The Railway Navvies

by Terry Coleman

  The sub-contracting system gave a man a chance, with diligence and luck, to make his fortune. Self-help was more than a cant expression: men could make themselves, and many are the tales of those who did. One was Sir Edward Banks, who started as an agricultural labourer. He left home, so the story goes, with two shillings and two shirts, one rather inferior to the other. All the clothes he had were on his back, except for the good shirt, which he carried in his pocket. He could not read a word. He first went to Scotland, laboured on canals there, and afterwards became a small contractor. He did well, went on to build bridges over the Thames, to take some part in early railway works, and to undertake nearly all the government works at Sheerness, under the celebrated engineer Sir John Rennie. He accumulated a large fortune and was knighted. And all this by an illiterate, penniless labourer from Yorkshire.

  George Stephenson: engineer, father of Robert.

  So goes the story. Perhaps it is a tall story, particularly the bit about the two shillings and two shirts. But Banks’s was a mild success compared with that of George Stephenson, the colliery engine boy who created half the railway revolution. And the history of Joseph Firbank, which is well documented, is little less spectacular than that of Banks. Firbank was born in 1819 at Bishop Auckland, and at the age of seven joined his father down the mine. In 1840 he was working on the Bishop Auckland and Weardale branch of the Stockton and Darlington Railway, and when he was only twenty-two he took a sub-contract on the Woodhead Tunnel of the Sheffield and Manchester Railway. From there he went to the York and Scarborough Railway, and amassed enough capital to take a contract on the Nottingham and Lincoln line of the Midland Railway. He survived the panic of the mid-1840s, then lost nearly everything on the Rugby to Market Harborough contract in 1848, but again recovered, and went from profit to profit until he ended his contracting career on the Settle and Carlisle line in the 1870s. He became a Justice of the Peace and Deputy Lieutenant, and died a rich man in 1886. He was one of the few contractors to offer his men not only bread but sympathy. On his works he gave his men water and oatmeal instead of beer, and they liked him in spite of it.

  The way was always open for a navvy who could save enough to buy a few horses and carts and take a small subcontract. Brassey for one encouraged this, and some men worked with him for forty years, as labourer, ganger, and sub-contractor. He had a way with his men. He would visit the works, talk with sub-contractors, and even take the advice of navvies. He was anxious to make a profit, but also to keep good men with him, so he dealt fairly. On his visits of inspection along the line he would listen to his sub-contractors and gangers. If a sub-contractor was obviously going to lose on one contract – if, say, the cutting he had taken thinking it to be sand turned out to be tricky shale – Brassey might alter the terms and pay a bit more, or see the man got a better deal on the next contract he took farther down the line. Those who saw Brassey on these visits were impressed by his genial manner towards his old followers. He used to recognize many of the old navvies, even some he had not seen for years, and call them by their Christian names. He shook hands with gangers and stopped for a few moments to talk over old times and ask after common acquaintances who had worked on previous contracts. Brassey’s son put it this way: ‘A small manifestation of kindness like this, how little it costs, how much it is valued.’

  When Brassey was dying, in December 1870, his men remembered him and many of them came, some from abroad, to see their old master. Some had been his agents on great contracts, others navvies who had followed his works for thirty years. They did not intrude upon his illness, but asked to be allowed to wait in the hall of his house, hoping to see him as he was helped out to his carriage, and to shake his hand once again.

  It was not only in Brassey’s nature to treat his men decently: it was also in his own interests. A fly-by-night contractor, and there were many, could grind his men as hard as they would tolerate, not caring how they lived or ate, concerned only to finish a particular contract, take his profit on it, and move on. Brassey, on the other hand, had to maintain an establishment. To assemble a temporary rabble of navvies was not difficult, but he wanted a standing army which could travel from one railway to another, and from one country to another. He preferred the men he knew, looked after them, and was respected by them.

  Peto, too, was much liked by his men. In the late 1840s, when he visited Portugal to inspect some works there, he rode down the new line on the tender of an engine, sitting on coal bags. All along the line he was greeted by the navvies who were at work, and at the end of the line, where there were many men who had worked for him on previous contracts, the cheers followed faster and faster, until, to the astonishment of Portuguese bystanders, Peto was lifted shoulder high and carried to his hotel.

  Thomas Brassey, contractor.

  For both contractor and sub-contractor life was perilous. A man needed luck. Of the thirty main contractors who undertook to construct parts of the London and Birmingham Railway, ten failed completely. Jackson and Seddon lasted only a few months on the Primrose Hill contract, and T. Townsend about a year at Tring before the company took over. William Soars gave up after about nine months at Wolverton, and again the company took over the uncompleted works. At Kilsby, Jos. Nowell & Sons found they could not go on, and surrendered the contract in February 1836. Mr Lecount, assistant engineer to the company, explained that these contractors failed because the cost of labour and materials rose soon after the biggest contracts were let. It became plain to these contractors that they could not carry on except at great loss, and after this, said Lecount,

  a complete want of energy soon became apparent, and the company were under the necessity, at whatever cost, of getting the contracts into their own, or some other person’s hands as quickly as possible, as it was clear that whatever additional outlay might become necessary on this account, would be more than counterbalanced by the time which would be gained.

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

  The method of tendering was frequently chancy, particularly in the early years. Firbank himself used to tell a story of one Mr Wythes (probably George Wythes, who undertook, among other lines, that from Dorchester to Maiden Newton) who was thinking of submitting an offer for a contract. He first thought £18,000 would be reasonable, but then consulted his wife and agreed it should be £20,000. Thinking it over, he decided not to take any risk, so made it £40,000. They slept on it and the next morning his wife said she thought he had better make it £80,000. He did; it turned out to be the lowest tender notwithstanding, and he founded his fortune on it.

  Few were so lucky. Robert Rawlinson, an engineer who had worked on canals and then on the London and Birmingham Railway, said that in a wet season, and particularly with night work, no contractor could estimate within 25 per cent, and might be out by thousands of pounds. Look, he said, at such a contract. The new broken ground in the excavations was worked by man and horse into an adhesive mud, knee deep. The new embankment was in an even worse state. The horses’ feet were cut by rails and sleepers, and the mud and wet produced diseases in their legs. The temporary railways buckled, the newly formed embankment slipped at the base and subsided at the top. The end of the embankment, at the tiphead, could not be kept up to its level; the wet earth was shaken in its wagon ride over bumpy rails into the consistency of birdlime and stuck to the inside of the trucks, making it impossible to tip. Frequently rails, wagons, and horses fell over the tiphead and were buried. Men and horses were almost powerless and became dispirited, and the poor contractor was bewildered or wrapped in despair. The savings of a life could be lost in a month or so.

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

  Many more contractors went broke than made a fortune. The career of Benjamin Bailey is typical of many. He was a sub-contractor on the London and Birmingham, and rose to be what he called ‘first contractor under Mr Brunel’ on stretches of the Great Western, with ‘horses, materials for work, wagons and carts and eve
rything’. Then he failed and in 1846 was back at labouring.

  On the whole, sub-contractors did not enjoy a reputation for the greatest integrity. As Thomas Walker, missionary, put it:

  The Devil has a lot of sub-contractors: a bad lot I tell you; like some I have known who have drawn £500 or £1,000 and sloped to America and left the poor men nothing.

  Benley and Leech, sub-contractors on the East Lancashire Railway at Hepton, near Burnley, sound as if they had gone over to the devil. One Saturday in the middle of September 1846 the rumour went round that they were planning to leave the district without paying the labourers the month’s wages they were owed. The monthly pay was at a pub called the Angel, where the sub-contractors had taken rooms. On the Saturday morning only some men were paid, and then the money stopped. It then became clear why Benley and Leech had been quietly removing their furniture from the inn during Friday night, and the navvies took the law into their own hands. A great crowd surrounded the Angel and shouted out that the two bilkers would be kept inside until the remaining wages were paid. The navvies lived from hand to mouth, and because there was no pay they had no food for themselves or their families. They decided that if they were going to starve so should Benley and Leech, so the innkeeper was ordered to give the two men nothing to eat or drink. Throughout Saturday night and Sunday a large concourse of people assembled in front of the Angel. Inside, the two contractors were detained in a billiard room by a large posse of labourers, who made what money they could by showing their prisoners to all who cared to pay a halfpenny for the sight of them, and collected seventeen shillings in this way.

  Later on Sunday the magistrates became alarmed, and persuaded the navvies to allow the two men to be taken to the police station, on the understanding that they should appear in court on Monday to answer summonses against them. The court was crowded with navvies. A witness explained that the main contractor on the line paid the sub-contractors only once a month, and that they then paid the men, who had been hired at a fixed day rate. But the sub-contractors had fallen behind with the work and did not have the money to pay the wages. It was an old and familiar tale, and the magistrates could do nothing. The navvies could take their remedy at civil law and sue the sub-contractors for debt, but that was all. The two bilkers had committed no crime. So there was nothing left but for the magistrates to be sympathetic, to praise the forbearance of the navvies, and to say how sorry they were that some men and their wives and children had not eaten since Saturday. The bench had no power to enforce payment, and in any case the sub-contractors were broke.

  When he was taken back, for his own safety, to the officers’ day room at the police station, Leech climbed through the window and ran, but the navvies saw him, chased him, and conducted him in triumph to his old quarters at the Angel. To protect him, and to prevent a breach of the peace, four policemen rescued Leech and escorted him back to the police station amid the shouts and threats of the mob. But the navvies were really powerless. They stood around arguing that if the sub-contractor could not pay them the main contractor should, but he would accept no obligation. He had not hired the men. They were nothing to do with him. So the mob dispersed, as many had done before and many would after. The navvies drifted off to other work, and when things quieted down Benley and Leech slipped out of the police station and left town.

  A preparatory sketch of navvies by J.C. Bourne (1814–96), the most gifted artist of the early railway age. Twelve of his lithographs of the London and Birmingham Railway, which were first published in four volumes in 1838–39, appear in this book. He also drew scenes on the Great Western. Later he lived for twelve years in Russia, depicting the engineer Vignoles’s bridge at Kiev, and then scenes in Moscow and St. Petersburg. But it is for his scenes of railway building that he is best remembered, and he has been called the Piranesi of the railway age.

  In no profession, perhaps, were there so many bold, rapacious quacks as among railway contractors and civil engineers. Benley and Leech were among the rapacious. But generally the contractors and sub-contractors not only paid their men, they paid well. Throughout the century a railway navvy could earn more than, say, a farm labourer – sometimes two or three times as much. The contractors were not philanthropists. They were out to make not friends but profits, and paid well because they had to. The work was always heavy and dangerous, and a man had to abandon the comfort of his home and live in a shanty by the line. There had to be something to induce a farm labourer to leave the land and go for a navvy, and that something was money. The contractors needed the better labourers and had to pay for them. A contractor chose his men as he chose his horses; there was a certain limit below which neither cheap horses nor cheap men were any good to him. He had to finish the line on time or pay a money penalty, so men who could not work hard and fast were useless and just got in the way.

  Once he had got his navvies by paying well, the contractor had to keep them by paying better than the man building the next stretch of line. The railways were not built rationally, according to a system, one main line at a time. They were thrown up all together in periods of intense competition, so in 1838, say, if a man was not paid handsomely enough on one contract of the London and Birmingham he could tramp a few miles north and work for another master, or go on a longer tramp and try his luck on the Great Western. There were few strikes, and this is because, in days of prosperity, the navvies had a more powerful argument – they could jack up and go elsewhere. In times of unemployment, in the quiet years of the early 1840s when there was for the while little railway-building, the men stood to gain little by strikes, but even then wages never fell as low as in factories. Even in slack times the contractors had to maintain their armies, perhaps at some immediate loss to themselves.

  It was all a matter of supply and demand. Wages increased because of great and sudden demands for labour. This was particularly true of foreign lines. When the Grand Trunk of Canada was being constructed Brassey had to send out men from England. They were engaged in Lancashire and Cheshire, and on landing in Canada were paid 40 per cent more than at home for doing the same work. As the work went on, with the hardships becoming greater and some men returning home, the wages rose from 3s. 6d. a day to 6s. Masons whose pay in England was 5s., and who were taken to Canada at the contractors’ expense, were paid 7s. 6d., although the cost of living was not higher in Canada than in England. The point was that there was a ready supply of men in England: in Canada there was not.

  To build a railway in New South Wales 2,000 men were sent out from England at the joint expense of the contractors and the government. The cost of living for a single navvy was 10s. a week as compared with 8s. at home, but although this difference was so small, and although the contractors paid for the passage out and back, navvies were so scarce that men who had been paid 3s. to 3s. 6d. a day in England could earn 7s. 6d. and more in Australia. Some masons and bricklayers earned as much as 12s. to 13s. a day. When native labourers were used their pay always rose too. On the Bilbao and Tudela line men were receiving a mere shilling a day at the start, but this had risen to 3s. a day before the railway was completed. On the same line the masons’ wages increased from 1s. 4d. to 5s. a day.

  The fall in wages after a commercial panic, when there was less building and work was scarce, shows how closely the rate of wages depended on supply and demand. After the railway panic of 1847–8 labour on the Royston and Hitchin Railway was cheaper than it ever was afterwards. Men who on the North Staffordshire, shortly before the panic, had earned 3s. 6d. a day, accepted half a crown on the Royston line. Brassey found that after the panic the navvies’ wages, which had risen as high as 6s. a day in the mania of 1846, declined so that on the Cheshire junction line the cost of the whole works fell by 15 per cent.

  Mackay, one of Brassey’s staff, worked out a comparative table of weekly wages from 1843 to 1869.

  He explained that in 1843, which was a period of general depression, excellent workmen were plentiful, and provisions for men and ho
rses cheap. The Gloucester and Bristol Railway was built at this time, and so was the Gloucester to Stonehouse Line, where clay cuttings were taken out at the low cost of sixpence a yard, inclusive of horse labour. Three years later, when Brassey’s English contracts included the Lancaster and Carlisle, Trent Valley, Caledonian, North Staffordshire, and Eastern Union Railways, things were different. This year, 1846, was the height of the second railway mania, the demand for men was great, and good navvies were scarce. In Lancashire and the north farmers complained that most of their men had gone to the railways but even so the contractors needed more. Beer was given to the men as well as wages. Lookouts were placed on the roads to intercept men tramping, and take them to the nearest beer shop to be treated and induced to start work. Work went on day and night, and sometimes the same men worked continuously for several days and nights on end. A few men were paid for as many as forty-seven days in one lunar month. Provisions were dear and wages high, higher than they ever were again until the Settle and Carlisle line of the seventies. This was the year after the first Woodhead Tunnel was finished. Mackay wrote: