George Stephenson (43 page)

Despite the intensity of their printed words when they take each other to task in their journals, railway enthusiasts are very gentle, warm-hearted people. Some groups of enthusiasts are suspicious of the outside world, turning themselves into cold cliques, but railway fans, treated kindly, fall over themselves to be helpful, absolutely confident that the passion which has taken over their lives will soon dominate yours. They're almost messianic in their fervour, desperate for converts, seizing any chance to spread the good word.

Mr Charlton dropped everything when I called on him, though I'd arrived out of the blue with no advance warning. He rang his son, a commercial traveller and railway enthusiast, who rushed round by car and offered to take me to Killingworth to look at where the colliery used to be. It took a long time to get there, and back, because they each got so carried away with telling me about their love for railways that they kept on stopping the car so they could tell me face to face and enthuse all the better.

Mr Charlton senior explained that his speciality has always been works locos – the engines owned by private companies.

‘Most enthusiasts have always liked the locos that pulled the passenger trains best, but now they're all dashing round trying to photograph the old works that I photographed years ago. There aren't many passenger locos left these days so they're turning to works locos before they get broken up.'

The biggest new development amongst railway fans, I gathered, is stereo. LP records of railway noises have been selling in their thousands for years but now with stereo, members compete to produce the most deafening effects.

‘I've got one friend,' said Mr Charlton, ‘who's extended his lounge so that it's now twenty-four feet long, just to improve his stereo. He puts on the Big Boys, like old
Ohio
and
Baltimore
locos, and you should hear them! They start quietly in one end of his lounge, in the distance, then they get louder and louder till they tear right over you!'

The car was stopped again so they could both savour the memory of it all. Not just the memory. They continually talked in the present tense about steam.

‘Steam's live, that's the attraction. That's what we love about it. You feel you can do anything with steam, if you understand it. You've got to understand steam.

‘You work together to control it, to get the best out of it. Your fireman could ditch you by putting on too much or too little. If you were driving, you could kill him by going too hard at the wrong time. It takes two people, a partnership, to get the best out of steam, to get to the heart of its power. When two people are working in harmony with steam, you can do anything. Now diesel, huh. One man turns it on, and that's all there is to it.'

‘What I like about steam is its smell,' said his son. ‘That's the biggest attraction to me. It's a sort of hot, oily smell. Not the sort of oil smell you get from that stuff you put in the car. This is real oil. It was a most peculiar scent.' They sat breathing in heavily, remembering long forgotten whiffs.

Today, the Stephenson Locomotive Society has 600 members. Meetings are held in twelve centres around the country, and they still have a magazine, now published monthly. The General Secretary is Brian Gilliam (telephone 020 8501 1210).

LONDON

London, as ever, has most of the good things in life and much of George Stephenson's life has ended up there.

The Institution of Mechanical Engineers has to be the first stop, just to see how they remember their first president. I expected a dusty old office run by a man and a Smike-like boy trying hard to keep alive the spirit of steam. The organisation sounds so Victorian and artisan whereas the Institution of Civil Engineers, the one which was so much smarter and snobbier in Stephenson's day, would seem to have a better chance of being up to date and relevant. Civil engineers means roads and bridges, motorways and flyovers. Mechanicals means machines and makes you think of blue overalled mechanics and fitters.

Their headquarters is at 1, Birdcage Walk, a smart address at least, beside Horse Guard's Parade, just round the corner from Whitehall, very handy for Buckingham Palace. (I imagined a couple of rooms stuck away at the back of someone else's building.) It turned out to be the handsomest, poshest building in sight, one I'd passed many times thinking it must be part of the Foreign Office. And the Mechanicals own all of it. As a site it must be worth millions of pounds. Inside, it oozes quiet affluence with massive carved staircases and corridors, thick carpets and antique furniture, uniformed lackeys hovering discreetly to direct the bustling business men who've flown in from all over the world, come to meet in one of the many committee rooms. There's a staff of 180 and a membership of 80,000,
all
of them very far from blue collar workmen.

Mechanical engineers are still basically occupied with machines. Steam just happens to be the first ever mechanical means of transport. After that came the motor car, the aeroplane, the jet engine, the hovercraft and now the space ship – all of them created by mechanical engineers. But transport is only one of the many branches of mechanical engineering. The institution has departments for energy, environment and sustainability, mechatronics, medical engineering, tribology, power industries, pressure systems – anything in fact where a machine of some sort is used. They have just started to allow membership to incorporated engineers, i.e. ‘technician' grades. They get very upset when the papers talk about ‘engineers on strike again' when what is meant is fitters. To be even the humblest novice member of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers you have to be a graduate or hold an acceptable diploma in some aspect of mechanical engineering. To be a Member with a capital letter, and therefore allowed to put M.I.Mech.E. after your name, you have to be an established engineer holding a position of authority. When you've really made it, or as their guide book says, ‘when you are a well established mechanical engineer holding a post of greater responsibility', then you might be elected a Fellow and allowed to change your visiting card to F.I.Mech.E.

The institution is a professional body, looking after the rights and interests of its members. Until recently it set its own examinations, but now a general council of all engineers looks after that. But it does guard its prestige very carefully, investigating at least two bogus claims a week from scoundrels masquerading as M.I.Mech.E. George Stephenson would certainly never have got in today.

However, they're still highly pleased with their first president. There are Stephenson relics and references all over the place. Members can buy an institution tie inscribed with the
Rocket
motif. There's the Stephenson room, used for committee meetings, which is festooned with Stephenson memorabilia, drawings and paintings, patents taken out by him, a paper knife used by the great man, his brass rule, a watch. They have his will framed and hung up for all to see, and a desk arranged as it was at Great George Street, plus various specifications and drawings thought to be in his hand. (Graphic panels explain his work and its importance).

The institution's library has the greatest surviving collection of letters relating to Stephenson, either gifts from collectors and families over the years or purchases which the institution itself has made, either privately or at auction at places like Sotheby's. One of the librarians pointed to a portrait of one benefactor who in the 1930s gave the institution a present of £100,000. In another corner he pointed out a solid silver replica of the
Rocket
– the only known model made in silver – and worth a small fortune.

All Stephenson documents are accessible via the institution's website. Like the vast majority of Stephenson letters, they were dictated to secretaries and refer to purely railway business. But the Phillimore collection does include George's bank pass book and a cheque for £72 16
s
3
d
, both from the Glyn Hallifax Mills bank. In a collection of letters and documents called the Crow Collection I found a shirt collar which once belonged to Stephenson, folded flat and arranged in a plastic folder like one of the letters. It's signed by him, presumably for laundry purposes. If only collars could speak.

The Institution of Civil Engineers is round the corner in Great George Street, the street where Robert and George had their London office, and is an equally imposing building and an equally thriving professional organisation.

The Civils have never quite forgiven Smiles for that story about them turning George Stephenson down for being unqualified. As late as 1956 they were still worrying about it, judging by a publication they produced that year called
A Study of an Alleged Slight
. It refutes once and for all the charge that they thwarted his desire to be a member, saying that such a story about such a great national figure can be ‘little more than a tax on the reader's powers of credulity'.

They have a handful of letters by George and Robert (one from Robert to Brunel) but perhaps their most interesting Stephenson relic is a scrap album which George compiled. It contains newspaper cuttings that took George's fancy and show his wide and rather esoteric range of interests. The subjects include: Hawkes's Newly Invented Portable Cockle for Hot Air Beds; Purity of Flours; Witchcraft; Divorce in France; Sir Walter Scott; Wings of Insects; Interesting Anecdote of a Cat; Piracy; Brazilian Diamonds; Advice to Young Ladies; The Jewish New Year; Curious Musical Instruments; Goat's Milk at Lisbon; Paganini's Departure from Dublin; Gretna Green Marriages; Opening a Mummy. Newspapers today see very tame by comparison.

The most extensive collection of railway documents are in the British Transport Historical Records, now cared for by the Public Record Office at Kew.

They have the official documents, minute books, plans and other materials of more than 1,000 railway companies, all arranged on more than 15,000 feet of shelf space. They're immaculately preserved and catalogued and open to the public (once you have applied for a reader's ticket), though a great many people are not fully aware that they exist. Many railway enthusiasts haven't quite realised that the government, in the shape of the Public Record Office, is now the guardian of British Rail's history.

They are particularly strong on Robert Stephenson, having seventy letters written by him, plus documents about Robert Stephenson and Company. Their original material on George is limited, though they have six letters from him and the records of all the companies he worked for.

The officer in charge when I called was Derek Barlow, author of the standard biography of Dick Turpin, currently working on a history of London banyos, the eighteenth-century gentlemen's bath houses, many of which were also brothels. He was born in Darlington and collected engine numbers as a boy. ‘You'd hear the noise first, feel the rail shimmering, then see the smoke, inhale the smoke and with a woosh, the great monster would be bearing down upon you. My goodness, it was terribly exciting. I can understand the fascination of all trains, even today's rather grubby, impersonal diesel engines. You can see and feel an irresistible force. You don't have to be Freudian to say it's sexual.'

The mecca for all railway fans of every age is the Science Museum in South Kensington. It's a child's delight but must be an attendant's nightmare. Everything is so invitingly displayed, great hulking engines and trams and machines, stretching up to the ceiling, and all of it welcoming you to climb or clamber over, to press buttons and start machines and models. It's always crowded with kids, many of the bigger ones treating it as an adventure playground, running round in hordes, fighting behind machines, trying to light cigarettes, till the keepers grab them.

The
Rocket
, their most famous single railway exhibit, isn't as big an attraction as one might expect. Most casual visitors pass it by. It looks rather small, black and ugly, not painted up the way it was at Rainhill. Surrounded by much bigger, more glamorous machines, both steam and electric,
Rocket
seems dwarfed and rather left behind.

The
Rocket
ran successfully on the Liverpool–Manchester line until 1836 when it was bought for £300 by James Thompson of Kirkhouse, near Brampton in Cumberland, who was agent for the Earl of Carlisle's collieries. He ran it on his four-mile colliery railway till around 1840, during which time it is supposed on one occasion to have covered the four miles in four minutes, carrying the Alston election results, but no engineer today believes this was remotely possible. It was exhibited at the 1851 Great Exhibition and in 1862 finally ended up in South Kensington, though by that time many of its original parts were missing.

Apart from the original, the Science Museum has also on exhibition nearby a full-sized replica of
Rocket
which was made for them by Robert Stephenson and Company (by then moved to Darlington) in 1935. There seems to have been quite a trade in
Rocket
reproductions in the 1930s, big and small, started by Henry Ford in 1929 who had a working, steaming reproduction made for him personally at a cost of £2,451 – five times what Robert Stephenson and Company had charged to make the original. Two others, at around the same price, went to the Museum of Peaceful Arts in Chicago and the Museum of Science and Industry in New York.

There are several personal objects on display at the Science Museum which belonged to George, such as a calico bag made from the dress of his first wife (so it says, and who are we to disbelieve), a snuff box, a magnifying glass and some locks of his grey hair. They've framed one of his rare handwritten letters, the one written to his third wife, ‘Dear Ellen', which the transcription maintains reads ‘Dear Glen'. Locked away from public sight they have a good collection of other railway documents, reports, cuttings and letters, many of them to do with Robert Stephenson. (Volume 18 in the brown holders, should anyone be working on a biography of Robert Stephenson, a work long overdue.) Being taken to see them was like visiting prison. A lady attendant, brandishing a large bunch of keys, took me down several corridors, unlocking doors as she went, including the office door of the Assistant Keeper in charge of Rail Transport. His door is always locked on the outside, just in case any railway enthusiast, carried away in a mad passion, should try to break in, hoping to find more grey locks of George's hair.