George Stephenson (15 page)

Around 1823, certain normally staid and sensible firms in the City of London got themselves very worked up about the possibilities of great fortunes to be made in South America. The idea was admittedly very exciting. Everybody knew the old stories, even if many of them were legendary, about the Inca gold mines, about the Spanish conquistadores and the undreamt of mineral wealth which they had found. These mines had been worked by hand, without machines, and long since left abandoned. Think what can now be done, suggested some bright speculator, using all our new and marvellous steam engines! As the Tyneside coal fields had been made deeper and longer through having steam winding engines and steam pumps, so the South American mines could now be opened up and all that gold and silver would be there for the taking. To this day the City of London goes slightly mad every ten years or so and it's very often at the prospect of unlimited mineral wealth. A hill made of gold in the outback of Australia can still get everyone very excited. In 1823 ‘a mania of speculation', as Nicholas Wood called it, became centred on South America.

There had been a similar stampede about ten years previously which everybody seems to have forgotten. In the excitement Richard Trevithick, that brilliant but impressionable engineer, had found himself with his bags and engines packed and on the way to Peru. He'd hardly been heard of since. It transpired later that he'd got caught up in Simon Bolivar's revolution against the Spanish dictators, and other adventures, but at the time no one had yet heard whether he'd made his fortune or not, or even if he were still alive.

This time, said the speculators, things are different. We're not going to Peru looking for Inca mines. We're going much further north, to Mexico, where things are peaceful and this time, thanks to the wonderful developments of the last ten years, we really have got excellent engines, made by the very wonderful engineers in our Tyneside collieries.

Thomas Richardson, in his wisdom, despite being a sobersided Quaker, was one of the City men getting together an expedition to Mexico. He turned naturally to George Stephenson, probably trying to get him to go out there, but George wasn't so gullible. He had too much to do at home, what with the Stockton and Darlington and other railway ventures, but he agreed to give his considered advice on which sort of machines and equipment should be sent out.

Young Robert was much more excited. He jumped at the idea of leading an exploratory mining expedition to Mexico. Michael Longridge, his partner in the newly founded locomotive works, where Robert was supposed to be managing partner, wasn't at all pleased. Robert argued that it would just be for a short visit and Longridge could easily hold the fort while he was away. His father was even more against it,

Let me beg of you not to say anything against my going out to America [so Robert wrote to his father]. I have already ordered so many instruments that it would make me look extremely foolish to call off. Even if I had not ordered any instruments, it seems as if we were all working one against one another. Only consider what an opening it is for me as an entry into business. I am informed by all who have been there that it is a very healthy country. I must close this letter, expressing my hope that you will not go against me this time.

George doesn't appear at this stage to have said yes or no but Robert nonetheless went ahead with his Mexican plans. In February 1824 he went down to Cornwall to look at likely men and machines to be taken to Mexico. He was accompanied on this trip by his Uncle Robert, George's brother, who was also involved in the Mexican scheme.

From Devon on 5 March Robert wrote to his father, keeping up his efforts to persuade him, slipping in extra reasons for going, working them in as subtly as possible.

As far as I have proceeded on my journey to the Cornish mines, I have every reason to think it will not be misspent time; for when one is travelling about, something new generally presents itself, and though it is perhaps not superior to some schemes of our own for the same purpose, it seldom fails to open a new channel of ideas, which may not infrequently prove advantageous in the end. This I think is one of the chief benefits of leaving the fireside where the young imagination received its first impression.

However, the Mexican trip was called off around late March 1824. There were problems with land concessions out in Mexico and it looks as if Robert himself decided it wasn't such a good venture. But a month later, Robert accepts another South American venture which has suddenly come up, this time to Colombia. Once again, Thomas Richardson is one of the promoters. On this occasion there appears to be very little preparation. On an impulse, or so it would seem, Robert has decided that this time he is definitely going, whatever happens. And off he goes.

Rolt's theory about the motivation for this impulse rests on a very interesting letter, first discovered in 1930, which Robert Stephenson wrote to William James. The letter is dated 18 April 1824 – the very, time when the Mexican trip is called off. In this letter Robert says he has relinquished the Mexican trip and then, most surprisingly, asks James for employment. As Rolt says, young Robert is known to have enjoyed his work with James on the Liverpool–Manchester survey, and was a great admirer of James, but it seems very strange that he should now contemplate going to work with James instead of going back to the factory in Newcastle. He would appear not to want to go back to his father at any cost, but to be with William James.

When James received this letter, he himself was running into financial troubles, which makes Robert's request all the more surprising, unless he was doing it deliberately to help James who had taken on too many ventures, financing many of them out of his own pocket. James' health was poor and he'd been very slow to produce the necessary survey and plans for the Liverpool promoters. Robert had already heard about James' problems the previous year and had written him a very revealing letter in August 1823, just before he had set off with his father on the Irish trip.

It gives rise to feelings of true regret when I reflect on your situation; but yet a consolation springs up when I consider your persevering spirit will for ever bear you up in the arms of triumph, instances of which I have witnessed of too forcible a character to be easily effaced from my memory. It is these thoughts, and these alone, that could banish from my thoughts feelings of despair.… Can I ever forget the advice you have offered me in your last letters? and what a heavenly inducement you pointed before me at the close, when you said that attention and obedience to my dear father would afford me music at midnight. Ah, and so it has already. My father and I set off for London on Monday next, the 1st, on our way to Cork. Our return will probably be about the time you wish me to be at Liverpool. If all be right, we may possibly call and see what is going on. That line is the finest project in England.

It would appear from this letter that Robert must have been moaning about his father to James, saying he was fed up, in despair, and wanting to get away but had decided to follow James' advice and stick it out. Certainly James wasn't encouraging any rebellious feelings, despite what George may have thought.

When James eventually gets the letter from Robert Stephenson asking for a job he is unable to give one because of his own dire situation which has now led to bankruptcy. But the worst blow for James comes just a month after Robert's letter about a job. In May 1824, George Stephenson is given the job of surveying the Liverpool line, displacing poor old James.

For many years the James family kept up a bombardment on George, accusing him of bringing about James' downfall and his bankruptcy, intriguing to get the Liverpool job from him. As late as 1861 a book was published called
The Two James and the Two Stephensons
by someone simply signed E.M.S.P. – later revealed to be Mrs Ellen Paine, William James' daughter. She attacks George for pinching James' glory. ‘He has taken the credit for so many inventions from a cucumber to a lady's frilled petticoat.'

There now seems to be not the slightest doubt that George acted fairly in getting the Liverpool job, but the relationship between him and James is certainly rather clouded in mystery. According to Rolt, Robert was very upset, seeing the James affair as a matter of principle. James had been an early supporter of George and had helped him a great deal, publicising his name and his engines, introducing him to the right contacts. They had been business partners, taking out a patent together, though nothing much seems to have happened to it, and intimate friends, addressing long letters to each other. Then of course the business of James taking young Robert under his wing at Liverpool, originally with George's full support, shows their confidence in each other.

But when times turn bad for James, not only does George do nothing to help him, he takes the bread from under his nose by accepting the job which James desperately needed. Even if it was James' own fault that he lost the Liverpool job, Robert might well have thought that his father should have at least refused. This then is Rolt's theory – that it was the treatment of William James, the usurping of his Liverpool job by George Stephenson, that finally turned Robert against his father, convincing him he had to get away. When James couldn't give him a job, he took the next one which came along, which happened to be in Colombia.

There is no evidence in any letters to show or even suggest that Robert and his father had an argument over James, but what we know of Robert's character indicates he was a young man of high principle and what we know of George's character indicates that he wasn't a man to feel himself eternally grateful to those who'd helped him in the past. Many years later when James died, Robert put his name to a testimonial to him and got the Liverpool Manchester board to grant his widow £300. George did nothing, and is supposed not to have been pleased with Robert's actions. In none of his speeches in later life did George give James any credit.

The time scale fits in neatly – Robert leaving for Colombia almost straight after the news that George has got the James job. We know that Robert had been very close to James. Surprisingly, there is no reference in Jeaffreson or the 1857 edition of Smiles to Robert working with James on the Liverpool line. Had Robert forgotten or did he not want his friendship with James to be mentioned? It would certainly appear that George was jealous of James' influence on Robert.

However, there is one mistake in the evidence which Rolt mustered in support of his thesis that it was George taking James' job which made Robert leave. The only known connecting link at this stage between Robert and James, in fact the vital connecting link on which Rolt bases his whole supposition, is the surprising letter of 18 April 1824, the one in which Robert Stephenson asks William James for a job. This letter, so it has now been agreed, was written by Robert Stephenson, George's brother, not Robert Stephenson, George's son. Young Robert never asked James for a job nor had he any known connection with James after he lost the Liverpool position.

The confusion between Robert Stephenson and his uncle Robert is easily made. Both were involved in the Mexican scheme so the reference in the letter to Mexico no doubt convinced Rolt he had the right Robert – especially if he was already looking for a connection between young Robert and William James. The letter, which was bought by the Liverpool Library from Sotherbys, ‘the property of a lady', in 1973 has now been recatalogued – under Robert the brother, not Robert the son. (For a fuller explanation of the background to the letter see Appendix.)

Rolt's theory might still be right – that young Robert was upset by the treatment of James – but the most important element in his proof now collapses. All the same, whether or not there was a row about James, Rolt was the first to suggest that Robert went off to South America not for his health but because for some reason he wanted to get away from his father.

I don't personally believe there was any row, or even a specific difference of opinion over James or over any other subject. It was simply that young Robert, to put it in its simplest terms, was fed up with his father. He didn't need a pretext. He just wanted to get away. And the reasons why he wanted to get away are surely archetypal. The symptoms of an intense, claustrophobic father–son relationship can be traced back many years and, as so often happens, the son finally decides to make a break. The strong, domineering father has brought up his only son to take over the family business (in this case to help him make the family business) till the equally strong minded son, having doted on his father as a youngster, starts to rebel as a teenager. The son feels he's been used and bossed around, and decides at length to cut free and for once to be himself.

The picture we've always been given of Robert as a schoolboy is very endearing, the two of them together in the evening lamplight, the son testing the father's knowledge. It was a story beloved by the later Victorians. In Jeaffreson's biography he relates that Robert's earliest memory is of sitting on his father's knee ‘watching his brows knit over the difficult points of a page'. How Robert felt throughout these years can only be guessed at but there are several anecdotes in Jeaffreson where Robert is being forced to stay indoors and study when he clearly wants to go outside. Spurred on no doubt by all the physical hardships that George endured as a boy, and later boasted about, in fact quite soon boasted about, Robert himself wanted to be out doing robust things with the other lads in the mining village. He wants to go out, for example, and help his aunt Nelly at harvest time and then again to help take the men's picks to be sharpened (a job George himself did as a boy) but George tells him to ‘mind his buiks' instead. The neighbours thought George was too strict, forever saying that his son must ‘wark, wark, wark'.

George was very pleased with himself when Robert was sent to Dr Bruce's Academy but Robert doesn't appear to have been all that happy, perhaps beginning to revolt against his father's insistence on endless study. None of Robert's contemporaries interviewed later by Jeaffreson remember Robert as being anything special academically. ‘Goading him to work harder,' says Jeaffreson, ‘gave him a transient distaste for subjects to which he was naturally inclined.'