Henry Marc Brunel – Engineer Or Bon Viveur?
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HENRY MARC BRUNEL – ENGINEER OR BON VIVEUR? By Derek Portman November, 2004 CONTENTS Introductory Comments on Sources .................................................................. I Chapter I: Family Background......................................................................... 1 Chapter II: In His Father‟s Footsteps .............................................................. 9 Chapter III: Sir William Armstrong‟s Premium Apprentice and the Great Eastern again ................................................................................................. 31 Chapter IV: Back in London, John Hawkshaw‟s Pupil The Great Ship Saga Continued ...................................................................................................... 80 Chapter V: Assistant Engineer to Sir John Hawkshaw ................................ 129 Chapter VI: On His Own Professionally ...................................................... 170 Chapter VII: Principally Transportes Urbanos, Bahia, Brazil ....................... 212 Chapter VIII: William Froude‟s Cutting Edge Technology ........................... 238 Chapter IX: Torquay Local Board of Health Water Works ........................... 265 Chapter X: Barry Railway and Dock ............................................................ 312 Chapter XI: John Wolfe Barry and Henry Marc Brunel, Partners ................ 345 Chapter XII: Epilogue .................................................................................. 401 Appendix I: William Froude ......................................................................... 403 Appendix II: Model Testing And Ship‟s Trials .............................................. 411 Appendix III: The Channel Tunnel............................................................... 423 I Introductory Comments on Sources Henry Marc Brunel, like his father, Isambard Kingdom, and his grandfather, Marc Isambard, kept a diary and maintained letter books: this biography is very largely dependent on these sources. While the latter were sustained for most of his life, later on his career they became much less comprehensive. This was particularly so after William Froude‟s death in 1879. Also, after Henry entered into partnership with John Wolfe Barry the latter insisted that the correspondence on a particular engineering project was filed with the firm‟s documentation and not kept by Henry personally amongst his private papers. So, in the case of Tower Bridge for example, there are only Barry‟s words in a lecture he gave to fall back on for a detailed description of the project. We are thus left with a large gap in our knowledge of Henry‟s later professional life. Further, his diary was intermittent and after a period appears to have been discontinued. This is a singular loss as much of the colour in his professional life disappears from view and there is less insight into his personal relationships and his private life generally. The manuscripts of the diaries and letter books are held in the Special Collections Department of the University of Bristol Library. The letter books are in particularly poor condition and many of the pages are extremely fragile. For this reason, the University does not permit access to this material for research purposes. Fortunately, the late George Maby, one time Archivist of the University Library, prepared summaries of Henry Brunel‟s whole correspondence. In many instances these “summaries” are apparently quoting verbatim from the original text and as such are useable for quotation II purposes in this biography. This opportunity has been used frequently as it adds vibrancy to the narrative which otherwise could be rather flat. However the summaries of the letter books, suffer from two disadvantages, firstly they are Henry Brunel‟s view of events and so not necessarily objective, and secondly, what appears in the summaries is how George Maby interpreted the text and may not convey the full meaning of what Henry was saying. Other sources may exist, for example among Froude‟s papers deposited at the Science Museum repository at Wroughton, near Swindon, the archives of Barry‟s partnership lodged with successor firms, the records of the London Underground amongst railway company records in The National Archives at Kew and in local government minute books and similar records. Just one of these has been pursued, the Torquay Local Board of Health minute books in the Devon Record Office in Exeter in connection with the Torquay Water Works Scheme. The omission of these possible sources means that this biography is the life of Henry Marc Brunel according to Henry Marc Brunel‟s own account of his life. This is not necessarily a bad thing as Henry had very few engineering projects he could truly say were his own: his professional life was largely played out in a supporting role to a principal engineer. However, on the few occasions he was overall responsible for a project, this has been singled out for detailed consideration and treated in as much depth as possible. During the late nineteen eighties Maby worked closely with Geoffrey Tudor who was at one time Senior Lecturer in Naval History at Britannia Royal Naval III College, Dartmouth1 The intention was to write a biography of Henry Brunel. Although much research work was done, Tudor was unable to complete his studies and the biography was never started. He has, however, made all his working papers, which cover not only Henry Brunel but also topics connected with him, available to the present writer, who is greatly indebted to him for this generous gesture and for the advice and support which he has given while this biography was being written. Further, his comments on the initial draft have been incorporated into the final text. The biography is largely time based. There is some back tracking, brought about by the need to follow a theme to its end before picking up on another topic which started somewhat earlier. As a result the Chapter headings are not a firm indication of what is in the chapter, rather the subject which dominates it. Certain matters of importance are treated in the text of this biography only as they appeared to Henry or as the part Henry played in the sequence of events. To facilitate a better understanding of the wider implications of Henry‟s work and to broaden the background to his life, three appendices have been added to the text. They are Appendix I, William Froude, Appendix II, Model Testing and Ships‟ Trials and Appendix III, The Channel Tunnel. Each of these three topics has an importance well beyond any contribution that Henry may have made to them in a supporting role. The biography starts about the time Henry left Harrow School and was helping Isambard Kingdom Brunel in the launch of the Great Eastern. It therefore does not cover Henry‟s childhood and adolescence nor does it 1 Geoffrey Tudor was also Historical Adviser to the Brunel in Devon Trust and in this capacity wrote a booklet entitled The Brunels in Torbay, G. D. C. Tudor, Torbay Natural History Society 1989. IV describe the Brunel family‟s travels through Europe to Egypt and up the Nile, a journey which was taken by Isambard for health reasons in the last year of his life. In addition to the thanks due to Geoffrey Tudor, the author is also indebted to David Brown for his assistance on the subject of William Froude and his work, and more generally to Nick Lee, one time the Archivist at the University of Bristol, who also commented constructively on the initial draft, to Hannah Lowery, the present Archivist and to Michael Richardson, Librarian of the Special Collections Department. All have been extremely helpful during the writing of this work but the author accepts full responsibility for the accuracy and objectivity of this Life of Henry Marc Brunel and for the views expressed therein, some of which may be controversial. 1 Chapter I: Family Background To say that Henry Marc Brunel was the last of an engineering dynasty would be an overstatement: Three engineers spread over three generations is hardly that, when compared with the Barings or Rothschilds in merchant banking, the Pilkingtons in glass manufacture or the Cadburys in confectionery, to mention just a few. But the Brunels‟ creativity and energy as engineers were of the greatest importance, coming as they did at a time of rapid progress in technology and industrial development, in forming the science based and business driven society in which we live today. Henry‟s obituary in the Minutes of the Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1904, restricting itself largely to his professional career, puts it differently “the name of Brunel will ever remain peculiarly associated with the progress of engineering during the nineteenth century”.2 The question is “how did this happen?” The quick and most accurate answer is “by chance”. Not to accept this is not to understand how Marc Isambard Brunel (Marc) established himself in Britain, becoming an engineer of international repute, to be followed by his only son, Isambard Kingdom Brunel (Brunel), perhaps even more successful than his father. Henry Marc‟s (Henry) relative under-achievement in his grandfather‟s chosen profession must be seen against this background. It was not quite “clogs to clogs” in three generations in either an engineering or social sense but it was approaching it. Henry was only a shadow of his father and his grandfather but, that said, his professional career was not without its successes. 2 Minutes of the Proceedings of the Institution of Civil