Naming a street or square after a famous man or woman is a relatively rare event in Britain and it is rarer still for a man to give his name to a town. So it is some mark of Thomas Telford's renown that in 1968 a new town built to alleviate crowding in the English Midlands was named Telford in his honor. Its 150,000 residents commemorate the great Scottish engineer every time they provide their address. Telford is in Shropshire, where, as Julian Glover's fine new biography reminds us, Thomas Telford was county surveyor from 1787, building forty-two bridges and a network of road schemes that still frame the landscape of this most rural of English counties.
Telford was born in Eskdale in the Scottish Lowlands in 1757. He was brought up by his widowed mother, leaving school at age twelve and spending many of his school days helping at local farms, often as a shepherd boy. If that sounds like an unpromising start to life, we must remember that this was a vibrant age of Scottish Enlightenment where the schoolmaster was king. Telford's brief and bitty education endowed him with a love of books and a thirst for learning that never left him. A passionate autodidact, intrigued by theory, he was also given the best possible practical grounding as an engineer. Apprenticed to a stonemason, he began cutting and laying stone as soon as he left school. His skills would find a ready market in a nation where improved communications by road and water were the ligaments connecting the nations of Britain to one another and Britain to its empire. Telford was not just swept into this maelstrom of history in the making; he helped shape his country more than any other man of his generation.
Inevitably, the maelstrom drove Telford south to London, where he joined a host of brilliant Scots. He worked as a mason in the London of the Adam Brothers, employed on Somerset House by the Swedish-born Scottish architect Sir William Chambers. Telford's talents and tireless enthusiasm for work made him the darling of influential countrymen from Eskdale, especially the local landowner Sir William Pulteney, now also London based and, through a prudent marriage, soon to become one of the nation's richest commoners. It was Pulteney who steered Telford to Shropshire, where he made connections with a freemasonry of site managers, architects, and ironmasters who stayed with him for much of his professional life; Glover is especially good on Telford as a team player in the giant construction projects he would subsequently undertake—a judgment that posterity has been more ready to make than Telford himself, who underplayed in his autobiography the contribution that others had made.
In Telford's long career three achievements stand out. The first, between 1800 and 1805, was the great canal aqueduct a hundred feet high over the River Dee at Pontcysyllte in North Wales. The canal basin was made of iron, a relatively untried departure at the time, and the elegant aqueduct on its slender stone piers was famously denominated “The Stream in the Sky” by contemporaries. The second was a scheme of revolutionary transport improvements by road and canal across the Scottish Highlands, through which Telford self-consciously brought civilization to his native country. It involved twelve hundred miles of new roads, forty-three harbors for the local fishing industry, and around a thousand bridges over the treacherous streams of this mountainous territory.
Last was the road from London to Holyhead in Anglesey, an island off the North Wales coast, the main connection with Dublin. This was a vital integument connecting Ireland to the mainland after the Act of Union of 1801 required Irish members of Parliament to travel to London to take up their seats. Before Telford's innovations, this was a risky journey, involving two dangerous sea crossings. Telford oversaw the construction of a safe port at Holyhead, together with the improvement of the highway from London to the Menai Strait dividing Anglesey from the mainland. This was now crossed with a suspension bridge, the roadway carried on great iron chains strung between castellated stone piers, which opened in 1826. A suspension bridge over such a great span (1,368 feet) was an untried prospect and the high coastal winds played havoc, the roadway twisting and swaying so badly that traffic halted until the wind dropped. Strengthening was needed for years to come, the whole saga denting Telford's confidence in his capacity to take on vast new projects.
Even into his seventies, Telford braved biting winds, freezing temperatures, and primitive living conditions in filthy inns and wayside cottages, his robust frame unshaken into a ripe old age. He would die peacefully at his home in London in September 1834, a national hero, the first engineer to be buried in Westminster Abbey. He was renowned not only in Great Britain but across Europe, his reputation in Sweden especially gaining him huge prestige. Yet, in many ways, Telford's was a reputation that faded quickly—not through any lack of achievement, but because he lived too long. By the time of his death a new age of iron roads and steam trains would bring a revolution of speed and modernity that he could not have foreseen. Indeed, he was skeptical of these new technologies and sniffy about their prospects. But he was then an old man and resented the new world that he knew only the young would make.
Glover has written a persuasive and eloquent biography. It adds relatively little to L. T. C. Rolt's groundbreaking Thomas Telford (1953)—Glover even repeats some of Rolt's chapter headings—or Anthony Burton's Thomas Telford: Master Builder of Roads and Canals (1999; reissued 2015). Burton's book has better maps and illustrations; Glover is ill served by his publishers in this regard. But Glover has an effortless prose style with a confident eye for modern parallels in the infrastructure difficulties of the twenty-first century United Kingdom. His is a Telford for modern times.
