The Railway Navvies

by Terry Coleman

  Generally, though they were brutalized by constant risk and death, the men were fastidious in their mourning and made an event of a funeral. It was sometimes wondered why men so coarsened should show such grief as they commonly did for their dead comrades. One man was killed on a beautiful summer evening. The weight of earth that fell on him snapped in two a knife he was carrying in his pocket, though the man himself, when they dug him out, was scarcely grazed. It was, said John Shedlock, engineer, a light evening and the men could have worked several hours longer, but so strong was their sympathy with their dead mate that they refused to, and went home. Mr Shedlock was astonished.

  There is one less gentle tale of a ganger on the London and North-Western Railway in the late 1830s who raffled the body of one of his navvies. Nearly 300 men joined in, at sixpence a time, the proceeds to go towards a drinking bout. The raffle took place, and so did the revel, but the man who won the body did not welcome it, and the funeral, after a fortnight’s delay, was performed by the parish. It is not clear how true this story is, because it was recounted, more than forty years later, by the Rev. D. W. Barrett, who was doing his best to suppress drunkenness among the navvies by recounting horrific tales of the loathsome results of drink. If it is true it is untypical. Navvies were usually devout at a funeral. On 27 April 1846 a young man called Clerrett was working as a tip-driver on the Southampton and Dorset Railway at Canford Bridge, in Dorset, when he fell so that the horse and wagon crushed him to death. He was only seventeen. At the funeral nearly 140 navvies, each wearing a white favour in his coat, followed the body to the grave. ‘The becoming demeanour of these stalwart and untutored men,’ said a newspaper report, ‘bespoke of the utmost sincerity of regret at the untimely fate of their comrade.’ The contractor arranged the funeral, and the men agreed to pay for it out of their next week’s wages.

  But what happened after a funeral was often a different story. In the same week as Clerrett’s death another young man died on the works at Maiden Newton in the same county. The Poole and Dorsetshire Herald said:

  A large number of the fellow workmen of the deceased followed the body, but although the funeral was conducted in the most impressive manner by the Hon. and Rev. W. H. Scott, rector, but little effect was produced on some, as at twelve o’clock the same night, a body of these persons made a most wanton attack on various persons connected with the White Horse Inn, breaking the windows and all things capable of being destroyed. Mr W. Thomas the constable was assailed and so much injured as to require medical assistance. Other persons attempting to keep the peace were also beaten. We are sorry to say that the neighbourhood is in danger of constant disturbance by these lawless fellows, and unless an efficient force be kept near other outrages may be expected.

  There are many such stories, of mourners being so drunk they nearly fell into the grave themselves, of funeral celebrations conducted to the terror of the neighbouring villagers, but at the same time there was attributed to the navvy a gentle, gruff, romantic reputation of being friendly and courteous towards corpses. In Self-Help, in a chapter entitled, ‘The True Gentleman’, Samuel Smiles tells the story of the Emperor of Austria who found himself strolling about the streets of Vienna at the time of a cholera epidemic, and encountered a corpse on a litter with no mourner. The relations were too afraid of the infection to attend the funeral. ‘Then we,’ said the Emperor, ‘will supply their place; for none of my poor people should go to the grave without that last mark of respect.’ Smiles then comments that fine though that illustration might be of the qualities of the gentleman, he could match it with another equally good, of two English navvies in Paris. One day a hearse was observed ascending the steep Rue de Clichy on its way to Montmartre, bearing a coffin of poplar wood with its old corpse. ‘Not a soul followed, not even the living dog of the dead man, if he had one.’ The day was rainy and dismal; passers-by lifted the hat, as was usual when a funeral passed, and that was all. At length it passed two English navvies, who found themselves in Paris on their way from Spain.

  A right feeling spoke from beneath their serge jackets. ‘Poor wretch’ said one to the other, ‘no one follows him; let us follow.’ And the two took off their hats, and walked bareheaded after the corpse of a stranger to the cemetery of Montmartre.

  5

  Shanties and Truck

  Navvies not only worked together; they also lived together. Even a thousand labourers working today on one site do not become a single body of men because they leave work at the end of the day and go home. But the railway navvies cut across open country, miles from anywhere, and after work they returned to their own shanty towns, away from the settled pattern of the villages from which they had come perhaps years before, and far from the civilizing and sobering influence of family and home.

  The clearest picture of shanty life in the early days is given by a boy, whose name is unknown, who ran away from home in March 1835 and tramped thirty miles to the nearest railway works. Later he wrote about his experiences in the magazine Household Words. At first he was taken on, as boys frequently were, as a tip-driver, but he drove horse and truck together over the tiphead, and got the sack. Again he went off on the tramp, until he was employed as a bucket-steerer in one of the shafts of the Watford Tunnel, and later as a member of a regular gang of navvies there. There were forty men in this gang, each with a nickname – Happy Jack, Long Bob, Dusty Tom, Billygoat, Frying Pan, Redhead, and others. The boy, who because of his new clothes and new tools was called Dandy Dick, was put to work with Kick Daddy, made friends with Canting George, and they all worked under a ganger called Bullhead.

  The boy himself lived in a small hut, but he knew the larger shanties well. Most were built of stone, brick, mud, and timber, roofed with tile and tarpaulin, and consisted of one large oblong room. There were sixty gangs working on the tunnel and almost all of them lived in these shanties, which the boy called dens of wild men. Each shanty was looked after by an old crone who was expected to cook, make beds, and wash and mend the clothes of her masters, who beat her fearfully, mostly for entertainment. These women took part in all the obscenity and blasphemy, and lent a hand in the fighting. Their features were disfigured, their heads and hands cut and bandaged, and they were quite at home.

  Watford Tunnel on the London and Birmingham, by J.C. Bourne.

  In his spare time the boy was teaching George Hatley to read, and one Sunday morning in early May, when it was too wet to go to church, he strolled over to George’s shanty and asked for him. The man was out, but Old Peg, the presiding crone, said he would be back by eleven o’clock. The boy said he would wait, the woman cursed him in a way intended to be very friendly, and he sat down on a three-legged stool and looked around the place. The open door was about midway in one of the walls, with a window on either side. Near one of the windows were rough benches, and on these sprawled four or five navvies who were already up. Two others were lying on the earth floor playing cards, and another was sitting on a stool mending his boots. They all nodded to the boy and offered him a drink. Near the other window stood three barrels of beer, all in tap, the keys of which were chained to a strong leather girdle round Peg’s waist. She was the tapster and sat in an old armchair near the barrels.

  The opposite end of the shanty was fitted up with bunks from floor to roof like the between-decks of an emigrant ship, and in each bunk lay one or two men, drunk or asleep, with their heads pillowed on their kit. This was their knock-off Sunday, the one Sunday in perhaps two or three on which they did not work. Nestling with many of the navvies were dogs and litters of puppies, mostly bullhounds or lurchers, which the men used for fighting or poaching.

  One end of the room was a kitchen. There was a rough dresser in one corner, and a rickety table on which stood tin, wood, or earthenware dishes, each holding a cup, basin, or bowl. Against the wall was fixed a double row of cupboards or lockers, one for each man, and below them, on hooks, were several large pots and pans. Over the central fireplace hung half a dozen guns. In anot
her corner was a large copper, beneath which a fire was roaring. Old Peg, muttering and spluttering, threw on coals to keep it boiling. Hanging over this copper were several strings, which disappeared into the steaming water. To the top of each string a bit of wood was attached, and the boy asked what this was for.

  ‘Them,’ said Peg in her broad Lancashire dialect, and taking one stick in her hand and pulling its string out of the copper, ‘why sith’ee lad, this bit o’ stick has four nicks in’t, well it’s Billygoat’s dinner, he’s a bed yond. Now this,’ taking up another stick with six nicks, ‘is that divil Redhead’s, and this,’ seizing a third with ten nicks, ‘is Happy Jack’s. Well, thee knowst he’s got a bit o’ beef; Redhead’s nowt but taters, he’s a gradely brute is Redhead. And Billygoat’s got a pun or so o’ bacon an’ a cabbage. Now, thee sees, I’ve got a matter o’ twenty dinners or so to bile every day, which I biles in nets, and if I dinna fix em in this rooad, I sud ha niver tell where to find em, and then there ud be sich a row as niver yet was heered on.’

  Soon after this, Red Whippet came in bringing with him a leveret, which he tossed to Peg. ‘Get it ready an put it along o’ the rest, and look sharp or thee’s head may be broken.’ Then the man took off his jacket and boots and tumbled into a berth.

  Such shanties were more civilized than many. On the South Devon Railway at Totnes in the middle forties the huts were made of mud or turf. The most usual way of throwing them up was to burrow a short way into a bank, so that the back and part of the sides of the hut would be formed by solid earth, and then make a roof of spare rafters and timbers. On the Hawick branch of the North British line twenty to thirty men slept in huts twenty-eight feet by twelve, two or three navvies sharing a bed. Alexander Ramsay, an engineer, said that the huts were often verminous; he knew of one man who had found twenty-four fleas on himself. There was no separation between the beds. In one slept a man and his wife and one or two children; in another a couple of young men; in a third in the same hut another man and his wife and family. In some of the huts, he said, a humane man would hardly put a pig. As late as 1887, at Brere Ferris, near Devonport, some old hulks of men-o’-war were bought by the contractors and towed up river for the navvies to live in. To this day, near Four Marks in Hampshire, a large wooden building stands by the side of the A.31, only a hundred yards or so from the London to Southampton line. It is now a pub, and its signboard bears the name of ‘The Shant’.

  The luckier navvies sometimes found billets in the villages along the line, but they were still fearfully crowded and overcharged, and were apt, in return, to slope off, that is leave without paying. Because of this the landladies sometimes asked to be paid direct by the contractor rather than take the chance that the navvies would forget to pay for lodgings. The navvies opposed this. Richard Pearce, who in 1846 had been a labourer for thirty-two years, having started on the Lancaster Canal, was asked by the 1846 Commons Committee if it might not be better for the masters to pay for the men’s lodgings.

  Navvies outside navvy hut on the Great Central, 1899, the last main line to be built in England.

  He was downright in his answer. ‘That would not do at all.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because some of the landlords’ wives would take one half of your victuals, if they were sure to get your money. They are not all honest, the lodging-keepers are not.’

  ‘On the other hand, the landlady is sometimes sloped?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ argued Pearce, thinking a little sloping a good thing, ‘there is such a case as this, which is, a landlady taking the lodger’s victuals, and if the man is going to pay the woman as well she would be paid twice.’

  Later in the century the navvies who drove railways over wild, open country – in the north-west of England and the Highlands of Scotland – lived as barbarously as they had ever done. Hovels remained hovels. But on lines taken through populated country, where there were at least villages along the line and towns not too far away, things got better. When the Manton to Kettering line was begun by the Midland Railway in the mid 1870s the navvies did not tramp in with nothing but two shirts and two shillings; they came in organized train loads with their families and possessions. At the railway stations little knots gathered together discussing the best way to get to the new works, or crowded round railway officials asking directions. Bundles of bedding, household stuff, furniture, bedsteads, frying-pans, birdcages, prams, and clocks were strewn over the platforms. There was not enough room for all in the villages, so soon the hills and dales for fifteen miles echoed with the sound of mattocks, hammers, and axes as the men built their own hut encampments. Hundreds of huts sprang up, mostly of wood, but a few of earth or bricks. A cluster of six appeared by the roadside here, a group of fifty across the hilltop there, another fifty in a valley by the riverside, and a little colony in the midst of a wood. Seaton Hill was crowned with a cluster which was given the name of Cyprus. Along the fifteen miles of the new line 2,500 men, not counting their families, lived in huts, and another 1,000 or 1,500 in villages. Prices went up. Trade followed the navvies. Brewers’ drays, hucksters, packmen, cheapjacks, milkmen, book-hawkers, shoemakers, tailors, and likeness-takers descended on the works.

  The Rev. D. W. Barrett, who was curate in charge of the Bishop of Peterborough’s railway mission, described the encampments in detail. While the huts were there, he said, they gave the countryside a colonial flavour. They might have been set in the Canadian backwoods or the Australian bush rather than in the English Midlands. The huts varied. Some were no more than primitive burrowed caverns in the side of a bank, covered over with bits of tarpaulin scrounged around the works. Others were small timber sheds, in which the men often sat and smoked as they waited to go down the tunnel shafts.

  Then there were those shacks with four walls of turf, made by piling sods of earth one on top of the other up to a height of about six feet, and by stretching across the top a sagging roof of timber. It appeared to Mr Barrett that all these huts needed was the hills of Connemara in the background and Paddy and his pig at the door to make the scene complete – and then you could have imagined yourself in what he called the wild regions of the Emerald Isle. Indeed, he said, the pig was often there. He found one of these hovels which had been made into a two-storeyed dwelling, though not by the usual method of adding a floor. The occupants had erected a huge wooden meat safe and hung it from the rafters. This was reached by a movable ladder. When he asked what it was he was told, ‘Oh, that be where the brats sleep.’ It was a brat cage.

  The largest huts were the shanties, wooden erections whose timbers were tar coated and then perhaps whitewashed, and whose roofs were made of felt. These large huts were divided into three parts. The central hall, with doors at the front and back, was the common living-room for the whole family and the lodgers. To the left was the bedroom of the man, his wife, and his children; and to the right the lodgers’ room. Some shanties could hold ten people, others many more. All were crowded, as many as 120 being crammed into a building that was meant for eighty. When the work was pressing on and extra men were taken on for a few weeks, the shanty-keepers did a great trade, charging fourpence a night for a bed, a penny to sleep on a table, and a halfpenny for the floor.

  Navvy carrying his dinner. From Punch, 1855.

  As you walked into one of these wooden huts you would see half a dozen empty spirit bottles, and walls covered with cuttings from Police News and other penny dreadfuls, or else papered with patchwork squares from a paper-hanger’s sample book. Birdcages and boots hung from the beams. In some, not many, said Mr Barrett, you might have thought you had walked into an officer’s quarters in an army camp because of the handsome clocks, cases of stuffed birds and animals, small objects of vertu, sewing machines, and musical instruments. This was the respectable side of the navvy society. These better huts were often named: The West End, The Hermitage, or Rose Cottage. One encampment took its civilization so far as to support a resident poetess whose verses were printed and cir
culated but not read. None survive.

  Whether they lived in ditches, shanties, or Rose Cottage, the navvies ate and drank enormously. One, policeman who visited the works near Edinburgh in 1846 remarked that provisions were abundant. He saw fifty loaves in one hut.When they wanted some bread they would, he complained (and this seems to have offended his Scots frugality), just take a new loaf and cut into it. Joseph Firbank mentions quite casually that his navvies consumed on average two pounds of meat, two pounds of bread, and five quarts of ale a day. He once knew a man drink seventeen quarts in an afternoon. Rawlinson said that on the London and Birmingham Railway crowds of people followed the navvies to sell them ale and whisky, and that some of the men carried their own kegs round with them.

  Ale was the most common drink: whisky and gin, when the money would stretch to them, the favourites. Thomas Beggs of the Scottish Temperance League was disheartened to find, on the Muirkirk and Ayr Railway at Crumnock, that the publicans were thriving as never before, one boasting that he had recently had the pleasure of ordering a 125-gallon cask of whisky. The publicans near a settlement looked on the navvies as their natural victims and did all they could, by doctoring their beer to make it seem stronger, by offering prizes, or hiring music and getting up clubs, to induce the men to spend more. Some men would sell their shovels for cider: and there was one woman publican who would pull the boots off a drunken man’s feet and take them instead of money when he called for more beer and could not pay. Beer could drink up almost all a man’s pay. One navvy, in a fit of Christian remorse, told a woman missionary how beer had dominated his life. The man had first worked on a farm, but had fallen to drink and dissolution, and by the time he was eighteen he was so desperate, having pawned all his clothes and being too ashamed to beg from his parents, that he enlisted in the Royal Marines for five years. But the Marines found him to be a bad character and an habitual drunkard and turned him out as a disgrace to the corps, so there was nothing left for him but nawying and more drink. ‘In fact I was in one hut for two and a half years,’ he said, ‘and was not sober one week of the whole time. We have been at many other places, too, and I have starved my wife and children and clothed them in rags, all through the cursed drink.’ Another man told the same missionary that he had saved £212, and then spent all but a shilling of it on drink in one month at Barnsley. This was in the early eighties. On the Kettering and Manton line it was estimated that in one year 312,000 gallons of beer and 5,200 gallons of spirits were drunk, at a cost of £36,000 altogether. Williams, the railway historian, said in 1852 that a sum equal to £1,000 a mile on all the railways of Britain had been spent on drink.