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Updated: June 17, 2025
Stephenson, “I’ll give you a wide range of subjects; what shall it be about?” “Say birds’ nests!” rejoined the other, who prided himself on his special knowledge of this subject. “Then birds’ nests be it.” A long and animated conversation ensued: the bird-nesting of his boyhood, the blackbird’s nest which his father had held him up in his arms to look at when a child at Wylam, the hedges in which he had found the thrush’s and the linnet’s nests, the mossy bank where the robin built, the cleft in the branch of the young tree where the chaffinch had reared its dwelling—all rose up clear in his mind’s eye, and led him back to the scenes of his boyhood at Callerton and Dewley Burn.
In after life, Stephenson’s mettle was often as hardly tried, though in a different way; and he did not fail to exhibit the same resolute courage in contending with the bullies of the railway world, as he showed in his encounter with Ned Nelson, the fighting pitman of Callerton. George Stephenson had now acquired the character of an expert workman.
Nixon, however, ordered Locke to go on with the work, which he did; and Stephenson, after some further practice, acquired the art of brakeing. After working at the Water-row Pit and at other engines near Newburn for about three years, George and Coe went to Black Callerton early in 1801.
Indeed, Andrew Robertson became very proud of his scholar; and shortly after, when the Water-row Pit was closed, and George removed to Black Callerton to work there, the poor schoolmaster, not having a very extensive connexion in Newburn, went with his pupils, and set up his night-school at Black Callerton, where he continued his lessons.
He lived to see him the greatest practical engineer of his own time, and to feel that his success was in large measure due to the wider and more accurate scientific training the lad had received from his Edinburgh teachers. In 1819 George married again, his second wife being the daughter of a farmer at Black Callerton.
George’s “philoprogenitiveness,” as phrenologists call it, had been exercised hitherto upon birds, dogs, rabbits, and even the poor old gin-horses which he had driven at the Callerton Pit; but in his boy he now found a much more genial object for the exercise of his affection.
Towards the close of his life he frequently went down to Newcastle, and visited the scenes of his boyhood. “I have been to Callerton,” said he one day to a friend, “and seen the fields in which I used to pull turnips at twopence a day; and many a cold finger, I can tell you, I had.” His hand was open to his former fellow-workmen whom old age had left in poverty.
One of the old residents at Black Callerton, who remembered him at that time, described him to the author as “a grit growing lad, with bare legs an’ feet;” adding that he was “very quick-witted and full of fun and tricks: indeed, there was nothing under the sun but he tried to imitate.” He was usually foremost also in the sports and pastimes of youth.
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