Brunel's Big Railway

BRUNEL’SBIG

RAILWAY How tHe GwR stRetcHed fRom PaddinGton to Penzance … and new yoRk!

BRUneL’s BiG RaiLway

By RoBin Jones

RoBin Jones

THREE GREAT

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GWR 4-6-0 No. 6024 King Edward I stands at Paddington after returning with ‘The Bristolian’ on March 3, 2012. DAVE RODGERS

Contents

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 12

Bristol and its darkest days Only the best will do The broad blueprint takes shape The Great Western’s great adventure begins Building east from Bristol Box Tunnel

The Iron Shire Horses Next stop: New York Central!

The first engine driver The first royal train The Bristol & Exeter Railway South Devon: Taking it to the limit and beyond

Paddington through the ages The conquest of Cornwall Defeat!

Clifton Suspension Bridge: Brunel’s ‘bookends’

CHAPTER 17

Slimmed down but still super fast!

CHAPTER ONE

Bristol darkest days A negro slave is inspected prior to being sold in the Caribbean.

and its

P

eople have lived in the Bristol area for at least 60,000 years, and the Romans had villas there, but it was only around 1000AD that the future city was founded, taking its name Brycgstow from the Old English words for ‘the place at the bridge’.

Twenty years later, it had developed as a trading centre to the point where it had its own mint churning out silver pennies bearing the town’s name, and in Norman times it boasted one of the strongest castles in southern England.

Its port developed in the 11th century at the point where the River Frome met the tidal River Avon, next to the original Bristol Bridge and just outside the fortified town walls.

By the 12th century, Bristol handled much of England’s trade with Ireland.

A new stone bridge was built in 1247 and the prosperous town expanded to absorb neighbouring villages to the point where in 1373, Bristol became a county of its own, separate from Gloucestershire and Somerset.

10

Following on from its prosperity as a mainstream trading port, Bristol took off as a centre for shipbuilding and manufacturing, and by the 14th century it was one of the four biggest settlements in England, along with London, York and Norwich.

Its expansion was brought to an abrupt halt by the Black Death in 1348-1349.

Nonetheless, by the 15th century, Bristol was the second most important port in England, trading with Ireland, Gascony and Iceland.

It was also the starting point of many key voyages of exploration, including expeditions across the Atlantic to find the mythological land of Hy-Brazil.

In 1490, the Italian merchant, explorer and navigator Giovanni Caboto or John Cabot moved with his family to Bristol. It was a career move, as he could use the port as a launch pad for a voyage to the New World, following in the wake of the expeditions of Christopher Columbus.

Henry VII agreed to fund such a voyage, and on May 2, 1497, he set sail on his ship The Matthew, a barque under 100 tons and crewed by 18 hands.

On June 9 he reached land, either Cape Breton Island or Labrador, but thought he had found an island off the coast of China and did not realise it was a continent in its own right.

He set off back to Bristol on June 26 and arrived in August to a hero’s welcome. The king was so pleased that he gave him £10, equivalent to about two years’ pay for an ordinary labourer or craftsman, and a pension of £20 a year.

On February 3 the following year, Cabot took five ships to Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. There is controversy about the fate of the expedition: it has long been held that it was lost at sea, but more recent research suggested that Cabot returned to Bristol by 1500. The date and manner of his death are not known; however, Cabot is held to have led the first European encounter with the mainland of

A contemporary depiction of conditions aboard a slave ship

North America since the Norse Vikings’ visits to Vinland in the 11th century.

Bristol merchants followed in his footsteps to the New World. In 1499, William Weston headed the first English-led expedition to North America.

There are some who have claimed that the name America derives not from the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci, who established that the land discovered

by Columbus was not part of the east coast of Asia and instead constituted an entirely separate landmass, but from that of a Bristol-based Welshman, Richard Ameryk.

In 1910, Alfred E Hudd, a member of the Clifton Antiquarian Club, published a paper in which he pointed out that the senior Collector of Customs of the Port of Bristol who probably handed over the money was Ameryk. Hudd claimed that Cabot then named the ‘new found land’ in Ameryk’s honour.

On his return from Newfoundland, Cabot had given one of the islands he had found to a friend and another to his barber. He also told a group of Italian friars that they could be bishops. If he was so liberal with favours, why not bestow one on the official who was handing him a personal fortune?

Hudd also mentions a lost manuscript of 1497 which referred to the discovery of America by Bristol merchants – several years before the name was well known on the continent.

Whatever the origin of the name, Bristol became a major embarkation point for voyages to America, both of exploration and settlement, followed by trade.

In the 16th century, however, Bristol merchants focused far more on trade with Spain and its American colonies, even when such activities were banned during the Anglo-Spanish War of 1585-1604. Bristol’s illicit trade soared in the second half of the 16th century and became a keystone of the local economy.

The transformation of the former Abbey of St Augustine into Bristol Cathedral in 1542 elevated the port to city status. By the 17th century, the days of Spain and Portugal as world powers were waning, and England’s

American colonies were gaining in importance for Bristol traders, especially during the Commonwealth of Oliver Cromwell, when trade with North America and the Caribbean flourished.

Bristol fishermen who had worked the Grand Banks of Newfoundland since the 15th century began settling in Newfoundland permanently in larger numbers in the 17th century, establishing colonies at Bristol’s Hope and Cuper’s Cove.

Bristol experienced rapid growth in the 18th century, when it was the second biggest port in England after London, mainly exporting woollen cloth, as well as coal, lead and animal skins, with regular trade routes to France, Ireland Portugal, Spain and Africa’s Barbary Coast. Imports included grain, slate, timber, wine and olive oil.

However, these were also the darkest decades, indeed centuries, of the city’s history, when it played a pivotal part in the African slave trade.

ABOVE: African slaves working on a Caribbean sugar plantation. BRITISH EMPIRE EXHIBITION ABOVE LEFT: Map of Bristol

by Robert Ricart, the common clerk of the town from 1478 to 1506.

A fancy dress ball held in the Merchant Venturers Hall in Bristol in 1867.

ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS 11

CHAPTER SIX

BOX TUNNEL B

y 1840, there were two Great Western Railways in operation, one running from London to Chippenham and the other from Bristol to Bath.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel now faced his biggest hurdle of all in order to join the two together.

Standing in the way of his route was an outlier of the Cotswolds Hills called Box Hill.

He had a plan, but it would push his design and engineering skills to the limit and cost the lives of around 100 navvies.

BOx TuNNEL

Critics said that Brunel’s planned 1.83-mile tunnel through the solid Bath stone hill would be unworkable. One MP warned that the slope was so great that if the train brakes failed, a train would leave the tunnel at 120mph.

Trains would run out of control in the blackness because of the 1-in100 gradient and passengers would suffocate in the steam. Even some doctors subscribed to the view that nobody would be able to survive two journeys through the tunnel.

During the marathon 57-day parliamentary hearing into the plans to build the GWR, none other than George Stephenson was called as a witness for the railway. Under cross examination, he was told by counsel: “The noise of two trains passing each other in this tunnel would shake the nerves of this assembly. I do not know such a noise.

No passenger would be induced to go twice.”

Again, as with the broad gauge and Maidenhead Bridge, Brunel paid no heed. He wanted only the best railway of them all, and nothing, least of all a stubborn hill, would get in his way.

Work on the tunnel began in September 1836, about a year after the railway had been given parliamentary assent. Between 1836-37, eight shafts were sunk at intervals through the hill and along the projected

ABOVE: The western portal of Box Tunnel as drawn by J C Bourne.

LEFT: GWR 4-6-0 No. 5043 Earl of Mount Edgcumbe storms out of Box Tunnel with Vintage Trains’‘The Bristolian’ on April 17, 2010. BOB GREEN 53

CHAPTER NINE

The

first GWR driver T

he first locomotive driver appointed to the Great Western Railway was Jim Hurst, an illiterate native of Lancashire.

He became a friend of Daniel Gooch and loved driving at speed. However, he was often fined for misdemeanours and ended up being transferred to Totnes.

He ended his career as a labourer in Swindon Works and retired at the age of 64 to the ‘model town’ of New Swindon, where he saw out his days in a well-kept company cottage a stone’s throw from the great workshops.

His son, also Jim Hurst, started as a Swindon Works apprentice and became its foreman. He went on to become locomotive superintendent of the Jersey Railway.

The Great Western Magazine, a regular company publication, once carried an article about Jim. The anonymous writer had visited him to record his recollections of those seminal years of the GWR and indeed steam railways, beginning with George Stephenson’s ground-breaking construction of a railway which ‘floated’ over the notorious allconsuming peat bog of Chat Moss which had up to then blocked the way from Manchester to Liverpool.

The following are excerpts from the interview.

“Well,” the interviewer said, “You know what I have come down for.”

“To hear my yarns,” said Jim. “Since my wife died suddenly here a few weeks ago, I have thought that my own time won’t be long, and that I’d like to leave some account of the few things I know after me. “Now,” said he, “how do you wish me to begin?”

“Begin,” the interviewer replied, “from your childhood, and tell the story of your life in your own way, and leave it to me to shape it afterwards.”

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Without waiting for any further signal, Jim immediately got up steam and started from the platform of his cradle.

“I was born at Astley in Lancashire in the year 1811. My parents were cotton hand loom weavers. I got no schooling. When I was nine years old, I commenced to wind bobbins, and at 10 I went to work a pair of cotton hand looms.

“Our home was within half a mile of Chat Moss, and I well remember in 1825, when George Stephenson came to have a look at the Moss and see how it would suit for a railway. He wanted some people to show him over the Moss, and he hired my father, another man and myself.

“By George’s orders, my father took a large staff to sink into the Moss, while I carried a flint and steel to light a candle, in order that when a sounding was made, George might be able to test whether the air coming from below was coalpit air or not.

“When I saw my father sticking the pole down deep in various parts of the Moss, and the water showing itself and no signs of the coal, I said to George: “Us lads had tried that scores of times with sticks, and found the water used to shoot up.”

He said: “You lads know better than I do,” and then he told me: “I will make a railway man of thee when thee gets old enough.” In the year 1826, the Act of Parliament was passed to make the (Liverpool & Manchester) railway, and in that year the work began, and a nice job it was.

“The Moss was like a sponge, and drains had to be constructed. That year my father gave up the weaving and went to work on the line, and he was the first man to put a spade in to make a drain at a place called Burton Moss.

My father afterwards became a small contractor for making the line, employing nine or 10 men, and I joined my father’s gang in the year 1827.

Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway by JMW Turner was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1844, though it may have been painted earlier. Who knows – could Jim Hurst have been driving the train, believed to be crossing Maidenhead Bridge, which was designed by Brunel and completed in 1838. The view is looking east towards London. A tiny hare appears in the bottom right corner. It has been interpreted as the hare running ahead of the train as an indication of the limits of technology. Others believe it is running in fear of the new machinery and Turner intended to hint at the danger of man’s new technology destroying the inherent sublime elements of nature. The painting is now in the collection of the National Gallery in London.

BRUNEL’SBIG

RAILWAY Engineering genius Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Great Western Railway was not only bigger, wider and faster than any other of its day, but linked London to New York via his great steamships from Bristol.

His unique broad gauge ‘super railway’ also connected Paddington to Plymouth and Penzance, and for decades was one of the wonders of the world.

Now his original main line from London to Bristol is about to be electrified to cater for the demands of travellers two centuries on, and accordingly, many of his historic structures along the route have been given listed building protection so future generations can admire and enjoy them.

This book looks at the history of the railway from London to Bristol and Brunel’s Great Western legacy that was to lead the company to even dizzier heights.

£6.99