Although it had by this time become certain that the disease under which he laboured had assumed a fatal character, he continued to give unremitting attention to his various professional duties; and in order to be nearer the ‘Great Eastern,’ he took a house at Sydenham, and removed there with his family in the beginning of August.
Almost every day he went to the great ship and superintended the preparations for getting her to sea. She was advertised to sail on September 6, and Mr. Brunel had intended going round in her to Weymouth.
He was on board early on the morning of the 5th, and his memorandum book has, under that date, an entry of some unfinished work which had to be looked after. Towards midday he felt symptoms of failing power, and went home to his house in Duke Street, when it became evident that he had been attacked with paralysis.
At one time it seemed possible that he might recover; but on the tenth day after his seizure, Thursday, September 15, all hope was taken away. In the afternoon he spoke to those who watched around him, calling them to him by their names; as evening closed in he gradually sank, and died at half-past ten, quietly and without pain.
The funeral was on September 20, at the Kensal Green Cemetery.
Along the road leading to the chapel many hundreds of his private and professional friends, his neighbours among the tradespeople of Westminster, the Council of the Institution of Civil Engineers, and the servants of the Great Western Railway Company, had assembled, and, with his family, followed his body to its place of burial, in the grave of his father and mother.[198]
It would be improper here to attempt to enter into a general criticism of Mr. Brunel’s works, or to determine the position which he is entitled to occupy among civil engineers. That task has yet to be accomplished, and must be undertaken by those who can claim to be impartial judges. It has been the object of this book to provide, as far as possible, the materials on which a just judgment of his career can be based.
But it may be permitted, in conclusion, to place on record the following testimony to the high position held by Mr. Brunel in the esteem of his contemporaries.
On November 8, 1859, at the first meeting of the Institution of Civil Engineers after the death of Mr. Brunel and of Mr. Robert Stephenson, Mr. Joseph Locke, M.P., the President, rose and said—
‘I cannot permit the occasion of opening a new session to pass without alluding to the irreparable loss which the Institution has sustained by the death, during the recess, of its two most honoured and distinguished members.