George Stephenson (32 page)

High-minded Victorian society was greatly alarmed by the barbaric life of the navvies and on every big railway site there was at least one missionary, sent by some charitable organisation to convert the brutes, trying hard to make them lead decent Christian lives, to sign the pledge of temperance and give up swearing. The coarse language of the navvies greatly upset the missionaries, especially lady missionaries. They maintained that the poor horses didn't like foul language either and begged the navvies not to swear at them.

On most lines, at least one riot broke out which needed the police or militia to break it up. The fights were either between the navvies themselves – with Yorkshire navvies fighting the Irish and Scots – or against the local villagers. In 1846 there was a pitched battle just outside Carlisle, involving over two thousand railway navvies, who'd come from as far away as Penrith and Kendal. The riots spread up and down the line and lasted two weeks till the Westmorland Yeomanry finally restored order.

It was the deaths, not the riots, which finally made the government interfere, particularly the deaths during the building of a notorious three-mile-long tunnel at Woodhead, under the Pennines, in 1838. It was a vital link in the line connecting Manchester to Sheffield and, luckily for George and Robert, it was not a Stephenson concern. The first engineer was Vignoles, an old opponent of George, who was replaced after many disasters and financial collapses by Joseph Locke. George, in his usual opinionated way, declared when the plans were announced that the tunnel couldn't be done. His actual remark was to the effect that he would eat the first locomotive which got through the tunnel. Over a thousand navvies were employed and they lived in miserable, inhuman conditions, nine miles from the nearest village. There were endless delays before the work was finished in 1845, by which time 32 navvies had died and 140 seriously injured. Edwin Chadwick (later famous for his work on the 1848 Public Health Act) revealed many of the scandals, such as penny pinching contractors who had deliberately not provided safe fuses for use with gunpowder as it took extra time. He estimated that in proportion to the total manpower employed, more men had been lost at Woodhead tunnel than at Waterloo. (Woodhead mortality amongst navvies was just over 3 per cent. At Waterloo, only 2.11 per cent of the soldiers died.)

A select committee of the House of Commons was set up in 1846 which talked a great deal about the general state of railway works but didn't do much, though the facts it came across were rather shattering. It was reported, for example, that a total of £16,500,000 was being spent every year on wages for the 200,000 navvies currently employed in building railways. It meant that in just fifteen years, since the opening of the Liverpool line, a new species of the human race had arisen who were now greater in numbers than the genuine armed forces. (In 1846, the effective strength of the army and navy was 160,000.) In most ways the navvies were fitter, stronger, more highly organised and better equipped than the British army who hadn't fought since 1815 and, as the Crimean War was to show, were completely unprepared for any serious action. The navvies might not have looked all that smart and dashing in their moleskin trousers, tied at the knees with string, knotted handkerchief and hobnailed boots, but they were a terrifying sight for every law abiding Victorian.

The men who made the money out of the navvies were the contractors, another new breed, who in an equally short space of time became immensely rich and immensely powerful. They were said at one time to have eighty MPs on their pay role, or at least in their pocket. Several of today's leading contracting firms, such as Cubitts and McAlpine, who did their early work on the Highland railways, can trace their origins back to these first railways. But the two biggest contractors of the day were Thomas Brassey and Morton Peto. Brassey, formerly a land agent, who had supplied some of the stone for George's Sankey Viaduct on the Liverpool line. This time he offered to supply men and materials for one of Locke's viaducts. They went on, with Locke as chief engineer and Brassey as contractor, to build many great railways. At the time of the London–Birmingham line, contractors were still relatively small scale. Robert originally engaged thirty main contractors, splitting up the line between them. But by the 1840s, Brassey was so powerful, controlling over 10,000 navvies, that he could contract for complete railways. By 1850 he'd built one in three of every mile of railway in Britain and one out of two in France. By the time of his death in 1870 he had built 4,500 miles of railway in all parts of the world, 1,700 miles of them in Britain. Peto was equally powerful but his works were not as far flung. He ended up a baronet while Brassey's son, also a contractor, became an earl.

When the English engineers moved abroad, as George and Robert Stephenson and Joseph Locke did, their regular contractors and navvies went with them. It wasn't just British brains which built so many of the world's railway lines – it was British muscles. Naturally it brought out some vigorous flag waving from the more chauvinistic Victorians, delighted by such British examples of Enterprise and Perseverance. Samuel Smiles, while condemning the navvies as heathens, praised their work rate, showing the frogs a thing or two, especially when it came to loading up their barrows:

While he [the English navvy] thus easily ran out some 3 or 4 cwt. at a time, the French navvy was contented with half the weight. Indeed, the French navvies on one occasion struck work because of the size of the English barrows, and there was an
émeute
on the Rouen Railway, which was only quelled by the aid of the military. The consequence was that the big barrows were abandoned to the English workmen, who earned nearly double the wages of the Frenchmen. The manner in which they stood to their work was matter of great surprise and wonderment to the French countrypeople, who came crowding round them in their blouses, and, after gazing admiringly at their expert handling of the pick and mattock, and the immense loads of ‘dirt' which they wheeled out, would exclaim to each other, ‘
Mon Dieu, voila! voila ces Anglais, comme ils travaillent!
'

The facts about such railways, as opposed to the exclamations, spoke for themselves. The Rouen railway was built by an army of 5,000 British navvies and half of it paid for with British capital. Later, when railways opened up in the New World, Brassey sent 2,000 British navvies to Canada, to build the Grand Trunk, and 2,000 for a line in New South Wales.

Mon Dieu
, could George Stephenson have guessed for one moment what he had unleashed when he finished the Liverpool line? The railways, with their navvies and contractors and engineers, all of which George spawned, did at least do a lot of economic good. It can even be argued that one of the reasons that Britain in the 1830s and 1840s escaped revolution, while most of Europe tore itself apart, was that we were all too busy building railways. There was work for everyone, if you were prepared to sweat, and the economy boomed. Socially, the conditions of the navvies might have been appalling, but they were in the fresh air, their own masters, and better paid than the sweat shop factories. Railways reduced barriers, joined people and towns together, opened up new worlds, new horizons and gave new opportunities for every class of society.

But there was one rather more abstract result of railways, much more bizarre, which was again directly caused by George Stephenson. When people began to talk of Railway Mania, which very soon the whole country was doing, it wasn't the armies of navvies or engineers or contractors who sprang to mind but the armies of paper speculators. None of them was more bizarre than George Hudson.

14

G
EORGE
H
UDSON AND
R
AILWAY
M
ANIA

G
eorge Stephenson has a lot of things to answer for and one of them is George Hudson. He was a draper's assistant from York who became the Railway King – a Victorian living legend. At the height of his powers Hudson far outshone Stephenson in public acclaim, public fame and social prestige. The newspapers and magazines of the day referred to him as a Monarch, talked about his crown and his court. London society begged for his favours – and his tips. Nobody was unaware of him – Carlyle, Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës, all refer to him in their private diaries and papers. In the 1840s, during the manic days of railway fever, he became the second most admired man in the kingdom, after the Duke of Wellington. And on one occasion even the Duke of Wellington came creeping to him for a favour.

It was George Stephenson who made George Hudson – in every way. Contact with Stephenson gave him a vital aura of respectability when he was just beginning. The world of instant railways which Stephenson created gave him his millions. What a pity Samuel Smiles never deigned to get to grips with Hudson's life. What terrifying morals he could have pointed. But the Victorians, alas, were so ashamed of their own created monster that when he fell they couldn't bury him quickly enough, vainly trying to hide their own guilt, greed and gullibility.

George Hudson was born in 1800 in a village near York, the fifth son of a yeoman farmer, which was where his peasant shrewdness was said to have come from. It was never more than shrewdness, unaffected by education or even the gift of the gab. He was always a bad speaker, most people finding him incoherent, except when he started reeling off the figures. His father died when he was nine, leaving no money, and he had to make his own way. At fifteen he left home and made for York, where he became apprenticed to a draper. He did well on the counter, well enough to be accepted at twenty-one into his employer's family, marrying one of the partner's daughters, a woman called Elizabeth five years older than himself. When he was twenty-seven, by which time he'd become a partner, he had a stroke of exceeding good luck. He said it was luck, but there were those who said it was his first con trick. A distant relative, a great uncle, became ill and young Hudson immediately rushed to his bedside. The will was made at the bedside, with only Hudson present, and to everyone's surprise Hudson was left everything, a small fortune of some £30,000. Overnight he moved into York's bourgeoisie. To leave no one in any doubt, he ceased to be a Methodist, which was how he'd been brought up, and became very staunch Church of England. At the same time, from being of no political opinion, he became a thrusting young Tory, highly active in the local party, making the right friends and helping all the right local nobility.

In 1833 there was talk in York, as there was in every town in the land, of the coming of railways. Few leading citizens, unlike their counterparts only a decade before, wanted to see their town missed out. A local group was set up to promote the idea of a railway between York and Leeds. Hudson was elected treasurer. An engineer was hired to survey the line and he eventually came up with a scheme using horse power, not locomotives. Despite the success of the Liverpool line, there were still many who thought steam wouldn't catch on. In early 1834 Hudson went on a visit to Whitby to look at some of his property, part of the loot which had come to him from his great uncle. There, by chance, he met George Stephenson who was looking at a possible railway line. Stephenson fired Hudson's imagination with schemes to cover the country with a network of railways. Hudson, whatever else he was, had an equally fervent imagination. He was quick to see the immense possibilities and was converted on the spot. Stephenson was highly impressed by Hudson's breadth of vision and enthusiasm and they became firm friends. Hudson went back to convert the York backers to steam and to build up his local power. He campaigned at the general election for a young local nobleman he'd teamed up with and managed to get him elected. In the process Hudson had distributed around £3,000 in bribes and other inducements. There were accusations in the House of Commons about skulduggery in York but when it came out that Whigs had been no better, hiring thugs to beat up Hudson's paid voters, it was dismissed as just another example of the corruption of local politics.

In 1836 Hudson, realising the growing national fame of his friend Stephenson, got the York committee to change the direction of their line. Stephenson was now working on a line directly through the Midlands and Hudson saw that if Stephenson's line from York could join up with his own line from York they would share in the success of the Stephenson scheme and also get him associated as their engineer. (He tried at first to get Stephenson to change his line, but he wouldn't, and had to change his own plans instead.) So the York and North Midland Railways was launched, with Hudson as treasurer and one of Stephenson's assistants as engineer.

With Stephenson's name to flash around, Hudson soon raised £300,000 and got the bill through parliament. He became chairman of the company, which helped his status in York as the citizens saw how he was putting them on the map. His work in local politics was crowned when he became York's lord mayor.

His reign as lord mayor was noted for its lavishness, mostly out of council funds of course. His banquets were the talk of the north of England as in turn he fêted the local clerical big wigs, the army, politicians, industrial and society leaders. In his speeches he was for ever boasting of his friendship with George Stephenson. When at one time things were flagging with the construction of the railway, he announced that George Stephenson had put £20,000 of his own money into the company's shares and was persuading his friends to do the same. (There is no proof that Stephenson did or said such a thing – more likely Hudson had offered him some shares as a present.) But George did become the engineer of many of the other railways which Hudson was soon creating or annexing. His first step was to take over a rival line, the Leeds and Selby, which he did in 1840, immediately closing it so that all passengers had to use his line. In 1840 George Stephenson was persuaded to join the board of the York and North Midlands, finally establishing his respectability.