Happy Birthday, You Bastard

15th August, Blind Jack Metcalf

John Metcalf,

15th August, 1717

You would think that someone who writes a daily article about bastards, mad bastards, magnificent bastards or otherwise would be waiting for the day with elegant poise for when the 15th of August rolls around and it’s Napoleon’s birthday once more. For there can be no greater candidate for an article on being either a magnificent bastard or a total bastard than Le Petit Caporal. But I gotta bring this bad boy somewhere south of 1,000 words and I could write 5,000 just about the famous picture of him riding that huge white charger and the symbology of it all. Bonaparte never rode anything like that in his life. He rode a donkey most of the time.

Instead, I like to wander around the country lanes of history, looking in the hedgerows of discovery and kicking up the snouting hedgehogs of obscurity. And in order to do that, I need a road.

Roads have been crossing the island of Britain for thousands of years, before the Romans ever turned up with their beautifully constructed and perfectly surveyed arterial superhighways. The staggering revelation that one of the major stones a Stonehenge came all the way from northern Scotland shows that Britian wasn’t simply populated by a series of stone throwing, isolated, hill dwelling tribes, but a network of interconnected and fluid people who could shift 8 tone boulders 500 miles across the country because they wanted to. You need roads for that sort of shit. And boats, obviously, because nobody is pushing and pulling that bastard all the way from Scotland. But these were people with a transport network.

Roman roads are still easy to spot in the landscape, either the ones with modern roads following the same path or ones that still cut, abandoned, through the landscape. The myth that they are all just dead straight, cutting through everything in their path is persistent. Roman roads didn’t go in the straightest line possible because they liked it that way, they went via the most efficient route and sometimes the most efficient route is around something. Roman roads are as identifiable by the sudden detours they make than by how straight they are. And they always start somewhere and go somewhere. The major Roman road that runs west out of the Welsh town of Carmarthen appears to just disappear into history, but for a while it still sits in the landscape, so it’s going somewhere. Where is the fascinating conundrum, because that’s yet to be determined.

Oh yeah, 1,000 words, right?

The next great phase of road building was during the Industrial Revolution when huge amounts of coal and raw materials needed to go one way and huge amounts of manufactured stuff needed to go the other. They built canals and invented railways for that, but they needed roads too, because huge amounts of people needed their money taken off them via tolls. The first professional road builder to emerge in this period was a card playing fiddler named Blind Jack Metcalf.

Metcalf was born into a poor family of horse breeders in Knaresborough, Yorkshire on 15th August, 1717. At the age of six, he lost his sight after a smallpox infection and was given fiddle lessons as a way of providing for himself when he got older. He became a successful fiddle player and in 1732, aged just 15, he was given the job of fiddle player at the Queen’s Head pub in Harrogate, replacing a Mr. Morrison who had been playing there for 70 years, so presumably everyone was bored of him by then.

Jack Metcalf, aged 79, Drawn by J.R Smith

He supplemented his income with horse trading and also became a proficient swimmer, diver, card player, cock fighter (stop sniggering), horse rider and, brilliantly, tour guide, showing people around the local area.

He also worked as a carrier, hauling people in a four wheeled chaise or a one-horse chair on local trips. He supplemented his work by hauling fish from the ports to Leeds and Manchester and after 1745, he bought a wagon and carried stone between York and Knaresborough. By 1754, he had a full-blown stagecoach business. And I know what you’re thinking. The answer is yes. He drove them himself.

Coming around a corner in the middle of nowhere to find yourself face-to-face with a four-horse stagecoach bundling along a good rate must have been alarming enough. Realising that it was being driven by a blind man must have been even more terrifying. Heaven knows what the passengers were feeling.

At the age of 20, Metcalf met Dorothy Benson, the daughter of the Granby Inn in Harrogate. Jack had other ideas and got another girl pregnant and Dorothy begged him not to marry her so he did the usual man thing and ran away. He worked up and down the coast, hiding from his responsibilities until he heard that Dorothy was to marry a local shoemaker at which point he came back and ran off with Dorothy. They got married in secret and had four children.

Playing fiddle down the pub is a great way of making connections in the community (and annoying them at the same time) and it was there Metcalf met Colonel Lidell, Member of Parliament for Berwick-on-Tweed. In a famous story, the two had a wager of 10 guineas as to who could travel the 207 miles from London to Harrogate first; Blind Jack, on foot or Lidell in his coach. Jack made the journey in five and half days, arriving first.

During the Jacobite rising of 1745, such connections got him the job of assistant to the royal recruiting sergeant in the Knaresborough area. He went with the army to Scotland and thank fuck they didn’t let him have a gun, but they did employ him to move cannons to the front. Despite being captured at one point, he took the opportunity to make a few coins by importing stockings from Aberdeen back to England.

In 1765, parliament passed an act authorising turnpike trusts to fleece poor people of money by building toll roads in the Knaresborough area. With nobody else in the area with any experience, Metcalf seized the chance, drawing on his experience as a hauler.

He won a contract to build a three-mile (5 km) section of road between Minskip and Ferrensby on the road from Harrogate to Boroughbridge. He explored the section of countryside alone and worked out the most practical route.

Metcalf built roads in Lancashire, Derbyshire, Cheshire and Yorkshire, including roads between Knaresborough and Wetherby, Wakefield, Huddersfield and Saddleworth, Bury and Blackburn with a branch to Accrington and Skipton, Colne and Burnley.

Metcalf believed that a well-constructed road should have a solid foundation, efficient drainage, and a smooth, convex surface to ensure rainwater quickly flows into side ditches. Recognizing that rain was the primary cause of road issues, he devised a method to build a road across a bog using rafts made from bundles of ling (a type of heather) and furze (gorse) as the foundation. This innovative approach earned him a reputation as a pioneering road builder, as many engineers thought it was impossible.

He developed his own unique method for calculating costs and materials, which he could never fully explain to others. Alongside Thomas Telford and John MacAdam, he is considered one of the fathers of modern road construction.

Facing competition from canals, he saw his profits dwindle and retired in 1792 to live with his daughter and her husband in Spofforth, Yorkshire. Over his career, he constructed 180 miles of road.

Blind Jack Metcalf died at the age of 92 on April 26, 1810, at his home in Spofforth. He is buried in the churchyard of All Saints’ Church. Dorothy died in 1778.

In 2009 a statue of John Metcalf was placed in the market square in Knaresborough, across from a pub that bears his name.

In 2017, the A658, the Harrogate Southern Bypass, was named 'John Metcalf Way'.

His headstone, erected in the churchyard of All Saints' Church, Spofforth, at the cost of Lord Dundas, bears this dreadful attempt at poetry:

"Here lies John Metcalf, one whose infant sight
Felt the dark pressure of an endless night;
Yet such the fervour of his dauntless mind,
His limbs full strung, his spirits unconfined,
That, long ere yet life’s bolder years began,
The sightless efforts mark’d th’ aspiring man;
Nor mark’d in vain—high deeds his manhood dared,
And commerce, travel, both his ardour shared.
’Twas his a guide’s unerring aid to lend—
O’er trackless wastes to bid new roads extend;
And, when rebellion reared her giant size,
’Twas his to burn with patriot enterprise;
For parting wife and babes, one pang to feel,
Then welcome danger for his country’s weal.
Reader, like him, exert thy utmost talent given!
Reader, like him, adore the bounteous hand of Heaven."