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  The British rail system depended on the work of vast armies of navvies and the British navvy would, like Brassey, travel the globe. These men are working on the Grand Central Railway in Britain.

  Morton Peto at the start of his career was more privileged than Brassey. He inherited his father’s already prosperous building company, based in East Anglia but undertaking national projects, including the erection of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. He always retained a very strong local interest, promoting dock facilities and rail connections to build up the local port of Lowestoft. Like Brassey his reputation was made on the basis of fair dealing: he delivered what he promised to the railway companies he dealt with around the world, and he treated those who worked for him with equally scrupulous fairness. Although men such as Peto and Brassey made immense fortunes, much of their wealth was in the form of shares and bonds, taken in part payment of a contract. When there was a general collapse in financial confidence and banks were even forced to close their doors, as happened in 1866, their fortunes were seen to consist of almost worthless pieces of paper, while their commitments had to be met in the coin of the realm.

  If a railway construction unit was a pyramid with the chief engineer at the apex, then the whole structure rested on a massive base made up of tens of thousands of workers, the navvies. They too had their origin in the canal age; the the name is an abbreviation of ‘navigators’, referring to the fact that they dug out a navigation. When the canal age began the full-time navvy had not come into existence, and labour was recruited locally. By the 1780s, the Reverend Stebbing Shaw, visiting the works on the Basingstoke Canal was noting that

  The contractor, agreeable to the request of the company of proprietors, gives the preference to all the natives who are desirous of this work, but such is the power of use over nature, that while these industrious poor are by all their efforts incapable of earning a sustenance, those who are brought from similar works, cheerfully obtain a comfortable support.

  In other words, the professional navvy had been born. Tramping from one working site to the next, he could outwork any rival. His reputation, for hard living as much as for hard working, was fearsome. No one could match him for strength and stamina, not the rural workers from the fields of England, and certainly not, both in his own estimate and in that of many others, any foreign workers.

  So it was that as the railway age began to gather momentum, Britain was established as the one country where every element for achievement was to be found. There were investors keen for new railway schemes in which to place their funds. There were engineers skilled and experienced in the new technology of the modern age of transport, who understood everything from the complex workings of a steam engine to the best method of building a high, stable embankment across a deep valley. There were contractors who could be trusted to understand the engineer’s plans and carry them out in earth, brick, stone and iron. And there was a labour force with special skills and strong sinews, ready to tackle any scheme their employers could devise. Small wonder that as men all over the world began to dream of a web of iron rails spreading across their countries, they looked to the British to turn their dreams into reality.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Europe

  The Russians can reasonably claim the honour of being the first to show an interest in British railway building with the visit of the Grand Duke Nicholas to the Middleton Colliery Railway. He was, at any rate, sufficiently impressed to order a model of Matthew Murray’s locomotive. When he later became Tsar Nicholas I he made it clear that his enthusiasm for railways was undimmed. It was, indeed, widely rumoured that the Tsar had sent spies to England to report on new industrial processes.

  In many ways Russia was the least likely country to dash forward into the railway age. Firstly, it was a land divided, part Asian, part European, with a ruling class that yearned for the sophistication of French culture, but wished to combine it with the absolute rule of a feudal court. Although it was a country that valued science, the arts and industry, it depended economically on peasants and serfs. It also aspired to the new railways before it had even acquired roads that were better than muddy tracks. These filthy winding roads, virtually unusable in the atrocious northern winter, did as much to defeat Napoleon’s army as any deed of the Russian army. Nationalists and religious zealots of the Orthodox church feared the new system, while others, like the very pro-Western Prince Viazemsky, mythologized it.

  Railroads have already annihilated, and in time shall completely annihilate, old previous means of transportation. Other powers, other steams have already long ago put out the fire of the winged horse, whose weighted hoof has cut off the life-giving flow that has quenched the thirst of so many gracious and poetic generations.

  This was a very long way from the realities of railway life among the coalfields of north-east England. But Russia had its pragmatists as well as its dreamers.

  In the 1820s, the Cherepanov family was running a factory making machine tools, and they became interested in using steam power. E.A. Cherepanov was despatched to England to investigate how this could be done. He saw a number of machines, and came home confident enough to start building engines at the company’s own factory. In 1830 it was proposed that a steam railway should be built from a copper mine at Nizhni i Tagil in the Urals to the factory. As these were only two miles apart it is indicative of the state of the roads that this project was deemed worthwhile. This time it was M.E. Cherepanov’s turn to go to England and to inspect the ‘road steam engines’. In the 1820s steam engines were so widespread and had already been around for over a century, that no one minded the presence of an inquisitive foreigner. Steam locomotives were a very different matter. Robert Stephenson’s works were already beginning to build up an impressive export business, and uninvited visitors were not encouraged. Nevertheless, Cherepanov was able to see locomotives out on the track in normal service, even if he could not watch them being built. He was back home in 1833 confident he could build an engine on the Stephenson model. In fact he was to build two to fit a track laid out to the Russian gauge of 2 arshim 5 vershak, or approximately 5 ft. 5 inches. In 1836 the first train set off on its pioneering run. It may have looked remarkably like a Stephenson engine, but its performance was nowhere near as good. Cherepanov had not been able to get quite close enough to the original for that. For its first genuine line for freight and passenger traffic Russia had after all to turn to Britain for expertise and hardware.

  Timothy Hackworth’s locomotive built for the first Russian railway in 1836

  In spite of the British connection, it was an Austrian, Franz Anton von Gestner, who first appeared in Russia with plans for a mainline railway to run from Tsarokoe Selo, home of the Imperial Summer Palace, to St Petersburg. Although the engineer was Austrian, almost everything used on the line came from Britain. Although Russia already had a successful iron industry and could, no doubt, have supplied rails for the line, it was actually cheaper to order rails from Merthyr Tydfil and ship them to Russia than to bring them overland from the Urals. If ever there was an argument for a railway system in Russia then this was it.

  A whole variety of orders was sent from Russia to England – everything from turntables to cattle trucks – but by far the most important items were the four locomotives. Two were supplied by the Robert Stephenson works at Newcastle, the other pair came from Timothy Hackworth’s works at Shildon on the Stockton & Darlington Railway. The Russians, perhaps realizing that an order specifying a gauge measured in arshim and vershak would pose problems in north-east England, settled instead for a six-foot gauge: a suitably Imperial measure. Later Russian lines were to be built to the more modest gauge of 5 ft. 6 inches.

  Timothy Hackworth, having survived the disappointment of the Rainhill Trials, had established a successful locomotive building business. Like so many stories of railway builders in distant lands, there is more than a hint of Boys Own Paper heroics in the surviving papers relating to the Russian adventures of the Hackwor
th family.

  The story begins prosaically enough with the first engine, costed out with nice exactness at £1,884 2s. 9¾d., to include the tender. It was a typical product of the Hackworth works of that time, 2-2-2 wheel arrangement, with five feet diameter drive wheels. The somewhat odd feature was the cylinders, which were 17 inches in diameter with a very short 9-inch stroke, a design feature that was to enjoy no more than a temporary vogue. The first engine was despatched in the care of Timothy’s seventeen-year-old son John, accompanied by the Shildon foreman George Thompson and a small team of erectors and fitters. John Hackworth’s overseas visit was not lacking in incident. He travelled in winter and had to make his way by sleigh from the only open Baltic port to St Petersburg. Young Hackworth recorded nonchalantly – as though such occurrences were commonplace in County Durham – that the whisky in their flasks froze and they were pursued by a pack of wolves. When they arrived they faced the confusing task of trying to instruct the Russians in the mysteries of the steam locomotive. Von Gestner’s men were simultaneously working on the track itself. At any one time a conversation might be held in English, Russian, Flemish or German.

  The Tsar himself came to see the first trial of the engine, and told John Hackworth of his earlier visit to England. He was very flattering about the new engine, declaring that he ‘could not have conceived it possible so radical a change could have been effected within 20 years.’

  The locomotive was not, however, without its problems. In the early days of British railways, locomotives were run on coke following a requirement first brought in on the Liverpool & Manchester that locomotives should ‘consume their own smoke’. In Russia, coal and wood were tried with poor results: log burning was a particularly spectacular failure, as a Vesuvius of sparks burst out of the chimney, blew back over passengers in open carriages and set their clothes on fire. Hence coke had to be imported from England. A more pressing problem, however, was the cold. On one occasion, the freezing conditions led one of the cylinders to crack. George Thompson simply set off for Moscow, a mere 600 miles away, had a pattern made from which a new cylinder was cast and bored, and then returned to St Petersburg where he fitted the new cylinder. The locomotive was put back to work.

  Once the engine had been successfully put through its trials it was ready for public use, but not without an official blessing by the Orthodox church in the presence of the Tsar and his family. Water was collected from a nearby bog and poured into a golden censer, in a ring of a hundred hurdles, where it was sanctified by the immersion of a golden cross. While a choir sang, priests gave their blessings. Then, using a large brush, the holy water was dashed with great vigour in the form of a cross over each wheel of the locomotive and also, inadvertently, over John Hackworth on the footplate. After that, and including prayers for the safe passage of the Tsar and all his family, the new age of passenger transport in Russia was declared open.

  As with many countries, Russia only needed help over the first difficult step before using her increasing knowledge and confidence to develop her own rail system. It was not an easy process, particularly the financing of lines. A system was arrived at which was to prove popular in many other parts of the world. The government guaranteed a minimum return on investors’ capital – in this case 4 per cent – and with this guarantee the stockbrokers, Harman and Co., were able to raise the money on the London market for the ambitious and expensive line from St Petersburg to Moscow.

  In France the position was reversed. The French began railway building on their own account. The innovative engineer Marc Seguin designed a locomotive in 1828 for the Lyons & St Etienne Railway, though even Robert Stephenson & Co. was commissioned to produce it. However, enthusiasm for railways was slow to develop.

  As early as 1833 Vignoles was surveying a line that would link London to Paris. That proved too ambitious for financiers to contemplate, so a more modest proposal was put forward for a purely French line from Paris to Dieppe, with a branch line to Rouen. The Minister of Public Instruction, Monsieur Thiers, visited England to look at the new railways, but declared himself horrified at such monstrosities and would do nothing at all to promote railway building in France. The banker, Charles Lafitte, was highly indignant at this lack of interest in the new transport system, and lashed out furiously, decrying the ‘dearth of capital, the mistrust of the inhabitants, the charlatanism of speculators’. He recruited the help of an English entrepreneur, Edward Blount, a man of many parts. He was political agent to the Duke of Norfolk, an advocate of reform and, most importantly, a man who had the confidence of financiers of the calibre of Rothschild and Montefiore. In 1839 they approached the French government for help with the London & Southampton Railway. This line was an obvious choice. The route was to depend for much of its traffic on the port of Southampton, and a cross-channel link to a railway at Dieppe was clearly very much in their interests. The French government was to subscribe 28 per cent of the total of £2 million capital and the rest was to be raised equally in London and Paris. The chairman of the company, W.J. Chaplin, one of the directors, William Reed, and the chief engineer Joseph Locke went to France, were satisfied with what they saw of the likely route and it was agreed that work would start on the Paris to Rouen section.

  An early map of the railway from Paris to Rouen, featuring a viaduct across the Seine.

  Locke had originally intended to use French contractors and French labour, but French contractors’ prices were unreasonably high, so the work was put out to tender in Britain. Thomas Brassey and William Mackenzie put in bids and agreed, probably wisely as neither had experience of working overseas, to combine forces and work as partners.

  If Locke was unimpressed by French contractors, Brassey and Mackenzie took an equally poor view of the peasant labour of Normandy. There was an obvious answer, as Joseph Locke explained in his presidential address to the Institution of Civil Engineers, describing the departure of Brassey and Mackenzie for France.

  Joseph Locke, the chief engineer, who worked on many of the early European railways.

  Among the appliances carried by these gentlemen, there were none more striking or important than the navvies themselves. Following in the wake of their masters, when it was known that they had contracted for works in France, these men soon spread over Normandy, where they became objects of interest to the community, not only by the peculiarity of their dress, but by their uncouth size, habits, and manners; which formed so marked a contrast with those of the peasantry of that country. These men were generally employed in the most difficult and laborious work, and by that means earned larger wages than the rest of the men. Discarding the wooden shovels and basket-sized barrows of the Frenchmen, they used the tools which modern art had suggested, and which none but the most expert and robust could wield.

  Brassey’s enthusiasm for the French venture was, it is said, helped by the fact that Mrs Brassey was fluent in the language, which was more than could be said for most of the British invasion, with its army of 5000 navvies. The British were expected to instruct their French counterparts, and Helps’ biography of Brassey contains some illuminating first-hand accounts of how the British set about this task.

  They pointed to the earth to be moved, or the wagon to be filled, said the word ‘d-n’ emphatically, stamped their feet, and somehow or other instructions, thus conveyed, were generally comprehended by the foreigner.

  Supervisors and others either made an effort to learn French or were given interpreters.

  But among the navvies there grew up a language which could hardly be said to be either French or English; and which, in fact, must have resembled that strange compound (Pigeon English) which is spoken at Hong Kong by the Chinese … This composite language had its own forms and grammar; and it seems to have been made use of in other countries besides France; for afterwards there were young Savoyards who became quite skilled in the use of this particular language, and who were employed as cheap interpreters between the sub-contractors and the native workmen … On this r
ailway between Paris and Rouen there were no fewer than eleven languages spoken on the works. The British spoke English; the Irish, Erse; the Highlanders, Gaelic; and the Welshmen, Welsh. Then there were French, Germans, Belgians, Dutch, Piedmontese, Spaniards, and Poles – all speaking their own language. There was only one Portuguese.

  Language was not the only difference. For example, the British navvy expected decent accommodation, but the Germans ‘would put up with a barn, or anything’. Then there was the question of appearance. The well-established navvy was expected to wear the navvy ‘uniform’ and ‘scorned to adopt the habits or the dress of the people he lived amongst.’ Pay too separated the native French from the rest. A sub-contractor noted that when work started in 1841 the French were happy, not to say delighted, with the pay they were offered: ‘When we went there, a native labourer was paid one shilling a day; but when we began to pay them two francs and a half a day, they thought we were angels from heaven.’ The British inevitably earned more, twice as much at the start, simply because they were more skilled. In wagon-filling, it was estimated that an experienced navvy would lift 20 tons of earth to a height of around 6 feet in the course of one day. To watch a well-trained team at work in a cutting was to see physical prowess at its most impressive. One of Brassey’s time-keepers wrote,

  I think as fine a spectacle as any man could witness, who is accustomed to look at work, is to see a cutting in full operation, with about twenty wagons being filled, every man at his post, and every man with his shirt open, working in the heat of the day, the gangers looking about, and everything going like clockwork. Such an exhibition of physical power attracted many French gentlemen, who came on to the cuttings at Paris and Rouen, and looking at these English workmen with astonishment, said, ‘Mon Dieu! les Anglais, comme ils travaillent!’ Another thing that called forth remark, was the complete silence that prevailed amongst the men. It was a fine sight to see the Englishmen that were there, with their muscular arms and hands hairy and brown.