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!)

WILLIAM HENRY CASTLE (1810-1865) AND THE STOKES CROFT BREWERY

For Bristol Beer Week in October 2013, the Ashley Down microbrewery rustled up a special brew, Stokes Croft IPA (that’s India Pale Ale for the uninitiated). The brewery is in the St Andrews district of Bristol, and Stokes Croft is the road that leads to it from the city centre.

Stokes Park IPA, specially brewed by Ashley Down microbrewery for Bristol Beer Week 2013

The road was also the site until the second world war of the Stokes Croft Brewery, which stood at the corner of Stokes Croft and City Road. In the 1830s it was run, under the name of Castle & Rees, by two brothers in law: my Carmarthen-born 3x great uncle Thomas Rees and my Bristol-born great great grandfather William Henry Castle. Thomas had married Susannah Capel Jennings and William her younger sister Caroline Collins Jennings.

(A third sister, Henrietta Collins Jennings was the wife of the engineer Thomas Richard Guppy of whom I have written here; and a fourth, Margaret Collins Jennings married William Lambert and inherited a house belonging to her uncle Thomas Collins, about which I wrote last year.)

The last remaining buildings of the Stokes Croft Brewery survive as Bristol’s Lakota Nightclub

William and Thomas also ran, under the name Rees & Castle, the Nursery Brewery on Kent Street in Liverpool, where Thomas had by 1837 made his home. I don’t know when they entered into partnership together. William was already a brewer when he married Caroline in Liverpool in 1837; and perhaps they met through her sister, the wife of his business partner. Thomas Rees was among the witnesses at William and Caroline's wedding.

There was a second brewery on Kent Street, the Mersey Brewery, in which William and Thomas were joined by a third Jennings brother in law, Thomas Richard Guppy. They brewed Mersey porter ale, and had traded as Guppy, Rees and Co since at least 1838 (when Guppy brought a court case against a carpenter for late completion of work on the brewery). But Guppy withdrew on 2^nd March 1840 to concentrate on his engineering career. Castle too dropped out of that operation exactly two years later, leaving Rees in sole charge there.

The brothers in law formally dissolved their Stokes Park and Nursery partnership on 10^th August 1842, but I don’t think there was any crisis. Two small breweries in two cities 180 miles apart probably had little to gain from shared ownership when one partner lived in each city. Thomas concentrated on the Liverpool sites and William took on sole ownership of Stokes Croft.

Stokes Croft at the junction with City Road, c1918 (brewery just out of sight on the right)

The families on the other hand remained very close. William and Caroline Castle’s daughter Emily was visiting her uncle Thomas and aunt Susannah Rees at the time of the 1861 census, and a year later there was a Rees-Castle partnership of a different kind when Emily married their son Lambert Thomas Rees, her first cousin.

By then both men had moved out of brewing and into grain processing. Thomas was a corn merchant and William a rice dresser – cleaning up imported rice to prepare it for sale. The Stokes Croft Brewery went through a series of owners. Foll & Abbott had it in the 1860s when they sold F&A pale bitter ale for a shilling a gallon. In the early 1880s it was owned by Hereford company Harvey & Co, who sold it on to Arnold, Perrett & Co in 1889. R.W. Miller & Co took it on only four years later, and Georges & Co bought it in 1911. Having survived Bristol’s blitz in the second world war it finally closed down in 1948.

Avonmead, postwar shops and flats on the site of the Stokes Croft Brewery

At 6.1% Stokes Croft IPA is not a beer merely to quench your thirst with, and no doubt much stronger than the ale produced by its eponymous predecessor. But it has strength too in the history carried in its name.

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 NAPLES-PORTICI LINE

Thomas Richard Guppy, friend and adviser to Isambard Kingdom Brunel, was my 3x great uncle. He was a gifted engineer who made many contributions particularly in the field of marine engineering and ship design. A life spent on construction sites and in iron foundries took its toll on Guppy’s health and at the age of 53 he moved from Bristol to Naples, in response to an invitation from the latter city.

For most of the nineteenth century Italy was moving slowly towards unification. But in 1849 southern Italy was a separate state known as the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, formed in 1816 from a union of the kingdoms of Sicily and Naples. Naples was the capital of the combined lands; and it was here, not in Rome, Milan or Turin, that the first Italian railway was constructed in 1839.
 

The inaugural journey on the Naples-Portici line, recorded here in a contemporary painting by Naples court painter Salvatore Fergola, took nine and a half minutes

The Naples-Portici line runs east from Naples around the bay for a little under five miles. Last summer, driving to Sorrento on the motorway in the narrow transport corridor between the sweep of Naples Bay and the slopes of Mount Vesuvius, I kept company with the line for part of the way.

Vesuvio was the name of the locomotive which hauled the inaugural train of eight coaches on 3^rd October 1839 in the presence of King Ferdinand II of Naples. The engine was built to designs of British railway pioneer Robert Stephenson by his regular manufacturer Michael Longridge at Bedlington, Northumberland.

 Above: an original coach from the inaugural journey, and a reproduction of the locomotive Bayard, which ran on the Naples-Portici line from December 1839 and was built to the same design as Vesuvio - both now in the National Railway Museum, Pietrarsa.

Below: based on the Fergola painting, stamps issued in 1989 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Naples-Portici line

With no previous Italian experience of railways, the line depended heavily on foreign input – French money and British engineering. King Ferdinand was determined not to be dependent on overseas expertise and in 1845 he opened Italy’s first railway workshops at Pietrarsa.

The first locomotive to roll off the production line was the Pietrarsa, still British designed and manufactured, but assembled in Pietrarsa. In 1852 the workshops wisely produced a huge cast-iron statue of their founder King Ferdinand, which still stands at the Pietrarsa workshops – now Italy’s National Railway Museum.

King Ferdinand II, founder of Italian railways, now stands outside the foundry which he founded, and which founded his statue

But Pietrarsa struggled with the high cost of importing coal – from Britain – and perhaps its continuing lack of metallurgical expertise was behind the invitation to Guppy which prompted his relocation in 1849. His reputation as engineer and director of both the Great Western railway and the Great Western Steamship Company must certainly have preceded him. He established his own engineering works in Naples, and over the next decade the metalworking industry there came to be dominated by just two firms – Guppy & Co, and Pattison & Co. John Pattison was a former colleague of Guppy’s.

Guppy’s firm was at one stage producing three locomotives a year for the expanding Neapolitan railway network. But his abiding interest was in marine engineering. After Italian unification in 1861 he and Pattison, pre-eminent in the new nation’s most important naval base, were extremely well placed to supply the needs of a new national Navy. Pattison built ships – destroyers and, later, faster more maneuverable torpedo boats – and Guppy supplied the engines to Pattison and others.

The escort vessel Rapido, built in 1876 by the Orlando Brothers in Livorno, with engines by Guppy & Co

For his contribution to the defence of the new nation, Guppy was knighted, receiving the title Cavaliere della Corona d' Italia. In his last years he continued to visit his workshops three days a week, and spent his leisure hours tending a vineyard on his estate near Portici (modern-day Herculaneum). He approached the cultivation of the grape with the same assiduous scientific rigour which he had applied to ships and trains. 2014 sees the 175^th anniversary of the opening of the Naples-Portici; and I will be raising a glass of Herculanean wine to celebrate Thomas Richard Guppy’s part in its history.

An Italian engine type FS660; Hawthorn-Guppy, the 1885 successor to Guppy’s original Naples workshops, produced 12 of them 1903-1904. They remained in service until 1930, a tribute to Guppy's standards of engineering excellence.