Unlocking the Early Railway Manager - Pt 3 - Three Engineers (again) and Some Soldiers

This is the third part of the ‘Turnip Rail Project’ that I hope will determine the nature of early railway manager. For those of you who are unaware of the process I am undertaking, I will, on my blog, be doing some new and original research. Simply put, our knowledge of early railway managers is minimal. There are some historians who have made broad statements about their backgrounds and work, however, more actual statistical research needs to be done. If you would like more information please see the first Blog post in the series (here) and the follow-up (here) where I presented my first findings and preliminary thoughts.

Principally, the 1848 Railway Officials Directory showed that three engineers, Joseph Locke, Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Robert Stephenson, dominated the engineering activities in the early British railway industry. However, my good friend Kevin was good enough to point out that many of these engineers may have been appointed for ornamental reasons so as to lend integrity to the company and allow them to attract potential investment.

I thought I would look a bit further into this. I found that of the 51 companies that had Locke, Brunel and Stephenson involved, in only 23 cases was their engineering role shared with one or more other engineer. Thus, the possibility of their appointments having ‘ornamental’ status was increased in these cases.

This left 28 of the cases where Locke, Brunel and Stephenson were the sole engineer listed, and while the actual day-to-day engineering of these lines may have been under the charge of men in their employ, the whole of the engineering side of their businesses would have been under their ultimate control. The 28 lines on which they had charge of engineering totalled 1396.16 miles, or 33.17% of the 4208.85 miles that the three men were involved with in some way. The 28 concerns were mostly small or medium sized railways, and the only large one was the Great Western Railway over which Brunel had complete control of its engineering affairs. Thus, as they were only engineers involved their appointments were more than just being ‘ornamental.’

Conversely, the 23 companies that had multiple engineers, but were under the three men’s partial charge, constituted 2812.6875 miles, or 66.82% of the total. Indeed, in many of these cases the railways were some of the largest concerns in the land, such as the London and North Western, London and South Western, Midland, York, Newcastle and Berwick and South Eastern Railways. Thus, it could be argued that the sheer size of the companies meant that the work involved in engineering was simply beyond the scope of one engineer.

This said, only six of the 23 railway companies were over 100 miles long, leaving 15 railways that were short in length but with multiple engineers engaged on them. The total length of these 15 railways was 679.58 miles (16.15%). Subsequently, these companies were the best candidates for being railways where the involvement of one of the engineering luminaries was for the purposes of attracting investors. Lastly, in only five cases, all of which involved Stephenson, was there any hint of him taking an ‘ornamental’ position as he adopted the title of ‘Consulting Engineer.’

Thus, there seems to be three tiers of these engineers’ involvement in the companies. Firstly, there were those companies where they had sole control, and while they may have been originally appointed for ‘ornamental’ reasons to attract investors, they had practical responsibilities. Secondly, there were cases where they did share control of engineering within a company with another individual, but the size of the company may have precluded sole control being possible given their other commitments. Indeed, these companies were some of the largest and, therefore, were most unlikely to have appointed them for ornamental reasons as the companies didn’t need that type of support to gain investment. Lastly, there were a handful of companies where they were most likely appointed for ornamental reasons because they shared the engineering title within small railway companies that possibly didn’t need two engineers. Therefore, the proportion of engineering appointments of these three engineers that were purely ornamental was seemingly small.

I also want to talk about the ‘military’ aspect of management. One of the principal claims by railway historians has been that ex-military officers were brought in to manage the early railways as they were some of the few individuals who had experience at administering large bodies of men. As stated in the last blog, the the 130 in the sample had 322 management posts. These were held by 226 individuals. If I am to believe Bonavia’s assessment of the senior management within the early railways, military men should feature prominently among the senior managers, especially in the administrative positions.

Unfortunately for Bonavia the evidence doesn’t support his argument. In the 1848 sample only 8 of the 226 (3.54%) men involved in managing Britain’s railways were listed as having a military title. Of these, seven were ex-army captains and one had been a member of the Royal Navy. Of the eight, three, Jee, McClean and Moorsom, were engineers; four, Badham, Hartnoll, O’Brien and Charlewood, were secretaries; and one, Mark Huish, was ‘manager.’ Of course, there may have been more military men within the 226 listed managers that didn’t cite their military titles, so there may have been more that I am missing. Furthermore, there may have been more ex-military men employed further down in the companies’ hierarchies that were not shown as the directory covered only senior managers. Yet, on this information alone it could be tentatively said that, amongst the senior managers of Britain’s railways in 1848, the number of military men was smaller far than Bonavia supposed. In reality I have been a bit bold with this statement. But, hopefully, the level of involvement by ex-military men may become clearer when I look at the other railway official’s directories from 1841 and 1847.

Unlocking the Early Railway Manager (The Turnip Rail Project) - Part 2 - Three Engineers

So this is the first part of my ‘Turnip Rail Project’ to actually feature research. I have had one of my friends describe it as a ‘research Time Team.’ If last weeks’ Time Team is anything to go by I certainly hope not; they found very little. For those who didn’t read my previous blog post, this is a project that I will present as I go that will determine the nature of the early British railway company managers. I will, therefore, include all my preliminary thoughts, mistakes and ideas. Primarily I will focus on the railway manager in the 1840s using three ‘railway officials’ directories from 1841, 1847 and 1848. If you want a bit more background, have a look at my last blog post here.

Anyway, in my time off over the last few days, away from my PhD and work, I have been ploughing through and processing the information contained in the 1848 directory of railway company officials. Yes, I am really that wild. I have also been watching Deadwood at the same time, so at least I can say that I have been doing something enjoyable (although Deadwood is pretty grim). Despite this distraction it has been a laborious task. But, the fruits at the end were most interesting.

I chose to start on the 1848 directory simply because it contained more information than the other two, and would reflect the state of British railway administration at a time when railways were in their ‘teenage’ years. In total I have collected data from 130 individual railways that were listed in the directory. For each, I have catalogued the number of officials in each railway, the number of posts listed, the names of the individuals and their positions. I have also noted the mileage of each railway, and in total the 130 railways operated 7117.55 miles of line in 1848. Originally I had calculated that there were 45,000 miles, but it is a wonder what a missing decimal point can do to my calculations.

Firstly, I will look at the sample of the managers’ post holdings. In total, 130 railways had 322 senior managerial posts according to the directory. Of these, 178 (55.28%) post were engineering roles (Engineer, Consulting Engineer, Assistant Engineer, Resident Engineer). Of course, I didn’t think straight at first, and for a very short while fell into the trap of thinking that this was 178 individual engineers. However, after playing around with Excel, I revised the stats. There were in fact 92 individuals, taking 177 positions on 123 railways. This meant that for some unknown reason 7 railways did not employ an engineer or did not list one. This may need a bit of looking into.

What is interesting is that while many Engineers only took assignments with one company, possibly indicating local relationships with the railway builders, personal connections with directors and individuals coming in from other industries to try their hand at railway building, a good number served multiple concerns. Three of the individuals on the list are names that have gone down in railway history. In 1848 Robert Stephenson (shown) was serving 26 railway companies, and Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Joseph Locke were both working with 13.

It is unlikely that they were directly involved all the time, and it is clear that on many of the companies that they worked on they received help. For example, Robert Stephenson was co-engineer with William Baker on the Birmingham, Wolverhampton and Stour Valley Railway, as well as J.E. Errington on the Lancaster and Carslisle Railway. Stephenson was also co-engineer on the London and North Western Railway with Joseph Locke. Lastly, Isambard Kingdom Brunel had a staggering seven Assistant Engineers on the Wiltshire, Somerset and Weymouth Railway. However, this was a unique example. In the majority of cases railways had only one or two engineers. Furthermore, the two engineers occasionally took the separate roles of ‘Resident Engineer,’ who was employed by the company, and ‘Consulting Engineer,’ who was called in when required. However, I admit that this was the arrangement on the London and South Western Railway (L&SWR) and it may have been different elsewhere.

Going back to the ‘big 3 engineers,’ (Brunel, Locke and Stephenson) I feel that the evidence does suggest that railway engineering in this country in 1848 was controlled by them. 51 of Britain’s railways had the 3 individuals involved. Simply based on the number of companies in existence, this put 28.81% of companies under their ultimate or shared engineering control. Yet, the engineers served many of the largest railway companies at the time, such as the London and North Western Railway, the London and South Western Railway, the Great Western Railway, the Midland Railway, the Eastern Counties Railway, the South Eastern Railway, the South Wales Railway and the York, Newcastle and Berwick. Thus, if mileage is taken into account, the three engineers were heading up engineering activities on 4208.85 miles of Britain’s railways, or 59.13%. Quite simply, this is a staggering amount of influence on the emergent railway industry.

Of course my brain is now buzzing with ideas about the influences that these relationships had on technology, more specifically the development of broad verses narrow gauge railways. After all, it wouldn’t be hard for the narrow gauge ideas of Locke and Stephenson, who engineered 3186.76 miles of Britain’s railways between them (44.77%) in 1848, to dominate when Brunel, who favoured broad gauge, only engineered 1022.08 miles (14.36%).

Yet, this isn't the overall purpose of the project. Hopefully in my next blog I’ll detail some of the findings and thinkings about the rest of the individuals in the survey. I'd be very interested to know whether the other engineers that weren't working with the luminaries had any links to them and what their backgrounds were. Also what about the other individuals listed? They were predominantly secretaries and their backgrounds were may be hard to get at. Also in the sample there were few managerial titles that we see in later railways such as 'Locomotive Superintendent' or 'Traffic Manager' and it'd be interesting to see if there was a correlation between the size of the railway and where these titles appear in the directory...anyway, I'll leave my musings for another time.

Pleas keep using the hash-tag - #TurnipRailProject - if you tweet about it!

Early railway networking...can you recommend a good engineer?

Last night I gave a paper at the London School of Economics on the development of the London and South Western Railway's management structure between 1836 and 1881. Of course, after such an event, there were a number of questions that were posed regarding the paper. These continued at the pub, the natural home it seems of the business historian. Of course, many subjects flew around, but one of the most interesting was the idea that railway engineers, especially in the early days of operation and construction, formed a 'who-knows-who' network that placed their students in important managerial positions in the emergent industry. This was because we knew that such railway luminaries such as Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Joseph Locke, both railway engineers with great influence in companies, placed their men in senior positions in railways they built.

Indeed, Locke, who built the London and South Western Railway is a particularly good example to show you what I mean. Locke had a reputation for having unbounded energy. He apparently moved so fast that his assistants found it difficult to keep up with the man. It is these assistants that are of interest. Indeed, perhaps Locke moved so fast that the assistants were simply left behind on the railways that he had built.
The number of the South Western's early managers that were Locke employees at some point meant that Locke had a heavy influence on the early management of the company. Both the first and second Locomotive Superintendents, Joseph Woods and John Viret Gooch (shown), had been employed by Locke. We only know that Woods was an employee of Locke's however more information is available about Gooch. He had aided his master on the construction of the Grand Junction Railway and in 1837 became its Resident Engineer. Gooch also had a link to another railway notable, in that his brother, Daniel Gooch, was the Great Western Railway's Chief Mechanical Engineer from 1837 to 1864. But it didn't stop there. One of Woods' first assistants was Joseph Beattie, who had charge of all the wagons and carriages on the line from 1839. He also had been a pupil of Locke's, also serving on the construction of the Grand Junction Railway and on the South Western.

However Locke's influence could not just be found in the Locomotive department. In 1836 he had became the company's consulting engineer. On resigning this post in 1849 he left in his place John Edward Errington. He also had aided Locke on the construction of the Grand Junction Railway, and had cooperated with him on the Lancaster and Carlisle Railway and thus had been in his employ for some time.

The moral of the story is that Locke was simply dropping engineers the South Western regularly to manage aspects of the company. Indeed, it also seems he did the same on the Grand Junction, which makes me think just who did he leave there? Of course I am only aware of the staff he got appointed on these two railways, but it is quite possible that on his other projects he did the same. Further, it would be fascinating to know which other engineers, such as Brunel or Stephenson perhaps, also left staff on railway companies. Indeed the South Western's Resident Engineer from 1870 was William Jacomb, a student of Brunel's who had been appointed from the Great Western Railway...however being dead since 1859, I doubt that the great man had anything to do with this appointment. Although, come to think of it I think that one of the directors of the South Western was a spiritualist...so, you never know. But, the fact was that Jacomb had been left on the Great Western when Brunel had died. He like Woods, Gooch, Beattie and Galbraith was simply left there. The main point is that early railway managers, particularly the engineers, seem to have had a significant influence on who was a railway manager in the companies' early years.

But why did these networks operate so fervently in the early railway? While the senior engineers are better known for building railways, in reality a lot of their work involved organising them as well. Indeed, many early railways, including the South Western and Great Western, were dominated by engineers. Locke even wrestled control of the L&SWR, for a short time, from the Directors of the company. They had this influence because, in reality, railway managers in the true sense of the word, those who had their entire careers in the industry, didn't exist in the 1830s and 40s. Going back through my blogs you will find a piece that I wrote describing how early railway managers were from a range of industries, that had some loose association with what the companies were doing, i.e. moving traffic and engineering. You can find it Here. This, therefore, provides a possibility as to why exactly senior railway engineers placed their men in the new companies...there was possibly very few people who could undertake managerial responsibilities, and being in such a position of control these engineers simply put forward their own men.

Therefore it seems an interesting future research agenda is to assess what the influence of these networks had on shaping how Britain's railways came to be managed. Given the importance of management structure to company efficiency, operation procedures and profitability, could it be possible that the actions of only a few individuals in the early history of Britain's railways, came to shape their course over the next 180 years. Well this is an open ended question that at some point I hope to answer.