The fatal consequences of following Wellington's advice
Alan Judd
THE LAST JOURNEY OF WILLIAM HUSKISSON by Simon Garfield Faber, 114.99. pp. 243, ISBN 0571210481 In the had old days of history teaching, you were made to learn a little about a lot, that lot comprising mainly public figures and events set in a chronological framework nailed into your brain. Thus, all I knew about William Huskisson was that he had been President of the Board of Trade some time during the 1820s, that he was associated with Canning and that he met an untimely but picturesque end when run over by Stephensen's Rocket at the opening of the Liverpool-Manchester railway. To us irresponsible youths who put pennies on the line and dared each other to dash across and retrieve them before the approaching electric train, that seemed careless. After all, the Rocket was quite slow, wasn't it?
Not that slow, according to this fascinating account, which also shows Huskisson's death as fuller of irony and sadness than our schoolboy minds had time for, though we might have appreciated the gore. It shows his life, too, as more significant than we realised. Although not one of the greatest political figures of his century, he was arguably among the most influential, especially in his early espousal of the new age of rail, whose first public victim he became.
Railways are Simon Garfield's passion, and his infectious enthusiasm makes his book all the more engaging. Not only does he rescue from relative obscurity such visionary figures as Henry Booth who, ignoring fears that rapid motion would crush lungs and that the milk in watching cattle would turn sour, forecast a nation wide rail network and assured incredulous audiences that
the man of business in Manchester will breakfast at home, proceed to Liverpool by the railway, transact his business and return to Manchester before dinner.
The Liverpool-Manchester line not only had a serious economic purpose (and effects), but its inauguration was symbolic of the new age. Watched by thousands, emulated by engineers from across the Channel and the Atlantic and costing an enormous £820,000, it was a feat of engineering endeavour and entrepreneurial boldness (and ruthlessness) that makes our modern upgrading of the West Coast line look the pathetic shambles it is. As often, technological advance provoked widespread opposition: there was sabotage, much of the surveying had to be done secretly, by moonlight, trains and railway workers were attacked. Attitudes, emotions and violence were similar to those aroused by GM crops now.
There is much pleasing incidental detail in the book. Railway builders were 'navigators' before they became 'navvies', politicians such as Castlereagh and Lord Liverpool took ether before public speaking, the Siamese twins on display for the inauguration bloodied the nose of one who mocked them (and later sired 22 children with their two wives), the starting cannon dislodged the eye of a spectator so that it hung by its moist sinews on his cheek' and some landowners supported the railway because it could bring manure more cheaply from the towns.
Huskisson was a life-long martyr to ill health, as well as extraordinarily accidentprone. Horses regularly threw him, carriages routinely flattened him, cables tripped him, and it may well have been weakness in his had leg that prevented him from climbing aboard the Duke of Wellington's carriage as the Rocket bore down on a parallel track. Had he stood still it wouldn't have hit him, hut the door he was struggling to open swung him into the path of the engine. The wheels went over his lower leg and thigh and he died, painfully, some nine hours later. The irony was that, seconds before, he had shaken hands with Wellington in an attempt to make up for their political falling-out, and Wellington's last words to him ('We seem to be going on — you had better step in') may have inadvertently done for him.
Part biography, part social, part railway history, this is a good example of historyby-episode — the study of a particular incident, showing how it knits in to wider themes. Everyone learns something from it. Although the author's apparent antipathy to the Duke has no obvious basis in his book, and although in the early pages he occasionally indulges in a novelist's omniscience, it is an enjoyable, well-researched and instructive account. By no means is it only for railway buffs, but it might turn you into one.
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