The Brunels: Father and Son

Anthony Burton

• Editore: Pen and Sword Transport
• Anno: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781526787002
• Argomento: Geschichte
• Categoria: Historische Biographien

Isambard Kingdom Brunel has always been regarded as one of Britain's great heroes and an engineering genius. His father Marc Brunel has not received the same degree of adulation, but this book will show just how important a part Marc played in his son's works and will also look at his own great achievements. Marc Brunel arrived in Britain as a refugee from revolutionary France, after a short time working in America. He was a pioneer of mass production technology, when he invented machines for making blocks for sailing ships. He had other inventions to his name, but his greatest achievement was in constructing the very first tunnel under the Thames. Isambard spent his early years working for and with is father, who not only encouraged him but throughout his career he was also able to offer practical help. The famous viaduct that carried the Great Western Railway over the Thames at Maidenhead, for example was based on an earlier design of Marc's. Isambard's greatest achievements were in revolutionizing the shipping industry, where hew as able to draw on his father's experience when he served in the navy. The book not only looks at the successes of two great engineers, but also their failures. Primarily, however, it is a celebration of two extraordinary mean and their amazing achievements.

Chapter 1

MARC BRUNEL: THE EARLY YEARS

Marc Isambard Brunel was born in Hacqueville, between Paris and Rouen on 25 April 1769, the latest in a long line of Brunels, whose ancestry can be traced right back to 1490 when Jean Brunel was born in the same village. It has never been much more than a hamlet; today the population is under 500, but it is surrounded by rich farming land, and it was on that land that generations of Brunels had made their living as tenant farmers. The farmhouse itself is still there, a large and comfortable building that speaks of a certain prosperity. Although they were tenants not landowners, they were substantial members of the community and they traditionally held the position of Maître des Postes, which was remunerative as at that time the hamlet stood on the main road, though it is now bypassed. This set up a pattern of family life. The eldest son would inherit the farm and the next to arrive would usually be expected to enter the church. This would ensure the incumbent a good deal of prestige and a comfortable way of life. It was not considered necessary to have a vocation to enter the Church. Some may have been zealous, others might do little more than conduct the occasional service. That depended on the individual, but one thing was clearly understood in the family: that becoming a priest was a great blessing for the second son. So it was assumed from birth that Charles the eldest would get the farm and Marc would take holy orders and that he would be suitably grateful. Things did not exactly go as planned.

Although the Brunel family had the gift of the church living, so that there would be no problem in establishing him, it was still essential that the potential priest received a classical education and his father, Jean Charles, ensured that he got one. The process started seriously at the death of his mother, when the boy was seven. Marc did not prove to be an enthusiastic scholar, in spite of his father’s efforts. Reports of those early days say that he showed more enthusiasm for watching the local wheelwright at work. This is not too surprising, since, for any child with a practical bent, there are few jobs more fascinating. There is the intricate carpentry of creating the wheel, but the real joy comes at the end, when the iron tyre has to be put on the wheel. Fired up to red-heat, the metal is placed over the wooden rim which promptly catches fire and is then dowsed in water, with its ensuing cloud of steam, to shrink the iron to the wood. For Marc, this was a great improvement over conjugating Latin verbs. Marc’s father, however, seems to have been convinced that all he needed was discipline and the learning would follow. The standard punishment was to shut him up in a gloomy room with rather forbidding portraits of his ancestors, one of whom always seemed to be looking at him with a disapproving gaze. Young Marc became so depressed by the sight of this one particularly grim portrait, that he dragged a table to the wall, put a chair on top, clambered up and sliced out the offending eyes with his pocket-knife. After that, home tuition came to an end, and at eight he was sent to the military college at Gisors, some 20km away from home.

The village of Hacqueville in France, the birthplace of Marc Brunel. The entrance to the Brunel farm can be seen to the right of the picture.

The college was much more to Marc’s liking as the boys could strut around in uniform like little soldiers with powdered wigs and swords at their side. He was good at mathematics and drawing and in the holidays he would go out with his sketchbook, visiting interesting locations. One of his favourites was the great medieval fortress of Chateau Gaillard, built by the English king Richard I then also the Duke of Normandy, on a promontory overlooking the Seine at Les Andelys, just a few kilometres from his home. He also developed a taste for music and began learning to play the flute. He was later shown a harpsichord and was intrigued by the mechanism. According to legend, he promptly set about inventing a model musical instrument that could produce the sounds of both harpsichord and flute. If the story is true – and many stories surrounding boys who became famous later in life are not – then he must have been extraordinarily gifted. His instrument would have to incorporate both a keyboard attached to a mechanism to pluck the strings and a blowing device for the flute. True or not, the boy was still showing a reluctance to study for the church and an enthusiasm for mechanical objects. His father made one last attempt to set him on what he regarded as the sensible path and he was sent for religious instruction to the seminary of Sainte Nicaise in Rouen.

For young Marc, the move was not welcome in the sense that he was now required to spend ever more time on the subjects in which he had little or no interest. On the other hand, Rouen was a busy city and an important inland port, able to take a variety of sea-going ships as well as river barges. Everything about the docks fascinated him and he was kept busy sketching everything from cranes to ships. One day, he saw two large iron cylinders being unloaded and, asking what they were, was told they were part of a ‘fire engine’. This was not a machine for putting out fires, but an early form of steam engine for pumping water based on a design by Thomas Newcomen in England. The system was quite simple. An overhead beam pivoted at the centre had pump rods suspended from one end. Just as in the village pump, someone has to move the handle up and down to get water, so a force was needed to raise the rods. Newcomen suspended a piston from the other end of the beam, that fitted tightly into a cylinder. Steam was admitted below the piston and then condensed by a cold-water spray, creating a partial vacuum, at which point air pressure forced the piston down, lifting the rods. Marc was intrigued and declared that one day he would like to visit the country that made such things. He could never have guessed how important a part steam power would play in the lives of himself and the son he would have many years later.

Marc now had a change in his fortunes. The principal of the seminary recognised that the boy had great talent, but no vocation for the Church. He informed Marc’s father of his views, and at that point a distant cousin of Marc’s stepped in. Mme Carpentier’s husband had retired from a life of seafaring and was now American Consul in Rouen. The family offered to take the boy in and arrange for private tuition from a friend of theirs, the resoundingly named, Vincent François Jean-Nöel Dulague. The friend was, in fact, the Professor of Hydrography at the Collége Royal in Rouen, and author of two standard textbooks on navigation. Surprisingly for such an eminent man, he agreed to take over the job of tutoring the boy, who was just entering his teenage years.

This was just what the boy needed to encourage his talents and give them direction. Trigonometry can seem a sterile subject, but when taught in terms of its application, then it can inspire. After just three lessons, Marc had grasped how the subject could be used to measure things which would have otherwise prove difficult. The theodolite is a surveying instrument that can measure angles. If you want to know the height of something, then if you can measure the distance from the base to the point where you’ve set up the instrument, then by using the theodolite to measure the angle between the base and the top of the object you are calibrating, you can create a triangle that will give you the height. Marc was so impressed with his new-found knowledge that he built his own basic theodolite and measured the height of Rouen Cathedral. This combination of natural ability and eagerness to learn so impressed Dulague that he decided to do what he could to secure Marc a career in the French Navy.

Thanks to Dulague’s prestige, he was able to arrange an introduction for his pupil to the Marquis de Castrie, who, after a distinguished military career, was now Secretary for the Navy. As a result, Marc was accepted as a Volontaire d’Honneur in the French Navy in 1785 and was assigned to a frigate. While waiting to set sail, he was far from idle. He saw that one of the officers had a Hadley’s quadrant, a navigational instrument that was used for measuring the angle of the sun to the horizon to determine the ship’s latitude. He at once set about making a similar instrument for himself. As the illustration on p.5 shows this was quite a complex device and the fact that he succeeded and used it throughout his time in the navy is a mark of his ingenuity and technical ability. In 1786, he boarded the Maréchal de Castrie and in 1786, as a 17-year-old cadet, he set sail for the Caribbean.

We know very little about his years at sea. There is a drawing of a coffee husking machine, marked Guadeloupe 1790, but there is no evidence it was ever built. We do know that in the course of his travels he acquired a good working knowledge of English. He returned to Rouen in January 1792 and found a very different France from the one he had left six years ago. On 14 July 1789, the Bastille had been stormed, marking the start of an ever more radical series of demands for reform of the old feudal system. In 1791, a new constitution had been agreed, with the king as a constitutional monarch, though still with the power to veto legislation. Such moderation was short lived. The aristocracy had already been stripped of their powers; soon they would also lose their heads. On 25 April 1792, shortly after Marc’s return, the guillotine claimed its first victim. He was, like most of the prosperous farmers of Normandy, a staunch royalist – a position that was rapidly becoming extremely dangerous.

A Hadley quadrant. This was the type of instrument that the young Marc Brunel made for himself with the help of a local carpenter.

Marc was once again staying with the Carpentiers in Rouen. One suspects the young man had a certain recklessness about him at this time; after all, he had almost certainly encountered many dangerous situations during his time at sea. The Revolution entered a new phase in August 1792 when a mob stormed the Tuileries Palace and imprisoned the king. The citizens of Rouen, who supported the king, set up a National Guard, which Marc promptly joined. After the sacking of the Tuileries, the defenders, including some of the Swiss Guard, made their escape and arrived in Rouen, expecting to be safe. But they were recognised and faced with a large band of sans culottes. Marc tried to intervene to plead for them, but the crowd was becoming more and more enraged. As he wrote in his diary:

‘We could not have escaped had they closed in on us, but they were intimidated by the sight of a few of the National Guard coming down the Cours Dauphin.’

It was all very well declaring one’s royalist sympathies in Rouen, but now he and François Carpentier decided to visit Paris. Here Marc could not refrain from expressing his views and told a crowd that he thought Robespierre’s rule would soon be ended. Paris was not the place to express such opinions and the two men were lucky to escape, holing up in an inn until they could make their way back to Rouen. They were just in time as the following day the barricades went up around the city.

The Carpentiers were soon to have another guest. Sophia Kingdom, usually known as Sophie, who was just 16 years old when she arrived in Rouen. Her father, William Kingdom, had lived in Plymouth where he was agent for supplying both the Navy and the Army. She was the youngest of sixteen children. At that period, French manners and fashions were still highly regarded in Britain, and any young lady hoping to enter society was expected to know all about them and preferably have at least a smattering of the language. So young Sophie was sent to France with two friends, M. and Mme. Longuemar. Quite why anyone thought it was sensible to send a young girl into a country of bloody turmoil we will never know, but the party duly arrived at Le Havre in December 1792. The visits did not last long. The Longuemars heard that two of their friends who were known royalists had been killed, and they scuttled back to England. Sophie, however, was ill and unable to travel, so they left her with friends, the ever accommodating Carpentier family. It was there on 17 January 1793 that Marc met her for the first time.

By now it was obvious even to the impetuous Marc that the times were dangerous for Royalist supporters and that he needed to stay out of sight. His enforced isolation was made considerably more agreeable, as it was shared by a beautiful young girl, about to celebrate her 17th birthday. On her part, she must have been enthralled by the tales he had to tell – no doubt suitably embellished – of his adventures around the world. The result was that the young couple fell in love. But they could not stay together forever. Marc simply had to get away.

Once again, the Carpentier connection proved invaluable. François was able to arrange with the American Vice Consul for Marc to be provided with a passport for a journey to America. The reason given was that he was to arrange for grain shipments to come back to France, as the country was suffering a severe shortage of bread. Marc set off, but he had not gone far when his horse stumbled, throwing him and leaving him unconscious by the side of the road. When he came to, there was no sign of the horse, but a coach stopped and the occupant enquired where he was going. Marc replied that he was going home to Le Havre. The occupant offered to take him. So, the ardent young royalist was helped on his way by the Republican Navy Minister Gaspard Monge. On 7 July 1793, Marc was on board the American ship Liberty and ready to set sail for New York. It was only then that he discovered that he had either lost or forgotten the essential passport. It could have been a calamity, but he borrowed a passport from another passenger and set to work forging one for himself. He was obviously an expert counterfeiter, which was just as well; they had scarcely left port before they were stopped by a French frigate and all passengers were ordered to muster on deck for their documents to be checked. The fake was passed without query and he was safely on his way.

Back in Rouen, Sophie’s life was becoming increasingly difficult. In October, a decree was passed calling for the immediate arrest of all English nationals. Sophie was taken away in a cart by armed men and, because the prisons were all full to capacity, she was taken to a convent at the port of Gravelines on the north coast. The nuns were reduced to extreme poverty, sleeping on bare boards with little to eat but a rough bread made out of a little flour mixed with straw. It was a terrifying place. It became overcrowded, but the authorities found a simple solution. They set up a guillotine, and prisoners were removed at regular intervals for execution. With each head that was removed, space was made for a new occupant. Petitions were sent for her release on the grounds that she had been very useful in France, teaching English to good, reliable republican families. None of this had any effect, but then, to everyone’s surprise, the doors were opened and everyone was told they were free to leave. Robespierre had fallen. Sophie made her way back to the Carpentier family in Rouen, where she was given a warm welcome, and they arranged for her passage back to England. The days of terror were ended for the young Englishwoman, but she did not forget the young Frenchman with whom she had shared the dangers.

Chapter 2

MARC IN AMERICA

Marc landed in New York on 6 September 1793, found temporary lodgings and then started to worry about how he would earn a living. Two of his fellow passengers had talked about setting up a survey of land in the north of the country up to Lake Ontario on behalf of a French company. They were to be based in Albany, some 150 miles north of New York. He made his way there and met two ex-shipmates, Pierre Pharoux and Simon Desjardins, who agreed that he could join the expedition to map an area of over 200,000 acres of wilderness. They set off with two tents, axes and four Native Americans as guides. Richard Beamish, in his Memoir of the Life of Sir Marc Isambard Brunel, published in 1862, recalls discussing the trip with Marc Brunel, but received very little real information about what must have been a difficult journey. We do know that they used a boat as their means of transport, almost essential in a country with no roads of any sort. But it would have been an arduous journey, often having to lift the boat from the water for portages, carrying it round falls and rapids, as they made their way up a network of rivers to the Great Lakes. Two anecdotes did emerge from their conversations about his travels. They were journeying upriver when they heard children’s voices shouting, ‘Viens papa – viens Maman, voila un bateau’ – Come on father and mother – there’s a boat. They had come upon a family of French settlers, who made them welcome. The other simply states that Marc killed a rattlesnake on Rattlesnake Island; the name might have suggested that it was not the healthiest place to visit.

Marc Brunel and Pharoux returned to New York by sea, and during the voyage began talking to an American merchant, Mr Thurman, described by Marc as an ‘homme sage’. He had become interested in the idea of developing a canal system that would ultimately link New York t...