James Cropper, Liverpool docks and the Liverpool & Manchester railway

Journal of Transport History, The, Mar 1998 by Jarvis, Adrian

The Liverpool & Manchester Railway, despite its absence from The Guinness Book of Records, is widely recognised as the first modern railway, the beginning of the system which some have suggested was Britain's greatest gift to the world.' Its success was striking and almost immediate, and has been seen as fully justifying, or even surpassing, the loftiest hopes of its farsighted promoters. In terms of the development of the locomotive, of permanent way, of working methods and of management many of the patterns it set had changed only in detail and extent, not in principle, a century later.

It is therefore tempting with hindsight to conclude that those who can be identified with the adoption of such far-reaching changes were wise men, to whose vision of the future mankind would be greatly indebted.2 Conversely, those who had different ideas, or who opposed the eventual winners, were either wicked or foolish: given their way, they would have denied to posterity the fruit of the labours of George Stephenson, the `heaven-born genius', `one of the noblest men who had ever lived3.

Among the worst of the supposed villains were those who thwarted the passage of the railway's first Bill in 1825. They have been portrayed as an unholy alliance of the vested interests of canal and turnpike proprietors,4 with the forces of reaction typified by the landed aristocracy.5 Worse than the clients were their lawyers, hired oratorical assassins who used their quick minds and silver tongues to destroy the credibility of the rough-hewn genius, George Stephenson.6 They can be made to appear as men of no intellect, achievement or communal utility, standing in the way of progress for the sake of fees paid by men only marginally less wicked than themselves;

Condemnations of this kind, once propounded, can be cheerfully repeated by one historian after another over long periods of time. Dr Dionysius Lardner forms an interesting example: a misguided scrutiny of his crystal ball led him into a couple of unfortunate remarks about the future of railways and of steam power.8 It appears that it was not until 1970 that anyone paused to consider whether Lardner's considerable output of popular explanation of science and technology, to say nothing of his more substantial offerings on the finances of railway working, might not after all be worth reading. As Hawke pointed out,9 Lardner became the butt of historians who felt a need to demonstrate the acuteness of their hindsight and the elegance of their wit.10 Such demonstrations were indeed a poor substitute for an understanding of the considerable amount of useful information that Lardner had to offer. His opposition to some of the ideas of such as Stephenson or Brunel was of itself sufficient to render him an object of ridicule for over a century." Clearly, if it could happen to him, it could happen to others.

James Cropper comes quite high in the demonology of early railways: he has been portrayed as a backward-looking man, incapable of seeing that the future of railways lay with the steam locomotive, and fixated with the idea that railways could function only by means of the obsolete system of using stationary winding engines. Of all the battles that George Stephenson had to fight, the second bitterest was that `battle for the locomotive' in which he stood alone against the combined forces of reactionaries like Cropper12 and the vested interests of a supposed clique of ageing London-based engineering snobs who shunned the man with the regional accent. 13

This view of things bears little resemblance to what really happened, yet it is not necessary to resort to the script of the Pageant of Transport14 produced for the centenary of the railway in 1930 for further examples. It is possible to find all the above ingredients in serious historical work. So great is the resulting distortion that Ferneyhough could remark:

How difficult it is now to analyse Cropper's motives and how puzzling to understand another anti-Stephenson tactic. On the grounds that advice about the whole enterprise should be sought from an independent civil engineer to examine and report upon the state of the works ...

That puzzlement arises from simple failure to begin with the subject of the analysis, namely Cropper.

Who was James Cropper?

The genesis of the idea of a Liverpool-Manchester railway is usually attributed to the vision of William James, who enthused the substantial Quaker corn merchant, Joseph Sandars, and the story continues with his looking around to find other visionaries of some commercial wealth and power to help him implement the scheme. One of the first he recruited was his fellow Quaker James Cropper, a successful merchant in the East India trade.

Cropper came from Winstanley, near Wigan, and began his commercial career as an apprentice under William Rathbone, another Quaker, in 1790. Rathbone Benson & Co was a successful and innovative firm. It was among the first to import American cotton into Liverpool, and became one of the trade's great success stories. Cropper was obviously a promising youth, for after five years he was admitted as a partner, and only two years later felt able to set up in business on his own. In 1799 he went into partnership with Thomas Benson to form the successful firm of Cropper Benson & Co., which occupied the rest of his working life. He succeeded in building the firm up without having to sell off any family land, yet was able to build a pocket stately home, Dingle Bank, to the south of Liverpool while retaining Fearnhead for a characteristically philanthropic project of which more anon.16