This year's holiday - to the North.

Every holiday my husband makes me walk for many hours around the cities and towns of our destination. Under no circumstances can we take a taxi.  I get very footsore and it is much worse when the weather is hot. This year I am  prepared for long walks and I chose a cold destination, Hadrian's wall in the North of England.

I really wanted to drive around looking at railway lines and other industrial archaeology, throwing in a day's walking on Hadrian's Wall path and looking at Roman camps such as Housesteads. But the Man in my Life decided we should take the train to the East end of the wall (Newcastle) and walk to the West end, and take the train back from Carlisle. We should walk the WHOLE THING.

He also thought we could carry our stuff in backpacks, so we took very little stuff.

First day - Wallsend to Newcastle - You start at the Segundum fort, and look at the remains of the Roman camp. There were 16 camps on the wall and this looked like a small one. It is right next to the now extinct shipyards. I was very sorry indeed to look at the complete lack of industry in Newcastle.

deserted buildings

The Roman camp partly exposed.

The museum was quite helpful, telling us from how far afield the soldiers came to man the wall. There was only one British troop. The rest came from many different areas of Europe and Asia. There were even troops from Syria and Iran.

It seems that Roman soldiers wore shoes and socks. I was pleased. How could they bear the cold of Up North with their little sandals?

 The path was entirely on the flat, next to the river Tyne and there were many information boards to look at telling about the industries that were there. Terrible industries like treating lead ore, leather working and most  noxious of all, making coal tar products like creosote, pitch and tar. The last industry caused such pollution that an entire embankment had to be built to stop the polluted earth seeping pollutants into the Tyne. It was a hell of a job but it has been done and the river is clean, and now there are flats and small houses built along there - and many more will come. The tide was out as we walked along. There were rows of tires in the mud and there were a couple of people digging in them. I asked what they were doing and they said digging for crabs to use as bait. A few people were fishing with long rods - the tide was out.

Once we reached the city we postponed the walk because there were things to see in the city - sadly I did not see, for example, the art gallery, but we did see the "Rocket" - the locomotive engine which won the Rainhill trials in 1829 and convinced the engineers watching that locomotive steam engines were the future. This machine is on display in the Discovery museum, which is in the old Co-operative building. It is hard to know whether any of the iron or brass parts are the originals. The wheels are wooden - probably original. The buffer is wooden! The design was re-worked by Stephenson so the pistons were lower, and we were looking at the original configuration. I think this artifact is not really the original Rocket. There was a display of pictures and documents with the Rocket which was very interesting. Especially - how soon Stephenson was able to design and build a much better engine! I think the science museum has exchanged this exhibit for the "Puffing Billy", which was the first locomotive engine, probably, and was used at Wylam colliery of which, more later.

The Rocket's wheels were made of pine

There was an old Merchant's house which was very impressive, and an old pub next door - walking is thirsty work. We also saw the castle and looked at the renovated double-decker bridge designed by Stephenson - the High Level bridge, it's called. Much original ironwork in it, I understand, but now has been put together more strongly. We also looked at the art (not impressive) in the Baltic building (impressive) and took a picture of the new bridge (beautiful and clever).

This entire bridge tilts, allowing river traffic underneath.

Day 2 - walk from Newcastle to Heddon on the Wall.
This walk started from the middle of town and we were carrying all our luggage on our backs. I admired Newcastle very much. What gorgeous Whig buildings! and a column to Lord Grey for passing the Reform Act of 1832!

Theatre, Newcastle

The walk stayed flat as we walked by the Tyne, where we saw some old coal staithes. The point of these was to load ships with coal when the tide was low. Here is a graphic showing the wagons on the staithes.

  and then we had to leave the river to go through a country park, eventually returned to the river and enjoyed leaving the city behind. At this point the walkers share the path with a lot of cyclists which could be annoying. We walked several miles and eventually came to the Wylam waggonway, where coal was taken to the staithes a few miles away. This was the place the first steam engine was developed - the Puffing Billy. I have looked it up in the Science Museum website and it was not invented by George Stephenson, but he would definitely have seen it as a young man. The cottage where he lived as a boy was a bit further on, on our route, so we made the effort to see it. It is owned by the National Trust but is not open to the public. In the 18th century four families lived in this modest cottage. They can't have had much space nor any privacy. The men and boys would have been miners.

Dating to 1813-1814, Puffing Billy was built by William Hedley, Jonathan Forster, and Timothy Hackworth, for use at the Wylam Colliery near Newcastle-Upon-Tyne.

Built to replace the horses used on the tramway, Puffing Billy was one of three engines built by Hedley, the resident engineer at the colliery. It remained in service at the colliery until 1862, when it was lent to the Patent Office Museum in South Kensington, which became the Science Museum. 

Puffing Billy

It's basically two beam engines working alternately. I think.

After this we had to climb a steep hill by a golf course to Heddon on the Wall, where we found a delightful tea room and we deserved some cake, certainly! We stayed that night in a farm outbuilding which had been converted for walkers. We had the room that was adapted for the disabled, so we had a bath room to ourselves, and we slept in bunk beds - they were hard.

The Prometheans by Max Adams

The book is about two generations who made a huge impact on Britain. Max Adams calls them "Prometheans" on the grounds that they stole the future from the gods, as Prometheus stole fire from the gods. That's as far as the analogy goes - the men of the early 18th C were not punished for their presumptions. Both the Stephensons were remarkably gifted, so were Humphrey Davy and Michael Faraday. So were both the Brunels, although the father had the edge as he was a true visionary. Charles Babbage was a visionary too, (he is mainly famous for inventing the "difference engine" or mechanical calculator), and wrote about how industry is organised and managed, and was sociable as well as inventive. John Martin, the massively talented painter of enormous dramatic scenes, wanted to join the practical activities of the scientific community with which he mixed by improving the drains and taking away the dreadful sewage of London, and even envisaged the Underground railway (circle line). 

One of the threads of this history is a biography of the Martin brothers, of whom the youngest, John, was (as mentioned above) a painter of apocalyptic landscapes of the early nineteenth century. Some of his works can be seen in the Tate gallery and they are still thrilling to look at, with lightning, explosions, fires and huge mountains! You can buy reproductions of them at All posters and Wayfair; so I suppose he is still popular although you would need to buy a really large poster to get the full effect of his works.

Like the German Caspar Friedrich, he painted marvellous scenes of nature, but man's place amongst it is not contemplative or inspired, but afraid, or awed, and helpless. His scenes have inspired the apocalyptic effects in a number of films. He came from a poor Northern background (the same town as my mother; I wish I had told her that when we first saw his pictures in the Tate) and his mother held frightening religious beliefs, which particularly affected his brother Jonathan, who was on the edge of crazy all his life.

Whether Martin was a millenarian or not is still the subject of dispute. Certainly his eccentric brothers – collectively known as the “Mad Martins” – were, and indeed his older brother Jonathan was also genuinely mad, setting fire to York Minster and subsequently being institutionalised in St Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics. Ruthven Todd, Martin’s biographer, unearthed an advertisement from 1848 for a book on the British Israelites (a fringe group of millenarians) “with designs by John Martin”, though neither the book nor any other link has been found. On the other hand, Martin’s friend Ralph Thomas described him as a “thorough Deist” – that is someone who saw proof of God’s existence not in scripture, but in the marvellous workings of the natural world. Martin also devoted the majority of the last two decades of his life to schemes for the betterment of London, particularly its smelly and polluted river;  he made no connection in these projects to his own religious beliefs. Nor, apparently, did he disapprove of London’s industrial modernity, but thought it “the most wealthy, civilised, and enterprising city in the world”.

Whatever Martin’s private convictions – or lack of them – there was undoubtedly something in the air. Random occurrences took on portentous significance. When, in 1815, a giant volcano erupted in Indonesia, the dust cloud obliterated the following year’s entire summer, and street hawkers sold pamphlets announcing the death of the sun. Percy Bysshe Shelley and his teenage mistress Mary fled London for Geneva where they stayed with Byron (much of Mary’s novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus was written there). Also, in 1816, Martin exhibited Joshua commanding the sun to stand still upon Gibeon at the Royal Academy. Although received dubiously by the Academy’s members, the painting was a hit among the viewing public, perhaps because its depiction of the prophet, marshalling with raised arms the elemental forces that swirled about him, was a tonic for the helplessness most people felt at the time. Martin became renowned for giving his public what they wanted, and was often derided because of it. He was an accomplished printmaker, and his affordable mezzotints hung in homes all around the world. But he was never elected as a Royal Academician, and was condescended to by the artistic establishment. (John Constable called him a “painter of pantomimes”.) By and large, he rose above such sneers. There is evidence, however, that the ambitious working-class artist was conflicted about his social standing: some, such as the painter Charles Leslie whom Martin once embarrassed at a concert by hissing throughout the National Anthem, saw him as something of a radical. This was despite Martin’s close friendship with Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and even Prince Albert, whom he reportedly received at his house in dressing gown and slippers.

Have to interrupt here and say Martin probably didn't want to sing "God save the King" because there was nothing good to say about George IV, who was vain and silly, but the  Saxe-Coburg-Gothas mentioned were men of sense. Prince Leopold was planted on the throne of Belgium and made a success of it.

Part of his popularity might be attributed to his skill at sanitising the decadent and raw products of Romantic culture. He absorbed Edmund Burke’s theory of the Sublime – that sensation of delightful terror elicited by vast, rugged vistas – and tailored it for mainstream tastes. J.M.W. Turner, fourteen years Martin’s senior and an acquaintance, though hardly a friend, achieved the critical recognition that the younger artist craved. The two men were markedly different: Martin was, by all accounts, a charismatic conversationalist and a snappy dresser; the reclusive Turner, according to Martin’s son Leopold, was “untidy; a sloven and unwashed”. 

 http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/aaaargh

Another of John Martin's brother's was called William, and he was an inventor, but being a dfficult character he never received credit for any of his inventions, although one was a miners' safety lamp much better than Davy's. 

In London, John Martin and his wife Susan made friends with all the notable scientists of the time: Humphrey Davy, Michael Faraday, Wollaston, Babbage, and Marc Brunel, Isambard's father. Charles Wheatstone, who eventually invented the electric telegraph (but not Morse code) was one of the friends. I don't know if they knew other notable engineers, for example, John Rennie. They held parties and loved conversation, chess and cards. 

Here I am, thinking still about the Brunels and the tunnel under the Thames. In the National Archives at Kew I found the responses to Isambard's invitation to dinner in the tunnel in November 1827. It must have been cold! Oh well, perhaps they all had woolly underwear and good coats on. Amongst those who wrote apologies were Michael Faraday and John Martin. Faraday said he was away and never got the invitation but he would have loved to have gone. Martin said a friend arrived and he couldn't come. I should have got those letters copied because it's remarkable to see the writing. Strange to think that Brunel kept those letters somewhere in his files all his life. The occasion was his first formal dinner, and the friends he invited included these notables. He was delighted that Admiral Codrington's son - also a naval officer - accepted his invitation. Isambard had a bit of a crush on the navy, although when you think of the size and the importance of the navy at that time, perhaps that's the wrong way of describing it. Isambard was impressed by the navy. That's better. 

Other Prometheans whose activities are described are Shelley, Caroline Norton, William Godwin, (Shelley's father-in-law), Henry Brougham and the Hunts - political radicals who spoke in favour of universal manhood suffrage - these were also John Martin's politics. Marc Brunel, for one, would not have agreed with this radical stance in politics, as he had a fear of mob violence that came from his experience of the French revolution. Isambard was instrumental in putting down the Bristol riots of 1831 - he had himself enrolled as a temporary constable.

The trouble is, none of these people considered themselves Promethean, this is a theme that the author has hit upon, and the book becomes somewhat ridiculous when the author suggests that Prometheanism was a conscious choice or even a religious sect. Adams tells the story of the Swing Riots of 1830 thus:

 "At the end of August threshing machines, always seen as a threat to employment in the southern counties, began to be destroyed. It was the start of what became known as the Swing Riots, a wave of incendiary attacks and riots across southern England lasting almost until the end of the year, in which the burning of hayricks was an iconic feature. [what does iconic mean in that sentence?] The unrest led to 19 hangings, more than six hundred gaol terms and five hundred sentences of transportation. The use of arson as a weapon of protest, symbolic of revenge, destruction and cleansing, had been psychotically perfected by Jonathan Martin. [i.e. when he set York Minster on fire. Arson, apparently, is a crime than can be perfected, psychotically.] Its deliberate employment to terrorize the government  during the Swing uprising seemed now to fulfil Mary Wollstonecraft's dire prediction of the potential evils of the Promethean myth." [I think he is talking about Frankenstein's monster in the book by Mary Shelley]. 

Then "The opening of 15 September 1830 of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway was an event almost impossibly overloaded with symbolism." 

This grand opening was marred by the awful accident of Huskisson being knocked down by the Rocket, his leg severed, and dying of the injuries. What does Huskisson symbolise in that scene? The Rocket might symbolise the future power of the common man (having the freedom to travel further) and Huskisson a privileged and landed Tory, but that is rather complicated because Huskisson was on the more progressive wing of the Tory party and was in favour of Free Trade - which theoretically made food cheaper. The political power of his class wasn't knocked down by democratic forces until the next century.


Isn't this a peculiar way of writing history? It sounds as though Wellington might have remarked to George Stephenson, "I say, my man, there's too much symbolism in the air today!" and Stephenson might have said, "Aye, right enough bonnie lad. There's that mooch meaning in ut steam engine as ud turn us all into representations of oor classes."


There were amazing changes going on at that time, in science, art and politics, however, by lumping a load of different men of talent together and labelling them Promethean merely makes the story more dramatic.

"The perfection of his usefulness" - how beautiful

However, the science is well-explained by Max Adams, I think.