George Stephenson was born in the pit village of Wylam near Newcastle in 1781 and started
work at eight, keeping the cows off the colliery's horse-drawn wagon way. He never went to
school and by ten he was working full-time in the pit. He showed a natural gift for mending
and inventing machines and slowly rose to become the colliery's resident engineeer. He also
showed natural gifts for fighting - willing to wrestle any brawny pitman who dared to cross
him, and to argue his case in his broad Northumberland dialect with any member of the local
aristocracy or professional engineering fraternity who dared to doubt his worth. Sir Humphrey
Davy, later President of the Royal Society, considered that Stephenson, then an unknown
pitman, was 'a thief, and not a clever thief'. This early battle was one of the many
Stephenson waged against the establishment.
Stephenson went on to build the world's first public railways: the Stockton and Darlington in
1825 and the Liverpool-Manchester in 1830. He also played a vital part in the birth of
Railway Mania and in the rise of the notorious George Hudson, the Railway King, who began
as a draper's assistant and built a railway empire worth thirty million.
Stephenson helped to change the face of civilisation by pioneering railways. He was a great
Victorian, yet very little was written about him between Samuel Smile's classic biography in
1857 and Hunter Davies' book 'George Stephenson' written in 1975. Davies visited the
scenes of Stephenson's boyhood and days of fame, produced much original research and
created a memorable human portrait not only of a great Victorian but of an original and
remarkable man.
Click here for a large picture of George Stephenson.(51,911 bytes)
Click Jon Rouse
