Excessively high wages, excessive work, excessive drinking, indifferent lodgings, caused great demoralization, and gave the deathblow to the good old navvy already on the decline. He died out a few years after this period.
Thomas Brassey Jnr, son of the great Brassey.
(Mackay was not the only one to mourn the death of the genuine navvy, but these complaints meant little. Contractors and engineers were always moaning that navvies weren’t what they used to be, but still went on boasting that the English navvy was the best in the world.) In 1849 when the Great Northern, Oxford, Worcester, and Wolverhampton, and Chester and Holyhead lines were being constructed, wages and costs were much lower. The general uneasiness caused by the financial crash of 1847 was aggravated by the political turmoils and European revolutions of 1848. Many contracts started in 1846 were not yet finished. Works were stopped in 1847 and were only partly resumed in 1848. The late forties and early fifties were a bad time for the navvies, many of whom went abroad. In 1855, though railway work was still slack, wages rose because men were harder to come by. The best had gone to France, Spain, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, and Canada with Brassey’s contracts. Other experienced navvies had gone to the Crimea, and at home the militia were all under arms. Wages were higher, and food dearer. It cost 5s. a day to feed a horse. Thereafter wages remained steady throughout the later fifties and sixties, except for a year or so at the time of the 1866 panic. Shortly before this the men on the Kensington and Richmond line had become almost unmanageable. But then came Black Friday, 11 May 1866, when after a great run on the banks the City financiers Overend and Gurney went bankrupt, Peto failed and 30,000 of his men found themselves out of work, Brassey barely survived, and railway shares dropped two-thirds of their value in a day. Immediately the men’s tone was much changed and their demands became more reasonable.
In 1872 Thomas Brassey Jnr (who was the son of the contractor and later became Earl Brassey), expounding the classical doctrine of supply and demand, said there were strict limits within which wages could fluctuate. They could not long continue so high as to deprive capital of its fair return, because if they did the capitalists would find something else in which to invest their money more profitably. Nor could wages long remain below the amount necessary to keep the labourer and his family. At about this time too, it became fashionable for classical economists to point out that whether cheap or dear labour was used, the cost of railway construction remained the same. Mr John Hawkshaw, a consulting engineer with experience in South America, Russia, Holland, India, and Britain, said that he was perfectly well acquainted with the value of ‘Hindoo and other labour’, and that though an English labourer would do more work in a given time than a Creole or a Hindoo, yet the Englishman had to be paid higher wages. Therefore it didn’t matter which the contractor used. This is not an argument that would have appealed to the contractors of the great days of British and West European railway building, before about 1855. It forgets that speed was the essence of these early contracts. No doubt Hawkshaw’s theory worked out well enough on the later railways of South America and India, where the cost of taking out British navvies and paying their higher wages would not have been justified, particularly when it hardly mattered within a few months when the line was completed.
But in the early days, though some of the more unscrupulous did their best to sell their men rotten food at the tommy shops, the better contractors looked after their people because they had no use for depressed and dispirited navvies. Brassey several times opposed suggestions that he should economize by reducing the pay of his men, partly perhaps because he was humane, partly no doubt because he knew they would work worse for worse pay. And in 1851 Peto (who became an M.P. in 1847), seconding the Address to the Crown at the opening of Parliament, said of the labouring man:
I know from personal experience that if you pay him well, and show you care for him, he is the most faithful and hardworking creature in existence; but if you find him working for fourpence a day, and that paid in potatoes and meal, can we wonder that the results are as we find them? [He was referring to the wretchedness of Irish navvies on some Irish lines at the time.] But give him legitimate occupation, and remuneration for his services, show him you appreciate those services, and you may be sure you put an end to all agitation. He will be your faithful servant.
*1 Peto (1809-89) never used his first name, generally signed himself S. Morton Peto, and after he was created a baronet in 1855 – for his services in building an army railway in the Crimea and in acting as one of the commissioners of the 1851 exhibition – he took the style of Sir Morton Peto.
4
Death and Disaster
We are pained to state that a labourer, who was working in the excavation of the rail-road, at Edgehill, where the tunnel is intended to come out and join the surface of the ground, was killed on Monday last. The poor fellow was in the act of undermining a heavy head of clay, fourteen or fifteen feet high, when the mass fell upon him, and literally crushed his bowels out of his body.
Liverpool Mercury, 10 August 1827
This is the first recorded death of a railway navvy. But this unnamed labourer killed on the Liverpool and Manchester was only the first of many thousands. The work was inherently dangerous. Gangs of men, half disciplined if at all, hacked away at great banks of earth and at sheer cliffs of rock, or blasted out tunnels hundreds of feet below ground. Deaths were expected, and the navvies increased the ever-present hazard by their own recklessness. It was a sort of bravado with many of them not to take care. A contractor said he knew one fellow who would smoke a pipe near an open barrel of gunpowder.
Gangs repeatedly undermined too great a height of earth, too great a ‘lift’ as it was called, exposing themselves to a constant risk of being buried, because they could earn more that way than by doing a bit at a time. Some excavations could be safely worked with a lift of ten or twelve feet, to bring down a fall of fifty tons, but in other soils a lift of not more than six or eight feet was prudent. The technique was to burrow into a face of earth – ‘knocking its legs from under it’ – and then to blast away the overhanging mass. Often the soil would not need blasting, but would fall of its own weight when sharpened iron bars and piles were driven in from above, and much of the skill of the excavator lay in knowing when he had burrowed far enough in, and when he should climb up on to the bank and hack away at the overhang to cave it in. In properly organized gangs one man would be stationed on top of the excavation to watch the soil over the burrow hole and shout a warning if it showed signs of shifting or cracking. But often the men did not bother with the lookout, or they worked at night when it was impossible to see. Blasting in tunnels was always perilous, and often seems to have been done by common navvies without any supervision.
Blasting rocks near Linslade on the London and Birmingham, by J.C. Bourne.
As if the work were not hazardous enough (and as if enough of them did not die anyway from dysentery, consumption, inflammation of the lungs, smallpox, cholera, and – like two men at Woodbridge in 1856 – sunstroke), the navvies also took risks for risks’ sake. At Blisworth the men had taken to riding on a rickety temporary tramway which was designed to take wagons of soil from a cutting to an embankment. One man was killed when a truck was derailed, but this did not deter others, and a few days later a gang of navvies riding down to their dinner were thrown off and buried beneath the derailed trucks and their load of earth. One young man emerged from the rubble, looked at his arm, said, ‘It’s broke, I maun go home,’ and walked six miles to his old village.
A few navvies grew wise. One older man described a certain cutting to Elizabeth Garnett, the missionary:
I went to look at it and I saw a spot that looked queer. It was about fifty feet overhead. I chucked a stone up and down came a bit of muck as big as a horse, so I jacked.
Another man told her:
I went round by Eston. We call it the slaughterhouse, you know, because every day nearly there’s a accident, and
nigh every week, at the farthest, a death. Well, I stood and looked down, and there were the chaps, ever so far below, and the cuttings so narrow. And a lot of stone fell, it was always falling, they were bound to be hurt. There was no room to get away nor mostly no warning. One chap I saw killed while I was there, anyhow he died as soon as they got him home. So, I said, ‘Good money’s all right, but I’d sooner keep my head on,’ so I never asked to be put on, but came away again.
But most navvies came to accept the risk of injury. They were callous when others were hurt. One ganger told a boy whose foot was crushed: ‘Crying’ll do thee no good, lad. Thou’dst better have it cut off above the knee.’ And when a man was himself injured it was the fashion – if contemporary accounts are to be believed, and perhaps they are not always – to display great resignation and fortitude. Theirs was a stoicism very like that of William Huskisson, one of the promoters of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway and a former President of the Board of Trade, after he was run over by a locomotive at the ceremonial opening of that railway in September 1830. Later that afternoon, after he had been given 240 drops of laudanum, he asked how long he had to live, and the surgeon told him at most six hours. Huskisson thanked him, and then made a will, which he signed W Huskisson. ‘It is an extraordinary fact,’ said the Manchester 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.
If navvies had made wills they would have dotted the i’s.
Even the most apparently humane of engineers resigned themselves – or rather their navvies – to the risk of the work. Brunel was once shown a list of 131 navvies on the Great Western, not including those slightly injured, who had been taken to Bath Hospital from 30 September 1839 to 24 June 1841. ‘I think it is a small list,’ he replied,
considering the very heavy works and the immense amount of powder used, and some of the heaviest and most difficult works; I am afraid it does not show the whole extent of accidents incurred in that district.
Asked again if he did not consider that such a list was, on the face of it, startling, he repeated that he did not. The number of accidents was small, considering so many men had been at work for two or three years.
William Huskisson, killed by a train, 1830.
The great number of casualties became something of a burden to hospitals. At Salisbury Infirmary between 23 June 1845 and 30 May 1846 there were fifty-two navvy in-patients.
The weekly cost of keeping each man was twelve shillings, and the total cost to the hospital was £177. Towards this the South-Western Railway Company contributed £5, and the contractor six guineas, leaving the hospital to find the other £165 14s. Not only the men suffered. Boys were often used to lead soil wagons and many died when they fell beneath the wheels. Edward Higham, aged five, was luckier. On 17 July 1845 he was discharged from the Manchester Royal Infirmary after being cured, so the hospital records say, of a fractured skull.
Because the companies and contractors were so mean the labourers had to help themselves by setting up sick clubs. About sixpence a week was collected at the pays, and an injured navvy was allowed twelve shillings a week. Sometimes this was found to be too much as it encouraged a man to stay ill when he could have returned to work, and if a man was suspected of malingering his money was cut to eight shillings a week. If a man died the contractor generally gave something to his wife and children, but not much. ‘If a man is killed,’ said Peto, ‘and I give his wife £5 or something of that kind, she is only temporarily relieved.’ Sometimes the navvies themselves were more generous; on one line of the Midland Railway in the late 1870s the men collected £80 for the widow of one of their gang. Not until 1904, long after there was any great need for it, did a few contractors set up an Aged Navvies’ Pension Fund, giving five shillings a week to navvies over sixty-five and seven shillings and sixpence to married couples. Even then only 200 received these pensions, a derisory number.
In a way, with so many huge works being flung up at so great a rate, it is surprising that men were killed only one or two at a time and not in whole gangs. It had been confidently predicted, when the London and Birmingham Railway was proposed, that in not so many years the viaducts and embankments would crumble and become just so many picturesque ruins to decorate the landscape. But most of the railway works stood, and still stand. There were few disasters.
One of these few was at Ashton under Lyne in 1845, where the Stalybridge to Ashton line was carried over the River Tame by a nine-arch viaduct. At about quarter past three on 19 April, a Saturday afternoon, an old man called William Kemp was sitting on the battlements of the arches watching a group of labourers putting the finishing touches to the viaduct which was due to be opened soon. He saw a crack, stuck his stick into it, and then went down into the valley below to have another look from there. He saw what looked like a steady stream of black mortar falling from one arch. At the same time Henry Morton, a navvy, up on the viaduct, saw the crack too, and pointed it out to his mates. ‘It’s nothing,’ they said, and laughed at it. Beneath them, Kemp heard the men laughing, looked up again, and was knocked over by a baulk of timber falling from the top. This was the beginning. The arches fell one after another, quickly, until they came to the centre of the viaduct; then there was a pause for a second or so, before the arches toppled from the farther bank in orderly succession. Of the twenty or so men on the arches, five jumped or were thrown clear, Henry Morton among them: the rest were buried in the collapsing rubble. It was twenty past three.
The noise was like so many gun-shots. Panic spread through the town of Ashton, women ran about shrieking in the streets and others clawed about in the debris to find their men. The contractor’s other navvies hacked away at the wreckage, trying to rescue their fellows, but the curious crowd so impeded them that James Lord, a magistrate, called in the military. Twenty or thirty men of the 56th Regiment of Foot arrived to keep the mob back. Joseph Fowler, one of the subcontractors, who had been on the second arch, escaped with a sprained ankle and stayed all Saturday night helping to direct the rescue. Another man who escaped ran three miles to Hyde, without stopping, to tell his wife he was all right.
Throughout Saturday 200 navvies toiled at the rescue, but they got in each other’s way and so the numbers were reduced to 150. All through Sunday immense crowds of people congregated on every height and spot commanding a view of the fallen arches and gazed for hours at the labourers digging. The Manchester Guardian reported that 20,000 to 25,000 stood and watched.
Steep barrow run on the Manchester Ship Canal, c.1890.
Gradually the men were found. Richard Critchley and Thomas Brown were brought out alive and not badly hurt. George Collier, aged forty-five, and James Bradbury, aged twenty-three or four, both excavators, were found dead, lying across each other. Abraham Nowell was also dead. He left four children and a widow soon expecting a fifth. William Birchenough survived, and was fit enough to go back to work on Monday. William Hardwick, called Trump, was dead. So was Michael Kelty, an Irishman, who was about to emigrate to America, and only waiting for a letter from the captain of the ship in which he was to cross the Atlantic. His widow, almost distracted, wandered about the ruins during Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. The body was uncovered on Tuesday, at four in the afternoon. Then there was a Yorkshireman, believed to come from some place within two miles of Leeds, perhaps the village of Holbeck, but who had never given his name and was written down in the contractor’s books as ‘York’. Later someone identified the body as that of John Hufferton.
Altogether fifteen died. All the bodies bore marks of severe contusion on the face, but in no instance was the head crushed or the features mutilated. On Sunday, 27 April, the workmen assembled in Park Parade, Ashton, at ten o’clock, where they were joined by the engineer and manager of the company, and then marched to the parish church to hear t
he Rev. J. Handforth preach on a text from the thirty-third chapter of Ezekiel, ‘Say unto them, as I live, saith the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked: but that the wicked turn from his way and live: turn ye, turn ye, from your evil ways; for why will ye die, O house of Israel?’ The navvies were all neatly dressed, behaved with great propriety, and seemed to feel the force of the gentleman’s statement that he had no pleasure in the death of their colleagues and that they themselves should turn from their wicked ways. They went on building the railway.
Why had the viaduct fallen? There were reports that it had been built only fifteen yards north of a coal pit which had been abandoned twenty-five years before, and that the foundations might have subsided into old pit workings. Not true, said the railway engineers. The pit was there, but everything was safe enough. No one was to blame. The company said it had been up to the engineers to build the viaduct, the engineers said it was up to the contractors, and the contractors in turn said the engineers had supervised the work anyway, and had been satisfied enough with it. The report of three experts given at the inquest was damning. ‘The rubble stone filling,’ the report said, ‘together with the improper workmanship, were alike unfitted to the purpose to which they were destined.’ The piers had been erected with an outer shell of ashlar stone, and the whole of the interior was a mass of rubble and scabblings, neither bedded with care, nor flushed, nor grouted, but full of cracks. ‘Not the slightest adhesion had taken place between the mortar and the masonry, in any one part.’ The coroner was unhappy. What, he asked, if such an accident had happened at a time when thousands of the workpeople of Ashton had been packed into an excursion train on its way to Manchester on a holiday? The jury brought in a rider which spoke of negligence in both construction and superintendence, but their formal verdict was ‘accidental death’. The railway works were put back by three months but they went on.
The Railway Navvies Page 7