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By Root 4110 0

The new railway lines from Euston had destroyed whole areas of rookeries and slum tenements. “These people will all be rehoused,” he would explain. He even predicted that one day many of the ordinary folk, those who did not have to live directly beside their work, would be housed in clean new settlements outside the city and be shipped in each day by rail. Still more remarkable were his ideas for the centre of London. With the ever increasing population, the horse-drawn omnibuses – hundreds of them nowadays – and the thousands of cabs and carriages, the whole area from Westminster to the centre of the old city was jammed solid for several hours every weekday. It could take an hour to get from Whitehall to the Bank of England. “But we can solve that by running trains underground,” he assured her. “From one end of London to the other in minutes. It’s just a question of air vents and disposing of smoke so that people don’t suffocate.”

He had a solution for the smelly old Thames, too. “A new sewer system!” he told his family enthusiastically. Only last year, on his own initiative, he had made a personal study of the problem, diving down, notebook in hand, into the endless labyrinth of drains, sewers, subterranean water channels and cesspits under old London every spare day he could find. He had memorized the entire system, hundreds of miles of it, and flushed with this remarkable if malodorous achievement, had designed an entirely new system which he had pressed upon the city authorities, so far without success.

The railway from London Bridge ran on high brick arches that cut, like a giant aqueduct across the roofline of the huddled dwellings of Southwark towards the green spaces of Greenwich and Blackheath, affording an excellent view across the area as one went along. Esther had just listened to her husband’s plans for the sewers once again, and thought what a visionary he was when, glancing out of the window, she chanced to catch sight of a spectacle which made her interrupt:

“Oh, Arnold! Do look! I think it’s Mary Anne!”

For several seconds after the Earl of St James had unrolled the designs on Captain Jonas Barnikel’s dining-room table, the worthy mariner did not speak. Young Meredith, who was representing his father, watched with interest. Then, Barnikel stroked his great red beard and delivered his opinion: “It’s the most beautiful thing I ever saw in my life,” he said gruffly.

“You can beat the Americans in this,” St James declared. “I’m betting on it.”

The designs were for a sailing ship. Though steamships were steadily claiming a share of the traffic of the seas, the overwhelming majority of the world’s trade, in the year of the Great Exhibition, was still carried by sail. And of all the sailing ships, the swiftest, the more elegant and romantic was that greyhound of the seas, the clipper. The lovely lines of the designs before them suggested that this vessel might be the fastest clipper ever built.

It was the Americans who had changed everything when, only two years ago, their famously swift cotton clippers had been allowed to enter the English tea trade. Leaving London with a variety of cargoes, the ships would catch the north-east trade winds down the Atlantic, round the southern tip of Africa, and let the great roaring forties blow them to the Far East to unload their cargo. Then, in high summer, they would arrive at the Chinese ports of Shanghai or Foochow, anchor amongst the junks and sampans, and await the first batches of tea-leaves of the year’s new crop. As soon as they had it, then what a commotion there would be as the ships were towed out, all flags flying, the other ships firing salutes, for the great race home. Back they would come on the southeast trade winds; lookouts would spot the first ships from the Kent coast; crowds would race down past the Tower to the London docks. And in the last two years the American clippers had come in so far ahead of the English vessels that it was humiliating.

Competition was the spur. London’s mariners were not going to accept defeat. Already they were busy