James Cropper, Liverpool docks and the Liverpool & Manchester railway

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

James Cropper was undoubtedly neither a fool nor a reactionary. He was a man with a nose for what he thought was an ethical cesspit. At Princes Dock he found one, and he found that it hinged on the family connections of the man in charge of all the engineering work. When he found the same family involved with the railway, and similar methods being employed by the principal engineer there, it is hardly surprising that he should have been suspicious. We now know that no corruption on anything like the scale of that at Princes Dock occurred, but Cropper did not, and he was perfectly entitled to his doubts. Had he failed to act on them he would have been in dereliction of his duty to the shareholders who had elected him. On his track record of taking a long-term view of things (and the Foster connection was finally destroyed only in 1837)52 it is entirely predicable that he should have embarked on what has been wrongly portrayed as a petty-minded vendetta. One obvious difference between the Fosters and the Stephensons emerges: in the latter instance Cropper failed to prove his case. George Stephenson's image has been so unimpeachable that Lambert was able to argue that Hudson's friendship with him proved that Hudson could not be all bad53 - which is rather akin to suggesting that Faust was such an extraordinarily nice chap that the Devil could not be all that bad either.

Because of the power of the Stephenson image Cropper's worries have not merely been disregarded as baseless, they have not been taken into account at all. As in the case of Dr Lardner, it is possible for an historical figure to be so discredited that it becomes traditional to mock him, and Rolt was again an arch-offender. 'Tradition', used in this sense, is almost the antithesis of history, for it is the practice of accepting and repeating that which is handed down without the slightest exercise of the critical faculties - in short, without knowing or caring whether it is true or not. It is here suggested that the time has come to look again at James Cropper's place in railway history, and to approach the question without the preconception that, because he disapproved of some of George Stephenson's ways of doing things, he must necessarily have been a fool, a knave or, more likely, both.

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Mrs Victoria Haworth, of the Robert Stephenson Trust, who kindly read a draft of this article and provided several references and many helpful comments.

Notes

Lofty claims were legion, e.g. railways `must, nevertheless, be recognised as by far the most valuable means of communication between men and nations that has yet been given to the world'. (S. Smiles, Lives of the Engineers: George and Robert Stephenson, 1874, p. xxxii.) The railway `has revolutionised our industrial, our commercial and our social conditions, and is now consolidating our imperial interests and effecting the civilisation of once barbarian lands.' (E. A.

Pratt, A History of Inland Transport and Communication, 1912, repr. Newton Abbot, 1970, p. 404.) '... the modern world was conceived on 8th October 1829, during the trials held at Rainhill ...' (N. Faith, The World the Railways Made, 1990, p. 14.) T. J. Donaghy (Liverpool and Manchester Railway Operations, 1831-45, Newton Abbot, 1972) is much more judicious but still uses expressions like `one of the most significant developments in transport history'