Having completed an MA Victorian Studies at Birkbeck over a decade ago, David Waller, author of the new book Iron Men, takes a look at the life and work of Henry Maudslay, linchpin of the industrial age

There were two very good reasons for launching my book Iron Men — about Victorian engineers — at Birkbeck recently.

The first was that when Birkbeck was founded in 1823, it was known as the Mechanics’ Institute, and the men who attended the evening classes in those days were the Iron Men in the title of my book. I’m sorry to say these early mechanics were all men: no Iron Women at all at this stage of the Industrial Revolution.

They were the engineers who designed and built the machinery that defined the age — powerful steam engines, railways and locomotive engines, ironclad ships, machines that made other machines (machine tools) and the complex equipment used in the textiles industry. These and other inventions helped turn the UK into the “workshop of the world,” the undoubted leader of the industrial world by the middle of the nineteenth century.

Iron Men focuses on Henry Maudslay (1771-1831), who came from a humble background as the son of a storekeeper at the Woolwich Arsenal. He shot to prominence after he worked with Marc Brunel, father of the more famous Isambard Kingdom Brunel, to design and build the machines used in the revolutionary Portsmouth block factory. This was the world’s first assembly line, producing more than 100,000 pulley blocks a year for the Royal Navy: a site that pointed the way to the mechanised future and became a tourist attraction.

Maudslay also built the tunnelling shield used in the construction of the Thames Tunnel from Rotherhithe to Wapping. Completed in 1843, this was another industrial wonder of the age, attracting 100,000 foot passengers on the day it first opened and 2m over the first nine months. Queen Victoria herself visited it by barge, and narrowly avoided a fatal collision with a steamboat. Unfortunately the tunnel proved a commercial white elephant, and in the way of many modern infrastructure projects, lost lots of money for its investors before being sold off to a railway company.

With the profits from Portsmouth, Maudslay opened a factory in Lambeth, just south of Westminster Bridge near the Thames. In time, this became one of the biggest engineering concerns in the UK, employing 500 people by the middle of the century. The company became one of the world’s leading manufacturers of marine engines used to power steamships. Maudslay engines drove Brunel’s Great Western, the first scheduled passenger ship to cross the Atlantic, which had its maiden voyage in 1837.

Henry Maudslay himself was self-taught and did not attend the Mechanics’ Institute, but undoubtedly many of the men he employed did. His factory attracted the brightest and best mechanics of the age, just like Google and Apple attract the best software engineers today. Among those who trained there were Joseph Whitworth, James Nasmyth and Richard Robert, all three of whom left London for Manchester where they became the top engineers of the Victorian age.

They and their peers were hungry for knowledge, and had their own Mechanics Magazine, which complemented the evening classes with articles on maths, trigonometry, chemisty and physics as well as practical engineering.

Given Birkbeck’s roots, it felt especially appropriate to launch the book in the Keynes Library. The other reason why Birkbeck was was the perfect location is that, like the students of the 1820s, I too am a graduate of the former Mechanics’ Institute, having completed the MA in Victorian Studies more than a decade ago. That was a formative experience, fortunately with no physics, chemistry or trigonometry, awakening a passionate interest in the social history of the nineteenth century.

Iron Men is the third book I have written about the Victorians since my time at Birkbeck, the others also delving into obscure or forgotten aspects of the Victorian past. The first was The Magnificent Mrs Tennant, the life of the Victorian Grande Dame Gertrude Tennant, and the second The Perfect Man, an account of Eugen Sandow, the fin de siècle body-builder famed for having the best body in the world.

So Birkbeck can be blamed for inspiring an interest that has absorbed most of my free time for more than ten years.

I have had to combine the writing with a full-time job, but this has proved no bad thing. For example, it helped me get a job in a finance company. In the job interview, I spoke with my prospective boss for one hour about Gustave Flaubert, the great French novelist who was Mrs Tennant’s paramour. I got the job.

Thereafter, whenever there was a sticky moment, I reminded my boss that I got the job because of my knowledge of Flaubert, not my understanding of the investment management business where I worked.

This is not quite the experience of the pre-Victorian mechanics, but still proved the practical value of a Birkbeck education!

This post was contributed by Dr William Ackah, lecturer in Community and Voluntary Sector Studies, who is based within Birkbeck’s Department of Geography, Environment and Development Studies (GEDS). He has just received a Fulbright All Disciplines Award to enable him to research at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.

When I was a young man, 16 or 17, doing O-levels and then A-levels in Waltham Forest East London, my dad would allow me to come to central London with my friends to go Foyles bookshop to buy exam past papers and revision guides. He believed education was the key to success in this country, and my parents – who were factory workers and first generation migrants from West Africa – sacrificed a great deal so that we would be successful at school and go on to this mysterious place that I knew little about except that it was grand and important and called university.

So my friends and I would go to Foyles, get the papers and then go into Soho to buy cassettes and second-hand records, and we would talk and share dreams about our aspirations. Sometimes we would pass by some of the hallowed London institutions, such as University of London, London School of Economics and Kings College, and look and think: could these really be places that we could attend. Do black people and ethnic minorities even exist in these places? I think I remember seeing Stuart Hall on television and knew that he was associated with the Open University but that was the full extent of my seeing universities and black experiences associated together.

Looking back on those times, it is amazing to think that some of us actually got to study in these hallowed places and now to actually work in one of them. For Black Scholars to engage in a critical dialogue within the higher education space is in one sense therefore quite remarkable. The paths that we have trod to carve out a space for ourselves in the academy have been long and hard. I can remember that when I graduated it made my family, my church and my community very proud. My Dad, who had very few pictures in the house, always had the graduation pictures of his children hung up on the wall – perhaps they signified a vindication of the decision he took to migrate and the struggles one had to endure in a hostile and racist climate of late 60’s and 70’s Britain.

So some of us have made it into the hallowed university, but here is the rub: entrance and acceptance into the institutional space of higher education has not resulted in freedom, liberation or advancement for many in our communities. We paved the way for black and minority ethnic students to enter into the academy and now as students they are entering into these spaces in droves on a dream of acceptance of advancement. But far too often they are getting a second class experience, feel alienated and not fully accepted and end up with second class results. They look around their institutions and see that their teachers, what they were being taught and the fabric and feel of the institution was white, pale, stale and that possibly they had been deceived. As the words of Bob Marley poignantly stated in his song Babylon System: “Building Church and University, deceiving the people continually, me say them graduating thieves and murderers, look out suckin the blood of the sufferers”.

It could feel for black students, staff and community that on entering the university space their life blood is being sucked out of them. If black experiences are studied at all it is as social, economic, political, health, criminal justice, and environmental problems that need to solved and that blacks do not have the skills and talents to solve them themselves. White academics who have studied us and researched us are the ones to ‘rescue’ us. Universities operating in this vein are reminiscent of colonial spaces, where education, religion and history were flung in the faces of Africans as reminders of how Europe was advanced and other people were backward. Africans needed to come to school to unlearn their heritage and culture and learn to value that of Europe. They needed to get rid of their gods and superstitious practices and adopt the gods of Europe and they needed to understand that they had no history, no philosophy, no academic enterprise that was of any value, and that their history and knowledge production starts and ends with Europe. This was how it was in colonial times and, it might argued, that this is still being replicated in the higher education system today.

That is why Black Scholars, students and increasingly the community are coming together to challenge these notions, and to think about how our disciplines and institutional spaces can be re-imagined and re-shaped to give value and dignity to marginalised minority communities. We want to see a higher education system that gives credit and value to the experiences of people of African descent and others who have suffered mis-education in the university system. We want to move beyond acceptance and access to the colonial mis-education project to recognition, advancement and genuine liberation both within and ultimately outside the institutional space. This is a crucial enterprise, to transform the partial-versity into a truly universal education environment genuinely fit for all.

Dr William Ackah, Birkbeck, University of London organised the Black Scholars in Critical Dialogue event at Birkbeck, University of London on 13 September 2016, with Dr Althea Legal-Miller, University College London and Dr Robbie Shilliam, Queen Mary, University of London and with the support of the Birkbeck Institute for Social Research. A podcast of the event is also available.