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Transportation Industry

Life and Times of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, The

Journal of Transport History, The, Mar 2004 by Marsden, Ben

R. Angus Buchanan, The Life and Times of lsambard Kingdom Brunel, Hambledon Press, London (2002), 318 pp., £20.00.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel was a 'little giant' of engineering whose works, like the Great Western Railway and the SS Great Eastern, have assumed iconic status. Although two descendants, lsambard Brunei and Celia Brunel Noble, produced informative biographies which were respectively worthy and engaging, for the last forty years the definitive account has been L. T. C. Rolf's. Here Angus Buchanan offers Brunel the full scholarly treatment he deserves.

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Buchanan charts Brunel's apprenticeship, his early projects with his father, Marc Isambard Brunel, and his activities in and around Bristol, the launchpad for his career and the site of the audacious Clifton suspension bridge. Particular attention rightly goes to Brunel's 'masterpiece', the Great Western Railway, designed as an ideal system for comfort-loving well-to-do passengers who wanted high speed over long distances. Brunel clearly intended the Great Eastern to be an extension of a global transport system; Buchanan reminds us that it was also, like the Thames tunnel of Marc Isambard Brunel, a huge media event. He sees Brunel's overseas projects, although limited in number, as typical of a diaspora of British engineering expertise in an Age of Empire; since he was directing at a distance, Brunel's working methods were for once revealed in correspondence, as were his struggles to impose British professional standards abroad and to maintain such elusive quantities as authority, position and confidence.

The last and most interesting part of the book continues Buchanan's exploration, synthesised in The Engineers (1989), of what it meant for a Victorian engineer to be a professional, socially, administratively and politically. He had to be a gentleman: clubbable (like Brunel), competent, courteous and fair; but he had also to be not so gentlemanly as to be lazy or independent of his master. Brunel's office emerges as a place in which a dozen projects might be simultaneously co-ordinated whilst - or perhaps because Brunel remained aloof even from fervent supporters like Daniel Gooch. Buchanan has claimed elsewhere that the engineers were, at least in public, a non-political bunch, but Brunel is shown here to have been an economic liberal, averse to patents and government interference as curbs on progressive private enterprise.

In constructing this biography the author has drawn effectively on Brunel's embarrassingly self-conscious early diaries, and on the extensive archival materials concentrated in Bristol and the Public Record Office. Buchanan's writing eschews the quirkiness of Noble and the infectious verve of Rolt in preference for the caution of modern scholarship. Many myths are laid to rest: we can no longer be certain that rats did eat the wax on the troublesome valves of Brunel's atmospheric railway. The book, therefore, is corrective. For its thorough treatment of Brunei's neglected projects, like the bridge at Balmoral, so austere as to leave Queen Victoria unamused, it is to be congratulated. Where Buchanan assumes the reader has absorbed more familiar narratives, the book is not exhaustive but rather provides supplementary interpretations.

There are some surprises. Buchanan effectively presents the fruits of modern studies, like his own, on particular engineering projects, on industrial archaeology, especially around Bristol, and on the culture of the engineering profession. He discusses the social and political context ('the times') within which Brunel worked, linking it, usually successfully, with the more particular dynamics of Brunel's actions. He gives less space to theoretically driven studies. Brunel's talk about the Great Western Railway, his Italian railway projects and the Great Eastern was permeated by system-speak; Buchanan himself writes of Brunel's gigantic woven fabric and uses the phrase 'technological system' at least once. But there is no explicit engagement with Thomas Hughes or his social constructivist heirs. A closer engagement, also, with the rich cultural history of nineteenth-century science might have delivered more evenhanded evaluations of those who, like Dionysius Lardner, disagreed with Brunel.

In any biography much depends on the skill with which the author animates his subject from the limited sources available, and engineers leave fewer traces than men of letters. The qualities that Buchanan assigns to Brunel, namely diplomacy, panache, genius, virtuosity, energy, dedication, courage and persistence, would have satisfied Samuel Smiles and his readers. They become meaningful to us by example and by comparison, especially when the author places Brunel next to his peers, like Robert Stephenson, with whom he had a close friendship, and John Scott Russell, with whom he famously disagreed. Buchanan would be the first to admit that, according to contemporaries, this same Brunel was extravagant, addicted to novelty, autocratic and assertive to the point of aggression when his professional status was challenged. Resolving the apparent tension between those images would amount, perhaps, to an investigation of Brunel's 'self-fashioning' and the building of a reputation central to his career.

Transportation Industry

Life and Times of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, The

Journal of Transport History, The, Mar 2004 by Marsden, Ben

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