Chapter 8

In principle, the idea was commendably simple. George Stephenson and his son, Robert, would be set up in business to build locomotives for the Stockton and Darlington Railway.

In practice, it became a major reason why the ground-breaking railway very nearly ran out of steam before it opened.

In the last chapter, it was 1823 and George Stephenson, the line’s engineer, fell out with his associate William Losh over the type of rails to be used. As well as ending a friendship, the fall-out meant that there was no factory in the North-East where locomotives could be built, because Losh refused to co-operate with his former business partner.

This fall-out came just as the Quaker pioneers were stealing themselves to choose steampower over horsepower. This was a daring decision, as The Northern Echo recalled in 1875: “The question wasn’t, as some ignorantly seem to think it, one between the modern locomotive on the modern rail and the horse, but between the horse and a wheezing asthmatical old tea kettle of a machine that hardly ever exceeded a rate of five miles an hour.”

Locomotives were operating successfully at only two collieries in the country – Killingworth and Hetton, both developed by George Stephenson – and nowhere on the scale envisaged in South Durham.

But Edward Pease, the principle pioneer, was convinced. In 1823 he and his cousin, Thomas Richardson, visited Killingworth and saw Stephenson’s engine, named Blucher, in action. A few weeks later, Pease ensured that an Act of Parliament gave the S&DR permission to used “loco-motives or Moveable Engines” for the first time.

But the fall-out from the fall-out left the Quakers with a huge problem. So in June 1823, Robert Stephenson and Company Limited was formed to build locomotives. The money behind the company came mainly from Pease. One source says the company initially had £2,000 – £1,000 of which Durham coal owners had given George as a thank you for inventing the miners’ safety lamp, and £500 each from Pease and Richardson. Another source says the company had £4,000 – Pease contributing £1,600, plus lending Robert Stephenson his contribution of £500.

In August 1823, the company purchased land in Forth Street, Newcastle, and began building a factory. Robert was just 19, but his father had ensured that he had been well-educated. He had paid 4d a week to send him to school in Longbenton – a considerable sacrifice at a time when George was paying off the debts he had inherited from his father, and paying someone else to fight in the army in the Napoleonic Wars because he had been conscripted. Robert had also spent two years studying at Edinburgh University.

On November 7, 1823, the S&DR committee handed Robert Stephenson and Company its first order: four stationary engines (two 30 horsepower, two 15 horsepower) for use on the Brusselton and Etherley inclines.

On September 16, 1824, the S&DR committee handed the company its first order for “travelling” locomotives: two, at £500 each, which came to be called No 1 Locomotion and No 2 Hope. For Pease, the principle was simple: he had provided the money so that the Stephensons would deliver on time. But it did not work like that.

The stationary engines were expected in early 1825, but were not ready for use for another nine months. It took months for the Stephensons to get around to starting the travelling locos and when, in June 1825, George casually announced that No 1 Locomotion would be ready soon, the S&DR committee immediately set an opening date of September 17 to shame him into producing the goods. As it was, No 2 Hope was not ready until October, and in November Pease approached a firm in Leeds to see if it would take over the engine-building duties.

The trouble with the Stephensons was that over the course of 1824 they had become too successful. Railway mania was sweeping the country. George found himself acting as a consultant to four planned railways: the Liverpool and Manchester, the Liverpool and Birmingham, the London and Northern, and the London and South Wales. He seemed to believe that he was the overlord of the iron horse, and no project could succeed without his intimate involvement.

With such a workload, it was unsurprising that the factory in Forth Street was neglected. But to make matters worse, Robert, who was supposed to be in charge of refining and building his father’s blueprints, had disappeared to South America in June 1824.

He had taken up a post as expeditionary engineer for the Columbian Mining Association and was away for most of the next three years working in Venezuela and Bolivia.

By December 1824, Pease was exasperated. George, he wrote, “shouldn’t place our property at risque by the application of his time and talent to other objects…whilst his talent and ingenuity is great, his execution is torpid, defective and languid as to promptings”.

It was now time for “self-preservation”, said Pease, and over George’s head appointed Michael Longbridge as the executive director of Robert Stephenson and Co.

Longbridge was the owner of Bedlington Iron Works, which had won the disputed contract to produce the S&DR’s rails.

Longbridge, one of the original shareholders in the S&DR, was told to act as the Stephensons’ conscience, but with George and Robert often at opposite ends of the globe, he found it a difficult task.

And so the opening date for the S&DR kept slipping into the future – after all, it would have been impossible to open a railway without locos.

And, rather like today’s new-fangled dot.com companies, its City backers began to become very concerned that they were pouring money into this new form of transport that showed no sign of making a profit.

Yet the Forth Street factory was the world’s first purpose-built railway works, and when the Stephensons did get around to producing a locomotive, it set the template that a global industry was to follow for generations to come.

From difficult beginnings to a world leader

ROBERT STEPHENSON AND COMPANY:
Despite its difficult beginnings, the company became renowned around the world as an engine-builder. Known fondly as Stivvies, it relocated to bigger premises in Springfield, Darlington, in 1901.

There, at its peak, it employed 2,000 men and produced 72 locos a year. In 1937, Stivvies amalgamated with R&W Hawthorn Leslie and Co, of Newcastle, a company which had built its first locomotive, The Coronation, for the Stockton and Darlington Railway in 1831.

The decline of the Golden Age of Steam meant a decline in the fortunes of Robert Stephenson and Co, and in 1962 its name was changed to English Electric.

When the Beeching axe cut through Britain’s rail industry in 1963, Stivvies closed the following year.