A Little Light in the Darkness the Life and Times of John Buddle
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1 A Little Light in the Darkness The Life and Times of John Buddle By David Kidd 2 A A Little Light in the Darkness The Life and Times of John Buddle Mining Engineer, Scientist and Local Hero 1773 - 1843 By David Kidd 3 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc- nd/3.0/deed.en_US. 4 Abstract John Buddle was a witness to history. His Journals and Diary contain accounts of the development of railways, terrible pit disasters, the building of the new port of Seaham Harbour, and shed new light on the early history of iron shipbuilding on Tyneside. They also tell the story of his love for his sister Ann and of his stormy relationship with the aristocratic Durham Coalowner Lord Londonderry. This book is a snapshot of Buddle and his world, it tells the story of the great and mundane events of his life in his words, and makes his diaries available for the first time to a wider readership. Buddle is now almost forgotten but in his own day he was a celebrity, a local hero, and he was at the centre of the development of the safety lamp, the steam locomotive, and the foundation of the first iron shipyard on Tyneside. The diaries also contain much of human interest. The story of the marriage of Charles Steward who later inherited the title of Lord Londonderry to the Durham coal heiress Frances Anne Vane Tempest could have come from the pages of one of the great Nineteenth Century novels. Buddle’s account of the disaster at Heaton and the failed rescue attempt is an epic story of courage and tragedy which matches Franklin’s and Scott’s lost Arctic and Antarctic expeditions, while John and Ann Buddle were one of the great Brother and Sister partnerships of the Nineteenth Century equal to Dorothy and William Wordsworth. 5 Dedicated to my Parents who encouraged my interest in History and to Ann Buddle the unsung heroine of this story 6 Acknowledgements This book could not have been written without the help of Jennifer Kelly the Librarian of the North East Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers which holds John Buddle’s papers. In the course of my research I was fortunate to meet Jane Woolley, a direct descendent of John Buddle through his nephew Robert Atkinson. Jane read the first drafts of this book and offered many helpful suggestions as well as sharing useful information from her research into the history of her family. I was also fortunate to meet Judith Green and benefit from her work at St James Church Benwell. Without Judith who organised volunteers to maintain the graveyard where John and Ann Buddle are buried and raised money for the reroofing of the church the future of St James would have been very much in doubt and this important link with Buddle might have been lost. The many errors of course are entirely my own responsibility. This is a new work and corrections and comments from readers are welcome. 7 Table of Contents Introduction…………………………………………………page 9 A Day to Remember………………………………………page 17 A Century of Inventions…………………………………..page 24 Newcastle’s Call…………………………………………...page 35 The Steam Elephant……………………………………….page 46 The Battle against Creep…………………………………page 62 The Deluge…………………………………………………..page 93 The Slaughterhouse………………………………………..page 120 The Jarrow Gibbet………………………………………….page 152 The Secret Diary…………………………………………….page 171 An Arranged Marriage………………………….…………page 175 Seaham Harbour……………………………………………page 197 The Lost Main Line…………………………………………..page 210 Politics and Personality…………………………………….page 226 QED……………………………………………………………page 248 Sudden Death……………………………………………….page 261 Endnotes……………………………………………………..page 266 Appendix A Glossary of Mining Terms…………………page 267 Bibliography…………………………………….…………..page 272 Page References…………………………………………..page 275 8 Abbreviations BJ Benwell Colliery Journal EM Essays on Mechanics and other Useful Knowledge HJ Heaton Colliery Journal HM Hebburn Colliery Memorandum Book JJ Jarrow Colliery Journal LJ Lambton Collieries Journal PB Placebook MJ Medomsley Colliery Journal WJ Wallsend Colliery Journal A note on the text References in this book to John Buddle or just Buddle refer to John Buddle Junior 1773 - 1843. His father who was also called John Buddle and died in 1806 is referred to as John Buddle Senior or Buddle (S) In the extracts from the diaries the original spelling and punctuation is preserved as far as possible to make sure the authentic voice of John Buddle himself can be heard. 9 Introduction This book makes a bold claim. John Buddle never claimed to have invented anything yet he was central to the development of the safety lamp and the involvement of Sir Humphrey Davy stems from Buddle’s conviction that the application of science was the way to make mining safe. Buddle worked with Davy on the lamp, supplying specimens of mine gas and testing the prototype and the account in his diary of the Hebburn disaster of 1810 show that he was interested in exactly how mine gas fired long before the Felling disaster of 1812 which led to the formation of the Sunderland Committee. Buddle’s promotion of the safety lamp in the collieries he managed stemmed from a deep concern for the lives of the pitmen who worked for him. John Buddle saw more men die than any normal human being should and reasonably expect to remain sane. Unlucky, tragic, careless, heroic and ultimately pointless deaths fill the pages of his diaries, the deaths of people he knew, people who were his responsibility. He was not as is sometimes suggested a callous or unfeeling man for whom the deaths of pitmen was just another cost of mining in pits which were literally death traps. Buddle’s diaries show he went to extraordinary lengths to protect his men and he was above everything else a great leader whom the men trusted and would follow anywhere. When fires and explosions ripped through mines Buddle was always at the head of the rescue, but he knew 10 that courage, and he had plenty of that, was not enough. He documented the deaths of his men because he wanted to understand how accidents happened and more importantly how they could be prevented. Colliery disasters he knew were not acts of God, they were caused by natural forces and with knowledge and understanding they could be minimised if not avoided. While inquests on mine disasters were still recording verdicts that no blame could be attached to anyone for the slaughter in the pits which was the result of an unfathomable act of God Buddle was presenting Scientific Papers on the cause of explosions and how they could be prevented. The safety lamp was only a small part of his efforts to introduce science into mining. Buddle kept a barometer in his office at Jarrow and when pressure was low he put the pit in a high state of vigilance with deputies watching the return of air at the furnace so the men could be withdrawn at the first sign of danger. Jarrow was a dangerous pit, but Buddle’s methods saved more lives than were lost and averted at least one major disaster where more than a hundred men could easily have died. The tragedy was that so many were lost. When Buddle managed at last to enter the workings at Heaton after an epic nine month battle against the water that drowned the pit and recover the bodies of seventy five men and boys killed by a flood of biblical proportions he was not just trying to save the pit. He wanted to know if the men suffered before they died, and give them a decent burial for the sake 11 of their families; it was compassion that drove him on at enormous cost even after all hope was gone. The disaster happened when the men at Heaton broke through into old flooded workings and Buddle proposed afterwards that there should be a central repository of the plans of old mines which could be consulted by mine owners and viewers so that such disasters could be avoided in future. Unfortunately it took a hundred and ten years and the deaths of thirty eight pitmen in the Montagu Colliery disaster for his suggestion to be fully implemented. Buddle was interested in this world not the next, and he believed it was his duty as a master, as an educated man, and a scientist to do everything he could to reduce the terrible loss of life in the mines. The simplest solution would have of course been to close the pits, with the technology available in the first half of the Nineteenth Century coal could not be mined safely from the fiery seams of Tyneside, but to Buddle that would have been a retreat from progress, civilization and human destiny. He once described his pitmen as foot soldiers of the noble House of Wynyard (Lord Londonderry’s mansion in County Durham). Buddle was a great leader, and the military metaphor is a good one, even if it accepts the inevitability of casualties. Mining for him was like war, a dangerous activity with unavoidable risks but great rewards, and like a general in battle he had clear aims, a plan of campaign, and the charisma to get others to follow him. Buddle like his father was a mathematician and he was born in one of the great ages of mathematics. Newton mechanics had shown that the 12 Universe was just a great machine and Buddle believed that with mathematics everything could be understood, that everything could ultimately be reduced to calculation, to numbers. Even the workings of human character itself he thought could be attributed to the shape and structure of the brain as the new “science” of phrenology was beginning to demonstrate.