Page 91 - BBC History The Story of Science & Technology - 2017 UK

Brunel’s newly-built pedestrian
Hungerford Suspension Bridge
over the Thames, c1845

contractor, William Ranger, had taken withholding from them payments to a total the GWR to pay them the £100,000, with
on the digging of the huge cutting near of over £100,000. 20 years’ accrued interest and all legal costs.
Sonning in Berkshire, and a series of tunnels How could he get away with this? The It came at a point when the GWR was severely
between Bath and Bristol. The work was answer would seem to be that the McIntoshes financially embarrassed, and the following
delayed by foul weather, as well as by had sunk so much of their money in the year the company came close to bankruptcy.
Brunel’s rejecting some of the work done, building of the GWR that they didn’t want to Brunel prided himself on his standards of
and in 1837 Ranger ran into difficulties. walk away from the job and risk a lawsuit: conduct, and always insisted on gentlemanly
He, too, became insolvent, and Brunel Brunel was effectively getting them to fund manners from his staff. The McIntosh case,
was left with a problem. He solved it by the building of the railway with their own which seems difficult to reconcile with this
transferring Ranger’s contracts to the credit. However, in 1840 old Hugh McIntosh view, was probably the most disreputable
well-run firm of Hugh and David McIntosh, died, and his son had had enough. The episode of his career. It is important to
father and son. One might have thought that executors of the estate sued the GWR, and on remember, in thinking about Brunel’s
Brunel would have been grateful to them, Brunel’s advice, instead of settling out of extraordinary achievements, that for all his
but he treated them even more badly. Brunel court, the company fought the case. genius as a designer and his insistence on
would reject work on grounds of quality, or Tactically, this may have seemed a shrewd being in control, without his staff and his
vary his design and expect them to cope move, as the Court of Chancery was notori- contractors he would have built nothing.
without increasing their price. ously slow and inefficient (as readers of There is a dark side to the Brunel legend, and
Where there was a disagreement about Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House will it is important to bear this in mind if we are
price, by standard practice the arbitrator know): at the time of Brunel’s premature to come close to understanding this great –
between the GWR and the McIntoshes was death in 1859 at the age but difficult – man.
Brunel himself, and perhaps not surpris- of 53, the case was still grinding on.
ingly, he always found in favour of the However, unlike Dickens’s Jarndyce family, Architectural historian Steven Brindle is the
GETTY former. If they were late with work, he the McIntoshes eventually received justice: author of Brunel: The Man Who Built the World
on 20 June 1865, the lord chancellor ordered
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005)
withheld money. By 1840, Brunel was
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