Fire and Steam (6 page)

Railways were seen as the future, although so were many other new inventions. As one writer puts it, there were a lot of schemes that were to prove far less rewarding than the railways: ‘In the 1820s, you could invest in balloon companies which would carry passengers through the London air at forty miles an hour, or in coaching companies which were
going to run coaches on relays of bottled gas instead of horses. Or you could lose your money in a railway run by steam.'
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In 1824, in an effort to obtain support, the committee issued a prospectus, an eloquent document largely written by Henry Booth, the highly literate company treasurer. The proposal at this stage did not commit the railway exclusively to locomotive haulage but instead suggested that a combination of steam engines, both fixed and moving, as well as cables and horses, would be used. The advantages of the railway were unequivocally stated: it would be more reliable than the canals, which were affected by water shortage in the summer and ice in the winter, and provide a more secure journey for goods which were frequently lost to pilferage during their transhipment to boats and their meandering passage on the water.

The lengthy prospectus was far-sighted in that it stressed the importance of Britain embarking on railway construction before its rivals overseas. The Tsar of Russia, Booth warned darkly, had expressed an interest in the design, and visitors from the United States had become acquainted with much technical detail. The railway, he observed, would stimulate the economy and encourage ‘fair competition and free trade'. On the issue of who would use the railway, however, the prospectus was less prescient. It concentrated on freight as the principal purpose of the line, almost ignoring the carriage of passengers to which Booth devoted barely a couple of sentences in the whole document. However, that began to change. In a letter in support of the railway sent to MPs and Lords just before the Bill entered Parliament, Sandars with great foresight anticipated the notion of commuting. While factories no longer needed to be next to rivers, thanks to steam rather than mill power, houses for the workers still had to be within walking distance. But with the railway, Sandars argued, that would no longer be necessary. He was way ahead of his time, as the commuting habit did not develop on any scale until the mid-Victorian period.

It seemed that everything was in place when the Bill was presented to Parliament in February 1825. The arguments were sound, there was support from all the local Chambers of Commerce, and even from their colleagues over the water in Ireland. The national interest was at stake and the existing transport methods were slow and expensive, so what
could go wrong? Well, British class interest for a start. The landowners had lined up the best briefs who marshalled their self-interested arguments with great aplomb. Worse, those arrogant barristers would enjoy roasting the self-educated and semi-literate Stephenson when he appeared in the witness box to outline the scheme. Stephenson let himself down by being too vague, having left much of the detailed work to assistants whose competence was, to put it kindly, variable. The sheer nastiness and dishonesty of the attack symbolized a desperate last
cri de coeur
of a class that suspected its days of ruling unchallenged were numbered. As one historian put it, the building of the railways was ‘the final battle between two economic systems and two ways of living'.
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One can imagine the scene. The barristers must have been unable to hide their contempt for the wooden Stephenson with his almost incomprehensible Northumbrian accent and his lack of clarity on detail. He stumbled over basic questions such as the width of the Irwell river where the railway was to cross it, the location of the baseline for all the other height levels (some of which were wildly wrong, thanks again to the incompetence of his assistants), and, most importantly, the method of crossing Chat Moss. After his ordeal, it was little wonder that Stephenson commented ruefully: ‘I began to wish for a hole to creep into.'
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Misguided the opposition may have been, but that did not stop it being successful. After three months and thirty-seven committee sessions, in May 1825 the MPs killed off the Bill by rejecting its preamble: it could not be proved, as it claimed, that the railway would be of benefit to local people. Thomas Creevey, an MP who had been against the motion throughout, crowed rather prematurely in a letter to his stepdaughter: ‘Well, the devil of a railway is strangled at last.'
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However, Creevey, along with Derby and Sefton, who were said to be ecstatic about the committee's decision, was to be proved wrong rather sooner than expected. Stephenson might have lost the battle but he won the war when a new Bill was drawn up a year later. For a time, though, he was cast off in the wilderness. He was sacked from the Liverpool & Manchester and his place as surveyor was taken by Charles Vignoles, a slender Irishman who had recently carried out an excellent survey of the route between London and Brighton for another putative railway. As with James and many other brave railway pioneers, Vignoles had a
varied past in several professions and, like most of them, his career would be punctuated by both great successes and rank failures.

Vignoles was under instruction to reduce further the impact of the line on the aristocrats and their fellow landowners and he even tried to win over Bradshaw by suggesting the canal man should buy shares in the railway. Bradshaw, whose mission for the canals was characterized by his biographer as ‘profit extraction to the utmost limit, regardless of the feelings and interests of the users of the canal',
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was hardly going to fall for that one, and he suggested instead that he became sole owner of the railway. However, not all those with canal interests were as Luddite as Bradshaw since the Marquess of Stafford, the heir to the Duke of Bridgwater, was prevailed upon to become the biggest investor in the railway, buying 1,000 shares at £100 each.

When the new prospectus and Bill were produced, the directors were confident of success. With the canal interests split, the railway's directors weakened the opposition further by promising that land purchase would be at the full market rate and they muddied the water over traction by suggesting that steam locomotives would not be the primary form of power. Nor was there the stumbling Stephenson to face the committee. Instead, Vignoles and George Rennie who, along with his brother John, was in charge of engineering, gave a far better impression, convincingly batting back any difficult questions from the counsel representing the objectors.

Suddenly, it all seemed obvious. Of course the railway project should go ahead; why would anybody object, since it represented progress and offered wealth generation?
The Times,
a good weathervane for the
Zeitgeist,
was suddenly fully supportive and just after the Bill was passed in May 1826 commented: ‘The petitioners' faith in their project and their willingness to build in the face of such distress were to attract the admiration of all England and gave the Liverpool & Manchester Railway Company a reputation for courage and persistence.'
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The resulting Act may have received the Royal Assent, but the concessions made to opponents meant that the scheme fell short of the fully-fledged railway so desperately needed to provide the two towns with a quick and efficient transport link. Locomotives were not to be used in Liverpool and engines on the rest of the line would have to be
fitted with condensers to eliminate smoke. One rule that would become universal was established straightaway: level crossing gates would be closed across the railway and open to road users unless a train was imminent, rather than the other way around. Somehow, the primacy of road users was established right from the outset. While constraining the railway in so many ways, the legislators had also protected themselves against the prospect of excessive profits should the railway be too successful by stipulating that annual dividends could not exceed 10 per cent.

With the Act at last in the bag, the big question was who should build the line? The job was initially offered to the Rennie brothers but their terms, which included keeping Stephenson out of the project, were rejected. Almost inevitably, there was only one man to whom the promoters could turn, the most experienced engineer of the time. So barely a year after his humiliating experience in Parliament, Stephenson returned in triumph, with the dual responsibility for both the civil engineering and the locomotives. Knowing that he was already employed in a similar capacity on the Stockton line, the directors gave him a salary of £800 annually for nine months' work. Stephenson was to be in charge of all aspects of building a thirty-one-mile railway: bridges, tunnels, embankments, cuttings, pumping engines, drainage, stations, earth-moving wagons, track and points. As rail historian Adrian Vaughan says, ‘this was a vast field for a man who had dragged himself up by his bootstraps and who had not learned to read until he was eighteen'.
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Stephenson, truculent as ever, soon fell out with Vignoles, who promptly resigned, and instead hired Thomas Gooch as his assistant. The whole construction of the railway centred on Stephenson, who became utterly indispensable: it was his vision and his ability to organize projects that brought about a successful conclusion to this unique enterprise. The task facing Stephenson and the team of twenty young acolytes he had hired and trained to prepare the design of the railway was completely unprecedented. The railway was to be a double-track line linking two towns and was a completely different proposition from the Stockton & Darlington or any of the numerous coal and mineral ore railways dotted around the north of England.

Stephenson sketched out broad ideas for all the various aspects of the civil work – bridges, embankments, tunnels, machinery, turntables and so on – and Gooch developed them into working drawings. It is difficult to visualize the practical difficulties they faced in the absence of any modern equipment or communication methods. Even the typewriter had not been invented and every report had to be dictated to assistants and composed by hand. The simple task of sending a message to the other end of the line or one of the many work sites involved despatching couriers on horseback and waiting hours for a response. But Stephenson was tireless. He would work from dawn to dusk, often ending up on some remote part of the railway where he would lodge near by. Although he gave contracts to suppliers to provide rails and other pieces of equipment, he was effectively the main contractor who appointed the assistant engineers. Each of his assistants was responsible for teams of up to 200 men. In later years, the roles of engineers and building contractors would be separated and large companies undertaking the construction of railways would emerge, but for the Liverpool & Manchester Stephenson took on both tasks himself.

The men who carved out the railway – and all those that followed in the next seventy years – were a special breed known as navvies, an abbreviation of ‘navigators', for they were the direct descendants of the workers who had built the canals. As Terry Coleman points out in his seminal work on the history of this amazing band of men, not all labourers who worked on the construction of the railways could term themselves a ‘navvy': ‘They must never be confused with the rabble of steady, common labourers, whom they out-worked, out-drank, out-rioted and despised.'
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The ordinary labourers would come and go, working on the railway when there was nothing to do in the fields but returning to them at harvest or planting time. In contrast, the navvies were an elite class of worker who could qualify for the appellation only if they fulfilled three criteria: they had to work on the hard tasks, such as tunnelling, excavating or blasting, and not on the easier types of work away from the railway; they had to live together and follow the railway, rather than merely residing at home; and they had to match the eating and drinking habits of their fellows, two pounds of beef and a gallon (eight pints) of beer a day. The agricultural labourers hired from
nearby villages could eventually qualify to become navvies but at first they would down tools, exhausted, at three in the afternoon and it would take a year to build up their strength enough to earn a good wage through the piecework system, and cope with the hard living.

The navvies came from all around the UK, but there were particularly large contingents from Scotland, Ireland and the two Rose counties, Lancashire and Yorkshire. They were a proud group of men whose fashions were surprisingly up to date and expensive. They favoured ‘moleskin trousers, double-canvas shirts, velveteen square-tailed coats, hobnail boots, gaudy handkerchiefs and white felt hats with the brims turned up'.
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Their most distinctive feature was a rainbow waistcoat, and they would pay a staggering 15 shillings (75p) for a sealskin cap.

Wages were paid in pubs, encouraging the long drinking bouts that could last for several days and the navvies normally returned to work only once their money had run out. Long-lived navvies were a rarity, with the combination of diet, drinking and danger killing most of them by their forties. And yet their achievements cannot be belittled: between 1822 when work on the Stockton & Darlington started, and the turn of the century, they built 20,000 miles of railway, largely through wielding picks and shovels with the odd barrel of gunpowder to speed things along, often at great risk, and, until the final years of the nineteenth century, without mechanical devices apart from crude lifting gear. Navvies died in their scores on many railway projects, particularly tunnelling, often through sheer carelessness or the fact that they were drunk on the job. Neither their sobriety nor the safety of their work was helped by the fact that some companies refused to hire a man unless he agreed to receive part of his wages in beer.

On the Liverpool & Manchester the most dangerous task was working on the tunnel on the approach to Liverpool and its excavation cost many lives, including the first recorded death of a navvy, reported in gory detail, as was the contemporary style, in the
Liverpool Mercury
on 10 August 1827: ‘The poor fellow was in the act of undermining a heavy head of clay, fourteen or fifteen feet high, when the mass fell upon him and literally crushed his bowels out of his body.' Many would die in precisely the same manner because undermining a big chunk of earth
to precipitate its collapse was a way of getting more pay through the piece-rate system. It was particularly perilous as any misjudgement or unexpected fault line could lead to disaster.