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Updated: May 8, 2025
Try twenty men in the most rudimentary test and you will find that it is not; then think of the nerve it takes to keep right on in battle, with your ship shaken by the enemy's hit. How long had the plugman been on his job? Six years. And the gun- layer? Seven. Twelve years is the term of enlistment in the British navy. Not too fast but thoroughly is the British way.
It was the secret of his inventions and discoveries thereafter. It was so with Stephenson, of whom we have spoken before. As soon as he was appointed plugman of an engine, at seventeen years of age, he began to study its construction. In his leisure hours, he took it to pieces and put it together again several times, in order to understand it.
It was like other guns of the latest improved type; but it had been in action, and you kept thinking of this fact which gave it a sort of majestic prestige. You wished that it might look a little different from the others, as the right of a veteran. As the plugman swung the breech open I had in mind a giant plugman on the U.S.S. Connecticut whom I used to watch at drills and target practice.
It was so with Benjamin; and this quality proved a valuable element of his success. It was the secret of his discoveries and inventions in his manhood, as we shall see, just as it was with Stephenson. As soon as he was appointed plugman of an engine, at seventeen years of age, he began to study its construction.
A pumping engine was erected there by Robert Hawthorn, the Duke’s engineer; and old Stephenson went to work it as fireman, his son George acting as the engineman or plugman. At that time he was about seventeen years old—a very youthful age at which to fill so responsible a post.
When the water-level in the pit was lowered, and the suction became incomplete through the exposure of the suction-holes, it was then his duty to proceed to the bottom of the shaft and plug the tube so that the pump should draw: hence the designation of “plugman.” If a stoppage in the engine took place through any defect which he was incapable of remedying, it was for him to call in the aid of the chief engineer to set it to rights.
He had thus already got ahead of his father in his station as a workman; for the plugman holds a higher grade than the fireman, requiring more practical knowledge and skill, and usually receiving higher wages. George’s duty as plugman was to watch the engine, to see that it kept well in work, and that the pumps were efficient in drawing the water.
The idea is to make a plugman or a gun-layer the same kind of expert as a master artisan in any other walk of life, by long service and selection. None of all the men serving these guns from the depths to the turret saw anything of the battle, except the gun-layer.
Shall I ever forget the flash in his eye if there were a fraction of a second's delay in the firing after the breech had gone home! The way in which he made that enormous block obey his touch in oily obsequiousness suggested the apotheosis of the whole business of naval war. I don't know whether the plugman of H.M.S. Lion or the plugman of the U.S.S. Connecticut was the better.
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