Isambard Kingdom Brunel: Industrial strength

Why is the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel leading the poll to find the greatest Briton of all time? Could it be that the voters haven't heard that he was a capricious maverick who risked his workers' lives? Matthew Sweet reports

Five years ago, I shared a croissant with the chief executive of the Institute of Mechanical Incorporated Engineers. (Don't worry, it gets better.) She talked about engineering's image problem; how a third of places on university courses in the discipline were going unfilled; how things hadn't always been this way; how the Victorians had celebrated the builders of bridges and roads and viaducts as members of an exuberant, heroic caste of pioneers. Then came her big confession: as a teenager, her bedroom pin-ups weren't of David Cassidy or Jimmy Osmond, but of a cigar-champing rivet mogul in a snugly-cut frock-coat; a man with a name like an Alabama baptist and a topper like the Cat in the Hat. A man who, according Great Britons, the BBC's talent show for dead people – is currently considered the most significant figure ever to be born in these islands.

So what did Isambard Kingdom Brunel ever do for us? He laid the railway tracks that transformed Britain from a nation of turnip-bashers to a nation that thinks living in the same village all your life is a form of psychological abuse. ("The time is not far off," he prophesied, "when we shall be able to take our coffee and write whilst going noiselessly and smoothly at 45mph.") He constructed the stately bridge that spans the Thames at Maidenhead, still the widest, flattest brick-built arch in the world, and the faux-Pharaonic towers of the Clifton Suspension Bridge, completed posthumously from his designs. He designed the Great Western, the world's first transatlantic steamship, and confounded critics who asserted that such a vessel would never be able to carry sufficient coal to make the crossing. He launched the SS Great Britain, a sea-going iron giant which was, at the time of its construction, the biggest ship in the world. He created the Royal Albert Bridge, that spiny-backed dinosaur that crosses the Tamar at Saltash. He consecrated the fume-filled cathedral of Paddington Station. Next time you find yourself at the terminus of Brunel's Great Western Railway, find a moment to stop on the platform, gaze up at the swooping waves of iron and glass that form its roof, and feel Brunel's genius winking back at you.

Jeremy Clarkson made the case for Brunel's primacy on BBC2 last week. He submerged himself in phoney Thames water, juddered over the Avon Gorge in a picnic hamper, and presented a summary of the engineer's progress that was far more airy and information-rich than most television history programmes – and his subject duly steamed to the top of the poll. Over the next few days, there were dark mutterings of a ballot-rigging scam, but this was exposed as the work of a cell of Churchillians whose multiple votes have now been discounted. The BBC was very happy, it said, that students of the university named in Brunel's honour had been double-clicking long into the night to ensure that their man maintained his lead over Darwin and Diana.

Brunel was born in Portsmouth in 1806, the son of an Englishwoman, Sophia Kingdom, and Marc Isambard Brunel, a French engineer and royalist who had dodged the guillotine by disappearing to across the Atlantic to New York. Young Isambard was born in Britain thanks to his father's animosity towards Napoleon and sense that a nation at war might be a good place for an industrial entrepreneur to accumulate scads of cash. But by the time that Brunel Senior had sunk his money into a factory in Battersea for the mass production of combat boots, the Emperor had abdicated.

Other schemes saved him from ruin: a saw-mill, and a foot tunnel that would make his name, and that of his ambitious young son. Inspired by the habits of the shipworm – a 2ft-long burrowing clam whose habit of lunching on nautical timber made it as great a marine terror as a school of Moby Dicks – Marc Brunel developed his "tunnel shield", and brought about a subterranean revolution. This device was a large cast-iron frame that could jack up an excavation as it was being bored, and trundle forward, a brick's span at a time, as work progressed. With this, the Brunels wormed their way under the Thames from Wapping to Rotherhithe and created the world's first underwater walkway. By the end of its first year of operation, a million people had passed through.

With this, the heroic legend of Isambard Kingdom Brunel was founded: the engineering genius who customarily worked an 18-hour day, sleeping at the office; the human dynamo who rose at 4am and rowed halfway down the Thames before breakfast; the amateur conjurer whose mishap with a gold sovereign made the nation hold its breath in anticipation. There are more dramatic stories from Brunel's life – his inspection of a collapsed section of the Thames tunnel by diving-bell, or the tragedy that occurred when a funnel of the SS Great Eastern exploded, boiling the stokers below – but it is the peculiar anecdote of the conjured coin that best illustrates the level of public support and affection that he enjoyed in his lifetime.

One day in the spring of 1843, Brunel was entertaining some children with his party trick – making a sovereign appear to vanish into his mouth and emerge from his ear. As he addressed his audience, the coin slipped down his throat and became lodged in his right lung. After several weeks of coughing himself sick, he designed a hinged table to which he was strapped, face down, and upended until his head was pointing towards the floor. The press issued daily reports on the progress of the coin, relating how it took two back-slapping sessions and a tracheotomy to dislodge the foreign body. Everybody, it seems, followed the case. When the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay read the good news, he ran along the street yelling, "It's out! It's out!" and nobody asked him what he was talking about.

Brunel managed his public image with great skill. It's only in the last decade that consideration of his achievements has risen above the level of hagiography. Until Adrian Vaughan's revisionist biography appeared in the Nineties, LTC Rolt's life of the engineer, first published in 1957, remained the standard account. Like Jeremy Clarkson's documentary, Rolt suppressed evidence of its subject's jealousy, arrogance, paranoia and depression, wished away strikes that took place on his projects, and erased his cavalier attitude to the men who risked and frequently lost their lives realising his grand designs.

Vaughan laid emphasis upon the "blue devils" that troubled the engineer, produced evidence that, for all his success and wealth, Brunel was haunted by a sense of failure. ("You and many others may think my life a pleasant one because I am of a happy disposition," he wrote, "but, from morning till night, from one end of the year to another, it is the life of a slave.") It wasn't a message that Brunellians wanted to hear: for pointing out their hero's human failings, Vaughan's book was dubbed "The Satanic Verses of the railway buff's world".

So here's what you didn't hear from the presenter of Top Gear, for your consideration when you visit the BBC's Great Britons website and find yourself invited to award Brunel marks out of 10 in the category of "compassion". He was a wrathful and manipulative boss. He employed a huge number of subcontractors, and treated them all in a high-handed and sometimes brutal manner. People whom he considered incompetent received abusive letters. "You are a cursed, lazy, inattentive, apathetic vagabond and if you continue to neglect my instructions I shall send you about your business," he snarled at an unfortunate employee named Fripp. "Pray keep out of my way or I will certainly do you a mischief."

Colleagues and collaborators who performed well were treated no better: Brunel became livid if they had the audacity to claim their fair share of the credit for a success. He would chivvy them into agreeing to complete work in too short a period, then deny them payment when they fell behind schedule. On the only occasion when a subcontractor decided to give him a taste of his own medicine, and downed tools unless a wages and materials bill of £34,000 was settled, Brunel raised an army of navvies to expel the company from the site by illegal use of force. One wonders why they came; the men who lugged the bricks and poured the concrete for his works had small reason to be grateful to him: Brunel considered the popular argument that employers should compensate employees and their families for an injury sustained at work to be a piece of madness that would encourage navvies to pitch themselves down gullies for the pension money. In the long slog to hack and blast the celebrated Box Tunnel through two miles of solid rock between Bath and Swindon, 100 men were killed.

Brunel, however, seems to have been equally careless of his own safety. When beginning work on the Clifton Suspension Bridge, he scooted over a wire slung from one side of gorge to the other. When it jammed halfway across, he jumped out of the basket and clambered over the cable like a lemur to release the snagged pulley. He narrowly avoided drowning three times during the construction of the Thames tunnel – once, by attempting to scare a party of influential visitors by rocking the boat in which he was rowing them to inspect the works, once when he plopped into a water-tank after somebody neglected to replace the manhole cover; once when he refused to heed his colleagues' warnings about burrowing through a stretch of soft mud, and brought the river down upon their heads. A colleague dragged Brunel by the collar to safety. Six members of the excavation crew were not so lucky.

If Great Britons gives Brunel's reputation another stoking, the stereotype of the modern engineering enthusiast – a lank-haired man in a diamond-pattern jumper, tapping his pipe and saying that Stockport viaduct was built with enough bricks to circle the globe – may have to be consigned to the blast furnace. It might even become possible to admit that you go gooey over the Great Western Railway without people suspecting that you live on Pot Noodle and own a collection of bobble hats. But it would be a pity if all that uncritical adulation was allowed to obscure its creator's darker side. Balls of fire, crested grebes and Kellogg's Frosties are great. Isambard Kingdom Brunel was much more complicated.

Matthew Sweet is the author of 'Inventing the Victorians' (Faber and Faber, £8.99)