The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1881-04-16 00:00:00

THE STEPHENSON CELEBRATION.

The Daily Telegraph notices the proposed celebration of
the hundredth anniversary of the birth of George Stephenson,
in a leader from which we make the following extracts :

In the September of 1825 George Stephenson pre-
dicted that the time was not far distant when mail
coaches would go by steam, and when it would be
cheaper for a walking man to travel by railway than
to walk on foot. Within five years from the utterance
of these remarkable words the Liverpool and Man-
chester line was opened, upon which occasion the
success of George Stephenson's rough and primitive
locomotive engine, the Rocket, was incontro-
vertibly established. The 24th of September,
1830, is indeed a day to be much observed by the
grateful compatriots of the obscure and illiterate
Northumbrian pitman, from whose busy and ingenious
brain the Rocket sprang, but another day is rapidly
approaching when it will be meet and right that the
inhabitants of these islands, supported by the
civilised world at large, should pay glad homage to
what may, without exaggeration, be called an
immortal memory: Two months hence, on the
9th of June, the recurrence of George Stephen.
son's hundredth birthday will come round ; nor is
there the slightest occasion for wonder, but very much
the reverse, that extensive preparations should already
have been commenced in the North of England, and
more or less throughout the United Kingdom, for
celebrating with fitting honours th 3 centenary of one
of the greatest men that ever England produced.
Statues have already been erected to George Stephen-
son in many parts of the country, as for instance, at
Newcagtle-upon-Tyne, within eight miles of which he
was bigrn ; in St. George's Hall at Liverpool, the city
from Irrich the Rocket started upon her memorable trial
trip; at the London terminus of the London and
North-Western Railway, of which, as chief engineer,
George Stephenson made the roadway and laid the
permanent track; and finally at Qhesterfield, in Derby-
shire, where the author of railways died. Scattered
over the face of the globe, there are also many other
tributes to his memory beyond the seas; but the man's
vast • achievements and the matchless influence
wrought by him for all time upon the
fortunes and destinies of mankind demand that
on the next 9th of June other and warmer obla-
tions than those expressed in iron, in marble, in
bronze, or in stone, should be offered to his worth. It
may, indeed, be doubted whether even now—fifty
years and more since the day when the Rocket,
surmounting a successful trial, inaugurated the rail-
way era—the most far-sighted minds among us have
fully realised the value of the invention which
George Stephenson then introduced. For those who
are less than fifty years of age it is absolutely
impossible to conceive what, without railways,
the world would be like. Grateful nations have
in all ages set up statues and raised monuments to
eminent statesmen and legislators ' • to disinterested
and large-hearted philanthropists; to famous poets,
philosophers, and men of letters; to soldiers anil
sailors of renown, and even to distinguished engineers,
inventors, and "scientists"—but it will be long
before England again gives birth to a George Stephen-
son, whose life-work outweighs in its results that
of all his other fellow-labourers during this busy
century.
For these reasons there should be no half-hearted
homage rendered, on the 9th of next June, to the
illustrious memory of George Stephenson No
element calculated to provoke enthusiasm and elicit
sympathy will be wanting when at Wylam—a little
colliery village lying eight miles to the west of
Newcastle-upon-Tyne—platforms are erected on the
9th of next June for public speakers to make what
they can out of the materials suggested by "the common
two-storyed rubble house, portioned off into four
labourers' apartments," which stands hard by. In
the lower room at the west end of this lowly tenement
—as worthy of immortality as a certain "wee-bit
bigging " in Ayrshire of which the fame has
gone forth into all lands—George Stephenson was
born, the second of a family of six children.
"The apartment is now," wrote Dr. Smiles in 1874,
"what it was when he was born in it—an ordinary
labourer's room," with unplastered walls, with
clay floor, and bare rafters overhead. This solitary
room was long the home of Robert and Mabel
Stephenson, and of their six children; nor can it be
wondered that, the father's wages being but twelve
shillings a week, the circumstances of the' family
were so straitened that, in days when school boards
had not been invented, nothing was left for education.
Until he was eighteen years old George Stephenson
could neither read nor write; and it is not a little
remarkable that the first impulse which set him
to learning his letters was imparted by his eager wish
to be able to spell out the early victories of the great
Napoleon in the local newspaper. His history will be
an example and an inspiration to the humblest and
most down-trodden children of the human family,
when they reflect how important it is to have strength
rather than cultivation:of mind. The poor, neglected
boy, born of the lowliest parents, who could neither
read nor write until almost out of his teens, lived to re-
volutionise human history merely by turning to ac-
count the facilities for thought and observation
afforded by a collier's scanty opportunities and by
the unassisted force of his brain. No man that ever
lived has impressed his name', more deeply upon the
annals of mankind, nor will it be forgotten at Wylam
next June that he was born among the humblest ranks
of the people, for whom, more than for princes and
nobles, it was ever his pride to work