Scottish engineer Thomas Telford changed the face of the country

Was it the geniuses who built Skara Brae on Orkney 5000 years ago? Or was it the mysterious people who erected standing stones across the north and the Hebrides? Was it two Roman emperors, Hadrian and Antoninus Pius, with their boundary-defining walls? Was it those chiefs and kings who built castles across the land, including, it has to be admitted, King Edward I of England, old Longshanks himself?

Was it those monks and stonemasons who built abbeys and other churches in our rural areas and cities, the magnificent Glasgow Cathedral being the finest example? Or did Scotland acquire its “look” much later in our history?

The questions occurred to me again this week as I contemplated the fact that Sunday will mark the 200th anniversary of the opening of the Caledonian Canal, one of the greatest feats of civil engineering in world, never mind Scottish, history.

I will tell the story of the canal in the Sunday National and will make a couple of surprising revelations about the project, the sort that history writers often ignore.

Today and next week, however, I am going to write about the man who created the Caledonian Canal, the greatest canal in Scotland, with the famous Neptune’s Staircase still the longest series of locks on any British canal.

His name was Thomas Telford (1757-1834). I believe he has no equal in the history of civil engineering in Europe, and I am confident enough to say that he was the man who most changed Scotland’s built environment and much of the rest of Britain’s too.

The industrial revolution and the advent of rail travel, followed much later by motorways and road systems, were the real drivers of change in the infrastructure of these islands, but right at the heart of that revolution was Thomas Telford.

Scotland owes him a huge debt of gratitude which is not always evidently marked – as far as I know, there is no statue of Telford in Scotland, although there is one in Westminster Abbey and another in Telford, the West Midlands new town named after him.

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He never figures very high in any list of greatest Scots but should do. Five years ago, Historic Environment Scotland published a book entitled Who Built Scotland, with

25 essays on pieces of Scotland’s infrastructure, none of which majored on any work by Telford. I hope to show why that was a serious omission because, in my view, no single individual was more responsible for the “look” of Scotland.

He should be revered, too, for the incredible example he sets us as a man who overcame a poverty-stricken childhood to make his way in life with his own hands and brain – literally so, as his first job was as a stonemason. He was that archetypal Scot, the “lad o’ pairts” for it is not generally known that apart from his engineering brilliance, Telford was a published poet.

He played an active part in society, particularly in England, and for the last 14 years of his life was the first president of the Institution Of Civil Engineers, He was renowned as the Colossus Of Roads the nickname given to him by his friend, the poet laureate Robert Southey.

Why do I term Telford the man who changed the face of Scotland? Well, apart from the Caledonian Canal, across Scotland there are dozens of bridges, numerous harbours, piers and 1000 miles of roads that he created, plus the not small matter of 32 churches built to his design. More about them next week … In composing this account of Telford’s life and career, I have relied heavily on his own memoirs and the biography by Samuel Smiles, the Scottish author of Self Help, who wrote about Telford as one of a series of books about engineers.

IT is a bit hagiographic, but then engineers, along with explorers and surgeons, were the heroes of the Victorian age and Smiles was no doubt mindful of the need to cater to his readers’ sensitivities. Numerous other books on Telford down the decades have relied on the known facts of Telford’s life, and so do I.

Thomas Telford was born on August 9, 1757, at Glendinning, Eskdale, in what is now Dumfries and Galloway, to John Telford, a shepherd, and his wife Janet. John Telford died when Thomas was just three months old. He was buried at Westerkirk churchyard and the family could not afford a proper tombstone.

Thomas remedied that matter while he served his time as an apprentice stonemason, the teenage Telford carving a stone with the lettering: “In loving memory of John Telford who after living 33 years, an unblameable shepherd, died at Glendinning, November 1757.”

Telford’s mother had taken her infant son to live at The Crooks, a cottage between Glendinning and Westerkirk, and she seems to have been supported by her Jackson relatives and by friends in Eskdale.

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Telford never forgot his humble beginnings and wrote in his autobiography: “I still recollect with pride and pleasure my native parish of Westerkirk, on the banks of the Esk, where I was born.”

In his will, he provided legacies for two local libraries, a donation very much in keeping with his thoughts about the importance of education.

Like almost all Scots of that era, Telford attended the local parish school. Even before he went to school, he was used to hard work and had acquired his first nickname. Smiles records: “Young Telford grew up a healthy boy, and he was so full of fun and humour that he became known in the valley by the name of ‘Laughing Tam’.

“When he was old enough to herd sheep, he went to live with a relative, a shepherd like his father, and he spent most of his time with him in summer on the hillside amidst the silence of nature. In winter he lived with one or other of the neighbouring farmers. He herded their cows or ran errands, receiving for recompense his meat, a pair of stockings and five shillings a year for clogs. These were his first wages,

and as he grew older they were gradually increased.”

His schooling gave him the grounding in the three Rs that enabled Telford to be apprenticed to a stonemason in nearby Lochmaben.

Now 15, Telford was beginning to show his independence of mind, and since the backbreaking work of building and repairing drystane dykes was not the sort of masonry work that he wanted, he left his apprenticeship, much to the dismay of his mother. A Jackson cousin of Janet persuaded a mason in Langholm to take Telford on and at least this change enabled him to work on houses, farm buildings and small bridges.

In his memoirs, Telford recalled the Langholm houses of the time as consisting of “one storey of mud walls, or rubble stones bedded in clay, and thatched with straw, rushes, or heather; the floors being of earth, and the fire in the middle, having a plastered creel chimney for the escape of the smoke, while, instead of windows, small openings in the thick mud walls admitted a scanty light”.

Thus it was that Telford’s first ambition was not to build roads, bridges and canals but to build good, solid houses for which he hewed the stonework.

A LOCAL woman, a Miss Pasley, learned of young Telford’s ambition to improve his learning, and she kindly provided him with volumes of literature in English and Scots from her own collection. Reading poetry in particular was to become a lifelong pursuit and Telford seized upon the work of Robert Burns when the Kilmarnock edition of the Bard’s poems was published in 1786.

By that time, however, Telford was a published poet himself, his homage to his home district published as Eskdale in the Poetical Museum of 1784. Here’s a short extract:

Deep ’mid the green sequester’d glens below,

Where murmuring streams among the alders flow,

Where flowery meadows down their margins spread,

And the brown hamlet lifts its humble head—

There, round his little fields, the peasant strays,

And sees his flock along the mountain graze;

And, while the gale breathes o’er his ripening grain,

And soft repeats his upland shepherd’s strain,

And western suns with mellow radiance play.

And gild his straw-roof’d cottage with their ray,

Feels Nature’s love his throbbing heart employ,

Nor envies towns their artificial joy.

Burns himself often used such flowery English but, as with the Bard, Telford was much better writing in Scots. That was all in the future, however, and anxious to improve his lot, in 1780 Telford set off for Edinburgh where the New Town was under construction. He spent two years working as a stonemason in the capital and would often travel to Midlothian to make sketches of Rosslyn Chapel – he was one of the first to appreciate its extraordinary architecture.

In 1782, Telford returned home and announced he was going to London. His motivation was simple: self-improvement. He wrote in his memoirs: “Having acquired the rudiments of my profession, I considered that my native country afforded few opportunities of exercising it to any extent, and therefore judged it advisable (like many of my countrymen) to proceed southward, where industry might find more employment and be better remunerated.”

He got a lucky break – a local landowner was sending a horse to a relative in London and engaged Telford to take the horse south. He duly delivered the nag and had another lucky break as soon as he hit the city. He had a letter of introduction from the Pasley family to Sir William Chambers, the Swedish-born son of a Scottish merchant who had become one of the foremost architects of the day and who was then building

Somerset House.

Chambers immediately signed on Telford and introduced him to Scotland’s pre-eminent architect, Robert Adam. As Telford states in his memoirs, it was meeting themthese two architects that made him resolve to follow in their footsteps. He wrote: “Although I derived no direct advantage from either, yet so powerful his manner that the latter left the most favourable impression; while the interviews with both convinced me that my safest plan was to endeavour to advance, if by slower steps, yet by independent conduct.”

Shortly afterwards Telford was working on houses in Portsmouth but was anxious to properly learn the trade of architecture and again he got a lucky break when Adam introduced him to Sir William Pulteney, who had been born as William Johnstone in 1729, in the same parish as Telford.

Pulteney had changed his name when he married a wife whose fortune was based on the family estates near Bath. Pulteney vastly increased that fortune through land speculation in America and by the time he met Telford he was probably the richest man in Britain.

He took a liking to his young fellow Scot, and in 1787, commissioned Telford to supervise the restoration of Shrewsbury Castle following the design of Robert Adam. The restoration was spectacularly successful and acted as a calling card for Telford, who now had a business of his own.

Find out next week just how successful he was and be sure to read about the Caledonian Canal in the Sunday National.