Biographies of Working Men | Page 9

drained fens of Lincolnshire, or traverse the
broad roads of the rugged Snowdon region; whether we turn to St.
Katharine's Docks in London, or to the wide quays of Dundee and
those of Aberdeen; whether we sail beneath the Menai suspension
bridge at Bangor, or drive over the lofty arches that rise sheer from the
precipitous river gorge at Cartland, we meet everywhere the lasting
traces of that inventive and ingenious brain. And yet, what lad could
ever have started in the world under apparently more hopeless
circumstances than widow Janet Telford's penniless orphan
shepherd-boy Tam, in the bleakest and most remote of all the lonely
border valleys of southern Scotland?

II.
GEORGE STEPHENSON, ENGINE-MAN.
Any time about the year 1786, a stranger in the streets of the grimy
colliery village of Wylam, near Newcastle, might have passed by
without notice a ragged, barefooted, chubby child of five years old,
Geordie Stephenson by name, playing merrily in the gutter and looking
to the outward eye in no way different from any of the other colliers'
children who loitered about him. Nevertheless, that ragged boy was yet
destined in after-life to alter the whole face of England and the world
by those wonderful railways, which he more than any other man was
instrumental in first constructing; and the story of his life may rank
perhaps as one of the most marvellous in the whole marvellous history
of able and successful British working men.
George Stephenson was born in June, 1781, the son of a fireman who
tended the pumping engine of the neighbouring colliery, and one of a
penniless family of six children. So poor was his father, indeed, that the
whole household lived in a single room, with bare floor and mud wall;
and little Geordie grew up in his own unkempt fashion without any
schooling whatever, not even knowing A from B when he was a big lad
of seventeen. At an age when he ought to have been learning his letters,
he was bird's-nesting in the fields or running errands to the Wylam
shops; and as soon as he was old enough to earn a few pence by light
work, he was set to tend cows at the magnificent wages of twopence a
day, in the village of Dewley Burn, close by, to which his father had
then removed. It might have seemed at first as though the future

railway engineer was going to settle down quietly to the useful but
uneventful life of an agricultural labourer; for from tending cows he
proceeded in due time (with a splendid advance of twopence) to leading
the horses at the plough, spudding thistles, and hoeing turnips on his
employer's farm. But the native bent of a powerful mind usually shows
itself very early; and even during the days when Geordie was still
stumbling across the freshly ploughed clods or driving the cows to
pasture with a bunch of hazel twigs, his taste for mechanics already
made itself felt in a very marked and practical fashion. During all his
leisure time, the future engineer and his chum Bill Thirlwall occupied
themselves with making clay models of engines, and fitting up a
winding machine with corks and twine like those which lifted the
colliery baskets. Though Geordie Stephenson didn't go to school at the
village teacher's, he was teaching himself in his own way by close
observation and keen comprehension of all the machines and engines
he could come across.
Naturally, to such a boy, the great ambition of his life was to be
released from the hoeing and spudding, and set to work at his father's
colliery. Great was Geordie's joy, therefore, when at last he was taken
on there in the capacity of a coal-picker, to clear the loads from stones
and rubbish. It wasn't a very dignified position, to be sure, but it was
the first step that led the way to the construction of the Liverpool and
Manchester Railway. Geordie was now fairly free from the uncongenial
drudgery of farm life, and able to follow his own inclinations in the
direction of mechanical labour. Besides, was he not earning the grand
sum of sixpence a day as picker, increased to eightpence a little later on,
when he rose to the more responsible and serious work of driving the
gin-horse? A proud day indeed it was for him when, at fourteen, he was
finally permitted to aid his father in firing the colliery engine; though
he was still such a very small boy that he used to run away and hide
when the owner went his rounds of inspection, for fear he should be
thought too little to earn his untold wealth of a shilling a day in such a
grown-up occupation. Humbler beginnings were never any man's who