Rides on Railways
by Samuel Sidney · English · Gutenberg #13271 · 605,726 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Rides on Railways
Author: Samuel Sidney
Release date: August 25, 2004 [eBook #13271]
Most recently updated: December 18, 2020
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13271
Credits: This eBook was prepared by Les Bowler, St. Ives, Dorset
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RIDES ON RAILWAYS ***
This eBook was prepared by Les Bowler, St. Ives, Dorset.
RIDES ON RAILWAYS
by Samuel Sidney.
PREFACE.
The following pages are an attempt to supply something amusing, instructive,
and suggestive to travellers who, not caring particularly where they go, or
how long they stay at any particular place, may wish to know something of the
towns and districts through which they pass, on their way to Wales, the Lakes
of Cumberland, or the Highlands of Scotland; or to those who, having a brief
vacation, may wish to employ it among pleasant rural scenes, and in
investigating the manufactures, the mines, and other sources of the commerce
and influence of this small island and great country.
In performing this task, I have relied partly on personal observation, partly
on notes and the memory of former journeys; and where needful have used the
historical information to be found in cyclopaedias, and local guide-books.
This must account for, if it does not excuse, the unequal space devoted to
districts with equal claims to attention. But it would take years, if not a
lifetime, to render the manuscript of so discursive a work complete and
correct.
I feel that I have been guilty of many faults of commission and omission; but
if the friends of those localities to which I have not done justice will take
the trouble to forward to me any facts or figures of public general interest,
they shall be carefully embodied in any future edition, should the book, as I
hope it will, arrive at such an honour and profit.
S. S.
LONDON, AUGUST, 1851.
CONTENTS.
LONDON AND NORTH WESTERN RAILWAY
EUSTON STATION
THE MIXED TRAIN
CAMDEN STATION
AYLESBURY
WOBURN AND BEDFORD
THE BUCKS RAILWAY
BANBURY
OXFORD
WOLVERTON STATION
BLISWORTH, NORTHAMPTON
WEEDON
RUGBY AND ITS RAILWAYS
ARNOLD AND HIS SCHOOL
COVENTRY TO BIRMINGHAM
BIRMINGHAM
WARWICK, LEAMINGTON, KENILWORTH, STRATFORD-ON-AVON
SOHO
THE BLACK COUNTRY (WALSALL, DUDLEY, WEDNESBURY, DARLASTON)
STAFFORD
LIVERPOOL
MANCHESTER
THE ROAD TO YORKSHIRE
YORKSHIRE
LEEDS
THROUGH LINCOLNSHIRE TO SHEFFIELD
SHEFFIELD
DERBYSHIRE
FROM CHESTER TO NORTH STAFFORDSHIRE
THE LAKES
HOME
LIST OF ENGRAVINGS.
EUSTON SQUARE, LONDON
HARROW-ON-THE-HILL
VIADUCT OVER THE RIVER COLNE, NEAR WATFORD
LOOKING FROM THE HILL ABOVE BOXMOOR STATION TOWARDS BERKHAMSTED
BERKHAMSTED STATION
LEIGHTON BUZZARD
DENBIGH HALL BRIDGE
THE WOLVERTON VIADUCT
BRIDGE IN THE BLISWORTH EMBANKMENT
VIEW FROM TOP OF KILSBY TUNNEL, LOOKING TOWARDS RUGBY
COVENTRY
THE SHERBORNE VIADUCT, NEAR COVENTRY
THE AVON VIADUCT
THE ASTON VIADUCT
ASTON HALL
NEWTON ROAD STATION, NEAR BIRMINGHAM
THE RAILWAY NEAR PENKRIDGE
STAFFORD
VIEW NEAR WHITMORE
VALE-ROYAL VIADUCT
EXCAVATION AT HARTFORD
VIADUCT OVER THE MERSEY AND MERSEY AND IRWELL CANAL, KINGSTON
THE DUTTON VIADUCT
THE WARRINGTON VIADUCT
LONDON AND NORTH WESTERN RAILWAY.
According to Mr. Punch, one of the greatest authorities of the day on all
such subjects, the nearest way to Euston Station is to take a cab; but those
who are not in a hurry may take advantage of the omnibuses that start from
Gracechurch Street and Charing Cross, traversing the principal thoroughfares
and calling at the George and Blue Boar, Holborn, the Green Man and Still,
Oxford Street, and the Booking Offices in Regent Circus.
Euston, including its dependency, Camden Station, is the greatest railway
port in England, or indeed in the world. It is the principal gate through
which flows and reflows the traffic of a line which has cost more than
twenty-two millions sterling; which annually earns more than two millions and
a-half for the conveyance of passengers, and merchandise, and live stock; and
which directly employs more than ten thousand servants, beside the tens of
thousands to whom, in mills or mines, in ironworks, in steam-boats and
coasters, it gives indirect employment. What London is to the world, Euston
is to Great Britain: there is no part of the country to which railway
communication has extended, with the exception of the Dover and Southampton
lines, which may not be reached by railway conveyance from Euston station.
The Buckinghamshire lines from Bletchley open the way through Oxford to all
the Western counties, only interrupted by the break of gauge. The
Northampton and Peterborough, from Blisworth, proceeds to the Eastern coast
of Norfolk and Lincoln. At Rugby commences one of several roads to the
North, either by Leicester, Nottingham, and Lincoln, or by Derby and
Sheffield; and at Rugby, too, we may either proceed to Stafford by the direct
route of the Trent Valley, a line which is rendered classical by the memory
of Sir Robert Peel, who turned its first sod with a silver spade and honoured
its opening by a celebrated speech; or we may select the old original line
through Coventry, Birmingham, and Wolverhampton, passing through a network of
little railways leading to Warwick and Leamington, the result of unprofitable
competition. A continuation of the Trent Valley line intersects the Pottery
district, where the cheapest Delft and the most exquisite specimens of China
ware are produced with equal success; and thus we reach Liverpool and
Manchester by the straightest possible line.
At Stafford we can turn off to Shrewsbury and Chester, or again following the
original route arrive at Crewe, the great workshop and railway town of the
London and North Western. Crewe affords an ample choice of routes--1st, to
Leeds by Stockport (with a branch to Macclesfield) and Huddersfield, or from
Leeds to York, or to Harrogate, and so on by the East Coast line through
Durham, Newcastle, and Berwick, to Edinburgh; 2dly, direct to Manchester;
3rdly, to Warrington, Newton, Wigan, and the North, through the salt mining
country; and, 4thly, to Chester. At Chester we may either push on to Ireland
by way of the Holyhead Railway, crossing the famous Britannia Tubular Bridge,
or to Birkenhead, the future rival of Liverpool.
At Liverpool steamers for America warranted to reach New York in ten days are
at our command; or, leaving commerce, cotton, and wool, we may ride through
Proud Preston and Lancaster to Kendal and Windermere and the Lake district;
or, pressing forward through "Merry Carlisle," reach Gretna at a pace that
defies the competition of fathers and guardians, and enter Scotland on the
direct road to Glasgow, and, if necessary, ride on to Aberdeen and Perth.
A short line from Camden Station opens a communication with the East and West
India Docks and the coast of Essex, and another, three miles and a half in
length, from Willesden Station, will shortly form a connexion with the South
Western, and thereby with all the South and Western lines from Dover to
Southampton.
The railway system, of which the lines above enumerated form so large a part,
is barely twenty-five years old: in that space of time we have not only
supplied the home market but taught Europe and America to follow our example;
even Egypt and India will soon have their railways, and we now look with no
more surprise on the passage of a locomotive with a few hundred passengers or
tons of goods than on a wheelbarrow or Patent Hansom Cab. Grouse from
Aberdeen, fat cattle from Norfolk, piece goods from Manchester, hardwares
from Sheffield, race horses from Newmarket, coals from Leicestershire, and
schoolboys from Yorkshire, are despatched and received, for the distance of a
few hundred miles, with the most perfect regularity, as a matter of course.
We take a ticket to dine with a friend in Chester or Liverpool, or to meet
the hounds near Bletchley or Rugby, as calmly as we engage a cab to go a
mile; we consider twenty miles an hour disgustingly slow, and grumble awfully
at a delay of five minutes in a journey of a hundred miles. Millions have
been spent in order to save an hour and a half between London and Liverpool;
yet there are plenty of men not much past thirty who remember when all
respectable plain practical common sense men looked upon the project for a
railway between London and Birmingham as something very wild if not very
wicked; and who remember too, that in winter the journey from London to
Liverpool often occupied them twenty-two hours, costing 4 pounds inside and 2
pounds out, besides having to walk up the steepest hills in Derbyshire,--the
same journey which is now completed in six hours at a cost of 2 pounds 5s.,
and in twelve hours for 16s. 9d., by the Parliamentary train in an enclosed
carriage.
It may be perhaps a useful wholesome lesson to those who are in the habit of
accepting as their just due--without thought, without thankfulness--the last
best results of the industry and ingenuity of centuries, if, before entering
the massive portals of Euston Station, we dig up a few passages of the early
history of railways from dusty Blue Books and forgotten pamphlets.
In 1826, the project of a railway from Liverpool to Manchester came before a
Committee of the House of Commons, and, after a long investigation, the
principle was approved, but the bill thrown out in consequence of defects in
the survey. The promoters rested their case entirely on a goods' traffic, to
be conveyed at the rate of six or seven miles an hour. The engineer was
George Stephenson, the father of the railway system, a man of genius, who,
although he clearly foresaw the ultimate results of his project, had neither
temper nor tact enough to conciliate the ignorant obstinacy of his opponents;
in fact, he was a very bad witness and a very great man. It is curious, in
reading the evidence, to observe the little confidence the counsel for the
bill had in their engineer, and the contempt with which the counsel for the
opposition treated him. The promoters of the railway expected few
passengers, hoped to lower the rates of the canals, and had not made up their
minds whether to employ locomotives or horses; George Stephenson looked
forward confidently at that same period to conveying the greater portion of
the goods and passenger traffic by a complete railway system; but he either
would not or could not explain the grounds of his confidence, and therefore
we find Mr. Harrison, the most eminent Parliamentary counsel of that day,
speaking in the following insolent strain of a man whose genius he and his
friends were unable to appreciate:--
"Every part of this scheme shows that this man (George Stephenson) has
applied himself to a subject of which he has no knowledge, and to which he
has no science to apply. . . . . When we set out with the original
prospectus, we were to gallop at the rate of twelve miles an hour, with the
aid of the devil in the form of a locomotive, sitting as postillion on the
fore horse. But the speed of these locomotives has slackened. The learned
Sergeant would like to go seven, but he will be content with six miles an
hour. I will show that he cannot go six. Practically, or for any useful
purposes, they may go at something more than four miles an hour. The wind
will affect them: any gale of wind which would affect the traffic on the
Mersey, would render it impossible to set off a locomotive engine, either by
poking the fire, or keeping up the pressure of the steam until the boiler
burst. A shower of rain retards a railway, and snow entirely stops it."
In reply, Mr. Adams modestly observed, "I should like my learned friend to
have pointed out any part of the publication in favour of the Liverpool and
Manchester Railway, which justified his statement that we professed that
goods were to be carried at the rate of twelve miles an hour; we have proved
that they can be carried at seven miles an hour, and it was never intended
they should be conveyed at a higher rate."
In the following year the Liverpool and Manchester Bill was carried, and in
1830 the career of the civilizing locomotive commenced, but it took many more
years to convince "Practical men" that the Railway would successfully compete
with the Coach and Canal.
When, in 1831, the scheme of a Railway between London and Birmingham was made
public, a very clever pamphlet appeared under the title of "Beware the
Bubbles," in which we find the following comical prognostications of the
results of Railways:--
"After all, what advantage does the London and Birmingham Railway hold out?
Only one,--celerity of motion; and, after all, the ten miles an hour is
absolutely slower than the coaches, some of which go as fast as eleven or
twelve miles an hour; and, with the length of time that the engine and its
cumbrous train requires ere it can stop, and the other contingencies, there
would be little difference in the time of a twelve miles an hour coach and a
fifteen miles an hour engine, supposing twenty or thirty stoppages, to pick
up little parcels, between London and Birmingham. The conveyance is not so
safe as by coach."
After enumerating a series of theoretical dangers, he proceeds. "Another
consideration, which would deter invalids, ladies, and children from making
use of the Railway, would be want of accommodation along the line, unless the
Directors of the Railway chose to build inns at their own expense. But those
inns the Directors would have, in great part, to support, because they would
be out of the way of any business except that arising from the Railway, and
that would be trifling. Commercial travellers would never, by any chance, go
by the Railroad. The occasional traveller, who went the same route for
pleasure, would go by the coach-road also, because of the cheerful company
and comfortable dinner.
"Not one of the nobility, the gentry, or those who travel in their own
carriages, would really like to be drawn at the tail of a train of waggons,
in which some hundreds of bars of iron were jingling with a noise that would
drown all the bells of the district, and in momentary apprehension of having
his vehicle broken to pieces, and himself killed or crippled by the collision
of those thirty-two ton masses. Even if a man had no carriage of his own,
what inducement could he have to take so ungainly a conveyance. Three hours
is more than the maximum difference by which the ordinary speed of coaches
could be exceeded; and it is not one traveller in a thousand to whom an
arrival in London and Birmingham three hours sooner would be of the slightest
consequence.
"Then as to goods. The only goods that require velocity in coming to London,
are ribands from Coventry. Half the luggage room of a coach, on a Saturday
night, is quite adequate to the conveyance of them. The manufacturers of
Coventry will never be such fools as to send their property on an errand by
which it must travel further and fare worse. For heavy goods, the saving by
canal would be as twelve to one, beside the perfect safety. In the canal
boat there is no danger of fracture, even to the most delicate goods;
whereas, if fine China goods were to be brought by the rapid waggons, the
breakage would probably be twenty-five per cent.
"As to the profits of the undertaking let us be extravagantly liberal.
Suppose that the Railway was to get one-third of the goods, as well as one-
third of the passengers, see what they would make of it:--
One-third of the Goods . . . 96,540 pounds
One-third of the Passengers . 30,240
--------
126,780 pounds
--------
Annual expenses . . . . . 385,000 pounds
Returns. . . . . . . . 126,780
--------
Annual deficiency . . . . 258,220 pounds
--------
To meet an outlay of 7,500,000 pounds.
"But the probability is that canals would reduce their rates one-half; and
thus, competing wholesomely, extinguish the railway. The coach-masters would
do the same thing--run for twelve months at half the present fares, and then
not one man in his senses would risk his bones on the railway. The
innkeepers would follow a course precisely similar, and give nice smoking
dinners, foaming tankards and bottles of beeswing at so cheap a rate, and
meet their customers with so good humoured faces, and do so many of those
kind offices that legions would flock to the hospitable road. And while all
this was going on, and the thousands of men which the authors of this
ridiculous scheme had expected to send upon the parish were thriving, the
solitary stranger who had nobody to tell him better would go swinging at the
tail of the engine, bumping first on the iron plates on this side and then on
the iron plates on that side; and if he escaped being scalded to death by the
bursting of his engine, or having all his bones broken by collision with
another, he would be fain to rest for the night within some four bare walls
and gnaw a mouldy crust which he brought in his pocket, or, as an alternative
of luxury, wade some ten miles through the mire, and feast upon a rasher of
rusty bacon and a tankard of the smallest ale at the nearest hedge alehouse."
All this now sounds inexpressibly droll, and yet this prophet of evil was not
entirely wrong; nay, in some important particulars he was more right than the
railway promoters, whom he so heartily detested. The railway did cost nearly
seven millions instead of four millions as calculated by the projectors, and
the cost of working before the amalgamation with the Grand Junction did
amount to 380,000 pounds per annum: two figure facts which would have
effectually crushed speculation could they have been proved in 1831; but then
the per contra of traffic was equally astounding in its overflow, instead of
one-third of the existing traffic, or 126,780 pounds a-year allowed by the
pamphleteer, the London and Birmingham earned a gross revenue of nearly
900,000 pounds, while still leaving a traffic in heavy goods on the canals
sufficient to pay from 6 to 30 pounds per cent. to the proprietors, in spite
of a reduction of rates of upwards of 50 pounds per cent. Indeed this
traffic actually increased on the Grand Junction Canal, since the opening of
the Birmingham Railway, from 750,000 pounds in 1836, to 1,160,000 pounds in
1847.
Perhaps on no point would the expectation of the most sanguine among the
early projectors of railways been more satisfactorily exceeded than in regard
to safety. Swiftness, and cheapness, and power, acute intelligent engineers
foresaw; but that millions of passengers should be whirled along at a speed
varying from twenty to fifty miles an hour with more safety than they could
have secured by walking a-foot, would have seemed an anticipation of the very
wildest character. Yet such is the case. In 1850, upwards of seventy
millions of souls were conveyed by railway; when eleven passengers were
killed and fifty-four injured, or less than one to each million of passengers
conveyed.
Even at the risk of seeming trite, prosy, and common-place, it is right to
remind the young generation who consider the purchase of a railway ticket
gives them a right to grumble at a thousand imaginary defects and
deficiencies in railway management, how great are the advantages in
swiftness, economy, and safety, which they enjoy through the genius,
enterprise, and stubborn perseverance of George Stephenson and his friends
and pupils in 1825.
EUSTON STATION.
This station was an after-thought, the result of early experience in railway
traffic. Originally the line was to have ended at Camden Town, but a
favourable opportunity led to the purchase of fifteen acres, which has turned
out most convenient for the public and the proprietors. It is only to be
regretted that it was not possible to bring the station within a few yards of
the New Road, so as to render the stream of omnibuses between Paddington and
the City available, without compelling the passenger to perspire under his
carpet-bag, railway-wrapper, umbrella, and hat-box, all the way from the
platform to the edge of Euston Square.
The great gateway or propylaeum is very imposing, and rather out of place; but
that is not the architect's fault. It cost thirty thousand pounds, and had
he been permitted to carry out his original design, no doubt it would have
introduced us to some classic fane in character with the lofty Titanic
columns: for instance, a temple to Mercury the winged messenger and god of
Mammon. But, as is very common in this country,--for familiar examples see
the London University, the National Gallery, and the Nelson Column,--the
spirit of the proprietors evaporated with the outworks; and the gateway leads
to a square court-yard and a building the exterior of which may be described,
in the language of guide books when referring to something which cannot be
praised, as "a plain, unpretending, stucco structure," with a convenient
wooden shed in front, barely to save passengers from getting wet in rainy
weather.
[EUSTON SQUARE, LONDON: ill1.jpg]
As Melrose should be seen by the fair moonlight, so Euston, to be viewed to
advantage, should be visited by the gray light of a summer or spring morning,
about a quarter to six o'clock, three-quarters of an hour before the starting
of the parliamentary train, which every railway, under a wise legislative
enactment, is compelled to run "once a-day from each extremity, with covered
carriages, stopping at every station, travelling at a rate of not less than
fifteen miles an hour, at a charge of one-penny per mile." We say wise,
because the competition of the Railway for goods, as well as passengers,
drove off the road not only all the coaches, on which, when light-loaded,
foot-sore travellers got an occasional lift, but all the variety of vans and
broad-wheeled waggons which afforded a slow but cheap conveyance between our
principal towns.
At the hour mentioned, the Railway passenger-yard is vacant, silent, and as
spotlessly clean as a Dutchman's kitchen; nothing is to be seen but a tall
soldier-like policeman in green, on watch under the wooden shed, and a few
sparrows industriously yet vainly trying to get breakfast from between the
closely packed paving-stones. How different from the fat debauched-looking
sparrows who throve upon the dirt and waste of the old coach yards!
It is so still, so open; the tall columns of the portico entrance look down
on you so grimly; the front of the booking-offices, in their garment of clean
stucco, look so primly respectable that you cannot help feeling ashamed of
yourself,--feeling as uncomfortable as when you have called too early on an
economically genteel couple, and been shown into a handsome drawing-room, on
a frosty day, without a fire. You cannot think of entering into a gossip
with the Railway guardian, for you remember that "sentinels on duty are not
allowed to talk," except to nursery maids.
Presently, hurrying on foot, a few passengers arrive; a servant-maid carrying
a big box, with the assistance of a little girl; a neat punctual-looking man,
probably a banker's clerk on furlough; and a couple of young fellows in
shaggy coats, smoking, who seem, by their red eyes and dirty hands, to have
made sure of being up early by not going to bed. A rattle announces the
first omnibus, with a pile of luggage outside and five inside passengers, two
commercial travellers, two who may be curates or schoolmasters, and a brown
man with a large sea-chest. At the quarter, the scene thickens; there are
few Hansoms, but some night cabs, a vast number of carts of all kinds, from
the costermonger's donkey to the dashing butcher's Whitechapel. There is
very little medium in parliamentary passengers about luggage, either they
have a cart-load or none at all. Children are very plentiful, and the
mothers are accompanied with large escorts of female relations, who keep
kissing and stuffing the children with real Gibraltar rock and gingerbread to
the last moment. Every now and then a well-dressed man hurries past into the
booking-office and takes his ticket with a sheepish air as if he was pawning
his watch. Sailors arrive with their chests and hammocks. The other day we
had the pleasure of meeting a travelling tinker with the instruments of his
craft neatly packed; two gentlemen, whose closely cropped hair and pale plump
complexion betokened a recent residence in some gaol or philanthropic
institution; an economical baronet, of large fortune; a prize fighter, going
down to arrange a little affair which was to come off the next day; a half-
pay officer, with a genteel wife and twelve children, on his way to a cheap
county in the north; a party of seven Irish, father, mother, and five grown-
up sons and daughters, on their way to America, after a successful residence
in London; a tall young woman and a little man, from Stamford, who had been
up to London to buy stone bottles, and carried them back rattling in a box; a
handsome dragoon, with a very pretty girl,--her eyes full of tears,--on his
arm, to see him off; another female was waiting at the door for the same
purpose, when the dragoon bolted, and took refuge in the interior of the
station. In a word, a parliamentary train collects,--besides mechanics in
search of work, sailors going to join a ship, and soldiers on furlough,--all
whose necessities or tastes lead them to travel economically, among which
last class are to be found a good many Quakers. It is pleasing to observe
the attention the poor women, with large families and piles of packages,
receive from the officers of the company, a great contrast to the neglect
which meets the poorly clad in stage-coach travelling, as may still be seen
in those districts where the rail has not yet made way.
We cannot say that we exactly admire the taste of the three baronets whom a
railway superintendent found in one third-class carriage, but we must own
that to those to whom economy is really an object, there is much worse
travelling than by the Parliamentary. Having on one occasion gone down by
first-class, with an Oxford man who had just taken his M.A., an ensign of
infantry in his first uniform, a clerk in Somerset House, and a Manchester
man who had been visiting a Whig Lord,--and returned third-class, with a
tinker, a sailor just returned from Africa, a bird-catcher with his load, and
a gentleman in velveteens, rather greasy, who seemed, probably on a private
mission, to have visited the misdemeanour wards of all the prisons in England
and Scotland; we preferred the return trip, that is to say, vulgar and
amusing to dull and genteel. Among other pieces of information gleaned on
this occasion, we learned that "for a cove as didn't mine a jolly lot of
readin and writin, Readin was prime in winter; plenty of good vittles, and
the cells warmed."
It must be remarked that the character of the Parliamentary varies very much
according to the station from which it starts. The London trains being the
worst, having a large proportion of what are vulgarly called "swells out of
luck." In a rural district the gathering of smock-frocks and rosy-faced
lasses, the rumbling of carts, and the size, number, and shape of the trunks
and parcels, afford a very agreeable and comical scene on a frosty,
moonlight, winter's morning, about Christmas time, when visiting commences,
or at Whitsuntide. No man who has a taste for studying the phases of life
and character should fail to travel at least once by the Parliamentary.
The large cheap load having rumbled off from the south side of the station,
about nine o'clock preparations are commenced for the aristocratic Express,
which, on this line, is composed of first-class carriages alone, in which, at
half the price of the old mail coach fares, the principal stations on the
line are reached at railway speed.
To attend the departure of this train, there arrive not only the republican
omnibi and cabs, from the damp night crawler to the rattling Hansom, but
carriages, with coronets and mitres emblazoned, guarded by the tallest and
most obsequious of footmen, and driven by the fattest and most lordly of
coachmen; also the neatest of broughams, adorned internally with pale pink
and blue butterfly bonnets; dashing dogcarts, with neat grooms behind,
mustached guardsmen driving; and stately cabriolets prance in, under the
guidance of fresh primrose-coloured gloves.
But, although the passengers by the Express train are, in every respect, a
contrast to those by the Parliamentary, the universal and levelling tendency
of the railway system is not less plainly exhibited.
The earl or duke, whose dignity formerly compelled him to post in a coupe and
four, at a cost of some five or six shillings a mile, and an immense
consumption of horse-flesh, wax-lights, and landladies' curtsies on the road,
now takes his place unnoticed in a first-class carriage next to a gentleman
who travels for a great claret and champagne house, and opposite another
going down express to report a railway meeting at Birmingham for a morning
paper. If you see a lady carefully and courteously escorted to a carriage
marked "engaged," on a blackboard, it is probably not a countess but the wife
of one of the principal officers of the company. A bishop in a greatcoat
creates no sensation; but a tremendous rush of porters and superintendents
towards one carriage, announces that a director or well-known engineer is
about to take his seat. In fact, civility to all, gentle and simple, is the
rule introduced by the English railway system; every porter with a number on
his coat is, for the time, the passenger's servant. Special attention is
bestowed on those who are personally known, and no one can grumble at that.
Some people, who have never visited the continent, or only visited it for
pleasure, travelling at their leisure, make comparisons with the railways of
France and Germany, unfavourable to the English system. Our railways are
dearer than the foreign, so is our government,--we make both ourselves; but
compare the military system of the continental railways; the quarter of an
hour for admission before the starting of the train, during which, if too
early or too late, you are locked out; the weighing of every piece of
baggage; the lordly commanding airs of all the officials if any relaxation of
rules be required; the insouciance with which the few porters move about,
leaving ladies and gentlemen to drag their own luggage;--compare all this with
the rapid manner in which the loads of half-a-dozen cabs, driving up from
some other railway at the last moment, are transferred to the departing
Express; compare the speed, the universal civility, attention, and honesty,
that distinguish our railway travelling, and you cannot fail to come to the
conclusion that for a commercial people to whom time is of value, ours is the
best article, and if we had not been a lawyer-ridden people we might also
have had the cheapest article.
Before starting the Express train, we must not fail to note one new class of
passengers, recruited by the speed of railways, viz., the number of gentlemen
in breeches, boots, and spurs, with their pinks just peeping from under their
rough jackets, who, during the season, get down to Aylesbury, Bletchley, and
even Wolverton, to hunt, and back home again to dinner. But the signal
sounds. The express train moves off; two gentlemen at the last moment are,
in vain, crying out for Punch and the Times, while an unheeded hammering at
the closed door of the booking-office announces that somebody is too late.
There is always some one too late. On this occasion it was a young gentleman
in a pair of light top-boots, and a mamma and papa with half-a-dozen children
and two nursery-maids in a slow capacious fly.
We cannot bestow unqualified praise upon the station arrangements at Euston.
Comfort has been sacrificed to magnificence. The platform arrangements for
departing and arriving trains are good, simple, and comprehensive; but the
waiting-rooms, refreshment stand, and other conveniences are as ill-contrived
as possible; while a vast hall with magnificent roof and scagliola pillars,
appears to have swallowed up all the money and all the light of the
establishment.
The first-class waiting-room is dull to a fearful degree, and furnished in
the dowdiest style of economy. The second-class room is a dark cavern, with
nothing better than a borrowed light.
The refreshment counters are enclosed in a sort of circular glazed pew, open
to all the drafts of a grand, cold, uncomfortable hall, into which few ladies
will venture.
A refreshment-room should be the ante-room to the waiting-room, and the two
should be so arranged with reference to the booking-office and cloak-rooms,
that strangers find their way without asking a dozen questions from busy
porters and musing policemen.
Euston Station reminds us of an architect's house, where a magnificent
portico and hall leads to dungeon-like dining-room, and mean drawing-room.
Why are our architects so inferior to our engineers?
On the platform is the door of the telegraph office, which also has offices
for receiving and transmitting messages at all the principal stations.
THE MIXED TRAIN.
The Mixed train on this line holds an intermediate rank between the
Parliamentary and the Express, consisting as it does of first and second-
class carriages, at lower fares than the one and higher than the other,
stopping at fewer stations than the Parliamentary, and at more than the
Express; but worth notice on the present occasion, because it is by these
trains only that horses and carriages are allowed to be conveyed.
Carriages require very careful packing on a truck. At the principal stations
this may be very well left to the practised porters, but at road-side
stations it is a point which should be looked to; for it has not unfrequently
happened that the jogging, lateral motion of the railway has heated the axles
of a carriage or truck, so that at the end of the journey the wheels have
been found as fast as if they had been welded, and quite unfit to travel.
Travelling in a carriage on a truck is by no means safe: some years since
Lady Zetland and her maids were nearly burned to death, sparks from the
engine having set fire to their luggage. The maid threw herself off the
truck, and had an extraordinary escape.
The arrangements of the boxes for carrying horses are now very complete, and
when once a horse, not of a naturally nervous disposition, has been
accustomed to travel by rail, it will often be found better to take him on to
hunt at a distance than to send him overnight to a strange place with all the
disadvantages of change of food, and temptations to neglect in the way of the
groom. It is, however, a class of traffic to which few of the railway
companies have paid much attention; yet, in our opinion, capable of great
development under a system of moderate fares, and day tickets. The rates are
not always stated in the time tables, but on the London and North Western a
day ticket for a horse costs fourteen shillings for thirty miles.
Besides horses, packs of hounds, and even red deer are occasionally sent by
rail. But deer travel in their own private carriages. Hounds are generally
accompanied by the huntsman, or whip, to keep them in order. And on the
Great Western line a few years ago a huntsman was nearly stifled in this way.
The van had been made too snug and close for travelling comfortably with
twenty couple of warm fox-hounds.
If there is the slightest doubt about a horse entering the van quietly, the
best way is to blindfold him before he becomes suspicious. Among other
pursuits, horse racing has been completely revolutionised by the rail. The
posting race-horse van was a luxury in which only the wealthiest could
indulge to a limited extent, but now the owner of a string of thoroughbreds,
or a single plater, can train in the South or the North, and in four and
twenty hours reach any leading course in the kingdom; carrying with him, if
deemed needful, hay, straw, and water.
As we move slowly off toward Camden Station, by the fourth of the eighteen
passenger trains which daily depart from Euston, and emerging with light
whirl along within sight of rows of capital houses, whose gardens descend to
the edge of the cuttings, we are reminded that under the original act for
taking up Euston, it was specially provided, at the instance of Lord
Southampton, that no locomotive should be allowed to proceed further to the
south than Camden Town, lest his building land should remain neglected garden
land for ever. This promise was accepted with little reluctance by the
company, because in 1833 it was popularly considered that the ascent to reach
Camden Town could not be easily overcome by a heavily loaded locomotive.
Consequently a pair of stationary engines were erected at Camden Town, and a
pair of tall chimneys to carry off their smoke and steam.
But the objections in taste, and difficulties in science, have vanished. On
this line, as on all others, tenants are readily found for houses fringing a
cutting; locomotives run up even such ascents as the Bromsgrove Lickey,
between Worcester and Birmingham, with a load of 500 tons. So ten minutes
have been saved in time, and much expense, by doing away with the rope
traction system. The stationary engines have been sold, and are now doing
duty in a flax mill in Russia, and the two tall columns, after slumbering for
several years as monuments of prejudices and obstacles overcome, were swept
away to make room for other improvements.
It is, however, very odd, and not very creditable to human nature, that
whenever a railway is planned, the proprietors are assailed by unreasonable
demands for compensation, in cases where past experience has proved that the
works will be an advantageous, and often an ornamental addition.
In 1846 a Sheffield line was vehemently opposed by a Liverpool gentleman, on
the ground that it would materially injure the prospect from a mansion, which
had been the seat of his ancestors for centuries. The tale was well told,
and seemed most pitiful; an impression was produced on the committee that the
privacy of something like Hatfield, or Knebworth, was about to be infringed
on by the "abominable railway." A stiff cross-examination brought out the
reluctant fact, however, that this "house of my ancestors," this beautiful
Elizabethan mansion had been for many years let as a Lunatic Asylum at 36
pound per annum.
In another instance a railway director sold a pretty country seat, because
the grounds were about to be intersected by a railway embankment; two years
after the completion of the railway he wished to buy it back again, for he
found that his successor, by turfing and planting the slope, had very much
increased the original beauty of the gardens.
CAMDEN STATION.
But thus gossiping, we have reached Camden Station, and must take advantage
of an unusual halt to look into the arrangements for building waggons and
trucks, and conveying coals, merchandise, goods, and all live stock included
between pigs and bullocks.
Not without difficulty did Mr. Robert Stephenson succeed in inducing the
directors to purchase thirty acres of land here; it was only by urging, that,
if unused, the surplus could be sold at a profit, that he carried out his
views. Genius can foresee results which, to ordinary capacities, are dark
and incomprehensible. Since 1845 it has been found necessary to take in an
additional plot of three more acres, all now fully occupied.
In no respect were the calculations of parties engaged in the construction of
railways more at fault than with regard to the station accommodation needed
for goods traffic, which, on the principal lines, has added full twenty-five
per cent. to the original estimates. George Stephenson calculated the cost
of getting over Chat Moss at 40,000 pounds; his opponent proved that it would
cost four hundred thousand: but it was executed at exactly the sum Stephenson
set down, while the capital involved in providing Station Room for
merchandise at Liverpool and at Manchester, has probably exceeded the
original estimate for the whole line.
On this railway the increase of the goods traffic has been of very recent
date. At a very early period after the opening of the line, the merchandise
department became the monopoly of the great carriers, who found it answer
their purpose to divide the profits afforded by the discount allowed to
carriers by the railway company, without seeking to develop an increase of
occupation. Under this system, while carriers grew rich, the goods traffic
remained stationary. But when the amalgamation with the Grand Junction,
which had always been its own carrier, took place, a great reduction in rates
was made, as well as arrangements for encouraging the conveyance of every
kind of saleable article. The company became a common carrier, but employing
Messrs. Pickford, and Chaplin and Horne to collect goods.
The result was a marvellous increase, which has been progressing ever since.
A regular trade is now carried on between London and the most remote parts of
the kingdom in every conceivable thing that will bear moving. Sheep have
been sent from Perth to London, and Covent Garden has supplied tons of the
finer description of vegetables to the citizens of Glasgow; every Saturday
five tons of the best fish in season are despatched from Billingsgate to
Birmingham, and milk is conveyed in padlocked tins, from and beyond Harrow,
at the rate of about one penny per gallon. In articles which are imported
into both Liverpool and London, there is a constant interchange, according to
the state of the market; thus a penny per pound difference may bring a
hundred chests of congou up, or send as many of hyson down the line. All
graziers within a day of the rail are able to compete in the London market,
the probability of any extraordinary demand increases the number of beasts
arriving weekly at Camden Station from the average of 500 to 2000, and the
sheep from 2000 to 6000; and these animals can be brought from the furthest
grazing grounds in the kingdom without any loss of weight, and in much better
condition than the fat oxen were formerly driven to Smithfield from the rich
pastures round Aylesbury, or the Valley of the Thames.
Camden station, under the alterations effected in 1848-9, has a double line,
for goods waggons only, 2,500 feet in length, entirely clear of the main
line. The length of single lines, exclusive of the main line, exceeds twelve
miles.
To describe it in detail would be a very unsatisfactory task; because, in the
first place, it can ill be understood without a map, and in the next, changes
are constantly taking place, and still greater changes will be forced on the
company by the increase of goods traffic, which, great as it is, is only in
its infancy. Even now freights are paid to the London and North Western for
all the way to China. But, as an agricultural implement of commerce, the
locomotive has been comparatively as little used as the stationary engine,
although hundreds of trades of a semi-rural character are drawing toward the
railway lines, and away from the country towns, which were formerly the
centre of rural commerce, because standing on the highways or near canals.
But such a revolution can only be effected slowly.
At Camden will be found a large yard for the reception of the Midland
Counties' coal, the introduction of which has had a considerable effect in
bringing down the price of sea-borne coal.
The cattle pens have lately been altered and enlarged. Just before Christmas
this place is almost as amusing and exciting as a Spanish bull-fight;
although, as a general rule, the silence of a place where, during every
quarter of an hour, of day and night, so enormous a business is being carried
on, is very surprising.
Twenty-four steam waggon horses, or engines, for heavy loads are kept in a
circular engine-house, or stable, 160 feet in diameter, with an iron roof.
This form renders every engine accessible at a moment's notice. The steam
race-horses for the passenger work are kept in an oblong building opposite
the carters. The demand being more regular, there is no need for the
expensive circular arrangement of stables for this class of engines. In a
large boiler-house, boiling water and red-hot coke are kept ready night and
day, so that on the occasion of any sudden demand no time need be lost in
getting up steam. There is besides a waggon-building department, a shop for
executing such trifling repairs in the locomotives as need no reference to
the great workshop at Wolverton. The passenger carriages are most of them
built at Euston station, by Mr. Wright.
The carrying department is very conveniently situated close to the Regent's
Canal, so as to have easy communication with inland as well as sea
navigation. A series of sheds occupy an area of 135,000 superficial feet,
and the platforms to receive goods from railway trucks on one side and from
waggons on the other, occupy 30,000 feet. These platforms and sheds are
provided with 110 cranes, for loading and unloading, with a power varying
from one ton and a half to twenty tons. By these appliances, work of the
most miscellaneous character goes on all day, and part of the night.
The railway trucks and waggons are moved about by horses: it is amusing to
see the activity with which the heavy brutes often bring a waggon up at a
trot, jump out of the way just at the right moment, and allow the waggon to
roll up to the right spot by its own momentum.
The horses are lodged in stables in the underground vaults, which we cannot
commend, as they are dark, damp, full of draughts, and yet ill ventilated;
but it was necessary to use these vaults, and difficult to find stabling for
such a number of horses close at hand.
The carrying department at Camden is very miscellaneous, and moves
everything, from the contents of a nursery ground to a full grown locomotive,
but they do not impress a stranger so much as the arrangements at Manchester
and Liverpool. The annual consumption of gas at Camden exceeds six million
cubic feet.
Under the railway system the certainty and rapidity with which merchandise
can be transmitted, changes and simplifies more and more every year the
operations of trade. For instance, Southampton is the great port for that
part of our Indian, South American, and Mediterranean trade which is
conducted by steamers. When a junction has been effected between the London
and North Western and the South Western, costly packages of silk, muslin,
gold tissue, jewellery, may be sent under lock from the Glasgow manufacturers
to the quay alongside at Southampton in a few hours, without sign of damage
or pilferage, and at the last moment before the departure of the steamer. The
communication between the docks on the Thames and Camden Town, will enable a
grocer in Manchester to have a hogshead of sugar or tobacco sent in answer to
a letter by return of post, at a saving in expense which may be imagined from
the fact, that it costs more to cart a butt of sherry from the London Docks
to Camden Town, than to send it by rail all the way to Manchester.
To provide for the enormous and annually increasing traffic in passengers and
merchandise, there are:--
1 State carriage. 260 Horse boxes.
555 Locomotives and tenders. 132 Sheep vans.
494 First-class mails. 7385 Goods waggons.
420 Second-class carriages. 14 Trolleys.
342 Third-class. 1155 Cribb rails.
25 Post-offices. 5150 Sheets.
242 Carriages,--trucks for 162 Cart horses.
letters and newspapers. 41 Parcel carts.
201 Guards' brakes.
Making a grand total rolling stock of 10,663.
The passenger carriages afford eleven miles of seat room, and would
accommodate 40,196 individuals, or the whole population of two such towns as
Northampton.
The loading surface of the goods equals eleven acres, and would convey 40,000
tons.
If the tires of all the company's wheels were welded into one ring, they
would form a circle of seventy-two miles.
To keep this rolling stock up in number and efficiency, there are two
establishments, one at Camden Town, and one at Wolverton.
Camden Town is the great coach house of the line, where goods waggons are
built and repaired in one division, where sound locomotives, carriages and
trucks are kept ready for use in another.
The waggon building department of Camden is worth visiting, especially by
railway shareholders.
Every one is interested in railways being worked economically, for economy
gives low rates and increased profits, which both increase trade and multiply
railways. Hitherto the details of carrying, especially as to the
construction of waggons and trucks, have been much neglected.
On one line running north, it is said that the loss in cheese stolen by the
railway servants, amounts to as much as the whole sum paid for carrying
agricultural produce, and on the line on which we are travelling, breakages
have sometimes amounted to 1,200 pounds a-month.
The fact is, that railway carriers have been content to use rude square boxes
on wheels, covered when loaded, if covered at all, with a tarpaulin, without
any precautions for draining off the wet, to which it was constantly exposed
when out of use,--without "buffers" or other protecting springs, so that the
wear and tear of the waggon and its load, from inevitable shocks, was very
great.
The imperfect protection of a tarpaulin was, and is, a great temptation to
pilferage. These sources of expense, in wear and tear of conveyances, loss
of tarpaulin coverings, each worth 6 pounds 6s., breakage, pilferage of
goods, combine to sum up a formidable discount from the profits of railway
carrying, and, in the case of certain goods, lead the owners to prefer the
slower transit of a canal boat. Even iron suffers in market value from
exposure to the weather; porcelain and glass are liable to perpetual smashes,
on waggons without buffers, in spite of the most careful packing; while tea,
sugar, cheese, and all untraceable eatables are pilfered to an enormous
extent, besides more valuable goods.
It was hoped that railway transit would put an end to the dishonesty which
was carried on wholesale on the canals; but, where open trucks are used, this
expectation has been only partly realised, for the temptation of opportunity
has been too strong, for even the superior class of men employed on railways.
In order to meet these evils, Mr. Henson, who has the charge of the waggon-
building department at Camden, has built and patented a covered waggon with
buffers, which unites with great strength, safety, capacity, and smoothness
of motion. The scientific manner in which these waggons are framed, gives
them strength in proportion to their weight. The buffers with which they are
fitted, and the roof, protecting from the weather, render them altogether
durable, and therefore economical; while the construction, as will be seen
from our vignette, renders pilferage, unless by collusion with the
respectable party who overlooks the unloading, almost impossible.
A diminution of the cost for repairs of rolling stock (on an average equal to
12 pounds per ann.), and of the cost for compensation to customers for
breakage and pilferage, should be a leading object with every sensible
railway director. Indeed these losses, with deadweight, and lawyer's bills,
are the deadly enemies of railway directors.
Further improvements in these waggons have been effected by the use of
corrugated iron, which is light and strong at the same time; and the iron
waggons have been again improved by employing iron covered with a thin
coating of glass, under a new patent, which renders rust impossible and paint
unnecessary. The simple contrivance by which the door and moveable roof is
locked and unlocked by one motion, is worthy of the notice of practical men.
600 of these lock-up waggons, with springs and buffers, are in use on the
London and North Western Railway.
Mr. Henson has also succeeded in establishing a traffic in gunpowder, by
inventing a carriage of sheet iron, lined with wood, in which four-and-a-half
tons of gunpowder can be conveyed without fear of explosion either from
concussion or external combustion.
The shops at Camden have room for building or repairing 100 waggons. They
are to be seen in every stage of progress.
The great object is to combine strength with lightness. If the strength
being the same, the saving of a ton can be effected in a waggon, it will
amount to from thirty to ninety tons in an ordinary goods train. An
important consideration, for deadweight is the great enemy of the railway,
and ninety tons of useless weight is equivalent to a loss of 90 pounds in
sending a goods train a journey to Birmingham. British oak is the favourite
wood for the frames of railway waggons; teak, if of equal quality, is dearer,
and the inferior is heavier, without being so strong. If in any of the many
countries with which we trade a wood can be discovered as good and as cheap
as English oak, the railways which are constantly extending their carrying
stock, can afford a steady demand.
About the passenger carriages, which every one can see and examine for
himself, there is not much to be said. On the Continent, where they cannot
afford to use mahogany, they use sheet-iron and papier-machee for the panels;
in England, mahogany chiefly in the first class. When we began, stage
coaches were imitated; there are some of the old cramped style still to be
seen on the Richmond line; then came enormous cages--pleasant in summer,
fearfully cold in winter, without fires, which have not been introduced in
England, although they are found in the north of Europe and America. A
medium size has now come into favour, of which some fine specimens are to be
seen in the Hyde Park Exhibition.
On the Great Northern line some second-class carriages have been introduced,
varnished, without paint, and very well they look. Economy again, and the
increase of branches, have led to the use of composite carriages for first
and second-class passengers all on one body. These, which were in use years
ago on the northern coal lines, are now revived and improved.
The Camden station has received an entirely new feature by the completion of
the line to the docks and to Fenchurch Street, with stations at Islington,
Hackney, and Bow. Already an immense omnibus traffic has been obtained--a
sort of traffic which produces the same effect on engines as on horses. They
are worn out rapidly by the continual stoppages. But horses show wear and
tear directly, whereas iron and brass cannot speak except through increased
expenses and diminished dividends.
Leaving Camden, at which trains stop only on arriving, we swiftly pass
Kilburn, where an omnibus station is to be established for the benefit of the
rising population of citizens, to Willesden, where the junction line through
Acton to the South Western is to commence. Willesden has been rendered
classic ground, for the Hero-worshippers who take highwaymen within the
circle of their miscellaneous sympathies, by Mr. Harrison Ainsworth's "Jack
Sheppard,"--the "cage" where this ruffian was more than once confined still
remains in its original insecurity.
Sudbury affords nothing to detain us. The next station is within a mile of
Harrow-on-the-Hill, with its beacon-like church spire. Rich pasture lies
around, famous for finishing off bullocks fed in the north. Harrow school is
almost as much one of the institutions of England as Oxford and Cambridge
Universities. It is one of the great public schools, which, if they do not
make the ripest scholars, make "men" of our aristocracy. This school was
founded by one John Lyon, a farmer of the parish, who died in 1592.
[HARROW-ON-THE-HILL: ill2.jpg]
Attached to it there are four exhibitions of 20 pounds each, and two
scholarships of 50 pounds each.
The grand celebrity of the school rests upon the education of those who are
not on the foundation. The sons of noblemen and wealthy gentlemen, who in
this as in many other instances, have treated those for whose benefit the
school was founded, as the young cuckoo treats the hedge sparrow. Among its
illustrious scholars Harrow numbers Lord Byron and Sir Robert Peel.
An old saw runs: "Eton fops, Harrow gentlemen, Winchester scholars, and
Westminster blackguards."
Since the palmy days when Dr. Drury was master and Byron and Peel were
pupils, Harrow has declined to insignificance, and been by the abilities of
Dr. Wordsworth raised again. The term of Harrow gentlemen still deservedly
survives, Harrow being still the gate through which the rich son of a parvenu
family may most safely pass on his way to Oxford, if his father desires, as
all fathers do in this country, that his son should amalgamate with the
landed aristocracy.
At Pinner, the next station, we pass out of Middlesex into Hertfordshire.
Watford, a principal station, is within a mile of the town of that name, on
the river Colne. Here Henry VI. encamped with his army before the battle of
St. Albans. Cassiobury Park, a favourite spot for picnics, is close to the
station. It was the opposition of the late proprietor, the Earl of Essex,
that forced upon the engineer of the line the formidable tunnel, which was
once considered an astonishing railway work,--now nothing is astonishing in
engineering.
[VIADUCT OVER THE RIVER COLNE: ill3.jpg]
Near King's Langley we pass the Booksellers' Provident Retreat, erected on
ground given by Mr. Dickenson, the great paper maker, who has seven mills on
the neighbouring streams, and reach Boxmoor, only noticeable as the first
station opened on the line.
[LOOKING FROM THE HILL ABOVE BOX MOOR STATION TOWARDS BERKHAMSTED: ill4.jpg]
The next station is Berkhamsted. Cowper the poet was born here, his father
was rector of the parish. Berkhamsted Castle is part of the hereditary
property of the Prince of Wales and Duke of Cornwall. At this castle William
the Conqueror, after the battle of Hastings, met the Abbot of St. Albans with
a party of chiefs and prelates, who had prepared to oppose the Norman, and
disarmed their hostility by swearing to rule according to the ancient laws
and customs of the country. Having, of course, broken his oath, he bestowed
the castle on his half-brother, Robert Moreton, Earl of Cornwall. King John
strengthened the castle, which was afterwards besieged by the Dauphin of
France. When Edward III. created the Black Prince Duke of Cornwall, the
castle and manor of Berkhamsted were bestowed upon him "to hold to him, and
the heirs of him, and the eldest sons of the kings of England, and the dukes
of the said place;" and under these words through civil wars and revolutions,
and changes from Plantagenet to Tudor, from Tudor to Stuart, with the
interregnum of a republic, an abdication, and the installation of the
Brunswick dynasty. The castle is now vested in Albert Prince of Wales.
[BERKHAMSTED STATION: ill5.jpg]
The Chiltern Hills, including the Chiltern Hundreds, the only office under
the crown always open to the acceptance of all without distinction of
parties, lies within a short distance of Berkhamsted. Ashdridge Park,
formerly the seat of the Duke of Bridgewater, the originator and author, with
the aid of Brindley and Telford, of our great canal system, lies about a mile
to the eastward. The scenery of the park and gardens are fine. The house is
modern.
Tring station, a mile and a half from the town, may be reached from London,
31.5 miles, in less than an hour by the express train, and the traveller
arrives in as wild a district as any in England. Three miles north of Tring
lies the town of Ivinghoe, possessing a large cruciform church, worthy of a
visit from the students of "Christian architecture," with an old sculptured
timber roof, and containing a tomb with a Norman French
inscription,--according to some the tomb of Henry de Blois, Bishop of
Winchester, brother of King Stephen. At the Rose and Crown we are informed
venison is to be had in perfection at moderate charges during the season. The
station is the highest point on the line, being 420 feet above the sea, 300
above Camden Town, and 52 above Birmingham.
In the course of the Tring excavation in the gravel deposits above the chalk,
the tusk and teeth of an elephant were found, and in crossing the Icknield or
Roman Way, about thirty-three miles, were sixteen human skeletons, and
several specimens of Roman pottery: two unique urns are now in the possession
of the Antiquarian Society.
Two miles from Tring we pass from Hertfordshire into Buckinghamshire. It
remains a disputed point whether the name of the county is derived from
bucken or boccen, a deer, according to Spelman, or with Lysons, boc, a
charter, or with Camden from bucken, beech trees, which, as in his time,
still abound and flourish. Unfortunately the state of agriculture does not
allow the pastors of the country to take the ease and rest that was enjoyed
by the celebrated Mr. Tityrus before the repeal of the Roman corn laws, an
ease which has cost many an unfortunate schoolboy a flogging.
Our next halt, Cheddington, is noticeable only because it stands on the fork,
of which a short branch, nine miles in length, leads to Aylesbury.
AYLESBURY.
Aylesbury, standing on a hill, in the midst of one of the richest, if not the
richest, tracts of pasture lands in England, is very ancient without being
venerable. The right of returning two members to Parliament is found
periodically profitable to the inhabitants, and these two MP's with a little
lace, constitute its only manufactures. The loss of the coaching trade by
the substitution of the railroad, was a great blow to its local prosperity.
Among other changes, the Aylesbury butchers often go to London to buy meat,
which has passed in the shape of oxen through the town to ride to London.
The Berry field, said to be the best field in England, lies in the Vale of
Aylesbury. The saying of "good land bad farmers," is not belied among the
mass of those who meet in the markets of Aylesbury. With a few exceptions
the farming is as bad as it can be, the farmers miserably poor, and the
labourers ignorant to a degree which is a disgrace to the resident clergy and
gentry. We had some experience of the peasantry during the railway surveys
of 1846, 1847, and found them quite innocent of thinking and reading, with a
timid hatred of their employers, and perfect readiness to do anything not
likely to be found out, for a pot of beer. They get low wages, live low, and
work accordingly. It was round Aylesbury, that for many years, the influence
of the insolvent Duke of Buckingham was paramount.
To city sportsmen, Aylesbury has interest as the centre of Baron Rothschild's
(stag) hunt; to politicians, because of great meetings of the country party
held there.
We must not omit to notice the duck trade carried on by the poorer order of
people round the town. They hatch the ducks under hens generally in their
living rooms, often under their beds, and fatten them up early in spring on
garbage, of which horse flesh not unfrequently forms a large part. The ducks
taste none the worse if for the last fortnight they are permitted to have
plenty of clean water and oats, or barleymeal. Most of the Aylesbury ducks
never see water except in a drinking pan. The cheap rate at which the
inferior grain can be bought has been a great advantage to these duck
feeders.
The many means now open of reaching the best markets of the country will
probably change the style and make the fortunes of a new race of Bucks
farmers. Those of the present generation who have neither capital nor
education can only be made useful by transplantation.
Returning from Aylesbury, and gliding out of the deep cuttings over a fine
open country, we approach the Leighton Buzzard station, and see in the
distance the lofty octagonal spire of the Leighton Buzzard church.
The town is half a mile from the station, and commands the attention of the
church antiquary from its fine church and cross.
The church, says a very competent authority on such matters, "is one of the
most spacious, lightsome, and well-proportioned perpendicular churches,
cruciform, with a handsome stone spire. The roof, stalls, and other wood-
work very perfect. The windows, some ironwork, and other details, full of
interest."
The cross stands in an open area in the centre of the market place, and is
twenty-seven feet high above the basement, which is raised by rows of steps
about five feet.
At Leighton Buzzard a branch line of seven miles communicates with DUNSTABLE.
[LEIGHTON BUZZARD: ill6.jpg]
Dunstable is situated in the centre of the Dunstable Chalk Downs, where the
celebrated Dunstable larks are caught which are made mention of in one of
Miss Edgeworth's pretty stories. The manufactures are whiting and straw
hats. Of an ancient priory, founded in 1131, by Henry I., and endowed with
the town, and the privileges of jurisdiction extending to life and death,
nothing remains but the parish church, of which the interior is richly
ornamented. Over the altar-piece is a large painting representing the Lord's
Supper, by Sir James Thornhill, the father-in-law of Hogarth. In a charity
school founded in 1727, forty boys are clothed, educated, and apprenticed. In
twelve almshouses twelve poor widows are lodged, and in six houses near the
church, called the Maidens' Lodge, six unmarried gentlewomen live and enjoy
an income of 120 pounds per ann. With this brief notice we may retrace our
steps.
On leaving Leighton, within half a mile we enter a covered tunnel, and we
strongly recommend some artist fond of "strong effects" in landscape to
obtain a seat in a coupe forming the last carriage in an express train, if
such are ever put on now, sitting with your back to the engine, with windows
before and on each side, you are whirled out of sight into twilight and
darkness, and again into twilight and light, in a manner most impressive, yet
which cannot be described. Perhaps the effect is even greater in a slow than
in an express train. But as this tunnel is curved the transition would be
more complete.
At Bletchley the church (embowered in a grove of yews, planted perhaps when
Henry VIII. issued his decrees for planting the archer's tree) contains an
altar tomb of Lord Grey of Wilton, A.D. 1412. The station has now become
important as from it diverge the Bedford line to the east, and the lines to
Banbury and Oxford to the west.
A branch connects Bletchley with Bedford 16.25 miles in length, with the
following stations:-
FENNY STRATFORD. LIDLINGTON.
WOBURN SANDS. AMPTHILL.
RIDGMOUNT. BEDFORD.
WOBURN AND BEDFORD.
Woburn is one of those dull places, neat, clean, and pretentious in public
buildings, which are forced under the hot-house influence of a great
political family.
We pass it to visit Woburn Abbey, the residence of the Russell family, with
its extensive and magnificent gardens, its model farms, its picture gallery,
and other accessories of a great nobleman's country seat.
It was at Woburn that Francis, Duke of Bedford, held his sheep-shearing
feasts, and by patronising, in conjunction with Coke of Norfolk and Mr.
Western, improvements and improvers in agriculture and stock-breeding, did so
much to promote agricultural improvement in this county, and to create that
large class of wealthy educated agriculturists, which confers such great
benefits on this country.
Now that every country gentleman has at least one neighbour who is, or
professes to be, an agricultural improver, it is difficult to give an
adequate idea of the benefit we have derived from the agricultural enthusiasm
of the noblemen and gentlemen who first made the science of cultivating
breeding fashionable, we must be excused the word, among a class which had
previously been exclusively devoted to field sports or to town life. They
founded that finest of all modern characters--the English country gentleman,
educated, yet hearty, a scholar and a sportsman, a good farmer, and an
intelligent, considerate landlord; happy to teach, and ready to learn,
anything connected with a pursuit which he follows with the enthusiasm of a
student and the skill of a practical man.
The other stations have nothing about them to induce a curious traveller to
pause. Not so can we say of BEDFORD.
Bedford has been pauperised by the number and wealth of its charities. A
mechanic, or small tradesman, can send his child if it be sick to a free
hospital; when older to a free school, where even books are provided; when
the boy is apprenticed a fee may be obtained from a charity; at half the time
of apprenticeship, a second fee; on the expiration of the term, a third; on
going to service, a fourth; if he marries he expects to obtain from a charity
fund "a portion" with his wife, also educated at a charity; and if he has not
sufficient industry or prudence to lay by for old age, and those are virtues
which he is not likely to practise, he looks forward with confidence to being
boarded and lodged at one of Bedford's fifty-nine almshouses.
The chief source of the charities of Bedford is derived from an estate of
thirteen acres of land in the parish of St. Andrew, Holborn, London,
bequeathed by Sir William Harpur, an alderman of that city, in the reign of
Edward VI., for founding a free school for instructing the children of the
town in grammar, and good manners. This land, now covered with valuable
houses, produces some 16,000 pounds per annum.
On this fund there are supported, 1st. a Grammar School, with eighty boys on
the foundation, and as many private boarders; a Commercial School, containing
100 to 150 boys; a National School, of 350 boys, where on the half holidays
170 girls are received, a regular Girls' School and an Infant School.
Beside which, the girls in the hospital for poor children, another branch of
the charity, are taught household duties, needlework, reading and writing. In
these schools the children of all resident parishioners of Bedford's five
parishes are entitled to receive gratuitous instruction. In the National
School twenty-five boys are clothed from a fund left by Alderman Newton, of
Leicester.
The Warden and Fellows of New College, Oxford, are visitors, and appoint the
master and second master of the Grammar School. There are four masters,
viz., the head, with two assistant masters; a mathematical master, and a
writing master. The scholars enjoy the advantage of eight exhibitions, of 80
pounds per annum each, six of which must be bestowed on town boys, the
remaining two may go to boarders.
The cheap and good education attainable as a matter of right in this borough,
have rendered it a favourite resort of half-pay officers and unbeneficed
clergymen, blessed with large families.
The church of St. Paul is large, with a nave and a south aisle, divided by
early English piers and arches. A stone pulpit, ornamented with gilt
tracery, on a blue ground, has been removed in favour of an oak one, with the
chancel. The church of St. Peter has an old Norman door, a fine antique
front, and some curious stained glass in the windows.
John Bunyan, author of the "Pilgrim's Progress," was co-pastor in a Baptist
Meeting House, in Mill-lane, from 1671 until his death in 1688. The chair in
which he used to sit is still preserved in the vestry as a relic.
A few miles from Bletchley, is a forgotten, but once celebrated spot, Denbigh
Hall, over which the traveller whirls without notice, yet worthy of
remembrance, because it affords a name and date for tracing the march of
railway enterprise.
In 1838, a gap in the intended railway from London to Birmingham extended
from an obscure public-house, called Denbigh Hall, to Rugby. At either point
travellers had to exchange the rail for the coach or chaise.
On June 28, 1838, when Queen Victoria was crowned, for days before the
coronation, the coaches for the intermediate space were crammed; the chaises
and post horses were monopolised, and at length, to cover thirty odd miles,
every gig, standing waggon, cart, and donkey cart that could be obtained in
the district, was engaged, and yet many were disappointed of their journey to
London.
On this London and Birmingham line, in addition to, and without disturbing
the ordinary traffic, 2,000 souls have been conveyed in one train, at the
rate of thirty miles an hour.
Truly Queen Victoria can set the railway conquests of her reign against the
glories of the war victories of Queen Anne and her grandfather, King George.
[DENBIGH HALL BRIDGE: ill7.jpg]
THE BUCKS RAILWAY.
A recent extension from Bletchley traverses Buckinghamshire, and by a fork
which commences at Winslow, passes through Buckingham and Brackley to Banbury
by one line, and by Bicester to Oxford by the other. We need not pause at
Brackley or Winslow. Buckingham is notable chiefly as being on the road to
Princely Palatial Stowe, the seat of the Buckingham family, now shorn of its
internal glories in pictures, sculptures, carvings, tapestry, books, and
manuscripts. Its grounds and gardens, executed on a great scale in the
French style, only remain to delight the traveller; these would require, and
have been often described in, illustrated volumes. Here we shall not dwell
upon the melancholy scene of grandeur, power, and wealth frittered away in
ignoble follies.
BANBURY.
Banbury is more celebrated than worth seeing. Commercial travellers consider
it one of the best towns in England, as it is a sort of metropolis to a great
number of thriving villages. Banbury cakes are known wherever English
children are bred, and to them, where not educated in too sensible a manner,
the Homeric ballad of--
"Ride a cock horse
To Banbury Cross,"
is sung. Unfortunately, the Puritans, in the time of Edward VI., pulled this
famous cross down.
They were in great force there; for as Drunken Barnaby, in his tour, tells
us:--
"There I found a Puritan one,
Hanging of his cat on Monday
For killing of a rat on Sunday."
At Banbury was fought, after the English fashion, one of the great fights
that preceded the carrying of the Reform Bill. Previous to that change,
sixteen electors had the privilege of sending a member to Parliament.
During the Reform excitement six of these privileged gentlemen seceded from
their usual compact, and determined to set up on their own account. For want
of a better man, they pitched upon Mr. Easthope, of the Morning Chronicle,
since that period, much to his own astonishment no doubt, pitchforked into a
baronetcy. The old original M.P. was Colonel Hutchinson, the companion of
Sir Robert Wilson in carrying off Lavalette. On entering the town, ten
thousand Reformers set up such a howling, that Colonel Hutchinson, thinking
his last hour at hand, drew a dagger. Upon which more groans and shrieks
followed, with such threats as made it prudent for the friends of the Colonel
to compel him to retreat. Under these circumstances, the streets of the town
were crammed full with an excited mob; the poll was opened; the six, amid
tremendous plaudits, voted for Easthope, and Reform; the ten very discreetly
staid at home, and thus, by six votes, a baronetcy was secured to the
unopposed candidate.
It is droll to look back upon the movement which led public opinion to prefer
a stockjobber to a gallant soldier.
Banbury manufactures horse girths and other kinds of webbing, as well as
excellent ale. There are two inns, both good.
The Buckinghamshire Railway has reduced the price of coal to the inhabitants
from 22s. to 15s. per ton, on 150,000 tons per annum.
BICESTER, commonly pronounced Bister, is thirteen miles by the road from
Oxford, a town as ancient as the Heptarchy; famous for a well once sacred and
dedicated to St. Edburgh, for its well attended markets and cattle fairs, and
especially for its excellent ale. It is in the centre of a capital hunting
country. The women make a little bone lace.
OXFORD.
Oxford is one of the great gates through which our rich middle classes send
their sons to be amalgamated with the landed and titled aristocracy, who are
all educated either there or at Cambridge.
To say of any one that he is an "Oxford man," at once implies that he is a
gentleman, and when a well-looking, well-mannered, and even moderately
endowed young gentleman has passed respectably through his curriculum at
Christchurch or Magdalen, Balliol, Oriel, University, or any other of the
correct colleges, it rests with himself whether he runs the race of public
life in England on equal terms with the sons of the oldest of the titled and
untitled aristocracy, even though his father were an eminent retired dust
contractor, and his mother laundry maid or factory girl. But money alone
won't do it, and the pretension, the display, the coxcombry permitted in a
peer, must be carefully avoided by a parvenu. Thus Oxford interests classes
who care very little for its educational, antiquarian, or architectural
resources, as one of the institutions of the country by which any capable man
may cut off his plebeian entail, and start according to the continental term
"noble."
The material beauty of Oxford is great--the situation, in a rich valley
bounded by softly flowing rivers, fine--the domes, and spires, and old grey
towers rising in clusters, prepare the mind of the approaching traveller for
the city where the old colleges and churches, planting out and almost
composing it, afford at every bend of the long streets, at every turn of the
narrow thoroughfares, some grand picture, or charming architectural effect;
even our Quakers are proud of Oxford in England when they travel in America.
Then Oxford is so decorously clean, so spotlessly free from the smoke of
engines and the roar of machinery; the groves and gardens, and trim green
turf seen through richly-carved and corbeled archways, give such a feeling of
calm study, and pleasant leisure, that we will defy the bitterest radical and
the sourest dissenter not to be softened and charmed by his first
impressions.
To those who arrive prepared to be pleased, stored with associations of the
past, fortunate enough to have leisure and introductions to some affable don
long resident, and proud to display the treasures and glories of his beloved
Alma Mater, Oxford affords for many days a treat such as no other city in the
world can supply to an Englishman.
The best known route from London is by the Great Western Railway, which,
according to the original plan, would have passed close to the city. But all
the University and ecclesiastical dignitaries were up in arms; they saw, in
their mind's eye, the tender, innocent undergraduates flying from the
proctor-guarded precincts, where modesty, virtue, and sobriety ever reign, to
the vice-haunted purlieus of London, at all hours of the night and day. The
proctors and professors triumphed; the railway was obliged to leave a gap of
ten miles of common road between its invading, unhallowed course, and the
sacred city; and great was the rejoicing in the Convocation Chamber, and many
the toasts in the Senior Common Rooms to the health of the faithful sons of
Oxon, who in Parliament had saved the city from this commercial desecration.
But as even Grosvenor-square was at length glad to admit gas after abiding
longest of all in the genteel gloom of oil lamps, so was Oxford in the end
glad to be put on a branch, as it could not be put on a main line; and now,
beside the rail on which we are travelling, Worcester, Banbury, and
Wolverhampton, and two roads to London and Birmingham are open to the
wandering tastes of the callow youth of the University; as may be ascertained
by a statistical return from the railway stations whenever a steeple-chase or
Jenny Lind concert takes place in or near any of the towns enumerated.
The entrance from Bletchley is, perhaps, the finer, as rolling round a
semicircle, we sweep into sight of the dome of Radcliffe Library and the
spire of St. Mary's Church, descend, enter the city by the Cheltenham-road,
and passing through an inferior suburb, reach the head of High-street, of
which a great German art critic declared, "that it had not its equal in the
whole world." Wide, long, and gently curving, approached from either end, it
presents in succession the colleges of Lincoln, Brasenose, University, All
Souls, Queen's, St. Mary's Church, with peeps of gardens with private houses,
and with shops, which do not detract, but rather add, to the dignity and
weight of the grand old buildings.
Having slowly sauntered up and down, and scanned the various characters
peculiar to the City of Universities--as, for instance, an autocrat in the
person of a Dean of Christchurch, a Principal of Balliol, or a Master of
Jesus, a Proctor newly made, but already endowed with something of the
detective police expression; several senior fellows, plump, shy, proud, and
lazy--walking for an appetite, and looking into the fishmongers on their way
to the parks; a "cocky" Master of Arts, just made, and hastening to call on
all his friends and tradesmen to show off his new dignity, and rustle the
sleeves of his new gown; three lads, just entered from a public school (last
month they laid out tip in Mother Brown's tarts), on their way to order three
courses and dessert at the Mitre, where very indifferent fare is provided for
fashionable credit prices; a pale student, after Dr. Pusey's own heart, in
cap and gown, pacing monk-like along, secretly telling his beads; a tuft
(nobleman) lounging out of the shop of a tailor, who, as he follows his
lordship to the door, presents the very picture of a Dean bowing to a Prime
Minister, when a bishop is very sick.
A few ladies are seen, in care of papas in caps and gowns, or mammas, who
look as if they were Doctors of Divinity, or deserved to be. The Oxford
female is only of two kinds--prim and brazen. The latter we will not
describe; the former seem to live in perpetual fear of being winked at, and
are indescribable.
From these street scenes, where the ridiculous only is salient, for the quiet
and gentlemanly pass by unnoticed, while pompous dons and coxcombical
undergraduates are as certain of attention as turkeycocks and bantams, we
will turn into the solemn precincts of a few of the colleges.
At the head stands Christchurch in dignity and size, founded by Cardinal
Wolsey, Pope Clement VII. consenting, in 1525, on the revenues of some dozen
minor monasteries, under the title of Cardinal College. The fall of
Wolsey--England's last Cardinal, until by the invitation of modern mediaeval
Oxford, Pius IX. sent us a Wiseman--stopped the works. One of Wolsey's latest
petitions to Henry was, "That his college at Oxford might go on." And by the
King, after some intermediate changes, it was finally established as
Christchurch.
The foundation now consists of a dean, eight canons, eight chaplains, a
schoolmaster, an organist, eight choristers, and 101 students, of whom a
considerable number are exhibitioners from Westminster School. It is in
symbolism of these students that the celebrated Great Tom of Christchurch
clangs each evening 101 times. Besides these students, there are generally
nearly 1000 independent members, consisting of noblemen, gentlemen commoners,
and commoners. To be a gentleman commoner of Christchurch, all other
advantages being equal, is the most "correct thing" in the University; none
can compete with them, unless it be the gentlemen commoners of Magdalen. The
Christchurch noblemen, or tufts, are considered the leaders of fashion,
whether it be in mediaeval furniture, or rat hunting, boating, or steeple-
chase riding, old politics or new religions.
Among the illustrious men it claims as pupils are, Sir Philip Sydney and Ben
Jonson, Camden and South, Bolingbroke and Locke, Canning and Sir Robert Peel,
whom Oxford rejected. The front is in Aldate's-street, for which consult Mr.
Spier's pretty guide card, the entrance under the lofty clock tower, whence,
at ten minutes past nine every evening, the mighty tom peals forth his
sonorous summons. The "Tom Gateway" leads into the quadrangle familiarly
termed "quad," 264 feet by 261, the dimensions originally planned by Wolsey;
but the buildings which bound it on three sides were executed after the
destruction of the old edifice in the great civil wars from designs by Sir
Christopher Wren in 1688.
The Hall on the south side is ancient; we ascend to it by a flight of steps
under a handsome groined roof supported by a single pillar. The Hall is 115
feet long, 40 wide, and 50 high. The open roof of oak richly carved,
decorated with the arms of Wolsey and Henry VIII. Other carvings adorn the
fire-place and a fine bay window.
On the sides of the rooms are hung a series of 120 portraits of
ecclesiastics, poets, philosophers (these are few), statesmen, and noblemen,
representing distinguished students of the College.
The dinner hour, when the dean and chief officers sit in state on the dais,
masters and bachelors at the side tables, and undergraduates at the lower
end, is an impressive sight, recalling feudal times. The feeding is the
worst of any in Oxford, much to the advantage of the taverns and pastrycooks.
When in 1566 Queen Elizabeth visited Oxford, a play was performed before her
in this hall by the students, in the course of which, "a cry of hounds
belonging to themselves" having been counterfeited in the quadrangle, the
students were seized with a sudden transport; whereat her Majesty cried out,
"O excellent! these boys in very truth are ready to leap out of the window to
follow the hounds."
Amid the many changes of taste and opinion since the days of Queen Bess, the
love of hunting still prevails in Christchurch, not one of the least healthy
tastes, in an age of perpetual competing work; and the Christchurch drag is
one of the stock amusements anathematized toward the end and permitted at the
beginning of every hunting term, for the glory of the chief tuft and the
benefit of hard-reading men, who cannot waste their time in trotting from
cover to cover dependent on the vagaries of such an uncertain animal as a
fox, and are therefore content to hunt a "cad" armed with a red herring over
the stiffest country he can pick.
After the Hall, the Kitchen should be visited. It is the most ancient part
of the building, for Wolsey, with a truly ecclesiastical appreciation of the
foundation of all sound learning, began with the kitchen, and it survived
him. Agriculture, gardening, cooking, and confectionery, were among the
civilizing arts brought to great perfection by religious houses and lost for
a long period after the Reformation, which, like other strong medicines,
cleared our heads at the expense of our stomachs.
In Wolsey's kitchen may be seen the huge gridiron on which our ancestors
roasted sheep whole and prepared other barbarous disgusting dishes.
In the Peckwater Quadrangle are to be found the Library and the Guise
collection of pictures, which contains curious specimens of that early school
which the mad mediaevalists are now fond of imitating, and a few examples of
the famous Italian masters who rose on the force of genius, which did not
disdain study but did disdain imitation.
Wickliff was a warden, and Sir Thomas More a student, in Canterbury Hall,
which was amalgamated in Wolsey's College.
The Chapel of Christchurch is the Cathedral of Oxford. The oldest parts
belonged to the church of St. Frideswide's Priory, consecrated A.D. 1180.
Wolsey pulled down fifty feet of the nave and adapted it to the use of his
college. The stained glass windows, without which every Gothic cathedral has
a bare, naked, cold appearance, and which were peculiarly fine, nearly all
fell a sacrifice to puritanical bigotry.
For the many curious and beautiful architectural features we must refer in
this instance, as in all others, to the architectural guides, such as
Parker's, with which every one who feels any interest in the subject will
provide himself.
Leaving Christchurch by the Canterbury Gate up Merton-lane, we pass on one
hand Corpus Christi, founded in the reign of Henry VIII., where Bishop Sewel,
author of "The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity," and Richard Hooker, a
Protestant whom even a Pope praised, were bred; on the other, Oriel, where
studied Walter Raleigh, one of England's greatest men, a poet and
philosopher, soldier and statesman, mariner and historian; not guiltless, yet
worthy of pity in his fall and long imprisonment, and of honour in his brave
and Christian death,--the victim of the ever feeble treacherous Stuarts. What
other line of kings has had the fate to sign away the lives of two such men
as Raleigh and Strafford? Oriel also claims as students Prynne, who, with
his libels and his ears, laid the foundation of our liberty of the press;
Bishop Butler, whose "Analogy" showed how logic and philosophy could be
applied to support the cause of Christian truth; Dr. Arnold, the reformer of
our modern school system, whom Oxford persecuted during life and honoured in
death; and lastly, the clever crotchety Archbishop Whateley, who has not only
proved that Napoleon Bonaparte never existed, but that Mr. Gibbon Wakefield's
bankrupt schemes of colonization were triumphant successes. Next we come to
Merton, the most ancient of all the colleges, founded 7th January 1264. The
oldest of its buildings now standing is the library, the oldest in England,
erected 1377. Wickliff was a student of Merton. University College, which
next falls in our way, claims to date from King Alfred, but has no charters
so ancient as those of Merton. The buildings are not more early than Charles
I., but the chapel contains some of Grinling Gibbons's best carvings, and a
monument by Flaxman of Sir William Jones, who was a fellow of this
University. The modern part, fronting High-street, is from the designs of
Barry, the architect of the Palace of Westminster.
University College has one of the old customs, of which several are retained
in Oxford, called "chopping at the tree." On Easter Sunday a bough is
dressed up with flowers and evergreens, and laid on a turf by the buttery.
After dinner each member, as he leaves the hall, takes up a cleaver and chops
at the tree, and then hands over "largess" to the cook, who stands by with a
plate. The contribution is, for the master half a guinea, the fellows five
shillings, and other members half a crown each. In like manner, at Queen's
College, which stands opposite University, on Christmas day a boar's head is
brought into the hall in procession, while the old carol is sung--
The boar's head in hand bear I
Bedecked with bays and rosemary,
And I pray you, my masters, be merry.
Qui estis in convivio,
Caput apri defero,
Reddens laudes Domino.
While on New Year's day the bursar presents to every member a needle and
thread with the words, "Take this and be thrifty." We have not been able to
obtain a statistical return of the standing of the Queen's men in the books
of the tradesmen of Oxford as compared with members of other colleges, but we
recommend the question to Mr. Newdegate or some other Oxonian figure monger.
This college was founded by Philippa, queen of Edward III. It was directed
by the statutes that there should be twelve fellows and seventy poor
scholars, who were to be summoned to dinner by the sound of a trumpet; when
the fellows, clothed in scarlet robes, were to sit and eat, while the poor
scholars, kneeling in token of humility, were to dispute in philosophy. The
kneeling, disputing, and scarlet robes have been discontinued, but the
trumpet still sounds to dinner. There are usually about 300 members on the
books of this college.
Lower down the High-street is All-Souls, whose two towers are picturesque
centres of most views of Oxford. The buildings are various in character and
merit, and well worth examination. The grand court was designed by Hawksmoor
rather on the principles of a painter than an architect; he wished it to make
a good picture with the existing buildings, and he succeeded. All-Souls is
composed entirely of fellows, who elect from other colleges gentlemen whose
qualification consists in being "bene nati, bene vestiti, et moderater docti
in arte musica."
With so easy a qualification as that of being well born, well dressed, and
able to sing the Old Hundredth Psalm, Old King Cole, or Kilruddery, it may be
imagined that All-Souls has never done anything to disturb the minds of
kings, cabinets, or reviewers, or even of the musical critics. Pleasant
gentlemanly fellows, when they do get into parliament it is usually as the
advocates of deceased opinions. Had Joanna Southcote been genteel, the
fellows of All-Souls and some other colleges would have continued Joanna
Southcotians fifty years after her decease.
All-Souls, too, has its legend and its commemorative ceremony. The diggers
of the foundations found in an old drain a monstrous mallard, a sort of
alderman among wild ducks, thriving and growing fat amid filth. On being
cooked he was found first-rate, and, in memory of this treasure-trove and of
the foundation-day, annually on the 14th January the best mallard that can be
found is brought in in state, all the mallardians chanting--
O the swapping swapping mallard, etc.
From Queen's we proceed to New College, built in the palmiest days of Gothic
architecture by William of Wykeham, also architect of Windsor Castle and of
Winchester Cathedral, of which he was bishop, as well as Chancellor of
England under Edward III. He was indeed a learned, pious, earnest man. "A
worker-out of the glorious dreams he dreamed." According to his plan, a
certain number of poor boys, of origin as humble as his own, were to receive
a training in the best learning of the age; from these, the ablest were to be
selected annually and sent to New College, with the enjoyment of such an
income as would support them while studying philosophy and theology. At
present, after a year's probation, youths at eighteen or nineteen become
actual fellows, in enjoyment of an income varying from 190 to 250 pounds per
annum, until such time as they marry or are provided with a college living.
"Wykeham laid the first stone of his new college on the 5th March 1380. Being
finished, the first warden and fellows took possession of it April 14, 1386,
at three o'clock in the morning." The original buildings consist of the
principal quadrangle, containing the hall, chapel, and library, the
cloisters, and the tower. Additions, quite out of keeping with the rich
simplicity of the original design, were made by Sir Christopher Wren. The
chapel, first shorn of its ancient splendour by puritan zeal, and since
restored in mistaken taste, is still one of the most beautiful edifices of
the kind in England,--perhaps in Europe. Weeks of study will not satisfy or
exhaust the true student of Gothic architecture here. We trust that, sooner
or later, some of the funds now spent on guttling and guzzling will be
devoted to substituting facsimiles of ancient coloured glass for the painted
mistakes of Sir Joshua Reynolds, and restoring the ancient glories of gilt
and colour to the carved work.
If possible, the stranger should attend the service, when he will hear grand
singing and accompanied by a magnificent organ. The silver gilt crozier of
Wykeham, formerly studded with rich gems, is one of the few relics of value
preserved by New College. Charles I. received the greater part of a rich
collection of plate as a contribution to his military chest in the great
civil war. This crozier interests, for, gazing on it, we are carried back
five centuries, when it was not a bauble made in Birmingham, but a symbol of
actual power and superior intelligence. The sceptre of a prince of a church
which then absorbed almost all the intellect and all the learning of the age.
The garden with its archery-ground, and the "Slipe," with its stables and
kennels, complete what was meant to be a temple of sacred learning and active
piety, but which has become a very Castle of Indolence, a sort of Happy
Valley, for single men. Winchester School still retains its ancient
character for scholarship. (It is said to be almost impossible to "pluck" a
Wykehamist); but the foundation has been grossly abused, the elected being
not poor boys but the sons of wealthy clergymen and gentlemen, as indeed they
had need be, for, by another abuse, the parents of boys on the foundation
have to pay about 40 pounds a-year for their board. But, when a boy,
distinguished for diligence and ability among his fellows, has been, at
eighteen or nineteen years, elected to a Fellowship of New College, his work
for life is done,--no more need for exertion,--every incentive to epicurean
rest. Fine rooms, a fine garden, a dinner daily the best in Oxford, served
in a style of profusion and elegance that leaves nothing to be desired, wine
the choicest, New College ale most famous, a retiring-room, where, in
obsequious dignity, a butler waits on his commands, with fresh bottles of the
strong New College port, or ready to compound a variety of delicious drinks,
amid which the New College cyder cup and mint julep can be specially
recommended. Newspapers, magazines, and novels, on the tables of both the
junior and senior common rooms, and a stable for his horse and a kennel for
his dog, form part of this grand club of learned ignorance. And so, in idle
uselessness, he spends life, unless by good fortune he falls in love and
marries; even then, we pity his wife and his cook for the first twelve
months,--or, by reaction, flies into asceticism and becomes a father of St.
Philip Neri or a follower of Saint Pusseycat.
But, after all this virtuous remonstrance on the misdirection of William of
Wykeham's noble endowment, we must own that, of our Oxford acquaintance, none
are more agreeable than those New College fellows of the old school, "who
wore shocking bad hats and asked you to dinner." Much better than the cold-
blooded "monks without mass" who are fast superseding them, just as idle and
more ill-natured.
From New College we will go on to Magdalen, the finest--the wealthiest of all:
it cannot be described, it must be seen; with its buildings occupying eleven
acres and pleasure-grounds a hundred acres, its tower whereon every May
morning at daybreak a mass used to be and a carol is still sung, and its
deer-park. Here we may say, as of New College, is too much luxury for
learning.
The sons of dukes have become mathematicians; we have known an attorney's
clerk, the son of a low publican, become an accomplished linguist in his
leisure hours,--but such men are mental miracles, almost monsters: a fellow of
Magdalen or New College who works as hard as other men deserves to be
canonized.
We have not space to say anything of the other Colleges. St. John's is noted
for its gardens, Pembroke because Samuel Johnson lodged there for as long a
space as his poverty would permit.
The Colleges visited, we proceed to "The Schools," which contain the Bodleian
Library, founded by Sir Thomas Bodley in 1573, and by bequests, gifts from
private individuals, by the expenditure of a sum for the last seventy years
out of the University chest, and the privilege of a copy of every new British
publication, has become one of the finest collections in Europe; especially
rich in Oriental literature. The books are freely open to the use of all
literary men properly introduced, and the public are permitted to view the
rooms three times a week.
The Picture Gallery contains a collection of portraits of illustrious
individuals connected with the University, by Holbein, Vandyke, Kneller,
Reynolds, Wilkie, and others. Among these are Henry VIII., the Earl of
Surrey, and Sir Thomas More, by Holbein. Among the sculptures are a bust of
the Duke of Wellington by Chantrey, and a brass statue of the Earl of
Pembroke, Chancellor of the University from 1616 to 1630, which is said to
have been executed from a design by Rubens.
There is also a chair made from timber of the ship in which Drake sailed
round the world, and the lantern of Guy Fawkes.
On the ground floor are the Arundel marbles, brought from Smyrna in the
seventeenth century by the earl of that name.
The Theatre, close at hand, built by Sir Christopher Wren, will contain three
thousand persons, and should be seen to be appreciated when crowded by the
elite of the University and of England, on the occasion of some of the great
Oxford festivals, when the rich costumes of the University, scarlet, purple,
and gold, are set off by the addition of England's beauty not unadorned; as,
for instance, on the last visit of the Queen and Prince Albert.
The Clarendon Press, built from designs of Vanbrugh out of the profits of the
University (garbled) edition of "Clarendon's History of the Great Rebellion,"
and the Ashmolean Museum, where may be seen the head of the dodo, that
extinct and deeply to be regretted bird, are close at hand, as also the
Radcliffe Library, from the dome of which an excellent view of the city may
be obtained.
The University Galleries, which present an imposing front to St. Giles-
street, contain, beside antique sculpture, the original models of all
Chantrey's busts, and a collection of original drawings of Michael Angelo and
Raffaelle, made by Sir Thomas Lawrence, and purchased after his death by the
University, the present Earl of Eldon contributing two-thirds of the
purchase-money.
CONSTITUTION AND COSTUME OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD.
The University is a corporate body, under the style of "The Chancellor,
Masters, and Scholars of the University of Oxford." It includes nineteen
Colleges and five Halls, each of which is a corporate body, governed by its
own head and statutes respectively.
The business of the University, as such, is carried on in the two Houses of
Convocation and of Congregation; the first being the House of Lords, and the
other, which includes all of and above the rank of Masters of Arts, the House
of Commons.
The Chancellor--elected by Convocation, for life--never, according to
etiquette, sets his foot in the University, excepting on occasions of his
installation, or when accompanying Royal visitors. He nominates as his
representative a Vice Chancellor from the heads of colleges, annually, in
turn, each of whom holds his office for four years.
The Vice Chancellor is the individual who may occasionally be seen walking
about in state, preceded by a number of beadles carrying maces, or, as they
are profanely called, "pokers."
The two proctors are next in authority to the Vice Chancellor. Their costume
is a full dress gown, with velvet sleeves, and band-encircled neck. They are
assisted by two deputies, or pro-proctors, who have a strip of velvet on each
side of the gown front, and wear bands. The proctors have certain
legislative powers; but are most conspicuous as a detective police force,
supported by "bulldogs," i.e., constables. A proctor is regarded by an
undergraduate, especially by a fast man, with the same affection that a
costermonger looks on a policeman. In the evenings, it is their duty to
prowl round, and search, if necessary, any house within three miles, for so
far does their authority extend. The dread of the proctor compels tandem
drivers to send their leaders a distance out of town; and many an excited
youth, on the day of a neighbouring steeplechase, is stopped, when driving
out of the city, with--"Your name, sir, and of what college?"
"Lord R. Christchurch."
"Go back to your rooms, my lord, and call on me in an hour at Worcester."
The members of the University are divided into those who are on the
foundation and those who are not. Those on the foundation are the dean,
president, master, warden, according to the charter of the College; the
fellows, scholars, called demies at Magdalene, and post-masters at Merton;
chaplains, bible-clerks, servitors, at Christchurch and Jesus. The
qualifications for these advantages vary; but leading colleges--Oriel and
Balliol--have set an example likely to be followed of throwing fellowships and
scholarships open to the competition of the whole university, so that the
best man may win. The disadvantage of the system lies in the fact, that
having won, the incentives are all in the direction of idleness.
The degree was formerly obtained by passing first through a preliminary
examination termed a "little go," and afterwards through the "great go." The
latter, successfully performed, entitles, at choice, to the title of B.A.
(Bachelor of Arts), or S.C.L. (Student of Civil Law). With time and money,
the degrees of M.A. or B.C.L., and eventually D.C.L., may be obtained,
without farther examination. But very recently an intermediate examination
has been imposed.
A candidate for a degree in music has only to perform an exercise previously
approved by the professor of music in the music schools.
Doctors of Divinity and Masters of Arts wear a stuff gown, with two long
sleeves, terminating in a semicircle. The full dress of Doctors of Divinity
is scarlet, with sleeves of black velvet--pink silk for Doctors of Law and
Medicine.
Bachelors wear a black stuff gown, with long sleeves tapering to a point, and
buttoned at the elbow; noblemen undergraduates a black silk gown, with full
sleeves, "couped" at the elbows, and a velvet cap with gold tassel; scholars
the same shaped gown, of a common stuff, with ordinary cloth cap; gentlemen
commoners a silk gown with plaited sleeves, and velvet cap; if commoners, a
plain black gown without sleeves, which is so hideous that they generally
carry it on their arm.
The expense of maintaining a son at the University may be fixed at from 200
pounds, as a minimum, to 300 pounds a-year; the latter being the utmost
needful. But a fool may spend any amount, and get nothing for it. The
fashion of drinking has gone out to a great extent; and the present race of
undergraduates are not more random and extravagant than any set of young men
of the same age and number would be if thrown together for two or three
years.
At the same time, it is not the place to which a father to whom economy is an
object should send a son, least of all one previously educated on the milk
and water stay-at-home principle.
As a general rule, it is not among the nobility, and sons of the wealthy
gentry, that much excess is found to prevail; but among those who at the
University find themselves for the first time without control, with money and
with credit at command.
In a summer or autumnal visit, Christchurch Meadow, and some of the many
beautiful walks round Oxford, should be sought out and visited alone; on such
occasions, on no account be tormented with one of the abominable parrot-like
guides. These horrid fellows consider it their duty to chatter. We have
often thought that a dumb guide, with a book for answering questions, would
make a great success.
In winter, when the flooded meadows are frozen over, those who love to see an
army of first-class skaters will find an Oxford day ticket well worth the
money--youth, health, strength, grace, and manly beauty, in hundreds, cutting
round and round, with less of drawback from the admixture of a squalid mob
than in any other locality.
And then again in the hunting season, take the ugliest road out of Oxford, by
the seven bridges, because there you may see farthest along the straight
highway from the crown of the bridges, and number the ingenuous youth as on
hunters they pace, or in hack or in dogcart or tandem they dash along to the
"Meet." Arrived there, if the fox does get away--if no ambitious youngster
heads him back--if no steeplechasing lot ride over the scent and before the
hounds, to the destruction of sport and the master's temper--why then you will
see a fiery charge at fences that will do your heart good. There is not such
raw material for cavalry in any other city in Europe, and there is no part of
our social life so entirely novel, and so well worth exhibiting to a
foreigner, as a "Meet" near Oxford, where in scarlet and in black, in hats
and in velvet caps, in top-boots and black-jacks, on twenty pound hacks and
two hundred guinea hunters, finest specimens of Young England are to be seen.
On returning, if the sport has been good, you may venture to open a chat with
a well-splashed fellow traveller on a beaten horse, but in going not--for an
Oxford man in his normal state never speaks unless he has been introduced.
The only local manufactures of Oxford, except gentlemen, are boots, leather-
breeches, and boats; these last in great perfection. The regattas and
rowing-matches on the Isis are very exciting affairs. From the narrowness of
the stream, they are rather chases than races; the winners cannot pass, but
must pursue and bump their competitors. The many silent, solitary wherries,
urged by vigorous skilful arms, give, on a summer evening, a pleasing life to
river-side walks, although that graceful flower, the pretty pink bonnet and
parasol, peculiar to the waters of Richmond and Hampton, is not often found
growing in the Oxford wherry. Comedies, in the shape of slanging matches
with the barges, are less frequent than formerly, and melodramatic fistic
combats still less frequent.
But old boatmen still love to relate to their peaceable and admiring pupils
how that pocket Hercules, the Honourable S--- C---, now a pious clergyman,
had a single combat with a saucy six foot bargee, "all alone by they two
selves," bunged up both his eyes, and left him all but dead to time, ignorant
then, and for months after, of the name of his victor.
Oxford sometimes contends with Cambridge on neutral waters in an eight-oared
cutter match, but is generally defeated, for a very characteristic
reason--Cambridge picks a crew of the best men from the whole University;
Oxford, more exclusive, gives a preference to certain colleges over men.
Christchurch, Magdalene, and a few others, will take the lead in all
arrangements, and will not, if they can help it, admit oarsmen from the
unfashionable colleges of Jesus, Lincoln, or Worcester!
It is worth knowing that in the long vacation, commencing on July 6, there is
no place like Oxford for purchasing good dogs and useful horses. Oxford
hacks have long been famous, and not without reason. Nothing slow would be
of any use, whether for saddle or harness; and although the proportion of
high-priced sound unblemished animals may be small, the number of quick
runners is large. There is an establishment in Holywell Street which is
quite one of the Oxford sights. There, early in winter mornings, more than a
hundred stalls are to be found, full of blood cattle, in tip-top condition,
and on summer afternoons no barracks of a cavalry regiment changing quarters
are more busy.
We must not leave Oxford without visiting Blenheim, the monument of one of
our greatest captains and statesmen, with whom, perhaps, in genius and
fortune, none can rank except Clive and Wellington. Blenheim should be seen
when the leaves are on the trees. The House is only open between eleven
o'clock and one. The better plan is to hire a conveyance, of which there are
plenty and excellent to be had in the city, at reasonable charges. When we
remember this splendid pile--voted by acclamation, but paid for by grudging
and insufficient instalments by the English Parliament--was finished under the
superintendence of that beautiful fiery termagant, Sarah Duchess of
Marlborough, who was at once the plague and the delight of the great Duke's
life, every stone and every tree must be viewed with interest. We should
advise you, before passing a day at Blenheim, to refresh your memory with the
correspondence of the age of Queen Anne and her successors, including Swift,
Bolingbroke, Pope, and Walpole; not forgetting the letters of Duchess Sarah
herself, and Disraeli's "Curiosities of Literature," for the history of the
building of Blenheim, and how the Duchess worried the unfortunate architect,
Vanbrugh.
Blenheim contains a large number of first class paintings, including an
altar-piece by Raffaelle, several good Titians, a very fine collection of
Rubens, choice specimens of Vandyke and Sir Joshua Reynolds. After returning
to Bletchley our next halt is at Wolverton station.
WOLVERTON STATION.
Wolverton, the first specimen of a railway town built on a plan to order, is
the central manufacturing and repairing shop for the locomotives north of
Birmingham.
The population entirely consists of men employed in the Company's service, as
mechanics, guards, enginemen, stokers, porters, labourers, their wives and
children, their superintendents, a clergyman, schoolmasters and
schoolmistresses, the ladies engaged on the refreshment establishment, and
the tradesmen attracted to Wolverton by the demand of the population.
This railway colony is well worth the attention of those who devote
themselves to an investigation of the social condition of the labouring
classes.
We have here a body of mechanics of intelligence above average, regularly
employed for ten and a-half hours during five days, and for eight hours
during the sixth day of the week, well paid, well housed, with schools for
their children, a reading-room and mechanics' institution at their disposal,
gardens for their leisure hours, and a church and clergyman exclusively
devoted to them. When work is ended, Wolverton is a pure republic--equality
reigns. There are no rich men or men of station: all are gentlemen. In
theory it is the paradise of Louis Blanc, only that, instead of the State, it
is a Company which pays and employs the army of workmen. It is true, that
during work hours a despotism rules, but it is a mild rule, tempered by
customs and privileges. And what are the results of this colony, in which
there are none idle, none poor, and few uneducated? Why, in many respects
gratifying, in some respects disappointing. The practical reformer will
learn more than one useful lesson from a patient investigation of the social
state of this great village.
[THE WOLVERTON VIADUCT: ill8.jpg]
Those who have not been in the habit of mixing with the superior class of
English skilled mechanics will be agreeably surprised by the intelligence,
information, and educational acquirements of a great number of the workmen
here. They will find men labouring for daily wages capable of taking a
creditable part in political, literary, and scientific discussion; but at the
same time the followers of George Sand, and French preachers of proletarian
perfection will not find their notions of the ennobling effects of manual
labour realised.
There are exceptions, but as a general rule, after a hard day's work, a man
is not inclined for study of any kind, least of all for the investigation of
abstract sciences; and thus it is that at Wolverton library, novels are much
more in demand than scientific treatises.
In Summer, when walks in the fields are pleasant, and men can work in their
gardens, the demand for books of any kind falls off.
Turning from the library to the mechanics' institution, pure science is not
found to have many charms for the mechanics of Wolverton. Geological and
astronomical lectures are ill attended, while musical entertainments,
dissolving views, and dramatic recitations are popular.
It must be confessed that dulness and monotony exercise a very unfavourable
influence on this comfortable colony. The people, not being Quakers, are not
content without amusement. They receive their appointed wages regularly, so
that they have not even the amusement of making and losing money. It would
be an excellent thing for the world if the kind, charitable, cold-blooded
people of middle age, or with middle-aged heads and hearts, who think that a
population may be ruled into an every-day life of alternate work, study, and
constitutional walks, without anything warmer than a weak simper from year's
end to year's end, would consult the residents of Wolverton and Crewe before
planning their next parallelogram.
We commend to amateur actors, who often need an audience, the idea of an
occasional trip to Wolverton. The audience would be found indulgent of very
indifferent performances.
But to turn from generalities to the specialities for which Wolverton is
distinguished, we will walk round the workshops by which a rural parish has
been colonised and reduced to a town shape.
* * * * *
WOLVERTON WORKSHOPS.--To attempt a description of the workshops of Wolverton
without the aid of diagrams and woodcuts would be a very unsatisfactory task.
It is enough to say that they should be visited not only by those who are
specially interested in machinery, but by all who would know what mechanical
genius, stimulated as it has been to the utmost during the last half century,
by the execution of profitable inventions, has been able to effect.
At Wolverton may be seen collected together in companies, each under command
of its captains or foremen, in separate workshops, some hundreds of the best
handicraftsmen that Europe can produce, all steadily at work, not without
noise, yet without confusion. Among them are a few men advanced in life of
the old generation; there are men of middle age; young men trained with all
the manual advantages of the old generation, and all the book and lecture
privileges of the present time; and then there are the rising generation of
apprentices--the sons of steam and of railroads. Among all it would be
difficult to find a bad-shaped head, or a stupid face--as for a drunkard not
one. It was once remarked to us by a gentleman at the head of a great
establishment of this kind, that there was something about the labour of
skilled workmen in iron that impressed itself upon their countenances, and
showed itself in their characters. Something of solidity, of determination,
of careful forethought; and really after going over many shops of
ironworkers, we are inclined to come to the same opinion. Machinery, while
superseding, has created manual labour. In a steam-engine factory, machinery
is called upon to do what no amount of manual labour could effect.
To appreciate the extraordinary amount of intellect and mental and manual
dexterity daily called into exercise, it would be necessary to have the
origin, progress to construction, trial, and amendment of a locomotive engine
from the period that the report of the head of the locomotive department in
favour of an increase of stock receives the authorization of the board of
directors. But such a history would be a book itself. After passing through
the drawing-office, where the rough designs of the locomotive engineer are
worked out in detail by a staff of draughtsmen, and the carpenters' shop and
wood-turners, where the models and cores for castings are prepared, we reach,
but do not dwell on the dark lofty hall, where the castings in iron and in
brass are made. The casting of a mass of metal of from five to twenty tons
on a dark night is a fine sight. The tap being withdrawn the molten liquor
spouts forth in an arched fiery continuous stream, casting a red glow on the
half-dressed muscular figures busy around, which would afford a subject for
an artist great in Turner or Danby-like effects.
But we hasten to the steam-hammer to see scraps of tough iron, the size of a
crown-piece, welded into a huge piston, or other instrument requiring the
utmost strength. At Wolverton the work is conducted under the supreme
command of the Chief Hammerman, a huge-limbed, jolly, good-tempered Vulcan,
with half a dozen boy assistants.
The steam-hammer, be it known, is the application of steam to a piston under
complete regulation, so that the piston, armed with a hammer, regularly,
steadily, perpendicularly descends as desired, either with the force of a
hundred tons or with a gentle tap, just sufficient to drive home a tin tack
and no more. At a word it stops midway in stroke, and at a word again it
descends with a deadly thump. On our visit, an attempt was being made to
execute in wrought, what had hitherto always been made in cast iron. Success
would effect a great saving in weight. The doors of the furnace were drawn
back, and a white glow, unbearable as the noon-day sun, was made visible,
long hooked iron poles were thrust in to fish for the prize, and presently a
great round mass of metal was poked out to the door of the fiery furnace--a
huge roll of glowing iron, larger than it was possible for any one or two men
to lift, even had it been cold. By ingenious contrivances it was slipped out
upon a small iron truck, dragged to the anvil of the steam-hammer, and under
the direction of Vulcan, not without his main strength, lodged upon the
block.
During the difficult operation of moving the white-red round ball, it was
beautiful to see the rapid disciplined intelligence by which the hammerman,
with word or sign, regulated the movements of his young assistants, each
armed with an iron lever.
At length the word was given, and thump, thump, like an earthquake the steam-
hammer descended, rapidly reducing the red-hot Dutch cheese shape to the
flatter proportions of a mighty Double Gloucester, all the while the great
smith was turning and twisting it about so that each part should receive its
due share of hammering, and that the desired shape should be rapidly
attained, sometimes with one hand, sometimes with the other, he interposed a
flat poker between the red mass and the hammer, sharing a vibration that was
powerful enough to dislocate the shoulder of any lesser man. "Hold," he
cried: the elephant-like machine stopped. He took and hauled the great ball
into a new position. "Go on," he shouted: the elephant machine went on, and
again the red sparks flew as though a thousand Homeric blacksmiths had been
striking in unison, until it was time again to thrust the half-welded cheese
into the fiery furnace, and again it was dragged forth, and the jolly giant
bent, and tugged, and sweated, and commanded,--he did not swear over his task.
At length having succeeded in making the unwieldy lump assume an approach to
the desired shape, he observed, in a deep, bass, chuckling, triumphant aside,
to the engineer who was looking on, "I'm not a very little one, but I think
if I was as big again you'd try what I was made of."
Since that day we have learned that the experiment has been completely
successful, with a great diminution in the weight and an increase of the
strength of an important part of a locomotive.
We have dwelt upon the picture because it combined mechanical with manual
dexterity. A hammerman who might sit for one of Homer's blacksmith heroes,
and machinery which effects in a few minutes what an army of such hammermen
could not do.
If our painters of mythological Vulcans and sprawling Satyrs want to display
their powers over flesh and muscle, they may find something real and not
vulgar among our iron factories.
After seeing the operations of forging or of casting, we may take a walk
round the shops of the turners and smiths. In some, Whitworth's beautiful
self-acting machines are planing or polishing or boring holes, under charge
of an intelligent boy; in others lathes are ranged round the walls, and a
double row of vices down the centre of the long rooms. Solid masses of cast
or forged metal are carved by the keen powerful lathe tools like so much box-
wood, and long shavings of iron and steel sweep off as easily as deal
shavings from a carpenter's plane. At the long row of vices the smiths are
hammering and filing away with careful dexterity. No mean amount of judgment
in addition to the long training needed for acquiring manual skill, is
requisite before a man can be admitted into this army of skilled mechanics;
for every locomotive contains many hundred pieces, each of which must be
fitted as carefully as a watch.
If we fairly contemplate the result of these labours, created by the
inventive genius of a line of ingenious men, headed by Watt and Stephenson,
these workshops are a more imposing sight than the most brilliant review of
disciplined troops. It is not mere strength, dexterity, and obedience, upon
which the locomotive builder calculates for the success of his design, but
also upon the separate and combined intelligence of his army of mechanics.
Considering that in annually increasing numbers, factories for the building
of locomotive, of marine steam-engines, of iron ships, and of various kinds
of machinery, are established in different parts of the kingdom, and that
hence every year education becomes more needed, more valued, and more
extended among this class of mechanics, it is impossible to doubt that the
training, mental and moral, obtained in factories like those of Wolverton,
Crewe, Derby, Swindon, and other railway shops, and in great private
establishments like Whitworth's and Roberts' of Manchester, Maudslay and
Field's of London, Ransome and May of Ipswich, Wilson of Leeds, and
Stephenson of Newcastle, must produce by imitative inoculation a powerful
effect on the national character. The time has passed when the best workmen
were the most notorious drunkards; in all skilled trades self-respect has
made progress.
A few passenger carriages are occasionally built at Wolverton as experiments.
One, the invention of Mr. J. M'Connel, the head of the locomotive department,
effects several important improvements. It is a composite carriage of
corrugated iron, lined with wood to prevent unpleasant vibration, on six
wheels, the centre wheels following the leading wheels round curves by a very
ingenious arrangement. This carriage holds sixty second-class passengers and
fifteen first-class, beside a guard's brake, which will hold five more; all
in one body. The saving in weight amounts to thirty-five per cent. A number
of locomotives have lately been built from the designs of the same eminent
engineer, to meet the demands of the passenger traffic in excursion trains
for July and August, 1851.
It must be understood that although locomotives are built at Wolverton, only
a small proportion of the engines used on the line are built by the company,
and the chief importance of the factory at Wolverton is as a repairing shop,
and school for engine-drivers.
Every engine has a number. When an engine on any part of the lines in
connection with Wolverton needs repair, it is forwarded with a printed form,
filled up and signed by the superintendent of the station near which the
engine has been working. As thus--"Engine 60, axle of driving-wheel out of
gauge, fire-box burned out," etc.
This invoice or bill of particulars is copied into a sort of day-book, to be
eventually transferred into the account in the ledger, in which No. 60 has a
place.
The superintendent next in command under the locomotive engineer-in-chief,
places the lame engine in the hands of the foreman who happens to be first
disengaged. The foreman sets the workmen he can spare at the needful
repairs. When completed, the foreman makes a report, which is entered in the
ledger, opposite the number of the engine, stating the repairs done, the
men's names who did it, and how many days, hours, and quarters of an hour
each man was employed. The engine reported sound is then returned to its
station, with a report of the repairs which have been effected. The whole
work is completed on the principle of a series of links of responsibility.
The engineer-in-chief is answerable to the directors for the efficiency of
the locomotives; he examines the book, and depends on his superintendent. The
superintendent depends on the foreman to whom the work was entrusted; and,
should the work be slurred, must bear the shame, but can turn upon the
workmen he selected for the job.
In fact, the whole work of this vast establishment is carried on by dividing
the workmen into small companies, under the superintendence of an officer
responsible for the quantity and quality of the work of his men.
The history of each engine, from the day of launching, is so kept, that, so
long as it remains in use, every separate repair, with its date and the names
of the men employed on it, can be traced. Allowing, therefore, for the
disadvantage as regards economy of a company, as compared with private
individuals, the system at Wolverton is as effective as anything that could
well be imagined.
The men employed at Wolverton station in March, 1851, numbered 775, of whom 4
were overlookers, 9 were foremen, 4 draughtsmen, 15 clerks, 32 engine-
drivers, 21 firemen, and 119 labourers; the rest were mechanics and
apprentices. The weekly wages amounted to 929 pounds 11s. 10d.
Of course these men have, for the most part, wives and families, and so with
shopkeepers, raise the population of the railway town of Wolverton to about
2,000, inhabiting a series of uniform brick houses, in rectangular streets,
about a mile distant from the ancient parish church of Wolverton, and the
half-dozen houses constituting the original parish.
For the benefit of this population, the directors have built a church,
schools for boys, for girls, and for infants, which are not the least
remarkable or interesting parts of this curious town.
The clergyman of the railway church, the Rev. George Waight, M.A., has been
resident at Wolverton from the commencement of the railway buildings. His
difficulties are great; but he is well satisfied with his success. In
railway towns there is only one class, and that so thoroughly independent,
that the influence of the clergyman can only rest with his character and
talents.
The church is thinly attended in the morning, for hard-working men like to
indulge in rest one day in the week; in the evening it is crowded, and the
singing far above average.
To the schools we should like to have devoted a whole chapter now, but must
reserve an account of one of the most interesting results of railway
enterprise.
There is a literary and scientific institution, with a library attached.
Scientific lectures and scientific books are very little patronized at
Wolverton; astronomy and geology have few students; but there is a steady
demand for a great number of novels, voyages, and travels; and musical
entertainments are well supported.
The lecture-room is extremely miserable, quite unfit for a good concert, as
there is not even a retiring room, but the directors are about to build a
better one, and while they are about it, they might as well build a small
theatre. Some such amusement is much needed; for want of relaxation in the
monotony of a town composed of one class, without any public amusements, the
men are driven too often to the pipe and pot, and the women to gossip.
In the summer, the gardens which form a suburb are much resorted to, and the
young men go to cricket and football; but still some amusements, in which all
the members of every family could join, would improve the moral tone of
Wolverton.
Work, wages, churches, schools, libraries, and scientific lectures are not
alone enough to satisfy a large population of any kind, certainly not a
population of hard-handed workers.
* * * * *
WOLVERTON EMBANKMENT was one of the difficulties in railway making, which at
one period interested the public; at present it is not admitted among
engineers that there are any difficulties. The ground was a bog, and as fast
as earth was tipped in at the top it bulged out at the bottom. When, after
great labour, this difficulty had been overcome, part of the embankment,
fifty feet in height, which contained alum shale, decomposed, and spontaneous
combustion ensued. The amazement of the villagers was great, but finally
they came to the conclusion expressed by one of them, in "Dang it, they can't
make this here railway arter all, and they've set it o' fire to cheat their
creditors."
On leaving Wolverton, before arriving at Roade, a second-class station, after
clearing a short cutting, looking westerly, we catch a glimpse of the tower
of the church of Grafton, where, according to tradition, Edward IV. married
Lady Gray of Groby. The last interview between Henry VIII. and Cardinal
Campeggio, relative to his divorce from Catherine of Aragon, took place at
the Mansion House of this parish, which was demolished in 1643.
About this spot we enter Northamptonshire, and passing Roade, pause at
Blisworth station, where there is a neat little inn.
BLISWORTH, NORTHAMPTON.
Miles. Miles.
BLISWORTH. 34.5 OUNDLE.
4.75 NORTHAMPTON. 40.75 WANSFORD.
15.75 WELLINGBOROUGH. STAMFORD by Coach.
20 HIGHAM FERRERS. 47.25 PETERBOROUGH.
26 THRAPSTON.
From Blisworth branches out the line to Peterborough, with sixteen stations,
of which we name above the more important.
The route presents a constant succession of beautiful and truly English rural
scenery, of rich lowland pastures, watered by the winding rivers, and bounded
by hills, on which, like sentinels, a row of ancient church towers stand.
The first station is Northampton.
* * * * *
NORTHAMPTON, on a hill on the banks of the river Nene, is a remarkably
pleasant town, with several fine old buildings, an ancient church, an open
market square, neat clean streets, and suburbs of pretty villas, overlooking,
from the hill top, fat green meadows, flooded in winter. Shoemaking on a
wholesale scale, is the principal occupation of the inhabitants. For strong
shoes Northampton can compete in any foreign market, and a good many light
articles, cut after French patterns, have been successfully made since the
trade was thrown open by Peel's tariff. There are several factories, in
which large numbers of young persons are employed, but the majority work by
the piece at home for the master manufacturers.
Northampton is also great in the fairs and markets of a rich agricultural
district, and rejoices over races twice a year, in which the facilities of
the railroad have rendered some compensation to the inn-keepers for the loss
of the coaching trade. Northampton was originally intended to be a main
station of the railway between London and Birmingham. The inhabitants were
silly enough to resist the bestowal of this benefit upon them, and
unfortunate enough to be successful in their resistance. In after years,
when experience had rendered fools wise, they were glad to obtain the present
branch through to Peterborough; but the injury of the ill-judged opposition
can never be cured.
The church of All Saints, in the centre of the town, has an ancient embattled
tower which escaped the great fire of 1675. St. Peter's, near the West
Bridge, a remarkably curious specimen of enriched Norman; St. Sepulchre's, a
round church of the twelfth century, all deserve enumeration. There are also
two hospitals, the only remains of many religious houses which existed before
the Reformation. St. John's consists of a chapel and a large hall, with
apartments for inferior poor persons; St. Thomas's is for twenty poor alms-
women. No vestiges, beyond the earthworks, remain of the castle built by
Simon de St. Liz, who was created Earl of Northampton by William the
Conqueror. Northampton was a royal residence during the reigns of Richard
I., John, and Henry III.; a battlefield during the wars of the Barons and the
wars of the Roses; but the ancient character of the town was almost entirely
destroyed by the great fire of 1675,--not without benefit to the health,
though at the expense of the picturesqueness of this ancient borough.
Northampton is important as the capital town of one of our finest grazing and
hunting counties, where soil and climate are both favourable to the farmer.
Large numbers of the Scotch, Welch, and Herefords sold in Smithfield, are fed
in the yards and finished in the pastures of Northamptonshire.
The present Earl of Spencer keeps up, on a limited scale, the herd of short-
horns which were so celebrated during the lifetime of his brother, better
known as Lord Althorpe,--at his seat of Althorpe, six miles from the town, and
also carries on a little fancy farming. The late Earl of Spencer was much
more successful as a breeder than as a farmer; indeed, it may be questioned
whether the prejudices of that amiable and excellent man in favour of pasture
land, did not exercise an injurious influence over the proceedings of the
Royal Agricultural Association.
Northampton returns two members to Parliament, and has a mayor and
corporation.
The railway route from Northampton to Peterborough presents a series of
pleasant views on either side,--so pleasant that he who has leisure should
walk, or ride on horseback, along the line of Saxon villages, visit the
series of curious churches at Wellingborough, Higham Ferrers, with its
collegiate church and almshouse, Thrapston and Oundle, and other stations.
Within two miles of Thrapston is Drayton House, Lowick, the seat of the
Sackville family, which retains many of the features of an ancient castle,
and has a gallery of paintings by the old masters. The church of Lowick
contains several monuments, brasses, and windows of stained glass. Near
Oundle is to be found the earthwork of Fotheringay Castle, where Mary Queen
of Scots was confined, tried, and executed. The castle itself was levelled
to the ground by order of her son, James I. On leaving Oundle we pass a
station appurtenant to Wansford in England, of which we shall say a word
presently.
Here we may take coach across to Stamford in Lincolnshire (see Stamford),
unless we prefer the rail from Peterborough. There is a point somewhere
hereabouts where the three counties of Northampton, Lincoln, and Huntingdon
all meet.
* * * * *
WANSFORD IN ENGLAND.--If about to investigate the antiquities of Stamford or
Peterborough, the traveller will do well to stop at Wansford for the sake of
one of the best inns in Europe, well known under the sign of "The Haycock at
Wansford in England." This sign represents a man stretched floating on a
haycock, apparently in conversation with parties on a bridge. It is intended
to illustrate the legend of Drunken Barnaby, who, travelling during the time
of the plague from London northward, tasting and criticising the ale on the
road, drank so much of the Northamptonshire brewst that he fell asleep on a
haycock, in one of the flat meadows. In the night time, as is often the case
in this part of the country, a sudden flood arose, and our toper awaked to
find himself floating on a great tide of water, which at length brought him
to a bridge, upon which, hailing the passengers, he asked, "Where am I?" in
full expectation of having floated to France or Spain; whereupon they
answered, "at Wansford." "What!" he exclaimed in ecstacy, "Wansford in
England!" and landing, drank the ale and gave a new name to the inn of this
village between three counties. The inn (which belongs to the Duke of
Bedford) affords a sort of accommodation which the rapid travelling and short
halts of railways have almost abolished. But an easy rent, a large farm, and
a trade in selling and hiring hunters, enables the landlord to provide as
comfortably for his guests, as when, in old posting days, five dukes made the
Haycock their night halt at one time. On entering the well carpeted coffee-
room, with its ample screen, blazing fire, and plentiful allowance of easy
chairs, while a well appointed tempting dinner is rapidly and silently laid
on the spotless table-cloth,--the tired sportsman or traveller will be
inclined to fancy that he is visitor to some wealthy squire rather than the
guest of an innkeeper. When we add that the bed-rooms match the sitting-
rooms, that the charges are moderate, that the Pytchley, Earl Fitzwilliam's,
and the Duke of Rutland's hounds (the Beevor), meet within an easy distance;
that the county abounds in antiquities, show-houses like Burleigh, that
pleasant woodland rides are within a circle of ten miles, that good pike-
fishing is to be had nearly all the year round, while in retirement Wansford
is complete; we have said enough to show that it is well worth the notice of
a large class of travellers,--from young couples on their first day's journey,
to old gentlemen travelling north and needing quiet and a bottle of old port.
The last station, Peterborough, presents an instance of a city without
population, without manufactures, without trade, without a good inn, or even
a copy of the Times, except at the railway station; a city which would have
gone on slumbering to the present hour without a go-a-head principle of any
kind, and which has nevertheless, by the accident of situation, had railway
greatness thrust upon it in a most extraordinary manner.
* * * * *
PETERBOROUGH is one of the centres from which radiate three lines to London,
viz., by the Northampton route, on which we have travelled; by the direct
line, through Herts, of the Great Northern; and by the Eastern Counties, with
all its Norfolk communications. From Peterborough also proceeds an arm of
the Midland Counties, through Stamford, Oldham, and Melton Mowbray, and the
best Leicestershire grass country, to Leicester or to Nottingham,--while the
Great Northern, dividing, embraces the whole of Lincolnshire and makes way to
Hull, by the Humber ferries, on the one hand, and to York on the other. There
is, therefore, the best of consolation on being landed in this dull
inhospitable city, that it is the easiest possible thing to leave it.
Peterborough dates from the revival of Christianity among the Saxons;
destroyed by the Danes A.D. 870, rebuilt by Edgar in 970, it was attacked and
plundered by Saxon insurgents from the fens under Hereward the Wake, in the
time of William the Conqueror. At the dissolution of religious houses under
Henry VIII., Peterborough was one of the most magnificent abbeys, and, having
been selected as the seat of one of the new bishoprics, the buildings were
preserved entire. In the civil wars, the Lady Chapel and several conventual
buildings were pulled down and the materials sold. At present the cathedral
is a regular cruciform structure of Norman character, remarkable for the
solidity of its construction.
It was commenced 1117, by John de Saiz, a Norman. The chancel was finished,
A.D. 1140, by Abbot Martin de Vecti. The great transept and a portion of the
central tower were built by Abbot William de Vaudeville, A.D. 1160 to 1175,
and the nave by Abbot Benedict 1177-1193. The fitting up of the choir is of
woodwork richly carved. The greater number of the monuments, shrines, and
chantry chapels, were destroyed by the Parliamentary troops. Two queens lie
buried here, Catherine of Aragon and Mary of Scotland, without elegy or
epitaph, monument or tombstone.
The Cathedral viewed, nothing remains to detain the traveller in this
peculiarly stupid city. Within a pleasant ride of five miles lies Milton
House, the seat of Earl Fitzwilliam.
* * * * *
STAMFORD.--Although Stamford is not upon this line of railway, travellers
passing near should not fail to visit so ancient and interesting a town. Few
English boroughs can trace back more distinctly their antiquity. Six
churches still remain of the fifteen which, beside many conventual buildings,
formerly adorned it. For Stamford was one of the towns which, had not the
Reformation intervened, would have been swallowed up by the ever hungry
ecclesiastical maw. Stamford awakens many historic recollections. It has a
place in Domesday Book, being there styled Stanford: King Stephen had an
interview there with Ranulph, Earl of Chester. In 1190, the Jews of Stamford
were plundered and slain by the recruits proceeding to the crusades; and, ten
years afterwards, when Edward I. expelled the Jews from England, "their
synagogue and noble library at Stamford were profaned and sold." Many of the
books were purchased by Gregory of Huntingdon, a monk of Ramsey Abbey, a
diligent student of ancient languages; and thus the result of much learning,
collected in Spain and Italy, and handed down from the times when the Jews
and Arabs almost alone cultivated literature as well as commerce, was sown in
England, the last of European kingdoms to become distinguished in letters.
Stamford was the refuge of Oxford students on the occasion of disturbances in
1333. It was taken by the Lancastrian army of the North under Queen Margaret
in 1461, and given up to plunder; and, in 1462, when thirty thousand
Lincolnshire men marched, under the command of Sir Robert Wells, against
Edward IV., under the walls of Stamford they were defeated, and, flying, left
their coats behind. But the latest battles of Stamford have been between
Whig and Tory, and even these have ceased.
The houses and public buildings are all built of a rich cream-coloured stone,
which gives an air of cleanliness and even distinction, which is an immense
advantage. There are two fine hotels. The borough returns two members, both
nominated by the Marquis of Exeter, who owns a large proportion of the vote-
giving houses. The bull-running has been abolished here, as also at Tutbury,
in Staffordshire; but those who are curious to see the ceremony may have
occasional opportunities in the neighbourhood of Smithfield market, where it
is performed under the especial patronage of the aldermen of the city of
London.
WEEDON.
The next station after Blisworth is Weedon, properly, Weedon Bec, so called
because formerly there was established here a religious house, or cell, to
the Abbey of Bec in Normandy. The Church, a very ancient building, contains
portions of Norman, and various styles of English, architecture.
[BRIDGE IN THE BLISWORTH EMBANKMENT: ill9.jpg]
The importance of Weedon rests in its being the site of a strongly fortified
central depot for artillery, small arms, and ammunition, with extensive
barracks, well worth seeing, but not to be seen without an order from the
Board of Ordnance. In passing, a few mild soldiers may be seen fishing for
roach in the canal, and a few active ones playing cricket in summer. The
Weedon system of fortification eschews lofty towers and threatening
battlemented walls, and all that constitutes the picturesque; so that Weedon
Barracks look scarcely more warlike than a royal rope manufactory.
After Weedon we pass through Kilsby Tunnel, 2,423 yards long, which was once
one of the wonders of the world; but has been, by the progress of railway
works, reduced to the level of any other long dark hole.
[VIEW FROM THE TOP OF KILSBY TUNNEL: ill10.jpg]
RUGBY AND ITS RAILWAYS.
Rugby, 83 miles from London, the centre of a vast network of railways, is our
next halting place.
That is to say, First, an arm of the Midland to Leicester, to Burton, to
Derby, to Nottingham, and through Melton Mowbray to Stamford and
Peterborough; thus intersecting a great agricultural and a great
manufacturing district.
Second, the Trent Valley Line, through Atherstone, Tamworth and Lichfield, to
Stafford, and by cutting off the Birmingham curve, forming part of the direct
line to Manchester.
Third, A line to Leamington, which may be reached from this point in three-
quarters of an hour; and fourth, a direct line to Stamford, by way of Market
Harborough; which, with the Leamington line, affords the most direct
conveyance from Norfolk, and Lincolnshire, through Peterborough to
Birmingham, Gloucester, and all that midland district.
The Oxford and Rugby Line, which was one of the subjects of the celebrated
Battles of the Gauges, has not been constructed; and it may be doubted
whether it ever will.
The town lies about a mile from the station on the banks of the Avon, and
owes all its importance to Laurence Sheriff, a London shopkeeper in the time
of Queen Elizabeth, who, in 1567, endowed a school in his native village with
eight acres of land, situated where Lamb's Conduit-street, in London, now
stands, whence at present upwards of 5000 pounds a year is derived.
Rugby was long considered the most snobbish of English public schools, a sad
character in a country where style and name go so far. Some twenty years
ago, when the Rugbaeans had the "presumption" to challenge the Wykehamists to
play at football, the latter proudly answered, that the Rugbaeans might put on
worsted stockings and clouted soles, and the Wykehamists in silk stockings
and pumps would meet them in any lane in England. But, since that time, the
Harrow gentlemen, the Eton fops, the Winchester scholars, and the Westminster
blackguards, have had reason to admit that Arnold, a Wykehamist, long
considered by the fellows of that venerable institution an unworthy son,
succeeded in making Rugby the great nursery of sound scholars and Christian
gentlemen, and in revolutionizing and reforming the educational system of all
our public schools.
The following, by one of Arnold's pupils, himself an eminent example of
cultivated intellect and varied information, combined with great energy in
the practical affairs of life and active untiring benevolence, is a sketch of
"ARNOLD AND HIS SCHOOL."
In the year 1827, the head mastership became vacant of the Grammar School at
Rugby, and the trustees, a body of twelve country gentlemen and noblemen,
selected, to the dismay of all the orthodox, the Rev. Thomas Arnold, late
fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, and then taking private pupils at Laleham,
Middlesex. Transplanted from Oriel, the hotbed of strange and unsound
opinions, out of which the conflicting views of Whateley, Hampden, Keble, and
Newman, were struggling into day; himself a disciple of the suspected school
of German criticism; known to entertain views at variance with the majority
of his church brethren on all the semipolitical questions of the day; an
advocate for the admission of Roman Catholics to Parliament, for the reform
of the Liturgy and enlargement of the Church, so as to embrace dissenters;
the distrust with which he was regarded by all who did not know him may be
imagined.
It was a critical time, the year 1827; the mind of the country was then
undergoing that process of change which shortly afterwards showed itself in
the emancipation of the Roman Catholics, the passing of the Reform Bill, the
foundation of the London University, and the publications of the Useful
Knowledge Society. Old opinions were on all sides the objects of attack. At
such a period, public schools, with their exclusively classical teaching and
their "fagging" systems, were naturally regarded as institutions of the past
not adapted to the present. It seemed probable that a remodelling, or,
according to the phrase of the day, a "reform" of them, would be attempted by
the new intellectual school of which Lord Brougham was regarded as the type.
It was the views of this party which, it was anticipated, Dr. Arnold would
hasten to introduce into Rugby.
We now know that he did not do this, although he did reform not only the
school of Rugby, but gave a bias to the education of the sons of what is
still the most influential class in this country, which has lasted to the
present day, and that in a direction and in a manner which surprised his
opponents, and at one time provoked even his friends.
It may not be uninteresting to such of our readers as love to trace the
origin of those changes of opinion, which are at times seen to diffuse
themselves over portions of society from an unseen source, to learn how this
original man commenced his task of training the minds committed to him in
those peculiar tendencies, both as to feeling and thinking, which enter
appreciably into the tone of the upper classes of the present generation.
Dr. Arnold, from the day on which he first took charge of the school, adopted
the course which he ever after adhered to, of treating the boys like
gentlemen and reasonable beings. Thus, on receiving from an offender an
answer to any question he would say, "If you say so, of course I believe
you," and on this he would act. The effect of this was immediate and
remarkable; the better feeling of the school was at once touched; boys
declared, "It is a shame to tell Arnold a lie, because he always believes
you;" and thus, at one bold step, the axe was put to the root of the
inveterate practice of lying to the master, one of the curses of schools. In
pursuance of the same views, when reprimanding a boy, he generally took him
apart and spoke to him in such a manner as to make him feel that his master
was grieved and troubled at his wrong-doing; a quakerlike simplicity of mien
and language, a sternness of manner not unmixed with tenderness, and a total
absence of all "don-ish" airs, combined to produce this effect. Nor were his
personal habits without their effect. The boys saw in him no outward
appearance of a solemn pedagogue or dignified ecclesiastic whom it was a
temptation to dupe, or into whose ample wig javelins of paper might with
impunity be darted; but a spare active determined man, six feet high, in duck
trousers, a narrow-brimmed hat, a black sailor's handkerchief knotted round
his neck, a heavy walking-stick in his hand,--a strong swimmer, a noted
runner; the first of all the masters in the school-room on the winter
mornings, teaching the lowest class when it was his turn with the same energy
which he would have thrown into a lecture to a critical audience, listening
with interest to an intelligent answer from the smallest boy, and speaking to
them more like an elder brother than the head master. {67} They soon
perceived that they had to deal with a man thoroughly in earnest, acute,
active, and not easily deceived; that he was not only a scholar but a
gentleman, who expected them to behave as the sons of gentlemen themselves.
Their attention was awakened, and, although their fears were somewhat
excited, their sympathies and interest were at the same time aroused. This
was a good commencement; but Arnold was ready with other means no less
effectual for engaging their thoughts. He opened out to them at once "fresh
fields and pastures new," in the domain of knowledge; he established
periodical examinations, at which (if a tolerable proficiency in the regular
studies was displayed) a boy might offer to be examined in books on any
subject he might prefer, and prizes were awarded accordingly. The offer was
eagerly seized; modern history, biography, travels, fiction, poetry, were
sought after; the habit of general reading was created, and a new
intellectual activity pervaded the school. The writer well remembers the
effect produced on him when he heard that Arnold had lent one of the boys
Humphrey Clinker, to illustrate a passage in his theme. He felt from that
time forth that the keys of knowledge were confided to him, and, in proof of
this, his own little library, and those in the "studies" of many of his
neighbours, shortly doubled their numbers. French, German, and mathematics,
were encouraged by forming distinct classes on these subjects, and by
conferring for high standing in them some of the privileges as to exemption
from fagging, which previously had only attached to a similar standing in
classics. Modern history was also introduced as a recognised branch of
school study. The advantage of this was, that many of the boys, who, from
deficient early training or peculiar turn of mind, were unable to bring
themselves to proficiency in the regular Latin and Greek course of the
school, and consequently were idle and listless, found other and more
congenial paths in which intelligence and application would still meet with
their reward.
By these simple means, now generally adopted in classical schools, but up to
that time supposed to be incompatible with high accomplishments in classical
learning, the standard of intelligence and information was incalculably
raised, and the school, as a place of education in its wider sense, became
infinitely more efficient.
We should have stated that Dr. Arnold's skill as a teacher was unrivalled; he
imparted a living interest to all he touched, to be attributed mainly to his
habit of illustrating ancient events by "modern instances." Thus, Thucydides
and Napier were compared almost page by page; thus the "High Church party" of
the Jews was pointed to as a type of "the Tories." By means of his favourite
topic, physical geography, he sought to bring the actual theatre of events
before his pupils. Thus he would describe (when living at Laleham), the
Vatican and Janiculum hills of Rome, as being "like the hills on the right
bank of the Thames behind Chertsey;" the Monte Marie as being "about the
height and steepness of Cooper's Hill," and "having the Tiber at the foot of
it like the Thames at Anchorwick."
To philology even, the deadly science of dead languages, and the great
business of public schools, he contrived to impart life by continually
pointing out its bearing on the history of the races of mankind. The
interest thus given to study was something before unknown in schools.
So far we have confined ourselves to the effect of Arnold's system on the
mind, but the source of his most anxious thoughts and constant solicitude lay
deeper than this; it related to the spiritual condition, or, according to the
German phrase, "the inner life," of the boys. With his usual indifference to
personal labour he assumed the preachership of the chapel, declining however,
also, with characteristic disinterestedness, the salary attached, hitherto
given to increase the stipend of a junior master, and his famous "quarter of
an hour" sermons, into which he threw all the power of his character and his
intellect, no doubt gave him an opportunity of confirming, on certain minds,
that influence which was primarily due to his earnest acts of heart and head.
We here approach a portion of his career on which difference of opinion must
always exist. Impressed with an abiding conviction that all earthly things
were subordinate to the relation between man and his Maker; keenly
appreciating all that was "of good report," and impatient of evil, or what
seemed to him to be of evil tendency, even to intolerance, it must be
admitted that in Arnold there was something of the zealot. With his acute
sense of responsibility as to the spiritual state of the boys, it was natural
that he should seek to impress those with whom he was brought in contact, and
he did so. The personal notice he bestowed on boys of serious tendencies,
asking them to his house and conversing with them on solemn subjects had this
effect, and soon engendered "a sect" in the school. Now, the boys who were
thus susceptible and formed this sect, were generally of the milder order of
character, and not of that precocious virility which always gives influence
in a great school; hence arose among the natural leaders of the school, the
strong in character and the stout in heart and hand, a reaction against
Arnold and against Arnold's views, as being opposed to the traditional
notions of the school. This reaction was strengthened by the peculiar nature
of some of these views, such, for instance as those on the subject of the
code of honour. Arnold, although himself a man actuated by a nice sense of
honour, felt it his duty to set himself strongly in words against the code of
honour; it was the constant object of vituperation on his part, even from the
pulpit. His notions on this point, however, never gained ground with his
hearers, who could not be brought to believe that their master (himself as
true a knight errant as ever drew sword or pen,) was serious when he told
them that the spirit of chivalry was "the true Antichrist."
The attempt to introduce a more highly-wrought tone of religious feeling than
was perhaps of wholesome growth in very young minds was, therefore, not
without its drawbacks; the antagonism to some of his own views which it
called forth, combined with the utter disregard to established views which
characterized his own teaching, and which the school caught from him, told
upon the boys' minds. The direct and indirect effect of Arnold's school of
thought may indeed, now, we think, be traced in the general distrust of
hitherto received opinions, which, but little tinged in England it is true
with either licentiousness or irreverence, is nevertheless characteristic of
the present generation.
These effects are also more manifest now that Arnold's personal influence can
no longer be exercised. So long as he was at his post, his earnest
simplicity of character, his purity of life, his intellectual vigour, his
fearless seeking after truth, carried away the sympathies of all who were
brought in contact with him; not one of whom but will say, on looking back to
the impression he left on them, "Behold an Israelite indeed in whom there was
no guile!"
Thus the reform introduced into Rugby by Arnold, and indirectly into other
public schools through him, was then very different from that which was
anticipated from him. He did, it will be seen, none of the things he was
expected by his party to do. He strenuously inculcated the views of
Christian doctrine most opposed to those of the Latitudinarian party. {71} He
stoutly adhered to the system of "fagging," as being the best mode of
responsible government for the school "out of school," founding his opinion
on his own experience at Winchester, on which he often dwelt. He raised and
improved the standard of classical learning in its wider sense, so that the
scholars of Rugby gained a high standing at the universities; and by showing
that this was attainable consistently with acquirements in other branches of
learning, and with the utmost amount of intelligent interest in the knowledge
of the day, he confirmed that opinion in favour of the advantage of classical
learning, as a sound philosophical means of training the faculties for
worldly affairs, which we have seen lately advocated and applauded even in
the heart of Manchester itself, at the opening of Owen's College.
The change he introduced was thus more thorough, more deep and comprehensive,
than any which the suggestions of his partisan supporters would have
accomplished. It was a change in the very spirit of education, reaching
beyond the years of boyhood or the limits of school walls.
COVENTRY TO BIRMINGHAM,
Instead of turning off from Rugby by the new route to Leamington, we will
keep the old road, and so push on straight to the great Warwickshire
manufactory and mart of ribands and watches. First appears the graceful
spire of St. Michael's Church; then the green pastures of the Lammas, on
which, for centuries, the freemen of Coventry have fed their cattle, sweep
into sight, and with a whiz, a whirl, and a whistle, we are in the city and
county of Coventry--the seat of the joint diocese of Lichfield and
Coventry--which return two members to Parliament, at the hands of one of the
most stubbornly independent constituencies in England; a constituency which
may be soft-sawdered, but cannot be bullied or bribed.
A railroad here branches off to Nuneaton, distant ten miles, a sort of
manufacturing dependency of the great city; and on the other, at the same
distance, to Leamington, with a station at Kenilworth.
In addition to its manufacturing importance, an importance which has survived
and increased in the face of the changes in the silk trade and watch trade,
commenced by Huskisson, and completed by Peel, Coventry affords rich food for
the antiquarian, scenes of deep interest to the historical student, a legend
for poets, a pageant for melodramatists, and a tableau for amateurs of poses
plastiques.
Once upon a time Kings held their Courts and summoned Parliaments at
Coventry; four hundred years ago the Guilds of Coventry recruited, armed,
clothed, and sent forth six hundred stout fellows to take part in the Wars of
the Roses; at Coventry the lists were pitched for Mary of Lancaster, and
Phillip Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, to decide in single combat their counter-
charges before the soon-to-be-dethroned Richard II.
At Coventry you will find the effigy of vile Peeping Tom, and can follow the
course through which the fair Godiva rode naked, veiled by her modesty and
flowing tresses, to save her townsmen from a grievous tax. To be sure, some
English Niebuhrs have undertaken to prove the whole story a legend; but, for
our parts, we are determined to believe in tradition and Alfred Tennyson's
sonnet.
There are three ancient churches in Coventry, of which St. Michael's, built
in the reign of Henry I., is the first; the spire rising 303 feet from the
ground, the lofty interior ornamented with a roof of oak, curiously carved,
and several windows of stained glass.
[COVENTRY: ill11.jpg]
St. Mary's Hall, a large building, now used for corporation council meetings,
and festivities, erected in the reign of Henry VI., is one of the richest and
most interesting vestiges of the ornamental architecture of England. The
principal room has a grotesquely-carved roof of oak, a gallery for minstrels,
an armoury, a chair of state, and a great painted window, which need only the
filling up of royal and noble personages, their attendants, and the rich
burgesses of Coventry, to recall the time when Richard II. held his Court in
this ancient city, and, with "old John of Gaunt," settled the sentence on
Harry of Hereford, and Philip of Norfolk.
In this chamber is to be seen a beautiful piece of tapestry, executed in
1450, measuring thirty feet by ten, and containing eighty figures.
In the free school, founded by John Moles, in the reign of Henry VIII., Sir
William Dugdale, the antiquarian and historian of Warwickshire, was educated.
The income is about 900 pounds a-year, and the scholars have open to
competition two fellowships of St. John's College, Oxon, one at Catherine's
Hall, Cambridge, and six exhibitions at either University. Previous to the
investigations of the Charity Commissioners, the fine school-room was locked
up, and the books of the library torn for waste paper to light fires. At
present, under the reformed system, the school is attended by a large number
of scholars.
There are more than a dozen educational and other charities for the benefit
of the poor, enjoying a revenue of many thousands a-year.
There are also several curious specimens of domestic architecture of the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to be found in Coventry. It is, however,
on the whole, a dark, dirty, inconvenient city. The surrounding belt of
Lammas lands on which the freemen have the right of pasturing their horses
and cows, has prevented any increase in the limits of the city.
In the middle ages Coventry was celebrated for its "mysteries and pageants,"
of which an account has been published by Mr. Reader, a local bookseller.
The chief manufactures are of ribands and of watches, both transplantations
from the Continent. The electors of Coventry distinguished themselves by
their consistency during the Free-trade agitation. They exacted a pledge
from their members in favour of Free-trade, except in watches and ribands.
More recently these same Coventry men have had the good sense to prefer a
successful man of business, the architect of his own fortunes, to a Right
Honourable Barrister and ex-Railway Commissioner.
[THE SHERBORNE VIADUCT, NEAR COVENTRY: ill12.jpg]
One thing needful to preserve the manufacturing position of Coventry is, a
first-rate School of Design--labour, and coal, and ample means of conveyance
they have, east and west, and north and south; and now the manufacturers only
need the cultivation of true principles of taste among the whole riband-
weaving population. For taste is a rare article, and many draughts of small
fry must be made before one leviathan salmon can be caught. Great advances
have been made recently in the production of the best kinds of ribands. A
specimen produced by subscription for the Hyde Park Exhibition of 1851,
proved that Coventry was quite able to rival the choicest work of France in
the class of machine-made ribands. The application of steam power to this
class of manufactures is of but recent date. Coventry surveyed, and this may
be done in a few hours, unless the traveller is able and willing to examine
its rich manufactories, it is difficult to resist the invitation of the
railway porter, bawling, to Kenilworth, Leamington, and Warwick, names
calling up a crowd of romantic associations, from Shakspeare to Scott and
Bulwer; but for the present we must keep steadily on to Birmingham, where
steam finds the chief raw materials of poetry and fashioner of beauty.
BIRMINGHAM.
A run of nineteen miles brings us to what the inhabitants call the Hardware
Village, a healthy, ugly town, standing upon several hills, crowned with
smoke, but free from fog.
The old railway station stands at the foot of one of these hills, leaving a
drive of a quarter of a mile through a squalid region, almost as bad as the
railway entrance into Bristol, before entering into the decent part of the
town; but the new station, now in course of rapid completion, will land
passengers behind the Grammar School, in New Street, the principal, and,
indeed, only handsome street of any length in Birmingham.
At the old station there is an excellent hotel, kept by Mr. Robert Bacon, who
was so many years house steward to the Athenaeum Club, in Pall Mall; and at
the refreshment-rooms a capital table d'hote is provided four times a-day, at
two shillings a-head, servants included, an arrangement extremely acceptable
after a ride of 118 miles.
[NEWTON ROAD STATION, NEAR BIRMINGHAM: ill16.jpg]
At the new station similar refreshment-rooms are to be provided, and it is to
be hoped that the architect will plan the interior first, and the exterior
afterwards, so that comfort may not be sacrificed, as it usually is in
English public buildings, to the cost of an imposing portico and vestibule.
As a railway starting point, Birmingham has become a wonderful place. In
addition to those main lines and branches passed and noted on our journey
down, it is also the centre at which meet the railroads to Derby and
Sheffield; to Worcester, Cheltenham, Gloucester, and Bristol; to London
through Oxford, by the Broad Gauge Great Western, to Shrewsbury and Chester
through Wolverhampton, beside the little South Staffordshire lines, which
form an omnibus route between Birmingham, Walsall, Dudley, and Lichfield, and
other iron nets "too tedious to describe."
To a stranger not interested in manufactures, and in mechanic men, this is a
very dull, dark, dreary town, and the sooner he gets out of it the better.
There are only two fine buildings. The Town Hall, an exact copy externally
of the Temple of Jupiter Stator at Rome, built of a beautiful grey Anglesey
marble, from the designs of Messrs. Hansom and Welch, who also undertook to
execute it for 24,000 pounds. It cost 30,000 pounds, and the contractors
were consequently ruined. A railway company would probably have paid the
difference; but, in such cases, communities have no conscience, so the people
of Brummagem got the Hall of which they are justly proud "a bargain."
The interior is disappointing, and wants the expenditure of some more
thousand pounds in sculptures and decorative details, to bring it into
harmony with its noble external effect. The great room, 145 feet in length,
by 65 feet in width and height, will contain upwards of 8,000 persons.
Musical meetings are held here periodically, for the benefit of certain
charities; but the sight best worth seeing, is the Hall at the period of an
election, or of political excitement, crowded with a feverish army of
workmen, cheering, groaning, swaying to and fro, under the speeches of their
favourite orators. Then in this Pagan temple may be seen a living specimen
of a Brummagem Jupiter, with a cross of Vulcan, lion-faced, hairy, bearded,
deep-mouthed swaggering, fluent in frank nonsense and bullying clap-trap,
loved by the mob for his strength, and by the middle classes for his money.
The lofty roof re-echoes with applause.
The temple, the man, and the multitude, all together, are well worth a
journey to Birmingham to see.
There is also the Free School of King Edward VI., in New Street, a stately
pile, built by Barry, before he had become so famous as he is now; which
supplies first-rate instruction in classics, mathematics, modern languages,
and all branches of a useful English education, after the plan introduced
into our public schools by Dr. Arnold, to the sons of all residents, at an
extremely cheap, almost a nominal rate. Ten exhibitions of 50 pounds each
for four years at Oxford or Cambridge are open to the competition of the
scholars.
The salary of the Head Master is 400 pounds a-year, with a residence, and the
privilege of boarding eighteen pupils. Of the Second Master, 300 pounds.
Beside Under Masters.
These liberal appointments have secured a succession of competent masters,
and cannot fail to produce a permanent and favourable change in the character
of young Birmingham. The diffusion of sound classical learning was much
needed to mitigate the coxcombical pretensions of the half-educated, and the
vulgar coarseness of the uneducated. The inhabitants of manufacturing towns
are apt to grow petty Plutocracies, in which after wealth, ignorance and
assumption are the principal qualifications. Brass turns up its nose at
iron, and both look down upon tin, although half an hour in the world's fire
make all so black as to be undistinguishable.
Besides this, which we may term the High School, there are four schools
supported out of King Edward VI.'s foundation, where reading, writing, and
arithmetic, are taught.
The funds on which these magnificent ecclesiastical establishments are
supported, arise from lands in the neighbourhood which originally produced
only 21 pounds a year, and were part of the estates of the Guild of the "Holy
Cross." After being occupied first as fields and then as gardens, the rise
of manufactures and extension of the town of Birmingham, converted a great
portion into building land. The present revenue amounts to about 11,000
pounds per annum, and are likely to be still further increased.
Twenty years ago, school lands which are now leased for terms of years, and
covered with buildings, were occupied as suburban gardens at trifling rents.
Eventually the Birmingham Free School will enjoy an income equal to the wants
of a university as well as a school. Meagre accounts of the income and
expenditure of this noble foundation are published annually, under the
regulations of an Act of Parliament passed in 1828; but no report of the
number of scholars, or the sort of education communicated, is attached to
this balance sheet. It would be very useful; and we hope that the self-
elected corporation, who have the management, will see the propriety of
supplying it.
Birmingham also possesses a chartered college, "Queen's College," similar to
that at Durham; first established as a medical school by the exertions of the
present dean, Mr. Sands Cox, since liberally endowed by the Rev. Dr.
Warneford to the extent of many thousand pounds, and placed in a position to
afford the courses in law, physic, and divinity, required for taking a degree
at the University of London. Also a Blue Coat School, and School for the
Blind.
In a picturesque point of view there are few towns more uninviting than
Birmingham; for the houses are built of brick toned down to a grimy red by
smoke, in long streets crossing each other at right angles,--and the few
modern stone buildings and blocks of houses seem as pert and as much out of
place as the few idle dandies who are occasionally met among the crowds of
busy mechanics and anxious manufacturers. What neatness--cleanliness--can do
for the streets, bell-pulls, and door-knockers, has been done; the foot-
pavements are, for the most part flagged, although some of the round pebble
corn-creating footways still remain in the back streets. One suburb,
Edgbaston, is the property of Lord Calthorpe, and has been let out on
building leases which entirely exclude all manufactories and inferior classes
of houses. The result has been a crop of snug villas, either stucco or
polished red brick; many of them surrounded by gardens and shrubberies, and a
few of considerable pretension. Of this suburb the Birmingham people think a
great deal; but, as it is built upon a dead flat in long straight lines, its
effect is more pleasing to the citizen after a hard day's work, than to the
artist, architect, landscape gardener, or lover of the picturesque.
Birmingham is, in fact, notable for its utility more than its beauty,--for
what is done in its workshops, rather than for what is to be seen in its
streets and suburbs. Nowhere are there to be found so numerous a body of
intelligent, ingenious, well educated workmen. The changes of fashion and
the discoveries of science always find Birmingham prepared to march in the
van, and skilfully execute the work needed in iron, in brass, in gold and
silver, in all the mixed metals and in glass. When guns are no longer
required at the rate of a gun a minute, Birmingham steel pens become famous
all over the world. When steel buckles and gilt buttons have had their day,
Britannia teapots and brass bedsteads still hold their own. No sooner is
electrotype invented, than the principal seat of the manufacture is
established at Birmingham. No sooner are the glass duties repealed than the
same industrious town becomes renowned for plate glass, cut glass, and
stained glass; and, when England demands a Palace to hold the united
contributions of "The Industry of the World," a Birmingham banker finds the
contractor and the credit, and Birmingham manufacturers find the iron, the
glass, and the skill needful for the most rapid and gigantic piece of
building ever executed in one year.
In order to appreciate the independent character and quick inventive
intelligence of the Birmingham mechanic, he should be visited at his own
home. A system of small independent houses, instead of lodgings, prevails in
this town, to the great advantage of the workmen.
It is only within a very few years that the working classes have had, in a
local School of Design, means of instruction in the principles of taste, and
arts of drawing and modelling; while, until the patent laws are put upon a
just foundation, their inventive faculties can never be fully developed. When
the artizans of Birmingham have legislative recognition of their rights as
inventors, and free access to a first-rate school of design, their "cunning"
hands will excel in beauty as well as ingenuity all previous triumphs.
The wealthier classes have, from various causes, deteriorated within the last
sixty years, while the workmen have improved within that time. Men who have
realized fortunes no longer settle down in the neighbourhood of their
labours. They depart as far as possible from the smoke of manufactures and
the bickerings of middle class cliques, purchase estates, send their sons to
the universities, and in a few years subside into country squires.
Professional men, as soon as they have displayed eminent talent, emigrate to
London; and the habit, now so prevalent in all manufacturing towns, of living
in the suburbs, has sapped the prosperity of those literary and philosophical
institutions and private reunions, which so much contributed to raise the
tone of society during the latter half of the last century. The meetings of
an old Literary and Philosophical Society have been discontinued, and the
News Room was lately on the brink of dissolution. Instead of meeting to
discuss points of art, science, and literature, the middle classes read the
Times and Punch, and consult the Penny Cyclopaedia. The literary and
scientific character which Birmingham acquired in the days when Boulton,
Watt, Priestly, Darwin, Murdoch, and their friends, met at the Birmingham
Lunarian Society, to discuss, to experiment, and to announce important
discoveries, have passed away never to return; and we are not likely to see
again any provincial town occupying so distinguished a position in the
scientific world. The only sign of Birmingham's ancient literary pre-
eminence is to be found in several weekly newspapers, conducted with talent
and spirit far beyond average. It is an amusing fact, that the sect to which
Priestly belonged still trade on his reputation, and claim an intellectual
superiority over the members of other persuasions, which they may once have
possessed, but which has long been levelled up by the universal march of
education. The richer members publish little dull books in bad English on
abstruse subjects, and, like Consuelo's prebendary, have quartos in
preparation which never reach the press.
In fact, the suburban system of residence and the excessive pretension of
superiority by the "pots over the kettles" have almost destroyed society in
Birmingham, although people meet occasionally at formal expensive parties,
and are drawn together by sympathy in religion and politics.
Nothing would induce an educated gentleman to live in Birmingham except to
make a living, yet there are residing there, seldom seen out of their
factories, men of the highest scientific and no mean literary attainments.
There are a number of manufactories, which, in addition to their commercial
importance, present either in finished articles, or in the process of
manufacture, much that will interest an intelligent traveller.
GLASS.--Messrs. F. & C. Oslers, of Broad Street, have attained a very high
reputation for their cut and ornamental, as well as the ordinary, articles of
flint glass. The have been especially successful in producing fine effects
from prismatic arrangements. Their gigantic chandeliers of great size, made
for Ibrahim Pacha, and the Nepalese Prince, were the steps by which they
achieved the lofty crystal fountain, of an entirely original design, which
forms one of the most novel and effective ornaments of the Crystal Palace.
The manufactory as well as the show-room is open to the inspection of
respectable strangers.
Messrs. Rice and Harris are also extensive manufacturers of cut and coloured
glass; and Messrs. Bacchus and Sons have been very successful in their
imitations of Bohemian glass, both in form and colour. Messrs. Chance have
acquired a world-wide reputation by supplying the largest quantity of crown
glass in the shortest space of time for Paxton's Palace. These works, in
which plate and every kind of crown glass is made, are situated at West
Bromwich. The proprietors have benevolently and wisely made arrangements for
the education of their workmen and their families, which are worthy of
imitation in all those great factories where the plan, which originated in
Lancashire, has not been already adopted. A letter of introduction will be
required in order to view Messrs. Chance's establishment, of which we shall
say more when noting the social state of the Birmingham operatives.
PAPIER MACHE.--Messrs. Jennens and Bettridge's works are so well known that it
is only necessary to refer to them for the purpose of saying that in their
show-rooms some new application of the art which they have carried to such
perfection is constantly to be found. Pianos, cradles, arm-chairs, indeed
complete drawing-room suites, cornices, door-plates, and a variety of
ornaments are displayed, in addition to the tea-trays and tea-chests in which
the art of japanning first became known to us.
Although Messrs. Jennens and Co. have the largest establishment in
Birmingham, there are several others who produce capital work; among them may
be named Mr. Thomas Lane and Messrs. M'Callum and Hodgson, who both exhibited
specimens of great merit at the last Birmingham Exhibition of manufactures.
But metals afford the great staple of employment in Birmingham, and we shall
avail ourselves, in describing the leading trades, and touching on the social
position of the workmen, of the admirable letters on Labour and the Poor in
Birmingham which appeared in the Morning Chronicle in the course of 1850.
{81}
* * * * *
BIRMINGHAM BUTTONS.--"A Brummagem Button" is the old-fashioned nickname for a
Birmingham workman. The changes of fashion, and the advances of other
manufactures, have deprived that trade of its ancient pre-eminence over all
other local pursuits; but the "button trade," although not the same trade
which made great fortunes in a previous generation, still employs five or six
thousand hands, of which one-half are women and children.
In the middle of the eighteenth century a plain white metal button was made,
which may occasionally be seen in remote rural districts, on the green coats
of old yeomen, wearing hereditary leather breeches. At that period the
poorer classes wore coarse horn or wooden buttons, chiefly home made, and the
tailor made, as well as the clothes, buttons covered with cloth. By degrees
very handsome gilt buttons came into wear, and continued to employ many
hands, while the blue coat which figures in the portraits of our grandfathers
remained in fashion.
In 1826, the Florentine, or covered button, now in almost universal use,
which is manufactured by machinery with the aid of women and children, was
introduced, and by 1829 the gilt button trade had been almost destroyed.
The change produced great distress, vast numbers of persons were thrown out
of work, who could not at once turn to any other employment. In 1830 a
deputation from the gilt button trade waited upon George IV. and the
principal nobility, to solicit their patronage. The application succeeded,
coloured coats with metal buttons came into fashion, and dandies of the first
water appeared in bright snuff-coloured, pale green, and blue coats, such as
are now only worn by Paul Bedford or Keeley, in broad farce. In 1836 a cheap
mode of gilding, smart for a day, dull and shabby in a week, completely
destroyed the character of gilt buttons, and brought up the Florentine again.
This change was, no doubt, materially assisted and maintained by Bulwer's
novel of "Pelham," which set all young men dressing themselves up like crows
with white shirts.
In 1840 a deputation to Prince Albert attempted another revival of the gilt
button trade, and at the same time the silk stocking weavers waited on the
Prince to endeavour to drive out the patent leather boots, and bring in the
low shoe. Both attempts failed. At present there are symptoms of a turn of
fashion toward coloured coats and bright buttons, which may be successful,
because the fashionable world abhors monotony. The flame coloured coats,
long curls, and pink under waistcoats of George IV., were succeeded by the
solemn sables of an undertaker; the high tight stock made way for a sailor's
neckcloth. For a time shawl waistcoats, of gay colours, had their hour. Then
correct tight black yielded to the loosest and shaggiest garments that could
be invented. Perhaps the year 1852 may see our youth arrayed in blue, purple
and pale brown.
But a very little consideration will prove that these artificial changes,
although they may benefit a class, are of little advantage to the community.
If a man gives 10s. more for a coat with gilt buttons than for one with plain
buttons, he has 10s. less to expend with some other tradesman.
The Florentine Button, first invented in 1820, and since much improved, is a
very curious manufacture. It is made--as any one may see by cutting up a
button--of five pieces; first, the covering of Florentine, or silk; second, a
cover of metal, which gives the shape to the button; third, a smaller circle
of mill-board; fourth, a circle of coarse cloth, or calico; fifth, a circle
of metal, with a hole punched in the centre, through which the calico or
cloth is made to protrude, to form the shank, to be sewed on to the garment.
"Ranged in rows on either side of a long room of the button factory, (says
the correspondent of the Morning Chronicle) are from 50 to 100 girls and
young women, from the age of fourteen to four or five and twenty, all busily
engaged, either at hand or steam presses, in punching out metal circles
slightly larger than the size of the button which is to be produced. Before
each press the forewoman is seated, holding in her hand a sheet of zinc or
iron, about two feet long, and four inches broad. This she passes rapidly
under the press if worked by hand, and still more rapidly if worked by steam,
punching and cutting at the rate of from fifty to sixty disks in a minute. As
they are cut they fall into a receptacle prepared to receive them. The
perforated sheets are sold to the founder to be melted up, and made into
other sheets. In other rooms younger women are engaged in cutting up
Florentine cloth, or other outside covering material, paste board and calico.
Of these a young woman can punch 57,000 a-day, and of metal, 28,000 a-day.
The upper discs are submitted by another set of girls to presses from which
each receives a blow that turns up an edge all round, and reduces it to the
exact size of the button. The lower disk is punched for the shank to come
through, stamped with the maker's name, or the name of the tailor for whom
the buttons are made, and coated with varnish, either light or black.
"The five pieces then pass into a department where a woman superintends the
labours of a number of children from seven to ten years of age.
"These little creatures place all five pieces, one after another, in regular
order, in a small machine like a dice-box, constructed to hold them, which is
placed under a press, when a firm touch compresses the whole together in the
neat form, which any one may examine on a black dress coat, without stitch or
adhesive matter."
This patent was the subject of long litigation between rival inventors, to
the great benefit of the lawyers, and loss of the industrious and ingenious.
Within the last twelve months Messrs. Chadbourne, button-makers, of Great
Charles Street, have adapted this Florentine button to nails for furniture
and carriages.
The Patent Linen sewn-through Button is another recent invention, which has
superseded the old wire button for under garments, than which it is cheaper,
neater, and more durable. It is composed of linen and circles of zinc.
Horn Buttons, with shanks, which are extensively used for cloth boots and
sporting jackets, are made from the hoofs of horned cattle, which are boiled,
cut, punched, dyed, stamped when soft, and polished by brushes moved by steam
power; the chief part of the work being done by women and children.
Pearl Buttons have become an important part of the Birmingham manufactures,
partly on the decline of metal buttons. They are extensively used on coats
and waistcoats, where gilt buttons were formerly employed.
The shell used in the manufacture of buttons, studs, card counters, etc., is
the mother of pearl, the Concha margaritifera of naturalists. Five kinds of
shell are employed:--First. The Buffalo Shell, so named because it arrived
packed in buffalo skins; it comes chiefly from Panama, is the smallest and
commonest, and sells to the trade at about 15 pounds a ton.--Second. The
Black Scotch, from the Sandwich Islands, whence it is sent to Valparaiso and
to Sydney, New South Wales, worth from 15 to 30 pounds a ton. The large
outer rim is of a blackish, or rather greenish, tint, the centre only being
white. The outer rim was formerly considered worthless, and large quantities
were thrown away as rubbish. Change of fashion has brought the prismatic
hues of the dark pearl into fashion for shooting-coats, waistcoats, and even
studs. It used to be a standing story with a Bristol barber that a square in
that city had been built on thousands of pounds worth of tobacco stalks,
thrown away as useless, until it was discovered that that part of the plant
was capable of making a most saleable snuff. And so in Birmingham; the
Irvingite Church, on New Hall Hill, is said to be built on hundreds of tons
of refuse shell, which would now be worth from 15 to 20 pounds per ton. The
third shell is the Bombay, or White Scotch, worth from 20 to 50 pounds per
ton. The fourth comes from Singapore, and is brought there to exchange for
British manufactures by the native craft which frequent that free port. It
is a first-rate article, white to the edge, worth from 80 to 90 pounds per
ton. The fifth is the Mother of Pearl Shell, from Manilla, of equal value
and size, but with a slight yellow tinge round the edge.
Pearl buttons are cut out and shaped by men with the lathe, polished by women
with a grinding-stone, and sorted and arranged on cards by girls.
Glass Buttons were formerly in use among canal boatmen, miners, and
agricultural labourers, in certain districts. They are now chiefly made for
the African market. The process of making them and studs is well worth
seeing.
Beside the buttons already enumerated, they make in Birmingham the flat iron
and brass buttons, for trowsers; steel buttons, for ladies' dresses; wooden
buttons, for overcoats; agate buttons, for which material is imported from
Bohemia; and, in fact, every kind of button and stud, including papier mache.
The manufacture of brass shanks is a separate trade, and the writer of the
letters already quoted, states the annual production at, or upwards of, three
millions per working day. Of these, part are made by hand, but the greater
number by a shank-making machine, wrought by steam power, and only requiring
the attendance of one tool-maker.
"The machine feeds itself from a coil of brass or iron wire suspended from
the roof, and cuts and twists into shanks, by one process, at the rate of 360
per minute, or nearly 75,000,000 per annum. Some button manufacturers employ
one of these machines; the majority buy the shanks."
* * * * *
GUNS AND SWORDS.--According to Hutton, the historian of Birmingham, the town
was indebted for its occupation in supplying our army with fire-arms, to an
ancestor of a gentleman who now represents a division of Warwickshire, a Sir
Roger Newdigate, in the time of William III.
The story, however, seems only half-true. Hutton would imply that the first
muskets manufactured in England were made in Birmingham. It seems more
likely, that the connexion with William III. arose from the desire of that
monarch to have the flint-lock, which was superseding the match-lock on the
Continent, made in his own dominions.
At any rate, the revolution of 1688, which the romantic anti-commercial party
of Young England so deeply regret, gave Birmingham its gun trade, as well as
Hampton Court its asparagus beds.
When Walpole gave us peace, the attention of the manufacturers was directed
to fowling-pieces, and from that time forward Birmingham has contained the
greatest fire-arm factory in the world, although, of course, subject to many
fluctuations. Twenty years ago, "A long war soon," was as regular a toast at
convivial meetings of Birmingham manufacturers, as at any mess-room or in any
cock-pit in her majesty's service.
The government has made several attempts, by establishing manufactories with
public money and under official control, to become independent of Birmingham,
but the end has invariably been great loss and pitiful results in the number
of arms produced.
We hope to live to see the time when our navy will be built as economically
as our guns are made--by private contract--and our public ship-yards confined
to the repairing department.
During the war which ended at the battle of Waterloo, the importance and
prosperity of the gun-makers were great. It was calculated that a gun a
minute was made in Birmingham on the average of a year, but the Peace threw
numbers out of work and reduced wages very considerably.
Time has brought the trade to a level; indeed, it is one of the great
advantages of Birmingham, that the prosperity of the town does not rest on
any one trade; so that if some are blighted others are flourishing, and when
one fails the workmen are absorbed into other parallel employments.
The gun trade now depends for support on the demand for--first, cheap muskets
for African and other aboriginal tribes; secondly, on cheap fowling-pieces,
rifles, pistols, blunderbusses, etc., for exportation to America, Australia,
and other countries where something effective is required at a moderate
price; thirdly, on the home demand for fowling-pieces of all qualities, from
the commonest to those sold at the West End of London, at fancy prices;
fourthly, on that for fire-arms required by our army and navy; and, lastly,
on occasional uncertain orders created by wars and revolutions on the
Continent.
There are a vast number of guns, or parts of guns, made in Birmingham, which
bear the names of retailers in different parts of the kingdom. Even very
fashionable gun-makers find it worth their while to purchase goods in the
rough state from Birmingham manufacturers on whom they can depend, and finish
them themselves.
This is rendered easy by the system. No one in Birmingham makes the whole of
a gun. The division of labour is very great; the makers of the lock, the
barrel, and the stock, are completely distinct, and the mechanics confine
themselves to one branch of a department. The man who makes the springs for
a lock has nothing to do with the man who makes the nipple or the hammer;
while the barrel-forger has no connexion with the stock-maker or lock-maker.
The visitor who has the necessary introductions, should by no means omit to
visit a gun-barrel factory, as there are a good many picturesque effects in
the various processes, beside the mechanical instruction it affords.
The following is the order of the fabrication of a common gun:--
The sheets for barrels are made from scraps of steel and iron, such as old
coach-springs, knives, steel chains, horse shoes and horseshoe nails, and
sheets of waste steel from steel pen manufactories.
These, having been sorted, are bound together, and submitted first to such a
furnace, and then to such a steam hammer as we described in our visit to
Wolverton, until it is shaped into a bar of tough iron, which is afterwards
rolled into sheets of the requisite thickness.
From one of these sheets a length sufficient to make a gun barrel is cut off
by a pair of steam-moved shears, of which the lower jaw is stationary and the
upper weighs a ton, of which plenty of examples may be seen in every steam
engine factory.
The slip of iron is made red hot, placed between a pair of rollers, one of
which is convex and the other concave, and comes out in a semicircular trough
shape; again heated, and again pressed by smaller rollers, by which the
cylinder is nearly completed
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