In Our Time - George and Robert Stephenson

Episode Date: April 12, 2018

In a programme first broadcast on April 12th 2018, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the contribution of George Stephenson (1781-1848) and his son Robert (1803-59) to the development of the railways in C19th. George became known as The Father of Railways and yet arguably Robert's contribution was even greater, with his engineering work going far beyond their collaboration. Robert is credited with the main role in the design of their locomotives. George had worked on stationary colliery steam engines and, with Robert, developed the moving steam engine Locomotion No1 for the Stockton and Darlington Railway in 1825. They produced the Rocket for the Rainhill Trials on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1829. From there, the success of their designs and engineering led to the expansion of railways across Britain and around the world. with Dr Michael Bailey Railway historian and editor of the most recent biography of Robert StephensonJulia Elton Past President of the Newcomen Society for the History of Engineering and TechnologyandColin Divall Professor Emeritus of Railway Studies at the University of YorkProducer: Simon Tillotson. This programme is a repeat

This is the BBC. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programmes if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programmes. Hello, in October 1829, George and Robert Stevenson proved that their steam locomotive rocket could pull the trains on the planned Liverpool to Manchester Railway more reliably and much faster than any other. More than that, they proved that these moving locomotives were better than once fixed to the ground,

that pulled the carriages along on cables. The Stevenson's success that month was the birth of the railways, we know it, a transport system that spread around the world, and George became known as the father of railways. Robert his son went on to eclips him, becoming the greatest engineer of his age. Besides locomotives, he built bridges, tunnels, embankments,

he set the mould for the great booster that railways gave to the Industrial Revolution. With me to discuss George and Robert Stevenson are Colin DeVal, Professor Emeritus of Railway Studies at the University of York, Julie Elton, Professor President, former president of the Newcomen Society for the Study of History, the History of Engineering and Technology, and Michael Bailey, railway historian and biographer of Robert Stevenson. Colin DeVal, they've been railway tracks for some time before the stevenisons, but not with moving engines.

Can you tell me what they've been used for? Well, railways have been around for at least 200 years before the Stephensons came on the scene. We can date them back to the early 17th century. and most of these lines were part of the mining or extractive industries. So they were carrying coal or minerals like limestone. And they were very effective as bulk carriers. You could move things on a railway, which was almost impossible to move on the roads as they existed at the time.

But these were short railways. They were usually only a few miles long at maximum. and they were part of a transport system that extended beyond the railway. What was their power? Was it horse power? Most of them were horse-powered, yes. Although some of these railways used gravity as well, used the weight of the wagons to move them from one and to the track to the other. So that was the original thing there.

And when did people start thinking, well, we can develop that? Well, the crucial years of the first decade of the 19th century, when engineers like Richard Trevithic down in Cornwall started experimenting with what was known at the time as high pressure steam engines, first of all on roads, but then on the early quite crude railways of the time, as an alternative to horsepower. And the driver here was really economics. These very early steam locomotives couldn't move much faster than a horse could, but horses were becoming increasingly expensive to,

to keep alive. That was because of the war with Christ. Because of the Napoleonic Wars, exactly. So there was a real economic imperative to develop an alternative to the horse, and that was the high-pressure steam engine. What was the layout of the transport system in this country before railways got underway?

Well, it was quite sophisticated. The road system was not nearly as bad as we often imagine it to be, because throughout the 18th century, increasingly roads have been turnpiked. In other words, the statutory trusses been set, up with responsibility to maintain the roads and to put them in good order. And once engineers like Telford had learned how to create good surfaces, those main roads really were quite effective and there were quite sophisticated networks of carriers carrying goods

from one end of the country to the other, for example, Russell's Flying Wagon would travel several times a week from London through the West Country down to Exeter. Then of course there were the inland... Russell's Flying Wagon. Russell's Flying Wagon's, yes, yes. Sounds like a Beatle song, doesn't it? But inland waterways were very important as well. Of course, the canals, particularly in the north of England and the Midlands,

connecting up with improved rivers. So they carried a lot of coal and other goods as well, like pottery around the Midlands and beer, for example, from Burton down to London. And a lot of the carrying was done by sea. Coastal shipping was very important. We tend to forget, as a maritime nation, Britain was not only trading overseas in the 18th century,

but there was a lot of trade went by sea. So beer, for example, was exported from West Dorset, from places like Bridport to London, and along the coast to places like lime. So sea travel, coastal vessels were really important. By this time, at the time we're talking about, the second, third decade, of the 19th century, had the intensive canal system,

especially in the middle, a bit to the north, had it become congested? Yes, congestion was an increase. problem, particularly in the northwest between Liverpool and Manchester, which were booming as industrial towns. And that was a strong imperative

again for the development of the early mainline railway as a way of increasing capacity. So there's all sorts of reasons why we should have room. Julia Elton, how had George Steamerson made his reputation before 1829? Well, he was born into

the North East Coalfield in the world that Colin describes as short haulage and moving coal and really, really difficult part of life to be born into on the coal field, very labour intensive. He was working with engines and he clearly had

an extraordinarily intuitive feel for mechanical engineering. He couldn't read all right. He taught himself to read all right in his late teens. And he had a very strong geordia accent. He had a very strong Georgie accent. Which was mocked in the course later in London. Indeed it was

and he never lost it. No, London's got a lot to answer, but let's move on. Yes. And really the breakthrough for him came in 1811. He'd had a lot of experience with machinery

and in 1811 there was a brand new pump installed to drain a new coal mine and nobody could make the pump work and George Stevenson was asked to go and have a look at it and he put in the modifications and he drained the mine having made the engine work within about two days and of course the great thing about that

is that it saved his employers a ton of money they suddenly were able to get at this coalface and so after that because he'd saved them so much money and he was interested in locomotives he got a budget to have a go at building a locomotive. And in 1814 he built his first locomotive called Blucher, which was a little model, really. Can we get to the Stockton, Darlington, Row? I'm coming up to the Stockton and Darlington. Because the whole point about the Stockton and Darlington

is this kind of background. Right. Because George Stevenson became, after Blucher, really the preeminent engineer, and the most notion, engineer in locomotives. Who wanted the Stockton Dalton Railway in it? Who wanted to build the Stockton down in the railway?

Well, the great coal owners, because it was a way of getting the coal down to the sea, down to the T's, and therefore down to London. And how long would this be? The line itself. The line is slow. Well, it's 27 miles, and it's a long way on from its precursor. which was the Hetton Colliery Railway, which was only eight miles, but had horses, winding engines and locomotives. And it led the way to the Stockton and Darlington, and the Stockton and Darlington was the first line to be drawn primarily by locomotives.

And the reason that George Stevenson was so extraordinarily successful is that unlike his predecessors in locomotive development, he understood that, the locomotive and the track it was running on were two parts of a perfect hole. And while he was developing the locomotive, he was also developing in tandem the edge rails that it went on. And so the Hett and Colliery line had cast iron rails, edge rails, which broke. The Stockton and Darlington, because of Stevenson's work, actually was fitted with wrought iron edge rails, which did not break, and because they were strong enough to carry the locomotives, they could then increase the size of the locomotives. Did Robert his son, who went to Edinburgh University,

was determined that he wouldn't be caught out with his accent anyway. Did Robert his son want to come into the business, or did his father dragoon him into it? I mean, Robert Stevenson, like his father, was born into the northeast curlefield, I don't suppose for a minute, and particularly given his also his aptitude for mechanical, engineering, I don't suppose for a minute that actually it never occurred to him to do anything else. Sometimes, even today, you come into a doctor's family and then the next generation.

I don't think he was dragooned. I just think it was the way it was. Thank you very much. Michael Bailey, can we move on to the Reinhill trials in October 1829 and their significance? The shareholders of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway had invested a vast sum of money in that project. and they needed to be satisfied that their money had been well spent by being... Getting a train from Liverpool to Manchester. Liverpool to Manchester and back again. Indeed, from the beginning, it was a two-way track,

unlike the Stockton and Darlington, which was just a single track. The amount of money that they were to spend on motive power was crucial to the success of the venture. And so they needed to be satisfied that what George Stevenson was advocating was indeed the best option for them. He was a strong advocate for locomotives because he had experience on the railways

that we've just heard about from Julia. Now, the difficulty is that his advocacy is one thing, but the fact that he was saying to the directors of the railway, my factory in Newcastle made the best locomotives. There was a clear conflict of interest. So the rainhill trials were not just to demonstrate that locomotives were the right form of motive power, but that also gave the opportunity to the Stephensons

to demonstrate that their locos really were the best. So it was a test. They called in anybody who wanted to go to get the fastest turn up at Rainhill and they would have three days of trials and the fastest would get the contract. That is absolutely right, yes. Now, initially five offers were made to the directors, but in practice only three actually participated in the trials. And the rocket ran away with it, didn't it?

Yes, it did, yes. The technology behind the rocket is in itself quite extraordinary because if you take George Stevenson's locos on the Stoughton and Darlington, they were slow lumbering five or six miles an hour hauling coal. What was required on the Liverpool and Manchester was a much faster, much more reliable locomotive that could travel the distance there and back. And what they sought to demonstrate at Rain Hill was that the locomotive could actually achieve that. Rocket did, because of its new technology, that Robert Stevenson had developed. Very often we think that George Stevenson built the rocket, he didn't. He was so preoccupied with building the railway line that it was his son Robert, who actually did all the development work on the locomotive. And the advancements that were made between the beginning of 1828 and the September of 1830 when the line opened were quite staggering. and the locomotive form was developed just in that brief period about 33 months of work.

They got up to 30 miles an hour. Yes, rocket did, yeah. Which was out of this world in those terms, isn't it? Well, all the people that came, many people came to the Rain Hill trials, and they witnessed this locomotive going past them at this speed, they knew straight away that the horse was going to be replaced. It was the fastest thing on Earth.

I've used rocket-assisted take-off in the trail, but why resist a good cliche and a bad joke, okay. So it really did take off after that, didn't it? That was proof that something big was going on and everybody wanted part of it and money pounded in and commissions pounded in. Well, what was demonstrated on the Liverpool and Manchester line

was the latent demand for travel that existed because the line was initially built to carry goods from Liverpool, the port of Liverpool to Manchester. and manufactured goods back again, what actually happened was that people turned up in their droves to travel between Manchester and Liverpool and the other way. And consequently, the directors had to play catch-up in providing sufficient locos and carriages

to meet this extraordinary demand. Colin DeValde, the demand was from very well off people, though. There was first and second class, but no, until much later, nothing that any working men could use at all, really. So can you tell us what the obstacles were in the way of the expansion of the railway? Is there you over the rocket? That's proof positive. It's happening. The North wants it. The industry, the industrial revolution is growing. This is what it needs to make it the extraordinary thing it became, the world-changing thing it became. So there were obstacles, though. And what were they?

Well, I think the short answer is vested interests. The railway was being dropped into a country which already had, as I said before, really quite a sophisticated. transport system, the inland waterways and the turnpikes and so on. And all of that are taking a lot of money, a lot of capital to build. And so there were many people who thought, who quite rightly saw the railway as a threat to the return that they had confidently expected on the money that they'd invested in the waterways and so on. And many of these people had the power to oppose the railways in Parliament because all railway companies had to get a private act of parliament,

both to set themselves up as limited companies so that if the project went wrong, the shareholders would only lose their initial investment. That in turn encouraged people to invest in what was not yet a surefire. Limited liability. Limited liability. But the second power that a parliamentary act gave

was that of acquiring land on a compulsory basis. So straight away, you're setting up a potential conflict of interest between landowners who of course were very well represented in parliament even after the 1832 Reform Act and and promoters of railway companies. Landowners still had a terrific pull though. They managed to divert railways a long way from towns and a long way from their houses and so on. They were still in, they never left the driving seat for very long that lot, did they? No, and they quite quickly learned actually that railways would, on the whole, would do them good because many of the these landowners had larger states

and they were turning farming into a form of industry and they quickly realized, for example, that the railway was going to be a way of moving agricultural product over much larger distances. And there was money to be made out of railways

by landowners. So yes, there are clear examples of where landowners forced a railway to divert around an estate or around a country house. But on the whole, by the end of the 1830, most landowners, certainly by the beginning of the 1840s, most landowners were supporting most railway projects. So there was a consensus. People were joining in. A lot of lawyers, of course, so it was wonderful opportunity.

But investors were piling a lot of it. It became a sort of bubble, didn't it? It certainly did. In terms of investment, yeah. There was a mini bubble in the late 1830s. But the real bubble, the one we tend to remember now was the mania of 1844 to 1846, 1847. because by the early 1840s, the success of the railway was assured. I mean, some of the companies like the London and Birmingham Railway were paying very significant dividends of the order of 10%. And people started pouring money into schemes, some of which were very sound in terms of commercial prospects,

in terms of engineering, some of which, frankly, were simply speculative bubbles. So from 1844 onwards, there were a huge number of bills becoming before Parliament, several hundred in each parliamentary session. And Parliament, frankly, was becoming overwhelmed, and many of these schemes were not being properly scrutinised. I didn't realise it's 700, as big as night. It's like the American West Coast buildings, that sort of thing, isn't it? It was for a year or two, yes, yes.

Just for a year or two. Julia, Yelton, always significant about the building of the London to Birmingham Railway. Well, I think that's very easy. It was the biggest civil engineering project that had ever been done since the pyramids or the Great Wall of China, take your pick. Well, I'll pick the pyramids as you're up in a second. It was absolutely colossal piece

of earth moving on an enormous scale. It was 112 miles long so that it's much longer than Liverpool and Manchester, much longer than the, obviously, than the Stockton and Darlington. It was the first of what you might call the great main line. it connected London with the industrial heartlands of the north. And Robert Stevenson... And it took five years?

Yes, because... It took five years because they were up against problems that nobody had ever encountered. And actually the whole... I'm saying how small it is. I'm praising them, Julius. Yes, oh, right. Well, good.

Just a second here. I'm glad you're praising them because Robert Stevenson is worth every sort of praise. Yes, no, it was extraordinary. But interestingly, then as now, what dog civil engineering are ground conditions. And Robert Stevenson hit some of the worst ground conditions that anybody could imagine with no experience. And he was the right man in the right place.

He had every talent, unlike his contemporaries, including Brunel. He was a brilliant civil and a mechanical engineer. Brunel was a terrible mechanical engineer. The obstacles were having to get the kills, tunnel through that line of, you know, through that hill. When they built the cutting out of Euston Station, they didn't understand that clay would swell when exposed to air so that all their retaining walls fell in. And they had then to build retaining arches underneath to keep them and keep them apart.

You then get to Killsby Tunnel, which is one of the most extraordinary things ever. And there was a bed of quicksand, and although they took borings, the borings just missed. the quicksands, and they started digging out this tunnel, and they were flooded, it was flooded and flooded and flooded, and finally they had to install 13 enormous pumps to drain this bed of quicksand, and you can see that to this day because there are great ventilation tunnels,

and if the train is going slowly enough through the Killsby Tunnel, you can see the daylight coming through. It was a heroic piece of engineering of, it is impossible to praise it too highly, and the civil engineering profession learned from it up to this day. It laid the basics. And Robert Stevenson overlooked a really bit of it. Robert Stevenson was the engineer-in-chief, and he was a brilliant administrator.

He was a brilliant picker of men. I would not say women, but there weren't any then. He chose a really wonderful team. He oversaw the contractors, the letting of the conduct, the whole organisation of it. He rode the line at least 12 times in the first year or so. He kept an eye on it and, of course, he had to keep his directors and his shareholders happy. He was the right man in the right place to do it,

and it's very hard to underestimate him because, you know, he's been so eclipsed in our time. Yes, wrongly, so we'll forget about that. Yes. And it took five years. We're never relevant in this program. So I'd like to say that now. Michael Bailey, we've got Rain Hill. Now we've got London and Birmingham.

The Stephenson's were very heavily connected with both of those. As it were, what happened next? The early railway systems were so successful that it triggered a great deal of interest, as Colin has outlined, in railways joining other industrial centres around the country. So there were quite a number of opportunities for investors to create these railways, get them through Parliament,

which needed the strength of an engineer who had experience. And because of the successes of George and Robert Stevenson, then they were the natural first port of call for the groups of investors, to choose. So Robert Stevenson went on to be the engineer for many, many miles of railway in the late 1830s and into the 1840s. A couple of thousand I've read.

Yes, that's right. By the time we get to 1850, he had been overseeing the construction of a third of the country's entire railway system, which was best part of 2,000 miles by that time. And he was a great bridge builder. In one case, one of the bridges he built is still thought of as an extraordinary feat at the time across the Menai Straits? Absolutely, yes. Well, that one of course was just in the last decade of his life.

It was the most difficult bridge to build. The constraints were such that you couldn't put an arch bridge in. The Admiralty, funnily enough, was the organisation that protested against any height restriction for their vessels, not the Royal Naval vessels from time to time would need to go through the Menai Straits. I mean, the idea was ridiculous, but the Admiralty insisted that there was sufficient clearance. So it meant that there was a big span requiring this very large bridge to be built to join Anglesea to the mainland. And Robert Stevenson and his team developed the tubular bridge, which we can still see an example of today at Conway,

because Conway was a much smaller tubular bridge. but the Britannia Bridge was a magnificent bridge which required a great deal of thought on A, in a manufacturer and also B for erection and both of these challenges Stevenson met extremely well Connelly DeValle, can we put them in some sort of context we have been talking about the Stevenson's

and they were extraordinary father but others were around as well can you give us something of the context The thing is taken off now. What's going on? Well, yes, the Stevenson's were certainly not the only engineers. We've heard from Julia, the I.K. Brunel, of course, was another leading engineer at that time. There are other very, very important engineers like Joseph Locke, who did a lot of important work with Robert Stevenson initially.

But I think we should remember that building railways required all sorts of people to get involved. Now, we've moved into the main line era of the 1830s, in the 1830s, in the 1840s. We've mentioned finance briefly, so bankers were very important. Lawyers were absolutely central to the promotion of railways. Landowners, we've also mentioned. You have to get landowners on board, and you have to get politicians on board. So railway building from the 1840s onwards was really about bringing together coalitions of different parties, different individuals, different institutions to create the finance and the political support for construction these amazing feats of engineering throughout the countryside.

But as I understand it, Parliament was very often, except in one or two cases, were they on side and egging it on, or helping it at least. Well, Parliament, on the whole, approved the coming of the railway, and Gladstone was a key figure here. We're talking now about the young Gladstone, still in his 30s, a Peelike conservative at this time in the 1840s, and he was a leading advocate of the expansion of the railway system, and partly because he could see how it would benefit individuals, poorer people.

He was a great advocate of making trains travel cheaper. And he was also initially rather keen to see a lot more strategic planning of the network. You have to remember that at this stage, railway schemes were promoted by regional interests, by industrialists and so on. They had to convince Parliament on a case-by-case basis that, a particular project was worthwhile. But there was a brief moment when Parliament thought, well, maybe we should take a more systematic look. Maybe we should have a strategic plan

that would develop a nicely integrated national system. And the Board of Trade, which at that time had the oversight of railway development, set up a railway board, colloquially called the Five Kings, which was headed by Earl Dalhousie, later went on to become Governor General of India, who attempted to put some kind of order on these myriad schemes that were coming before Parliament. So between the summer of 1844 and the summer of 1845,

there was this attempt to develop a strategic plan. But it all fell apart. Michael. I'd just like to make reference again to Robert Stevenson during this time. He was very much against this free market approach. He was an old-school Tory, as it were, but he criticised the work of Parliament and the free market system. I'd just like to give you one brief quote as to his opinion.

He writes, The extraordinary features of the parliamentary legislation and practice consists in the anomalies, incongruities, irreconcilabilities and absurdities which pervade the entire mass of legislation. That says it all, his opinion. We've talked about bridges and all the other things he did. Do you think that they had an undue influence?

Do you think as it were the Stevens collared the market? Well, I suppose you could say that. They produced a model that was immensely successful. And of course, their gauge of four foot eight and a half went on to become standard. Yes, I mean, I think that they influenced and dominated the railway world in an extraordinary way, really, because they were successful and because they knew what they were doing

and they understood about how railways worked. And I think George Stevenson understood that the locomotive was going to take off. And then Robert consolidated that. by his brilliance. Is it possible to ask and maybe the others want to join in here, how far the rail has can be seen to give an extraordinary

and exceptional boost the Industrial Revolution in this country, turning it from a very important revolution event for this country which was being copied off. But it became a world-dominating event for quite a while. And in its longer-term effect

on Grabside Red was far in a way the most important revolution, the most important, influence on people's lives of any revolution has ever been. Now, how far did the railways play? What part did the railways play in that? I think you could liken them, in a sense, to the effect that computers have had on our own time.

Within about 15 years, they had an enormous effect on everybody. Michael pointed out that unleashing a latent desire to travel. We're still living with that. People want to go places, and the railways gave them the opportunity to do that, it changed people's diet. You could commute to work. You didn't have to stay in your life. It completely changed people's perceptive on life.

And of course, it reduced the country in size, if you see what I mean. You could actually, it didn't take you three days to get from London to Newcastle by horse. You could be there in a day. It shrank people's perceptions in a sense and began to globalise the world. also the factories for wrought iron and building bricks and all the sort of thing, expanded and expanded. And it became a great cluster, a virtuous circle cluster. Let's include Brunel. I was a bit dismissive of him because he gets, he forefronts too much.

Anyway, never mind. Robert Steamer's relationship, Brunel, was a good one, as I understand it. Yes, it was. The pair of them were professional men and they got on extremely well, even though, like barristers, they found themselves representing their clients with very different interests and therefore there was an obligation to speak out on behalf of their clients

very much in opposition to each other but they understood that they were a professional man they had this strong relationship that we have fortunately quite a lot of correspondence between them which has survived and you can see the warmth of their relationship in that correspondence

Robert Stevenson passionately disagreed with Brunel over the choice of gauge. He argued strongly for the retention of standard gauge, whereas Brunel, as we know, pursued the broad gauge. Brunel also The width of the track,

which was wider on the Great Western than it was to the standard gauge that we are now used to. The other point of contention as well was the Brunel's selection of the atmospheric system of propulsion

which needs a very brief explanation, trains without locomotives, that were pushed along the track by the evacuation of air, a vacuum system, as it were. Brunel spent quite a lot of his employer's money on developing a system down in Devon.

Stevenson would have none of it. He disagreed with it and would have no part of it. So again, Parliament considered the whole question of the gauge of the track, the whole question of atmospheric railway system, and that put the two of them in opposing camps. But for all that, they were good friends. I think what's coming out from what Michael has said,

that Robert really was a system builder. Yes, you know, he was brought in as the engineer, the consultant engineer for particular projects, but all the time he saw the importance of the railway developing as a network that was spread across the company. across the country. And as Julia said, that enabled the expansion of import, export, trade and so on and so forth. Whereas Brunel, technically brilliant, though he was, he's a Maverick, really, I think Brunel.

But Brunel was locked into a particular model of the railway, particularly with the initial railway between London and Bristol, a mercantile model of the railway, in which the railway would be an essential link in a trade link from the Americas. He wasn't so interested in the railway serving the industrial powers of the North and the Midlands. And I think that tension remained in the two men's outlooks throughout their professional careers. Stevenson wanted the network. Brunel was much more interested in making the Great Western the Supreme Railway of the age.

Can I come back to in a moment, Julia? I skipped through the effect that the railways had on the Industrial Revolution. Do you have any sort of, as it were, kill bullet points to take this better to the list than I did? Well, no, I think you're right. The construction of railways and then their operations provided an enormous boost for industry because the railways needed in huge quantities of bricks and wrought iron.

But equally, by reducing the cost of travel and by speeding it up, that encouraged all sorts of industries to do. developed by expanding the scale of markets, both within the United Kingdom, but also overseas as well. And Stevenson went to advise throughout Europe and he went to South America and so on, so you wanted to say something, Judy. Well, really, that it seems to me that what makes Robert Stevenson outstanding is that he's got an enormous amount of what you might call engineering common sense. And Brunel, for all his brilliance, just, it seems, it seems,

to me didn't have that at all and the atmospheric railway is a very good example of that that Stevenson talked about a railway as a machine and he says that quite often and so that and a machine is full of parts and all the parts have to work in order to make the machine function and the thing about the atmospheric railway is that it was too inflexible and there were far too many parts that would go wrong and it was never going to function properly and in a sense it seems to me that the atmospheric railway

is the thing that divides them and Brunel for all his brilliance was never going to have the kind of engineering common sense that was going to influence really the world in the way that Robert Stevenson did. That's just well on that for another moment

Michael Bailey I skipped over it but he was called by these other countries to advise them, Switzerland and all the place in Europe? Yes, Robert Stevenson was consulted on many, many projects, not only in Europe, but also further afield. In Europe, several of the countries

that we're only too familiar with, with railways, France, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Norway. He was involved in the first railway schemes in each of these countries. And indeed, he received awards from the governments of the some of those countries

for the work that he did. Switzerland, he was a consulting engineer to the fairly new Swiss government because of all the cantonal problems that they had earlier. And he advised them on a complete transport system, largely dominated by railways and the lake system, of course. But then he went further afield. He was consulted on a railway in Egypt, for example, to join Alexandria with Cairo. And he got brought into that as the engineer-in-chief for that project. further afield, India. He was the engineer in chief for the Great Indian Peninsula Railway. He never actually went there. His associate engineers were sent out there. James Barclay was the chief engineer for the construction of the line. But Stevenson's influence through Parliament and through the boardrooms of the city of London became so strong that they looked to him sooner than others for his advice. Colin, Colin Deval, was his influence so strong that he began to advise?

He seems a modest man, not him, say it would be good for you to have a railway there, and good if you would have a railway there. Would he begin to tell people where they should plant their lines? Well, like all engineers, he was certainly very influential when it came to particular projects. I'm not sure that he himself would initiate projects, but he was quite a wealthy man by the end of his business. life, who's also an NMP, wasn't he? So he wore many hats, and if somebody was interested in a particular railway running from

A to B, he would be a go-to-person. And he was often influential in enabling one scheme to go-ahead rather than another. I mean, a good example is the railway from London to Holly Head, which was an essential part of governing what, of course, at that time, the island. of Ireland was part of the United Kingdom. The government was very keen in the 1840s to have a railway. And Stevenson threw his hat into the railway from Chester to Hollyhead, which Michael has already mentioned in connection with the bridge over the Menai Straits. Now that wasn't the only project. So Stevenson, Robert Stevenson, was scarcely a disinterested party in the discussions

over how to create this link between London and Holly Head. Yes, it's interesting part of it. What do you think it had any, what effect did it have on when Gladson introduced a cheap affair? Did it begin to have a big effect on ordinary people, they went to the seaside, this sort of thing? Can you tell us about that? No, I mean, suddenly people could go on holiday. There's an absolutely charming music front called the Excursion Train Galop of about 1860, which shows an open railway carriage

going past Shakespeare cliff on its way to Dover packed with people dressed in their holiday clothes, waving their hats in the air and going on holiday. Yes, that's the thing about it, unleashed a desire for travel, not only in the upper classes who already sort of had it, but right the way down. I think Julian is right.

The excursion trains were extremely important in enabling working class people to travel, but Gladstone's Act of 1844, which required railway companies to offer trains at a penny a mile. Penny a mile was actually quite expensive in terms of working class wages at the time. So most working class people in the 1840s would have only travelled on a parliamentary train maybe every few years to move to search for work or something like that. It wasn't until much later in, say, the 1870s that railway travel became cheap enough for ordinary working people to travel on a weekly basis.

Robert Stevenson particularly brought the business, the trade, the skill, imagining right up the social scale. His father had started being dismissed in the London law for not being understood because he spoke Geordy. Robert Simpson, the Queen Victoria allowed his cortege to go through Hyde Park, a royal park, and he buried in Westminster Abbey and so on and so forth. It achieved then Great Heights. Can you expand on that a bit? Yes, I think it's important to realise that Robert Stevenson,

up in the social scale quite significantly. And by the time you get to the 1840s and into the 1850s, he was very much the man of London society. He was well known in Westminster in parliamentary circles. He was himself an MP from 1847. He was also extremely well known in the boardrooms of the city of London. And so he started to exert quite a lot of influence. People had considerable respect

for his views. Very often, when there were disputes which were difficult to resolve, they would ask Robert Stevenson to act as an arbitrator to, because such was the respect in which he was held, that people would accept his views,

which dispelled the argument. Was there still a feeling, can I come in and say, was there still a feeling, or answer, maybe this is what you want to ask, was the still a feeling that engineers were still somehow below the salt that really had to say?

to buy a country house and he himself gone into Parliament and did he buy a country house or whatever he did or he didn't that they were slightly below the salt socially I think we're running out of time have you got time to answer that? I think in their day

know that they had risen well above the salt I think it's subsequently that they've sunk back to below the salt I mean I was in fact going to say about the great exhibition in which Robert Stevens been played a really seriously important part and he was about to have a terrible row

with the commissioners and leave and the letters all say for God's sake get him on board we cannot lose him. We have to get him back at all costs. And he was upgraded to being a commission of the great exhibition, really listened to. And so, since his day, somehow, engineers have sunk beneath the salt.

I don't know why. Well, maybe that is certainly another programme, but thanks to you, Julia Elton, and to Colin DeValle, and to Michael Bailey. Next week we'll be discussing George Elliott's study of provincial life Middle March, pulled by Virginia Woolf, one of the few English novel for grown-up people. So there we are. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now

with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. You're being recorded. There you go. You get your best question, Julie. Well, I mean, my best quote is the Britannia Tubular Bridge. The Britannia Tubular Bridge. The Brutania Tubular Bridge was the most risky, the most dangerous, the most terrifying project that anybody did.

And it involved a whole lot of new techniques, including how the hell you're going. going to put your tubes in place when the Admiralty won't let you shut the navigation channels. And so they were floated into place on pontoons and jacked up. And Robert Stevenson is terrified of the floating, is terrified of the whole thing. And he is recorded by the painter, who painted them all up on the bridge, as being to outward seeming, as calm and immobile is his iron structure. But as his nerve tension increased with a suspense,

attending the carrying out of the complex movements of floating the tubes in voluntary tears were seen to be trickling down his face. They were under tremendous stress. They had the whole of society. They had the whole of the expectations of the society riding on their shoulders and Robert Stevenson more than any of them, and it showed. Well, I'm glad you, I really am glad. That's a very good connection.

It'll go to just about as many people. Yes. all day when he listened to. Right. Well, this question about whether engineers were below the sort, I think I agree with Julia that certainly by the second half of the 19th century, engineers

had crawled very successfully up the social scale. And yes, arguably, there has been something of a decline since. But I think at least in part of the explanation is that engineers have themselves to blame. They have fragmented their professional organisation. And actually

the Stevenson's are a good example. of this. So by 1820 there was a professional institution, the institution of civil engineers, it's still very much with us, and that represented all sorts of engineers, engineers who've been working on ports and harbors, on roads, and increasingly canals as well.

And they were a little bit sniffy, I think, about the early railways. The mechanical engineers. The mechanical engineers, as they became known, yes. and Rood mechanicals The rude mechanical So the civils were already You know

Very much of the middling order They were very much The part of the emerging Professional middle classes In Georgian and early Victorian England Of course in the 1840s The mechanical engineers

As they were self-identifying Had set up their own institution The Institution of Mechanical Engineers Which again is still with us Which had George Stevenson as first president and Robert as second. And this process of the sort of balkanisation of the

professional structure continued through the 19th century so it became increasingly difficult for engineers as a group to speak with one voice to power in Parliament and so on. It's a consequence of specialisation of course. When you were in the early 1800s

you were a civil engineer. You encompassed all of these disciplines but as you started to specialise that's when the institution started to to build up and develop. One of the disciplines like bridge building and tunneling and embankment security. Well that was all part of the

institution of civil engineers, but then the structural engineers became a new institution in their turn because again there were specialists in structural engineering as opposed to other forms. Was it that? Was it the sort of the dead hand of gentility that went over it? Well I think there's

a certain thing about it always seems to me that the language doesn't help us. That English, in this particular instance doesn't help us in, you know, you're an engineer etc. If you're in France or in Germany here, you're an engineer, which could just as well be somebody lying flat

in their back on a Saturday morning repairing a car as it could be somebody designing crossrail. And it's very hard to... You're actually, that's post hoc. I mean, it's because we have made it so. We can say engineering just as good a way as the French can say enjeure.

I mean, that's not the end of that. The fact is that the people, the themselves been put in that category, and then the word has actually been diminished to describe them. It isn't the word itself that carries the sky. No, but it is in the outside world, engineer equals engine, which could be anything. I think the fact that certainly railways and many other important forms of infrastructure in the 19th century were financed by private money in the... United Kingdom. So the financing

of railways and the need to draw in private capital rather than using the state's resources meant that financiers and bankers and indeed lawyers, as we mentioned before, were arguably a lot more important in the promotion and indeed the construction

of railways in the 19th century. So the engineers were part of a team but if one were to single out the most important members of that team, you can make a strong argument for saying it was finance. and the legal profession. That didn't happen so much on, say, the continent

where the state played a much bigger role in the planning and the construction of railways. And I think that had a knock-on effect that engineers found it very difficult to take place at the top of the table when the money was coming from banks, from banking houses, from financial institutions. Was there any...

Sorry. I was just going to say one topic that perhaps we didn't have the opportunity to develop, is that the two Stevenson's were partners in the company in Newcastle that made locomotives. Now, we'll briefly mention that in the context of the Rain Hill trials. But it went on, of course, the Robert Stevenson and the company went on to become a major exporter of locomotives.

And in fact, began the growth of an enormous industry in this country. centres in Glasgow, in Manchester, in Leeds, in Newcastle and elsewhere. Carlyne. They built them in Carlin. In a small number. Yeah, not quite... Yeah, we're on the matter.

But it was a major, major industry that I think, you know, it's all too easy to forget. These days, we do make trains in this country, but it's only a shadow of its warmer self. And why is that? And other people got better, we packed it in.

We packed it in, frankly. Why is that? Well, it's caused so much. cheaper to buy a train from a large train builder in Japan or in... But we were a large train builder once. Yes, exactly. Absolutely. I think it's tragic that we come back to the dominance of a particular kind of finance in the British economy.

And, you know, if you can invest that money overseas in train manufacturers overseas and reduce British manufacturing of trains to basically an assembly line, then that's where the money goes. Other countries, I mean, Germany is a good example. France as well. their financial systems are structured in a way that it gives a much higher priority to manufacturing within the nation state. Well, that's it, doesn't it?

It's a bit sad, isn't it? Yes, very sad. Here we're being rescued with an offer from the BBC. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Hello, I'm Paul Lewis and I'm here to tell you about the Moneybox podcast. Moneybox is all about your money, how you earn it, spend it, save it, invest it, and how you stop anyone else taking it from you. Sadly, there's a lot of that about.

By the Monday, we was a voice that we'd lost the $3 million, which is virtually everything that we had in there. It's not all gloom, though. We cover pensions, benefits, banking, insurance, tax, and getting money back when things go wrong. Whenever any customer feels, any inconvenience from us, if we make an error, I am deeply sorry for that. Sign up.

wherever you usually get your podcasts from. This is the BBC.