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BIOGRAPHIES OF WORKING MEN
by
GRANT ALLEN, B.A.
1884
CONTENTS.
I. THOMAS TELFORD, STONEMASON
II. GEORGE STEPHENSON, ENGINE-MAN
III. JOHN GIBSON, SCULPTOR
IV. WILLIAM HERSCHEL, BANDSMAN
V. JEAN FRANCOIS MILLET, PAINTER
VI. JAMES GARFIELD, CANAL BOY
VII. THOMAS EDWARD, SHOEMAKER
PREFACE.
My acknowledgments are due to Dr. Smiles's "Lives of the Engineers,"
"Life of the Stephensons," and "Life of a Scotch Naturalist;" to Lady
Eastlake's "Life of Gibson;" to Mr. Holden's "Life of Sir William
Herschel;" to M. Seusier's "J. F. Millet, Sa Vie et Ses Oeuvres;" and
to Mr. Thayer's "Life of President Garfield;" from which most of the
facts here narrated have been derived.
G.A.
BIOGRAPHIES OF WORKING MEN.
I.
THOMAS TELFORD, STONEMASON.
High up among the heather-clad hills which form the broad dividing
barrier between England and Scotland, the little river Esk brawls and
bickers over its stony bed through a wild land of barren braesides and
brown peat mosses, forming altogether some of the gloomiest and most
forbidding scenery in the whole expanse of northern Britain. Almost
the entire bulk of the counties of Dumfries, Kirkcudbright, and Ayr is
composed of just such solemn desolate upland wolds, with only a few
stray farms or solitary cottages sprinkled at wide distances over their
bare bleak surface, and with scarcely any sign of life in any part save
the little villages which cluster here and there at long intervals
around some stern and simple Scottish church. Yet the hardy people who
inhabit this wild and chilly moorland country may well be considered to
rank among the best raw material of society in the whole of Britain;
for from the peasant homes of these southern Scotch Highlands have come
forth, among a host of scarcely less distinguished natives, three men,
at least, who deserve to take their place in the very front line of
British thinkers or workers--Thomas Telford, Robert Burns, and Thomas
Carlyle. By origin, all three alike belonged in the very strictest
sense to the working classes; and the story of each is full of lessons
or of warnings for every one of us: but that of Telford is perhaps the
most encouraging and the most remarkable of all, as showing how much
may be accomplished by energy and perseverance, even under the most
absolutely adverse and difficult circumstances.
Near the upper end of Eskdale, in the tiny village of Westerkirk, a
young shepherd's wife gave birth to a son on the 9th of August, 1757.
Her husband, John Telford, was employed in tending sheep on a
neighbouring farm, and he and his Janet occupied a small cottage close
by, with mud walls and rudely thatched roof, such as in southern
England even the humblest agricultural labourer would scarcely consent
willingly to inhabit. Before the child was three months old, his
father died; and Janet Telford was left alone in the world with her
unweaned baby. But in remote country districts, neighbours are often
more neighbourly than in great towns; and a poor widow can manage to
eke out a livelihood for herself with an occasional lift from the
helping hands of friendly fellow-villagers. Janet Telford had nothing
to live upon save her own ten fingers; but they were handy enough,
after the sturdy Scotch fashion, and they earned some sort of
livelihood in a humble way for herself and her fatherless boy. The
farmers about found her work on their farms at haymaking or milking,
and their wives took the child home with them while its mother was busy
labouring in the harvest fields. Amid such small beginnings did the
greatest of English engineers before the railway era receive his first
hard lessons in the art of life.
After her husband's death, the poor widow removed from her old cottage
to a still more tiny hut, which she shared with a neighbour--a very
small hut, with a single door for both families; and here young Tam
Telford spent most of his boyhood in the quiet honourable poverty of
the uncomplaining rural poor. As soon as he was big enough to herd
sheep, he was turned out upon the hillside in summer like any other
ragged country laddie, and in winter he tended cows, receiving for
wages only his food and money enough to cover the cost of his scanty
clothing. He went to school, too; how, nobody now knows: but he DID
go, to the parish school of Westerkirk, and there he learnt with a
will, in the winter months, though he had to spend the summer on the
more profitable task of working in the fields. To a steady earnest boy
like young Tam Telford, however, it makes all the difference in the
world that he should have been to school, no matter how simply. Those
twenty-six letters of the alphabet, once fairly learnt, are the key,
after all, to all the book-learning in the whole world. Without them,
the shepherd-boy might remain an ignorant, unprogressive shepherd all
his life long, even his undeniable native energy using itself up on
nothing better than a wattled hurdle or a thatched roof; with them, the
path is open before him which led Tam Telford at last to the Menai
Bridge And Westminster Abbey.
When Tam had gradually eaten his way through enough thin oatmeal
porridge (with very little milk, we fear) to make him into a hearty lad
of fifteen, it began to be high time for him to choose himself a final
profession in life, such as he was able. And here already the born
tastes of the boy began to show themselves: for he had no liking for
the homely shepherd's trade; he felt a natural desire for a chisel and
a hammer--the engineer was there already in the grain--and he was
accordingly apprenticed to a stonemason in the little town of
Lochmaben, beyond the purple hills to eastward. But his master was a
hard man; he had small mercy for the raw lad; and after trying to
manage with him for a few months, Tam gave it up, took the law into his
own hands, and ran away. Probably the provocation was severe, for in
after-life Telford always showed himself duly respectful to constituted
authority; and we know that petty self-made master-workmen are often
apt to be excessively severe to their own hired helpers, and especially
to helpless lads or young apprentices. At any rate, Tam wouldn't go
back; and in the end, a well-to-do cousin, who had risen to the proud
position of steward at the great hall of the parish, succeeded in
getting another mason at Langholm, the little capital of Eskdale, to
take over the runaway for the remainder of the term of his indentures.
At Langholm, a Scotch country town of the quietest and sleepiest
description, Tam Telford passed the next eight years of his uneventful
early life, first as an apprentice, and afterwards as a journeyman
mason of the humblest type. He had a good mother, and he was a good
son. On Saturday nights he generally managed to walk over to the
cottage at Westerkirk, and accompany the poor widow to the Sunday
services at the parish kirk. As long as she lived, indeed, he never
forgot her; and one of the first tasks he set himself when he was out
of his indentures was to cut a neat headstone with a simple but
beautiful inscription for the grave of that shepherd father whom he had
practically never seen. At Langholm, an old maiden lady, Miss Pasley,
interested herself kindly in Janet Telford's rising boy. She lent him
what of all things the eager lad most needed--books; and the young
mason applied himself to them in all his spare moments with the
vigorous ardour and perseverance of healthy youth. The books he read
were not merely those which bore directly or indirectly upon his own
craft: if they had been, Tam Telford might have remained nothing more
than a journeyman mason all the days of his life. It is a great
mistake, even from the point of view of mere worldly success, for a
young man to read or learn only what "pays" in his particular calling;
the more he reads and learns, the more will he find that seemingly
useless things "pay" in the end, and that what apparently pays least,
often really pays most in the long run. This is not the only or the
best reason why every man should aim at the highest possible
cultivation of his own talents, be they what they may; but it is in
itself a very good reason, and it is a sufficient answer for those who
would deter us from study of any high kind on the ground that it "does
no good." Telford found in after-life that his early acquaintance with
sound English literature did do him a great deal of good: it opened and
expanded his mind; it trained his intelligence; it stored his brain
with images and ideas which were ever after to him a source of
unmitigated delight and unalloyed pleasure. He read whenever he had
nothing else to do. He read Milton with especial delight; and he also
read the verses that his fellow-countryman, Rob Burns, the Ayrshire
ploughman, was then just beginning to speak straight to the heart of
every aspiring Scotch peasant lad. With these things Tam Telford
filled the upper stories of his brain quite as much as with the trade
details of his own particular useful handicraft; and the result soon
showed that therein Tam Telford had not acted uncannily or unwisely.
Nor did he read only; he wrote too--verses, not very good, nor yet very
bad, but well expressed, in fairly well chosen language, and with due
regard to the nice laws of metre and of grammar, which is in itself a
great point. Writing verse is an occupation at which only very few
even among men of literary education ever really succeed; and
nine-tenths of published verse is mere mediocre twaddle, quite unworthy
of being put into the dignity of print. Yet Telford did well for all
that in trying his hand, with but poor result, at this most difficult
and dangerous of all the arts. His rhymes were worth nothing as
rhymes; but they were worth a great deal as discipline and training:
they helped to form the man, and that in itself is always something.
Most men who have in them the power to do any great thing pass in early
life through a verse-making stage. The verses never come to much; but
they leave their stamp behind them; and the man is all the better in
the end for having thus taught himself the restraint, the command of
language, the careful choice of expressions, the exercise of deliberate
pains in composition, which even bad verse-making necessarily implies.
It is a common mistake of near-sighted minds to look only at the
immediate results of things, without considering their remoter effects.
When Tam Telford, stonemason of Langholm, began at twenty-two years of
age to pen poetical epistles to Robert Burns, most of his
fellow-workmen doubtless thought he was giving himself up to very
foolish and nonsensical practices; but he was really helping to educate
Thomas Telford, engineer of the Holyhead Road and the Caledonian Canal,
for all his future usefulness and greatness.
As soon as Tam was out of his indentures, he began work as a journeyman
mason at Langholm on his own account, at the not very magnificent wages
of eighteenpence a day. That isn't much; but at any rate it is an
independence. Besides building many houses in his own town, Tam made
here his first small beginning in the matter of roads and highways, by
helping to build a bridge over the Esk at Langholm. He was very proud
of his part in this bridge, and to the end of his life he often
referred to it as his first serious engineering work. Many of the
stones still bear his private mark, hewn with the tool into their solid
surface, with honest workmanship which helps to explain his later
success. But the young mason was beginning to discover that Eskdale
was hardly a wide enough field for his budding ambition. He could
carve the most careful headstones; he could cut the most ornamental
copings for doors or windows; he could even build a bridge across the
roaring flooded Esk; but he wanted to see a little of the great world,
and learn how men and masons went about their work in the busy centres
of the world's activity. So, like a patriotic Scotchman that he was,
he betook himself straight to Edinburgh, tramping it on foot, of
course, for railways did not yet exist, and coaches were not for the
use of such as young Thomas Telford.
He arrived in the grey old capital of Scotland in the very nick of
time. The Old Town, a tangle of narrow alleys and close courtyards,
surrounded by tall houses with endless tiers of floors, was just being
deserted by the rich and fashionable world for the New Town, which lies
beyond a broad valley on the opposite hillside, and contains numerous
streets of solid and handsome stone houses, such as are hardly to be
found in any other town in Britain, except perhaps Bath and Aberdeen.
Edinburgh is always, indeed, an interesting place for an enthusiastic
lover of building, be he architect or stonemason; for instead of being
built of brick like London and so many other English centres, it is
built partly of a fine hard local sandstone and partly of basaltic
greenstone; and besides its old churches and palaces, many of the
public buildings are particularly striking and beautiful architectural
works. But just at the moment when young Telford walked wearily into
Edinburgh at the end of his long tramp, there was plenty for a stout
strong mason to do in the long straight stone fronts of the rising New
Town. For two years, he worked away patiently at his trade in "the
grey metropolis of the North;" and he took advantage of the special
opportunities the place afforded him to learn drawing, and to make
minute sketches in detail of Holyrood Palace, Heriot's Hospital, Roslyn
Chapel, and all the other principal old buildings' in which the
neighbourhood of the capital is particularly rich. So anxious, indeed,
was the young mason to perfect himself by the study of the very best
models in his own craft, that when at the end of two years he walked
back to revisit his good mother in Eskdale, he took the opportunity of
making drawings of Melrose Abbey, the most exquisite and graceful
building that the artistic stone-cutters of the Middle Ages have handed
down to our time in all Scotland.
This visit to Eskdale was really Telford's last farewell to his old
home, before setting out on a journey which was to form the
turning-point in his own history, and in the history of British
engineering as well. In Scotch phrase, he was going south. And after
taking leave of his mother (not quite for the last time) he went south
in good earnest, doing this journey on horseback; for his cousin the
steward had lent him a horse to make his way southward like a
gentleman. Telford turned where all enterprising young Scotchmen of
his time always turned: towards the unknown world of London--that world
teeming with so many possibilities of brilliant success or of miserable
squalid failure. It was the year 1782, and the young man was just
twenty-five. No sooner had he reached the great city than he began
looking about him for suitable work. He had a letter of introduction
to the architect of Somerset House, whose ornamental fronts were just
then being erected, facing the Strand and the river; and Telford was
able to get a place at once on the job as a hewer of the finer
architectural details, for which both his taste and experience well
fitted him. He spent some two years in London at this humble post as a
stone-cutter; but already he began to aspire to something better. He
earned first-class mason's wages now, and saved whatever he did not
need for daily expenses. In this respect, the improvidence of his
English fellow-workmen struck the cautious young Scotchman very
greatly. They lived, he said, from week to week entirely; any time
beyond a week seemed unfortunately to lie altogether outside the range
of their limited comprehension.
At the end of two years in London, Telford's skill and study began to
bear good fruit. His next engagement was one which raised him for the
first time in his life above the rank of a mere journeyman mason. The
honest workman had attracted the attention of competent judges. He
obtained employment as foreman of works of some important buildings in
Portsmouth Dockyard. A proud man indeed was Thomas Telford at this
change of fortune, and very proudly he wrote to his old friends in
Eskdale, with almost boyish delight, about the trust reposed in him by
the commissioners and officers, and the pains he was taking with the
task entrusted to him. For he was above all things a good workman, and
like all good workmen he felt a pride and an interest in all the jobs
he took in hand. His sense of responsibility and his sensitiveness,
indeed, were almost too great at times for his own personal comfort.
Things WILL go wrong now and then, even with the greatest care;
well-planned undertakings will not always pay, and the best engineering
does not necessarily succeed in earning a dividend; but whenever such
mishaps occurred to his employers, Telford felt the disappointment much
too keenly, as though he himself had been to blame for their
miscalculations or over-sanguine hopes. Still, it is a good thing to
put one's heart in one's work, and so much Thomas Telford certainly did.
About this time, too, the rising young mason began to feel that he must
get a little more accurate scientific knowledge. The period for
general study had now passed by, and the period for special trade
reading had set in. This was well. A lad cannot do better than lay a
good foundation of general knowledge and general literature during the
period when he is engaged in forming his mind: a young man once fairly
launched in life may safely confine himself for a time to the studies
that bear directly upon his own special chosen subject. The thing that
Telford began closely to investigate was--lime. Now, lime makes
mortar; and without lime, accordingly, you can have no mason. But to
know anything really about lime, Telford found he must read some
chemistry; and to know anything really about chemistry he must work at
it hard and unremittingly. A strict attention to one's own business,
understood in this very broad and liberal manner, is certainly no bad
thing for any struggling handicraftsman, whatever his trade or
profession may happen to be.
In 1786, when Telford was nearly thirty, a piece of unexpected good
luck fell to his lot. And yet it was not so much good luck as due
recognition of his sterling qualities by a wealthy and appreciative
person. Long before, while he was still in Eskdale, one Mr. Pulteney,
a man of social importance, who had a large house in the bleak northern
valley, had asked his advice about the repairs of his own mansion. We
may be sure that Telford did his work on that occasion carefully and
well; for now, when Mr. Pulteney wished to restore the ruins of
Shrewsbury Castle as a dwelling-house, he sought out the young mason
who had attended to his Scotch property, and asked him to superintend
the proposed alterations in his Shropshire castle. Nor was that all:
by Mr. Pulteney's influence, Telford was shortly afterwards appointed
to be county surveyor of public works, having under his care all the
roads, bridges, gaols, and public buildings in the whole of Shropshire.
Thus the Eskdale shepherd-boy rose at last from the rank of a working
mason, and attained the well-earned dignity of an engineer and a
professional man.
Telford had now a fair opportunity of showing the real stuff of which
he was made. Those, of course, were the days when railroads had not
yet been dreamt of; when even roads were few and bad; when
communications generally were still in a very disorderly and
unorganized condition. It is Telford's special glory that he reformed
and altered this whole state of things; he reduced the roads of half
Britain to system and order; he made the finest highways and bridges
then ever constructed; and by his magnificent engineering works,
especially his aqueducts, he paved the way unconsciously but surely for
the future railways. If it had not been for such great undertakings as
Telford's Holyhead Road, which familiarized men's minds with costly
engineering operations, it is probable that projectors would long have
stood aghast at the alarming expense of a nearly level iron road
running through tall hills and over broad rivers the whole way from
London to Manchester.
At first, Telford's work as county surveyor lay mostly in very small
things indeed--mere repairs of sidepaths or bridges, which gave him
little opportunity to develop his full talents as a born engineer. But
in time, being found faithful in small things, his employers, the
county magistrates, began to consult him more and more on matters of
comparative importance. First, it was a bridge to be built across the
Severn; then a church to be planned at Shrewsbury, and next, a second
church in Coalbrookdale. If he was thus to be made suddenly into an
architect, Telford thought, almost without being consulted in the
matter, he must certainly set out to study architecture. So, with
characteristic vigour, he went to work to visit London, Worcester,
Gloucester, Bath, and Oxford, at each place taking care to learn
whatever was to be learned in the practice of his new art.
Fortunately, however, for Telford and for England, it was not
architecture in the strict sense that he was finally to practise as a
real profession. Another accident, as thoughtless people might call
it, led him to adopt engineering in the end as the path in life he
elected to follow. In 1793, he was appointed engineer to the projected
Ellesmere Canal.
In the days before railways, such a canal as this was an engineering
work of the very first importance. It was to connect the Mersey, the
Dee, and the Severn, and it passed over ground which rendered necessary
some immense aqueducts on a scale never before attempted by British
engineers. Even in our own time, every traveller by the Great Western
line between Chester and Shrewsbury must have observed on his right two
magnificent ranges as high arches, which are as noticeable now as ever
for their boldness, their magnitude, and their exquisite construction.
The first of these mighty archways is the Pont Cysylltau aqueduct which
carries the Ellesmere Canal across the wide valley of the Dee, known as
the Vale of Llangollen; the second is the Chirk aqueduct, which takes
it over the lesser glen of a minor tributary, the Ceriog. Both these
beautiful works were designed and carried out entirely by Telford.
They differ from many other great modern engineering achievements in
the fact that, instead of spoiling the lovely mountain scenery into
whose midst they have been thrown, they actually harmonize with it and
heighten its natural beauty. Both works, however, are splendid feats,
regarded merely as efforts of practical skill; and the larger one is
particularly memorable for the peculiarity that the trough for the
water and the elegant parapet at the side are both entirely composed of
iron. Nowadays, of course, there would be nothing remarkable in the
use of such a material for such a purpose; but Telford was the first
engineer to see the value of iron in this respect, and the Pont
Cysylltau aqueduct was one of the earliest works in which he applied
the new material to these unwonted uses. Such a step is all the more
remarkable, because Telford's own education had lain entirely in what
may fairly be called the "stone age" of English engineering; while his
natural predilections as a stonemason might certainly have made him
rather overlook the value of the novel material. But Telford was a man
who could rise superior to such little accidents of habit or training;
and as a matter of fact there is no other engineer to whom the rise of
the present "iron age" in engineering work is more directly and
immediately to be attributed than to himself.
Meanwhile, the Eskdale pioneer did not forget his mother. For years he
had constantly written to her, in PRINT HAND, so that the letters might
be more easily read by her aged eyes; he had sent her money in full
proportion to his means; and he had taken every possible care to let
her declining years be as comfortable as his altered circumstances
could readily make them. And now, in the midst of this great and
responsible work, he found time to "run down" to Eskdale (very
different "running down" from that which we ourselves can do by the
London and North Western Railway), to see his aged mother once more
before she died. What a meeting that must have been, between the poor
old widow of the Eskdale shepherd, and her successful son, the county
surveyor of Shropshire, and engineer of the great and important
Ellesmere Canal!
While Telford was working busily upon his wonderful canal, he had many
other schemes to carry out of hardly less importance, in connection
with his appointment as county surveyor. His beautiful iron bridge
across the Severn at Buildwas was another application of his favourite
metal to the needs of the new world that was gradually growing up in
industrial England; and so satisfied was he with the result of his
experiment (for though not absolutely the first, it was one of the
first iron bridges ever built) that he proposed another magnificent
idea, which unfortunately was never carried into execution. Old London
Bridge had begun to get a trifle shaky; and instead of rebuilding it,
Telford wished to span the whole river by a single iron arch, whose
splendid dimensions would have formed one of the most remarkable
engineering triumphs ever invented. The scheme, for some good reason,
doubtless, was not adopted; but it is impossible to look at Telford's
grand drawing of the proposed bridge--a single bold arch, curving
across the Thames from side to side, with the dome of St. Paul's rising
majestically above it--without a feeling of regret that such a noble
piece of theoretical architecture was never realized in actual fact.
Telford had now come to be regarded as the great practical authority
upon all that concerned roads or communications; and he was reaping the
due money-reward of his diligence and skill. Every day he was called
upon to design new bridges and other important structures in all parts
of the kingdom, but more especially in Scotland and on the Welsh
border. Many of the most picturesque bridges in Britain, which every
tourist has admired, often without inquiring or thinking of the hand
that planned them, were designed by his inventive brain. The exquisite
stone arch which links the two banks of the lesser Scotch Dee in its
gorge at Tongueland is one of the most picturesque; for Telford was a
bit of an artist at heart, and, unlike too many modern railway
constructors, he always endeavoured to make his bridges and aqueducts
beautify rather than spoil the scenery in whose midst they stood.
Especially was he called in to lay out the great system of roads by
which the Scotch Highlands, then so lately reclaimed from a state of
comparative barbarism, were laid open for the great development they
have since undergone. In the earlier part of the century, it is true,
a few central highways had been run through the very heart of that
great solid block of mountains; but these were purely military roads,
to enable the king's soldiers more easily to march against the revolted
clans, and they had hardly more connection with the life of the country
than the bare military posts, like Fort William and Fort Augustus,
which guarded their ends, had to do with the ordinary life of a
commercial town. Meanwhile, however, the Highlands had begun gradually
to settle down; and Telford's roads were intended for the far higher
and better purpose of opening out the interior of northern Scotland to
the humanizing influences of trade and industry.
Fully to describe the great work which the mature engineer constructed
in the Highland region, would take up more space than could be allotted
to such a subject anywhere save in a complete industrial history of
roads and travelling in modern Britain. It must suffice to say that
when Telford took the matter in hand, the vast block of country north
and west of the Great Glen of Caledonia (which divides the Highlands in
two between Inverness and Ben Nevis)--a block comprising the counties
of Caithness, Sutherland, Ross, Cromarty, and half Inverness--had
literally nothing within it worthy of being called a road. Wheeled
carts or carriages were almost unknown, and all burdens were conveyed
on pack-horses, or, worse still, on the broad backs of Highland
lassies. The people lived in small scattered villages, and
communications from one to another were well-nigh impossible. Telford
set to work to give the country, not a road or two, but a main system
of roads. First, he bridged the broad river Tay at Dunkeld, so as to
allow of a direct route straight into the very jaws of the Highlands.
Then, he also bridged over the Beauly at Inverness, so as to connect
the opposite sides of the Great Glen with one another. Next, he laid
out a number of trunk lines, running through the country on both banks,
to the very north of Caithness, and the very west of the Isle of Skye.
Whoever to this day travels on the main thoroughfares in the greater
Scottish Islands--in Arran, Islay, Jura, Mull; or in the wild peninsula
of Morvern, and the Land of Lorne; or through the rugged regions of
Inverness-shire and Ross-shire, where the railway has not yet
penetrated,--travels throughout on Telford's roads. The number of large
bridges and other great engineering masterpieces on this network of
roads is enormous; among the most famous and the most beautiful, are
the exquisite single arch which spans the Spey just beside the lofty
rearing rocks of Craig Ellachie, and the bridge across the Dee, beneath
the purple heather-clad braes of Ballater. Altogether, on Telford's
Highland roads alone, there are no fewer than twelve hundred bridges.
Nor were these the only important labours by which Telford ministered
to the comfort and well-being of his Scotch fellow-countrymen.
Scotland's debt to the Eskdale stonemason is indeed deep and lasting.
While on land, he improved her communications by his great lines of
roads, which did on a smaller scale for the Highland valleys what
railways have since done for the whole of the civilized world; he also
laboured to improve her means of transit at sea by constructing a
series of harbours along that bare and inhospitable eastern coast, once
almost a desert, but now teeming with great towns and prosperous
industries. It was Telford who formed the harbour of Wick, which has
since grown from a miserable fishing village into a large town, the
capital of the North Sea herring fisheries. It was he who enlarged the
petty port of Peterhead into the chief station of the flourishing
whaling trade. It was he who secured prosperity for Fraserburgh, and
Banff, and many other less important centres; while even Dundee and
Aberdeen, the chief commercial cities of the east coast, owe to him a
large part of their present extraordinary wealth and industry. When
one thinks how large a number of human beings have been benefited by
Telford's Scotch harbour works alone, it is impossible not to envy a
great engineer his almost unlimited power of permanent usefulness to
unborn thousands of his fellow-creatures.
As a canal-maker, Telford was hardly less successful than as a
constructor of roads and harbours. It is true, his greatest work in
this direction was in one sense a failure. He was employed by
Government for many years as the engineer of the Caledonian Canal,
which runs up the Great Glen of Caledonia, connecting the line of lakes
whose basins occupy that deep hollow in the Highland ranges, and so
avoiding the difficult and dangerous sea voyage round the stormy
northern capes of Caithness. Unfortunately, though the canal as an
engineering work proved to be of the most successful character, it has
never succeeded as a commercial undertaking. It was built just at the
exact moment when steamboats were on the point of revolutionizing ocean
traffic; and so, though in itself a magnificent and lordly undertaking,
it failed to satisfy the sanguine hopes of its projectors. But though
Telford felt most bitterly the unavoidable ill success of this great
scheme, he might well have comforted himself by the good results of his
canal-building elsewhere. He went to Sweden to lay out the Gotha
Canal, which still forms the main high-road of commerce between
Stockholm and the sea; while in England itself some of his works in
this direction--such as the improvements on the Birmingham Canal, with
its immense tunnel--may fairly be considered as the direct precursors
of the great railway efforts of the succeeding generation.
The most remarkable of all Telford's designs, however, and the one
which most immediately paved the way for the railway system, was his
magnificent Holyhead Road. This wonderful highway he carried through
the very midst of the Welsh mountains, at a comparatively level height
for its whole distance, in order to form a main road from London to
Ireland. On this road occurs Telford's masterpiece of engineering, the
Menai suspension bridge, long regarded as one of the wonders of the
world, and still one of the most beautiful suspension bridges in all
Europe. Hardly less admirable, however, in its own way is the other
suspension bridge which he erected at Conway, to carry his road across
the mouth of the estuary, beside the grey old castle, with which its
charming design harmonizes so well. Even now it is impossible to drive
or walk along this famous and picturesque highway without being struck
at every turn by the splendid engineering triumphs which it displays
throughout its entire length. The contrast, indeed, between the noble
grandeur of Telford's bridges, and the works on the neighbouring
railways, is by no means flattering in every respect to our too
exclusively practical modern civilization.
Telford was now growing an old man. The Menai bridge was begun in 1819
and finished in 1826, when he was sixty-eight years of age; and though
he still continued to practise his profession, and to design many
valuable bridges, drainage cuts, and other small jobs, that great
undertaking was the last masterpiece of his long and useful life. His
later days were passed in deserved honour and comparative opulence; for
though never an avaricious man, and always anxious to rate his services
at their lowest worth, he had gathered together a considerable fortune
by the way, almost without seeking it. To the last, his happy cheerful
disposition enabled him to go on labouring at the numerous schemes by
which he hoped to benefit the world of workers; and so much
cheerfulness was surely well earned by a man who could himself look
back upon so good a record of work done for the welfare of humanity.
At last, on the 2nd of September, 1834, his quiet and valuable life
came gently to a close, in the seventy-eighth year of his age. He was
buried in Westminster Abbey, and few of the men who sleep within that
great national temple more richly deserve the honour than the
Westerkirk shepherd-boy. For Thomas Telford's life was not merely one
of worldly success; it was still more pre-eminently one of noble ends
and public usefulness. Many working men have raised themselves by
their own exertions to a position of wealth and dignity far surpassing
his; few indeed have conferred so many benefits upon untold thousands
of their fellow-men. It is impossible, even now, to travel in any part
of England, Wales, or Scotland, without coming across innumerable
memorials of Telford's great and useful life; impossible to read the
full record of his labours without finding that numberless structures
we have long admired for their beauty or utility, owe their origin to
the honourable, upright, hardworking, thorough-going, journeyman mason
of the quiet little Eskdale village. Whether we go into the drained
fens of Lincolnshire, or traverse the broad roads of the rugged Snowdon
region; whether we turn to St. Katharine's Docks in London, or to the
wide quays of Dundee and those of Aberdeen; whether we sail beneath the
Menai suspension bridge at Bangor, or drive over the lofty arches that
rise sheer from the precipitous river gorge at Cartland, we meet
everywhere the lasting traces of that inventive and ingenious brain.
And yet, what lad could ever have started in the world under apparently
more hopeless circumstances than widow Janet Telford's penniless orphan
shepherd-boy Tam, in the bleakest and most remote of all the lonely
border valleys of southern Scotland?
II.
GEORGE STEPHENSON, ENGINE-MAN.
Any time about the year 1786, a stranger in the streets of the grimy
colliery village of Wylam, near Newcastle, might have passed by without
notice a ragged, barefooted, chubby child of five years old, Geordie
Stephenson by name, playing merrily in the gutter and looking to the
outward eye in no way different from any of the other colliers'
children who loitered about him. Nevertheless, that ragged boy was yet
destined in after-life to alter the whole face of England and the world
by those wonderful railways, which he more than any other man was
instrumental in first constructing; and the story of his life may rank
perhaps as one of the most marvellous in the whole marvellous history
of able and successful British working men.
George Stephenson was born in June, 1781, the son of a fireman who
tended the pumping engine of the neighbouring colliery, and one of a
penniless family of six children. So poor was his father, indeed, that
the whole household lived in a single room, with bare floor and mud
wall; and little Geordie grew up in his own unkempt fashion without any
schooling whatever, not even knowing A from B when he was a big lad of
seventeen. At an age when he ought to have been learning his letters,
he was bird's-nesting in the fields or running errands to the Wylam
shops; and as soon as he was old enough to earn a few pence by light
work, he was set to tend cows at the magnificent wages of twopence a
day, in the village of Dewley Burn, close by, to which his father had
then removed. It might have seemed at first as though the future
railway engineer was going to settle down quietly to the useful but
uneventful life of an agricultural labourer; for from tending cows he
proceeded in due time (with a splendid advance of twopence) to leading
the horses at the plough, spudding thistles, and hoeing turnips on his
employer's farm. But the native bent of a powerful mind usually shows
itself very early; and even during the days when Geordie was still
stumbling across the freshly ploughed clods or driving the cows to
pasture with a bunch of hazel twigs, his taste for mechanics already
made itself felt in a very marked and practical fashion. During all
his leisure time, the future engineer and his chum Bill Thirlwall
occupied themselves with making clay models of engines, and fitting up
a winding machine with corks and twine like those which lifted the
colliery baskets. Though Geordie Stephenson didn't go to school at the
village teacher's, he was teaching himself in his own way by close
observation and keen comprehension of all the machines and engines he
could come across.
Naturally, to such a boy, the great ambition of his life was to be
released from the hoeing and spudding, and set to work at his father's
colliery. Great was Geordie's joy, therefore, when at last he was
taken on there in the capacity of a coal-picker, to clear the loads
from stones and rubbish. It wasn't a very dignified position, to be
sure, but it was the first step that led the way to the construction of
the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. Geordie was now fairly free from
the uncongenial drudgery of farm life, and able to follow his own
inclinations in the direction of mechanical labour. Besides, was he
not earning the grand sum of sixpence a day as picker, increased to
eightpence a little later on, when he rose to the more responsible and
serious work of driving the gin-horse? A proud day indeed it was for
him when, at fourteen, he was finally permitted to aid his father in
firing the colliery engine; though he was still such a very small boy
that he used to run away and hide when the owner went his rounds of
inspection, for fear he should be thought too little to earn his untold
wealth of a shilling a day in such a grown-up occupation. Humbler
beginnings were never any man's who lived to become the honoured guest,
not of kings and princes only, but of the truly greatest and noblest in
the land.
A coal-miner's life is often a very shifting one; for the coal in
particular collieries gets worked out from time to time; and he has to
remove, accordingly, to fresh quarters, wherever employment happens to
be found. This was very much the case with George Stephenson and his
family; all of them being obliged to remove several times over during
his childish days in search of new openings. Shortly after Geordie had
attained to the responsible position of assistant fireman, his father
was compelled, by the closing of Dewley Burn mine, to get a fresh
situation hard by at Newburn. George accompanied him, and found
employment as full fireman at a small working, whose little engine he
undertook to manage in partnership with a mate, each of them tending
the fire night and day by twelve-hour shifts. Two years later, his
wages were raised to twelve shillings a week, a sure mark of his
diligent and honest work; so that George was not far wrong in remarking
to a fellow-workman at the time that he now considered himself a made
man for life.
During all this time, George Stephenson never for a moment ceased to
study and endeavour to understand the working of every part in the
engine that he tended. He was not satisfied, as too many workmen are,
with merely learning the routine work of his own trade; with merely
knowing that he must turn such and such a tap or valve in order to
produce such and such a desired result: he wanted to see for himself
how and why the engine did this or that, what was the use and object of
piston and cylinder and crank and joint and condenser--in short, fully
to understand the underlying principle of its construction. He took it
to pieces for cleaning whenever it was needful; he made working models
of it after his old childish pattern; he even ventured to tinker it up
when out of order on his own responsibility. Thus he learnt at last
something of the theory of the steam-engine, and learnt also by the way
a great deal about the general principles of mechanical science. Still,
even now, incredible as it seems, the future father of railways
couldn't yet read; and he found this terrible drawback told fatally
against his further progress. Whenever he wanted to learn something
that he didn't quite understand, he was always referred for information
to a Book. Oh, those books; those mysterious, unattainable,
incomprehensible books; how they must have bothered and worried poor
intelligent and aspiring but still painfully ignorant young George
Stephenson! Though he was already trying singularly valuable
experiments in his own way, he hadn't yet even begun to learn his
letters.
Under these circumstances, George Stephenson, eager and anxious for
further knowledge, took a really heroic resolution. He wasn't ashamed
to go to school. Though now a full workman on his own account, about
eighteen years old, he began to attend the night school at the
neighbouring village of Walbottle, where he took lessons in reading
three evenings every week. It is a great thing when a man is not
ashamed to learn. Many men are; they consider themselves so immensely
wise that they look upon it as an impertinence in anybody to try to
tell them anything they don't know already. Truly wise or truly great
men--men with the capability in them for doing anything worthy in their
generation--never feel this false and foolish shame. They know that
most other people know some things in some directions which they do
not, and they are glad to be instructed in them whenever opportunity
offers. This wisdom George Stephenson possessed in sufficient degree to
make him feel more ashamed of his ignorance than of the steps necessary
in order to conquer it. Being a diligent and willing scholar, he soon
learnt to read, and by the time he was nineteen he had learnt how to
write also. At arithmetic, a science closely allied to his native
mechanical bent, he was particularly apt, and beat all the other
scholars at the village night school. This resolute effort at
education was the real turning-point in George Stephenson's remarkable
career, the first step on the ladder whose topmost rung led him so high
that he himself must almost have felt giddy at the unwonted elevation.
Shortly after, young Stephenson gained yet another promotion in being
raised to the rank of brakesman, whose duty it was to slacken the
engine when the full baskets of coal reached the top of the shaft.
This was a more serious and responsible post than any he had yet
filled, and one for which only the best and steadiest workmen were ever
selected. His wages now amounted to a pound a week, a very large sum
in those days for a skilled working-man.
Meanwhile, George, like most other young men, had fallen in love. His
sweetheart, Fanny Henderson, was servant at the small farmhouse where
he had taken lodgings since leaving his father's home; and though but
little is known about her (for she unhappily died before George had
begun to rise to fame and fortune), what little we do know seems to
show that she was in every respect a fitting wife for the active young
brakesman, and a fitting mother for his equally celebrated son, Robert
Stephenson. Fired by the honourable desire to marry Fanny, with a
proper regard for prudence, George set himself to work to learn
cobbling in his spare moments; and so successfully did he cobble the
worn shoes of his fellow-colliers after working hours, that before long
he contrived to save a whole guinea out of his humble earnings. That
guinea was the first step towards an enormous fortune; a fortune, too,
all accumulated by steady toil and constant useful labour for the
ultimate benefit of his fellow-men. To make a fortune is the smallest
and least noble of all possible personal ambitions; but to save the
first guinea which leads us on at last to independence and modest
comfort is indeed an important turning-point in every prudent man's
career. Geordie Stephenson was so justly proud of his achievement in
this respect that he told a friend in confidence he might now consider
himself a rich man.
By the time George was twenty-one, he had saved up enough by constant
care to feel that he might safely embark on the sea of housekeeping.
He was able to take a small cottage lodging for himself and Fanny, at
Willington Quay, near his work at the moment, and to furnish it with
the simple comfort which was all that their existing needs demanded.
He married Fanny on the 28th of November, 1802; and the young couple
proceeded at once to their new home. Here George laboured harder than
ever, as became the head of a family. He was no more ashamed of odd
jobs than he had been of learning the alphabet. He worked overtime at
emptying ballast from ships; he continued to cobble, to cut lasts, and
even to try his hand at regular shoemaking; furthermore, he actually
acquired the art of mending clocks, a matter which lay strictly in his
own line, and he thus earned a tidy penny at odd hours by doctoring all
the rusty or wheezy old timepieces of all his neighbours. Nor did he
neglect his mechanical education meanwhile for he was always at work
upon various devices for inventing a perpetual motion machine. Now,
perpetual motion is the most foolish will-o'-the-wisp that ever engaged
a sane man's attention: the thing has been proved to be impossible from
every conceivable point of view, and the attempt to achieve it, if
pursued to the last point, can only end in disappointment if not in
ruin. Still, for all that, the work George Stephenson spent upon this
unpractical object did really help to give him an insight into
mechanical science which proved very useful to him at a later date. He
didn't discover perpetual motion, but he did invent at last the real
means for making the locomotive engine a practical power in the matter
of travelling.