Sydney Smith

Blogs can sometimes get too serious and depressing. It’s time for lightening up a little. I have always wished I could find more of Sydney Smith on the web or in the libraries. What I have found was sparse but worth passing on.

One of my San Diego friends recently extolled the quality and quixocity of English humor. (Ah me! I have just invented a word). That special talent goes back a ways (English Humor, that is, not word creation). Sydney Smith was the funny man of England in the first half of the 19^th Century.  His letters and bon mots were legion and hilarious.  Among his host of correspondents were Daniel Webster, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and hundreds of others.  He was a Minister in the Church of England. But I must say he had some highly irreverent things to say about bishops and other such creatures. 

One of his quotes I especially liked - "Don't mind poor Sir Jeffrey. Only last week he was heard to make insulting remarks about the equator." 

Since we have recently been plagued by a rash of tragic railway crashes it seemed relevant to clarify the state of railway safety and how it has (or has not) progressed in the last 170 years. Sydney Smith has contributed his bit to this debate.

His greatest and longest running satirical battle was with the board of directors of the Great Western Railway that ran west out of Paddington.  He was finally denounced in Parliament as a Coward by some Colonel Blimp, one of the Directors.  All this occurred in about 1845 when railways were in their infancy.  It seems there was a great train wreck in Paris in which hundreds were roasted to death in a fiery train crash. Our friend Smith wanted to force the Directors to unlock the doors on the coaches of the GW so that the passengers could all leap to safety when the train crashed (which they frequently did in those days).  He claimed that only idiots would open the doors and jump out when the carriage was in motion at the breathtaking speed of 30 mph and we might be just as well off without them.  The railway had in fact left one door in each coach open for such emergencies but Smith decried the possibility that the coach might overturn on the side of the unlocked door thereby trapping people in the fiery aftermath.  The Director's argument that "off side doors certainly could not be left open as the passengers might leap out into the path of an oncoming train approaching from the other direction." Smith noted that should the coach catch fire and he should find himself on the off side he would quickly head for the embankment not only to avoid the oncoming train which might not come along for a half hour or so but also to avoid being toasted to a light brown by the raging fire of the burning coach.  Smith felt that the safety regulations would never be amended until someone with at least the rank of a Bishop suffered immolation. He said we would all regret the loss of such an eminent person but the public gain might make it worth it.

I hope you enjoyed the tale. Most of it has been paraphrased from Smith's writings. Consult Bartlett's Familiar Quotations for more Smith material - sadly too brief.