The Railway Navvies

by Terry Coleman

  The railways came suddenly. After the surveyors, the navvies; perhaps, as at Blisworth in the late thirties, 3,000 of them on a five-mile stretch of line. They lodged, when they could, in the villages, and when there were no villages they herded into turf shanties thrown up by the men themselves or by the contractors. A few brought their wives. Most had women not their wives. The navvies were paid once a month, sometimes not so frequently, and usually in a public house, and then for days afterwards they drank their pay, sold their shovels for beer, rioted, and went on a randy.

  Crystal Palace navvies at Sydenham, 1853.

  ‘They appeared to me,’ said an engineer, ‘when they got half drunk, the same as a dog that has been tied for a week. They ran about and did not know what to do with themselves.’

  The Irish marched to fight the Scots, the English fought among themselves, and no work was done until all the money was gone. Then for the next month, until the next pay, the navvies lived on truck, taking tickets from the contractor to tommy shops, owned by the contractor, to buy high meat at high prices. A sovereign was worth at most fifteen shillings at a tommy.

  Often they worked drunk. On many contracts a man would not be given work unless he took part of his pay in beer. Publicans toured the line, and where whisky was forbidden, as it sometimes was by the magistrates, it was brought up in kegs marked paraffin. The brewers allowed gangers five shillings for every barrel of beer they sold to their men. Even where a contractor like Peto put a stop to the sale of beer on the works, he did not attempt to prevent drinking altogether. ‘A man,’ he said, ‘has a right to bring a gallon with him if he likes in the morning.’

  The navvies were careless, and lived up to their reckless reputation with bravado. In the Kilsby Tunnel, on the London and Birmingham Railway, three men were killed as they tried to jump, one after the other, over the mouth of a shaft in a game of follow my leader. One navvy on the Great Western line at Whiteball was twice reproved by his ganger for earthing under too great a fall of dirt, undercutting into the face of the soil. He carried on: it was quicker that way. A quarter of an hour later the overlap fell in and killed him. ‘He was a good workman,’ said the ganger, ‘and a nice sort of chap.’

  They had a tradition of tramping from job to job, leaving one place on the slightest pretext or none at all. Some deserted their families: others took wives and children with them on treks across England. A woman missionary found one such man destitute on Clifton Downs. He had been on the tramp for three months, his wife and children were starving, and he was in despair. She gave him his fare to Newbury where there was thought to be work; he spent the money on food for his family instead, and then tramped to Newbury to find there was no work after all. He returned to Bristol, where he had left his family, and ended up selling fish in the streets. Others did worse. Warwick Jack (real name supposed to be John Morgan) died on the tramp at Eccup at six o’clock in the evening of Christmas Day, 1880. He got to the works at three that afternoon, and dropped dead three hours later while he was sitting on a chair and talking. Perhaps he was one of the loafers that Thomas A. Walker, a missionary for thirty-seven years, so much disliked. ‘I can’t understand,’ he told the men,

  why chaps like you should support in idleness a lot of cadging loafers, who go about from one job to another, never doing a stroke of work themselves. I have seen a fellow come to a cutting, no kit on his back, or a very small one you may be sure. He never asks the ganger if there is any chance, he sits down and begins to talk; his business is to tramp about from one job to another; and tell the news, and a precious pack of lies no doubt he often tells. Well, he tells you in his own way, and to suit his own ends, what works he has been to, what new works are starting, what wages are being paid. In return you make a collection, a penny apiece or more, and he goes away to the pub with more money in his pocket than you can earn by your day’s labour. I saw a fellow of this stamp on the Severn Tunnel [this was in 1884], a week or two ago, who has been there six times, and never asked for a day’s work. Why do you do it?

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

  They did it because it was also the tradition that a navvy on tramp who came to a contract where there was no work for him should be given what was called the tramping bob to help him on his way. Or if a destitute navvy passed others who had money he could ask for this shilling and they were expected to give it.

  Brunel found his navvies ‘very manageable’. Other engineers did not find things so easy, but a show of moral fibre was felt to be all that was necessary to quell the rabble. Frederick Williams, in an early history of the railway published in 1852, tells a story in which 300 navvies, ‘manifesting their rage by the most terrible oaths and threats’, were confronted by an engineer. ‘You know, my men, that I am always your friend if you are in the right; but you are not now, so go back and mind your work.’ The workmen, says Williams, knew their man and went back like a flock of sheep. He goes on, however, to commend prudence.

  Navvy on the tramp, from Punch magazine, 1855.

  But when [they were] once excited by liquor it was useless to restrain them, for this would only increase their violence; the engineers never stopped then to parley, but as they passed along on horseback, where the men might be standing in the way, an authoritative, ‘Whar off’ was the only remark made as the horseman rode past.

  But the men were not all devoid of the Victorian virtues. They could be grateful to a competent master. On the G.W.R., when some navvies unearthed a Roman urn, one of them seized a handful of some sixty coins, for which the men were scrabbling, saying, ‘These are for Mr Shedlock.’ John Shedlock was the engineer on that part of the line. Nor were they beyond self-help. John Francis wrote in his History of the English Railway in 1851:

  …there are many men who, twenty years since, delved and dug, and gained their bread by the sweat of their brow, who are now in possession of most valuable estates.

  But most drank their pay.

  For their riots and their drunkenness, and for more than that, the navvies were feared. Francis wrote of them:

  At war with all civilized society, the great mass glorying in Chartism, they are to be dreaded, for their thews and sinews would form no trifling element of success.

  This was nonsense. The great mass of them were no more Chartists than they were Christians, and it was really their impiety that so concerned Francis and many others. The navvies were infidels, and as such should be condemned. And condemned they were.

  The clergy did most of the damning. The Rev. William St George Sargent, one of two chaplains to the Lancaster and Carlisle line (stipend £150 a year and appointed by a benevolent family, ‘pitying the moral destitution of these men’), was one such clergyman. To the Select Committee on Railway Labourers he said:

  I should think, comparing them with others of the lower class of society, and I have had much experience with the lowest, having been chaplain to a Mendicity Institution for common beggars (before the Poor Law was introduced into Dublin they had a Mendicity Institution), I think that they are the most neglected and spiritually destitute people I ever met. Yes, most vile and immoral characters… they are ignorant of Bible religion and gospel truth, and are infected with infidelity, and very often with revolutionary principles.

  At this, Viscount Ebrington, a member of the Committee, asked: ‘You spoke of infidel opinions. Do you believe that many of them are Socialists?’*1

  Mr Sargent replied: ‘Most of them in practice; though they appear to have wives, very few of them are married. Their infidel opinions lead them to doubt the authority of the word of God, and very often to deny the existence of a First Cause.’

  Mr Sargent also complained that the men seemed ignorant of the use of money. One navvy had told him he would not know what to do with his money if it was not for the beer shop, and that he would rather spend it himself than put it by for others to spend after he was dead.

  They were not Christians and they did not know the use of money:
therefore they were revolutionaries. But Mr Sargent did his best. He sold the navvies 350 bibles (costing sixpence to one-and-six each, according to size), 200 prayer books, and 200 hymn books.

  Thomas Jenour, formerly a soldier but in 1845 employed by the Pastoral Aid Society as a reader on the Croydon and Epsom Railway, also tried to ‘impress upon men’s minds that they are reasonable creatures and not merely machines of flesh and blood’. He succeeded, up to a point.

  ‘They certainly wonder,’ he said,

  and have expressed astonishment that God should have made some rich, and some so dreadfully poor; but after, if you tell them the value of the soul, that the whole world is of no value in comparison to the soul, it has made them pay great attention to my observations: in fact, I am convinced they would be a very different class of people if you could convince them of the value of the soul.

  The railway companies were convinced, at any rate, of the value of the railway, but hardly of the value of their men’s lives. Railway engineers rarely kept any count of the men killed. Even Robert Rawlinson of the London and Birmingham, one of the most humane of engineers, said he did not. In Scotland there was not even a formal coroner’s inquest held on the victims. It was customary to ignore the navvies; as if railways built themselves. In his history Francis mentioned them, but excused himself for it.

  A chapter devoted to the railway labourer may be regarded as intrusive by some, and as gossipy by others: by a third class it may be considered as repulsive. But the ‘navigator’ is necessary to the rail.

  The intrusive, repulsive life of a navvy was not commonly a long one. An old navvy was rare. When James (Daddy) Hayes died on the works at Eccup on 23 January 1882, at the age of eighty-six, his age and his funeral were remarkable. His mates, who buried him, said he was one of the first navvies in England. Many navvies died as boys, run over by the wagons they were leading to the tip-head. The few who survived until they were sixty looked seventy, and most died at forty – a good age for a navvy.

  While they lived they lived riotously. They poached the women along the line, and they poached the game, though not the Earl of Harewood’s, because Lady Harewood was known and beloved by the men for her many kindnesses. They contaminated the population by easy vice and easy money. As Williams wrote in 1852:

  Painful is it to find that the triumphs which the human intellect has achieved should be so intimately associated with the moral degradation of so large a section of the community.

  Many histories of the railways have been written. Their heroes are the Stephensons, Brunel, Locke, Vignoles – engineers; Brassey, Peto, Firbank – contractors; Hudson – organizing genius and talented fraud. But there are others who also had a hand in making the railways. William Birchenough, who survived the collapse of a viaduct he was building, and William Hardwick (Trump), who did not; George Hatley, learning to read in a shanty camp, and Redhead, eating nothing but potatoes; Denis Salmon, Irishman, beaten up with a pick shaft, and John Hobday, Englishman, transported for fifteen years for doing it; Mary Warburton, who ran off with a navvy, and Rachel Foulkes, navvy nurse, who died of cholera; Thick-lipped Blondin the thief, Ene-Eyed Conro the forger, Devil-driving George the seducer; Bible John who was gored to death by a cow, Alexander Anderson who wrote bad verse, William Lee who died slowly of a broken back, and Happy Peter the navvy preacher who dropped dead one hot day as he said amen.

  *1 Lord Ebrington might have been interested to know that though the navvies were hardly Socialists, the son of one was to become a Minister in a Labour government. Mr Tom Fraser, when he was Minister of Transport in 1965, presented a copy of the first edition of this book to the Cabinet library at 10 Downing Street. He said the first job his father had at the turn of the century was carting material for the embankments of the new line between Larkhall and Coalburn, and that his grandfather, who was born in Inverness, came to Glasgow when he was sixteen and worked all his life on the railways.

  2

  The Works

  The engineering of the early railways was like nothing before. Only the cathedrals were so audacious in concept and so exalted in their architecture, but they were few and the building of one, in God’s good time, could take a hundred years: the railways were many, and made in the contractor’s good time, which was money. True, there were roads in Britain before the railways came, but since the Romans they were only little roads, and few. Even the turnpikes were made in bits and pieces from here to there, with no sense of a system. The Liverpool and Manchester Railway was built before there was any decent road between the two cities. Only the canals of the eighteenth century can compare in any way with the railways that so soon killed them. Only the cathedrals before were so vast in idea: nothing before was so vast in scale.

  It is easy to forget this vastness, or never to see it at all. The same visitor to Bristol who sees Brunel’s suspension bridge at Clifton, and will not forget it, may quite possibly, on the way down in the train from London, have remained unaware of the same engineer’s gigantic railway tunnel at Box, near Bath. Passengers to Bournemouth do not see Locke’s great cuttings between Basingstoke and Winchester; the traveller through Stockport does not notice that the broad viaduct on which his train stands, ninety feet high, cuts the town in two and dominates everything for miles; the passenger from Manchester to Liverpool never even glances up at the sheer rock walls of George Stephenson’s cutting at Olive Mount. Nowadays a motorway may be admired, but the railways have been there too long to be considered, though as a feat of engineering the M.I is nothing to the London and Birmingham Railway, completed 120 years before. There is hardly a branch line in Britain whose earthworks would not be marvelled at if they were those of a new road or an ancient fort. John Ruskin called them ‘Your railway mounds, vaster than the walls of Babylon.’

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

  These earthworks are so much greater than those of roads because a railroad is more than a simple road with rails on it. A road, even a good road, can curve, and climb hills. A railway, by its nature, cannot do this. There are two things to consider. First, the lack of friction between metal wheel and metal rail, and second, the result of the first, the much heavier loads which can be hauled on a railway than on an ordinary road surface. On the level this is fine, but when a railway comes to any slope at all there is trouble. The very lack of friction between wheel and rail which enabled bigger loads to be pulled now becomes a lack of traction. The wheels cannot get a grip to haul the big load up a slope against the pull of gravity. In 1833 experiments snowed that if a locomotive would draw sixty-seven tons on the level, it could draw only fifteen tons on an incline of 1 in 100, and could not move at all on 1 in 12. In the early days it was estimated that to overcome a gradient of 1 in 300 required a tractive power nearly twice as great as was needed to move the same load at the same speed on a level, and that to ascend an elevation of thirty feet required as much power as would move the same load along a mile of level line.

  So a railway must be level and also, because a train cannot safely take curves at any speed, as near straight as the engineer can devise. Across the plains of Canada a railway was easy to lay, and gangs could put down an average of two miles a day and sometimes much more, but over even the easiest of country in Britain a railway was difficult. A line from London to Southampton or Birmingham was an immense undertaking. Lecount, who made many ingenious calculations, reckoned that the London and Birmingham was unquestionably the greatest public work executed in ancient or modern times. If its importance was estimated by labour alone, perhaps the Great Chinese Wall might compete with it, but if the immense outlay of capital, the great and varied talents of the men who worked on it (Lecount meant the engineers, himself among them), and the unprecedented engineering difficulties were taken into account, then, he said, the gigantic work of the Chinese sank totally into the shade. Perhaps hoping to impress by sheer weight of numbers, he went on to compare the railway with the Great Pyramid of
Egypt – ‘that stupendous monument which seems likely to exist to the end of all time’. The labour expended on the pyramid was equivalent to lifting 15,733,000,000 cubic feet of stone one foot high. This was performed, according to Diodorus Siculus, by 300,000 or, according to Herodotus, 100,000 men, and took twenty years. To build the railway 25,000,000,000 cubic feet of material was lifted one foot high, or 9,267,000,000 cubic feet more than for the pyramid. Yet this had been done by 20,000 men in less than five years. Mr Lecount did not want to dispraise the pyramid; he made generous allowances.

  ‘From the above calculations,’ he said,

  has been omitted all the tunnelling, culverts, drains, ballasting and fencing, and all the heavy work at the various stations, and also the labour expended on engines, carriages, wagons, etc.; these are set off against the labour of drawing the materials of the pyramid from the quarries to the spot where they were to be used – a much larger allowance than is necessary.

  Not content with having vanquished the Chinese Wall and the pyramid, he then remarked that if the circumference of the earth were taken in round figures to be 130,000,000 feet, then the 400,000,000 cubic feet of earth moved in building the railway would, if spread in a band one foot high and one foot broad, go round the equator more than three times.

  Building the retaining wall at Camden, by J.C. Bourne.

  This was the way an engineer saw the London and Birmingham. Charles Dickens also saw part of the line while it was still being built, and in Dombey and Son he wrote this description of the cutting at Camden Hill, in North London:

  The first shock of a great earthquake had, just at that period, rent the whole neighbourhood to its centre. Traces of its course were visible on every side. Houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up; buildings that were undermined and shaking, propped by great beams of wood. Here, a chaos of carts, overthrown and jumbled together, lay topsy-turvy at the bottom of a steep, unnatural hill; there, confused treasures of iron soaked and rusted in something that had accidentally become a pond. Everywhere were bridges that led nowhere; thoroughfares that were wholly impassable; Babel towers of chimneys, wanting half their height; temporary wooden houses and enclosures, in the most unlikely situations; carcasses of ragged tenements, and fragments of unfinished walls and arches, and piles of scaffolding, and wildernesses of bricks, and giant forms of cranes, and tripods straddling above nothing. There were a hundred thousand shapes and substances of incompleteness, wildly mingled out of their places, upside down, burrowing in the earth, aspiring in the air, mouldering in the water, and unintelligible as any dream. Hot springs and fiery eruptions, the usual attendants upon earthquakes, lent their contributions of confusion to the scene. Boiling water hissed and heaved within dilapidated walls, whence, also, the glare and roar of flames came issuing forth; and mounds of ashes blocked up rights of way, and wholly changed the law and custom of the neighbourhood. In short, the yet unfinished and unopened Railroad was in progress; and, from the very core of all this dire disorder, tailed smoothly away, upon its mighty course of civilization and improvement. But as yet, the neighbourhood was shy to own the Railroad. One or two bold speculators had projected streets; and one had built a little, but had stopped among the mud and ashes to consider further of it. A bran-new Tavern, redolent of fresh mortar and size, and fronting nothing at all, had taken for its sign The Railway Arms; but that might be rash enterprise – and then it hoped to sell drink to the workmen. So, the Excavators’ House of Call had sprung up from a beer shop; and the old-established Ham and Beef Shop had become the Railway Eating House, with a roast leg of pork daily, through interested motives of a similar immediate and popular description. Lodging-house keepers were favourable in like manner; and for the like reasons were not to be trusted. The general belief was very slow. There were frowsy fields, and cow-houses, and dunghills, and dust-heaps, and ditches, and gardens, and summer-houses, and carpet-beating grounds, at the very door of the Railway. Little tumuli of oyster shells in the oyster season, and of lobster shells in the lobster season, and of broken crockery and faded cabbage leaves in all seasons, encroached upon its high places. Posts, and rails, and old cautions to trespassers, and backs of mean houses, and patches of wretched vegetation, stared it out of countenance. Nothing was the better for it, or thought of being so. If the miserable waste ground lying near it could have laughed, it would have laughed it to scorn, like many of the miserable neighbours.