The Railway Navvies

by Terry Coleman

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  About The Railway Navvies

  About Terry Coleman & Christian Wolmar

  Reviews

  About Christian Wolmar’s Railway Library

  Table of Contents

  www.headofzeus.com

  FOR MY FATHER, JACK, AN ENGINEER

  Watford tunnel on the London and Birmingham Railway, by J.C. Bourne, 1837.

  Contents

  Cover

  Welcome Page

  Dedication

  List of Illustrations

  Foreword

  Author’s Preface

  Chapter 1: The Navvy Age

  Chapter 2: The Works

  Chapter 3: Navvy and Contractor

  Chapter 4: Death and Disaster

  Chapter 5: Shanties and Truck

  Chapter 6: Riots and Randies

  Chapter 7: Woodhead

  Chapter 8: Chadwick, Parliament, and Do-Nothing

  Chapter 9: Wellington, Cat’s Meat, and Mary Ann

  Chapter 10: Sin and Sanctity

  Chapter 11: Women not their Wives

  Chapter 12: King of Labourers

  Chapter 13: Last Fling

  Endpaper

  Sources

  Selected Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  About The Railway Navvies

  Reviews

  About Terry Coleman & Christian Wolmar

  About Christian Wolmar’s Railway Library

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Copyright

  List of Illustrations

  p.3 Deep cutting near Blisworth on the London and Birmingham Railway. Lithograph by J.C. Bourne, 1837.

  p.6 and p.96 Watford Tunnel on the London and Birmingham Railway by J.C. Bourne, 1837.

  p.16 View from the top of Kilsby Tunnel, 1837.

  p.18 Engine house at Camden Town, by J.C. Bourne, 1837.

  p.20 Stockton and Darlington Railway, c.1833.

  p.23 Church Tunnel by S.C. Brees, 1837. Courtesy of the Science and Society Picture Library.

  p.30 The Crystal Palace Gang that built Sydenham station in 1853 – the first known photo of navvies.

  p.31 Crystal Palace navvies at Sydenham, 1853.

  p.33 Air shaft in the Kilsby Tunnel by J.C.Bourne, 1837.

  p.35 Navvy on the tramp, from Punch magazine, 1855.

  p.41 Excavation at Olive Mount on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, c.1828.

  p.44 Building the retaining wall at Camden by J.C. Bourne.

  p.47 Building the engine shed at Camden by J.C. Bourne.

  p.50 Chat Moss on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway.

  p.53 Barrow runs on Boxmoor embankment, by J.C. Bourne.

  p.54 Tring cutting. Lithograph by J.C. Bourne.

  p.57 Early tunnel on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, coming into Lime Street station, by T.T. Bury.

  p.64 Robert Stephenson, one of the great engineers.

  p.68 George Stephenson, engineer, father of Robert.

  p.71 Thomas Brassey, contractor.

  p.72 Landslip on the Wolverton embankment, by J.C.Bourne.

  p.73 Wolverton viaduct, almost completed, by J.C.Bourne.

  p.76 and Endpapers: Vignette of navvies at work by J.C. Bourne. From the Elton collection at the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust.

  p.80 Thomas Brassey Jnr, son of the great Brassey.

  p.84 Blasting rocks near Linslade, by J.C. Bourne.

  p.87 William Huskisson, killed by a train, 1830.

  p.90 Steep barrow run on the Manchester Ship Canal, c.1890.

  p.99 Navvies outside navvy hut on the Great Central, 1899.

  p.102 Navvy carrying his dinner, from Punch, 1855.

  p.105 An ale seller on the Manchester Ship Canal, c.1890.

  p.128 Samuel Morton Peto, the great contractor.

  p.137 Two Woodhead tunnels, the old (left) and the new under construction, 1953.

  p.140 Map of Woodhead Tunnel.

  p.159 Diagram of the two original tunnels at Woodhead.

  p.164 Edwin Chadwick, barrister and social reformer.

  p.167 Robert Rawlinson, engineer and public health reformer.

  p.182 The Black Gang on the Manchester Ship Canal, c.1890.

  p.188 Alexander Anderson, navvy poet.

  p.199 Construction of St. Pancras station, 1866.

  p.200 Thomas Hardy, as a young architect.

  p.210 Memorial in the shape of a tunnel at Otley, Yorkshire.

  p.213 Elizabeth Garnett, evangelist.

  p.225 Navvy woman, unusually prosperous, 1899.

  p.234 Navvy children in atypical Sunday best, c.1899.

  p.243 Building a bridge at Faubourg Saint Antoine, c. 843.

  p.248 Roasting a whole ox for the navvies’ feast, Rover, 1843.

  p.254 Punch’s view of navvies routing the Russians.

  p.257 Men surrounding Peto, Brassey and Betts’ office in the Waterloo Road hoping to volunteer for the Crimea.

  p.260 Navvies and their railway in the Crimea.

  p.264 Navvies and the might of intellect, Punch, 1855.

  p.266 Boys with tip truck on the Great Central, 1809.

  p.273 Queensland navvies blasting a cutting, c.1910.

  p.276 Navvies on the Great Central, c.1897.

  p.277 Breakfast in the old cellars at Nottingham.

  p.280 Navvies’ dinner at Sulgrave on the Great Central.

  p.283 Barrow run in Canada at the turn of the century.

  p.318 Bronze statue of The Unknown Navvy at Gerrard’s Cross by Anthony Stones. Photo by Anthony Howlett-Boulton.

  Foreword

  They are the forgotten men. And yet, even now, on every train journey, their work in creating Britain’s railways can still be seen. They carved out the cuttings, built the embankments, dug the tunnels and laid the track. Today’s railways are largely still on the same alignments that they carved out of Britain’s untamed landscape.

  Few people, however, appreciate, as Terry Coleman’s book accurately describes, that the navigators – navvies - were a very special group of men. And unique. Whilst in other countries railways were mostly built by whatever local labour was available, such as displaced agricultural workers and immigrants, the navvies who worked on Britain’s railways during the final three quarters of the 19th century were a breed apart. Newly arrived workers on the railway construction sites had to qualify to become accepted as navvies, both through their ability to move enough dirt in a day, but also to match the prodigious drinking feats of the more experienced men. The navvies were, in today’s parlance, ‘hard nuts’ who took pride in their achievements and their courage.

  They needed to be. The construction of the railways was the most ambitious civil engineering project ever attempted. Pace cathedrals, pyramids and temples, the railways extended over a far greater area and involved, again as Coleman explains, far greater efforts than any previous undertaking. It was not just a matter of laying tracks across the land. Railways had to be almost level to accommodate the locomotives of the day that made their construction both more expensive and more perilous. The risks were constant and there were all manner of ways to be injured or killed. The use of explosives to break through hills was the greatest killer, but landslips caused by over eager attempts to speed up the carving of cuttings or simple falls were other ways in which navvies frequently met their end. Safety was not helped by the fact that wages were normally paid partly in beer which certainly gave some of them Dutch courage. Coleman spares no detail in describing the stupid ways some died but also the lack of any safety culture among the contractors. He is no romantic, recognising both the navvies’ achievements and their failings.

  Not surprisingly, their efforts were rar
ely appreciated by local people. When the railway builders arrived in an area, chaos often ensued. The local hostelries would be drunk dry and chickens and other livestock would need to be closely guarded. They lived mostly on their own encampments with, at times, wives and other camp followers whose demands on the local economy would push up food prices.

  In short, the railway age and all the economic development it brought in its wake, could not have been achieved without the efforts of these men. We remember the Stephensons, the Brunels and the other greats who built our railways, but rarely do we think of the navvies, who died in their thousands to create 20,000 miles of railway in just over 75 years – that is five miles every week during the whole period - mostly with their bare hands and a few basic hand tools aided by lots of explosives.

  Next time you are on a train and are looking out of the window, remember that the track you are speeding along was most probably created by this remarkable company of men whose achievements and exploits are so lovingly set out in this book.

  Christian Wolmar

  London, 2015

  Author’s Preface

  It is now fifty years since this book was first published, and it has remained in print almost all that time. From the start it was a lucky book, lucky most of all in its subject. It was about a race of men who were familiar, and yet unknown. Everyone had seen navvies at work in the street. A man could be said to work like a navvy, eat like a navvy, swear like a navvy. But very little had been written directly about navvies, and any book that attempted their history would be the first, so in that sense there was a legend waiting to be written. And it would be a book about men at work – building a viaduct, making an embankment, blasting a tunnel – and work is an inherently attractive theme. One of the many virtues of John Le Carre’s novels is their detailed description of a spy’s tradecraft.

  This way of looking at the book came to me only when I asked myself why it had lasted. I did not reason like that when I began. I did not say, “Here is a legend. I shall write it.” Indeed I am not clear why I chose the subject at all. It was an unlikely one for me. In 1961 I was a young sub-editor in the Manchester office of the Guardian, which had just stopped being the Manchester Guardian, working on the arts and leader pages, sending to the printer the copy of great men like Alistair Cooke, Neville Cardus, and Philip Hope-Wallace. Subs work at night, and in the almost empty offices at Cross Street, while I waited to read the proofs of the last edition, I would often browse through the bound files of the Guardian going back to the 1830s. It was there I think that I read the Guardian’s account of the opening of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, the day when Huskisson, a former President of the Board of Trade, was run over by a train. It is a better report than The Times’s, which is usually quoted. Huskisson asked the surgeon how long he had to live, was told six hours, and then made a will. “It is an extraordinary fact,” said the Guardian, “and evinces the uncommon firmness and self-possession of the right. hon. gentleman under such awful circumstances, that after he had signed the papers he turned back, as it were, to place a dot over the i, and another between the W and the H.” I remember thinking how good that reporter must have been to notice such a telling detail.

  My first interest was in the coming of the railways, and then in the heroic engineering of the tunnels, cuttings, and viaducts. My father was an engineer, so perhaps that was a curiosity that ran in the blood. Then it just happened that the navvies, the men who built the railways with pick and shovel, became my principal concern, and I have no recollection of what prompted this change of direction.

  When I moved to London in 1963 I did write a feature on the men building the M2, a motorway that was meant to run from London to Dover but still ends, fifty-two years on, twenty-nine miles short of the capital. Any railway engineer or any railway navvy would have been astonished that British motorways – whose engineering is nothing compared to that of the railways – should have been built in little bits here and there, and taken so long. By then I was already writing an outline of The Navvies, and the luck continued. It was such luck as I would wish any author with his first book. The Navvies was straight away commissioned by the then huge house of Hutchinson – for an advance of only £200 but that did not matter. I had fallen among gentlemen publishers, Robert Lusty and Harold Harris, who, as I later saw, thought the book would do reasonably, but cannily ordered a small first print run. Then, if the notices were decent, they could rapidly reprint on their own presses. This they did, bringing out six new impressions in a year, which looks good on a title page. My agent said she had never seen such copious notices for a first book. The Bookseller listed it as The Railway Nannies, not perhaps a good start, but then I opened papers and read the reviews of writers who were great names to me – Asa Briggs, W G Hoskins, Joanna Richardson, Oliver Warner, L T C Rolt. The Sunday Express, which was then a broadsheet and a power in the land, gave the book half a page. I most liked the Daily Worker review, which said the book should be read by every working man. The Minister of Transport, following a tradition that each member of the Cabinet should give a book to the library of No. 10, presented Harold Wilson with a copy. The book was put into braille. The Yorkshire Post gave it its prize for best first book of the year, and the judges were Bonamy Dobree and Robert Rhodes James. But one thing a new author learns quickly is how few copies constitute what can conscientiously be called a best-seller. The hardback never sold more than 20,000 copies. The first paperback did get on the Sunday Times bestseller as number one – for one week, after which it dropped out entirely.

  Some reviewers thought the book was written con amore, which was true but ought to be true of any book. One, noticing that I was with the the Guardian, said I wrote with a fierce radical eye. This was not true. I was never a radical in that sense, more a Peelite Tory – that is to say a Tory about to wreck his own party by repealing the Corn Laws, so that a working man could recruit his exhausted strength with abundant and untaxed food. That one saving grace would not have saved me, and perhaps, if I had been known as no radical, the reviews would have been less sympathetic: the sixties were very much a collectivist era. But I had writtten, with some sharpness, that an 1846 Select Committee report into the death of railway labourers cried out for action, and that nothing had been done; that the report was not even debated. Well, it could not have been, since Parliament was in recess at the time. And now, having reported politics for many years, I would understand that a Select Committee whose recommendations offended railway interests would not easily command much parliamentary time. What was to be expected from a House of Commons where one company alone was said to have had eighty members in its pocket?

  Several reviewers were sure that the book would make a film or TV epic. I did not then know that reviewers naturally think that books they like will film well. The stage, film, and TV history of the book is entertaining. First a musical was written, but its increasing costs exhausted the patience of the would-be impresario and it was never put on. A BBC documentary was made, set in and around the Woodhead Tunnel which is the subject of the central chapter of this book. After that, three BBC producers wanted to make drama series: one fell over a cliff before his interest could come to anything. Granada Television maintained enthusiasm for thirteen years before deciding that locations in England and a cast of thousands would be too expensive. It was then discovered that Ireland was full of disused railways and would be cheaper. Irish television companies, north and south, then proposed a co-production, with predictable results. A Film on Four project reluctantly collapsed. A production company called Knaves Acre sent my agent a cheque which bounced four times. Over the years I have written two scripts and advised on two others. A bankable film company, wanting to make a film on navvies, to be called “That All Men Should Be Brothers”, paid me, for four hours’ consultation, more than the book had ever earned in all printed editions, and then sadly went under in the slump of 1991.

  But that is a diversion. A book’s proper life is in print and
I am happy to have this new edition. There are some new pictures, but I have added nothing to the text. I doubt if any startling new sources will come to light. Navvies did not keep journals. Railway company reports barely mention them. The principal source must remain local newspapers. It is hard graft going through them, but rewarding. Nineteenth century provincial newspapers are not sensational, though some academics think so. Macaulay said, “The only true history of a country is to be found in its newspapers.” As a journalist I could never make such an incautious claim. But for navvies I do believe that contemporary newspaper reports are as close as you will get to real life.

  Terry Coleman

  London, 2015

  View from the top of Kilsby tunnel, 1837.

  There comes a crowd of burly navvies, with pickaxes and barrows, and while hardly a wrinkle is made in the fading mother’s face, or a new curve of health in the blooming girl’s, the hills are cut through, or the breaches between them spanned, we choose our level, and the white steam-pennon flies along.

  GEORGE ELIOT

  Engine house at Camden Town by J.C. Bourne, 1837.

  1

  The Navvy Age

  Thomas Eaton was one of the 1,100 navvies who made a railway tunnel three miles long through the Pennines. It took six years, from 1839 to 1845. No one kept an exact count of how many men died blasting through the millstone, or how many were buried by sudden falls of sandstone, or tipped out of a swaying bucket half-way up a 600-foot air shaft. But Eaton knew for sure that at least thirty-two men had died in one way or another, and the surgeon, whom he had got to know well, seeing so much of him, said another 140 had been badly hurt. In the end things got so rough at the tunnel that Eaton could stand it no longer, and he left in the early winter of 1845, just before it was finished. The year after, he was one of the navvies who went to Westminster to give evidence before the Commons committee which was inquiring into the evils of the railway works.