Jonathan Backhouse, the dastardly Duke and how gold ‘balanced the wheels’ of one of the first British railways.
Considered superficially, the early history of the railways is also the early history of steam power. But there were steam engines before there were locomotives: the first patent for a steam-powered pump - designed to drain coal mines of flood water – was granted in 1698 to Thomas Savery of Modbury, Devon, and it worked (up to a point).
Looking back even further, in fact to the beginning of the first millennium, we find the aeolipile, probably built by Hero of Alexandria, and described as a simple, bladeless radial steam turbine which spins when the central water container is heated. Other than entertain, it did nothing useful.
Equivalently, there were railways before they were linked to steam engines. In Britain, these were inevitably associated with mining – usually coal but sometimes iron ore - and the earliest, horse-drawn and running on wooden tracks, were apparently designed by German engineers working at the Cumbrian collieries in the 1590s. In Austria, the wooden-tracked Reisszug leading to the large fortress above Salzburg was first described in 1515 and, disturbingly, is still in operation (hopefully upgraded).
Steam and rail really came together in the first quarter of the nineteenth century in Britain, where the pace of invention and innovation has been equated to Silicon Valley two centuries later.
In short, Cornish mining engineer Richard Trevithick, who had already constructed a couple of steam-powered carriages, built the first railway engine in 1804, which won a bet by hauling 10 tons of iron and 70 men along 10 miles of tramway (details vary) at Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales. He built two more, the last wonderfully called Catch-me-who-can, in 1808 and then he lost interest because his locomotives were too heavy for the iron tracks, which kept bending or breaking.
By 1813-1814, Puffing Billy built by Messrs Hedley, Forster and Hackworth was in operation hauling coal trucks along metal tracks to Lemington Docks in Northumberland, and a little more than 10 years later, George Stevenson, who in addition to his own range of inventions, had taken advantage of Trevithick’s disinterest to develop and dramatically improve many of his designs, as well as improve the track the engines ran on, launched the world’s first steam-powered passenger railway, running between Stockton and Darlington (26 miles apart).
The key characters in the drama are Jonathan Backhouse, Quaker and owner and manager of Backhouse’s Bank, Darlington, and William Harry Vane, third Earl of Darlington.
The Original Passenger Line
This story is set on this original Stockton/Darlington passenger line, in 1819, as the process of planning and track laying began to take hold. The key characters in the drama are Jonathan Backhouse, Quaker and owner and manager of Backhouse’s Bank, Darlington, and William Harry Vane, third Earl of Darlington.
Backhouse’s Bank, one of a number of Quaker-run banks in the north-east of England, was the primary source of capital for the new venture, which was supported by most inhabitants of this predominantly mining community. The spirit of the Industrial Revolution was in the air. England had, only four years earlier, dealt with Napoleon at Waterloo (in Belgium, not the London station) and the post-war economy was relatively strong.
Lord Darlington, however, took rather a dim view of all this progress. His ancestral estates, focused on Raby Castle and Barnard Castle in County Durham, were funded by agriculture not by industry, and he was, like the majority of nineteenth century aristocrats, a believer in the maintenance of the status quo. Moreover, he was a great foxhunting man and the new railway tracks were set to cross the coverts or territories of the Raby Hunt.
(Note: Fox hunts inevitably had rights to hunt across land owned or leased by others, and these rights were jealously guarded. Thus, the Stockton/Darlington railway was planned to cross the Raby Hunt’s territory, but this was not land necessarily owned directly by Lord Darlington).
Jonathan Backhouse (Northern Echo)
Lord Darlington’s commitment to the sport is probably best summed up by the description that auctioneers Christies included with the sale in 2006 of a rare edition of RABY HUNT -- Earl of Darlington’s Fox-Hounds. Operations of the Raby Pack, in the Years 1787 [-1826].
“The Earl of Darlington, subsequently the Marquess and Duke of Cleveland, continued to hunt, and to publish an account of his hunting, until 1839 when, at the age of seventy-three, he retired, noting, ‘Thus ends a season better for sport than the former year but unfortunate in many respects but in none so much as my own want of health, which obliges me to decline and relinquish my pack, to which I had been attached for fifty-three seasons.’”
William Vane, third Earl of Darlington by William Thomas Fry
Break the Bank
What was to be done? Vane had already written to the appropriate parliamentary committee informing it that the proposed railway would cut across his foxhunting coverts and, indeed, had won a vote in the Commons which blocked the railway’s development. The problem however was that the margin of victory had been small, and railway enthusiasts or ‘pioneers’ – led by an enthusiastic group of Quakers – were working hard to overturn the decision.
So, if London wouldn’t do in the long term, clearly the answer was to address the source of the trouble – not the railway company but the bank, Backhouse’s, which funded it. Vane, as well as being a committed foxhunter, had also been a student at Christchurch College, Oxford, and came up with, as Baldrick and Blackadder had it, a Cunning Plan: “as Cunning as a Fox who has just been appointed Professor of Cunning at Oxford University”.
The idea was simple – break Backhouse’s Bank by forcing (or attempting to force) the conversion of piles of banknotes into gold.
Gold Sovereign of 1819
Pay the Bearer on Demand
Until well into the twentieth century, British banks, including the Bank of England (BoE), were underpinned by gold at a fixed conversion rate to the pound, i.e. one paper pound to one gold sovereign. Thus, the holder of any banknote either issued by the BoE, or by a commercial bank such as Backhouse’s, was entitled upon demand to convert paper to metal. In practice, however, this facility was rarely used (although, as is always the case, there remained a preference for gold itself) and, indeed, was sometimes suspended, for example, in times of war.
There was, however, no war and Lord Darlington determined to ruin the bank by instructing his tenants to stockpile Backhouse’s paper and then send his agent, armed with this mass of banknotes, to demand immediate conversion into gold, knowing full well that few if any commercial banks ever had sufficient gold on hand to be able to cover all their paper liabilities without some notice.
On the other side of the counter, Backhouse got wind of the Earl’s plan and set out to borrow as much gold as he could lay his hands on from nearby Quaker banks. Then loading this into a carriage, he set out at a gallop which would not have disgraced Lord Darlington’s hunters, to return to Darlington.
But gold is heavy. And as Backhouse’s loaded carriage attempted to traverse Croft Bridge, some three miles outside Darlington, one of its front wheels broke and the rescue mission seemed doomed to failure. Backhouse was unperturbed and – at least this is how the story goes – shifted the disposition of gold within the carriage so the weight was to the back and the front axle bearing the broken wheel was lifted clear of the ground. The carriage, and moreover its contents, survived this unlikely three-mile wheelie. Backhouse’s Bank, and moreover the Stockton Darlington Railway, was saved to become the first railway passenger service when it opened 1825.
There are all sorts of apocryphal accounts of the words exchanged between Backhouse and Lord Darlington when they next met, but what is clear is that, a few years later, Jonathan Backhouse and his wife Hannah set off to become Quaker missionaries in America. At least for a while, Lord Darlington, despite the disruption to his precious coverts, continued foxhunting for many years and, moreover, in the archives of Barclays Bank. The books from 1819 survive with accounts of cash being taken to London and in the list of losses, the cost of a broken wheel at £2.3s.
With many thanks to Aelred Connelly (now of Darlington, Co. Durham) for suggesting this story.
