The Birth of Modern Britain: A Journey into Britain’s Archaeological Past: 1550 to the Present. Francis Pryor
to the lives of the people who built, maintained and used these things. The machines also tended to be seen as objects in their own right, without, as we have seen, much attempt being made to reconstruct their social setting.
It’s worth noting here that even the best known of the abandoned monuments to Britain’s industrial past were slow to be protected under the Ancient Monuments Protection Act of 1882. Even the great iron bridge of Ironbridge, Shropshire, was not given statutory protection by Scheduling until 1934 and was only taken into Guardianship (i.e. public ownership, display and administration) as late as 1975. The following year the iron-making furnace at Coalbrookdale was at last Scheduled, almost exactly two hundred years after its final major rebuilding by the great ironmaster Abraham Darby in 1777. In retrospect the archaeological establishment was extraordinarily slow to protect the remains of the Industrial Revolution, and this despite one of the greatest acts of official Philistinism in the twentieth century.
The great Doric portico, universally known as the Euston Arch, was demolished in 1962 by the Transport Commission who believed it stood in the way of commercial success. I can remember standing beneath its towering columns and staring up at the classical entablature (not that I knew the word, of course) high above my head. And I can remember wondering why there wasn’t a building directly behind it, as there was at, say, the British Museum. In my child’s mind I couldn’t grasp, any more than could the bureaucrats and politicians of the 1960s, that the great portico heralded the world’s first main line between major cities. It was more than a mere symbol: it was a metaphor for what was to follow. And we tore it down.
There was massive public outcry at what is still seen as an act of wilful destruction, and this despite letters to the then Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan. The anger was not just that a fine building of 1835 was being unnecessarily destroyed, but it was a building that had come to symbolise the confidence of the Railway Age and ultimately Britain’s role in the Industrial Revolution.7 It was built by Philip Hardwick to be a triumphal entrance to the London to Birmingham railway and it was intended to impress – which undoubtedly it did.
The fight to prevent the powers that be from destroying the Euston Arch drew everyone involved in industrial archaeology together. Right across Britain, new societies were established involving academics, students, amateurs and professionals. As a result the support for this form of archaeology is probably more broadly based than any other branch of the subject. At first this diversity was seen by many in the academic world as a weakness. But today we generally view such things rather differently; indeed, industrial archaeology is becoming one of the more intellectually rigorous branches of the discipline, yet one which benefits greatly from the hands-on approach of its many part-time helpers. By now the bias in favour of machines over people has largely been addressed and quite soon the adjective ‘industrial’ will slip from general use.
Today industrial archaeology is seen as a branch of post-medieval archaeology which was the last of the major period societies to come into existence. The Prehistoric Society was the first (1935) and the Society for Medieval Archaeology appeared in the post-war years (1957). Just ten years after that (and five years after the destruction of the Euston Arch), in 1967, the Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology was founded. Its journal, Post-Medieval Archaeology, is still the bible for anyone with a serious interest in the period.
My own enthusiasm for industrial archaeology goes back some time and owes much to some remarkable people. Ever since I was a child and enjoyed making things with Meccano kits I have admired engineers. I suppose like most boys I grew up almost worshipping men like Brunel and Telford and I can well remember my maternal grandmother, née Nora Parsons, telling me wonderful stories about our relative Sir Charles Parsons as he steered his Turbinia (built in 1897), the first steam-turbine-powered vessel and then by far and away the fastest ship afloat, through the great dreadnoughts at the famous display of British naval might at Spithead. I loved the way he cocked a snook at the naval establishment who were then obliged to commission a turbine-powered vessel from his yard.
One of the first real live engineers to cross my path was a remarkable and very eccentric gentleman who was a distant relative, an old friend of the family and my godfather. He was a lovely man, but a hopeless godfather, at least as far as God was concerned. His name was Julian Turnbull. I first came across him when I was about ten. At the time he worked for the Iraq Petroleum Company, where he specialised in putting out desert oil rig fires, with explosives. Today he would be described as partially sighted and wore glasses with extraordinarily thick lenses. Even then I remember thinking that these must have inhibited his work in the blowing sands of Arabia.
He and his wife Dorothy lived in a tiny bungalow in Barnet and I recall my first visit to the shed at the bottom of his garden as clearly as my first step into the great nave of Ely Cathedral. It was impeccably organised, with spanners arranged in order of size, their outlines painted in black against a white background, doubtless to help his failing sight return them to their correct position. But the most remarkable feature of this quite small (maybe 15 x 8 feet) shed was his collection of screwdrivers, which in those days were all wooden-handled. It was vast and must have included hundreds – no, thousands – of examples which ranged from something shovel-sized, used by marine engineers, to a series of minute watchmakers’ tools. The largest was about six foot long and next to it was one a bit smaller and a bit smaller, and so on and so on, until the hut walls had been encircled two or three times. I adored those screwdrivers.
In the middle of the hut was an old Atco lawnmower which Julian had converted to steam power, using the case of a wartime howitzer shell he had found in the desert as a boiler. All the pipes and pistons were lovingly lagged with carefully coiled string. I only saw it operate once on his tiny lawn. But once was more than enough. It belched prodigious quantities of coal smoke and sparks while its almost blind operator blundered around behind it, spending more time wrestling with its handlebars on the weed-choked flowerbeds than the lawn. After ten minutes of mayhem I asked him whether it gave a good cut. He said he had no idea about that, but the hot coals seemed to keep grass growth to a minimum for several weeks. So I suppose it did work after a fashion.
The second person was very different but no less inspiring. Today he is very well known as one of the founding fathers of industrial archaeology and has more recently spent time running the Science Museum and English Heritage. Sir Neil Cossons first crossed my path when he came to give a lecture at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, some time in the early 1970s, when I was an assistant curator there. His talk was on the industrial archaeology of Ironbridge and Coalbrookdale, where he was director of the Museum and the Trust which ran it. I found it inspiring and the following year I couldn’t wait until I had taken all our students from our dig at Fengate, on the outskirts of Peterborough, right across England to see what he and his team had achieved.
As we walked around Ironbridge I realised for the first time just how much archaeology could appeal to the general public, but only if it was well displayed – a lesson I have never forgotten. Later I got to know Neil rather better when we sat on English Heritage’s Ancient Monuments Advisory Committee and I always made a point of seeking him out when we did field trips to industrial sites. This was because he had the rare gift of knowing where to find some obscure feature, nook or cranny which would bring the place vividly to life.
I’ve talked about Ironbridge, the Euston Arch and the origins of post-medieval archaeology and I suppose I ought to cover such major events in the history of industrial archaeology at some length in this book. But, on the other hand, this isn’t a textbook. I’m concerned here not with the history of industrial archaeology, but with current research and the direction in which it is heading. Having said that, I am also attempting to provide a balanced account of the period for the general reader.
I must also come clean and confess that many readers of my earlier books have laughed out loud when I suggested to them that I have been in search of balance. And their response: ‘Balance? You? You’re a born partisan and could no more achieve balance than fly.’ Which wasn’t quite the reply I had expected, but is possibly true, nonetheless. So in this instance I will drop such pretence and follow my instincts, which are to see what the current generation of scholars finds interesting and exciting. I make no apologies for this approach, which will generally