The Railway Navvies

by Terry Coleman

  When it came the explosion was a dull, muffled boom, and the earth jolted. The foot of the cliff appeared to dissolve. The mass above slowly separated from the mainland and sank to the beach. In two minutes the cliff had gone. The volleys of ejected chalk rolled inwards upon themselves, great boulders crashed into the sea, broke, and then reappeared above the surface as crushed and coalescing bits, fermenting. There was no roaring explosion, no bursting out of fire, no wreath of smoke, for the gunpowder had exploded under a pressure which almost matched its energies, under a million tons of chalk. When the turf from the top of the cliff reached the level of the beach the stream of debris was 1,200 feet across and covered fifteen acres of sea and sand.

  The most hazardous job of all was tunnelling. The miners worked deep in the earth, often soaked by muddy water, in constant peril from their own explosions, breathing foul air made fouler by the fumes of gunpowder, and working twelve hours a shift, day and night.

  If the tunnel was short the miners bored in from one end, or from both ends; but in a longer tunnel work would also proceed from shafts bored vertically into the earth along the line of the tunnel. These shafts were bored by a machine called a gin, which was powered at first by horses attached to a great wheel, and later by steam engines. This boring of the shaft was itself a feat of engineering: most shafts were eight to ten feet across and some were as deep as 600 feet. When the bore was completed men descended to its foot in huge buckets and began to excavate the main tunnel, working in two directions at once from the bottom of the shaft. The soil and the men were brought up in the same buckets. When the tunnel was completed the shafts served as air holes, creating a strong draught, so that the men putting the finishing touches to the masonry of the tunnel worked in a constant gale of wind, a contrast to the fug in which they had laboured for so long before.

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

  The first of the great railway tunnels was that bored under Liverpool in 1827. Henry Booth, treasurer of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, wrote that in some places the substance excavated was a soft blue shale, with abundance of water; in other places a wet sand appeared, requiring great labour and contrivance to support until the masonry which was to form the roof was erected. Under Crown Street, near the Botanic Garden, the whole mass of earth above the tunnel fell in from the surface, to a depth of thirty feet of loose moss, earth, and sand. No one was hurt.

  Sometimes the miners refused to go on, and the engineers had to chivvy them back to work. Nor, said Booth, was this surprising. The men bored their way almost in the dark, with the water streaming around them, and uncertain whether the props and stays would bear the pressure from above until the arch work was completed. Those who had been through the tunnel after it was completed, when it was lit by gaslight and traversed by horses, carriages, and crowds of passengers, could not, he said, easily picture to themselves the original dark and dangerous cavern, with the roof and sides supported by shores, while the miners worked by the light of a few candles, whose feeble glimmer, glancing on the water which ran down the sides, or which spread out in a sheet below, was barely enough to show the dreariness of the place.

  The tunnel was a mile and a quarter long, and was the work of 300 miners. During its construction it was one amusement of the bolder citizens of Liverpool to walk part way through to see how the work was getting on. The Liverpool Mercury of 16 February 1827, after reporting that the shafts were sixty feet in depth, added that the visitor might descend them in one of the buckets with perfect safety, and that it was an interesting and novel sight to those who had never seen mining in its grander operations. Though numerous candles were burned by the workmen, ‘the darkness of the cavern was but made visible’, and the sound of busy hammer, and chisel, and pickaxe, the rumblings of the loaded wagons along the railway leading from the farther ends of the cavern to the pit, and the frequent blasting of the rock, mingling with the hoarse voices of the miners whose sombre figures were scarcely distinguishable, formed, so the report said, an interesting tout ensemble of human daring, industry, and ingenuity.

  One visitor said of the men that their numerous candles twinkled in the thick obscurity like stars on a gloomy night, marking out their figures here and there in dark profile while they flung about their brawny arms – all this, together with the frequent explosions and the fumes of gunpowder, ‘conveying no contemptible idea of some infernal operation in the region of Pluto’. This same observer, James Scott Walker, afterwards wrote that parties of workmen were employed at each of the six shafts and at each end of the tunnel, and that, guided by the mariner’s compass, they met each other with astonishing precision at the lines of cutting. Though each party had cut about five hundred yards, the levels of the tunnels seldom varied above an inch at the joins. ‘And the sensations,’ said Walker,

  of the workmen and contractors when, after so long and perilous a working in ‘the bowels of the harmless earth’, they were enabled by the removal of the stone barriers between them to shake hands with each other in regions never visited by the light of day, may be more easily conceived than described.

  The methods of tunnelling remained, throughout the century, much the same as they were at Liverpool. A visitor who went down a shaft of the Belsize Tunnel, London, in 1865, said that at the bottom you could see a kind of light and hear strange sounds from both sides. He followed the newly excavated tunnel in one direction and after about eighty yards reached the lights and found a dozen men at work, half of them with pickaxes, tearing away at the rough clay and accompanying every stroke with a noise that was half grunt, half groan. After these navvies had cleared away a length of twelve feet the centre supports were put up and the bricklayers took over. All these men worked day and night in relays, some of the labourers working for two days and the intervening night without more than an occasional break for food.

  Tunnels were the hardest work, but out in the open country a viaduct is perhaps the most spectacular kind of railway engineering to look at. To create an embankment of much the same size would have been a greater labour, but such an embankment, after more than a hundred years, and covered with trees and shrubs, looks like a natural rise. Indeed, railway earthworks very soon became part of the landscape. In A Laodicean, a novel published in 1881, Thomas Hardy described the mouth of a tunnel which had been built only a few years before:

  The popular commonplace that science, steam, and travel must always be unromantic and hideous, was not proven at this spot. On either slope of the deep cutting, green with long grass, grew drooping young trees of ash, beech, and other flexible varieties, their foliage almost concealing the actual railway which ran along the bottom, its thin steel rails gleaming like silver threads in the depths. The vertical front of the tunnel, faced with brick that had once been red, was now weather-stained, lichened, and mossed over in harmonious rusty-browns, pearly greys, and neutral greens, at the very base appearing a little blue-black spot like a mouse-hole – the tunnel’s mouth. Mrs Goodman broke the silence by saying, ‘If it were not a railway we should call it a lovely dell.’

  But a viaduct is wood or stone or metal, and distinctly man made. Viaducts were, however, most frequently built in and near towns, where their advantages were many. In a built-up area the soil for embankments would have to be brought in from miles off, and the company would have to buy whole tracts of expensive land on which to put up its earthworks. Viaducts, on the other hand, were made of bricks and iron, materials easily got, and could be erected by masons and builders, who were also easily found. The company needed to buy only the narrow strip of land over which the line would pass. Many of the London lines, for instance that from London Bridge to Greenwich, were virtually viaduct lines all the way, and though they were more expensive to build than lines on level ground, they were less costly than embankment railways would have been, and were easier to maintain. There were other advantages. As one early railway historian said, the vacant spa
ces beneath the arches could be let for tenements, shops, or warehouses, fitted up as ragged schools or as nightly homes for the homeless, or used for other purposes. In 1849 a body calling itself The Samaritan Society of England set out to shelter and ‘reclaim’ destitute people and discharged prisoners. It announced that it would rent arches from London railway companies and fit them out with first, second, and third class compartments for men, and first and second for women. The tenements would be warmed by hot water, lit by gas, and supervised by the police. The first class would have iron bedsteads, flock mattresses, and blankets and cost twopence a night; the second class wooden boards, pillows, and rugs for a penny a night; and the third class clean straw, for nothing. It was proposed to turn some of the second class arches into day schools on the plan of the Rev. Mr Queckett, who had already leased three arches from the Blackwall Railway in which to teach 600 children.

  Bridges were generally not navvy work, or, at least, they were not commonly erected by the same men who built the other works of a railway. The railway company often made the bridges itself, or, if these works were contracted out, they were retained by the principal contractor, who himself employed a separate force of masons, carpenters, and iron-workers to construct them.

  In an age which well knew how to exploit mechanical inventions, and in which great works of engineering became commonplace, it seems at first astonishing that the chief tools used to build the railways were picks, shovels, and gunpowder. Powered tools of any kind were hardly used at all, and this is not because there were none to be had. As early as 1843, John Weale, in his book Ensamples of Railway Making, wrote about a steam shovel which – though it was, he admitted, not the English practice – he commended to the British and Irish public. He included an illustration of a newly patented excavator, originally an American invention, which could cut and level the earthwork for a railway at a cost considerably below that of manual labour, and which had the additional advantage, guaranteed by the patentee, of saving much time. These advantages would, he hoped, be proved when the machine was adopted in Britain. It would be an important consideration in the making of less costly railways and was ‘a desirable object for immediate use’. With an engineman and his assistant, together with six men to cart away the removed earth, it could be made to excavate 1,500 cubic yards in twelve hours, at a cost for fuel of twelve shillings a day. The machine itself cost £1,500.

  Perhaps this capital cost is one reason why steam excavators were rarely used in Britain, but the principal reason is that, except for a few years of the first and second railway manias, labour was easy to come by, and contractors, who already took enough risks, preferred the traditional navvy to the untried machine. In the United States and Canada, where labour was scarce and expensive, mechanical diggers were used. In the States the machine tradition became so strong that today the word navvy is understood to mean not a man but a steam shovel. But in Britain and Europe men and spades were always there for the asking.

  It was only at the tag end of the railway age that machines were at all widely used here. In 1887 Frederick McDermott wrote in his biography of Joseph Firbank, the contractor, that the steam excavator was fast encroaching on the province of the navvy, and was to be seen working on many contracts. It had, he said, been estimated that one of these steam navvies could fill 240 wagons, nearly 1,000 cubic yards, in a day often hours. To excavate by hand only 600 yards a day, at the same rate as the steam navvy, would have taken 100 men, and since only thirty men were required to work with the machine, it could be said to do the work of seventy.

  But this was at the end. Almost all the railways had been long built – with picks and shovels.

  3

  Navvy and Contractor

  It takes many men – with ideas, and engineering know-how, and shovels – to build a railway, and the method of executing works by contract and sub-contract was essential to the sudden and rapid growth of the mid nineteenth century. In the early years the railway company appointed an engineer, who surveyed the line himself and employed assistant engineers and navvies to man the works. This was how George Stephenson built the Liverpool and Manchester. But only a few years later, at the time of the first railway mania, greater speed, greater organization, greater division of labour, became essential. It was then that the first big contractors appeared, quoting so much a mile for a whole line, letting out a cutting at so much a yard, amassing fortunes or collapsing into bankruptcy.

  The making of a railway was organized in this way: first the company, the London and Birmingham or the Great Western, appointed an engineer – say Robert Stephenson or Brunel – to devise the routes, specify the works to be done, superintend their construction, and to be responsible to the company for the whole venture. The company then invited tenders for part or whole of the work, and appointed a principal contractor, or contractors, to carry out these works. This main contractor was the Brassey or the Peto, the grand entrepreneur. The contractor himself then appointed agents for each section of the line, and these agents were empowered to let parcels of the work, a cutting here, an embankment there, to sub-contractors. These sub-contractors in turn appointed the gangers, the corporals of the enterprise, and the gangers took on the navvies.

  Robert Stephenson, one of the great engineers.

  There were variations, according to the size of the work and the capacity of the main contractor. Some sub-contractors engaged gangers as their employees at a fixed wage, and paid the navvies, whom they took on through the gangers, by the day. Others sub-contracted again, so that the gangers were not their employees but their agents. Often the navvies worked not for a fixed day rate but on piece work, for so much a foot, or so much a set. Sometimes the navvies were employed neither on a daily rate nor on piece work, but rather formed themselves into butty gangs, and struck a bargain with the sub-contractor to do a piece of work for a certain sum, in effect becoming sub-sub-contractors. One trouble with butty gangs was that, since the pay was generally shared equally, each man was expected to do equal work. It sometimes happened that one man, not so strong as the others, overstrained himself trying to keep pace with them. And there were often squabbles about pay. Which one of the gang of ten or twelve men should collect the wages at the pay table? Was the leader of the butty to get something extra? Each man in a butty gang mistrusted the others in a fine spirit of comradeship. Thomas Eaton, navvy, said he had often known disputes – ‘One man will want to take an advantage of the others; they generally settle it with an odd blow on the head.’

  But in spite of its drawbacks the butty system was the one Brassey preferred. He could maintain reasonable discipline on his works, and it was his strong belief that the best way to get things done was to give the men a personal interest in doing a decent amount of work and finishing contracts on time. So the system of sub-contract was used wherever possible. On the L.S.W.R. between Winchester and Basingstoke, where Brassey contracted for part of the work under Joseph Locke, the engineer, there was an unusual proportion of excavation, about 3,250,000 cubic yards on a seventeen-mile stretch. The works were heavy and costly, and the time allowed for completion was so short that the works had to be pursued with the greatest diligence, day and night. Eleven hundred men were employed. They earned high wages and they did the work by the date agreed.

  The amount of work let to a sub-contractor varied according to his capital and past record. One man would be allowed to take a contract for £10,000, another for twice that amount, and some would employ up to 200 men. When the work was organized in this way the function of the principal contractor was rather that of a practical engineer overlooking the execution of the works by a number of smaller contractors. The principal contractor himself remained responsible to the company’s engineer. On this system the main contractor was not the employer of the navvies. This then was the classical method which ensured expedition and profit, and kept the main contractor free from any direct responsibility for the navvies. Only a few contractors preferred to superintend the work
more closely, not to sub-contract it out, but to employ men directly. One of these was Samuel Morton Peto,*1 the Baptist, who in the extent of his railway works was second only to Brassey. Often his way was to take a big contract and then to appoint a chief agent who would superintend the work entirely, and through whom he would pass all his orders. This agent had under him on the contract, say, for the line between Ely and Peterborough, four sub-agents, each of whom had charge of about eight or nine miles of the line. Under these again, to every two miles, was a timekeeper, who kept a record of the time worked by every man in his own section. The work was then let to gangers who employed the men. The timekeeper’s duty was to report to the sub-agent on the Saturday morning the hours the men had worked up to Friday night, and they were paid every Saturday. In this weekly payment, as in his concern for the sobriety and safety of his men, Peto was unusual. But though he preferred to employ men directly, and to exercise a closer control over the work, he could not always do this. In 1846, the year of the Ely to Peterborough line, he was employing 9,000 men, many of them on the sixty-one miles of the Southampton to Dorchester route, but of these only 3,700 were in his direct employment, the others being engaged by sub-contractors.

  Nevertheless, a large and powerful contractor such as Peto or Brassey could impose what conditions he wanted on the sub-contractors. Some of the larger railway companies, too, reserved to themselves, on paper at least, a substantial right to superintend working methods. In many agreements with a contractor the price of the work, and a list of any additional works to be completed, was given. The time for completion and the fines for being late were stated, with the condition that all payments were subject to the engineer’s approval of the work done. The contractor found tools, labour, and materials, constructed all foundations, excavations, shafts, culverts, drains, and roads, and provided pumps, scaffolding, fencing, and other details, according to the specifications, plans, and drawings, and the instructions which he received from the engineer. He laid the permanent way, the materials for which were found by the company. If the contractor did not employ enough men on the works the engineer had a right to take on more after giving the contractor a week’s notice of this. These men could use the contractor’s material, and their wages would be deducted from the contract price. The engineer generally had the right to sack any of the contractor’s men doing their work badly. The contractor was also bound to take down or alter any work not approved by the engineer. All materials, from the moment they were brought on the site, became the railway company’s property and the contractor could not remove them without permission. Payments were usually made in monthly instalments, 10 per cent being kept back and not paid to the contractor until twelve months after completion, during which time he had to maintain the works.