Page:Engines and men- the history of the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen. A survey of organisation of railways and railway locomotive men (IA enginesmenhistor00rayniala).pdf/28

 farm, and was attending the plough at early hours when little children ought to be in bed. His next duty was to pick bats and coal droppings, and when the overseer came round he used to hide lest he be thought too little to earn a living. Like all the poor children of his day, he was working hard before he could read or write, but he mastered those arts later.

Shortly after the age of 13, George Stephenson worked as a brake-man for Waterrow Pit, on the tramway between Wylam and Newburn, his father being at Walbottle. A large dog fetched his dinner daily from Walbottle to Wylam tramway. A removal of the family brought him to Killingworth, where George Stephenson became stoker to a colliery engine. Working early and late and at all hours of the night, his wages were then only one shilling a day. He really thought his fortune was made when his wage rose to twelve shillings weekly. He was still a stoker when advanced to 17s. a week, with overtime added, and as a young man he was sober, industrious, and very studious of all the ways of steam engines. He ran the risk of being forced into the Militia, or being seized by a press gang for the Navy, and, like many other young men, thought of going to America. He was married at the age of 22, and in 1803 his only child Robert was born.

Stephenson tried his hand at laying down tramways, or waggonways as they were called, and he was making headway as a mining engineer. "I was, however, a poor man," he afterwards said, and in order to educate his son, "How do you think I did? I betook myself to mending my neighbours' clocks and watches at night after my day's work was done, and thus I got the means of bringing up my son." He had seen a locomotive as Wylam, and set himself to contrive one which would work much better, as the irregular action of the cylinders made such jerks in the working as continually tended to shake it to pieces. Lord Ravensworth and the Killingworth owners supplied him with money to make a locomotive, and in July 1814, it was tried upon the tramway, being patented in 1815, and bearing the name of "Blucher."

It was fifteen years after building his first engine, years crowded