God Is an Englishman (38 page)

And this, in fact, was what occurred, for the dawn mists were over the Thames when he descended the spiral staircase from his eyrie, peeled off jacket and shirt, and washed under the stable pump, to the astonishment of the night-duty stableman, one of Keate’s elderly derelicts, who came out of the hay store and stopped to stare at his employer spluttering under the jet. He said, disapprovingly, “Lord ha’ mercy, Mr. Swann. I ’eard splashing an’ woulder bet it was one o’ they loafers who’d climbed the fence to steal forage. I was just gonner fetch my scatter-shot gun,” but Adam said, cheerfully, “I’ve been working overtime, Hoskins. Now I’m going down to London Bridge station for coffee and a bacon sandwich. Throw me a clean horse cloth, there’s a good fellow!” Hoskins handed him the cloth and watched him towel himself, pondering the caprices of the gentry who, with money in the bank, preferred to work through the night within close range of a stinking tannery when they might have been home in bed with wife or GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 197

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light-o’-love. He said, “Any special in structions for Mr. Keate when I go orf dooty, sir?” and Adam said, “None for Mr. Keate but a word to Mr. Tybalt. Tell him I’ve in vented the ready reckoner. No more than that—‘Mr. Swann has invented the ready reckoner.’ And by the time I’m back make sure the carpenter is available. I’ve got a special job for him.” The carpenter, a part-time employee responsible for running re pairs on the short-haul waggons, was awaiting him when he returned and so was Tybalt and Keate, both hoping to be introduced to Frank enstein. It meant very little to them on the drawing board, but the carpenter grasped the idea readily enough and undertook to assemble a prototype by noon, providing he wasn’t disturbed.

It was really no more than a large, slabsided frame mounted on a turntable, and the idea had developed from Adam’s comparison between a terrestrial globe and Mercator’s projection. It had four faces, each fitted with spring clamps capable of holding smaller frames, and each frame could be lifted out to expose one below.

The faces were designed to provide a summary of the four component factors of a long haul, the type of goods likely to be handled in a specific area; the roads and natural hazards within that area; the equipment and personnel available at any one base; and, finally, the time schedules of goods trains running over the railways in the territory under review. The whole thing was designed to spin accord ing to requirements, and there was a set of frames on each face rele vant to the area concerned. By standing beside it, and spinning it in full circle, it would be possible (providing his calculations were correct and the material on the frames up-to-date) to reduce the nature and weight of a haul to a formula in relation to distance travelled, time consumed, type of waggon and team employed, and the flow of goods traffic across the twelve areas on the master map.

Tybalt was captivated by it, declaring that once the result of a canvass was analysed Frankenstein would prove invaluable to the person charged with the task of arriving at an estimate. Unable to wait for the carpenter’s prototype he persuaded Keate to give him details of equipment and personnel likely to be allocated to Exeter, capital of the Western Wedge. Then he set about calculating the profits of a ghost haul from Moretonhampstead, in the railway-free fringe of Dartmoor, to the Exeter goods sidings. Soon he had en listed Adam in a trial run of two frigates, each carrying a load of milk churns consigned for Bristol. The result, they found, was very encouraging. They could do the run at a competitive price and still have the milk aboard an eastbound goods train within two hours of loading. Another two hours, with wholesalers to meet it, would see it arrive at Bristol dairies. The prospect of such a swift passage be tween cow and GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 198

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customer impressed him, giving him the impetus to begin work on a Western Wedge canvass that same day.

In the event it was by no means as simple as he had supposed. The summarised material required to fill forty-eight frames demanded concentrated research that kept Adam office-bound for ten days at a stretch, and even when it was assembled, and indexed for easy ref erence, scores of minor adjustments were seen to be necessary. By the time Frankenstein was ready to spin he was desperate for fresh air and exercise, and with the new target date fixed for July 1st, he took time off to prospect the Kentish Triangle on horseback, basing himself at Tryst in order to superintend his domestic upheaval but paying far more attention to a follow-up of Tybalt’s postal canvass of the area.

Replies were coming in now, first in a steady trickle, later in a stream amounting to an overall result of around forty per cent of the whole. Browsing through them, and preparing quotations, Adam had indisputable evidence of the blight that had struck the national road haulage system since the completion of a mainline railway system within the last few years. Short-run haulage was booming, as his own London returns proved, but medium and long-distance trans port had undergone a dramatic decline. In many rural areas no regular waggon service for heavy goods or produce existed, so that he sometimes wondered how all these teeming cities were fed and how difficult it must be for some of the locally based craftsmen to seek markets beyond their doorsteps. It was as though, with the arrival of the gridiron, the British had been segregated into cate gories of first, second, and third class citizens, like the passengers they whirled from one end of the country to the other. At one end of the scale were big manufacturers, city merchants, and well-estab lished tradesmen, who could transport products at a speed un dreamed of only twenty years before. At the other end was an agriculture drained of its labour force and communities living in small towns and villages that were as isolated as Crusoes if they happened to live far from the main arteries of the railroad companies. Spurs were entirely dependent upon population. The big companies saw no reason to waste mainline profits by opening up cross-country lines to serve a limited or scattered community.

It was a state of affairs, however, of which he had no reason to complain. With something like eight hundred contracts written into his ledgers he was tempted to take an even bigger gamble, by open ing eight or ten depots, instead of confining himself, for the time being, to four. He held back, however, inhibited partly by staffing problems, partly by a reluctance to put more strain on the shoulders of the indefatigable Tybalt and his apprentice clerks.

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Avery seldom appeared in the yard more than once a week. The partnership that existed between them was absurdly loose and, in actual fact, Adam was never really clear as to the extent of his re serves, for they had nothing in writing and their financial arrangements continued to rest on mutual confidence, apart from the fixed rate of interest for the two initial advances.

His books told him that the necklace had so far yielded him a little over five thousand pounds, but he could never make up his mind whether this was wholly or partly Avery’s money, or how many of the stones representing their reserve capital had been disposed of by his intermediary. It seemed to him a very weak link in what was becoming a solid chain of enterprise, but when he raised the matter, suggesting that they should have a proper agreement drawn up, Avery flatly declined to enter into any such arrangement, pointing out that the less lawyers knew about the source of the money the better. Adam, he said, could draw on his account if he needed fresh capital at any time, and Avery expressed himself wholly in favour of more and more expansion. Aware that inquiries concerning the source of capital might be awkward, and might even put the whole venture in jeopardy, Adam followed his advice and let this side of the business drift. In this respect, he told himself, he was in the fashion. Every day now he crossed paths with merchants in a very big way of business, who blithely borrowed what seemed to him astro nomical sums from banking houses and from one another in order to invest in all kinds of dubious ventures, both here and in faraway places where men like Roberts were opening up new and apparently limitless markets.

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Adam Swann was probably the first city merchant to institute what later generations of businessmen learned to call the weekly confer ence of heads of departments.

It grew out of need to correlate the day-to-day work of Keate, re sponsible for personnel and rolling stock, Tybalt, immersed in his gigantic canvass, as well as the income and outgoings of the parent yard, Blubb, the ex-coachman, who was a kind of quasi-sergeant-major of the London waggoners and their apprentices, and himself, as the man who had elected to drive this unlikely team across half England.

Tybalt, he discovered, he could trust to complete any task set him, and they were in almost hourly contact with one another, usually through a booming speaking-tube that connected the belfry with the counting-house near the weighbridge.

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Keate, who was inclined to be over-conscientious, was obsessed with the shortage of reliable carters, men he felt he could personally recommend to an employer who had lived up to all his initial promises and was now absorbing most of the local waifs who could be lured into regular employment. It was by no means easy, he told Adam, to find men who could be trusted out of his sight in places as far away as Salisbury, Exeter, Abergavenny, and Maidstone, and it was essential, as he saw his duty, to put such men as consented to serve in the provinces in charge of thoroughly trustworthy depot managers, who could be relied upon to resist the temptation to “shoulder” goods, as men like Blubb had once “shouldered” passengers, that is to say, carry them intermediate distances on a coach-run and pocket the fares. Such men were diffi cult to find, and of those interviewed only a few signed on to undergo a period of training at Headquarters.

It sometimes seemed to Adam, vetting all the applicants, that there were now only two kinds of Englishmen. Humourless, Bible-educated evangelists, like Keate and Tybalt, who although hard working and scrupulously honest, allowed their judgements to be clouded by moral prejudices, and hard-drinking, hard-swearing rascals like Blubb, who could be relied upon to do a good day’s work but were usually of an extremely independent turn of mind. Even the waggoners and their apprentices tended to drift into one or other of these two camps, mutually contemptuous of one another, and united only by their loyalty to the man who filled their weekly wage-packet. Among the coachmen there was a minority of Holy Joes, enlisted by Keate or Tybalt from the lowest strata of the mission hall congregations, but the majority were men of Blubb’s stamp, who had known better days, and were not slow to remind younger colleagues that they had once conveyed belted earls over the turnpike roads at fifteen miles an hour and were now reduced to humping goods from one district to another at an average rate of under ten.

He had almost given up hope of finding men with managerial pro pensities, who were neither preachers nor crusty old drunkards, with a hatred of everything associated with the railroad. Then, out of the blue, John Catesby presented himself, and Adam discovered an entirely new type of artisan who seemed to him a direct product of the new age, a man who was equipped to meet its brassy challenge and prepared to fight hard to enlarge his precarious foothold in society.

Catesby was frank from the outset. He was partially self-educated and both conscious and proud of his essential place in a world where a man’s labour was all he had to sell. He demanded a guarantee of six months’ employment, subject to Adam’s satisfaction and ex pressed a preference for piece-time rates against the GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 201

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basic wage and out-of-town overnight allowance. He was a tall, ravaged Lancastrian, who had spent his childhood in the mill before the Ten Hour Act went some way towards the abolition of juvenile slavery, and his experiences there had left an indelible mark upon him. His truculence, however, unlike Blubb’s, stemmed not from a distrust of mechanisation (of which he wholly approved) but from a hatred of exploitation of the majority by the lucky few, men like Sam Rawlinson, who had made the grade and were now hard at work forgetting how their success had been achieved.

Adam, liking his outspokenness, encouraged him to talk about the
laissez-faire
relationship between labour and capital that men like Palmerston championed, declaring it to be the only road to riches for master and man. Catesby, risking the job he had come seeking, denied this doctrine, saying that it was the best prescription he knew for a French-style revolution, and could only be made to work for both parties if the labour forces of the country organised themselves into guilds or unions, like the craftsmen among their mediaeval forefathers. “As it is,” he said, “the only safeguard the majority has against enslavement is the presence in Westminster of a humanist minority, led by Lord Shaftesbury, and he has to fight vested interests every inch of the way, even for such obvious im provements as fenced-in machinery. I’m not quoting from an anarchist’s pamphlet, Mr. Swann.

I’ve slaved under the overseer’s strap in one of their damned mills, a mite of nine, working a twelve-hour day, and being beaten black and blue if he nodded off and was lucky enough to fall backwards and not face foremost into the cogs! I’ve seen folk treated as no plantation owner in the cotton fields would treat blacks he valued as property, and this is a Christian country! I’ll admit to another thing and you can make what you like of it. I’ve done time in one of their stinking gaols for rioting in Bolton before I were twenty, and I wouldn’t be telling you that if it hadn’t got around that you were a good man to work for, who pays over the odds hourly rates, and don’t treat men like cattle.” Adam made one of his swift, intuitive decisions. “I’m looking for a man to open up northern territory,” he said, “and I prefer local men if I can find them.