George Stephenson Read Free Page A

break his own arms stopping the machine and bump all the men in the cage. But George, our hero, managed to persuade the viewer of the pit, as the manager was called, that he could do the job properly. Soon afterwards he was promoted to being a fully fledged brakesman.
    At Black Callerton, the colliery where in 1801 he was made a brakesman, there was a pitman called Ned Nelson who complained about the way that George, as brakesman, drew him out of the pit. He challenged George to a fight after work and George agreed. From an early age, he had been proud of his strength, wrestling with village boys, but no one thought that he would have a chance against the much older and tougher Ned Nelson. George hammered him. Another triumph.
    It is to Samuel Smiles’ biography, which appeared in 1857, that we are indebted for these touching early stories of George as a pit boy growing up. Every anecdote finishes with a long homily about George’s virtues, such as bravery and fortitude. Smiles went back to the pit villages in the 1850s and picked up these stories from old miners, still working away, and set great store by them in his biography. There is no doubt about George’s great ingenuity and aptitude as an engineman, but reading between the lines his character could be interpreted in different ways from the same stories. We have to take Smiles’ word for it that Ned Nelson was ‘a roystering bully, the terror of the village’, but from the way George was going around doing other people’s jobs, telling them how he could do it better, he must have struck many older pitmen as a real know-all, too cocky by half. Even though he was certainly clever at repairing engines, a certain humility might have been more suited to his years.
    Until the age of eighteen he was completely illiterate. He was a grown man, earning around £1 a week, the top pay in the colliery for an untrained mechanic, but he realised that he could never improve further, least of all call himself a skilled mechanic, unless he could read and write. It wasn’t that he wanted to be up to date with Miss Austen’s amusing novels, Sir Walter Scott’s romantic epics, or Wordsworth’s lovely poems that the gentry were currently enthusing over; he realised the simple fact that there was an easier way of discovering the principles of engines than taking them to pieces. People like Nicholas Wood, a young viewer who was soon taking a great interest in his work, pointed out that it was all written down in the books, Wood was a properly qualified engineer, in other words his middle-class parents had been able to pay not just for his schooling but for his apprenticeship to an established colliery engineer, the men who designed and built the engines, leaving them to the likes of George Stephenson to run.
    George began night classes with a man in the nearby village of Walbottle, going three nights a week at a cost of threepence a week, practising his pot hooks on a slate in spare moments at work. A local farmer gave him extra coaching and by the age of nineteen, much to his pride, he could write his own name. Sums came easier than writing. He hired boys to rush back and forward with his slate full of homework to have it corrected. By about the age of twenty or twenty-one, he understood the simple elements of reading and writing. They never came easily to him. Even from the earliest days he paid or persuaded other people to write letters for him and read to him from books. Many letters and documents belonging to George Stephenson have come to light since Smiles’ day, and still more are being found, but it is rare for them to be in George’s own hand.
    Having become an engine mechanic and desperately if belatedly trying to become educated, he now managed to find some time for courting. His first recorded girl friend was Elizabeth Hindmarsh, the daughter of the largest farmer in the Black Callerton parish. He met her secretly in her