Map of a Nation (54 page)

Thomas Colby had been distracted by the Irish survey for almost twenty years. From his new place of work, he turned his attention back to the First Series of maps of England and Wales. This project had been over forty years in the making and was only now inching its way to completion. While the Ordnance Survey had been in Ireland, a very small team of map-makers had been engaged in revising the finished First Series maps and the engravers had been busy producing charts of Wales. There were also plans afoot to re-examine the height of Britain’s peaks, measuring all altitudes from a ‘datum’, a standard position, which the Ordnance Surveyors
eventually
took as the ‘mean sea level’ at the Victoria Dock in Liverpool. What became known as the ‘primary levelling of Great Britain’ took place between 1840 and 1860, although it would be subsequently recalculated from a different datum, at Newlyn in Cornwall, in the early twentieth century. And the Trigonometrical Survey was also shortly to be recalculated in order to better compensate for the effects of local attraction and the size and shape of the earth; this exercise would be finished in 1852. But mapping a nation is like the well-known analogy of painting the Forth Railway Bridge: almost as soon as the map of a region has been published, a new map is likely to be necessary to keep up with changes in the landscape. And it is not only the scenery that alters. As time passes, fresh demands are made of maps that require adaptations in their content and appearance, and place additional burdens on their makers.

 

38. The Ordnance Survey’s Principal Triangulation of Great Britain.

 

D
URING THE YEARS
of the Ordnance Survey’s Irish adventure, Britain had fully entered the era of the Industrial Revolution. Every year saw
dramatic
change in which, at first near Leeds, Stockton and Darlington, and then between Liverpool and Manchester, and in South Wales, and finally stretching across England and southern Scotland, lengths of iron and then steel railway track were laid. The clouds of smoke and soot that puffed from
the engines that travelled along these railway lines were vastly multiplied in the nation’s skyline by the factories that were quickly replacing traditional small-scale producers, and by the clusters of chimneys of the urban centres that were mushrooming around the new hubs of industry. The skies of industrialising Britain were not a conducive home to the map-makers’ sight lines, which were forced to struggle through smog so thick that it proved more problematic than the dense fog and cloud of Ireland. And there were changes under, as well as over, the ground. The demand for coal to power both the new steam engines and Britain’s factories required new workforces for the mines of central and northern England, Scotland and South Wales, in which ‘unguided, hard-worked, fierce, and miserable sons of Adam’ toiled away in the nation’s subterranean world. The kingdom whose infrastructure had been gradually coalescing through the previous century was now rapidly transforming into a state integrated through industry.

It was not just the rapid alterations to Britain’s landscape that presented the Ordnance Survey with a challenge; the new uses for the maps that many of the projectors of the Industrial Revolution devised did as well. In the years immediately before and after Queen Victoria’s accession to the throne in June 1837 many of the nation’s administrative and governmental bodies were formed, including the Poor Law Commission and the Board of Health. These found applications for the Ordnance Survey that had never been dreamt of when it was established in 1791, and it quickly became clear to Colby that the project he was now managing and the nation it was mapping were both
radically
different to those in which he had been first employed in 1802. The explosion in the size and density of the population of cities had made social concerns like poverty, disease and contagion, and sanitation unavoidably
pertinent
. In 1834 the Poor Law Commission was established, partly to research the links between poverty and disease, and also to investigate sanitary conditions in the large urban centres that grew up around factories and mines. Railway engineers also depended on good maps of the landscape to plot the course of their tracks. It was a new country under a new monarch, and it needed a new map.

His experiences in Ireland had persuaded Colby of the benefits of
mapping
on a larger scale than the one-inch First Series. His return to Britain at
the height of the Industrial Revolution reinforced this view, as the Ordnance Survey became the focus for a number of urgent requests. In the mid 1830s, the Poor Law Commission contacted the Ordnance Survey to ask it to
produce
maps of Britain’s towns on the huge scale of five feet to one mile, to reveal the presence of every existing tap, drain, sewer and water source, and improve urban sanitation. The Tithe Communication Act of 1836 had also created a demand for large-scale maps to accurately delineate property boundaries, in order to calculate the tithes that were owed by landowners to the Church. So in April 1840, Colby wrote to the Inspector-General of Fortifications with a proposition. England’s northern counties still needed to be mapped in order to bring the First Series to completion, and a separate survey of Scotland had been begun in the 1810s. Colby suggested that these largely unmapped parts of Britain should now be surveyed, not on the
one-inch
scale of the First Series, but on the larger six-inch scale that had been used in Ireland. He proposed that the resulting maps of England’s northern counties could subsequently be reduced to the one-inch scale, to finish the First Series on a uniform basis.

In October 1840 the Treasury agreed to Colby’s scheme. In February 1841 the Master-General of the Board of Ordnance passed a ‘Survey Act’ through Parliament, which gave the Ordnance Survey’s map-makers the legal right to enter any private property on British soil with three days’ written notice. It was specifically designed to assist those engaged in mapping the nation on a large scale, who needed access to private estates to accurately depict their extent, internal groundcover, buildings and boundaries. Buoyed up by this new power, in 1842 the Interior Surveyors began mapping Lancashire and Yorkshire on the six-inch scale. Three years later, some of the Ordnance Survey’s map-makers were diverted away from their work on the First Series to survey the urban centres of Fleetwood, Clitheroe, Manchester and Lancaster, on the enormous five-foot scale requested by the Poor Law Commission. Mapping on such a large scale created surveys in which
individual
shrubs might even be identified: it was enormously time-consuming and depleted the surveyors available for the small-scale mapping of England and Wales. In 1845 the number of map-makers remaining at the Ordnance Survey’s disposal was further decreased. In that year, known as ‘the great railway
year’, it was said that ‘every one seemed to have a mania for new schemes’ and ‘many lines were proposed’. But whereas the Poor Law Commission was working in collaboration with the Ordnance Survey, the railway
companies
became a rival when they decided that the First Series’ one-inch maps were too small to plan new railway lines. They offered the huge salary of three guineas a day to surveyors to draw up bespoke maps, and 287
employees
left all levels of the Ordnance Survey for this lucrative employment.

The following year, amid all these upheavals, the Ordnance Survey lost its director. In 1846, Thomas Colby was promoted to major-general, a
much-deserved
accolade. But under the Army’s rules he was no longer allowed to remain director of the Ordnance Survey with this rank, so in April 1847 he had no choice but to take retirement. Although he may have been
initially
disoriented and found it hard to adjust to his new relaxed pace of life, Colby soon transferred his perfectionist energies to his seven children, moving the family to Bonn for a while to further their education. Before he left, Colby set the Ordnance Survey’s finances and achievements before the House of Commons and the Board of Ordnance. The year 1847 marked exactly a century since David Watson and William Roy had begun surveying Scotland in the wake of the defeat of the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion at Culloden. In the intervening period, British map-makers had wrenched the nation away from its state of cartographic myopia, a feat in which Thomas Colby had played no small part.

Under his watch the Trigonometrical Survey of Britain had been very nearly completed. Ireland had also been enveloped in its own national
triangulation
and Interior Survey, and maps of its entirety were now available for purchase. Interior Surveys of Scotland and northern England were under way on the six-inch scale, and First Series one-inch maps of England and Wales had been completed and published up to a line between Hull and Preston. After three major price changes, these iconic maps were no longer prohibitive luxuries. Sold in individual sheets of forty by twenty-seven inches, fifty-nine were available for seven or eight shillings each (less than two days’ wages for a craftsman in the building trade), and the rest retailed even more cheaply at between three and six shillings. Thanks to increased demand and these reduced prices, over 28,000 sheets of the First Series had been sold in
1845 alone. By 1846 the First Series’ sales had brought in
£
4259. This was, however, only a tiny fraction of the total expenditure on all the Ordnance Survey’s endeavours since 1791, of
£
1,462,522 (around
£
85 million in 2010’s currency). Of that enormous sum,
£
28,375 had been spent on the Scottish survey and
£
574,439 on the First Series, and Colby estimated that to
complete
the latter project, a further
£
316,492 would be required. Thomas Colby had devoted forty-five of his sixty-three years of life to the Ordnance Survey and he could retire with the gratifying knowledge that he had played a vital role in setting Britain’s lands in order.

 

A
S HIS SUCCESSOR
, Colby recommended to the Board of Ordnance the officer William Yolland, who had been employed in the Royal Engineers since 1828 and had joined the Ordnance Survey after instruction at Chatham and Woolwich and a four-year stint in Canada. Since its move to
Southampton
, Yolland had been in charge of the Ordnance Survey’s general running. But to Colby’s annoyance and disgust, in March 1847 it was announced that Lewis Alexander Hall, a 53-year-old lieutenant-colonel in the Royal Engineers with no experience on the Ordnance Survey, would be appointed its Superintendent. Hall, who possessed a flabby jawline, a small petulant mouth and beady eyes, was Chief Engineer of the London District, and it may have been that the commander of the Royal Engineers and Corps of Royal Sappers or Miners, together with the Master-General of the Ordnance, were both seduced by his experience in military engineering. Colby commented angrily that this decision ‘will show most distinctly that neither’ of his two superiors ‘have any notion that the charge of a great national survey requires any experience of such a duty’. And indeed, over the seven years of Hall’s superintendency, the Ordnance Survey fell into deep trouble. Amid
desperate
indecision, mostly around the scales on which the maps should be conducted and engraved, the First Series was nearly forgotten.