THOMAS LONGRIDGE GOOCH, 1808–1882

NOTES AND REFERENCES

• Obituary notice, Minutes of Proceedings vol. 72 (1883), pp. 300–308. ('One of hiscontemporaries' was C. B. Vignoles, in his inaugural address as president of the Institution, 11 1871. Facts drawn from this obituary and from the MSS.92, Gooch I.C.E. (see note 2) are not referenced separately here.
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• Library I.C.E. MSS.92 Gooch. 'A Few Memoranda relating to the Professional Life of Thomas Longridge Gooch, Civil Engineer (by himself)' is an 80-page quarto notebook, written about 1867. The journals, numbered from 1 to 7 (no. 3 being missing, apparently from an early date), were kept in small plain-paper writing books, not uniform in size. It appears that Gooch had diaries of later years in his possession when writing the 'Few Memoranda'; those that survive cover September 1823 to April 1826 and May 1829 to November 1833. There is a typed transcript of the 'Few Memoranda', containing a few inaccuracies in proper names.
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• S. Smiles, George and Robert Stephenson (1874 ed.), pp. 188–189.
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• For Redmayne, see Dictionary of National Biography 1951–60; copies of letters, May 1934, inserted in MSS.92 Gooch, Library I.C.E.
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• Ed. R. B. Wilson, Sir Daniel Gooch: Memoirs and Diary (Newton Abbot, 1972), pp. 4–5; R. E. Chester Waters, Genealogical Notes of the Kindred Families of Longridge, Fletcher, and Hawks (pp. c. 1872), pedigree III (where Ringsfield is wrongly spelt 'Kingsfield'). Gooch's second name, about which there can be no doubt, is misspelt 'Langridge' in R. E. Carlson, The Liverpool & Manchester Railway Project 1821–1831 (Newton Abbot, 1969), p. 187; N. W. Webster, Joseph Locke (1970), p. 54 and Britain's First Trunk Line (Bath, 1972), p. 38.
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• Crow Hall (not 'Condhall', Diaries of Sir Daniel Gooch, Bart. (1892), 5) was demolished in 1970 (Wilson, op. cit.(5), p. 55) to make way for a housing estate. It stood at the west side of the A1171 road close to its T-junction with A192.
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• John Gooch and George Stephenson were friends: letter from Stephenson to Michael Longridge, 16 November 1824: W. O. Skeat, George Stephenson: the engineer and his letters (Inst.Mech.E., 1973), pp. 82–83, wrongly indexed under T. L. Gooch, p. 264.
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• J. G. H. Warren, A Century of Locomotive Building by Robert Stephenson & Co. (Newcastle, 1923), p. 64.
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• He went straight to Liverpool, not to the eastern end of the line with Allcard as stated by N. W. Webster, Joseph Locke (1970), p. 40.
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• For letters in George Stephenson's own hand, J. Simmons, 'A Holograph Letter from George Stephenson', Journal of Transport History, new ser. 1 (1972), pp. 107–115 (to Robert Stephenson in Colombia, 23 February 1827); W. O. Skeat, op. cit. (7), pp. 127–128 (letter to Michael Longridge, 8 February 1830).
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• Gooch's diaries for 1829 contain a good deal about the Bolton & Leigh Railway to supplement the accounts in L. Basnett, 'The First Public Railway in Lancashire', Trans. Lancs. & Cheshire Antiq. Soc. 62 (1951, reprinted 1963), pp. 157–176, and J. R. Bardsley, The Railways of Bolton (Bolton, 1959).
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• C. H. Ellis, British Railway History I (1954), p. 50, writes: 'his [Locke's] successsor T. L. Gooch was responsible for serious errors in the survey of the Edge Hill tunnel'. This seems to be wrong. The first (Wapping) tunnel was completed in June 1828 (Vignoles, who did the survey, admitted 'small errors' in it); the second (Lime Street) tunnel was surveyed in 1831 and again there were errors, which George Stephenson, defending himself after a report by Joseph Locke, July 1832, said were unimportant and Allcard was not to blame. The dates make it impossible for Gooch to have been involved. See R. H. G. Thomas, The Liverpool & Manchester Railway (1980), pp. 38, 116, 118. It seems that L. T. C. Rolt, George and Robert Stephenson (1960), p. 151, may be in error in attributing Locke's report to the first tunnel (unless he reported on both, of which there is no evidence).
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• There is an anecdote about Gooch surveying on the London & Birmingham line, not worth reproducing here, in P. Lecount, The History of the Railway connecting London and Birmingham [1839], pp. 9–10.
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• N. W. Webster, Britain's First Trunk Line: the Grand Junction Railway (1972), p. 53, says that Gooch went with Locke to the G.J.R. in 1833. There is no mention of this in the diaries or 'Memoranda', and the chronology provides no gap into which a spell with the G.J.R. could be fitted. Perhaps there is a confusion with John Viret Gooch, who was on the G.J.R. (J. Marshall, Biographical Dictionary of Railway Engineers (1978), p. 95). T. Roscoe, Grand Junction Railway (1839), p. 23, records that T. L. Gooch laid the first stone of the G.J.'s Birmingham viaduct on 13 October 1835, when he was certainly in London & Birmingham employment.
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• Gooch, 'Few Memoranda': not mentioned in T. Mackay, Life of Sir John Fowler (1900), which is vague at this point (pp. 19–22).
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• F. Whishaw, Analysis of Railways (ed. 2, 1838), p. 164; and Railways of Great Britain . . . (1840), p. 314.
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• "Original Notes of the Rt. Honble. Lord Stanley, Chairman of the Committee of the House of Commons on the Manchester & Leeds Railway Bill", P.R.O. Rail 1008/114 (box of R. Gill's papers).
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• Letters on leaving L. & B.R., July-August 1836, P.R.O. Rail 1008/114 (Gill papers), folios 4, 8, 9, 12, 13, 14, 19; John Brunton's Book (Cambridge, 1939), p. 38; Welsh letter quoted in M. Robbins, George and Robert Stephenson (ed.2, H.M.S.O., 1981), p. 35.
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• Hopping . . . (2) Dancing. A country fair or wake, at which dancing is a principal amusement, is so called in the North of England, (J. O. Halliwell, Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words (1847) p. 459): see also J. T. Brockett, Glossary of North Country Words (Newcastle, 3rd ed., 1846), pp. 226–7.
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• On one of these visits he travelled from Hereford to Abergavenny "per tramroad", 9 May 1832. This gives a date for regular passenger traffic on the Hereford Railway earlier than any hitherto published: R. A. Cook and C. R. Clinker, Early Railways between Abergavenny and Hereford (Rly. & Canal Hist. Soc.,), simply say that the Hereford Railway became liable for passenger duty in 1839, which is the date given by B. Baxter, Stone Blocks and Iron Rails (Newton Abbot, 1966), p. 197, for the commencement of passenger traffic.
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• Newcastle Daily Chronicle, 24 November 1882; Ruthanna Gooch mentioned, Wilson, op. cit. (5), p. 313); Inscription, Kensal Green Cemetery, see Note 29 below. The diaries show that the statement in the I.C.E. obituary, followed by J. Marshall, Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway, I. (1969), p. 62, and Biographical Dictionary of Railway Engineers (1978), p. 96, that for over 20 years the only holiday that Gooch had was three days for his honeymoon, to be wrong.
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• S. Smiles, Lives of the Engineers: George and Robert Stephenson (1874 ed.), pp. 255–7; L. T. C. Rolt, George and Robert Stephenson (1960), p. 252; J. Marshall, Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway, I (1969), pp. 41–2; information from Mr. A. H. King, Area Civil Engineer, British Railways, Preston. M. Macdonald, World from Rough Stones (1974), is a novel set against the construction of the Summit Tunnel.
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• This fragment and the original roof are attributed to George Stephenson by C. Stewart, The Architecture of Manchester (1956), p. 45 and The Stones of Manchester (1956), pp. 67–8; N. Pevsner, Lancashire: South (1969), 288; but Stephenson's connection was very slight. A fine series of lithographs was published in 1845, Views on the Manchester and Leeds Railway, drawn from Nature, and on Stone, by A. F. Tait with a Descriptive History by Edwin Butterworth. It is remarkable that this work mentions Gooch only once (in a footnote, p. 11), though it gives the names of the resident engineer and the contractor for the tunnel with some prominence. Presumably after Gooch's resignation it was not politic to give him credit in a work dedicated to the board of directors. Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait (1819–1905) was a landscape and animal painter who studied at the Royal Institution, Manchester; he emigrated to the United States in 1850 (F. D. Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution (Paladin ed., 1968), pp. 137–8). Nothing seems to be recorded of Edwin Butterworth, whose text is of no great merit.
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• Incorrectly attributed to Daniel Gooch (who was already at Swindon), P. E. Baughan, North of Leeds (1966), p. 48.
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• The Wakefield, Lincoln & Boston scheme was not carried out as such, but substantial parts of the proposed line were built by the Great Northern Railway: J. G. Ruddock and R. E. Pearson, Railway History of Lincoln (Lincoln, 1974), pp. 64–6; J. Wrottesley, Great Northern Railway I (1979), pp. 13–14.
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• It is often difficult to decide who was really responsible for what in these years. The titular 'engineer' or 'designer' must often have been the head of a large office in which responsibility was very extensively delegated. This is especially true of the Stephensons. For example, Robert Stephenson is usually credited with the design of the London & North Western Railway's 'Round House' locomotive depot at Camden; but as I have shown ('From R. B. Dockray's Diary', Journal of Transport History 7 (1966), p. 158) he himself claimed no responsibility for the design. The detailed plans for the original survey of the Manchester & Leeds Railway were seen and approved by George Stephenson after they had been deposited (p. 60, above).
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• Gooch's memory must have been highly selective at this point. It is stated that one of the cast-iron bridges on the line had failed and this caused the postponement: 'Anglo-Scot', 'How the London and North-Western Railway secured the Premier Route to the North and North-West', Railway Magazine 21 (1907), p. 474; W. L. Steel, History of the London and North Western Railway (1914), p. 171. But Sir George Findlay, Working and Management of an English Railway (ed.5, 1894, S. M. Phillp's biographical introduction, p. 7) wrote that after the failure of the cast-iron Dee bridge on the Chester & Holyhead Railway (24 May 1847) the Trent Valley Railway engineers re-examined their bridges and found them faulty. Findlay was an assistant under Brassey on part of the line.
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• See P. E. Baughan, North of Leeds (1976), esp. pp. 65–7, 85–94, 101.
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• Team Lodge, altered or rebuilt and renamed 'Endsleigh', appears to have been demolished c. 1950–60: information from Mr. R. W. Manders, Local Studies Librarian, Newcastle upon Tyne Central Library, and Mr. P. Conway, Borough Librarian, Gateshead.
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• Wilson, op. cit. (5), pp. 363–4; Waters, Genealogical Notes (see n.5), pedigree III; information on Gooch grave, Kensal Green Cemetery (no. 18844/77-78/RS), from Mr. D. J. Burkett, Secretary, General Cemetery company.
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• Wilson, op. cit. (5), p. 53.
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• Gooch wrote pretty sharply to Robert Gill, a director of the Lancashire & Yorkshire (as the M. & L. had become), as a shareholder on 2 December 1848, protesting at proposals for further capital spending and calling for a reduction in the board to 12 or at most 15—there were then 36: P.R.O., Rail 1008/114, fol. 22.
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• J. C. Jeaffreson, Life of Robert Stephenson (1864), II pp. 245–6, 259.
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