George Stephenson Read Free

George had to help from an early age with the younger ones, making sure they didn’t stray on to the wooden train way which went past their front door. His first paid job was at eight when an old widow gave him tuppence a day to keep her cows off the line. Horses pulled the coal wagons along these wooden rails from the pit to the riverside staiths, or loading stations. From there they went into keels, or coal barges, down the Tyne and then into the seagoing coal boats for London. As his father moved around the area, George got various jobs at the different pits. He started about the age of ten driving one of the horses for tuppence a day, becoming a picker at sixpence a day – picking stones and dross out of the coal – until the age of fourteen, when he was employed no longer as a boy worker but as an adult, becoming assistant fireman to his father on one shilling a day.
    He had set his heart on working on a pumping engine with his father and there are numerous stories about the hours he spent as a boy making scale models in clay of his father’s engine and of the other engines he had seen at work in the collieries. From his father he developed a great love for the countryside. It was very easy to get quickly out of the colliery into open unspoiled fields and woods. But you had to be careful. Disturbing game, let alone trying to capture any, was an offence which could result in transportation, if not hanging. There were 220 offences for which the death penalty could be imposed, ranging from sheep stealing and pickpocketing to murder. (It was only in 1808 that pickpocketing goods to the value of one shilling or more ceased to be a capital offence.) The landed gentry clung to their estates and their privileges, making life for the poor very harsh, terrified that the workers would be influenced by the revolution which had begun in France.
    George was eight when it began and he grew up whilst England was at war with revolutionary France and then Napoleon. He and his three brothers were now at work full time in the mine with their father, and bringing home their extra incomes, but they were well aware of the effects of the war. The price of wheat shot up and corn riots were frequent. In his biography of Stephenson, Samuel Smiles relates that by 1800 the price of wheat had become 130 shillings a quarter whereas in 1795 it had only been fifty-four shillings.
    George spent all his spare time working on the engine, even though he was only the assistant fireman, taking it to pieces after his work was over and putting it together again. The pit where he and his father both worked soon failed and around sixteen George went to a different pit on his own, as a fireman in his own right. When he was seventeen, George met up with his father once again at a new winning at Newburn – this time with George as plugman.
    George’s eagerness to learn was not limited to the pumping machines he worked on but extended to all of the machinery in the mine. At the age of seventeen he had already got further than his father had done in a lifetime, but he was not content to be simply a plugman, even though he was now in charge of the pump and his father. (When the water level went down in the pit and the suction stopped, it was the plugman’s job to go to the bottom of the shaft, plug the pipe and get the suction I started again.) He was constantly being called to mend other machines, such as the winding engine which controlled the cage up and down the shaft, a job considered much more important and difficult than manning a pump. He managed to persuade a friend to let him have a go at being the brakesman, the man in charge of the winding machine, so called because the most difficult part was stopping the machine at the exact time. The established brakesmen were annoyed and one of them went so far as to stop the working of the pit, saying that not only was young George untrained, he couldn’t do the job properly and would