Putting Britain on the map
Ordnance Survey owes much to the remarkable work of William Mudge, who died 200 years ago this month
Ordnance Survey owes much to the work of William Mudge, who died 200 years ago. By Martyn Baguley
Two hundred years ago, on 16 April 1820, William Mudge died. Not a name that resonates like those of some of his contemporaries – Byron, Wordsworth, Darwin – but one that should be better known for, during his relatively short life, he put much of Britain literally on the map.
Since 1518, map-making in Britain had been a minor responsibility of what was called the Board of Ordnance (from the French word ordonnance, which relates to the organisation of military affairs). Distinct from the Army, it was an independent military body that operated from the Tower of London where, based in a drawing room in the White Tower, a talented, small band of both military and civilian draughtsmen, some as young as 11, busied themselves with the intricacies of military surveying, trigonometry and geometry, all fundamental for map-making.
Following the Jacobite Rebellion in 1745, so that military maps could be made to ‘facilitate the subjugation of the clans’, a survey of Scotland using simple techniques had been done by William Roy, a 21-year-old Scottish land surveyor. With a French invasion threatening, in 1756 Roy was recruited to be part of a small team commissioned to prepare rough maps of England’s south coast. He argued the case for a national survey of Britain consistently, but the American War of Independence and the Seven Years War had left the Treasury short of money so his appeals fell on deaf ears.
Towards the end of the 18th century, renewed and growing concern about the prospect of a French invasion of England focused the minds of politicians on the fact that available maps of the south coast were inadequate. They didn’t provide sufficient details of features that could hide soldiers, where troops could be quartered or the nature of the terrain over which they might have to fight. With national security at stake the need for a countrywide survey to produce detailed, accurate maps had become urgent. It was clearly a job for the Board of Ordnance. By July 1791
King George III had given his approval for the survey. William Roy had died in 1790; the skills of the White Tower’s mapmakers were going to be much in demand. Amongst them was 28-year-old Lieutenant William Mudge, a man who was to play a seminal role in the United Kingdom’s map-making history.
THE SOLDIER BECOMES A SURVEYOR
To get to know the man we must first regress to 1 December 1762 when he was born in the then town of Plymouth. At a time when who was more important than what you knew, Mudge was fortunate to be born into what is on record as being ‘an extraordinary conglomeration of high achievers with a wide variety of interests, temperaments and friends’: the pre-eminent writer Samuel Johnson was his godfather and artist Joshua Reynolds a friend of the family.
Little is known about Mudge’s early schooling but he must have done well academically because, when just 15 years old, he was accepted into the prestigious Royal
Military Academy, Woolwich, to train as a commissioned Army officer. Whilst there his godfather visited him and gave him a guinea and a book. Although he is on record as not being ‘very attentive’, graduating two years later aged 17 with the rank of second lieutenant in the Royal Artillery, he was posted to South Carolina to join the British Army fighting in the American War of Independence. He returned to England in 1783 and was stationed in the Tower of London, where he was given the opportunity to study higher mathematics and amused himself in his spare time constructing clocks (horology was in the blood, but that’s another story).
With his good social contacts and considerable mathematical talent it is not surprising that in July 1791 Mudge was appointed deputy director of the survey to serve under Major Edward Williams.
Land-surveying methods had progressed considerably following the invention in 1787 of the first theodolite, an instrument used to measure horizontal and vertical angles. In 1784, William Roy had been commissioned by the Royal Society to work with French surveyors to solve the dispute over the relative positions of
At every observation point they had to winch the 90kg theodolite to the top of a 30ft wooden tower
the Royal Observatories of Greenwich and Paris. The work had involved the accurate measurement of the length of a baseline on the level ground of Hounslow Heath (now occupied by Heathrow Airport) followed by ‘triangulation’, a method for finding the position of a feature in the countryside by forming triangles from known points. Roy’s survey data would provide a useful start for the British Survey.
Wasting no time, with the additional support of Isaac Dalby, a 47-year-old mathematician and surveyor who had worked with Roy on the Greenwich/paris survey, and a small team of young artillery men, during July 1791 Williams and Mudge started carefully remeasuring the 5.2-mile-long Hounslow baseline. It took 11 weeks and finally identified an overmeasurement of just 4.6 inches.
The triangulation began in the spring of 1792: it was work for young men. Regardless of the weather they had to haul the
A 2016 Ordnance Survey map showing the Western Highlands, scale four miles to an inch
18th-century theodolite, which weighed 90kg, on a sprung horse-drawn cart along often mud-choked roads and, at every observation point, winch it by crane to the top of a 30-foot-high wooden tower then, when possible, read angles of sight to distant landmarks accurately.
The surveyors sent all the measurement data in stages to the Tower of London, where draughtsmen converted them into maps. By 1799 the area from the south coast north to Coventry and west to Gloucestershire had been surveyed. On 1 January 1801 the first map – an Entirely New & Accurate Survey of the County of Kent - was published at a scale of one inch to the mile. An Austrian general pronounced it “the finest piece of topography in Europe”.
MUDGE MAKES HIS MARK
William Mudge was appointed director of the survey in 1798 following the death of Colonel Williams. Added to the increased responsibilities were family worries. In the late 1780s he had married Jane Williamson, the daughter of a superior officer, and by 1800 they had five children. With Mudge’s work keeping him away from London much of the year his family lived in Devon, so the doting father had seen little of them. All this conspired to affect his health; his normally kindly disposition and the quiet humour that made him popular began to be affected by ‘depression of spirits’.
The work was relentless. In 1802, recognising that he needed extra help, Mudge recruited Thomas Colby, a wiry 17-year-old, into the surveying team. Despite having had to have his left hand amputated in 1803 due to a pistol loaded with shot bursting whilst he was practising with it, Colby proved to be a huge asset, helping with the surveying of most of England and Wales south of a line through Birmingham by the end of the war with France in 1815, and continuing with surveys as they extended into northern England, Wales and Scotland as far north as Orkney and Shetland.
Mudge’s work didn’t go unnoticed by his superiors and peers. In 1798 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, in 1809 he was appointed Lieutenant-governor of his alma mater, the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, in 1813 he was promoted to the rank of Regimental Colonel and in 1817 awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of
Edinburgh. In 1818, following a short holiday in France for the benefit of his health, he was appointed Commissioner of the Board of Longitude, a British government body formed in 1714 to offer prizes to encourage innovators to solve the problem of finding longitude at sea, and in 1819 he was visited by Frederick VI of Denmark who presented him with a gold chronometer.
With the recruitment of Thomas Colby to the field surveying team, Mudge was able to spend more time in London. In 1804 he made time to have his portrait painted by James Northcote, an assistant of the eminent artist Joshua Reynolds, and he started to look for a house to buy. It took him three years to find a suitable place but in 1808 he bought one near to Oxford Circus. Together with his wife and children it was his comfortable home for 12 years until he died there from ‘internal inflammation’ at the relatively young age of 58. He was survived by his wife, Jane, who lived for another four years, one daughter and two sons.
A few months after his death the Caledonian Mercury newspaper proclaimed, “that such part of the survey that has been already published both for accuracy of delineation and beauty of execution surpasses any work of the kind ever produced in this or any other country”.
And the Ordnance Survey? Rooted in the remarkable work of founder fathers such as William Roy and William Mudge, it blossomed to become today a United Kingdom government-owned limited company with prestigious headquarters in Southampton and a map-making reputation second to none.
‘The finest piece of topography in Europe,’ said an Austrian general