For me, The Victorian Age brings to mind the Industrial Revolution with its great feats of engineering; the building of railways, the construction of bridges, the development of powerful steam engines and radical advances in the production and use of new materials such as steel.
Everyone is aware of the successful inventions and developments of the Victorian era but, have you ever wondered about the failures that must have occurred amongst all these triumphs?
At the dawn of the railway age everything was new and untried. Victorian engineers had their work cut out to simply get a train to move and stay on track until it reached its destination. Stopping the train was not considered an essential function! For many years this depended on a single wooden brake being pushed onto just one wheel of the locomotive and the driver's skill in putting the engine into reverse. This 'keep things moving at all costs' attitude may explain many of the basic faults that caused so much carnage and mayhem.
The giant steps taken in Victorian technology were sometimes achieved at high cost. Health and safety issues were seldom considered and impatience for achievement too often resulted in catastrophe and disaster.
Many of the mistakes that were made were failures not of materials but of organisation and understanding of the concept of safety. Victorian society was run by the wealthy who, for generations, had viewed the poor as expendable (the slave trade was only abolished in 1833; Opium was harvested in the British-run Indian subcontinent and brought profit to Britain despite the obvious suffering it caused). The careless attitude to the loss of life caused by disasters was frankly the norm of the day. To bosses it was a mere inconvenience, to the wretched poor it was something that was just part of life. This way of thinking goes some way to explain why improvements sometimes took so long to be applied.
On 16th June 1883 The Victoria Hall in Sunderland was packed with children attending a show. When it was announced that prizes would be given out the 1,100 children in the gallery rushed to the stairs in excitement, unaware that the doors at the bottom of the narrow spiral staircase were locked. Hundreds of children were trapped, crushed by those coming down the stairs after them. When those downstairs realised what was happening the doors were unlocked but, as they were built to swing inwards toward the stairs, they were impossible to open against the press of bodies on the other side. Eventually the doors were smashed down but 114 boys and 69 girls aged between 3 and 13 died. An inquest recommended that exits in public buildings must open outwards and this subsequently resulted in the invention of the push bar emergency exit.
'The Victorians learnt by a painful series of trials and errors', says author Trevor Yorke. 'Perhaps the mistakes are the price that had to be paid for a period of enterprise and invention never seen before'.
What The Victorians Got Wrong by Stan & Trevor Yorke is an antidote to the current thinking that all things Victorian were successful, and explores some of the mistakes and errors of judgement that occurred. It is a sobering counter balance to the well known tales of glorious success.
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