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JOHN COOKE BOURNE:RAILWAY ARTIST AND VISIONARY

In 1836 John Britton, a London publisher, spotted a talented young artist drawing the building of theLondon & Birmingham Railway (L&BR) as it made its way into central London. The artist, John

Cooke Bourne, was sketching the spectacle out of passion for the subject. His drawings capturedthe upheaval, the chaos and the scale of the engineering works required to build what was to

become the first truly main-line railway in the world.

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Matt Thompson

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Building a Retaining Wall, Park Street, London, lithograph by J. C. Bourne, 1838. Revealing the upheaval that the railway brought to the capital.

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Charles Dickens, who livednear Euston station, laterdescribed the scene in hisnovel Dombey and Son

(1848):

The first shock of a great earthquakehad, just at that period, rent thewhole neighbourhood to its centre.Traces of its course were visible onevery side. Houses were knockeddown; streets broken through andstopped; deep pits and trenches dugin the ground; enormous heaps ofearth and clay thrown up…fragments of unfinished walls andarches and piles of scaffolding, andwildernesses of bricks...In short, theyet unfinished and unopenedRailroad was in progress; and, fromthe very core of all this dire disorder,trailed smoothly away, upon itsmighty course of civilisation andimprovement.

Bourne’s Drawings of theLondon & Birmingham RailwayBritton encouraged Bourne to work hisdrawings up into a series of lithographs(prints) which he subsequently published,at first in a series of part works, and then,in 1839, in a single edition entitledDrawings of the London & Birmingham

Railway. The drawings are full of energyand dynamism and they give a first-handimpression of what it was like toexperience the first ever flush of railwaybuilding and the power of the IndustrialRevolution.

Bourne reveals the lived experience ofthe times; the breaking down andrebuilding of whole sections of towns andcities; the transformation of the Englishlandscape and the shrinking of distance toa degree previously incomprehensible. Hereminds us is that the IndustrialRevolution was as much achieved throughthe brute strength of the navigators, their

Birmingham Station, lithograph by J. C. Bourne, 1838. Curzon Street Station was designed by architect Philip Hardwick in a similar style to Euston Station, London.

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horses and the hand tools with which theyworked as it was by the fireside in SohoHouse.

The ArtistJohn Cooke Bourne was born on 1 September 1814 at 19 Lamb’s ConduitStreet, London, to Edward Cooke Bourne,a hatter, and Mary Ann. The Bournehousehold had strong links to the worldof engraving and printmaking. Livingwith them were George and WilliamCooke (no immediate relations as far as isknown) who were well-known engraversand had reproduced works by artistsincluding J.W.M. Turner.

In 1828, at the age of 14, John wasapprenticed to another well-knownengraver John Pye. Like the Cookebrothers, Pye had also engraved manyworks by Turner. Bourne’s early sketchesshow a great deal of Pye’s influence butalso demonstrate the eye for detail that

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would mark out his later railwaylithographs as being exceptional.

The topographical tradition thatportrayed landscapes, picturesque ruins andsublime castles and crags suffused Bourne’searly work. These were aesthetic traditions,established in the seventeenth andeighteenth centuries through the artistsSalvator Rosa and Claude Lorrain, whichwere still popular in the early nineteenthcentury. The coming of the railwaystransformed his world and provided newinspiration for his art.

The Coming of the RailwaysRailways had developed to meet the needto transport heavy, bulky objects, such ascoal and limestone, from collieries andquarries to a place where they could betranshipped onto waterborne vessels suchas barges. As the Industrial Revolutiongathered pace there was an ever increasingdemand for coal in greater quantities.

There was also a need to move rawmaterials such as cotton from ports to millsand factories, as well as to move finishedgoods from their place of manufacture tothe client or marketplace. The eighteenth-century canal system had been created tomeet this demand, but by the early 1800sit was under strain.

Steam had been used for generations inwinding engines and pumps and by 1802the first experiments were undertaken todevelop a steam-powered locomotive toreplace the horse. After much trial anderror, workable railway locomotives wereproduced. In 1814, the year of Bourne’sbirth, the engineer George Stephensondemonstrated that a steam locomotivewith smooth, flanged wheels could gainenough traction to haul a train on smoothiron rails.

In 1825, when Bourne was eleven yearsold, the Stockton & Darlington railwayopened, and when Bourne was sixteen in

1830, the first intercity railway opened -the Liverpool & Manchester Railway.

Bourne grew up in a time ofinnovation, speculation and invention.Throughout his early years the railwayswere constructed by engineers that arehousehold names: Blenkinsop, Stephensonand Hackworth. As the need to movemore fuel, materials and goods grew,railways expanded. Locomotives becamemore powerful, track became more robustand longer routes served collieries,quarries, ports, towns and cities.

Origins of the London &Birmingham RailwayIn the 1820s, the need to improve the linkbetween London and Birmingham wasrecognised. Manufacturers had to turndown work because they could not movegoods to the capital quickly enough bycanal. Usually a three-day journey, it couldtake weeks if the canals froze in winter.

View from above the Kilsby Tunnel, lithograph by J. C. Bourne, 1838. The Kilsby Tunnel was the largest single piece of engineering along the whole line. The picturesque landscape above the tunnel appears to be undisturbed by the huge endeavours below.

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Navvies at work, London, sketch by J. C. Bourne, 1837. The sketch captures the people who physically built the railways.

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Ensuring a more effective link betweenthe heartland of industry and thecommercial centre of the country wasessential for economic growth.

By 1830 a line was proposed that ranbetween the two cities via Coventry, withGeorge and Robert Stephenson appointedas surveyors. Their survey established theroute and estimated the construction costat £2.5 million for 112½ miles of doubletrack, while the potential profits for therailway once completed were calculated tobe more than £670,000 per year.

An Act of Parliament was necessary topermit construction. This was difficult toachieve as many landowners were against

the building of railways and the associatedcompulsory purchase of necessary land.They feared that the railway would ruinproductive agricultural estates, frightencattle and other livestock and have anegative impact on fox and stag hunting.

As many of the major landowners werealso MPs, their personal misgivings aboutthe railways could be brought to bear inParliament. After being initially thrown outin 1832, the plans for the railway receivedroyal assent on 6 May 1833. Undoubtedlythe £250,000 the L&BR paid incompensation to landowners eased itspassage through Parliament the secondtime.

Constructing the RailwayWork began almost immediately: land waspurchased, contracts let and detailedsurveys made. Thousands of people wererequired to build the embankments,excavate the cuttings and construct thebuildings. These men, the navvies, becamepart of British folklore because of theirprodigious strength, stamina and appetitefor drinking and fighting.

It would be almost impossible toimagine the sheer scale of the undertakingand the impact that the building of therailway had on the landscape, had JohnCooke Bourne not recorded the process ofconstruction in intimate detail. His work

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West side of Viaduct over the River Blythe, lithograph by J. C. Bourne, 1838. The juxtaposition of the old bridge alongside the new rail bridge reflects thedesire to show that the railway could be an integral part of the landscape.

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captured a period that was infused withexcitement, possibility and potential.

Bourne’s Artistic AchievementBourne’s drawings are suffused with thepicturesque aesthetic of his apprenticeshipwhere the hard lines of the engineering aresoftened by the rough shapes of trees andvegetation. He was, of course, not the firstartist to be drawn to the railways as asubject, but he was among the first tocontextualise the railway within the Englishcountryside in a way that suggested stability,solidity and a sense of permanence.

Many of the artists who had producedimages of the other great undertaking ofthe period, the Liverpool and ManchesterRailway (L&MR), had struggled withperspective, scale or the technical details ofhow the railway was actually constructed.This led to their images being somewhatnaive and stiff.

Bourne’s drawings have the clarity anddetail of a photograph at a time whenphotography was in its infancy. They are,

by turns, pin sharp in their eye for detailcontrasted with a fluidity whichcommunicates the landscape in a loose,almost impressionistic style.

At a time when there was much anxietysurrounding the building of railways,Bourne was able to demonstrate that arailway could not only sit comfortably inthe landscape but also, in certain cases,complement it. He produced images thatcreate an idealised railway, which had aprofound influence for years to come.

Pro-Railway propagandaIt was this combination of the industrialwith the aesthetic that attracted JohnBritton to Bourne’s work. Whileresearching the text that he would includein the publication of Bourne’s lithographs,he wrote to the secretary of the L&BRasking for information on the railway. Inhis letter in The National Archives, he gaveone of the motivations for publishing thedrawings:

Fully aware that we have jealous &

fastidious critics to deal with both inthe houses of parliament & out ofthem, I wish to remove, or at least tocheck, the tide of prejudice against us,and display our powers, capabilitiesand effects.

In this sense, Bourne’s drawings can beseen as having a political subtext. Not onlywere they beautiful, they carried a message.They were published by a man who waskeen to change the minds of those bothinside and outside of government whowere against the railway. What better wayto do that than by picturing them as aspectacle, to wonder over and marvel atand not to be afraid of.

Originally published as a series of part-works before the complete edition of1839, Bourne’s drawings were wellreceived by the press. The quality of hisdraughtsmanship was highly praised andone reviewer in the Gentleman’s Magazine

went so far as to suggest that he might‘speedily rank among the first landscapepainters of our age.’

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Dr Matt Thompson is Director of Collections &Learning at the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust.

Further ReadingF. Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution,revised by A. Elton (Paladin, 1968).J. van Laun, ‘John Cooke Bourne (1814–1896),lithographer: Drawings of the London &Birmingham Railway (1836-1838)’, The Journal ofthe Railway and Canal Historical Society, 2014–15.M. Thompson, The Picturesque Railway, (TheHistory Press, 2015).M. Thompson, ‘Modernity, anxiety and thedevelopment of a popular railway landscapeaesthetic, 1809–1879’in S. Spalding and B. Fraser(eds), Trains, literature and culture; reading andwriting the rails, (Lexington Books, 2012).

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Shortly after their publication, Bournewas commissioned by another publisher toproduce a series of drawings of the GreatWestern Railway. By the time these werepublished in 1846 the railways had lostsomething of their appeal in the public eye.

The Railway Mania of 1845, aspeculative investment bubble that sawmany thousands lose considerable sums ofmoney on unworkable and sometimesridiculous schemes, took the shine off therailways. In the later 1840s they began,once again, to be viewed with suspicionand wariness. Bourne, without realising it,had captured an entrepreneurial spirit thatexisted perhaps only for fifteen years fromthe opening of the Liverpool andManchester in 1830 to the bursting of therailway bubble in 1845.

Bourne’s InfluenceWhen asked to draw a train, a child willalmost always draw a steam locomotive; acolourful crayon-scrawl of an engine witha chimney and smoke trailing behind. Very

rarely will they picture a diesel or electricengine. The railway of the nineteenthcentury is embedded in our collectiveimagination and this seeps out into thepublic eye though the watercolours of EricRavillious, Edward Thomas’ ‘Adlestrop’,Hornby train sets, Thomas the Tank Engineand repeats of the Titfield Thunderbolt.

There seems nothing morequintessentially English than a rurallandscape with a small steam enginehauling a short mixed train of carriagesand wagons. One writer, Ian Carter, haseven described how the railway dragonwas quickly ‘domesticated’ and soon‘nestled in [the] English countryside’.

Today we can travel the route of theLondon & Birmingham Railway fromEuston to the heart of the Midlands. Theimpact of the line, built in the 1830s, is stillbeing felt more than 175 years after itopened. Bourne’s drawings, however, arenot limited to the 112½ miles of track -they exist as part of our shared industrialpast and our understanding of what a

railway can be; a thing that transforms notonly the landscape through which it passesbut those who view it and travel on it.

Bourne may well be considered arelatively obscure artist but his influence,whether we realise it or not, has beenprofound. His idealised, picturesquerailway is still very much with us today. l