291

BRUNEL.

DIED SEPTEMBER 15, 1859.

AN ANNIVERSARY STUDY.

ISAMBARD KINGDOM BRUNEL was born at Portsmouth on April 9, 1803, a few months after the Victory had brought back thither the body of Nelson. Pitt had not been dead many weeks. Pitt's great rival, Fox, was in fact, though not in name, Prime Minister, but with only five months of life before him.

The Brunels were a Norman family of good position. Brunel's father, Marc Isambard, who was made a knight in 1841, and is consequently known to the present generation as Sir Isambard Brunel, was an officer in the French navy from 1786 to 1792, when, being a fervent Royalist, he became perforce an émigré. He escaped to America, where he soon rose to the position of engineer to the New York State Government; but in January 1799, turning his back on America, he came to England to marry an Englishwoman and settle down. Isambard Kingdom-the latter name the surname of the lady's family-was their only son.

Isambard the younger owed to his father not only his natural genius for engineering, but also an education such as few of the early English engineers were fortunate enough to receive. Telford was the son of a shepherd, Brindley of a cottier. George Stephenson, as all the world knows, began life as a collier lad. Nicholas Wood, who in 1838 was called in by the Great Western directors as one of the leading authorities of the day to advise them on Brunel's broad-gauge designs, was a colliery viewer. Nor were the younger men who succeeded Wood and Stephenson much better off in many cases. Brunel's own life,' written by his son, Isambard the third, a distinguished ecclesiastical lawyer, records the fact that Mr. Lane, who was chief engineer of the Great Western Railway from 1860 to 1868, began his career as foreman bricklayer on the Thames Tunnel.

Brunel, however, enjoyed the advantage of a liberal education, and to the admirable lucidity of mind and facility of expression

1 It is impossible for me to give in detail the various points in which I am indebted to this work. Though I have supplemented its perusal by a good deal of reading of my own, the whole of this article is practically based upon it.

which that education developed in him he owed no small share of his professional success. George Stephenson, with his unpolished manners, his slow hesitating utterance, and his harsh Northumbrian burr, was so roughly handled by the opponents of the Liverpool and Manchester Bill on its first introduction that the promoters, when they came forward a second time, did not venture to put him into the witness-box. No counsel was ever rash enough to adopt similar tactics in order to discredit the grandiose and unprecedented designs of Brunel. On the Great Western Bill, Brunel, being then only twenty-eight years old, was under cross-examination for eleven days. He showed,' says an eyewitness, a profound acquaintance with the principles of mechanics. He was rapid in thought, clear in language, and never said too much or lost his presence of mind. I do not remember ever having enjoyed so great an intellectual treat.'

Whether from natural precocity, due possibly to his French blood, or owing to the stimulus applied by constant and familiar intercourse with his very active-minded father, Brunel's mental powers developed unusually early. At four years old his talent for drawing was already remarkable, at eight he had mastered Euclid, at fourteen he has passed Sallust some time' and 'likes Horace very much, but not so much as Virgil,' and his spare time is devoted to making a plan of Hove, where he was at school, on a scale which necessitates his writing to London to borrow his father's long 80-foot tape.' The next two years were spent at a Paris Lycée, the Collège Henri Quatre, studying mathematics and rubbing up his French. At sixteen he regularly entered his father's office, where work on the plans of the Thames Tunnel was just beginning.

For the next five years the lad's life-he almost immediately assumed all the responsibility and performed more than all the work of a grown man-was bound up with the tunnel. On its history there is no need to dwell. After five years' labour, during which a length of about two hundred yards had been completed, the river burst in, drowned a number of workmen, and all but drowned young Brunel, who was very seriously injured in a gallant attempt to guide into a place of safety the men who had been working under his charge at the post of danger. The directors, as soon as the facts were reported, passed a resolution, and ordered it to be advertised in the Times' and other papers, to the effect that having heard with great admiration of the intrepid courage

and presence of mind displayed by Mr. Isambard Brunel, the company's resident engineer,' they desired 'to give their public testimony to his calm and energetic endeavours, and to that generous principle which induced him to put his own life into more imminent hazard to save the lives of the men under his immediate care.'

Certainly the resident engineer deserved all the testimonials, public or private, that his directors could give him, seeing that for several years he had not only gone in hourly risk of his life, but all the time he had been working like a galley slave. In September 1826, his father's journal notes on a Wednesday that he had not been in bed since the previous Friday; in the following November he himself records that he had 'passed seven days out of the last ten in the tunnel. For nine days on an average 20 hours per day in the tunnel, and 33 hours to sleep.' And even when seriously injured in the accident above described, and in such pain that he could hardly speak, he was laid on a mattress on the deck of a barge and towed out into the middle of the river, in order to direct the operations of the men who, from a diving bell, were endeavouring to locate and to repair the breach.

Brunel's personal connection with the tunnel ceased at this point. The works were for the time abandoned, and when, seven years later, in 1835, a Government loan enabled them to be resumed, Brunel had advanced far beyond the post of a mere resident engineer. Here is how his diary sketches his position at the close of 1835. The railway [the Great Western] now is in progress. I am thus engineer to the finest work in England. A handsome salary, on excellent terms with my directors, and all going smoothly. . . . And it is not this alone, but everything I have been engaged in has been successful. Clifton Bridge, my first child, my darling, is actually going on: recommenced work last Monday-glorious.' The diary then gives a 'pretty list of real sound professional work' in hand, and winds up with: This at the age of twenty-nine. I can hardly believe it.'

The year 1835, in which the Great Western Railway obtained its first Act, undoubtedly commences the period of Brunel's life which is of most public importance. But before passing on to it a word must be said as to his first child, his darling, Clifton Bridge. The bridge owes its origin to a bequest in the year 1753, by a Bristol alderman, of the sum of 1,000l., which he desired to be accumulated till it reached 10,000l., and then devoted to building a

bridge, as he had been informed it could be built for that amount. In 1829, by which time the fund had reached 8,000l., the trustees obtained an estimate for a stone bridge. The estimate was 90,000l., so they advertised for designs for a suspension bridge. Brunel and twenty-one other engineers competed, and five of the designs, Brunel's among them, were selected. Telford, the builder of the Menai Suspension Bridge, was appointed as arbiter, and Telford was of opinion that no span exceeding his own at the Menai Straits (under 600 feet) was admissible. So Brunel, whose design had implied a single span, ranging, according to the position selected for crossing the gorge, between 760 and 1,180 feet, withdrew. Telford then refused to recommend any of the other four designs. Next Telford was asked to submit a design himself. He did so, but it failed to meet with approval. Thereupon a second competition was instituted. This time both Telford and Brunel were competitors. Finally, Brunel was unanimously appointed engineer.

Serious work began in 1836; by 1843 45,000l. had been spent, the work was not much more than half done, and funds were exhausted. Ten years later the definite abandonment of the undertaking was determined on, and the suspension chains were sent down to Cornwall to be used for the Albert Bridge at Saltash. In 1860 some leading members of Brunel's profession determined that the Clifton Bridge should be finished, both as constituting a memorial of their late friend (Mr. Brunel had died in the previous September) and in order to remove a slur from the profession. So, as the original Clifton chains had gone to Saltash, the chains from the Hungerford Suspension Bridge, another of Brunel's works, which was just being removed to make room for the South-Eastern Railway extension to Charing Cross, were brought down from London, and Clifton Bridge was finally opened in 1864, 111 years after the death of Alderman Wick. But to this day the towers of Egyptian architecture, which were to have been decorated with a series of figure subjects illustrating the whole work of constructing the bridge, from the quarrying of the ore and the forging of the chain-links to the driving of the last rivet, lack the ornament which, with characteristic fertility of resource and lavishness of voluntarily incurred labour, Brunel had designed for them.

The Clifton Suspension Bridge was a small affair, at least from a pecuniary point of view, but it powerfully influenced the whole

after course of Brunel's life. His connection with Bristol, a city whose wealth and importance two generations back were, relatively speaking, vastly greater than at present, brought him at the end of 1832 an engagement to advise as to the best measures to be adopted to prevent the silting up of the Floating Harbour. Almost at the same time the local committee for the promotion of what was to be the Great Western Railway was in process of formation, and Brunel naturally became a candidate for the post of engineer. The committee at the outset almost committed themselves to a declaration that they would select as engineer the man who would submit the lowest estimate. Brunel promptly declared that he would withdraw his candidature. You are holding out,' he wrote to the committee, ' a premium to the man who will make you the most flattering promises. It is quite obvious that the man who has either least reputation at stake, or who has most to gain by temporary success, and least to lose by the consequences of disappointment, must be the winner in such a race.' The committee were convinced-as not a few committees and boards were afterwards-by Brunel's unfaltering enunciation of the plain principles of business ethics, and withdrew their condition. On March 7, 1833, being then some weeks short of his twenty-seventh birthday, Brunel was duly appointed engineer of the great undertaking with which to all time his name will be indissolubly connected.

Here is a note from his diary of a few months later, made after the first public meeting held in support of the project: 'Got through it very tolerably, which I consider great things. I hate public meetings; it is playing with a tiger, and all you can hope is that you may not get scratched or worse.' The rest of the summer he spent travelling, surveying, interviewing all day, and writing letters and reports the greater part of the night. 'Between ourselves,' he wrote to one of his assistants, 'it is harder work than I like. I am rarely much under twenty hours. a day at it.'

Indeed, his capacity of doing without sleep was very remarkable. I believe that at that time,' writes an intimate friend, referring to this year 1833, he scarcely ever went to bed, though I never remember to have seen him tired or out of spirits. He was a very constant smoker, and would take his nap in an armchair, very frequently with a cigar in his mouth; and if we were to start out of town at five or six in the morning, it was his