Thomas Telford
Nor pass the tentie curious lad.
Who o’er the ingle hangs his head.
And begs of neighbours books to read:
For hence arise
Thy country’s sons, who far are spread
Baith bold and wise.
Pan of a poem by Thomas Telford, published
in Ruddiman’s Edinburgh Magazine, 1779
Of the famous canal engineers it was Thomas Telford§ who, apart from his canal work, closed the gap between the canal age of the eighteenth century and the age of nineteenth-century engineering achievement.
Telford’s early life followed what, by now, must seem a familiar pattern – a poor childhood, training as a craftsman, introduction into engineering, and eventual fame and fortune. It is no wonder that Samuel Smiles became so fascinated by the lives of the engineers – they were all real, live evidence of the benefits of his famous doctrine of ‘self help’.
Thomas Telford was born in Glendinning in Eskdale in the Lowlands of Scotland on 9 August 1757. Three months later, his shepherd father died and his mother had to move into a small cottage, where they lived together in one room. The boy was fortunate that he had an uncle able and willing to pay for his schooling, although as soon as lessons were over what spare time he had was taken up in working for local farmers. The ‘tentie curious lad’ of Telford’s own poem was himself.
Schooling over, Telford was apprenticed in Langholm as a stone mason – a craft at which he became highly skilled and in which he took a great deal of pride. Smiles tells a story of Telford paying a visit to his old home in Eskdale in 1795, when he was well established in his new career in engineering. There he met an old friend and fellow-workman, Frank Beattie, who had turned to innkeeping. ‘What have you made of your mell and chisels?’ asked Telford. ‘Oh!’ replied Beattie, ‘they are all dispersed – perhaps lost.’ ‘I have taken better care of mine,’ said Telford; ‘I have them all locked up in a room at Shrewsbury, as well as my old working clothes and leather apron: you know one can never tell what may happen.’1
Thomas Telford inspecting work in the Highlands. Note that the navvies are local men, wearing the kilt. (A.D. Cameron)
Telford worked as a journeyman mason, and, in 1782, set off for London, where he was employed on the building of Somerset House. He was a keen and ambitious young man who was already determined on a rather more promising career than that of stone mason – his aim was to become an architect. He studied whenever he had time and opportunity, and saved his money. He was fortunate in having a patron, William Pulteney, who was prepared to exert his influence to help Telford advance his career. To say he was fortunate is really an understatement; architecture, unlike engineering, was an established profession which was not easily entered. A young man needed patronage. When his work on Somerset House was over, Telford moved down to Portsmouth, where he acquired some of the practical experience and knowledge of harbour construction that was to be put to use later.
The big step forward for Telford came in 1786 when, largely through his patron’s influence, he was appointed Surveyor for the County of Shropshire. This job brought him into an area in which the Industrial Revolution was already well advanced and into contact with large-scale civil engineering projects – mostly road and bridge building. He rebuilt the county jail and even had the opportunity to indulge his taste for stylish architecture. Anyone seeing his church at Madeley needs no further evidence to decide that the most sensible choice Telford ever made was to abandon the career of architect for that of engineer. It is competent, but dully derivative. His new engineering career began in earnest when, in October 1793, he was appointed ‘General Agent, Surveyor, Engineer, Architect and Overlooker of the Works’ for the Ellesmere Canal Company. He continued to work, part-time, as County Surveyor, but canal work soon took over. He was doubly fortunate in his first canal job, he began work under the guidance of the best of the canal engineers and certainly the one most willing to give of his own time and experience, William Jessop, and he arrived at a time when the company was ready to undertake the most ambitious civil engineering project of the century.
Telford’s early work with the Ellesmere was that of a superior dogsbody, turning his hand to anything from the supervision of bridge building to debt collection. It was tiring work, but excellent training for a man in a hurry to learn. By February 1795 Telford was thought to have learned enough to be given his first job as chief engineer, and he took over work on the Shrewsbury Canal on the death of the previous engineer, Josiah Clowes. Almost immediately after joining the company, Telford was faced with the problem of deciding on a design for a new aqueduct to carry the canal across the River Tern at Longdon, the original having been washed away in a flood. The obvious choice for the former stone mason would have been a masonry aqueduct, but the leading proprietors in the Shrewsbury company were the great iron founders–William and Joseph Reynolds, and John Wilkinson. The idea for an iron, instead of a stone, aqueduct was suggested by the Committee Chairman, Thomas Eyton, and was accepted. Telford took enthusiastically to the idea and went to work with William Reynolds on designing the structure. It was not a particularly impressive work, only just over 60 yards long and 16ft high, but it gave Telford the chance to work in a new material. He put the experience to good use.
Telford appears to have been an instant convert to the virtues of iron construction, though the actual design of the Longdon Aqueduct is more likely to have been that of the man with experience with the metal, Reynolds. (In his portrait, he had himself painted holding the plans of the aqueduct in his hand.) Nevertheless, Telford soon showed his own mastery of the material when he designed a road bridge at Buildwas, submitting his design for an iron bridge just three months after work began at Longdon. Then he returned to the Ellesmere Canal, where planning was well underway for the mightiest structure in the British canal system, the aqueduct across the River Dee.
Just as there is controversy over the allocation of credit for the Barton Aqueduct, so there is argument about how the honours should be divided for Pontcysyllte. Contemporary commentators were all but unanimous in giving the acclaim to Telford and, in his own autobiography, he wrote that the Committee was ‘pleased to accept my undertaking the conduct of this extensive and complicated work.’2 He was then, however, an old man and not untouched by vanity. The notion of the young man returning fired with enthusiasm, forcing his elders to accept his revolutionary plans, is certainly attractive and makes for a good story. Reality is more complex. There is one point over which there can be no argument. The original plan called for a series of locks to bring the canal down the sides of the Dee valley, with the river being crossed by a three-arched masonry aqueduct. Stone had already been quarried in readiness when, on 14 July 1795, Jessop proposed a very different plan for an iron trough aqueduct, to be carried at a higher level. How far he was swayed by Telford’s advocacy we cannot now know, but as Hadfield and Skempton have pointed out, Longdon was by no means the only major structure to be built in iron at this period. Outram had designed an iron aqueduct for the Derby Canal and the great iron bridge across the Wear at Sunderland had been built, while the American engineer Robert Fulton had suggested iron instead of stone for Marple aqueduct on the Peak Forest Canal, though his suggestion was turned down. Telford’s Advocacy of iron was not unique. However Jessop reached his conclusions, it was his reputation that carried the day for the new plan – and his reputation that would have suffered had the scheme failed. As chief engineer, the ultimate responsibility was his. Many years were to go by, and there were to be many changes in plan, before Pontcysyllte was complete, and, in the early stage, there were a good many worries over men’s reactions to working on such a structure, and Jessop expressed his concern in a letter to Telford of 26 July 1795:
‘In looking forward to the time when we shall be laying the Iron Trough on the Piers I foresee some difficulties that appear to me formidable – In the first place I see the men giddy and terrifyed in laying stones with such an immense depth underneath them with only a space of 6 feet wide & 10 feet long to stand upon and the same want of room will hardly allow space for the Beams and scaffolding while the Iron work is putting together.’
Quoted in Hadfield and Skempton. op, cit.
The spectacular Pontcysyllte Aqueduct, crossing the Dee near Llangollen. (British Waterways)
An engineering drawing of a section of Pontcysyllte, showing how the iron sections were bolted together. (Institution of Civil Engineers)
Telford himself gave details of the methods they employed during construction:
‘The stone piers are 18 in number, beside the two abutment piers; they were all built to the level of 20 feet, and then the scaffolding and gangways were all raised to that level, and the materials being brought from the north bank, the workmen always commenced at the most distant or south abutment pier, receding pier by pier to the north bank; and by this ascending from time to time in their work they felt no more apprehension of danger when on the highest, than at first on the lowest gangways.’
Thomas Telford, op. cit.
He was proud of his safety record, if a little unfeeling about the solitary victim: ‘… one man only fell during the whole of the operations in building the piers, and affixing the iron work upon their summit, and this took place from carelessness on his part.’
Telford’s enthusiastic advocacy no doubt contributed to the substitution of iron for masonry at Pontcysyllte and he was heavily involved in the actual construction, but Jessop remained chief engineer. It was the biggest undertaking of its kind of that period, 1,007ft long and 120ft high, and it remains the most impressive single monument to the work of the canal builders. The opening ceremony on 26 November 1805 was a suitably grand affair.3 The Shropshire Volunteers turned out for the occasion and brought along two brass field-pieces for firing salutes and their band for playing ‘loyal airs’. Many dignitaries made speeches and listened to others. Mr Telford’s praises were sung and banners were waved carrying poetic messages like,
‘Hero conquer’d Nature owns Britannia’s sway
While Oceans’ realms her matchless deeds display’
or the more mundane, if rather more pertinent: ‘Success to the iron trade of Great Britain of which Pontcysyllte Aqueduct is a specimen.’
A procession of barges crossed the aqueduct and, after the speech, came back again: ‘The discharge from the guns, as the procession returned, the plaudits of the spectators (calculated at full 8,000), the martial music, the echo reverberating from the mountains, magnified the enchanting scene; and the countenance of everyone present bespoke the satisfaction with which they contemplated this very useful and stupendous work.’ After that, there was a ‘sumptuous dinner’ for the dignitaries and roast sheep with ‘an ample addition of beef and ale’ for the workmen.
Before this event occurred, however, Telford had begun work on what, in terms of the size of the task, was the most ambitious of all British canal schemes – the Caledonian. Again, although Telford is credited with responsibility for the entire operation, throughout the first years of planning and early construction, Jessop played an important part. He prepared estimates, designed many features and acted as consultant engineer. The canal itself was part of a much wider project with which Telford was concerned – the plan for the development of the Scottish Highlands. In 1802 he carried out a survey for the Treasury Commissioners. The whole area was in an appallingly depressed condition – socially as well as economically. The scars of the disastrous uprising of 1745, and the evictions and appropriations of the new Highland landlords who had replaced the old-style chieftains, left a population dispirited and desperately poor. Telford proposed a road and bridge-building programme, harbour building and development, and the Caledonian Canal. The improved transport system would promote growth in the long term, and provide badly needed work in the short term.
The Caledonian Canal was planned to avoid the long sea route round the north coast of Scotland, by joining Fort William on the West Coast to Inverness on the East. Parliament authorised the canal’s construction and guaranteed the necessary finance. It was to be canal building on a massive scale, and, if any canal can be said to rival the greatest of the railway works, then this is it. For a start, it was not a narrow barge canal, but a ship canal; then, it was to be built through the heart of the Scottish Highlands. Lastly, it was to be built by a work force that, initially at any rate, was totally untrained. Such a scheme, set in a wild and remote region of Britain, would have been inconceivable less than half a century before. When work on the Caledonian began, just over forty years had passed since the opening of the Bridgewater Canal. Canal technology had not just advanced – it had leaped into a new age. The Caledonian was possible because the means to make it possible were available. When Brindley began to work on the tunnel at Harecastle on the Trent & Mersey, he had to build a crude atmospheric engine to his own design; before Telford began any work on the Caledonian, he ordered three Boulton & Watt steam engines for draining – a 36 HP engine, one at 26 HP and a small 6 HP engine.4 It is a fair indication of how far canal engineering had developed.
It was not any particular difficulty that made the Caledonian so remarkable. but the scale of the enterprise, the machinery that was brought in the number of workmen involved, the sheer quantity of earth and rock that had to be shifted. It was so remote that it was hardly likely to attract the sort of tourist who went to have a look at other canals in the making. But Telford was a great friend of the poet Robert Southey, and together they went to see the construction when activity on the canal was at its height. Southey left a record of what he saw.5 It is a doubly valuable record, for Southey was a professional writer who was able to describe the works with clarity and elegance, and, because he had the engineer with him he could describe what he saw with accuracy. It is worth quoting Southey at length, for there is no comparable eye-witness account of just what was involved in a major canal construction. They began at Fort Augustus:
‘Thursday Sept 16., 1819 – Went before breakfast to look at the Locks, five together, of which three are finished, the fourth about half-built, the fifth not quite excavated. Such an extent of masonry, upon such a scale, I have never beheld, each of these locks being 180 feet in length. It was a most impressive and rememberable scene. Men, horses, and machines at work; digging, walling, and puddling going on, men wheeling barrows, horses drawing stones along the railways. The great steam engine was at rest, having done its work. It threw out 160 hogs heads per minute [8000 gallons]; and two smaller engines (large ones they would have been considered anywhere else) were also needed while the excavation of the lower docks was going on; for they dug 24 feet below the surface of water in the river, and the water filtered thro’ open gravel. The dredging machine was in action, revolving round and round, and bringing up at every turn matter which had never before been brought up to the air and light. Its chimney poured forth volumes of black smoke, which there was no annoyance in beholding, because there was room enough for it in this wide clear atmosphere. The iron for a pair of Lock-gates was lying on the ground, having just arrived from Derbyshire.’
They continued on towards the eastern end of Loch Oich:
‘Some parts of the canal in which we walked this morning, were cut forty feet below the natural surface of the ground.
The Oich has, like the Ness, been turned out of its course to make way for the Canal. About two miles from Fort Augustus is Kytra Lock, built upon the only piece of rock which has been found in this part of the cutting – and that piece just long enough for its purpose, and no longer. Unless rock is found for the foundation of a lock, an inverted arch of masonry must be formed, at very great expense, which after all is less secure than the natural bottom.
At this (the Eastern) end of Loch Oich a dredging machine is employed, and brings up 800 tons a day. Mr Hughes, who contracts for the digging and deepening, has made great improvements in this machine. We went on board, and saw the works; but I did not remain long below in a place where the temperature was higher than that of a hot house, and where machinery was moving up and down with tremendous force, some of it in boiling water.’
They then moved on to look at the work in progress between Lochs Oich and Lochy:
‘Here the excavations are what they call at “deep cutting”, this being the highest ground on the line, the Oich flowing to the East, the Lochy to the Western Sea. This part is performed under contract by Mr Wilson, a Cumberland man from Dalston, under the superintendance of Mr Easton, the resident engineer. And here also a Lock is building. The earth is removed by horses walking along the bench of the Canal, and drawing the laden cartlets up one inclined plane, while the emptied ones, which are connected with them by a chain passing over pullies, are let down another. This was going on in numberless places, and such a mess of earth had been thrown up on both sides along the whole line, that the men appeared in the proportion of emmets to an ant-hill, amid their own work. The hour of rest for men and horses is announced by blowing a horn; and so well have the horses learnt to measure time by their own exertions and sense of fatigue, that if the signal be delayed five minutes, they stop of their own accord, without it.’
The scenes that Southey described, with tracks laid, excavators at work, and barrow runs, are strongly reminiscent of accounts of construction work on the early railways. From these scenes of intense activity, Telford and Southey went on to Fort William to view the flight of locks now known as ‘Neptune’s Staircase’. Southey’s enthusiasm, like the lock, ran over.
‘We landed close to the Sea-lock; which was full, and the water running over; a sloop was lying in the fine basin above; and the canal was full as far as the Staircase, a name given to the eight successive locks. Six of these were full and overflowing; and when we drew near enough to see persons walking over the lock-gates, it had more the effect of a scene in a pantomime, than of anything in real life. The rise from lock to lock is eight feet, 64 therefore in all; the length of the locks, including the gates and abutments at both ends, 500 yards – the greatest piece of such masonry in the world, and the greatest work of its kind, beyond all comparison.
A panorama painted from this place would include the highest mountain in Great Britain, and its greatest work of art. That work is one of which the magnitude and importance become apparent when considered in relation to natural objects. The Pyramids would appear insignificant in such a situation, for in them we would perceive only a vain attempt to vie with greater things. But here we see the powers of nature brought to act upon a great scale, in subservience to the purposes of man: one river created, another (and that a huge mountain stream) shouldered out of its place, and art and order assuming a character of sublimity.’
A ship making its way down the Banavie locks on the Caledonian Canal. The poles were inserted into the capstans to work the locks. (British Waterways)
Whatever one thinks of Southey’s views of the relative merit of the Egyptian pyramids and Telford’s canal, there is no mistaking the awe-struck tone of a sensible man faced with something far outside his everyday experience. The workings on the Caledonian were vast, and what is particularly striking is the degree to which canal work had become mechanised, with the huge dredgers floating along as each new section of the canal was flooded. The excavators and pumps were giants of their time, though they might seem quite insignificant today (a modern watcher might also be somewhat less sanguine about the harmlessness of all those ‘volumes of black smoke’). But, with all the increased sophistication of techniques, digging the Caledonian called mostly for a lot of sweating men with shovels and barrows who could be called on to dig the deep, wide trench through the earth. The story of these men and their work will be told in more detail in the last section of this book.
The sort of technical difficulties that Telford had to face were exemplified by the construction of the sea-lock at Clachnacharry on the Beauly Firth at the eastern end of the canal. The shore line at this point on the coast was very flat, so if vessels of any size were going to get into the canal then, as they could not get to it, the canal had to be taken to them. First of all an embankment was built out to sea. Clay was taken out of a nearby hill and carried out to the shoreline on a specially constructed iron railway. The bank was then extended outwards until it reached some 400 yards from the high-water mark. Stones were laid on top and the whole left for six months to settle. The canal and the lock pit were then dug out of the mound. At first, the lock pit was kept drained by a chain-and-bucket system worked by a team of six horses, but, as the pit drew deeper, the horses had to be replaced by a 9 HP steam engine. The excavations were finished in June 1811 and the massive lock gates were hung.
The most impressive part of the whole undertaking was the section between Lochs Oich and Lochy, the deep cut which Southey described so vividly. But everything about the Caledonian was on a previously unconsidered scale. By the time of the opening in November 1822, the work on the canal had been continuing for almost twenty years and had cost over £900,000, of which nearly half was the cost of labour. But, although labour costs were the main item, it is worth noting that expenditure on machinery reached the very high figure of £121,000.6
It would be very pleasant to be able to say that, after all that expenditure of time, money and effort, the canal was a huge success. Unfortunately, it was not. The timber trade that was to have been its mainstay never materialised, and even if it had done so the navigation on the canal proved rather more difficult than had been expected. The passage through the Highland mountains all too frequently acted as a wind tunnel, against which boats could make no headway. But it was still a kind of triumph. It was certainly a personal triumph for Telford, which his friend Southey recorded for posterity, in a set of verses setting out Telford’s engineering history:
Telford who o’er the vale of Cambrian Dee
Aloft in air at giddy height upborne
Carried his Navigable road …
and so on for rather a long time. These grandiloquent stanzas were, however, thought worthy enough to be inscribed on stone and set by the side of the Caledonian Canal. The waterway itself is a worthier memorial to the engineer.
During the time of the construction of the Caledonian, Telford worked on other canal projects, and quite a large part of that time was taken up with improving older parts of the system. It is a further mark of the success of the canals, and the improvements in construction techniques, that it took less than half a century for the earliest parts to prove inadequate to cope with the increased traffic. Telford worked on the Birmingham system and constructed a new Harecastle tunnel alongside Brindley’s original. Where the first version had taken eleven years, the new tunnel, built next to the old, was finished in three and, on completion, was found to have been so accurately holed that a watcher at one end could see clear through to daylight at the other. And it was not only in Britain that Telford’s engineering skills were in demand – he was also called in as engineer on the Gotha Canal, built between 1810 and 1829, in Sweden.
Telford retained his interest in canals right up to his death in 1834, when the railway age was starting to come into its own, a development with which he was unable to come to terms. He was too old to change his ways, and could only see the railways as a threat to the canal system to which he had made such a massive contribution. He fought for his beloved canals in the only way he could: by attempting to build a canal that was so modern that it could offer a real alternative to the upstart railways. The Birmingham & Liverpool Junction Canal was begun in 1826, offering a new, direct route between the two cities. It was to follow a very straight line, avoiding contour cutting by means of very deep cuts and equally high banks. The engineering proved extraordinarily difficult, and the canal remained unfinished at Telford’s death. Ironically, the man who completed it, William Cubitt, was to use the experience he gained on Telford’s canal to make himself a highly successful career in railway construction.
Telford may have shown himself to be lacking in vision in relation to railways, but in every other respect he was the model for the new type of engineer – a man of great technical versatility, undeterred by lack of precedent for what he was attempting. His canal work can stand beside that of any other of the great canal engineers, but what gives him his unique importance is the great range of his activities. As important as his canal work was the work he did on road and bridge construction; and again he can stand comparison with the best. The Holyhead Road, with its two famous suspension bridges over the River Conwy and the Menai Straits, is the work of a man clearly undeterred by natural obstacles – its conception has the qualities that the great Victorians, such as Brunel, brought to their work. The Menai Bridge is arguably the finest of all Telford’s work, showing great originality and daring. St Katharine’s Docks in London was almost equally impressive. The most significant honour of all came to him when, in 1818, he became the first President of the Institution of Civil Engineers. It was more than a recognition of his own greatness, for it was a recognition of the importance of the new profession of civil engineering.
Telford, a man of paradoxes, is a difficult figure to characterise. He clearly had ambitions to be recognised as an artist, a man of sensibility. He worked hard at his poetry, with some success, but when he came to write his autobiography it turned out to be dull, pedestrian stuff, more of a technical treatise than the story of a man’s life. He retained his love for architecture, but showed little talent for the profession. His Madeley church is built in the then-fashionable Classical style that would have fitted it, unremarkably, into a provincial city – in a small, country town it is merely an absurdity, lumpen and out of place. Yet, when he came to his industrial building, he found a mode of expression that had a simple elegance, a strength of form and structure, that perhaps spoke for the stone mason in Telford and which the, later, architect Telford would have buried under a mess of fussy and irrelevant detailing. This was perhaps the most important clue to Telford’s life; his friendship with poets such as Southey was deep and real, but he could express himself most clearly in his own work when he reverted to the simpler styles of his youth.
Southey never indulged in any deep analysis of his friend, but was content to accept him as a happy, good-humoured companion: ‘There is so much intelligence in his countenance, so much frankness, kindness and hilarity about him, flowing from the never-failing well-spring of a happy nature … A man more heartily to be liked, more worthy to be esteemed and admired, I have never fallen in with.’ There was also a more serious side to Telford’s character – his concern for ‘improvement’, coupled with a belief that men needed work and all men should be supplied with work to do. An engineer who writes poetry and designs churches seems an essentially eighteenth-century figure. An engineer pontificating on the moral virtue of work seems very Victorian. Telford seems to belong somewhere in between the two. In his autobiography he reprints a poem that he wrote ‘in early youth, when the situation of the Author gave him little opportunity of being acquainted with English Poetry.’ It seems typical of Telford – the subject matter is his old home of Eskdale, and it expresses the conviction that the growth of industry and an improved transport system bring with them not only prosperity, but happiness as well. These are the thoughts of a Victorian engineer expressed in the language of a Georgian poet:
As o’er the land improving arts extend
Rejoicing ESKDALE feel their powers descend.
Stript of her cumbrous loads, her mountains rise,
While at their feet the peopled valley lies:
The less’ning woods, that dark and dismal frowns,
Now spread their shelter, not their gloom, around;
And where the boggy fen neglected lay,
Smiles the white cottage and the village gay.
§ The main sources for biographical information on Telford are his own autobiography, edited by John Rickman, Life of Thomas Telford (1838); Samuel Smiles, op. cit. Vol. 1874, an excellent modern biography: L.T.C. Rolt, Thomas Telford 1958. More recently, the author has researched and written his own biography, Thomas Telford, 2nd ed. 2015.