Occupational Medicine 2008 58(4):236-237; doi:10.1093/occmed/kqn058
© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society of Occupational Medicine. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
John Cooke Bourne, Working Shaft Kilsby Tunnel, 8 July 1837.
Wash drawing, 19.5 x 20.4 cm. National Railway Museum, York.
Mike McKiernan
In the drawing, the excavation of a tunnel is well advanced [1]. A single track runs through the middle (it would eventually have two lines) while the workers (navvies) gather in the mid-distance under a shaft. Two horses, harnessed for haulage, stand patiently nearby. A group of men struggle to move a basket of rubble and above them one worker ascends to the surface with more rubble. In the background, on the right, smoke is rising from a fire while in the right foreground, a worker is sharpening a tool on a grinding wheel. At the time, most of Bourne's fellow artists were concerned with capturing the pastoral idyll of innocent peasants pursuing rural tasks. But Bourne celebrates the navvies' strenuous work in almost a sacred way. He uses light from the shaft to create a spiritual atmosphere, where man ascends heavenward (by the fruit of his labours). Bourne seems to imply that this ‘cathedral to the iron horse’ depends entirely on the muscle power of simple workingmen. Symbolically, the weary horses will soon be replaced by the mechanical wonders that they have helped to build.
This wash drawing depicts work being carried out on the London Birmingham Railway (LBR), the first into London, running from Curzon Street Station, Birmingham, to Euston Station. The 112-mile long line took 20 000 men nearly 5 years to build, at a cost of £5.5 million pounds. About £500 000 was paid out in ‘sweeteners’ (bribes) to landowners along the route and the plans were passed by Parliament in 1833. Joseph Locke and George Stephenson were appointed joint engineers for the line in 1834, but their working styles were incompatible. Stephenson withdrew in 1835 and Locke became engineer-in-chief for the whole line. Kilsby Tunnel in Northamptonshire was at 2400 yards, the longest and most expensive railway tunnel then built. Extensive quicksands made its excavation one of the most difficult engineering challenges on the route. Eighteen working shafts were sunk to construct the tunnel, which took 2 years to complete, cost three times the estimate and claimed the lives of 26 workers [1]. The tunnel today has two 60-feet diameter ventilation shafts. The southerly shaft can be seen from the M45 motorway and the northerly one, which is 120 feet deep, by the A5 road just south of Kilsby village.
LBR commissioned Bourne to capture for posterity an accurate recording of the construction work and to counter prevailing anti-railway public opinion. John Ruskin (1819–1900) denounced the new railways, which ‘slashed like a knife though the delicate tissues of a settled rural civilization’ and ‘brutally amputated every hill on their way’ and Dickens alludes to it in Dombey and Son [2,3]. In the early part of 1837, Bourne was sent northwards to sketch the nearly completed Watford Tunnel and views of the construction work at Boxmoor, Berkhampstead, Tring and Wolverton. By 8 July 1837, he had reached the Kilsby Tunnel, where some of his most memorable sketches were produced [4]. He probably used a camera obscura in his preparatory work. The drawings were subsequently lithographed by Bourne himself and printed by Day and Haghe (lithographers to Queen Victoria). The book, Drawings of the London & Birmingham Railway, was published within months of the railway's opening in 1838 and John Britton produced the text [5,6].
John Cooke Bourne was born on 1 September 1814, to a hatter of Hatton Garden. He became known as ‘the Piranesi of the Railway Age’ after Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1729–78) an Italian artist famous for his etchings of Rome and of fictitious and atmospheric ‘prisons’ (Carceri d‘Invenzione) [7]. He died in the district of Brentford in February 1896.
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©NRM/Science & Society Picture Library.
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References
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- Science Museum. Making the Modern World. Sponsored by the ISB fund of the Treasury and the Cabinet Office. http://www.makingthemodernworld.org.uk/stories/the_age_of_the_engineer/01.ST.04/ (23 September 2007, date last accessed).
- Brightfield MF. The coming of the railroad to early Victorian England, as viewed by novels of the period (1840 –1870). Technol Cult (1962) 3:45–72.[CrossRef][Web of Science]
- Barman C. Early British Railways (1950) Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books.
- de Haan D, Cole B. John Cooke Bourne. Web-based exhibition with Science Museum, 2002. http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/on-line/jcook (26 October 2007, date last accessed).
- Drawings of the London& Birmingham Railway. Drawn by John Cooke Bourne, text by John Britton. London: Bourne and Ackerman. 1838–1839.
- Bourne JC. Bourne's London and Birmingham Railway (1970) Newton Abbot: David & Charles.
- Klingender FD. Art and the Industrial Revolution—Elton A, ed. (1968) New York: A. M. Kelley.
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