George Stephenson Read online

  He had set his heart on working on a pumping engine with his father and there are numerous stories about the hours he spent as a boy making scale models in clay of his father’s engine and of the other engines he had seen at work in the collieries. From his father he developed a great love for the countryside. It was very easy to get quickly out of the colliery into open unspoiled fields and woods. But you had to be careful. Disturbing game, let alone trying to capture any, was an offence which could result in transportation, if not hanging. There were 220 offences for which the death penalty could be imposed, ranging from sheep stealing and pickpocketing to murder. (It was only in 1808 that pickpocketing goods to the value of one shilling or more ceased to be a capital offence.) The landed gentry clung to their estates and their privileges, making life for the poor very harsh, terrified that the workers would be influenced by the revolution which had begun in France.

  George was eight when it began and he grew up whilst England was at war with revolutionary France and then Napoleon. He and his three brothers were now at work full time in the mine with their father, and bringing home their extra incomes, but they were well aware of the effects of the war. The price of wheat shot up and corn riots were frequent. In his biography of Stephenson, Samuel Smiles relates that by 1800 the price of wheat had become 130 shillings a quarter whereas in 1795 it had only been fifty-four shillings.

  George spent all his spare time working on the engine, even though he was only the assistant fireman, taking it to pieces after his work was over and putting it together again. The pit where he and his father both worked soon failed and around sixteen George went to a different pit on his own, as a fireman in his own right. When he was seventeen, George met up with his father once again at a new winning at Newburn – this time with George as plugman.

  George’s eagerness to learn was not limited to the pumping machines he worked on but extended to all of the machinery in the mine. At the age of seventeen he had already got further than his father had done in a lifetime, but he was not content to be simply a plugman, even though he was now in charge of the pump and his father. (When the water level went down in the pit and the suction stopped, it was the plugman’s job to go to the bottom of the shaft, plug the pipe and get the suction I started again.) He was constantly being called to mend other machines, such as the winding engine which controlled the cage up and down the shaft, a job considered much more important and difficult than manning a pump. He managed to persuade a friend to let him have a go at being the brakesman, the man in charge of the winding machine, so called because the most difficult part was stopping the machine at the exact time. The established brakesmen were annoyed and one of them went so far as to stop the working of the pit, saying that not only was young George untrained, he couldn’t do the job properly and would break his own arms stopping the machine and bump all the men in the cage. But George, our hero, managed to persuade the viewer of the pit, as the manager was called, that he could do the job properly. Soon afterwards he was promoted to being a fully fledged brakesman.

  At Black Callerton, the colliery where in 1801 he was made a brakesman, there was a pitman called Ned Nelson who complained about the way that George, as brakesman, drew him out of the pit. He challenged George to a fight after work and George agreed. From an early age, he had been proud of his strength, wrestling with village boys, but no one thought that he would have a chance against the much older and tougher Ned Nelson. George hammered him. Another triumph.

  It is to Samuel Smiles’ biography, which appeared in 1857, that we are indebted for these touching early stories of George as a pit boy growing up. Every anecdote finishes with a long homily about George’s virtues, such as bravery and fortitude. Smiles went back to the pit villages in the 1850s and picked up these stories from old miners, still working away, and set great store by them in his biography. There is no doubt about George’s great ingenuity and aptitude as an engineman, but reading between the lines his character could be interpreted in different ways from the same stories. We have to take Smiles’ word for it that Ned Nelson was ‘a roystering bully, the terror of the village’, but from the way George was going around doing other people’s jobs, telling them how he could do it better, he must have struck many older pitmen as a real know-all, too cocky by half. Even though he was certainly clever at repairing engines, a certain humility might have been more suited to his years.

  Until the age of eighteen he was completely illiterate. He was a grown man, earning around £1 a week, the top pay in the colliery for an untrained mechanic, but he realised that he could never improve further, least of all call himself a skilled mechanic, unless he could read and write. It wasn’t that he wanted to be up to date with Miss Austen’s amusing novels, Sir Walter Scott’s romantic epics, or Wordsworth’s lovely poems that the gentry were currently enthusing over; he realised the simple fact that there was an easier way of discovering the principles of engines than taking them to pieces. People like Nicholas Wood, a young viewer who was soon taking a great interest in his work, pointed out that it was all written down in the books, Wood was a properly qualified engineer, in other words his middle-class parents had been able to pay not just for his schooling but for his apprenticeship to an established colliery engineer, the men who designed and built the engines, leaving them to the likes of George Stephenson to run.

  George began night classes with a man in the nearby village of Walbottle, going three nights a week at a cost of threepence a week, practising his pot hooks on a slate in spare moments at work. A local farmer gave him extra coaching and by the age of nineteen, much to his pride, he could write his own name. Sums came easier than writing. He hired boys to rush back and forward with his slate full of homework to have it corrected. By about the age of twenty or twenty-one, he understood the simple elements of reading and writing. They never came easily to him. Even from the earliest days he paid or persuaded other people to write letters for him and read to him from books. Many letters and documents belonging to George Stephenson have come to light since Smiles’ day, and still more are being found, but it is rare for them to be in George’s own hand.

  Having become an engine mechanic and desperately if belatedly trying to become educated, he now managed to find some time for courting. His first recorded girl friend was Elizabeth Hindmarsh, the daughter of the largest farmer in the Black Callerton parish. He met her secretly in her father’s orchard and she seems to have had a fancy for him, but the family would have none of it. They had no intention of allowing their daughter to marry a poor, uneducated pitman, even if he was trying to better himself; and they certainly were not going to let him better himself at their daughter’s expense. She was being prepared for a much smarter catch. The romance was forcibly broken off by the Hindmarsh family, to the disappointment of Elizabeth herself. She declared she would never marry anyone else – and she didn’t.

  George meanwhile bounced back very quickly and started going out with another farmer’s daughter, though their family farm was much smaller than Hindmarsh’s and this time there was no dowry to add to the attractions. Her name was Ann Henderson and she was a domestic servant in the farmer’s house where George had taken lodgings. George made her a handsome pair of leather shoes – one of his many spare-time occupations to make more money – which she accepted, but she refused his marriage proposal. He then proposed to her older sister Frances, who worked as a maid at the same farm. Fanny, as she was called, was twelve years older than George, who was just twenty-one, and she was already thought of as an old maid.

  Fanny had worked as a servant in the farm for over ten years, before in fact the present owner had taken over. He’d inherited her and her reference which told him: ‘Frances Henderson is a girl of sober disposition, an honest servant and of good family.’ Some years previously she’d been engaged to the village school master in Black Callerton but he’d died when she was twenty-six leaving her, so the villagers thought, with no prospects of getting married. She jumped when young Geo
rge offered and they were married on 28 November 1802, at Newburn Church. Mr Thompson, the farmer who employed her, promised his young lodger and his faithful servant that he would be their witness and that they could have their wedding breakfast back at the farm.

  Newburn Church, a handsome Norman building, was in those days the centre of a large and affluent parish. The couple were married by a curate, not the vicar himself, but they did both sign the marriage register, though George may have signed Fanny’s name as well. George’s own signature in the register is badly smudged and endearingly child-like.

  Not long afterwards, they moved to Willington Quay, this time east of Newcastle, where George was to be brakesman in charge of a new winding machine that had just been installed. It was here, in their one room in a cottage by the Quay furnished out of Fanny’s savings, that their only son Robert was born on 16 October 1803. Fanny was considered in those days almost too old at thirty-four to have a first child, and she was ill for some time afterwards. The miners’ cottages, owned by the colliery, were continuously being divided up as more families moved in, until several families were crowded together into one cottage. At Wylam, for example, the Stephenson family of eight had been crowded into two rooms with unplastered walls and clay floors, while three other families shared the rest of the cottage.

  As George was now reasonably well paid for a working man, he managed to hang on to his one room and was soon able to afford two and then three rooms in the cottage, but he was always very canny and never threw his money around. He was still making shoes to supplement his earnings as well as mending clocks for the pitmen. Having a clock was a great status symbol, and of great use for a shift-working pitman.

  Samuel Smiles continually stresses how sober the young George Stephenson was, so much so that one almost suspects he was a drunkard. It has to be remembered that in the early nineteenth-century, drink was the mass escape. There were scores of gin and beer rooms in all these new industrial slum villages. Working as they did twelve, sometimes sixteen, hours a day, six days a week, all the year round except Christmas Day and Good Friday, worrying constantly about the rising price of bread, unable to strike or press for better conditions for fear of terrible reprisals, thanks to the Combination laws, it was hardly surprising that so many took solace in drink, the cheapest and almost the only form of escape. The stern Victorian morality with its continual theme of temperance from people like Smiles might today seem rather extreme. It was extreme because the problem was extreme.

  George was certainly sober. He could hardly have had time for boozing with working on his engines, making shoes, mending clocks and doing his homework. While most pitmen did spend their spare time drinking, or watching prize fights, or cock fighting, George was one of the new breed of self-made mechanics who were consumed and excited by the wonders of the modern world, especially all the new inventions, and wanted to know more about them.

  One of the newest wonders of the world was the canal. Since 1761, when the Duke of Bridgwater’s canal halved the price of coal in Manchester, canals had been spreading throughout the country. By 1815 there were 2,600 miles of canals in England, most of them built by sweated Irish labour, the land navigators as they were called, because they directed the passage of ships across the land, later to be known universally as navvies. Crowds gathered to watch canals being opened across hills like the Pennines, wondering at man’s ingenuity, forgetting of course that the Romans had first built canals in East Anglia over 1,500 years previously, though the secret had died with them.

  At the same time, roads were being greatly improved by engineers like Telford and McAdam. The newspapers were full of the new speeds achieved by the flying coaches on the new improved turnpike roads. In 1754 it had taken four and a half days by coach from London to Manchester. By 1788 this had been reduced to twenty-eight hours. But it wasn’t cheap. The working man couldn’t afford it. Sir Walter Scott, when he travelled down from Edinburgh to London by coach, reported that the price was £50. That was a year’s wages for someone like George Stephenson. When George and his wife Fanny set up home, they were lucky enough to borrow a farm horse to get themselves the fifteen miles to their new cottage at Willington. Normally George, like every other working man, walked everywhere. Or he stayed at home.

  The local wonder of the day, which was what attracted George in Willington, were the attempts by colliery engineers to use the stationary steam engines, so far used for pumping and winding, for drawing the coal wagons to the riverside. Steam engines were being placed beside any hilly bits of the tramways and used to pull the coal wagons on ropes or chains up the hill, letting them roll down the other side by gravity. On the flat, horses still pulled the wagons.

  There was one such machine at Willington, built by a well-known Tyneside enginewright, Robert Hawthorn, who had recommended George for the job as its brakesman. Like Nicholas Wood, the educated viewer, Hawthorn was an early patron of Stephenson’s, recognising his talent and giving him great help, though George gave him little thanks. He liked to think he mastered everything on his own. Stephenson felt that Hawthorn was jealous but as the latter was the boss he took care not to quarrel.

  In 1804 George moved to yet another pit, this time at Killingworth, seven miles north of Newcastle, again as a brakesman. Fanny’s health for a time improved and it was here that she gave birth to a daughter, also called Fanny. The baby died after three weeks and Fanny’s own health deteriorated again. She died of consumption the following year, at the age of thirty-seven. George was a widower of twenty-five, left with a two-year-old son to look after. By all accounts he was devoted to the baby, but not long afterwards he set off alone for Montrose in Scotland, on foot, to work on a new Watt engine. There is little record of George talking much about this expedition to Scotland in later life, though he often regaled people with the hard times he’d had at Killingworth. Smiles says he was invited to Montrose, which is surprising considering he was an obscure Northumbrian mechanic. Other Victorian writers, trying equally hard to preserve the image of George as some horny-handed saint, have said that he was so heartbroken by his wife’s death, distraught by all the sad memories in the little cottage, that he just had to get away. But in fact no one knows what his precise motivation was, and an attempt to draw nice morals from his every action is unnecessary. Perhaps he’d lost his job, through quarrelling with Hawthorn, and had been forced to seek work further afield. Someone like Hawthorn had influence throughout many Tyneside collieries. George was an ambitious young man and off he went, feeling sad about having to leave Tyneside, for whatever reasons, but no doubt feeling excited about the prospect of new experiences.

  He came back after a few months, walking home with the large sum of £28 which he’d managed to save. He’d left his baby Robert at home with a neighbour who acted as housekeeper. He found his cottage deserted on his return, much to his surprise and alarm. In his absence the neighbour had married one of George’s brothers and had taken the baby with her. George moved back into his old cottage and soon his unmarried sister Eleanor moved in to look after him and his son Robert. It was Eleanor who brought Robert up, and he referred to her always as Aunt Nelly.

  Nelly was three years younger than George and had been badly disappointed in love. She had gone to London to work as a domestic servant till a boyfriend back in Northumberland wrote and asked her to marry him. She sailed home to the Tyne, after a long passage which cost all of her savings, to find that the boyfriend had married someone else. She developed a passion for Methodism, taking young Robert to chapel with her, though failing to interest George. She sounds a bright cheerful soul and took Robert on many outings into the country. His aunt Ann (sister of his mother Fanny, the one who accepted George’s shoes but not his proposal) had married a farmer and lived in some style. Robert always remembered that when he visited her house he got a whole boiled egg to himself, not just the top of his father’s, plus a little butter.

  On his return from Scotland George also found that his father had
met with an accident. While mending an engine a fellow workman had suddenly let out the steam and the blast had blinded his father. His sight never returned and he was forced to leave work. Since the accident he had run up many debts which George paid off on his return. He moved his father and mother to a cottage near his at Killingworth and supported them until their death. George’s savings finally disappeared when not long afterwards he received another blow – he was drawn for service in the militia. Britain was waging war single-handed against Napoleon, and in 1808 Lord Castlereagh ordered local militia to be drawn up in every town, amounting to a total of 200,000.

  Press gangs went round strong-arming or bribing men into the navy while the army recruited its men by ordering a quota from every district. If you were drawn there was only one way out: you could pay someone else to go in your place, if you had the money. As long as the correct number was made up, the recruiting officer was happy. George paid for a substitute and that was the last of his Scottish savings. Not unnaturally he was rather miserable and depressed around this period. What with his family problems and his lack of money, his engineering ambitions seem to have been temporarily halted, though fortunately he was taken back as a brakesman at Killingworth. He said later in a speech that he’d seriously considered emigrating. ‘Not having served an apprenticeship, I had made up my mind to go to America, considering that no one in England would trust me to act as engineer.’