Te National Archive at Kew has the look of a 1960s university campus minus the hippies. A concrete prefabricated building set in landscaped grounds with an ornamental lake, where ducks and geese are the only sounds to disturb the researcher slaving away at his/her allotted desk. Until Covid came along I spent many happy hours there, most of the time directly or indirectly concerned with the history of the Stockton & Darlington Railway Company (S&DR). Since I usually knew what I was looking for but had no idea where to find it, most of my time was spent randomly scanning old company files. This usually meant I came across the source material I was after just when Kew was getting ready to close, or at best two minutes before they stopped issuing documents. It was during one of these end-of-day moments I came across the S&DR pay bills. On first glance, and I had no time for anything else, it seemed just pages of names, all set down in spidery faded handwriting, so I thought little more about it. On a subsequent visit, a year or two later, I found myself with more time at the end of the day and decided to have another glance at them in case there was something important I'd missed. It was then I realised how much useful information was actually there.
The S&DR began recording what it had paid out and to whom almost as soon as the company came into existence, long before that rolled out of New Shildon on that late September day in 1825. In those early years railway financial outlays were haphazard, and almost certainly incomplete, usually appearing as a mention-in-passing of a significant payment the company had made, buried amongst the other arcane minutiae of committee meetings. Nevertheless, there were important contracts made during the construction of the railway, including those with George Stephenson, as well as historically significant staff appointments, including that of Timothy Hackworth. There were also anomalous and mysterious entries such as “building a cow house in Geo. Allen's estate At Bank Top finding all materials”, for which Ralph Smith received £25. If these records were incomplete they were sufficient to identify exactly what the payments were for and to whom they were made, something not so obvious in later years. Construction of the S&DR was parcelled out to local contractors along the length of the line and the “works carried out at Stockton and West Auckland”, ie at opposite ends of the line, suggesting that Otley initially, may have been the favoured contractor for the whole construction project.
