses, purely in mounting their parliamentary campaign, had cost them £72,000. There were two reasons why the bill succeeded. One was the brilliant performance by Robert under some very intensive cross-examination – the sort which had floored his father not so long ago. Secondly, the company had silenced the sensitive feelings of the noblesse by the simple exercise of paying them money. Over £750,000 was paid out for land which had originally been valued at £250,000.

It took an army of twenty thousand navvies just over four years to build the London–Birmingham line. It was 112 miles in length, four times the length of the Liverpool line. For this massive enterprise Robert took over a hotel at St John's Wood which he turned into an operations headquarters with thirty draughtsmen producing miles of drawings. There were many formidable cuttings to be made, notably at Tring and Blisworth, and eight tunnels, several of them over a mile long. The most notorious was the 2,400-yards-long Kilsby Tunnel, which was not the longest but was by far the most difficult and expensive, in money and in human life. Trial shafts had indicated that the ground was shale but when digging started they hit quicksands. Robert set up thirteen stationary engines on Kilsby Hill to pump out water. They laboured night and day for nine months, pumping out water at the rate of 1,800 gallons a minute, before the sands were dry and the tunnel could be dug underneath. Smiles estimated that the water pumped out of the tunnel was equivalent to the contents of the Thames at high water between London and Woolwich. The estimated cost of the tunnel had been £99,000. It took over £300,000 to complete it. Almost every structure on the line had similar problems and many of the contractors whom Robert had engaged went bankrupt before the end. The total cost of the line was £5,500,000 – double what had been estimated. The triumphal arch at Euston, now alas gone, celebrated the victory of men over the elements as well as the arrival of railways to the capital.

It opened in 1838 amidst great national rejoicing. Dr Arnold, the famous headmaster, on first viewing a London–Birmingham train as it passed near his school at Rugby, remarked: ‘I rejoice to see it and think that feudality is gone forever. It is so great a blessing to think that any one evil is really extinct.'

It could be said, and many people did say, that new evils were brought forward by the now irresistible march of the railways, such as the navvies. It was the London-Birmingham line which saw them grow to military proportions and for the rest of the century they were an ever-present army which settled on many an unsuspecting unspoiled village.

Kilsby, for example, had been a minute village near Daventry. Overnight it became a shanty town as 1,250 navvies arrived to build the tunnel. They took over barns and huts, or erected their own tents and mud huts, and for almost two years completely dominated the area with their tunnelling, not to mention their fighting, their eating, and their drinking. As Terry Coleman observed in his excellent book
The Railway Navvies
(published 1965), navvies were outside the laws, outside civilisation, loved by the contractors, as long as they were sober, but feared by the normal population. Smiles described them as heathens, though he had to admit he was impressed by their capacity for hard work. Thomas Carlyle couldn't find one good word to say about them.

I have not in my travels seen anything uglier than that disorganic mass of labourers, sunk three fold deep in brutality. The Yorkshire and Lancashire men, I hear, are reckoned the worst; and not without glad surprise I find the Irish are the best in point of behaviour. The postman tells me that several of the poor Irish do regularly apply to him for money drafts and send their earnings home. The English, who eat twice as much beef, consume the residue in whisky and do not trouble the postman.

In
Dombey and Son
, Dickens has a long description of the apparent chaos of navvies at work, based on his observations of work on the London–Birmingham line at the Camden Hill cutting in north London. He likened the scene to a great earthquake which had just rent the whole neighbourhood to its centre. ‘Everywhere were bridges that led nowhere, thoroughfares that were wholly impassable, temporary wooden huts in the most unlikely situations, a chaos of carts, overthrown and jumbled together.'

The navvies' main tools were picks and shovels, barrows and carts. Their wheel barrow runs, which were set up when they were doing a steep sided cutting, always attracted hundreds of sightseers. It was spectacular, but highly dangerous. Planks were laid up the steep banks of the cutting and the navvy, having filled his barrow at the bottom, ran up the planks, balancing the barrow in front of him, pulled by a rope which went up the bank to a horse and pulley on the top. When he'd emptied his load at the top he ran down again, this time with the rope behind him, the horse taking the main weight of the empty barrow to stop it getting out of control. It was all done at high speed, with the navvies working in a butty (usually a gang of ten men), having contracted for a certain sum to move a certain amount of soil. Naturally, if the horse, or the man with the horse, or the navvy on the barrow, faltered for one second, the navvy could easily fall to his death.

Tunnelling was the most hazardous work. A shift was twelve hours long and when underground they often spent the whole time in foul air, stagnant water and with the constant risk of roofs collapsing or being killed by the haphazard use of gunpowder. The navvies themselves took very few precautions and the contractors thought only of their contract and how many weeks they'd fallen behind. Mechanical diggers, driven by steam, were known in the United States from as early as the 1840s but in England and Europe they were not used till the 1880s. Labour was cheap in Europe – and dispensable. It was not common practice for contractors to keep an account of navvies killed on a job. In Scotland there was not even the need to have an inquest, not if it was a navvy who'd died. Navvies were known for their daring and their daftness, and death was simply part of the job. Three men were killed, one after the other, in the Kilsby tunnel when for a wager they dared each other to jump over the mouth of a shaft.

Under the Truck Act of 1831, the so-called truck or tommy shops had been banned in England, but the act was aimed at factories not railways. No mention was made of railway labourers in the act. Navvies, as a breed, didn't stir the public awareness until the London and Birmingham. Railway contractors were therefore free to use the truck system and on many occasions they made more money from the truck shops than from building the line itself. It was, on the face of it, reasonable for a contractor, working out in the wilds, to set up a shop in the midst of the navvy encampment where the men could get the necessities of life, like beer and food and boots. But what happened was that a navvy was given his wages in goods – or in tickets to be exchanged for goods – which were only available at the tommy shop. The navvy would take his five shilling ticket to the shop but in exchange he would rarely get more than four shillings' worth of goods. The goods were generally bad and the prices high. They were encouraged to live on credit, spending tickets not yet earned, so it was rare indeed for a navvy to have real cash in his hand. Randies, as the navvies called their Saturday night saturnalia, were usually limited to eating and drinking round the tommy shop. It at least helped to spare some of the villages the worst of the troubles.

Navvies slept in their clothes, without taking their boots off, in their crudely built butty gang huts. Very often each gang hut had one old woman who did the cooking for them, and provided any other services if she was up to it. Navvies didn't get married. If they took up with a woman they left her when they moved on to the next site. The popular press thrived on stories of navvy orgies or woman-selling amongst navvies. A gallon of ale was said to be the going rate.

Some of the more enterprising contractors, to stop their navvies who actually had cash in their hands disappearing for days on a distant randy, arranged for brothels to be set up inside the camps. The girls were available, like everything else, on truck shop terms, with tickets being exchanged before the goods could be touched. There is a very tasteful and euphemistic description of such an enterprise in a contemporary book, published in 1868 by F. R. Condor, who was one of Robert Stephenson's pupils on the London–Birmingham Railway. (The book,
Personal Recollections of English Engineers
, appeared under the pseudonym ‘By a Civil Engineer', but Condor later proved to be the author.)

While not given to dancing, like his Continental neighbours, the well paid English labourer is not proof at all times against a weakness for female society, even if it not be of the most unexceptional decorum. Thus, after a pay, some of the most hard working, and therefore,
por tempore
, navvies might wander ‘off on the randy' to the nearest cities. To prevent Mahomet from wandering in search of the loadstone in the mountains, the contractor brought the loadstone to his bivouac. He arranged for the presence of some of the objects of Jack's admiration – lodged them, clothed them, fed them, made them as comfortable and respectable as the circumstances of the case admitted, and set down a charge for their blandishments in the paysheet. It came under the head of ‘tommy-shop' and reduced,
pro tanto
, the monthly balance of coin coming to the pay table.