SNOW WHITE TO STEPHENSON
Robert Gwynne
National Railway Museum,
Leeman Road
York UK
[email protected]
This is a story about the search for strategic minerals,
climate change, religious conflict, immigration, integration
and innovation. Overall a very modern story, although this
one starts over 400 years ago and from it emerges the
technology we call railways.
These included underground ‘Hund’ trucks running on
planks with a central guide pin, and ‘Riesen’, overland
wooden guided ways for larger horse-drawn trucks.
But first, consider the story of Snow White…..
When the pretty daughter of the local lord is cast adrift in
the forest she is rescued by people who work as miners.
Eventually her jealous step-mother sets out to kill her, and
she tries to do this by means of trading (in disguise) with
the mining household. The story is from the forests of
German-speaking central Europe and was collected by the
brothers Grimm around 1807. It hints at the power
relationship that underpinned the development of mining
there, for (as in the story) the wife of a local lord could not
simply say to her husband ‘these people have upset me,
please flatten their house and kill everyone there.’ In a
world emerging from feudalism, miners were often free
men and in some cases they bankrolled the local
aristocracy.
Take the example of Jacob Fugger (‘Jacob the Rich’) of
Augsberg (1459-1525) whose vast wealth came from the
mining and trading of silver, copper and mercury in
mainland Europe. He is once reported to have said ‘the
king reigns but the bank rules’. His wealth ensured the
election of Charles V as Holy Roman Emperor in 1519
and the banking systems he controlled enabled monies
collected by the sale of indulgences to get back to Rome.
Fugger’s world included the copper mines of ‘Upper
Hungary’ (now Slovakia). Here the towns were German
speaking and surrounded by forest.
In those mines special technology to move heavy minerals
around was in use, precursors to the railways we know
today.
Replica ‘Hund’ truck, National Railway Museum.
One of the developers of these mines for Haug Langnauer
and Company of Augsberg was Joachim Hoechstetter
(sometimes written Hechstetter) (1505-1535), briefly in
1528 Henry VIII’s ‘Master of Mines’. His son Daniel
Hoechstetter (1525–1581) was to end up in Keswick, but
first it is worth noting the influence of another son of a
copper miner, theologian Martin Luther (1483–1546).
In 1517, Luther, objecting to the sale of indulgences from
a firm belief that you can’t buy salvation, pinned an article
to his local parish notice board. This event became famous
as the ‘nailing of the 95 Theses to the church door at
Wittenburg’. In so doing Luther inadvertently started the
‘Reformation’. In Britain the battles over religion would
underpin the rocky politics of Henry VIII and his children.
By the time Elizabeth 1st (1533 – 1603) made it to the
throne in 1558 state policy was to try to control the
argument (a.k.a. the ‘Anglican church’) and interfere
overseas if this was to Britain’s advantage.
At this time Britain imported her copper for domestic
implements as well as for making cannon. Elizabeth I’s
secretary William Cecil (1521 – 1598) recognised this as a
strategic weakness, not least because of the threat from
Philip of Spain, son of Charles V and Elizabeth’s former
brother-in-law. Philip, sure that Elizabeth had dallied with
him for her own purposes, and that she was on the ‘wrong’
side when it came to the religious debate of the day was
bound to eventually act against Britain.
the Vicar of Brough and one of his daughters married the
Mayor of Newcastle. Hoechstetter, one of the leading
mining experts of his day is buried in Crosthwaite church,
near Keswick, although there is no plaque or memorial
there to this most significant immigrant.
In 1563 Haug Langnauer and Company of Augsberg,
Joachim Hoechstetter’s old company, were authorised to
prospect for minerals in England. ‘Minerals’ actually
mainly meant copper, as by now the Germans of Augsberg
were Europe’s experts in the prospecting for, mining and
smelting of this important mineral.
In 1566 they opened ‘Gottesgab’ (‘God’s Gift’) in the
Newlands Valley, just over the ‘Cat Bells’ ridge from
Keswick (and now called ‘Goldscope’). In 1568 ‘The
Company of Mines Royal’ was formed, one of the first
two joint stock companies in Britain. Shareholders
included William Cecil, Elizabeth 1st and other prominent
figures like the Earls of Leicester and Pembroke.
Carving, Crosthwaite church Cumbria
In 16th century Cumbria the geography was probably
against anyone building a ‘Riesen’ to bring ore to the
smelting works, but ‘Hund’ trucks were used, called
locally ‘Rowle’ trucks. We know this because Daniel
Hoechstetter’s notebook survived and because the remains
of ‘Hund’ truck tracks, arguably the oldest railway remains
in the world, were found in 1997 in a level cut by the
Germans on the Caldbeck fells at Silver Gill. [2]
Goldscope mine near Keswick, Cumbria
The Company promoter was Thomas Thurland, a classic
Elizabethan adventurer. Thurland (who died in 1574) was
nominally the Vicar of Gamston on Idle near Nottingham,
a city which thirty years after his death was to prove very
significant to the story of railways.
The mines manager and effectively managing director of
the Company of Mines Royal was Daniel Hoechstetter,
Joachim Hoechstetter’s son. Daniel Hoechstetter was born
in Augsberg and trained in Gastein/Rauris areas in Austria.
He brought with him to Cumbria knowledge of the very
latest mining technology, which included ‘Hund’ trucks
and ‘Riesen’.
Soon 150 German miners were at work in the Keswick
area. They built a smelter, coal sheds, workshops and a
stamp mill, their suburb was Brigham and they integrated
with the locals.[1](176 children were born to German
fathers between 1565 and 1584); today Cumbrian names
such as Hindmarch, Stanger, Pepper and Fisher relate to
this immigration. Hoechstetter and family integrated into
the local Cumbrian community, one of his sons became
‘Hund’ track remains, Caldbeck Fells, Cumbria 2006
Knowledge of the sophisticated techniques used by the
Germans to prospect for, mine and smelt copper ore in
Cumbria and elsewhere spread to the point were some of
those involved, including Daniel Hoechstetter Junior
(1562-1638) were included on an expedition to America in
1585[3].
Furthermore in their quest to turn a strategic business into
a profitable one the ‘Mines Royal’ didn’t just work in
Cumbria. By 1602 they developed mines in Cornwall,
shipping ore from St Ives to South Wales for processing
(having already set up a smelter there managed by one of
the ‘Cumbrian Germans’) and worked in the Severn valley
area of the English Midlands.
As Robert Cecil put it in a letter in 1599, “their desire
principally has been that her majesty and the realm might
be served with that commodity to make ordinance and
necessaries rather than to stand to the courtesy of
strangers, who were wont to serve the realm as they
pleased.”[4].
Significantly the ‘ordinance’ that helped defeat the
Spanish Armada in 1588 had been made not many years
after the St George’s Stolne had been cut at Goldscope,
near Keswick, making this mine (briefly) Europe’s richest
copper mine.
This treatise on mining and refining in many respects
described what was then going on in the Lake District.
At this time coal was becoming much in demand, driven
by a number of factors, not least climate change, in this
case global cooling. A 14 fold increase in coal production
took place from the 1550’s to the 1680’s. As the ‘little ice
age’ took hold coal was black gold if you could get it to
market in large lumps at the right price. Born into this
period of time, and alive when the ‘Company of Mines
Royal’ and its successors were active in Cumbria (1563 to
about 1630), is the first man to build what we would
recognise as a railway Huntingdon Beaumont (1560 –
1624).
Huntingdon Beaumont was the youngest son of Sir
Nicholas Beaumont, owner of the Coleorton mines
(Leicestershire), his ambition, was no less than to become
the ‘capital’s chief collier’ (a desire expressed in one of his
surviving letters) [7]. An entrepreneur and an innovator,
Beaumont was described in 1622 as ‘a man reputed to be
very skyllful in coalworks having spent a great part of his
life and tyme in suchlike works’[8] Beaumont was just the
right kind of person to be interested in the latest in mining
technology.
Wollaton Hall, Nottingham
In the same year that the Armada was defeated the
extravagant Wollaton Hall near Nottingham was finally
finished, its huge cost partly financed by the coal mines
owned by its builder Sir Francis Willoughby (1546 –
1596). Wollaton Hall is about two miles from Nottingham
city centre, a town well used to burning coal. (When
Queen Eleanor visited Nottingham in 1257, she fled the
town because it stank of coal smoke, a smell then
considered ‘injurious’ to health’ [5]).
Willoughby’s mines at Wollaton were ‘wet’;
‘Cornishmen’ introduced pumping machinery there in
1573, probably using ‘rag and chain’ pumps, also used on
royal ships from 1577-8 and another innovative mining
‘device’ well known to Hoechstetter and company.
Clearly knowledge of the advanced mining techniques
being used in the Cumbrian fells was spreading.
Willoughby died in 1596, and after a lot of legal wrangling
a relation, Sir Percival Willoughby (1554 -1643) inherited
Wollaton Hall, and £35,000 of debt. [6] With every reason
to be interested in anything that could increase his income,
included exploiting minerals on his land, this Willoughby
is known to have owned a copy of Georg Bauer’s (better
known as ‘Agricola’) work ‘De Re Metallica’ published in
1556.
Sir Percival Willoughby (1554-1643)
Beaumont lived relatively near to Sir Percival Willoughby
of Wollaton Hall and in 1602 Willoughby, in need of
money to keep him out of the Fleet (the debtor’s prison)
went into partnership with him to exploit the coal mines at
Strelley near Wollaton. In 1604 Beaumont built a
waggonway, a wooden railway (what the Hoechstetter’s
would have called a ‘Riesen’) to connect the mines at
Strelley with the main route into Nottingham, the first on
record in Britain.
His long term aim was to connect the waggonway with the
river Trent and ship coal via the Trent and the river
Humber to London, (a sort of early integrated transport
scheme) and thereby break into a market already by then
dominated by the North East collieries
The local Nottinghamshire landscape was right for the
waggonway as a neat spur led in a gentle gradient down
from Strelley to the site where the colliers of Nottingham
bought coal from the Wollaton mines, and yet there was no
river nearby that you could make navigable. Roads in the
area were, as elsewhere in Britain, often impassable,
presumably made more so by the inclement weather
associated with global cooling.
Newcastle waggonway c. 1773
When Beaumont returned to Strelley ‘on his light horse’
he introduced to the pits there 24-hour working and
brought production up to 20,000 tons a year but still ended
up in Nottingham prison for non-payment of debts. He
died there six years later. Sir Percival Willoughby, who
had helped put Beaumont in prison, paid for his burial. In
the North East, one of the innovations that Beaumont had
introduced to the coal trade, the waggonway, went from
strength to strength. In 1781 George Stephenson was born
next to the Wylam Waggonway, then already a generation
old and it is with him that most people begin their railway
‘once upon a time’.
Possible route of Wollaton waggonway c.1604
Failing to succeed at Strelley (or perhaps, not doing as
well as he would have liked) Beaumont then persuaded
some partners to back him in the North East. In 1608 he
took over a lease on a mine at Blyth and in 1609 he
developed the first waggonways in the North East at
Bedlington, Bebside and Cowpen.[9] Again the geography
was right with the land where the coal seams where well
above sea level and with no nearby navigable rivers.
Forty years after Beaumont arrived in the North East,
William Gray, writing the first history of Northumberland
wrote (and please note, the word ‘engines’ is best read as
‘devices’):
‘Master Beaumont, a gentleman of great ingenuity and rare
parts, adventured into our mines with his £20,000; who
brought with him many rare engines not known in these
parts, as the art to bore with iron rods to try the deepness
and thickness of the cole, rare engines to draw water out of
the pites; wagons with one horse to carry down coal from
the pits to the staithes to the river etc. before returning on
his light horse.”[10]
Stephenson’s birthplace next to the Wylam waggonway
which opened c.1748
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Dr Mike Lewis for his pioneering work ‘Early
Wooden Railways’, the work of researchers in the Lake
District, particularly Warren Allison and Sam Murphy.
Fred Hartley for his work on Coleorton, Pamela Marshall
for the work on Wollaton Hall and the late RS Smith, for
his work on Huntington Beaumont, the late RS Donald for
his work on ‘The Company of Mines Royal’. Also John
New and the ‘Waggonways Research Circle’ of the
Stephenson Locomotive Society.
This article is formed from background research for
NRM+, the plan to refurbish and redisplay the National
Railway Museum, York, UK in 2012.
Images – all images copyright NRM/SSPL apart from that
of Sir Percival Willoughby which is courtesy of Wollaton
Hall, Nottingham where a colour replica is displayed.
References
[1] W. Allison, S. Murphy and R. Smith. ‘An Early
Railway in the German Mines of Caldbeck’ Early
Railways 4, papers from the Fourth Annual International
Early Railways Conference, Six Martlets publishing
(2009) page 6.
Also referenced in web article - BBC Legacies: Cumbria
‘Keswick’s German Miners’ by Ian Tyler (2004) and in
‘The Mine Explorer’ volume 6, 2008, Cumbria Amenity
Trust.
The ERC 4 is the most complete and authoritative account.
[2] See above and M. Jecock, C. Dunn and A. Lax,
English Heritage Survey report on Roughton Gill Mine
and Silver Gill Mine, Cumbria A1/8/2001.
[3] G.C. Grassl. ‘Joachim Gans of Prague: The first Jew in
English America’. American Jewish history – volume 86,
No.2 June 1998 pp 195 – 217. (See also web articles on
Gans).
[4] M.B. Donald. ’Elizabethan Copper. The History of The
Company of Mines Royal 1568 – 1605’ first published
1955 reprinted by Michael Moon, Whitehaven 1989,1994
page 363.
[5] B. Freese. ‘Coal: A Human History’ Penguin 2004.
[6] P. Marshall. ‘Wollaton Hall and the Willoughby
Family’, Nottingham Civic Society, 1999.
[7] MJT Lewis, ‘Early Wooden Railways’. Routledge
Keegan Paul, 1970.
[8] Dr.R.Smith. ‘England’s First Rails – A
reconsideration’. Renaissance and Modern Studies
Volume 4, 1960. See also MJT Lewis.
Also in J. New ‘400 years of English Railways,
Huntingdon Beaumont and the Early Years’ article in
Backtrack Magazine Volume 18 No.11 Nov. 2004. The
‘Waggonway Research Circle’ website by John New has
much useful information.
[9] See [7]
[10] See [8]