The Map That Changed the World (33 page)

William Smith, now sixty-two years old, slightly lame from rheumatism, a little deaf, but otherwise as fit and wiry as a field geologist has a right to be, sat beaming throughout. He made a short speech of thanks, noting that Sir Isaac Newton had been born on the Oolite, and remarking on how the science of geology might have changed “had he looked down at the ground instead of up at the apple”—a remark that produced a clatter of (presumably polite) laughter that enabled Smith to resume his place and “hide my honoured head among the seated.”

Before he did so, however, he presented the society with three documents that have remained in Burlington House apartments ever since. He had discovered among his papers the original manuscript version of the Table of Strata he had dictated to Benjamin Richardson, in Joseph Townsend’s drawing room, thirty-two years before;
*
and he had found his circular map of Bath, colored in by hand in 1799; and he offered one of his elegant precursors to his great geological map of the nation shown as the frontispiece to the story.

There were more lunches and dinners the following day, an
artist was engaged to paint his portrait, and John Cary, who had published all the maps, atlases, and sections that were still on occasional sale in London, made Smith a present of a newly bought pair of silver-framed spectacles. And then Smith left London, heading first to Churchill, where he was born, and—despite never being much of a God-fearing man—going to church with all of his surviving family, where they engaged in “presenting our bald heads in supplication to their Maker.”

A week later and he was back in the icy fastnesses of Yorkshire, reunited with his wife, who he reported to be in tolerable health though troubled by a head cold. The Father of English Geology was at last able to rest on his laurels and begin the final chapter of his life as a revered elder statesman, at long last accorded his due, and given the respect that his hitherto unsung achievements deserved.

Pavlovia pallasioides

A
s everyone might wish, nothing but goodness seems to have attended the last years of William Smith’s life. He moved from Hackness to his cottage in Scarborough, he cultivated a small garden, he read and tried (in vain) to write the story of his own life, he nursed his now-fast-fading wife, he went for long walks on the cliffs, he raised geese and sent them off to his relations, he wrote letters aplenty—letters that show him to be a happy old countryman, lost in the revelry of a comfortable old age.

A literary critic might have cruel amusement with his style. I have omitted from this account all of his innumerable attempts at writing poetry, the results of which were execrable at best. The paragraph that follows is not chosen for its merit as a piece of writing, but just to show the new-found contentment which had been so sorely missing from his life before. It was an autumn evening as he sat and wrote the following in his journal:

He kept his “well-stored mind” as active as he could. He tried to tinker a little with the geology he knew, but steadily he came to realize that behind the vanguard of the “young Turks” who were now running the science, and who had given him his long-due recognition, geology was now accelerating rapidly away from him, the discoveries and theories multiplying at exponential rates.

He would travel, with near-religious punctiliousness, to the annual meetings of the newly formed British Association for the Advancement of Science—a body his nephew, John Phillips, had played a large part in establishing. But he would understand less and less of what was said; and when he came to suggest or to offer a paper, he found the organizers less than fully engaged by what he had to say. There were respectful pauses, hesitancies in
their manner, suggestions about another day, another topic.

His papers, wrote the historian Hugh Torrens, in the entry on Smith in the
New DNB
, “demonstrated all too clearly Smith’s great limitations in the new world of non-practical or theoretical geology, to which he was now expected to contribute.” Slowly, though Smith probably never came fully to know it, and cruel though it seems to say so, he was becoming out-of-date. It seems fitting to suggest that, living so close to their playground in Yorkshire’s Upper Jurassic, he was becoming a dinosaur himself in all but name.

But the comforts continued to arrive. In the early summer of 1832 Smith traveled to Oxford and in a further ceremony received his Wollaston Medal, now fresh from the die makers and engravers. The society had not stinted: the Wollaston had been made by no less a medal maker than Benjamin Wyon, who held the august post of Chief Engraver of the Seals and was responsible for designing and manufacturing some of the finest medals in the land, as well as various great seals with which nation-states—most of them colonial governments—impressed the final versions of their laws.

The medal was indeed made of gold; Smith’s name was engraved on one side, between a berib
boned twine of laurel and palm. Roderick Murchison presented it to him at a ceremony in the Sheldonian Theatre, the graceful seventeenth-century building that still represents the spiritual core of the great university. He made just a short speech, reminding the assembled gathering that they were in the presence of “a great original discoverer in English geology” he suspended the medal, on its blue silk ribbon, around the old man’s neck, and then stepped back to watch with pleased contentment as the assembled worthies of all England’s sciences applauded a choice with which everyone seemed to agree. All Oxford, and all scientific Britain, were now giving William Smith their combined imprimatur.

Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre, where Smith was awarded the first Wollaston Medal.

The government, too, chipped in. Within days it was announced that, in consequence of a petition from a panel of scientists, King William IV had agreed to grant Smith a pension, for the remainder of his life, of one hundred pounds a year. It was thought to be only right and fair that a man “whose personal labours for the good of all,” as it was put in countless petitions and other laudatory papers, had cost him his fortune—and, for a while, his freedom—should not be allowed to pass into old age a pauper. A hundred pounds was thought a sufficient sum to keep all wolves from doors; it was gratefully given, and the beneficence gratefully extended to cover the needs of his widow, when Smith himself died.
*

He still had one further honor to receive and that, which was offered (so his nephew reported) “quite unexpectedly” during another British Association meeting, was an honorary doctorate
of letters. The association was meeting in Ireland; the provost and fellows of Trinity College, Dublin decided that Mr. Smith must be so elevated. The old man—by now sixty-seven, “his increasing deafness depriving him of a full share of enjoyments”—was according to John Phillips astonished, “and sufficiently alive to feelings more common in his youth” to be delighted with the title. The delight was general—though there was astonished dismay in some quarters, too, that the Father of
English
Geology had been honored not by one of
England’s
academic institutions, but by the premier college in Ireland.

He dressed up in his new robes. He doffed his cap at the appropriate moment. He listened to the perorations in Latin. He mingled briefly with his fellow honorees—the three distinguished astronomers Sir Thomas Brisbane,
*
Professor Gerard Moll, and Francis Baily, and Louis Agassiz, the Swiss-American naturalist and fossil fish expert who had come up with the radical notion of
die Eiszeit
, the Ice Age. Whether, with his Oxfordshire accent, his deafness, his rheumatics, and his general innocence of urban sophistication, Smith felt comfortable in such august company, we can but wonder—John Phillips left a less than candid record of the occasion. In any case he was soon to be plucked away from the festivities, perhaps tactfully.

The dean of Trinity showed him around Dublin and took him up to the north of Ireland—which was then, unlike today, politically a part of the same country. The director of the Geological Survey of Ireland took him in hand and showed him around farms in the geologically fascinating parts of County Antrim. But though the tertiary basalts of the Giant’s Causeway may well have enthralled him, his former reputation seems to have died hard in Ireland; before long, according to local accounts, the newly created Dr. Smith was busily answering questions from the farmers about the efficiency of their drains.

To add to the final honor there was one final task. In 1834 the Palace of Westminster, where the British Houses of Parliament met, had been all but destroyed by fire. Sir Charles Barry had been commissioned, along with August Pugin, to conceive a fitting replacement—and duly did, with his son Edward Barry, creating what went on to become what is possibly the most familiar and iconic of all London’s great buildings, crowned as it is with the clock tower that holds the famous bell, Big Ben. In 1838 a four-man committee was established—Barry, Henry de la Beche, an architect named Charles Smith, and, with his brand-new honorific,
Doctor
William Smith. The committee was charged with the express purpose of selecting the stone that was to be used in the construction of the giant new edifice.

The four men set out (by rail!—such were these modern times) from Newcastle upon Tyne after that year’s British Association meeting.
They spent most of August and early September traveling by pony-and-trap, inspecting quarries, drawing up comparative tables of which stone was best for its workability, its appearance, its cost. The official report—to the commissioner of Her
*
Majesty’s Woods, Forests, Land Revenues, Works and Buildings—was published in March the following year—five days before William Smith’s seventieth birthday. It listed more than a hundred quarries; it compared the criteria of each; and it formally recommended that the new palace be built of a rock from whitish-colored Upper Permian formation, a sandy Magnesian limestone from a quarry at Mansfield Woodhouse, in Derbyshire.

The ornate stonework of the House of Commons—originally a Permian limestone selected by a committee of which Smith was a member. It corroded badly; Charles Dickens inveighed against the choice.

It turned out to be a less than happy choice. The Mansfield quarry proved to have too little workable stone for the job, and another quarry at Bolsover had to be hastily substituted. Much the same happened there, with the stone running out within a matter of weeks. A third try, at a nearby quarry in the village of Anston, seemed to work, however. Before long a train of barges was setting out regularly along the Chesterfield Canal, to connect with the fast cargo sloops that sailed along the Trent and the Humber and thence down past the Wash and the Norfolk coast to the Thames Estuary and London. The quarry seemed bottomless. It provided, in the end, most of the stone for what were to be the visible upper parts of the palace for decades to come.

Except that the Anston stone—which is technically a part of the Cadeby formation of the Zechstein epoch of the Upper Permian—proved a dismal selection. The committee had clearly not imagined the havoc that would be wrought on smooth sheets of a corrodable, white-colored limestone by the action of the winds and rain of industrialized London. A foul cocktail of acids, smoke, sulfur, heavy metals, and all manner of gases quite unknown in the pleasant towns of North Yorkshire scoured the new buildings. The stone changed color, flaked away, peeled off,
broke. All of a sudden the grandest public building in the land had the look of a dour tenement in the middle of a slum.

Within a decade of their completion, Barry’s buildings were being roundly attacked for their appearance, for their ruined look, for their discoloration and decay. Charles Dickens led the fray: If the buildings of the day were going to be as ornate as Barry and Pugin seemed to want, he said, then let them be built of proper, durable stone. That chosen for the Houses of Parliament, Dickens fulminated in a newspaper article, “is the worst ever used in the metropolis.”