The Railway Navvies

by Terry Coleman

  But before a railway could get that far, before it even started, the surveyors came to decide the route. Even here the navvies had their part. Many proprietors opposed the railway, because it ran through their orchards, or would dry up their cows, or set their ricks on fire, or scare away the foxes and ruin the hunt, or because railways were the devil’s device anyway. Many owners hoped, by their reluctance to sell their land, to increase the compensation they would get. For many reasons the railway surveyors were unwelcome, and navvies were sometimes used to persuade landowners of the value of the projected lines. As one Victorian commentator said:

  In some cases large bodies of navvies were collected for the defence of the surveyors; and being liberally provided with liquor, and paid well for the task, they intimidated the rightful owners. The navvies were the more willing to engage in such operations because the project, if carried out, afforded them the prospect of increased labour.

  Having completed his survey, and collected the information of his assistants, the engineer then decided the line the route should take. Rivers and streams were crossed as near their source as possible, hills, valleys, and undulating ground were passed or only touched, towns and places where the land was expensive approached with caution, pleasure grounds and gentlemen’s seats avoided.

  Building the engine shed at Camden, by J.C. Bourne.

  The engineer and his surveyors chose the easiest route, but still there were hollows to fill in with embankments or span by viaducts, rising ground to penetrate by cuttings, hills to tunnel through. Such railway engineering would not have been easy at any time, but it was made specially difficult in the early days by the limited performance of the first steam locomotives. On the Liverpool and Manchester Railway George Stephenson included gradients of 1 in 96 and 1 in 89 near Rainhill, but these proved so awkward that lightly loaded trains could at first only crawl up the incline. In the years immediately after this, in the late 1830s, the railway-makers were more cautious. Robert Stephenson included no gradient more severe than 1 in 330 on the London and Birmingham Railway, except for the initial climb out of Euston station as far as Camden, where the trains were at first not drawn by locomotives at all but hauled up on the end of ropes which were wound in by stationary engines. And on the Great Western to Bristol, Brunel laid the line nearly dead level for the first eighty-five miles out of London. Only a few years later, in the 1850s and 1860s, locomotives had improved so greatly that lines could be much more severely graded. The classic contrast between an early line and one constructed only a little later is that between the original London and South Western line from London to Southampton, and the later London to Portsmouth line. On the first line, built by Joseph Locke and completed in 1840, the easy gradients were achieved only by some stupendous cuttings between Basingstoke and Winchester. (Even this line itself was, when it was proposed, regarded as severe compared with the G.W.R. to Bristol. On the Southampton line, Litchfield is nearly 400 feet above the termini at London and Southampton, and one gradient of 1 in 250 runs for a distance of seventeen miles.) Twenty years later, when the Portsmouth line was completed, through Woking, Guildford, and Petersfield, the engineer permitted gradients of 1 in 80 and thus carried the line, with few earthworks of any size, uphill and downhill over the South Downs.

  But the main lines were almost all built early, and so were almost all massively engineered. After that the improved performance of locomotives made things easier, but even with the steeper gradients then permissible some lines of the 1870s, like the celebrated Settle and Carlisle, passed over country whose severity demanded huge tunnels and viaducts. So it happens that British railways, with few exceptions, are carried over and through great earthworks.

  Robert Stephenson put it this way at a dinner in Newcastle upon Tyne in August 1850. It was, he said, but yesterday that he had been engaged as an assistant in tracing the line of the Stockton and Darlington Railway. Since that period the Liverpool and Manchester, the London and Birmingham, and a hundred other great works, had sprung into vigorous existence. So suddenly, so promptly, had they been accomplished, that it appeared to him like the realization of fabled powers, as by a magician’s wand. Hills had been cut down, and valleys filled up; high and magnificent viaducts had been erected. Where mountains intervened tunnels of unexampled magnitude had been unhesitatingly undertaken. Works had been scattered over the face of the country, bearing testimony to the indomitable enterprise of the nation.

  All this was done with navvies and horses. Brassey said that a full day’s work for a man was fourteen sets. A set was a number of wagons, a train. These wagons were drawn by horses up to the works, the cutting or embankment, on a temporary line of rails which was extended as the earthworks grew. Each wagon in this train was filled by two men working together. If the train was filled and carted away fourteen times in a day then each pair of men would have filled fourteen wagons, and each individual navvy seven. A wagon was reckoned to hold two and a quarter cubic yards of muck, which was the navvy name for all kinds of earth and rock, so each man would lift nearly twenty tons of earth a day on a shovel over his own head into a wagon. This was the fourteen-set day. Some men did sixteen.

  But before the men could come to the more conspicuous earthworks the level ground had to be prepared to take the permanent way, which was not always easy: the ground might not be firm enough to take the weight of a loaded train. This was the trouble at Chat Moss, on the Liverpool and Manchester line. Chat Moss is a bog six miles out of Manchester, and it was said, when the Bill for the railway first came before a parliamentary committee in 1825, that no carriage could stand on the Moss short of the bottom. After the Act was obtained, and when George Stephenson started work on Chat Moss in June 1826, he found that the pessimists were very nearly right. The surface was coarse, ridgy grass, tough enough to walk upon about half-leg deep. In places the soggy soil went down thirty-four feet and then rested on layers of clay and quicksand until it reached solid bottom more than forty feet below the surface. Local farmers, who feared their cattle might stray there, shod them with wooden pattens. Stephenson said he would float the road across the Moss, and he did. At some points embankment after embankment disappeared gradually and silently into the Moss. His men shod themselves with planks, like skis, to sustain their weight by spreading its pressure. Sometimes they made little or no progress with the work and had to report that the Moss had swallowed down the results of their labour. Yet at last Stephenson conquered the Moss by the Moss. On overlapping hurdles made of branches and of the heather and brushwood that grew there, he laid sand, earth, and gravel, thickly coated with cinders, until at last he got a firm but elastic road to carry the railway.

  Chat Moss on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway c. 1831.

  Even where the land was not bog, rain could turn the churned-up soil into liquid mud. In February 1847, after heavy and lasting rains, the soil at Brockenhurst, in Hampshire, became dangerous to men and horses. The Poole and Dorsetshire Herald reported that in one week, ‘two horses, celebrated for their sagacity in carrying out the intentions of their owners, were killed through being unable to extract themselves from the soil’. Altogether eleven horses were similarly destroyed on the line between Brockenhurst and Osmansley Ford that season.

  But the principal works of the navvies were banking, cutting, and tunnelling. In embanking the aim was always to extract the necessary soil from the nearest possible place, and the engineers would have allowed for this when they first surveyed the way. One method was to take the earth from a side cutting, so that the finished work would consist of a raised embankment with a ditch running on one or both sides. This was done where there was no other feasible way of getting the soil wanted, but the more frequent method was to cart the soil to an embankment from a cutting a little farther back. This was done by tipping. A light tram road was made from the cutting to the edge of the embankment, and at the extreme verge a stout piece of timber was fastened to prevent the wagons toppling over the edge when they disc
harged their contents. A train of loaded trucks was then brought up to within fifty yards of the edge, and the first truck was detached from the train and a horse hitched to it. The horse that drew the wagon walked not directly in front of it between the tram lines, but to the side of the track, as if it were a canal horse on a towpath drawing a barge behind and to its side. The horse was made to walk, then trot, then gallop. When the truck got near the embankment edge the man running with the horse detached its halter, gave it a signal it had been taught to obey, and horse and man leaped aside. But the truck continued until it struck the baulk of wood laid across the end of the track, when it tipped forward, ejecting its contents over the edge of the bank. The horse was immediately brought up again and hooked on, and the truck was righted and drawn away to join an empty train waiting to be taken back to the cutting. In large works two lines of rails and two teams of horses and wagons would work together. If the soil did not fall just where it was wanted the spades of the navvies did the rest. As a boy, John Masefield, who was to become the Poet Laureate, saw a new branch line made from Gloucester to Ledbury, and watched the navvies tipping. Much later he wrote:

  The earthwork was manned by gangs of Public Works men who soon could be seen high up on the embankment top with trucks and horses working all day long at a game delightful to us to watch. They were employed in building the embankment by trolley loads of earth. The loaded trolleys were drawn along the top of the work by clever horses which knew exactly, or were made exactly to stop and turn aside at the proper instant. The horse went aside, but the truck went on and at the critical moment at the right spot was checked and tipped with its tons of material. We could never see the device at work, but they delighted by their precision and skill…. Now and then to this day, I wonder where the Public Works men found all the earth that they tipped to make that strong embankment, shall we say half a mile long, thirty feet high, at least twenty feet broad at the top and three times that breadth at the base. We could never see them loading the trucks, and never could find any big gap in any known landscape. No one was able to inform us. The earth was found I know not where, and used with great skill, leaving no great pit to show whence it had come.

  Making a cutting was heavier work. On the face of the hill through which the cutting was to pass, bodies of men started work between the posts and rails which marked the intended line of the railway. The upper surface of the earth was carted away, and soon the hill was laid open and a gullet excavated. This was a little cutting just large enough to take a row of wagons which were used to take the earth away. In this gullet the wagons could be brought alongside the navvies who were working on the banks just above the temporary line. Meanwhile, as the muck was removed by the navvies on both sides, the gullet was continued into the hill by those ahead. This was the method used when the soil from the cutting was needed for an embankment farther along the line, to which the stuff was carted off in horse-drawn trains of wagons.

  Barrow runs on Boxmoor embankment, London and Birmingham Railway, by J.C. Bourne.

  Sometimes, when there was no use for the soil, it had to be lifted up the sloping walls of the cutting and dumped at the sides. This was done by barrow runs, and this ‘making the running’ was the most spectacular part of navvy work, and one of the most dangerous. The runs were made by laying planks up the side of the cutting, up which barrows were wheeled. The running was performed by the strongest of the men. A rope, attached to the barrow and also to each man’s belt, ran up the side of the cutting, and then round a pulley at the top, where it was attached to a horse. When the barrow was loaded, a signal was given to the horse-driver at the top, and the man was drawn up the side of the cutting, balancing the barrow in front of him. If the horse pulled steadily and the man kept his balance everything went well. The man tipped his barrow-load on to the top of the cutting, turned round, and went down the side of the cutting again, this time drawing his barrow after him and with his back to it, while the horse all the time kept the rope taut and took most of the weight of the empty barrow.

  Tring Cutting. Lithograph by J.C. Bourne.

  But if, on the upward climb, the horse slipped or faltered, or if the man lost his balance on the muddy plank, then he had to do his best to save himself by throwing the loaded barrow to one side of the plank, and himself to the other. If both toppled over on the same side the barrow and its contents might fall on the man. In the Tring Cutting, on the London and Birmingham Railway, which runs through chalk at a depth of forty feet for two and a half miles, there were thirty to forty horse-runs, and nearly all the navvies were thrown down the slope several times, but they got so used to it, and became so sure-footed, that only one man was killed. One engineer invented a moving platform to take the stuff up the side of the cutting without a navvy having to go with it, but the men thought it was a machine designed to cut their wages, and broke it.

  Excavating was done almost entirely by hand, by pick and shovel, by row on row of navvies. One of Brassey’s timekeepers said:

  I think as fine a spectacle as any man could witness, who is accustomed to look at work, is to see a cutting in full operation, with about twenty wagons being filled, every man at his post, and every man with his shirt open, working in the heat of the day, the gangers looking about, and everything going like clockwork. Another thing that called forth remarks was the complete silence that prevailed among the men.

  But things were different when the line ran through hard rock, and the engineers blasted their way through. Bugles were blown to give warning of the blasts, and the twanging of horns, the grating noise of the iron borers, and the heavy incessant explosions on all sides might have induced a traveller, said one engineer, to believe he was in the neighbourhood of a sharp engagement.

  The engineers could blast their way through nearly everything. Round Down Cliff, on the South-Eastern Railway, between Folkestone and Dover, was 375 feet high, and it was in the way of the railway. To tunnel through would have been difficult, to dig it down would have taken a year and cost £10,000, to go round it was impossible because this would have meant carrying the line into the sea, so the only way was to blast the cliff away. This the engineer, William Cubitt, decided to do. What he had to move was a mass of chalk 300 feet wide and about seventy feet deep, and to do the job he planted in the cliff 19,000 lb. of gunpowder. At the time appointed for the blasting the railway directors and their guests assembled at a marquee on the top of another cliff about a quarter of a mile from the point of explosion. The fuses were inspected, and the spectators exchanged bad jokes in their nervousness. What, asked one, if the explosion should go wrong? ‘We shall all,’ answered another, ‘be swallowed up.’ ‘Swallowed down,’ said a third. As two o’clock approached, the time for the detonation, a silence fell in which the choughs and crows were clearly heard. The sea was calm. Flags were hoisted. A warning shell was thrown over the cliff where it burst with an echoing report which bounced from the hills around like rifle-fire. The flags were hauled down. It was one minute to firing.