The Story of the Cambrian | Page 4

sell his wares. It was the custom there for farmers to decline to look at any other business till the sale of the live stock was disposed of, and the market being loth to start and Mr. Savin eager to be home again, he rushed into the arena and startled the company present by buying a thousand sheep. This was before he became associated with railway pioneering, but it is a characteristic example of that dramatic impulsiveness which led to his subsequent success--and failure.
Caught by the spirit of venture and enthusiasm, which had swept over the country after the successful opening of the Manchester and Liverpool Railway in 1830, his thoughts had begun to turn to railway production, and the meeting with the young Montgomeryshire road and bridge builder opened the looked for door. In a room over the tobacconist shop now occupied by Mr. Richards, opposite the Post Office, in Church Street, Oswestry, and close to the premises in which, some fifteen or sixteen years earlier another notable man, Shirley Brooks, afterwards editor of "Punch," had toiled as a lawyer's article pupil to his uncle, Mr. Charles Sabine, Mr. Davies and Mr. Savin were brought together by Mr. George Owen, himself destined to play no small part in the planning of the Cambrian. A man of Kent, native of Tunbridge Wells, Mr. Owen had begun his business career in the office of Mr. Charles Mickleburgh, land surveyor, agent and enclosure commissioner, of Montgomery, one of whose daughters he subsequently married. He worked side by side with another young engineer, of whom we shall hear more presently,--Mr. Benjamin Piercy, under whose initial leadership, Mr. Owen, as resident engineer, was to serve the local railway for many a long year. Nor was that the only capacity in which his gifts were displayed. Making Oswestry his home, he became a member of the Town Council in 1860, mayor in 1864 and 1865, and alderman in 1874. For twenty years he was a member of the General Purposes Committee, served as borough and county magistrate, and was a member of the School Board from its inception, and chairman from 1891 till his death in 1901. Indeed, there was no interest in the town,--administrative, commercial and recreative,--in which he did not fill a conspicuous role. But, perhaps, of all his services to the community, none was more opportune or more prolific of far-reaching results than that happy inspiration of introducing Messrs. Davies and Savin.

II.
Still, it takes more than a couple of contractors, however enthusiastic, to construct a railway. Though the more visible, the organiser of the labour is not the only parent. Not less essential, in his creative function, is the capitalist; and even the powerful combination of capitalist and contractor is insufficient to carry matters to a practical conclusion without the expert guidance of the engineer. Nevertheless, Messrs. Davies and Savin, as the new partnership was termed, had not long to wait before their opportunity arrived.
The great "railway mania" which reached its climax on that notable Sunday, November 30th, 1845, to be followed by the catastrophic bursting of the bubble, had left men rather sobered in their outlook upon the future possibilities of speculation in this alluring direction. It had witnessed the formulation of no fewer than 1,263 separate railway schemes, involving an (hypothetical) expenditure of 560 millions sterling, of which 643 got no further than the issue of a prospectus, while over 500 went through all the necessary stages of being brought before Parliament and 272 actually became Acts--"to the ruin of thousands who had afterwards to find the money to fulfil the engagements into which they had so rashly entered."
Amongst these was a Bill for converting the Montgomeryshire Canal into a railway line, for which an Act was passed in 1846, but it was a hare-brained scheme and soon came to nought. Other proposals, however, developed into what promised, and have since proved, to be highly profitable enterprises. The western Midlands and North Wales had been linked by the line from Shrewsbury to Chester, which Mr. Henry Robertson, M.P., for the former town and afterwards for the County of Merioneth, in which his residence, Pale, near Corwen, was situate, had carried over the great viaducts of Chirk and Cefn. From Chester, Mr. Robert Stephenson, even more daring, had flung his extension of the North Western system, by way of
"The magic Bridge of Bangor Hung awful in the sky." {8}
across the Menai Straits into Anglesey and so to Holyhead. The air was again thick, and to become thicker, with new adventures. Hardly a valley in North or Central Wales but had its ardent advocates of connecting lines. Within a short time newspaper columns were to be flooded with prospectuses of all sorts of schemes. Parliamentary committee rooms buzzed with forensic eloquence about