George Stephenson (36 page)

Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the son of Sir Marc Brunel, was an exact contemporary of Robert Stephenson and was to prove his lifetime's rival. Like Robert, he was immensely precocious and had many engineering successes to his name, such as the Clifton suspension bridge, while still in his early twenties. But the Stephensons, father and son, and the Brunels, father and son, were very unalike in character. The Brunels had a touch of the Trevithicks, romantic and ingenuous, imaginative and daring. George and Robert were equally inventive but they were much more careful, more practical, meticulous craftsmen, improving on what had gone before rather than throwing the past aside. Brunel, the younger, was particularly original, looking at every problem completely afresh, ignoring, disdaining even, what had gone before. Robert in many ways had less confidence and daring than his father and appears to have worried endlessly, even at the height of his success, convinced, as he wrote to a friend, ‘that some fine morning my reputation may break under me like an eggshell'.

Smiles, being sagacious and painstaking himself, and perhaps through being a Northerner (at least a Scotsman), watched all of them at work from fairly close quarters and seems to have preferred the Stephensons. ‘The former [the Stephensons] were as thoroughly English in their characteristics as the latter were perhaps as thoroughly French. Measured by practical and profitable results, the Stephensons were unquestionably the safer men to follow.' (Marc Brunel was a refugee from the French Revolution which Smiles, being very British, wasn't going to forget.)

Since then, over the last hundred years or so, most railway writers appear to have had a softer spot for Isambard Kingdom Brunel, a glamorous figure with many glamorous successes to his name. The Great Western Railway, Brunel's creation, has always been a glamour line for railway lovers. Right from the beginning, he questioned the principles for building railways which George had laid down in the north and the Midlands. He decided, for example that wooden sleepers were far better than the stone blocks which the Stephensons had always demanded. Most important of all, he decided against their rail gauge of 4ft 8½ins. This was the gauge George had chosen at Darlington, for no better reason than it had been the wagon way at Killingworth, and was the gauge which had been followed by everyone else. Brunel, down in the remote south west corner of England, chose to be different. He chose no less than seven feet.

The GWR opened in 1838 and Brunel gave elaborate reasons for choosing such a broad gauge. The basic reason appears to have been speed, which led to great technical arguments amongst the experts for many years over whether a train really could go faster on a wide track than on a narrow track. Brunel had the body of his carriages between the wheels whereas the Stephensons had placed their carriages over the wheels so there wasn't a great advantage in volume of passengers or goods carried by the Brunel trains, which to the layman might seem the obvious advantage of increased width. Brunel's point was strength, speed and safety of his much bigger locomotives. They did indeed go faster, though it might have been due to better engineering, and they forced the Stephensons to improve their performances, even though George had by now decided that forty miles an hour was fast enough for any locomotive.

The first locomotive on the GWR was the
North Star
, built by Robert Stephenson and Company at Newcastle, and their first and perhaps most famous engineer was Daniel (later Sir Daniel) Gooch, appointed at the age of twenty-nine. Gooch had previously worked in Robert Stephenson's drawing office, but Brunel, whatever he thought of some of the Stephenson principles, couldn't be said to be blindly prejudiced.

Brunel, however, appears to have been rather blind to the problems which obviously lay ahead, problems which George and Robert had pointed out from the beginning. In 1848, just when George was beginning his genuine retirement at Tapton House, the expanding success of the GWR brought it to Gloucester where it met head on the standard gauge of Stephenson. Along with Railway Mania, the Battle of the Gauges became one of the topics of the day. Thackeray, once again, had a series of short stories about the ridiculousness of it all, about everyone, people, bags, baggages and animals having to decamp from one train and get into another one.

A royal commission, that institution beloved by every British government who doesn't know what to do, was set up in August 1845, and meticulously went through every facet of the problems, putting 6,500 questions to thousands of interested parties. Almost every expert was on the Stephenson side – even Joseph Locke gave evidence in their favour. Brunel and Gooch were almost on their own. The commission reported in 1846 in favour of the 4ft 8½ins gauge. Henceforth they said it had to be used in all public railways in Great Britain.

It was a personal triumph for George, though many commentators, then and now, had brave words to say for Brunel, fighting on his own against the weight of the Stephenson camp and their near-monopoly of the locomotive industry. But in many ways Brunel had been perverse. He genuinely considered his gauge was better, but his dimensions were equally as arbitrary as George's. There is no innate perfect width for a railway train. One width having been securely established, it was surely inconvenient and uneconomic for the country to consider changing it.

If Brunel was perverse in the gauge battle – and it's a word his supporters would never use – there was something paradoxical in his other major battle with George. At the same time as fighting for his broad gauge railway he was advocating a completely new system of rail transport which, if successful, would do away with locomotives of any sort. This was the atmospheric railway.

It must have been highly disturbing for George when he first heard about atmospheric railways. Having usurped the canals and the turnpikes, cutting them off in their prime, it did look for a time as if it could happen in turn to him and his railways before they'd ever reached their prime. The atmospheric system was not Brunel's invention but when he took it up, in the 1840s, his name was enough to make it not just a fashionable cause but a serious and genuine threat.

To put it as simply as possible, the atmospheric system was a method of blowing instead of pulling a train along the tracks. A large pipe was laid between the tracks and air was pumped along it from pumping stations placed at intervals beside the line. A piston connected the head of the train to a slot in the pipe. (Scientifically the principle at stake was more a sucking action than a blowing action, though that was how it appeared: the pumping machines exhausted the air in front of the train, the train therefore being forced into the vacuum which had been created, hence the name atmospheric.) Amazingly, the system worked and was seen to work. It was tried out on a line near Dublin and plans were made to use it at Croydon and elsewhere.

Robert, as was his wont, went into the matter very carefully and inspected every aspect in detail. George, as was his way, dismissed it out of hand. He saw it as just another permutation of the stationary engine principle which he'd beaten once and for all at Rainhill. Instead of having a rope or chain doing the pulling, so he said, it was simply a rope of air and it wouldn't work.

As if the idea wasn't enough of an insult to George, Brunel had the effrontery to propose it on George's homeland, on the railway to be built between Newcastle and Berwick. It was a railway George particularly wanted to build as it would achieve one of his life's ambitions, a direct line from Edinburgh to London. It became George's last great railway battle.

George first surveyed a Newcastle–Berwick line in 1836 but, for various reasons, nothing had happened. It was revived again in 1843 by none other than George Hudson who commissioned George, already identified with the project, as engineer and he was very happy to accept. (It can be seen how George, whatever he was beginning to think privately of Hudson, was therefore forced to continue in public as his friend.) On the other side, advocating a different route and the different, atmospheric, principle, was Brunel and his chief supporter Lord Howick, son of Earl Grey, an enormously wealthy local landowner and MP.

The grand, climactic confrontation of George and Brunel took place in Newcastle with many people hoping for a punch up. There were indeed reports that George had grabbed Brunel's arm in a decidedly rough-house style, but Smiles maintains all was friendly. ‘When Stephenson first met Brunel in Newcastle he good humouredly shook him by the collar and asked “What business had he North of the Tyne?” George gave him to understand that they were to have a fair stand-up fight for the ground and shaking hands before the battle like Englishmen, they parted in good humour.'

Both schemes went before parliament and George entered into the fight with enormous gusto and not a little vindictiveness – fighting on a principle, fighting the upstart Brunel and fighting a landed lord, the sort he could never stand. He'd had a running battle with Lord Howick from the beginning – or Hawick, as George called him, confusing him with the town. During his early survey work Lord Howick had tried desperately to keep George's confounded railway well away from his estates. George wrote to Michael Longridge telling him exactly how he felt.

Tapton House, Nov 30. 1843

I am rather astonished at Lord Hawick's observations about the line passing Hawick. It does not go through any of their pleasure grounds.… My senses are puzzled in judging how these people can set about making such paltry objections! It is compensation they want, nothing else.… This series of objections is a genteel way of picking the subscribers' pockets. It may however be better to keep these observations quiet until we come before Parliament. I have never taken any part in politics but I think I now will and become a Tory; and I shall buy a piece of land in Northumberland to oppose Lord Hawick. I do not like his double dealing work. Is the great thoroughfare through England and Scotland to be turned aside injuriously, for the frivolous remarks made by Lord Hawick? no! the times are changed. I wonder their pulse does not cease to beat when such imaginations enter their brains! these failings are not becoming human beings. I can have no patience with them. However, I suppose we must bend and keep our tempers until we get what we want.

When the battle did reach parliament in 1845, George had a chance meeting with Lord Howick at the Stephensons' London office. Smiles has a very entertaining description of what happened between them, as retailed to him by Robert Stephenson.

On the day in question, George was standing [in the outer office] with his back to the fire when Lord Howick called to see Robert. Oh! thought George, he has come to try and talk Robert over about that atmospheric gimcrack; but I'll tackle his Lordship. ‘Come in, my Lord,' said he, ‘Robert's busy; but I'll answer your purpose quite as well; sit down here, if you please.' George began, ‘Now, my Lord, I know very well what you have come about: it's that atmospheric line in the north; I will show you in less than five minutes that it can never answer.' ‘If Mr. Robert Stephenson is not at liberty, I can call again,' said his Lordship. ‘He's certainly occupied on important business just at present,' was George's answer; ‘but I can tell you far better than he can what nonsense the atmospheric system is: Robert's good-natured, you see, and if your Lordship were to get alongside of him you might talk him over; so you have been quite lucky in meeting with me. Now, just look at the question of expense,' – and then he proceeded in his strong Doric to explain his views in detail, until Lord Howick could stand it no longer, and he rose and walked towards the door. George followed him down stairs, to finish his demolition of the atmospheric system, and his parting words were, ‘You may take my word for it, my Lord, it will never answer.' George afterwards told his son with glee of ‘the settler' he had given Lord Howick.

George did indeed have the final settling. The Stephenson–Hudson line passed parliament amid much rejoicing in all locomotive circles. In Newcastle eight hundred workmen from the Stephenson loco works paraded in the streets with banners and music. (The atmospheric system did continue elsewhere for some years but was continually breaking down, was found to be uneconomic and finally abandoned. But for a time it did work: perhaps someone, some day, will take it up again.)

George always had great acclaim whenever he returned to Newcastle. He was cheered to the roof when he went back for the banquet organised by Hudson, when the first ‘flying' trains arrived from London. He was now being called the ‘Father of Railways', even the Inventor of Railways, according to some of the speeches, a title he never argued with. He visited Newcastle on another occasion when it was the venue for a meeting of the British Association, of which he'd been elected one of the vice-presidents. He toured the scenes from his boyhood, like Wylam, taking with him some of the distinguished guests, telling them harrowing stories about his early life and hard struggles.

In London, he never had the same spontaneous acclaim. It was, after all, Robert who brought the trains to London from the north, arriving at Euston, and Brunel from the west into Paddington. George had been personally rather abusive in his battles with Brunel, which Robert never was, and the Establishment generally still considered him something less than a gentleman and a great deal less than an engineering genius. However, George's progress in foreign parts, where he was a prophet showered with every sort of honour, was one long triumphant tour.

As we saw from the early days in Darlington and Liverpool, European and American engineers had long been watching George's locomotives with great interest. When the first locomotives were to be built in France for the Lyon–St Etienne, which started in 1829, two engines were brought from Stephenson's Newcastle works to act as models and George himself received a gift of 12,500 francs for his help and advice. Newcastle was also sending locomotives to the USA from as early as 1828. The oldest complete locomotive which now exists in America, preserved in the Smithsonian Institute, is
John Bull
, built at Forth Street in 1831. America's first locomotive railway was the South Carolina in 1830, five years after Darlington. (But by 1850 America had far outstripped Britain in the extent of its railway system.)