Heroes of science

by P. Martin Duncan

After his father’s death and his mother’s second marriage, the person to whom he was principally to look up to for protection, was his father’s eldest brother, to a portion of whose property he was heir. From this kinsman, who was but little pleased with his nephew’s love of collecting the “pundibs”[2] and “poundstones,” or “quoitstones,”[3] and had no sympathies with his fancies of carving sun-dials on the soft brown “oven-stone”[4] of the neighbourhood, he with great difficulty wrung, by repeated entreaty, money for the purchase of a few books fit to instruct a boy in the rudiments of geometry and surveying. But the practical farmer was better satisfied when the youth manifested an intelligent interest in the processes of draining and improving land; and there is no doubt that young William profited in after-life by the experience, if it may be so called, which he gathered in his boyhood while accompanying his relative (“old William”) over his lands at Over Norton.

Whatever he saw, was remembered for ever. To the latest hours of life he retained a clear and complete recollection of almost every event of his boyhood and often interested young and old by his vivid pictures of what he had seen when a child. These notices would be swelled to an unreasonable degree by introducing the pleasant stories of “the narrative old man;” but the following recollections, written in his seventieth year, of events which had passed fifty-six years before, are worth preserving as evidence of this peculiar circumstantiality of memory.

“I was early a tall and strong-grown boy, and in my way to London, between twelve and thirteen years of age, I particularly noticed the great work of cutting down the chalk hill at Henley-upon-Thames, and how the loaded carriages on an inclined plane were made to bring up the empty ones.

“I was in London shortly after the riots of Lord George Gordon; and at the time when news of Rodney’s defeat of the French fleet arrived.

“There was then a halfpenny toll for foot-persons passing over Blackfriars Bridge; the Albion Mills (worked by steam power) had just before been burnt down.

“Criminals were hanged at Tyburn, where there were cow-houses with wood seats on top for persons to see the executions.

“From Manchester Square to the Edgeware Road and Paddington, there were footpaths entirely across open fields. The buildings on the side of the square were unfinished; but, as more connected with what relates to the earth, I saw how the ground was made in Manchester Square, for a poor fellow, in turning his cartload of slush, had let his horse and cart slip down, so that he was up to his middle in mud, endeavouring to extricate his horse just as I passed by. This was on the east side of the square.”

In 1783, and from this time to 1787, the young man, without instruction or sympathy, prosecuted irregularly, but with ardour and success, the studies to which his mind was awakened. He began to draw, attempted to colour, became tolerably versed in the geometry and calculations then thought sufficient for engineers and surveyors, and by these acquirements, at the age of eighteen, so strongly recommended himself to Mr. Edward Webb, of Stow-on-the-Wold, who had been invited to make a complete survey of the parish of Churchill, for the purpose of enclosure, that he became assistant to that most able and excellent man, and was taken into his family.

This was the critical moment; from this event flowed all the current of his useful life, and to the same origin may be ascribed many of the peculiar habits and feelings, the contrasted lights and shades, which diversified his character.