CHAPTER III
TRANSFORMATION BY STEAM
All projects of increased speed in locomotion denounced when first proposed. Sir Henry Herbert, M.P., in seventeenth century, on journeys between Edinburgh and London in a fortnight. Parliament on railways. Lord Clanricarde, Colonel Sibthorp, etc. George Hudson, the railway King. Charles Guernsey, the original of Thackeray’s ‘de la Pluche.’ Progress and sequel of the railway fever of 1846. The Queen’s first railway journey. Hudson and his fall. Comparison between mines and railways as sources of national wealth. Mr W. H. Mallock’s demonstration that the working classes of the United Kingdom have increased in wealth more noticeably even than the upper classes.
The truth of Mr Disraeli’s humorous description, in his Edinburgh speech of 1868, of boots at the Blue Boar agreeing with the chambermaid at the rival Red Lion about the folly and iniquity of railways, appears to be rooted in the constitution of human nature. All readers are familiar with the picture of the English traveller, drawn by Mr Apperley in his famous Quarterly article, The Road. This imaginary passenger had gone to sleep in the days when public conveyances could not be counted on to perform more than some half dozen miles an hour. He awakes in the era of the lightning coaches and quicksilver mails timed to perform twice that distance within the sixty minutes. If, as archæologists say, a certain Ericthonius of Athens[7] invented some fifteen centuries B.C. the first chariot of which authentic record exists, he, too, was perhaps regarded as an enemy rather than as a benefactor by some among his amazed contemporaries. More than 3,000 years after the Attic revolutionary an English Member of Parliament, Sir Henry Herbert, said that a man who proposed to travel to and fro between Scotland and England within seven days each way would be voted fit for Bedlam.
By 1843, thirteen years, that is, after the historic steam locomotive between Manchester and Liverpool which caused the death of Mr Huskisson, the great railway systems of England existed in a form more or less complete. Eighteen hundred miles in all were open for traffic. Parliament had authorized the expenditure on them of seventy million pounds. Sixty million pounds had been so spent already. An average of three hundred thousand passengers was carried weekly. Neither by the opinion of parliament nor of the public were railways regarded with unequivocal favour, or even at all times with toleration. Colonel Sibthorp could say in the House of Commons that he considered all railways as public frauds and private robberies. Lord Fitzwilliam, Lord Lansdowne, the Duke of Wellington, Lord Clanricarde, all spoke of George Stephenson’s invention in the same contemptuous tones. The Morning Post in February 1842 dwelt with satisfaction on the fact that ‘the Queen never travels by railway;’ while Prince Albert who did sometimes patronize the train between Windsor and London was obliged only too often to protest: ‘Not quite so fast, Mr Conductor, if you please!’ Within four months of the Morning Post’s announcement, the Railway Times was able to record that Her Majesty made her first trip on the Great Western. A few months later the Royal passenger accomplished the distance between Southampton and Vauxhall in less than two hours without a hitch. Five years subsequently the Queen and Prince Consort journeyed to Cambridge for the installation of His Royal Highness as Chancellor in a train driven, as Her Majesty records, by George Hudson, the railway King. Between 1836 and 1846 the English mind was fairly reconciled to the new method of transit. The day had finally gone by when, as they had done a little previously, a firm of London solicitors could refuse the business of the Brighton line on the plea that coaches would drive off the trains in a month. From 1836 and onward the Liverpool and Manchester, the London and Birmingham, and the North Midland lines were all paying ten per cent. During 1846, the year of the railway mania, 440 railway Bills passed authorizing the construction of 8,470 miles and the raising of £180,138,901.
This was the zenith of the shortlived splendour of George Hudson, the railway King. He has been seen already in these pages, amid the Hyde Park crowd in the early forties, resting his large heavy person in his wife’s chariot. The man himself had first become known on the City Board of Health in York. Afterwards he was elected Mayor of his native town. In that capacity he made the acquaintance of George Stephenson. In 1845 the son of the York linendraper, now a power in the railway world was returned to the House of Commons as Member for Sunderland. His parliamentary career is alone, if at all, remembered to-day by the frequent encounters on the floor of the House between himself and Mr Bernal Osborne. Diverting memories of these were often recalled for the benefit of his friends by Hudson’s antagonist, with the generous admission of the raconteur that he had, in the ex-King, usually found his match, if not in humorous retort and thrust, yet in substantial argument. Two years after the ‘King’ drove the engine which took the Queen and her Consort to Cambridge, suspicions of Hudson’s motive and conduct took (April 19, 1849) a definite shape. The shareholders of the Midland demanded a Committee of Inquiry. The incriminated Chairman resigned his post, and quietly accepted his permanent eclipse. It was noticed to his credit at the time, and has not since been denied, that he made no efforts at self exculpation, disclosed no names or confidential transactions, and thus refused, as unquestionably it was in his power to do, to associate persons of the highest consideration with himself in his fall. Hudson was only the type of a class whose members were invested by the railway passion of the period with brief splendour and unsubstantial prosperity. In the Upper House, Lord Clanricarde mentioned how Charles Guernsey, a broker’s clerk, had subscribed fifty-two thousand pounds for shares in the London and York line. This was the undoubted original of Thackeray’s ‘de la Pluche.’ The total of his gains appears to have amounted to thirty thousand pounds. The essential facts of the sequel with very little of fictitious amplification are given by the novelist.
A reaction, as has been seen, followed the morbid enterprise of 1846. Its results, however, have endured to the present hour. In 1845 the United Kingdom possessed only two thousand four hundred miles of iron way. The capital invested upon these was only eighty-eight millions. Before 1850, the capital had increased to two hundred and thirty millions. To-day the aggregate miles of the railways of the United Kingdom are little, if at all short, of twenty thousand. The expenditure has been six hundred and thirty millions. The gross annual income is sixty millions. In order to appreciate with approximate accuracy the part played by the steam locomotive in the creation of nineteenth century wealth in England, or to define with practical distinctness that familiar term ‘the railway interest;’ it is necessary to examine this matter more in detail. In 1855 the total of capital represented by the United Kingdom railways was £297,584,709. In 1894, the latest date to which the Board of Trade returns are published, the total was £985,387,855. After forty years, therefore, the railway investments of these Islands had increased by £687,803,146.
Another chief source of national wealth and industrial employment during this reign has been provided by mining enterprise. In respect of the money value of each, what are the relations which the yield of subterranean labour has borne to the enterprises of steam upon the surface of the earth? In 1855 the value of all the minerals brought to the light of day is expressed by the figures £29,579,001. The figures referring to railways for the same year were, it will be remembered, seen to be £21,507,599. This comparison between the two shows therefore that in 1855 the mines exceeded the railways in value in round numbers, by eight million pounds. The exact figures of the excess were £8,071,402. Forty years later this balance is more than redressed. In 1894 the total of mineral wealth was £80,900,453. The entire railway receipts were £84,310,831. In other words, the surface opulence of the United Kingdom had not only made good its inferiority to the subterranean wealth, but had advanced beyond that rival, in round numbers, by three and a half million pounds. The exact figures were £3,410,378.