George Stephenson Read Free Page B

father’s orchard and she seems to have had a fancy for him, but the family would have none of it. They had no intention of allowing their daughter to marry a poor, uneducated pitman, even if he was trying to better himself; and they certainly were not going to let him better himself at their daughter’s expense. She was being prepared for a much smarter catch. The romance was forcibly broken off by the Hindmarsh family, to the disappointment of Elizabeth herself. She declared she would never marry anyone else – and she didn’t.
    George meanwhile bounced back very quickly and started going out with another farmer’s daughter, though their family farm was much smaller than Hindmarsh’s and this time there was no dowry to add to the attractions. Her name was Ann Henderson and she was a domestic servant in the farmer’s house where George had taken lodgings. George made her a handsome pair of leather shoes – one of his many spare-time occupations to make more money – which she accepted, but she refused his marriage proposal. He then proposed to her older sister Frances, who worked as a maid at the same farm. Fanny, as she was called, was twelve years older than George, who was just twenty-one, and she was already thought of as an old maid.
    Fanny had worked as a servant in the farm for over ten years, before in fact the present owner had taken over. He’d inherited her and her reference which told him: ‘Frances Henderson is a girl of sober disposition, an honest servant and of good family.’ Some years previously she’d been engaged to the village school master in Black Callerton but he’d died when she was twenty-six leaving her, so the villagers thought, with no prospects of getting married. She jumped when young George offered and they were married on 28 November 1802, at Newburn Church. Mr Thompson, the farmer who employed her, promised his young lodger and his faithful servant that he would be their witness and that they could have their wedding breakfast back at the farm.
    Newburn Church, a handsome Norman building, was in those days the centre of a large and affluent parish. The couple were married by a curate, not the vicar himself, but they did both sign the marriage register, though George may have signed Fanny’s name as well. George’s own signature in the register is badly smudged and endearingly child-like.
    Not long afterwards, they moved to Willington Quay, this time east of Newcastle, where George was to be brakesman in charge of a new winding machine that had just been installed. It was here, in their one room in a cottage by the Quay furnished out of Fanny’s savings, that their only son Robert was born on 16 October 1803. Fanny was considered in those days almost too old at thirty-four to have a first child, and she was ill for some time afterwards. The miners’ cottages, owned by the colliery, were continuously being divided up as more families moved in, until several families were crowded together into one cottage. At Wylam, for example, the Stephenson family of eight had been crowded into two rooms with unplastered walls and clay floors, while three other families shared the rest of the cottage.
    As George was now reasonably well paid for a working man, he managed to hang on to his one room and was soon able to afford two and then three rooms in the cottage, but he was always very canny and never threw his money around. He was still making shoes to supplement his earnings as well as mending clocks for the pitmen. Having a clock was a great status symbol, and of great use for a shift-working pitman.
    Samuel Smiles continually stresses how sober the young George Stephenson was, so much so that one almost suspects he was a drunkard. It has to be remembered that in the early nineteenth-century, drink was the mass escape. There were scores of gin and beer rooms in all these new industrial slum villages. Working as they did twelve,