Railway Empire Read online

  The Middleton colliery railway in Leeds. It was the first successful commercial railway, running on a rack and pinion system. It attracted a great deal of attention, and Grand Duke Nicholas of Russia was among those who visited the site.

  Mr Jameson’s Lectures have hitherto been confined chiefly to Zoology, a part of Natural History which I cannot say I am enraptured with; nor can I infer from many of his Lectures any ultimate benefit, unless to satisfy the curiosity of man. Natural historians spend a great deal of time in enquiring whether Adam was a black or white man. Now I really cannot see what better we should be, if we could even determine this with satisfaction; but our limited knowledge will always place this question in the shade of darkness. The Professor puzzles me sadly with his Latin appellations of the various divisions, species, genera, &c, of the animal kingdom. He lectures two days a week on Meteorology and three on Zoology. This makes the course very unconnected.

  I have taken notes on Natural Philosophy, but have not written them out, as there has been nothing but the simplest parts, and which I was perfectly acquainted with.

  There was no denying it, advances in the early days of the railways were the result of the practical experiences of working men – and that experience was most readily available in Britain. America, already showing its new spirit of independence, was to be one of the few countries that was to employ home-built locomotives from the start, but then an American, Oliver Evans, had taken his steam vehicle out on the road as early as 1804. It was not, of course, simply knowhow that was required, there had to be the industrial base there as well. That meant power and iron and engineering works, all of which Britain had been building up during the dramatic, and often traumatic, years of the Industrial Revolution. Britain had not just produced the first successful steam locomotive, it was also home to the first iron bridges, the first iron boat and a whole range of inventions and innovations. Yet this is only part of the story of the Railway Empire. Britain could, and indeed did, take a role as the engineering workshop for that Empire, shipping out locomotives to the rest of the world. But the world wanted more. Countries on every continent turned to Britain to build their railways, survey the routes, design their viaducts, dig out the ground and hack through the rock. Surprisingly, often they wanted Britain to find the money to pay for their railways as well. This, on the face of it, may seem strange. To find out why one has again to turn back to a period before the railway age began.

  The French had, as we have seen, a great tradition of canal building. The British were slow to follow their lead. Once they did, however, they did so with immense energy, developing a huge and complex network of canals. What is of interest here is how these canals (and then railways) were financed.

  A canal was not like a factory or mill. You could not just set up a canal in a modest way and use the profits to develop the business. Canals required very large capital sums indeed, running into hundreds of thousands of pounds, millions in today’s terms. Allowing promoters to encourage the public to invest in such projects with promises of large profits was an obvious solution, but the South Sea Bubble had shown that the public was, alas, just as willing to invest in a hopeless scheme as a sound one. Following this disaster, the government stepped in to regulate investment. Although canals were largely built by joint-stock companies, before anything could be done a scheme had to be approved by Act of Parliament. The company and its plans were subject to parliamentary scrutiny. It was not a fool-proof system, but it did offer the investors some guarantee that a disinterested third party had given the plans consideration and approved them as practical. In fact, companies regularly underestimated the construction costs by an alarming amount and overestimated the profits similarly. The relevant point is that a method had been found for financing very large capital projects, and on the whole it worked. The canals were built, and the best of them provided handsome dividends. A public had appeared that was quite ready to invest in such major capital projects. In the early days of French canal construction, the costs were born by the state; in Britain they were carried by a variety of people, ranging from speculators to sober industrialists. As the lure of the canals began to fade, these investors happily switched to railways. And the railways did not have to be on British soil.

  The engineers of the canal age had shown themselves more than competent, and men such as Jessop, Telford and Rennie rose to international as well as local fame. Civil engineering was put on a professional basis with the founding of the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1820. Thomas Telford was its first president. It became not so much a forum for ideas as a collecting house for practical projects. Telford wrote to Count von Platen of Sweden, who had invited him to work on the Gotha Canal in 1808, to ask for material to be sent to the library, but made it very clear precisely what was wanted: ‘You will remind them to send me drawings and descriptions of works really executed. We have no wish for learned discussions; facts and practical operations are to compose our collections and we should leave project and theory to those who are disposed to create new systems.’ There speaks the voice of the pragmatic British engineer, the man who had worked his way up from humble beginnings to the highest pinnacle of his profession, the very model of Samuel Smiles’ self-made man. To a large extent it was this quality that made the British engineer so popular with overseas promoters. He might not have been able to supply written answers to examination papers – some of the older generation of engineers could scarcely have read the questions – but he got ten out of ten in the practicals. He could be relied on to start a job and see it through to a successful conclusion. He was an engineer with muck on his hands.

  Even at the beginning of the railway age, not every engineer conformed to the stereotype. Men came from a great variety of backgrounds, and advanced by as many different routes. At one end of the spectrum stood stout, stolid George Stephenson, who spoke loudest and best when he spoke through his works rather than his words. Throughout his life he smarted from the verbal battering he received when Alderson, counsel for the canal interest opposing the Liverpool & Manchester Railway Bill, cross-examined him on his surveys. The engineer had been forced to rush the work and rely on untested figures supplied by equally harrassed juniors. He had made mistakes, but now these mistakes had been held up to public ridicule and he had been made to look at best a fool, at worst a dishonest charlatan. It all served to magnify his prejudice against the socially adept, sophisticated ‘London men’.

  Robert Stephenson’s Rocket, the famous locomotive that set the pattern for future development.

  Just such a man was Charles Blacker Vignoles, whose family had come to Ireland as Huguenot refugees. His early career was made in the army according to the conventional route of a gentleman – Sandhurst, followed by a commission in the York Chasseur. He saw active service in the Napoleonic Wars after which he spent two years travelling. He had little prospect of a successful military career: there was a glut of ambitious young officers at the time. So in 1817 he began a new career, in the event an adventurous one, as a surveyor in South Carolina. Back in England in 1824, an experienced surveyor and engineer, he was at once taking part in the world of railway construction. Almost his first job was to resurvey the Liverpool & Manchester line after Stephenson’s first survey had been demolished by the opposition. Having done a sound job of work, Vignoles must have hoped for more than he received in reward – a post as Stephenson’s assistant, an uncomfortable position for a critic. And Vignoles himself admitted he was no flatterer; he saw Stephenson’s faults and his prejudices. In his own words he ‘neglected to court Mr S’s favours by crying down all other engineers, especially those in London, for though I highly respect his great natural talents, I could not shut my eyes to his deficiencies.’ There followed an inevitable parting of the ways. In spite of his quarrel with Stephenson, Vignoles’ career culminated in his being elected President of the Institution of Civil Engineers – he was also chief engineer for railways as far apart as England and Mexico.

 
The most important event in terms of generating enthusiasm for railway construction was the opening of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway. Most of the work was done by Robert Stephenson’s locomotives, with a design based on the one illustrated here, Planet. The design was to find its way to many other countries.

  The backgrounds of the engineers who took railways to the world could not, then, have been more varied; yet all in those days shared something far more important than social difference. Their skills were learned and tested in the hands-on world of muddy cuttings and dripping tunnels. If anyone could be said to typify this breed of engineer it is John Fowler. Fowler followed in his father’s steps as a surveyor, but although he had opportunities for further education he left school at sixteen, at his own request, to be taken on as a pupil of J.T. Leather, engineer for the Sheffield Water Works. Later in life he was to declare with a not unreasonable pride: ‘Before I was nineteen I was a good engineering leveller, could set out works, and measure them up for certificates to be paid to contractors.’ He first came into contact with railways when Stephenson arrived to look at the line for the North Midland Railway that was to link Derby and Leeds. He went for the easy option, choosing the low ground but missing out, much to the indignation of the locals, the thriving town of Sheffield. Fowler was engaged to help look for alternative routes and this brought him into contact with Vignoles. This gives an indication of just how small the world of railway building was in the 1830s. Fowler, not yet out of his teens, was meeting the great men of the age. He was also getting a taste of the rough and tumble of railway life. Not all the gentry wanted railways, or even railway surveyors, anywhere near their properties, and did what they could to obstruct the work. On one occasion Fowler was taking levels when a local landowner’s servant firmly placed himself in front of the theodolite, declaring he had the right to stand where he liked on the public road.

  On this, one of my stalwart assistants inquired if he also had the right to stand or walk where he pleased on a public road. Unthinkingly the landowner’s man admitted that any man had such a right. ‘Then’, said my man, ‘my right is here, and if you obstruct me I shall remove you’; and walking up to the man, he took him in his arms and deposited him in a ditch.

  An English squire could, as many an engineer found out, prove more intractable than any peasant farmer, and a deal more prickly than any cactus. John Fowler learned his trade on the moors of Yorkshire and the downs of Suffolk and he was to apply his expertise, as eminent Sir John Fowler, in Europe, Africa and Asia.

  The chief, or consulting, engineers were the grand panjandrums of the railway world, so grand that some never even set foot in the countries – nor indeed the continents – where their advice was sought. The actual work of surveying, laying out the line and supervising the work went to subordinates, resident engineers and their assistants. Even then, the engineering staff rarely supervised the workforce itself. Once again they used a system developed and refined in the canal age. Work was let out to contractors. The latter provided the everyday tools of the works, which were simple enough – shovel, pick-axe, barrow – and, most importantly, the men. They accepted a price for doing the job and were then responsible for wages. There were many advantages to the railway company. They were able to set fixed-price contracts which, in theory if seldom in practice, should ensure that work remained within budget. They did not have to waste time recruiting labour, and they could disclaim all responsibility for a rowdy, troublesome workforce. At the end of construction they were not left with piles of unwanted tools and materials on their hands: the contractors could use the barrows and shovels on the next job. There were disadvantages: contractors in general had an overriding aim to finish a job quickly, collect the cash and move on, regardless of quality. The engineering staff wanted to see a job well and thoroughly done. It was a source of endless bickering throughout the canal age. A letter written in 1793 by the long-suffering and finally exasperated secretary for the Lancaster Canal to the contractors Pinkerton and Murray, could have been written by any of a score of secretaries to their firm of contractors.

  Thomas Brassey began his career as a railway contractor in Britain, but over the years he was to take his work force around the world.

  The Comc are sorry that they have reason to observe that the General tendency of your Management is to get the works hurried on without regard to the convenience of the public, the loss of the land occupiers or the advantage of the Company. You seldom provide the necessary accommodations before you begin to make the Bridges, and in the excavation you place your men in so many various places without either finishing as you proceed or making your fence wall & posts & railing – that the whole Country is laid open to damage. This grievance which has already caused so much trouble and expence is so very obvious & so much owing to your neglect that the Company will no longer suffer it … The not fulfilling the promises you make & the want of attention in yourselves, your agents & workmen to the direction of the Company Agent, are evils there is great reason to complain of.

  These words could also have been repeated verbatim in the railway age. Yet the system survived, largely because the railway companies considered that the alternative of hiring direct labour was generally a good deal worse, combining inefficient use of basic resources and an often arbitrary system of payment. The contracting system was so well established by the 1820s that it was a source of astonishment to Thomas Telford, when he was asked to report on the progress of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway in 1828, to find that it was not in use. George Stephenson had divided responsibility for construction between his three principal assistants.

  Each has 200 day men employed and pay them every fortnight as Company’s men for laying temporary roads, moving planks, making wheelbarrows, driving piles and, in short, doing everything but putting the stuff into the carts and barrows which is done by a set of men which is also under their direction and to whom they pay 3½d per yard to 5s as they think it deserves.

  This was seen as an aberration, a curiosity – and not to be repeated.

  In practice, the word ‘contractor’ could be used to describe at one end of the scale a semi-literate workman who had managed to acquire some primitive tools and persuaded a few old mates to work for him, and at the other a financial giant with a capital of millions in cash and a workforce with more men than some European armies. A few of the former in due course achieved the status of the latter. Some of the contractors, such as William Mackenzie, who was to play an important role in the construction of European railways, gained early experience on the canals, while others grew and developed with the railway age. Of these, two men were quite outstanding, Thomas Brassey and Samuel Morton Peto. On occasion they worked together; at other times separately. Of the two Brassey was probably the more successful, for Peto was to suffer seriously in the great crash that hit the world of banking and finance in 1866, and from which he never recovered. Brassey was hit likewise but managed to rebuild his fortune. According to his biographer, Sir Arthur Helps, Brassey had during his career a total of ninety-seven contracts in Britain for the construction of 2051 miles of railway; his forty-two overseas contracts covered an astonishing 4472 miles of line.

  Thomas Brassey’s beginnings were modest. His family owned land and farmed at Buerton in Cheshire, and he received a decent education before leaving school at the age of sixteen to be articled to a surveyor, a sound training for his later career. He was perhaps fortunate in being in the right place at the right time. The Holyhead road was being improved by Thomas Telford at the time, and Brassey had the opportunity to work on the survey. His employer, Mr Lawton, also proved a man of some foresight in recognizing the growing importance of Merseyside, and took his protégé into partnership establishing him in a new office in Birkenhead. Brassey was there when George Stephenson came to the area, hunting out good stone for the mighty Sankey viaduct on the Liverpool & Manchester Railway. Young Mr Brassey had the management of just such a quarry and took the engineer along to see it. S
tephenson must have been impressed, for he was soon suggesting that railway contracting was a good business to be in. Brassey subsequently put in a bid for the Dutton viaduct on the Grand Junction. His first shot at estimating for a railway viaduct came in too high and was rejected; his second for the Penkridge viaduct hit the target. He won the contract and was fortunate enough to establish a rapport with the engineer for the line, Joseph Locke. It was to be a working partnership that was to prove profitable to both men.

  Helps’ biography of 1872 has more than a touch of hagiography about it. There is no denying that Brassey was immensely successful: he died in 1870 leaving an estate of over £3 million. It is also clear that he was not only a man with a keen business sense, but that he combined it with generosity of spirit. He was a leader who was not afraid to delegate, once he was certain that trust was justified. A young estimator described how Brassey called him in and went through all his figures with immense precision, but having done so once, did not feel it necessary to do so again. He knew his office staff and appreciated their worth, and he knew his labourers equally well; he was aware that ultimately it was on their muscle-power that his fortune depended. An employer who can gain the affection as well as the respect of a gang of hard-drinking navvies has to be a man of special qualities. The tender-heartedness of Thomas Brassey is praised by Helps: ‘At the busiest period of his life he would travel hundreds of miles in order to be at the bedside of a sick or a dying friend, and to give what aid or consolation he could give him.’ A copy of the book was sent to the family of William Mackenzie, and a tart note pencilled in the margin declares that he never came anywhere near the sick-bed of his old partner. Edward MacKenzie, William’s younger brother who was also at the works at the time, was deeply shocked by this oversight and had a number of unflattering things to say about Brassey in his diary. Clearly the event was never forgotten by the McKenzies. It is comforting, after reading a biography such as this, to discover that the hero was not perhaps a paragon of all the virtues.