How Britain Worked Read online

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER 1

  THE RAILWAYS

  CHAPTER 2

  FROM FARM TO FACTORY

  CHAPTER 3

  FISH ’N’ CHIPS

  CHAPTER 4

  THE GARDEN

  CHAPTER 5

  COAL MINING

  CHAPTER 6

  THE HOLIDAY

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  PICTURE CREDITS

  INDEX

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  It is a largely forgotten fact that Britain was the first industrialized country in the world, but Guy Martin – the cult motorcycle racer and mechanic – is about to remind us how the Industrial Revolution helped make Britain great.

  Guy shows how the discoveries made in the late 18th–19th centuries are to thank for the ease of our every day lives: in order to cook a bacon and egg sandwich in Industrial era conditions, Guy has to restore a steam locomotive and railway to have the components delivered to the local shop; he has to bring a saw mill back into working order to be able to make a bicycle; he has to revamp a Victorian fishing trawler so he can cook himself some fish and chips, and when he decides to mow the lawn, he restores a Victorian botanical garden. After all that, he’s in need of a holiday – so he sets to work restoring a Victorian holiday resort.

  Illustrated throughout with specially commissioned photography as well as historical images, Guy will take us through each project; his passion, enthusiasm and sheer inventiveness bringing a completely new perspective to the Industrial Revolution. He invites us to live it with him, to enjoy the nostalgia, marvel in the mechanics and learn from its legacy.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  GUY MARTIN is a British motorcycle racer and mechanic. Born in 1981, he followed in his father’s footsteps racing bikes, and in 2011 starred in the cult documentary Closer to the Edge about the 2010 TT Races in the Isle of Man. Determined to maintain the heritage of the Industrial Revolution, Guy has previously made a documentary for the BBC, The Boat that Guy Built, in which he travelled along Britain’s canal networks using inventions of the Industrial era.

  INTRODUCTION

  I’m a pretty lucky guy. I race motorcycles, which I love. I work as a truck mechanic, which I love. I race mountain bikes, which I adore. I also get to appear on the telly, and while I still don’t really see myself a presenter, I’m slowly getting used to it. The thing that keeps me going back to it is that I get to meet so many people who are proper experts at what they do, and they don’t mind sharing their knowledge with the likes of me – which really does make me feel extra fortunate.

  The experts that I met while we were making the How Britain Worked TV series are all real enthusiasts who can talk about their own areas of expertise until the cows come home. Because they are so passionate about what they do, it’s brilliant to spend time with them. I’m a good listener. You learn by listening to people with skills and talents and I learned a lot while we were filming.

  It helped, of course, that I take a serious interest in any kind of machinery or engineering. I think we should all be proud of the things that clever and hard-working people in Britain have achieved – achievements in many cases that really did change the world. Britain’s industrial heritage is something that we should all be proud of. Even though the ordinary working people – the backbone of the Industrial Revolution – were often treated appallingly, we should celebrate their skills and talents instead of just dwelling on the hardships they had to suffer. Having learned about how badly people were treated on the farms and in the factories, on the railways and in the coal mines, I know that we should never forget what they went through. At the same time, we should also never forget what they achieved.

  That’s one of the reasons why it was so fascinating for me to meet craftsmen who could, for example, make a wheel entirely out of wood. We all see and use wheels every day – on every truck, every car, every bus and every bike. How many of us could even start to imagine how to make one from scratch, using a few pieces of wood and some simple tools? That’s more than just a skill, more even than a talent – it’s artistry, an art that we shouldn’t allow to die out.

  Seeing how a wooden wheel could be built like that – and having a go myself – was an amazing experience. It was also pleasing to see how today’s skilled workers use state-of-the-art technology to maintain and preserve the work of their predecessors. Time and again, I saw how modern methods worked hand-in-hand with traditional skills to reach a perfect end result. A Victorian engineer would be amazed by the sheer power of modern machines, let alone the robots and design computers used to create them.

  Working with modern kit doesn’t always mean that you’re able to sit in the comfort of an air-conditioned office or workshop. Dangling underneath Llandudno Pier on a safety line, burning through Victorian ironwork with a cutting torch, was not a job that could be tackled with any degree of comfort at all. I wouldn’t have missed that for the world, though. After all the time that I had spent chatting in front of a TV camera, that felt like a spot of proper hard graft. The fact that there was a slight element of danger thrown in made it all the better. Can I help it if I’m an adrenaline junkie?

  Given that the TV series was about how the Industrial Revolution changed Britain, drawing people away from the countryside, creating huge cities and transforming the way that people worked and relaxed, I reckoned that we would be spending our time filming in the Midlands. I saw us in Birmingham, or maybe as far north as Manchester. That, after all, is the sort of area where British industry really took hold. Not a bit of it. We covered a heck of a lot of ground.

  From Drumlanrig Castle in Scotland and Gayle Mill in North Yorkshire to Chatham Docks in Kent and the port of Brixham in Devon, we found people and organisations working to keep our industrial heritage alive. That was a real treat – finding so many who care so much about our history. The great American industrialist Henry Ford said that, ‘History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we made today.’ How wrong can you be? Old Henry was a real stick-in-the-mud. Despite what he said about making history, he strongly resisted making any changes or improvements to the Model T, the car that made his fortune in the early years of the twentieth century. He hadn’t learned the lessons of the past. You can’t stand still; you have to keep moving forward. The Victorians knew that. They were great innovators, developing new manufacturing techniques and machinery as fast as their constantly evolving technology would allow.

  I think that keeping that sort of history alive helps us to see how far we have come, the mistakes we have made and how best we can press on into the future. The people that I spoke to when we were filming the TV series weren’t stuck in a bygone age or trying to relive the past but they all had a healthy respect for the skills of the craftsmen who built modern Britain. I’m sure that every one of them could write a book about what they do – some already have done – and cramming all of the information that they could give us, along with all the stories they had to tell, into just six episodes on the telly was always going to be impossible.

  Some of that information, some of what I learned and some of things that we didn’t have time for in the TV series, have gone into this book. If you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed myself while we were filming, then maybe we will all have learned a bit more about the inventions, the industries and the people who helped to make Britain great.

  There are plenty of people outside the South East who also rely on the train to commute into town in Glasgow, Liverpool, Leeds, Manchest
er and Birmingham – 30,000 flood into Birmingham by train every morning – but for many it is easier to catch a bus at the street corner or step into a car. People who don’t regularly travel by train (and I have to admit that I’m one of them) know that the rail network exists, but don’t really see that it affects their lives a great deal. Yet without the railway network, we would never have developed into the world’s first truly industrialised nation, and Britain today simply wouldn’t work. Whether we as individuals take it for granted or not, Britain today still needs the rail network that was established 150 years ago.

  THE WAY OF THE WAGON

  Before the railways, goods that had to be transported in bulk went by sea around the coast and on rivers and canals inland. Lugging heavy goods such as timber or coal by horse and cart on Britain’s roads, even where there were well-surfaced highways, was slow and expensive. The canal network, developed during the eighteenth century, was the most cost-effective way of transporting vast quantities of coal from the Midlands coalfields. Being able to deliver it in bulk meant that the cost of coal was slashed and that helped to encourage all sorts of industries to use coal for steam power. Getting coal from the pits to the canals, of course, often presented its own problems. One of the solutions was to extend the wooden board pathways that were used for hauling coal to the surface in the mines. The earliest tracks of wooden planks, laid to stop the wheels of heavily laden coal wagons getting bogged down on the wet, muddy floor of the mine, sometimes had a slot between the timbers where a guide pole sticking out of the bottom of the wagon would fit to keep the wagon’s wheels running on the planks. The ‘slot car’ system later gave way to wooden rails that guided the wheels.

  The earliest of these ‘wagonways’ came long before the canal system, when they were used to move coal to river ports. Horses (or people if they would work cheaper) would be used to pull heavy trains of wagons on a slight downhill incline to the river. The slope made it easier for the horses to pull the huge loads: for the uphill journey on the way back, of course, the wagons were empty. One of the earliest examples was the Wollaton Wagonway, which was built just outside Nottingham in 1604. The wagonway was two miles long and cost about £170, which was a lot of money at the time. Even so, £85 per mile still seems cheap compared with the planned High Speed Two (HS2) rail link between London and Birmingham. The entire 335 miles of the new rail development, which will link with Manchester and Leeds, is estimated to cost £30 billion – that’s more than £89 million per mile!

  But £89 million per mile buys you a heck of a lot more than a wagonway. It gives you the ability to run trains at up to 250mph and cuts the journey time from London to Birminghan to under an hour. Even with a good downhill incline (which you’re clearly not going to get all the way from London to Birmingham) and even if it was possible to do the journey non-stop without messing about changing horses, London to Birmingham on a wagonway would have taken at least a day and a half.

  The wooden rails of the wagonways caused problems in that they wore out, or buckled or rotted, so they had to be replaced fairly frequently. They then tried ‘capping’ the wooden rails with iron, but that caused the wooden wagon wheels to wear out. The obvious solution was to have iron wheels, which ultimately ran on solid iron rails. The iron rail-and-wheel combination could carry far heavier loads than its wooden equivalent but eventually, from the time they were first laid at Derby Station in 1857, steel rails were accepted as the way forward.

  ABSOLUTELY STEAMING!

  Once the Industrial Revolution began to gather pace, the demand for coal became ever greater. Steam power was all the rage and coal was what everyone wanted to fire their boilers. By 1800, the firm of Boulton and Watt in Birmingham had built almost 500 steam engines, most of which were being used to power machinery in mills and factories. But if a steam engine could power machinery, turning flywheels that ran a shaft that used pulleys and gears to run all sorts of machines, then surely one could be used to haul goods on the wagonways? There were people who thought that a crazy idea, who thought that steam engines needed to be bolted down, that they would shake themselves to bits if they were made to move around and that a dangerous mobile furnace on wheels feeding a boiler that might blow itself apart at any moment was complete lunacy. There were others, however, who were clever enough, or daft enough, to give it a go.

  A steam engine that could operate on the railways, pulling greater loads at higher speeds, was something that several engineers were working hard to perfect. In 1801, Cornish engineer Richard Trevithick built a steam engine that would run not on rails but out on the public roads. He called it the Puffing Devil and tested it in London where the engine ran perfectly on its first outing but during further tests three days later, it broke down.

  Trevithick and his cousin, who had been steering the beast, left the Devil under some shelter and went into a pub for lunch. While they were eating goose and quaffing a few ales, they let the boiler run dry and the Puffing Devil turned into a Fiery Devil by bursting into flames. The machine was destroyed, but it didn’t put Trevithick off his experiments with steam. He had been around steam engines all of his life as his father was a mine ‘captain’, the most senior foreman in the mine, and the copper mines that were part of the landscape of Trevithick’s childhood used steam engines to pump water out of the tunnels.

  When Trevithick became a mining engineer, he designed steam engines that would use steam at higher pressures than had been used before, calculating that advances in the process for producing the wrought-iron boiler plates and pistons would make them strong enough to contain the pressure without blowing up (although one of his pumping engines did just that in Greenwich in 1803, killing four men).

  Trevithick kept at it, adapting his designs so that he could use higher-pressure steam to provide more force, allowing him to get more work out of a smaller engine. That meant that he could start to think about making his engines portable – even self-propelled. In 1804, he adapted an engine that he had built at the Pen-y-Darren ironworks in Merthyr Tydfil. The engine was intended to power a heavy hammer used for crushing ore, but Trevithick altered it to make the engine drive itself along on wheels. The boss at the Pen-y-Darren works had bet one of his rich mine-owner friends 500 guineas (that’s at least £25,000 in today’s money – it must have been like Richard Branson having a bet with Alan Sugar) that Trevithick’s steam engine could pull ten tons of iron ten miles along the Merthyr Tydfil Tramroad. In fact, Trevithick pulled ten tons of iron, five wagons and seventy men along the rails. The weight of the load, and the engine, broke some of the rails on which it was running and the Merthyr line returned to using lighter, horse-drawn wagons after Trevithick’s experiment, but he had certainly started something, as well as winning his boss a tidy packet.

  Trevithick wasn’t the only one in the mining business to experiment with steam engines hauling wagons. In 1813, mining engineer William Hedley built an engine that he called Puffing Billy at the Wylam Colliery just outside Newcastle upon Tyne. The engine, and its sister, Wylam Dilly, were designed to haul coal on the wagonway that connected the colliery to the River Tyne at Lemington. The engines were rebuilt with four axles rather than two – eight wheels spreading the weight to avoid breaking the cast-iron wagonway plates – then changed again when more robust rails were laid. Messing around with steam engines in this way might seem like an expensive indulgence for the mine owner, Christopher Blackett, who funded Hedley’s engine-building experiments, but the alternative was to use heavy horses and they were in short supply (as was horse fodder), due to so many of them being used by the military to fight Napoleon in Europe. Puffing Billy and Wylam Dilly turned out to be a sound investment, though, as they stayed in service for almost fifty years. Puffing Billy is now at the Science Museum in London and Wylam Dilly at the Royal Museum in Edinburgh.

  BY GEORGE!

  Hedley’s engines were important not only because they proved that steam locomotives could have long, reliable lives, but also because they operat
ed at the same colliery where a man called George Stephenson maintained the pumping engine. George’s son, also called George, was a proper boy who was fascinated by all things mechanical – especially steam engines. By the time he was fifteen he was grafting with spanners and rags alongside his father and he soon moved on to a variety of machine-minding mining jobs. In 1811, he repaired the pumping engine at High Pit near Killingworth and did it so well that before long he was in charge of all the colliery engines in the area.

  Like Hedley, Stephenson built his own steam locomotives for use at various collieries, adapting and improving designs developed by others. When a group of mill owners, mine owners and other merchants decided that they needed a rail line to transport their goods to the River Tees, Stephenson persuaded them that it should use steam locomotives. In 1821 he was given the job of building the railway from Witton Park to Stockton-on-Tees via Darlington. It was twenty-six miles long – the longest in the world at that time.

  Stephenson built several engines to run on the line, but the engine that pulled the first wagons on the Stockton and Darlington Railway (S&DR) was Locomotion No. 1. On its inaugural journey, Locomotion No. 1 pulled thirty-three wagons carrying coal, flour and more than 600 passengers. All except the VIPs rode in open carriages; the posh folks sat in something that looked like a large garden shed. The train chugged along at about 12mph and when it arrived in Stockton there was a crowd of 40,000 people there to meet it.

  The Stephensons liked to keep their business in the family. George’s eighteen-year-old son Robert (no, not another George) worked with his father on the S&DR. Father and son also became involved in building another new railway, this time the world’s first intercity line between Liverpool and Manchester. The thirty-five-mile railway began in Liverpool with a tunnel more than a mile long underneath the city. The line included sixty-four bridges and viaducts, as well as cuttings through solid rock and an iron bridge at Water Street in Manchester: it was a marvel of civil engineering. Although almost everyone believed that the line was a sound investment – 308 shareholders had parted with their hard-earned cash to own a slice of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway (L&MR) – not everyone was convinced that steam locomotives were the best power option. The S&DR, after all, didn’t run entirely with steam engines: anyone who paid to use the track could transport wagonloads of goods pulled by horses if they so chose. Many colliery tracks also used cables, wound by stationary steam engines, to haul wagonloads of coal, a method that was especially effective on steep gradients where a steam locomotive’s metal wheels couldn’t grip the rails.