Master builder
OLIVER WARNER
Marc Isambard Brunel Paul Clements (Longmans 60s)
That engaging pair, Marc Isambard Brunel and his son Isambard Kingdom, have both found appreciative current biographers. Mr L. T. C. Rolt dealt authoritatively with Isambard Kingdom some thirteen years ago. Now it is the turn of the father to be given a book with style and scholarship.
These Anglo-Norman inventors were characterised by prodigious energy and ver- satility. The son is the better known of the two, naturally so, for he was more sensa- tional. Fancy a pupil of Breguet, that watch- maker expert in the miniature, becoming master of the massive, broad guage Great Western Railway. Fancy his father, naval officer, self-exiled royalist, inventor of mass produced footwear, block-making engines and a hundred other utilities, going down to history as the man who achieved the first tunnel under the Thames. This pro- ject, in its own eerie way, nearly killed young Isambard and might well have done the same by Marc had he been less resilient.
From small to large—that was the Brunel way. Both men suffered from attempting too much. The giant ship 'Great Eastern' speeded the son's death; the Tunnel could have ruined the father. The entire story of that protracted effort is followed foot by foot until the reader almost feels the reek of accumulated gas at the working face and comes to fear the noise of the foul river water as it rushes in on its destructive way.
Typically, the elder Brunel took the idea for a tunnelling shield from a close study of the wooden shipwright's worst enemy. the teredo 'rayons. 'This lowly mollusc', explains Mr Clements, 'is nine inches long and half an inch in diameter. Its head is encased by two jagged, concave triangular shells, between which a proboscis protrudes. like the centre pin of a carpenter's bit. The boring shells oscillate about the axis of the proboscis, grinding the hardest oak into a nourishing flour, and from this unvarying diet the worm derives its power, and its smooth tunnel lining of petrified excreta ... To imitate the action of the ship-worm became Brunet's preoccupation.' One's next journey by tube may be enlivened by the thought of this creature, which, though it eventually brought Brunel knighthood and universal fame, also caused him immense trouble.
It is fitting that the more notable engineers should attract adequate biographies, and this book is one of the signs that they are doing so. It has a score of pleasing touches: Wellington's soldiers marching on Brunet's boots; French prisoners of war working at Chatham saw-mills, and, on the personal side, an account of a delightful family life. Brunel and his English wife Sophie were happy all their married years, but of Brunel his annalist relates that 'the society of culti- vated and elegant women gratified him, and once. while engrossed in an after-dinner con- versation, he fondly caressed a lady's hand. Sophie, knowing he believed it to be hers, understood his absent-mindedness.'
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