Last Journey of William Huskisson [Hardcover]

Simon Garfield (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 21, 2002

The Liverpool and Manchester Railway was the greatest engineering feat of its age. George and Robert Stevenson's "Rocket" was to become the most famous locomotive in history. William Huskisson was one of the greatest statesmen of his generation and certainly the most accident prone. On 15th September 1830, the three met for the first time. Huskisson's fateful accident, in which the "Rocket" crushed his leg and thigh, is an unforgettable image of the Industrial Revolution. But what really happened on that day? How did the opening of the world's first passenger railyway turn from a glorious morning into a tragic afternoon? This book is an entertaining tale of ambition, genius, rivalry and legend, plotting the eight-year struggle to build a railway with a cast of engineers, politicians, actresses, surgeons, socialites and breathtaking machines. It is a loud and evocative snapshot of the times, but above all it is a human story of one man's shocking and very gory demise.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Simon Garfield is the author of, amongst others, The End of Innocence: Britain in the Time of AIDS (1994), The Wrestling (1996), The Nation's Favourite: The True Adventures of radio 1 (1998) and, most recently, Mauve, which was described in the Daily Telegraph as 'a book about science which also happens to be a miniature work of art.'

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Faber & Faber (October 21, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0571210481
• ISBN-13: 978-0571210480
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,096,323 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars A great achievement and a tragic accident, September 24, 2009

By 

Ralph Blumenau (London United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Last Journey of William Huskisson (Paperback)

William Huskisson's last journey was on the train-ride which marked the official opening of the Liverpool-Manchester Railway on 8 September 1830, an event which was marred by the terrible accident that day which cost him his life. The book is of course about much more than that. We learn about all the problems and technicalities which were involved in the building of the tracks and of the engines which ran on them; about the personalities and rivalries of the inventors and the engineers; about the energetic and eloquent promoters of the scheme and the campaign to raise the funds and to get parliamentary approval for it; and about the vested interests of the canal owners and the fear of anything new which were mobilized against the idea and which succeeded in defeating the first bill in 1825, though the second was carried only a year later.

William Huskisson, the Member of Parliament for Liverpool, was of course one of the supporters of the railway, but he was much more than that, and a good part of the book is about his career and therefore about the politics of the period. These were the last years of the unreformed House of Commons: whereas Liverpool had two members of parliament, Manchester as yet had none. The ruling Tory Party had a reformist wing, which had been led by Huskisson's friend George Canning, and a conservative wing, suspicious of change, of which the Duke of Wellington was the leader. During the period of Canning's ascendancy in the party, Huskisson had been for four years a reformist President of the Board of Trade, in tune with the requirements of the Industrial Revolution; but soon after Canning's death in 1827, Wellington became Prime Minister, and in 1828 the Canningites left the government. We are given a good picture of Huskisson's personality: he achieved a great deal despite having been since his youth frail and, in view of his end, ominously accident-prone.

And so we come to that last journey. It would be a spoiler to describe it in all its surprising and little known details (how many people know that no fewer than eight trains participated in the opening?). There is a painful irony also in the fact that it looked as if the journey, with Wellington and Huskisson travelling in the same carriage, was the setting for a reconciliation between the two men, which might have led to Huskisson re-entering the Cabinet. The gruesome description of Huskisson's accident and death is told in as much detail as is the rest of the story.

The book does justice to the heroic achievement which opening the Liverpool-Manchester railway represented. There are many attractive illustrations and well-chosen quotations from the newspapers of the day; but the map at the beginning of the Liverpool-Manchester area shows only a few of the many places that are mentioned in the text. A more serious failing of the book is its organization - or rather, the complete lack of it in the first two of the three parts: it darts backwards and forwards in chronology, and moves from engineering technicalities to politics without any rhyme of reason. In the absence of technical drawings, I found the former pretty heavy going, and I suspect that the political sections were introduced here and there to give us a breather.

Garfield is a railway enthusiast, and there is an epilogue of 27 pages in which he rather scrappily tells of later railway developments which attract his special interest - giving a fair amount of attention also to later railway accidents, many of which were of course much more serious than that of 1830. The last bit of railway history he tells us takes us to 2002, the year in which the book was published. The ten-year plan which had then just been announced by the Strategic Rail Authority seems a long way away from Willaim Huskisson.

4.0 out of 5 stars Good, quirky account of the birth of Britian's railway, January 2, 2007

By 

Hugh Claffey (Co. Kildare Ireland) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Last Journey of William Huskisson (Paperback)

Have you ever wondered why some railway's are called ` X and Y' e.g the Liverpool and Manchester Railway? Do you know the origin of the word `navvy'? The answers are in this book, a quirky gem.
In the 1820's the canals and turnpike roads were the only method of taking raw materials and finished product between the growing industrial centre of Manchester and the great port of Liverpool. The backers of a proposed rail link between the two centres worked for over five years to get the financial, technical and logistical details right to build this railway, which is now no more than an afterthought in terms of British rail.
On its opening in 1830 expectations were high of a new era in prosperity ushered in by the `new impulse' which the railways would bring. So much so that the Prime Minister of day - Lord Wellington, of Waterloo fame - attended. There are excellent descriptions of the awe with which the machine evoked in the various elements of the population. However, tragedy marred the opening day, when one train struck William Huskisson, a Tory MP for the area, and severed his leg, leading to an agonising death. Huskisskon, was an economic progressive, though cautious in terms of political reform.
He fully backed the new railway, seeing it as a way to break the canal owners monopoly.
It was hugely unfortunate that he was the first fatality on the new line.
The book is obviously a `train-spotters' delight, however I would have appreciated more technical detail on the various innovations and improvements which were introduced in both engine and rail design though the early decades of the 1800's. There are quite excellent chapters on the financing of the project, and of the reactions of observers and participants to the `high speed' machines.
And, in case, you are over anxious ... . If the railway was called `The Liverpool to Manchester", Manchester folk (potential investors) would feel their city was not treated with sufficient status, and vice-versa. So both termini need equal billing.
The term `navvy' is a shortened form of `navigator', the people who laid the rails were navigating the countryside to find the most direct route to the destination.