Chapter 67 Westminster

The bill was called *A Act for making and maintaining a Railway or Railways from the Greystones Collieries, in the West Riding of the County of York, to the Wiltshire and Berks Canal at Westfield, with Works and Powers incidental*, and it came on before an Opposed Bill Committee of the House of Commons on the twelfth of August, in Room Eleven, which was full an hour before the sitting and hotter than the vale at harvest. The promoters' counsel were Prendergast — silk now, and heavier in every sense than the man who had faced them at Chancery — leading four juniors; the petitioners against were the trustees of the Ashworth estate and certain landowners and inhabitants, appearing by Hollis as agent, Graves as solicitor, and counsel retained late but gladly, a Mr. Acheson being engaged elsewhere and his place taken by a lean Northern Irishman named Caulfield, who had fought canal bills for ten years and regarded railway companies as a degradation of the art. The first days belonged to the promoters, as procedure decreed: they proved their preamble — that the works were indispensable to the supply of the district with fuel — through Verrall's general manager, through two colliery viewers, through a canal carrier who testified that his boats were loaded to the gunwales eight months of the year and forced to refuse freight the rest, and through Braithwaite, who gave his survey with the smooth competence Arthur remembered from the visit to the ring, and produced plans so beautiful that one member was heard to regret they proposed anything so vulgar as locomotives. Forty miles of line; thirty-one million tons of coal proved beyond the scarp; a district crying fuel. Caulfield's cross-examination of the canal carrier produced the session's first small crack — the man, pressed, admitting that the refused freight had been chiefly from pits east of the vale, which was where the unopposed half of the line ran — but cracks are not verdicts, and the promoters closed their preamble case with their majority apparently intact. The vale's delegation lodged at a coffee-house in Great Turnstile, thirty men in two attics and a cellar dormitory, and kept discipline of a kind that amused the waiters until they understood it: Gillingwater turned them out at seven for a walk along the Embankment, brought them back for breakfast, and marched them to the lobby by nine, so that the members passing to their committee room met daily a solid block of men in good black coats with sunburnt necks and the patient eyes of men who rise early by profession and have walked behind a plough through worse mornings than this. On Wednesday evening, in the coffee-room, Hollis briefed them plainly. "Gentlemen, you will hear tomorrow whether you exist. If we carry standing, the fight is real and long, and I shall want some of you in this lobby every day until the report stage, saying nothing, signing nothing, being seen. If we lose it, we lose nothing but time, for the case goes to the country and the country reads the Chronicle." A collier's son named Prosser, one of Trevanion's paid-off men who had taken work at the Westfield staiths precisely to watch the company's freight, asked the question the others were too proud for: whether a defeat would mean the pits coming after all, and wages, and whether he would be a traitor to hope twice over. Gillingwater answered him before Hollis could. "Theest thou thy own well, boy. Thou hast drunk of it thirty years. Let yon gentlemen settle whose fault it is thoust shouldn't drink of it ten years hence." It was Thursday before the petitioners were heard upon the preamble, and Caulfield spent his hour not denying the coal nor even the railway, but narrowing: the line east of the vale, he argued, served every purpose proved; the western branch, the loops, the two-mile belt of ancillary powers — these were not means but empire, and empire is not indispensable, it is only desired. The chairman of the committee, Mr. Ettrick, member for the manufacturing division across the hills, heard him out with a face cut from mahogany, and ruled nothing, and adjourned; and the vale's people, who had come up thirty strong with Gillingwater at their head, learned in the lobby the true texture of parliamentary war. It was conducted at a whisper, in doorways, over sandwiches; members drifted past the tenants as though they were furniture, until one paused — a young member for a coastal borough, curious, having read THE PARISH THAT KEPT BOOKS — and asked Gillingwater whether it was true his well-club kept minutes. It was true; forty-one families, a penny the month, rope and bucket held in common, minutes since 1819. "Then you are the oldest democratic institution I have heard of this session," the young man said, "and I sit on a Reform committee," and he went away with a copied page of the club's minutes in his pocket, and voted, and told two others, and this is how causes actually advance in that building — by inches, at tea. On Friday the promoters opened their answer to the petitions, and Prendergast made the speech Hollis had predicted and prepared for. The water question, he submitted with great respect, was irrelevant to a railway. If the Union's future mining operations endangered anything, mining required its own acts, its own inquiries, its own safeguards, at its proper time; to inquire into hydrology now would be to try a suit before a committee with no jurisdiction to decide it. The petitioners' real object — he did not say this harshly; he said it with sympathy — was to obstruct, upon sentimental grounds, the industrial development of England; and sentiment, however amiable in a parish, could not be suffered to write engineering into a private act. Caulfield rose to reply, and did not argue. He asked leave to hand up three documents: the perpetual injunction of the Court of Chancery, restraining works in the bounded area upon sworn proof of danger; the Master's paragraph; and the printed Watch-book of the waters, kept in succession by the children of a school, with its unbroken column of weekly counts. Then: "My lords' committee is invited to look at a railway. We invite it to look at the ground under one. The promoters' own engineer has drawn a catchment level running south along the strike toward this parish — it is Plate IV of his published report, my lords; obstruction does not publish plates. We say the power to *drain*, granted as a mere incident of a line of rails, is the very head of the danger sworn before Chancery; and we undertake to prove, upon oath, before this committee, that the drainage of the district is already beginning, unlawfully in spirit if lawfully in letter, at a place called Cinder Slack. We ask the committee to see the ground. Until it has seen the ground, we say the preamble is proved only by shutting one eye." Mr. Ettrick looked at the Watch-book a long time — longer, the ushers agreed afterward, than committees look at anything — and then said that the committee would view the locality, and that the question of the petitioners' standing to be heard further upon the merits would be taken on Monday morning. ---