CHARLES BLACKER VIGNOLES.* IN an alphabetical list of the officers
of the 43rd Light Infantry appended to the Historical Records of that famous regiment, is the following entry, which is a stumbling-block to the non-professional reader :—" Vignoles —, ensign, 14 April, 1795, on h. p. of Ind. Co. 8 Sept. 1795." Does it mean, he will ask, that an officer commissioned in April during a severe war, went on half-pay five months afterwards, or what is the explanation ? It is a sad one. The Ensign was a baby not quite two years old ; he was a prisoner to the French in Guadaloupe, where his father, Captain Charles Henry Vignoles, Adjutant, and his mother both died of yellow- fever, leaving the tiny soldier in the hands of a kind French merchant who had succoured his parents when they were captured. The commission, according to a common practice, was bestowed as a sort of compensation by the General, Sir Charles Grey, Commander-in-Chief, on the understanding that the new officer should " exchange to half-pay imme- diately, as he was too young to serve." The orphan was rescued by his uncle, Captain Hutton, R.A., son of Dr. Charles Hutton, Professor of Mathematics at the Woolwich Military Academy, who seems to have become a prisoner in order to reach his nephew. The name of the infantile officer• on half-pay was Charles Blacker Vignoles, who, after many adventures in war and peace, acquired renown as a Civil Engineer.
Without going back to the days of Joan of Arc and La Hire, we may say that the family comes of Huguenot stock, one among them at least having migrated to Dublin after the Edict of Nantes was cancelled ; and that the grandfather, as well as the father, of the orphan was a soldier. He was brought up in the house of his maternal grandsire, the Woolwich Professor, and it was the education which he received there that made him finally an Engineer. But, so far as we can gather, the hope of his guardian was that he would become a proctor, and his refusal to follow up his studies in Doctors' Commons led to a quarrel and separation. What the youth did at that period, his son has been unable to ascertain. Perhaps he went to the Peninsula as a volunteer in search of a commission, perhaps not ; but, at any rate, in 1813 he emerges from obscurity as a cadet, or a private pupil of Professor Leybourne, at Sandhurst, and thenceforth his life is easily traced. Through the kind aid of the Duke of Kent, who remembered the son of one once his secretary, he was appointed first to the York Chasseurs, and then, almost before he could join them, to the 1st Foot, or Royal Scots. With them he shared in the miseries and disasters attending the assault on Bergen op Zoom, his solitary but terrible experience of war. There he and his comrades of the Royals were taken prisoners ; but his clear, picturesque, and spirited account of their share in the business, shows that the battalion, though captured, did its duty well, after the grim fashion of those old days. He was not in the Waterloo campaign, being hurried off to Canada, and with quiet service there in Quebec, his campaigns closed ; for though he spent some time after his return with the army of occupation in France, he
• Life of Charles Blacker Vignoles, Soldier and Civil Engineer. By his Bon, (ninth= 3. Vignolea. M.A. London : Longmans and Co. could not escape the consequences of the sweeping " reduc- tions " which sent thousands of young fellows on to the Half- pay List. He was only three-and-twenty, yet how varied his life, —he had been a law-student ; he had gone through the worst ordeal of battle, an assault on a fortress ; he had been wrecked on Anticosti ; and he had engaged himself to be married ! After entering the Army, he did his best to push his way by hard work. His knowledge of French, German, and Dutch, his skill as a draughtsman, his acquirements as an engineer, his quickness in computations, really fitted him for those staff duties which he could not obtain ; but, irregular as his schooling had been, he really seems to have been better equipped for a soldier's career than most young men who joined the Army. Foiled in that career, he started on a fresh set of adventures. Before starting forth, however, he secretly married his sweet- heart, an excellent young lady, judging from her letters. Then he sailed for Venezuela, to aid the revolted colonists. On the voyage, his scampish fellow-adventurers became dis- tasteful to him. He heard language which he "had no conception of ;" he saw daily exhibitions of boxing on the quarter-deck ; he suffered from thefts, losing, among other things, "all his towels and pocket-handkerchiefs." So that at St. Thomas's he quitted these people and went to Charleston. There he readily found employment as a surveyor, both for the State and private persons, and he did a great deal of work in that way for which he was not always paid. His wife joined him, and he stayed in North America, chiefly in the Slave States, for six years, less one brief interval occupied in bringing home his wife. His labours were not confined to South Carolina, for he made an elaborate map of Florida, which, together with a sort of treatise on the country, he got published at New York. While there, he received a suggestive letter from a friend in Florida, who said :—" The Council to make laws have played the d—. They have taxed the people $15,000 to create offices for them- selves. All go home with an office. We have more judges and attorneys, courts and clerks, than you can imagine." No wonder the newly acquired " Land of Promise," as it was called, is described as overflowing with gall rather than milk and honey. The `. States " did not pay, but they were not a bad school for a young man who was to become a Civil Engineer. He finally returned to England in 1823, and he arrived at a critical time in the history of what was to be his profession— the dawn of steam traction and of the railway. He did surveying jobs here and there, wrote for the Encyclopwelia Metropolitana, became connected with the Rennies, and thus at length reached the crest of the rising wave of material progress. That is intimated by the fact that he was resident engineer on the famous Liverpool and Manchester Railway for eighteen months, and that he was intimate with Walker, the Rennies, and the elder Brunel. In fact, from that time forward, Vignoles held a front place in the line of British engineers who were soon actively engaged all over Europe. It was his curiously mingled early training, together with his tireless energy and a certain poetical largeness of mind and motive, which fitted him to achieve distinction as the con- structor of works, great and small, in many countries— Switzerland, Russia, Spain—as well as in the United Kingdom. He had his difficulties and disappointments ; he committed errors, engaged in disputes ; he trusted too much to the sense of honour in his fellow-creatures, and was more than once all the worse, in a pecuniary sense, for indulging a natural magnanimity bordering on utter unselfishness which was con- spicuous throughout his chequered career ; yet, on the whole, he led a bright, buoyant, successful life ; and if he died neither BO famous nor so rich as some of his contemporaries, he thoroughly deserved and enjoyed all he got, both in riches and renown. He is also an example of courage and per- severance, for in consequence of his unprofitable virtue, trust in fair dealing, at fifty years of age he had to begin life afresh from the ground.
One of his greatest works is the suspension bridge over the Dnieper at Kieff, a magnificent building which at the time of its construction was the largest of its kind in the world. The acceptance of his proposals by the Czar Nicholas gives a very good idea of the grand manner in which that masterful potentate did business. Vignoles went to St. Petersburg in September, 1847, to see the Emperor after the general plan of the structure had been accepted. The engineer met his employer at Peterhof, and he records the result in his diary:— " Of course I was in military uniform, and on entering the Emperor advanced immediately and shook me by the hand, and expressed himself glad to see me. The various points connected with the Kieff Bridge were then discussed, and the Emperor, after explaining the necessity for the width of-the portals to be twenty- eight feet, frankly and nobly decided to leave everything else to my own judgment and experience. The Emperor's words were : Si vous voulez me repondre sur votre parole d'honneur que le pont sera stablement construit, je vous laisse pleine action, et je vows en donne In main ;' and shaking my hand heartily, the Emperor added in English : Is it a bargain ?' I answered without a moment's hesitation, and looking him full in the face : Sur mon honneur, Sire, et sur ma tete.' " Powerful as the Czar was, he could not or did not put down the boundless corruption which prevailed under his reign nearly or quite as much as it has done under his successors. The very profits of the enterprise so solidly conducted at Kieff by Vignoles were absolutely swallowed up by the " harpies of St.
Petersburg," officials who would not facilitate business unless they were paid large sums ! The grand Suspension Bridge gave the engineer nothing but glory, which means that the engineer did not base his charges on the fact that he was dealing with public robbers. He wanted to protest and blaze out, as his generous temper prompted ; but he was always over- ruled by those who knew the inveterate vice of the Russian administrative system. The son, who has put together this account of his father, does not hide the failings he had in common with other men ; but, after all they are not of a grave order, and chiefly arose from the want of that regular training in youth which his abilities deserved. But, despite his faults of temper and manner, his impetuosity and sharp tongue, his life affords an admirable example of unfaltering self-develop- ment, ceaseless industry, and steadfast perseverance. He was an instance of that "reserved power" the amount of which latent in society so astonished a great statesman in his mature years. In his case the force came to the surface ; but it was the merest accident which prevented him from following a routine military career in time of peace, with talents unused in that line for lack of opportunity.
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