MICHAEL HENRY CASTLE (1808-1891) AND THE BRISTOL & EXETER RAILWAY

My great great great uncle Michael Castle was the deputy chairman of the Bristol & Exeter Railway. His brother in law, my great great great uncle William Harwood, was the company Secretary; and I suspect that many members of their families including my great great great uncle Charles Castle and my great great grandfather William Henry Castle were shareholders. All of them were prominent Bristol businessmen for whom an improved connection to Exeter was a worthwhile investment in the 1840s.

The Bristol & Exeter termini at Temple Meads (above, photo by AfterBrunel) and St Davids (below, photo by Geof Sheppard) – the Exeter building replaces Brunel’s original. Both photos from Wikipedia

The engineer for the route was none other than Isambard Kingdom Brunel, with whom other branches of my ancestry have personal connections: my 4x great aunt Sarah Guppy discussed bridge-building with him before he built the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol , and my 4x great uncle Daniel Wade Acraman supplied ironwork and machinery for Brunel’s masterpiece the SS Great Western. Sarah, her husband Samuel and her son Thomas Guppy all introduced innovative engineering solutions for the SSs Great Western, Great Britain and Great Eastern. Thomas and Isambard were lifelong friends and set up the Great Western Railway Company together, which connected London with Bristol.

The Bristol & Exeter naturally adopted the GWR’s broad track gauge of seven feet. It opened in 1844, seven years after the GWR, and to save money it operated for the first five years with GWR steam engines. When James Pearson took over as the B&ER’s Locomotive Engineer in 1850, he designed a succession of remarkable steam engines. Railway buffs are particularly fond of his 4-2-4 locomotives which used a flangeless driving wheel of exceptionally large diameter, up to nine feet. These huge wheels gave the Pearson machines an advantage in terms of speed, and at least one B&ER train travelled at over 80mph on a downhill section in Somerset.

James Pearson’s original 9ft 4-2-4T locomotive design (No.44, built and pictured c1854)

The B&ER was innovative in other ways, the first significant line to operate the block system of working to avoid collisions, and one of the first to use an electric telegraph for communication throughout its length. It was moreover a profitable line. 

In the 1870s it bowed to the inevitable and began to convert its track from Brunel’s broad gauge to the Stephenson standard of 4ft 8½ins, which had won the So-called Gauge Wars for domination of the railway system. The conversion would allow the B&ER to carry through trains to and from the rest of the British network. But the costs involved in this pushed the B&ER into an amalgamation with the GWR in 1876, and the line’s history as an independent operation was over. 

My most direct connection with the B&ER is something of a mystery. Among the papers of my great great great uncle Charles Castle which I inherited are two letters written in 1857 on B&ER letterheads, to Charles from his brother in law William Harwood, the Secretary of the railway company. I am not very sharp on financial business, but money is changing hands and the South Australian Banking Company is involved. (More in my next post!)

REV JOHN WARNE (c1800-1836) AND THE HOTWELLS

In 1836 the Gentleman’s Magazine carried the following item in its Obituaries column:

Feb. 19. At the Hotwells, Clifton, aged 36, the Rev. John Warne, priest vicar of Exeter. He was of Trin. coll. Camb., BA 1823, MA 182-. [sic]

That was that, then. More of an announcement than an obit. Was there really nothing more to say about the late John Warne, my 3x great uncle? Was he not even worth discovering the date of his MA for?

We do know a little bit of his clerical career, which was remarkably unspectacular. He was a minor canon in Bristol, and a curate in the posh Bristol suburb of Clifton until on the 6^th June 1830 he was (as the Hampshire Chronicle reported the following day)

collated by the Dean and Chapter of Exeter, to a Priest Vicar's Stall in their Cathedral, void by death of the Rev. Wm. Tanner.

Not by his own merits alone but by the death of poor old William Tanner! 

 Exeter Cathedral in 1830

Curate, minor canon and priest vicar are all variations of the same relatively junior role in the hierarchy of the Church of England. A curate was the local bishop’s man-on-the-spot, the cleric in charge of a particular church or parish – only after 1868 were such ministers formally known, as they are today, as vicars. A minor canon (for which priest vicar is simply another name) fulfilled the same tasks as a curate, but as part of a team of such clerics in a larger church or cathedral. Often they also had a choral role, leading the singing of high church calls and responses. Perhaps John Warne had a talent there, a sweet spiritual voice. But in a cathedral diocese they were the foot soldiers of the bishop, never part of his inner circle or chapter. So it was at Exeter Cathedral, and there John Warne remained until his own death six years later. 

His death – so often it is the manner of one’s departure that leaves the greatest impression; and, in the absence of much other information, so it is with Warne. The Hotwells of Clifton at which he died were, as the name implies, hot springs at the base of the cliffs of the Avon Gorge, now crossed by the Clifton Suspension Bridge. They have been known since at least the fifteenth century and the first attempt to harness their commercial potential came with the erection of a pump room in 1696.

The original Hotwells pump room, demolished in 1822

The original building was replaced in 1822 with Hotwells House, and a grand new pump room, based on those in Leamington and nearby Bath which Bristol hoped to rival. Presumably John Warne had some ailment which he thought would be improved by bathing in the warm waters. In the fifteenth century they were believed to cure scurvy; in the seventeenth, they were recommended for “hot livers, feeble brains and red pimply faces.” Warne’s death while actually visiting the spa cannot have been good for business. Perhaps he was simply overcome by the heat.

Hotwells House and pump room (1822)

The Hotwells’ location at the Avon Gorge was considered one of the most dramatically picturesque in England, and the spa had some success in attracting patrons to its supposedly restorative waters (later shown to be rather polluted). But it never competed with Bath, and Bristol’s real wealth was generated not by tourists at Hotwells Spring but by ships on the River Avon. If it was to continue to be accessible to ever-larger vessels, the port of Bristol needed to straighten the river bend on which the spa stood, and in 1867 the city’s merchant princes demolished the entire complex and the land it stood on.

If John Warne’s death is the most interesting thing about his life, it is not his greatest legacy. In 1832 he married Mary Laura Elizabeth Acraman (1802-1876), my 3x great aunt and a member of a prominent Bristol family of ships’ chandlers. In 1833, before the onset of whatever illness led him to the Hotwells, the couple had their only child, a daughter Elizabeth Ann. In time Elizabeth married and had children of her own. Mary Warne never remarried but, remaining in Clifton on a clergyman’s widow’s pension, outlived her husband by forty years.

WILLIAM EDWARD ACRAMAN (1799-1874) AND THE SWISS WATCH

In 1820, Daniel Wade Acraman sent his son William (my 3x great uncle) around Europe on the then-fashionable Grand Tour. Daniel had made his money with a foundry started by his father. Daniel himself was about to patent a new kind of chain cable, and under his management the family business would flourish to become one of the biggest in Bristol, where they supplied chandlery for the ship-building industry.

Daniel Wade Acraman’s memorial in St Stephen’s Parish Church, Bristol (photo by Bob Speel )

In time, when William took over the reins, Acramans would themselves become the owners of ships, importing luxury goods from all over the world and exporting British products to the colonies. But for now it was his father’s money which was paying for the cultural completion of twenty-one year old William’s education with a journey through the scenic wonders and architectural antiquities of the old world.

They kept in touch by letter, and a fellow descendent of Daniel’s has sent me a transcription of one of his letters to William during the trip. Mail was nothing new by the early nineteenth century of course, but I do marvel at the logistics. It was by no means certain that any given letter would find its intended recipient in the unreliable travel conditions of the time, and post was generally sent well ahead on the itinerary to await the arrival of the traveller. Daniel’s letter opens with a summary of recent correspondence in case either party has missed anything:

Dear William,

My last was to Naples dated march 23^rd. Concluding you will return to Rome in time for this, I shall direct it there. Yours to your sister and myself of the 22^nd ult. came home safe.

Pompeii, rediscovered in 1748, was why Grand Tourists went to Naples

It’s nice to think that William was in Naples thirty years before his sort-of cousin by marriage Thomas Richard Guppy went there to transform the marine engineering industry in the city. (I wrote about Guppy’s Neapolitan impact here recently – the relationship is tenuous: Thomas married Henrietta Jennings whose sister Caroline married my 2x great grandfather William Castle, whose sister Mary married William Acraman two years after his Grand Tour.)

There’s no mention of Mary Castle in this letter, dated 17^th April 1820, although Daniel does report the impending marriage of a family friend Philip  and, in the same breath, information about a forthcoming Batchelors’ Ball. (Philip may have been Philip Protheroe, later a partner with Guppy’s father Samuel in a soap-manufacturing venture – the Bristol business community was a small and close-knit one.)

Otherwise, the big news is that William is to be allowed to take stock in the family business, effectively becoming a partner. His 80-year old grandfather William Acraman, who started the firm and after whom he is named, has approved!

Acraman’s Store, No.1 Quay, Bristol, built c1830 when the family business was thriving with William Acraman’s involvement

William's father Daniel is only 45 years old but in poor health and unable to make the trip with William as he would have liked. He expresses envy of his son's journey:

The illness I have is so great that at times I am quite done for ... I need not say what joy I should receive if I was with you, but that being impossible I must look forward to the gratification of seeing you safe at home.

William is on his way home, from Naples north to Rome and on eventually, the letter makes clear, through Switzerland, and

I suppose by the time you get home you will know how to value your little bed and English fare, although you must be amply repaid by the sights you have seen.

Daniel has a favour to ask of William during the Swiss leg of his homeward journey.

Your aunt wishes you to buy her a watch about five or six guineas when at Geneva, without a chain, to hang using her Figure of Time. You will do this or not if you find it convenient. Mary [William’s sister] likes her watch and we all thought it quite large enough.

So Swiss watches were already objects of desire in the early nineteenth century.

A Staffordshire watch holder of the nineteenth century – the watch sits in a pocket behind the aperture, the dial visible without the need for a chain. Perhaps Mary Acraman had such a holder with a figure of Father Time.

Since, passing through Geneva, William was obviously returning to England by land rather than sea, it seems unlikely that he would get home to Bristol in time for the Batchelors’ Ball on 1^st May that year. Perhaps, if he did, it was there that William Acraman met his future wife. She would certainly have been dazzled by his fresh travellers’ tales.

THOMAS RICHARD GUPPY (1797-1882) AND THE S.S. GREAT WESTERN

Pioneering civil and nautical engineer Thomas Richard Guppy married Henrietta Collins Jennings (1810-1845), a sister of my great great grandmother Caroline Collins Jennings (1815-1876), making him my 3x great uncle Thomas.

Thomas Guppy wasn’t portrayed at the Opening Ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics, but his friend and colleague Isambard Kingdom Brunel was, by Kenneth Branagh

The Guppys and the Jennings’s were prominent families in the important British port city of Bristol, for which in 1830 a young Isambard Kingdom Brunel designed the Clifton Suspension Bridge. The bridge used construction techniques devised by uncle Thomas’s remarkable mother Sarah Guppy; and thereafter Thomas and Isambard became lifelong friends and colleagues. The same year that Brunel won the competition to design the Clifton bridge, he and Guppy formed a company to build a railway from the nation’s capital London stretching westwards to its most important seaport Bristol – the Great Western Railway.

The GWR won parliamentary approval for construction in 1832, and was formally founded in 1833 – Thomas was a director, and Isambard the GWR’s chief engineer. Thomas injected large amounts of his own money to fund the project; and during its construction Thomas’s mother Sarah also contributed. Later, after its opening, she proposed the idea that the banks of railway cuttings could be stabilised by planting trees to prevent landslides onto the track.

Sonning Cutting on the GWR, scene of a fatal rail accident caused by a  landslip in 1841 which prompted Sarah Guppy to suggest planting willows and poplars

The first GWR trains ran in 1838, but a casual remark from Brunel at a directors’ meeting three years earlier led to Guppy and him launching an even more ambitious project before the first was even completed. Why, Brunel half-joked, should they stop at Bristol? What if passengers could buy a through-ticket from London to New York? There was at the time no regular transatlantic crossing, and no one at the meeting took him very seriously – except Guppy.

The prevailing view was that no steamship could be built large enough to accommodate sufficient passengers and cargo AND the huge amount of fuel required to carry them all across the Atlantic. A committee was formed to plan a ship, to be called the S.S. Great Western, which could overturn such conventional wisdom. Guppy’s father and mother were both responsible for innovations in ship construction, and Thomas now spent three months himself touring Britain’s great ship-building centres, studying the best techniques of the best nautical engineers in the country.

S.S. Great Western, designed by Guppy and Brunel, fitted by Acraman, on a commemorative Royal Mail stamp of 2004

The S.S. Great Western was launched on 19^th July 1837 (and fitted out in large part by another 3x great uncle of mine, William Edward Acraman of Bristol ships’ chandlers Acraman & Co). After trials the ship made its maiden voyage to New York and back in 1838 in record time – 15 days out, 14 days back (including 24 hours lost for a stoppage at sea). It had consumed only three-quarters of its fuel supply in the process. As his obituary from the Institute of Civil Engineers noted, “Mr Guppy therefore assisted, conjointly with the late Mr Brunel, in the construction of the precursor of Ocean Steam Navigation.”

Thomas learned much from his 1835 survey of nautical engineering techniques; and he built on them many innovations of his own, which he applied to the Great Western’s successors, the Great Britain (1843) and the Great Eastern (1859). These included using copper plates on the hull instead of iron ones, to reduce corrosion; and (for the Great Eastern) a twin-walled, cellular system for constructing hulls which created a lining of buoyant, independent, water-tight compartments. In these he preempted double-hull improvements which were ordered after the catastrophic failure of the Titanic’s rather less successful watertight compartments some 53 years later.

DANIEL WADE ACRAMAN (1775-1847) AND THE S.S. GREAT WESTERN

I’ve had a soft spot for my Acramans since I found that single part-sad, part-humorous letter from my cousin Edward Daniel Acraman (see earlier posts). He was in Adelaide, a long way from home, when he wrote it, and never got back to Bristol.

Edward was named after his father, William Edward (my 3x great uncle), and his grandfather, Daniel Wade Acraman. Father and grandfather presided together over something of a golden age of Acraman prosperity in Bristol in the first half of the nineteenth century. They had passed like so many English families of the eighteenth century from a rural economy as yeoman farmers to urban industrial activity.

In the Acramans’ case they became iron founders and workers in Bristol, one of the most important ports in England at the time. Daniel Acraman patented a chain cable design in 1823, and by the 1830s the Acramans had a business empire of several companies and partnerships connected with marine engineering, manufacturing and supplying anchors, chains, boilers and other metalwork for shipping.

Bristol Harbour, with Acraman’s Warehouse to the rear on the left

and S.S. Great Western rear right under construction

The city was a centre for import and export, an obvious target for entrepreneurs of the railway boom of the early nineteenth century who were all racing to capture the lucrative freight market. The Great Western Railway, GWR, known to its passengers and shareholders as God’s Wonderful Railway, was formed at a public meeting in Bristol in 1833 took on the task of building a line from London to the city. The project was designed by the engineering genius Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who had already demonstrated his brilliance by his 1831 design for the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, the longest bridge in the world at the time (although it was only completed in 1864, five years after his death).

Brunel was not afraid to think big. He chose a wider-than-usual gauge for his track – 7 feet and one quarter of an inch, compared to the Stephenson standard gauge of 4 feet 8½ inches – and he had big ideas too about the length of journey his passengers could undertake. Why stop at Bristol? Brunel began to see the possibility of buying one ticket which could take you from London to New York. Such a voyage was becoming a technical possibility at the time, and several groups of businessmen were racing to make it a reality. The Great Western Steamship Company was formed in Bristol in 1836, and Brunel set about designing its flagship the S.S Great Western.

S.S. Great Western on her maiden voyage

Of course it was to be no ordinary ship. When it was launched in 1837 it was the largest steamship in the world, intended to prove Brunel’s theory that a larger ship would be more fuel efficient. It was built in the Patterson & Mercer yard at Bristol, and it seems that most of the machinery and ironwork on the wooden-hulled vessel was supplied by Acraman Morgan & Co. (The engines themselves were supplied and fitted by Maudslay, Sons & Field of Lambeth on the Thames.) The Great Western broke all records for a transatlantic crossing and arrived with a third of its fuel unused, vindicating Brunel's design. It became the first ship to offer a regular service between Britain and New York.

The success of the Great Western in pioneering the transatlantic route may have encouraged Acraman Morgan & Co to go into shipbuilding themselves in 1839. But the Acramans were in danger of becoming overextended. They had diversified in 1834 into a different kind of shipping interest, with a  company called Acraman Bush Castle & Co which imported tea from Canton. Having only recently (1832) completed a huge warehouse to accommodate all their ironworks, they had almost immediately had to invest in a large extension to it to store the tea.

Acraman’s No.1 Warehouse, 1832, before ...

and 1836, after tea extension, 

and today, as the Arnolfini Gallery

In all, too much money was going out and not enough coming back in. William Edward Acraman wrote in 1836 to one of his investors, “I wish one of these ships would arrive with some strong cargo [of tea].” But he also revealed that Messrs Bush and Castle were among those investors who had not yet paid in full for their shares in the company. Whether the ships never came in, or the investors never paid, the tea company went bankrupt in 1842, bringing about the spectacular financial collapse of the Acraman empire. The huge Acraman warehouse was sold off in 1846 to pay for the empire’s debts – and bought by the Bush family. It has been known as Bush House ever since.