Lives of the Engineers Part 22

It would be out of keeping with the subject thus drawn to a conclusion, to p.r.o.nounce any panegyric on the character and achievements of George and Robert Stephenson. These for the most part speak for themselves.

Both were emphatically true men, exhibiting in their lives many sterling qualities. No beginning could have been less promising than that of the elder Stephenson. Born in a poor condition, yet rich in spirit, he was from the first compelled to rely upon himself; and every step of advance which he made was conquered by patient labour. Whether working as a brakesman or an engineer, his mind was always full of the work in hand.

He gave himself thoroughly up to it. Like the painter, he might say that he had become great "by neglecting nothing." Whatever he was engaged upon, he was as careful of the details as if each were itself the whole.

He did all thoroughly and honestly. There was no "scamping" with him.

When a workman he put his brains and labour into his work; and when a master he put his conscience and character into it. He would have no slop-work executed merely for the sake of profit. The materials must be as genuine as the workmanship was skilful. The structures which he designed and executed were distinguished for their thoroughness and solidity; his locomotives were famous for their durability and excellent working qualities. The engines which he sent to the United States in 1832 are still in good condition; and even the engines built by him for the Killingworth Colliery, upwards of thirty years ago, are working steadily there to this day. All his work was honest, representing the actual character of the man.

He was ready to turn his hand to anything-shoes and clocks, railways and locomotives. He contrived his safety-lamp with the object of saving pitmen's lives, and perilled his own life in testing it. Whatever work was nearest him, he turned to and did it. With him to resolve was to do.

Many men knew far more than he; but none were more ready forthwith to apply what he did know to practical purposes. It was while working at Willington as a brakes-man, that he first learnt how best to handle a spade in throwing ballast out of the ships' holds. This casual employment seems to have left upon his mind the strongest impression of what "hard work" was; and he often used to revert to it, and say to the young men about him, "Ah, ye lads! there's none o' ye know what _wark_ is." Mr. Gooch says he was proud of the dexterity in handling a spade which he had thus acquired, and that he has frequently seen him take the shovel from a labourer in some railway cutting, and show him how to use it more deftly in filling waggons of earth, gravel, or sand. Sir Joshua Walmsley has also informed us, that, when examining the works of the Orleans and Tours Railway, Mr. Stephenson, seeing a large number of excavators filling and wheeling sand in a cutting, at a great waste of time and labour, went up to the men and said he would show them how to fill their barrows in half the time. He showed them the proper position in which to stand so as to exercise the greatest amount of power with the least expenditure of strength; and he filled the barrow with comparative ease again and again in their presence, to the great delight of the workmen. When pa.s.sing through his own workshops, he would point out to his men how to save labour, and to get through their work skilfully and with ease. His energy imparted itself to others, quickening and influencing them as strong characters always do-flowing down into theirs, and bringing out their best powers.

His deportment towards the workmen employed under him was familiar, yet firm and consistent. As he respected their manhood, so did they respect his masterhood. Although he comported himself towards his men as if they occupied very much the same level as himself, he yet possessed that peculiar capacity for governing which enabled him always to preserve among them the strictest discipline, and to secure their cheerful and hearty services. Mr. Ingham, M.P. for South Shields, on going over the workshops at Newcastle, was particularly struck with this quality of the master in his bearing towards his men. "There was nothing," said he, "of undue familiarity in their intercourse, but they spoke to each other as man to man; and nothing seemed to please the master more than to point out ill.u.s.trations of the ingenuity of his artisans. He took up a rivet, and expatiated on the skill with which it had been fashioned by the workman's hand-its perfectness and truth. He was always proud of his workmen and his pupils; and, while indifferent and careless as to what might be said of himself, he fired up in a moment if disparagement were thrown upon any one whom he had taught or trained."

In manner, George Stephenson was simple, modest, and una.s.suming, but always manly. He was frank and social in spirit. When a humble workman, he had carefully preserved his sense of self-respect. His companions looked up to him, and his example was worth even more to many of them than books or schools. His devoted love of knowledge made his poverty respectable, and adorned his humble calling. When he rose to a more elevated station, and a.s.sociated with men of the highest position and influence in Britain, he took his place amongst them with perfect self-possession. They wondered at the quiet ease and simple dignity of his deportment; and men in the best ranks of life have said of him that "He was one of Nature's gentlemen."

Probably no military chiefs were ever more beloved by their soldiers than were both father and son by the army of men who, under their guidance, worked at labours of profit, made labours of love by their earnest will and purpose. True leaders of men and lords of industry, they were always ready to recognise and encourage talent in those who worked for and with them. Thus it was pleasant, at the openings of the Stephenson lines, to hear the chief engineers attributing the successful completion of the works to their able a.s.sistants; whilst the a.s.sistants, on the other hand, ascribed the glory to their chiefs.

Mr. Stephenson, though a thrifty and frugal man, was essentially unsordid. His rugged path in early life made him careful of his resources. He never saved to h.o.a.rd, but saved for a purpose, such as the maintenance of his parents or the education of his son. In later years he became a prosperous and even a wealthy man; but riches never closed his heart, nor stole away the elasticity of his soul. He enjoyed life cheerfully, because hopefully. When he entered upon a commercial enterprise, whether for others or for himself, he looked carefully at the ways and means. Unless they would "pay," he held back. "He would have nothing to do," he declared, "with stock-jobbing speculations." His refusal to sell his name to the schemes of the railway mania-his survey of the Spanish lines without remuneration-his offer to postpone his claim for payment from a poor company until their affairs became more prosperous-are instances of the unsordid spirit in which he acted.

Another marked feature in Mr. Stephenson's character was his patience.

Notwithstanding the strength of his convictions as to the great uses to which the locomotive might be applied, he waited long and patiently for the opportunity of bringing it into notice; and for years after he had completed an efficient engine he went on quietly devoting himself to the ordinary work of the colliery. He made no noise nor stir about his locomotive, but allowed another to take credit for the experiments on velocity and friction made with it by himself upon the Killingworth railroad.

By patient industry and laborious contrivance, he was enabled, with the powerful help of his son, to do for the locomotive what James Watt had done for the condensing engine. He found it clumsy and inefficient; and he made it powerful, efficient, and useful. Both have been described as the improvers of their respective engines; but, as to all that is admirable in their structure or vast in their utility, they are rather ent.i.tled to be described as their Inventors. While the invention of Watt increased the power, and at the same time so regulated the action of the steam-engine, as to make it capable of being applied alike to the hardest work and to the finest manufactures, the invention of Stephenson gave an effective power to the locomotive, which enabled it to perform the work of teams of the most powerful horses, and to outstrip the speed of the fleetest. Watt's invention exercised a wonderfully quickening influence on every branch of industry, and multiplied a thousand-fold the amount of manufactured productions; and Stephenson's enabled these to be distributed with an economy and despatch such as had never before been thought possible. They have both tended to increase indefinitely the ma.s.s of human comforts and enjoyments, and to render them cheap and accessible to all. But Stephenson's invention, by the influence which it is daily exercising upon the civilisation of the world, is even more remarkable than that of Watt, and is calculated to have still more important consequences. In this respect, it is to be regarded as the grandest application of steam power that has yet been discovered.

The Locomotive, like the condensing engine, exhibits the realisation of various capital, but wholly distinct, ideas, promulgated by many ingenious inventors. Stephenson, like Watt, exhibited a power of selection, combination, and invention of his own, by which-while availing himself of all that had been done before him, and superadding the many skilful contrivances devised by himself-he was at length enabled to bring his engine into a condition of marvellous power and efficiency. He gathered together the scattered threads of ingenuity which already existed, and combined them into one firm and complete fabric of his own.

He realised the plans which others had imperfectly formed; and was the first to construct, what so many others had unsuccessfully attempted, the practical and economical working locomotive.

Mr. Stephenson's close and accurate observation provided him with a fulness of information on many subjects, which often appeared surprising to those who had devoted to them a special study. On one occasion the accuracy of his knowledge of birds came out in a curious way at a convivial meeting of railway men in London. The engineers and railway directors present knew each other as railway men and nothing more. The talk had been all of railways and railway politics. Mr. Stephenson was a great talker on those subjects, and was generally allowed, from the interest of his conversation and the extent of his experience, to take the lead. At length one of the party broke in with "Come now, Stephenson, we have had nothing but railways; cannot we have a change and try if we can talk a little about something else?" "Well," said Mr.

Stephenson, "I'll give you a wide range of subjects; what shall it be about?" "Say _birds' nests_!" rejoined the other, who prided himself on his special knowledge of this subject. "Then birds' nests be it." A long and animated conversation ensued: the bird-nesting of his boyhood, the blackbird's nest which his father had held him up in his arms to look at when a child at Wylam, the hedges in which he had found the thrush's and the linnet's nests, the mossy bank where the robin built, the cleft in the branch of the young tree where the chaffinch had reared its dwelling-all rose up clear in his mind's eye, and led him back to the scenes of his boyhood at Callerton and Dewley Burn. The colour and number of the bird's eggs, the period of their incubation, the materials employed by them for the walls and lining of their nests, were described by him so vividly, and ill.u.s.trated by such graphic anecdotes, that one of the party remarked that, if George Stephenson had not been the greatest engineer of his day, he might have been one of the greatest naturalists.

His powers of conversation were very great. He was so thoughtful, so original, and so suggestive. There was scarcely a department of science on which he had not formed some novel and sometimes daring theory. Thus Mr. Gooch, his pupil, who lived with him when at Liverpool, informs us that when sitting over the fire, he would frequently broach his favourite theory of the sun's light and heat being the original source of the light and heat given forth by the burning coal. "It fed the plants of which that coal is made," he would say, "and has been bottled up in the earth ever since, to be given out again now for the use of man." His son Robert once said of him, "My father flashed his bull's eye full upon a subject, and brought it out in its most vivid light in an instant: his strong common sense, and his varied experience operating upon a thoughtful mind, were his most powerful illuminators."

Mr. Stephenson had once a conversation with a watchmaker, whom he astonished by the extent and minuteness of his knowledge as to the parts of a watch. The watchmaker knew him to be an eminent engineer, and asked him how he had acquired so extensive a knowledge of a branch of business so much out of his sphere. "It is very easy to be explained," said Mr.

Stephenson; "I worked long at watch-cleaning myself, and when I was at a loss, I was never ashamed to ask for information."

Towards the close of his life he frequently went down to Newcastle, and visited the scenes of his boyhood. "I have been to Callerton," said he one day to a friend, "and seen the fields in which I used to pull turnips at twopence a day; and many a cold finger, I can tell you, I had."

His hand was open to his former fellow-workmen whom old age had left in poverty. To poor Robert Gray, of Newburn, who acted as his bridesman on his marriage to f.a.n.n.y Henderson, he left a pension for life. He would slip a five-pound note into the hand of a poor man or a widow in such a way as not to offend their delicacy, but to make them feel as if the obligation were all on his side. When Farmer Paterson, who married a sister of George's first wife, f.a.n.n.y Henderson, died and left a large young family fatherless, poverty stared them in the face. "But ye ken,"

said our informant, "_George struck in fayther for them_." And perhaps the providential character of the act could not have been more graphically expressed than in these simple words.

On his visit to Newcastle, he would frequently meet the friends of his early days, occupying very nearly the same station, whilst he had meanwhile risen to almost world-wide fame. But he was no less hearty in his greeting of them than if their relative position had continued the same. Thus, one day, after shaking hands with Mr. Brandling on alighting from his carriage, he proceeded to shake hands with his coachman, Anthony Wigham, a still older friend, though he only sat on the box.

Robert Stephenson inherited his father's kindly spirit and benevolent disposition. He almost worshipped his father's memory, and was ever ready to attribute to him the chief merit of his own achievements as an engineer. "It was his thorough training," we once heard him say, "his example, and his character, which made me the man I am." On a more public occasion he said, "It is my great pride to remember, that whatever may have been done, and however extensive may have been my own connection with railway development, all I know and all I have done is primarily due to the parent whose memory I cherish and revere." {377} To Mr. Lough, the sculptor, he said he had never had but two loves-one for his father, the other for his wife.

Like his father, he was eminently practical, and yet always open to the influence and guidance of correct theory. His main consideration in laying out his lines of railway was what would best answer the intended purpose, or, to use his own words, to secure the maximum of result with the minimum of means. He was pre-eminently a safe man, because cautious, tentative, and experimental; following closely the lines of conduct trodden by his father, and often quoting his maxims.

In society Robert Stephenson was simple, un.o.btrusive, and modest; but charming and even fascinating in an eminent degree. Sir John Lawrence has said of him that he was, of all others, the man he most delighted to meet in England-he was so manly, yet gentle, and withal so great. While admired and beloved by men of such calibre, he was equally a favourite with women and children. He put himself upon the level of all, and charmed them no less by his inexpressible kindliness of manner than by his simple yet impressive conversation.

His great wealth enabled him to perform many generous acts in a right n.o.ble and yet modest manner, not letting his right hand know what his left hand did. Of the numerous kindly acts of his which have been made public, we may mention the graceful manner in which he repaid the obligations which both himself and his father owed to the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Inst.i.tute, when working together as humble experimenters in their cottage at Killingworth. The Inst.i.tute was struggling under a debt of 6200 which seriously impaired its usefulness as an educational agency. Robert Stephenson offered to pay one-half of the sum, provided the local supporters of the Inst.i.tute would raise the remainder; and conditional also on the annual subscription being reduced from two guineas to one, in order that the usefulness of the inst.i.tution might be extended. The generous offer was accepted, and the debt extinguished.

Both father and son were offered knighthood, and both declined it.

During the summer of 1847, George Stephenson was invited to offer himself as a candidate for the representation of South Shields in Parliament.

But his politics were at best of a very undefined sort; indeed his life had been so much occupied with subjects of a practical character, that he had scarcely troubled himself to form any decided opinion on the party political topics of the day, and to stand the cross fire of the electors on the hustings might have been found an even more distressing ordeal than the cross-questioning of the barristers in the Committees of the House of Commons. "Politics," he used to say, "are all matters of theory-there is no stability in them: they shift about like the sands of the sea: and I should feel quite out of my element amongst them." He had accordingly the good sense respectfully to decline the honour of contesting the representation of South Shields.

We have, however, been informed by Sir Joseph Paxton, that although George Stephenson held no strong opinions on political questions generally, there was one question on which he entertained a decided conviction, and that was the question of Free-trade. The words used by him on one occasion to Sir Joseph were very strong. "England," said he, "is, and must be a shopkeeper; and our docks and harbours are only so many wholesale shops, the doors of which should always be kept wide open." It is curious that his son Robert should have taken precisely the opposite view of this question, and acted throughout with the most rigid party amongst the protectionists, supporting the Navigation Laws and opposing Free Trade.

But Robert Stephenson will be judged in after times by his achievements as an engineer, rather than by his acts as a politician; and happily these last were far outweighed in value by the immense practical services which he rendered to trade, commerce, and civilisation, through the facilities which the railways constructed by him afforded for free intercommunication between men in all parts of the world. Speaking in the midst of his friends at Newcastle, in 1850, he observed:-

"It seems to me but as yesterday that I was engaged as an a.s.sistant in laying out the Stockton and Darlington Railway. Since then, the Liverpool and Manchester and a hundred other great works have sprung into existence. As I look back upon these stupendous undertakings, accomplished in so short a time, it seems as though we had realised in our generation the fabled powers of the magician's wand. Hills have been cut down and valleys filled up; and when these simple expedients have not sufficed, high and magnificent viaducts have been raised, and if mountains stood in the way, tunnels of unexampled magnitude have pierced them through, bearing their triumphant attestation to the indomitable energy of the nation, and the unrivalled skill of our artisans."

As respects the immense advantages of railways to mankind, there cannot be two opinions. They exhibit, probably, the grandest organisation of capital and labour that the world has yet seen. Although they have unhappily occasioned great loss to many, the loss has been that of individuals; whilst, as a national system, the gain has already been enormous. As tending to multiply and spread abroad the conveniences of life, opening up new fields of industry, bringing nations nearer to each other, and thus promoting the great ends of civilisation, the founding of the railway system by George Stephenson and his son must be regarded as one of the most important events, if not the very greatest, in the first half of this nineteenth century.

[Picture: The Stephenson Memorial Schools, Willington Quay]