MIKE NORMAN’S grandfather, Bailey Cornforth, was a railway footplateman who lived in Shildon opposite the school named after the pioneering engineer, Timothy Hackworth.
Bailey was a Methodist lay preacher, like Hackworth, in the Soho chapel in Shildon, which was opposite Hackworth’s cottage.
When Bailey died, Mike inherited a lithograph (above) which featured a picture of Hackworth flanked by the first and last engines he built – it was a summation and celebration of the great man’s career.
“I am sure that the lithograph was up in the Soho chapel, and when it closed it was given to my grandfather for his long service,” says Mike. “I then had to find out more – I had to do something with it.”
His three year search for the story of the lithograph has taken him around the world and next Saturday brings him back to Shildon where he will launch his book about it.
Because as Mike, a retired academic from York, investigated he realised that while history hails George Stephenson as “the father of the locomotive”, Hackworth is very much in his shadow – and yet it was Hackworth who made Stephenson’s engines work, and it was Hackworth who made engines that were every bit as good, if not better, than Stephenson’s.
Then Mike discovered that the Americans have a different view of our railway history. In 1893, to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s discovery of the US, a world fair was held in Chicago, and it included a tribute to those railway pioneers whose invention had done so much to open up America to settlement.
The Baltimore & Ohio Railway made a working replica of Hackworth's Shildon-built Sans Pareil engine for display at the Chicago world's fair. It then toured the US before being destroyed in a tornado
And there was Hackworth placed on the same level as Stephenson, but with his concept of the blast pipe hailed as the breakthrough that made steam engines succeed.
Mike said: “The display was seen by millions in the US, and yet I couldn’t find any similar reference in this country. At the Chicago exposition for the first time, Hackworth was seen standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Stephenson, and he was given individual recognition for his pioneering accomplishments, and for all the accolades as ‘Father of the Locomotive’.”
Mike’s new book, It Wasn’t Rocket Science, is written as a novel, charting the explorations of Hackworth’s grandson into the career of his grandfather as he prepared for him to be recognised at the Chicago fair.
Of course, in rewriting history, Mike has promoted his own grandfather’s local hero to the top of the railway pantheon.
It is therefore fitting that the book will be launched in the Railway Institute which Hackworth founded in the streets that Bailey knew so well.
Everyone is invited to the launch talk, which begins at 2.30pm on Saturday, March 4, in the institute in Redworth Road. It will be followed by Hackworth’s great-great-grand-daughter, Jane Hackworth-Young, reopening the institute’s 190-year-old library.
The book will be on sale for £9.99, or it may be ordered through the website timothyhackworth.com
READ MORE: WORLD'S FIRST METAL RAILWAY BRIDGE TO BE RESTORED
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