How Britain Worked Page 11

  The voices of Loudon and others of influence were being heard by the town planners and local authorities, who had been tasked by the government to clear the streets of sewage and give city dwellers a decent living environment. Some industrialists, like the Cadbury family, took the opportunity when expanding their factories to build highly desirable homes for their workforce. The Cadbury company, who had been tea and coffee dealers, had expanded into cocoa and, famously, making chocolate. Like a number of other benevolent employers, the Cadbury family believed that a happy worker was a reliable and productive one. When they built their new factory at Bournville in 1879, they also built houses for the workforce that had their own gardens, as well as open spaces that encouraged their employees to enjoy the fresh air during their free time.

  ONE MAN WENT TO MOW

  Towards the end of the nineteenth century, new housing projects were designed to allow for garden areas and tree-lined streets made for a far more pleasant living space. While larger houses in the suburbs, with big gardens, were affordable only by middle-class professionals and merchants, local authorities were also becoming involved, and the first council houses were starting to appear. These houses, too, were surrounded by gardens.

  All of these new gardens included areas of lawn. The Victorians, who were mad keen on inventing machines to do all sorts of jobs, just had to come up with a way of cutting the grass that was more efficient and more mechanical than simply having someone stroll up and down with a scythe. That really did look a bit too medieval for the thoroughly modern Victorians. The man who came up with the first practical lawn mower was Edwin Beard Budding, who filed a patent for his grass-cutting machine in 1830, which is slightly before the Victorian era (she came to the throne in 1837), but by the time the lawn mower really caught on, it was her face on the coins and banknotes.

  Born in 1796, Budding trained as an apprentice carpenter. He moved on to work on factory machinery and it was while working in a woollen mill that he got the idea for his lawn mower. The mill was producing cloth for guards’ uniforms, so it had to have a perfect finish. A rotating blade was used to skim the surface of the cloth to remove any loose fibres and produce a smooth ‘nap’. In fact, the nap would lie perfectly smooth in one direction but slightly rough in the other. They use the same technique in woollen mills today, especially when they are producing the green baize cloth for snooker tables. The wool is expected to have a smooth run and a rough run, where the ball will run faster or slower, and it has to be right when the world’s top players can have a fortune in prize money riding on just one shot.

  Budding realised that the rotating blade could be used along with a flat blade to trap and cut blades of grass on a lawn. We took a look at the plans for his original machine and decided that, in order to see how well it worked, we would build our own. It took a fair amount of work but I had some lads helping me who knew exactly what they were doing. Budding would have been seriously impressed. They took his drawings and used CAD (Computer Aided Design) technology to recreate the parts that must have taken him forever to make. We visited the Science Museum in London to take a look at the earliest version of Budding’s machine and work out how it was all put together. The tricky bit was the blades. The young engineers with their computer technology couldn’t work out how Budding had attached the actual cutting edges to the rotating blade assembly. There didn’t appear to be any riveting involved and it was too early for welding. It turned out that the blades were pushed into slots and little metal wedges were hammered in to hold them in place. Once the metal had rusted a little, the blades were fixed in place for good. Clever, practical and not something you would come up with by using a computer!

  The blades were turned by gears that delivered the power from a cast-iron roller at the rear of the machine. There was a crude clutch, actually just a long metal arm, that could be used to knock the gears apart so that the mower could be pushed across the lawn without the blades turning and ruining a cut pattern that had taken ages for the gardeners to achieve. With the mower, you see, the roller flattened the grass after cutting first in one direction and then, on the return journey, flattened the next cutting lane in the other direction. In this it differed from the nap on a snooker table as on the snooker table you don’t have the stripes that mowing creates in the lawn. Getting the stripe pattern to look immaculate became part of the gardeners’ art.

  Budding’s mower was a heavy beast. The cast-iron arms that formed the side frames were beautifully curved. Had they been straight, they would have worked just as well, but they wouldn’t have looked as nice. Victorian engineering was as much about form as it was about function. The arms had grips at the end that allowed you to push the thing, but, because it was so heavy, there was another handle that swung out to the front so that another man could do some pulling – mowing the lawn was still a two-person job. As soon as we finished machining the last of the parts and assembled the whole mower, we took it out for a trial run. It worked a treat, shearing the grass very nicely and leaving stripes, even though the grass we were cutting was a bit damp. Fine for a scythe, but not so good for a heavy old lawnmower which tended to slip and skid a bit.

  A lawnmower like this was no use for cutting the grass in the front garden of a small house where the lawn was only a few paces long, and these were expensive machines that would cost a working man a month’s wages. Machine-cut lawns, however, became all the rage amongst those who could afford them. As well as building the machines themselves, Budding and his business partner licensed their manufacture to Ransomes who became one of the world’s most famous lawnmower companies.

  I’ve always had a soft spot for lawnmowers, as it was thanks to them that I first got interested in engines. As a kid I loved taking old Suffolk Punch motor mowers apart, making them work, then running them till they blew up so that I had to fix ’em up all over again. Hours of fun, although I wasn’t that interested in actually cutting any grass. The tattoo I have on my leg – the flaming piston – is a piston from a Suffolk Punch.

  We needed our lawnmower to be ready in time to help cut the grass the old-fashioned way in time for the new season at the Birmingham Botanical Gardens. We had to have the rock garden sorted as well and my job there involved using a technique that was devised by garden designer James Pulham. As well as using natural stone in the rock constructions that were his speciality, he made the most fantastic grottoes, fountains and ferneries using a material that was known as Pulhamite. He would use rubble, old bricks and stones to create a basic structure and then cover it in a kind of cement that he mixed to achieve the colour and texture of natural stone. Pulham then moulded and modelled the cement, spreading it over his base material to make rocks that looked so much like the real thing, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Because Pulhamite was often used alongside real rocks, that was entirely the point.

  I don’t know if anyone could tell whether my efforts were the real thing or not, but the whole restoration of the rock garden and cascade (which is a Grade II listed structure) was done along with specialists called the Rock & Water Group. We were all proud that when the restored garden and cascade was officially opened by local MP Gisela Stuart, it was renamed the Diamond Jubilee Cascade.

  Gardening has come a long way since the days when you needed a gang of peasants with scythes to mow the lawn. The average man now walks 220 miles behind his lawnmower during his lifetime and we all take it for granted that we have gardens outside our back doors, garden centres where we can drop in to buy all kinds of plants and public parks that are free for everyone to use. It’s one of the most pleasing and unexpected legacies of the great Industrial Revolution.

  GET THE ENGINE RUNNING

  The beam engine was a steam-driven pumping machine, the first really useful steam engine. If you were to ask the average man-in-the-street who invented the steam engine he might say ‘George Stephenson’ because he’s getting mixed up between his steam engines and steam trains. He might even say James Watt, because
he knew that Mr Watt was very successful when it came to building steam engines for industry. But not many people you stopped would be able to tell you that Thomas Newcomen designed his steam engine in 1712, a century before Stephenson put his first locomotive on the rails and almost twenty-five years before James Watt was even born. His machine wasn’t like the traction engines that I’ve been lucky enough to drive during the making of the TV show. It didn’t go anywhere. It was permanently installed on site, pretty much a building in its own right.

  Newcomen, from Dartmouth in Devon, was an ironmonger with an interest in all things mechanical. He looked at the ideas that had been tried by other inventors and engineers working on pumping systems and then added a few twists of his own, to create a piece of machinery that is a mechanical work of art. To understand how it operates, imagine a beam balanced like a seesaw on the top of a wall. Attached to one end of the beam is pumping gear that will lift water. This reaches way down into the bowels of the earth and is pretty heavy, so when the machine is at rest, the pump end of the seesaw is in the ‘down’ position. On the other side of the wall, attached to the ‘up’ end of the seesaw beam, is a giant piston. Below the piston, at ground level, is a boiler heated by a coal-fired furnace at the base of the central wall.

  When a valve is opened, steam is released into the piston’s chamber. As the chamber instantly fills with steam, the valve closes just in time for another valve to open, spraying a squirt of cold water into the steam. The steam immediately condenses, contracting into a puddle of water at the bottom of the chamber. This creates a vacuum and pressure from the atmosphere forces the piston down into the chamber. The little puddle of water is ejected, the weight of the pump gear pulls the piston back up again, more steam enters the chamber, and the entire cycle starts all over again.

  BRICK BY BRICK

  The reason, then, that I was standing on top of a mound of clay was because I was collecting some of that muck to make the bricks we needed, to restore some of the brickwork on a beam engine. The whole process started with a barrow-load of very wet, sticky clay at the York Handmade Brick Company just outside Alne in North Yorkshire. They’ve been making bricks here for more than seventy years and, while they have the most modern kilns and processes to ensure that all of their regular products are spot on, the guys there offered to lead me through the way bricks would have been made more than a century ago. The brickworks, like most brickworks, sits right beside the raw material that they need. They dig the clay out of the ground on site and get to work with it. Actually, it’s not quite that easy. The raw clay is heavy with water and they have to let it dry out, leaving it outside to weather like seasoning timber – the sun and the frost breaking it down until it is almost crumbly. Then they put the water back in again, but do so in a controlled way to achieve a mixture of the right consistency for making bricks.

  This part of the process is called ‘tempering’ and is best done by a machine that mulches the clay up into a mixture of clay, sand, water and other ingredients (sometimes old pulverised bricks or even ground glass) depending on what colour the brick is meant to be and what it’s going to be used for. Two centuries ago, this process would have been done by hand, or rather by foot. The brick makers would have bashed their mixture with clubs, turned it with spades and even trodden it with their bare feet – a bit like peasants treading grapes in France but without an end result that would leave you legless. Maybe I spoke too soon there. I had a go at mixing the clay with my shoes and socks off, and treading that mix, slipping around and struggling for balance, would have left my legs spent if I’d had to do it all day. This was a job that children often used to do, as their smaller feet were good at feeling for little stones in the clay that could burst when the brick was fired.

  Fortunately, when we were filming, we had to rely on the old Blue Peter trick of using ‘one I made earlier’, because we needed far more mix than I could produce in the time that we had. I would have had to march up and down for days in the plastic trough we were using if I was ever going to get my mix to the right consistency. The proper mix was available inside the brickworks and I was shown how take a portion of clay called a clot (about the size of a small loaf), dust it in sand and then ‘dash’ it into a mould (you have to dump it in hard to make sure you don’t have any air bubbles in there). Then you have to trim off the excess, dust the top with sand, knock the clay out onto the workbench and slide it onto a drying tray. We were using a metal form, but wooden moulds were what would have been used in times past – they were often made from beech, because the clay didn’t stick to it so easily. The reason the sand was dusted in the mould and on the clay was to stop it from clinging to the mould.

  The guys who were working on special handmade brick orders made it all look so easy but once you have picked up a few dozen of those clots and dumped them in the mould, you start to feel it in your arms. The blokes who were showing me the ropes have arms like pistons and can turn out over a thousand bricks a day each. That’s about the same as a brick maker would have been expected to do during a fourteen-hour shift a couple of hundred years ago. If he was working as part of a team, with one delivering clay, one cutting clots, one moulding bricks and a couple of others carrying and stacking, together they could produce 3,000 to 5,000 a day. This was piece work, so the more they made, the more they were paid: a brick maker in the middle of the nineteenth century would earn around four shillings for every thousand bricks he produced. A thousand bricks a day is some going, but to build an average-sized house might take 20,000 bricks. Even so, that’s only a fraction of the four-and-a-half million bricks made at the York Handmade Brick Company every year.

  The team at the brickworks had made a special mould for me that set my name in each brick, which was a nice touch – much appreciated! They had also made a batch of bricks ahead of time because the ones I turned out would need at least two weeks to dry. Believe it or not, the bricks I moulded each still had over a pint of water in them. If they were to go into a kiln like that, the water would heat up, expand and blow the brick apart. We didn’t want that happening, especially as we were going to fire the bricks in a very special kiln.

  Bricks are bulky, heavy objects that are expensive to transport. At one time, rather than shipping tons of bricks to a building site, the brick makers would make the bricks on site instead, using local clay. We decided to try to do it just like that, building a kiln in much the same way that we did when I was smelting iron for the filming of The Boat That Guy Built. The brick maker’s kiln was called a clamp. We used old bricks to build thick walls, placed the bricks to be fired in an even pattern inside, then built the walls over to roof it all in. There was no mortar used, just a bit of clay plastered on the outside to stop up any gaps (there were gaps left intentionally at ground level to act as flues and allow air to be drawn in). We lit a fire inside the clamp, stoking it with wood through a door. A small hole in the roof let the smoke out, although smoke was filtering out through every little crack it could find around the walls.

  Job done. All that we had to do now was check that the fire wasn’t burning too fiercely and that we had enough wood to keep stoking it. It would take at least ten hours to fire our bricks in this way: the more bricks there are in your clamp, the longer it will take. We had a few dozen bricks in ours, but when this technique was used a couple of hundred years ago, they would build a huge clamp that could fire around 40,000 bricks. Even a million bricks in a clamp was not unheard of! Some clamps burned for three weeks, some might take three months.

  It had been a cold, damp day and it was very pleasant standing round, warming our hands by the clamp and supping a cup of tea. Inside the clamp, the temperature was several hundred degrees but outside it was like a big radiator. Then I heard a strange, dull, popping sound. Then another one. The lads from the brickworks had a little chuckle to themselves and when I asked what was going on they just shrugged and said, ‘Clay must still have been a bit wet, Guy – that’s your bricks exploding!’ Fortunatel
y, only a few of them went pop and when we returned the next morning to take a look at the end result, we had plenty to help with the beam engine job.

  ALL FIRED UP

  The actual job of a beam engine was to pump water out of a mine. Flooding was just one of the hazards faced by the men working underground but it was also a major frustration for mine owners. They knew that they had rich seams of coal down there, but couldn’t get at them if the tunnels and shafts kept filling up with water. And from the early part of the seventeenth century onwards, Britain needed all the coal it could get. The Great Fire of London in 1666 brought about legislation that prevented people from using the most convenient material for building houses – wood – not only because it was such a fire risk but also because the government was concerned about Britain’s woodlands disappearing. Wood being burned as fuel meant that less wood was available to the government for the building of warships. So they thought they would preserve the forests by encouraging people to build with bricks and burn something else. The message was, ‘burn coal not the forests’ which is ironic, really, because the coalfields started out as forests.

  A LONG, LONG TIME AGO...

  Around 300 million years ago, vast tropical forests covered most of the earth’s surface. It was a time when the first dinosaurs had yet to appear, although there were probably a few lizard-like creatures roaming around, some big enough that you wouldn’t want to bump into one on the way home from the pub. Then there was a catastrophe, some kind of global warming event, and the forests died. They collapsed to form dense layers of decaying vegetation on the ground but were then flooded with water, creating huge peat bogs. Over thousands of years the peat bogs were slowly covered with layer upon layer of silt, sand and rocks until what had been a forest was now buried deep underground. The layers of rock and soil and water above pressed down on the old forest layer, compacting it and transforming it into what we now know as coal. Coal may look like rock, but it’s actually organic, made from plants, which is why it burns. There’s a basic rule of science that says, “You can’t destroy energy, you can only change it into something else.’ The energy that a tree absorbs from the rays of the sun goes into creating the carbon-rich wood of its trunk. That energy is still locked away in the carbon of coal and in burning it, we create a chemical reaction that changes the energy, releasing it as heat and light.