The Railway Navvies

by Terry Coleman

  All this needs to be put in perspective. In those days beer was much more freely drunk, particularly by the labouring classes, than now. On a railway works, where the water was not good, beer might be expected to be the customary drink. But, even so, any figures must be only cautiously accepted. At the best they are estimates. More likely they are guesses, and often guesses by teetotal clergymen who had a motive in exaggerating.

  But drink, certainly, was one of the navvies’ consolations. On one occasion at least they had champagne, at the ceremony of digging the first sod at Yeovil Pen Mill station in 1846. When a line was being made near Ashford, Kent, a strong wooden building was put up, known as The Cage, in which tiresome navvies were locked up. This did not deprive them of their drink. Friends poked pipes through the barred windows, and the prisoners sucked in their beer. All sorts of events were an excuse for a drink – pay days, of course, and funerals – and where there was no ready pretext one could be invented. The navvy custom of putting a man in the gauging box was only an excuse for a drink. If a man broke any of the traditional and unwritten laws existing among his fellow workmen, if he flouted his landlady’s rules, or committed a breach of the navvies’ freemasonry, the cry would go up, ‘Put him in the gauging box.’ A rough court was then constituted, the offender solemnly arraigned and invariably found guilty, fined, often heavily, and the money spent in drinks all round, or else put in an accumulating fund until there was enough for a big drink on a day off.

  An ale seller on the Manchester Ship Canal, c.1890.

  One navvy story crops up again and again, slighdy different each time. One version, ascribed to Sir Francis Head, tells the tale of a shanty landlady at Hillmorton, near Rugby, a woman of very sharp business practice who boasted that no navvy should ever do her down. One morning a labourer walked in carrying a huge stone bottle and asked for half a gallon of gin. She poured in the gin and then asked a high price, which he declined to pay. Right, she said, pour it back. Quietly he returned into her measure the half-gallon, and walked off. But since he had previously poured into his bottle half a gallon of water, both navvy and landlady eventually found themselves with half a gallon of gin and water.

  But more often it was the navvy who was done. Brewers would sometimes allow gangers a commission on every barrel of ale they could induce the men to drink, and the beer consequently cost dearer. This was only a mild form of exploitation. A much greater evil was truck.

  Truck is payment not in money but in goods or in tickets which can be exchanged for goods. On the face of it this seems reasonable enough. Bands of men working together miles from the nearest towns, away from the ordinary markets, could perhaps be best supplied by their employers, who could bring up the food in bulk, distribute it among the men, and deduct the cost from their wages. This way the men could get food cheaper than they could buy it singly. But this supposes honest dealing. In fact, truck became a system of plunder. Often contractors made more profit from truck than from the railway works themselves. Edwin Chadwick, the social reformer, said that contracts were often undertaken at prices which a competent engineer or contractor must have known to be too low to yield a profit. He gave the example of one piece of work taken by some contractors of a sort not much above the labourers they employed, who would lose by the work itself, but make more than £7,000 out of the truck of beer and bad food to the workmen. Here the interests of the contractors in the sale of beer were greater than in the proper execution of the work, and so their navvies often worked in a drunken state, and were encouraged to. Peto also knew of contractors who made their greatest profit from truck. One such man, he said, had made £1,400 in four weeks in this way.

  The racket was run like this. The men were paid at long intervals, generally once a month. They were not given to saving, and more often than not had no money of their own until they were paid, so in the weeks before the pay they had to live on credit. If a man was earning, say, five shillings a day he could, at the end of his first day on the works, ask the ganger for a sub, a subsistence allowance, up to the value of the money he had earned. This sub was given in the form of a ticket which could be exchanged for goods only at the truck shop, where the man was swindled left, right, and centre. First, the goods offered there were generally bad – rank butter, poor bacon, watered beer – but the man had no choice. The ticket was good there and nowhere else, so he could shop there or starve. Second, prices were higher and short weight was given: again the man had no choice but to pay. Third, the ticket was often not worth its face value even in tommy goods: it was the practice to deduct a commission, up to 10 per cent, so that the navvy’s five-shilling chit was really worth only four-and-sixpence. The deducted sixpence was the ganger’s or contractor’s cut. So the navvy lived on truck for a month until the pay day, when the value of all the tickets he had received was taken away from the wages due to him. Often he was left with little. On the North British lines in the mid forties, where masons were earning four shillings a day, they were so robbed by the shop-owners that at the end of a month they often had less than ten shillings to come in cash.

  Benjamin Bailey, an unsuccessful sub-contractor who once kept a truck shop on the London and Birmingham Railway, said he did not consider a sovereign worth more than fifteen shillings at such shops. If they wanted cash before the pay day men would sell the tickets they got from the ganger, but they did not expect to get more than two shillings or half a crown for a three- or four-shilling ticket. Often tickets were accepted at pubs. John Deacon, another failed sub-contractor who turned publican, kept a house at Ramsgate where he took tickets from the men and cashed them by arrangement with the shopkeepers. To compensate himself for his trouble he charged the men a halfpenny a pot extra.

  At a small shop a man’s name was just written down in the shopman’s book, but at larger works tickets were printed. Here is the form of a truck ticket used on a Scottish line in 1846:

  Borthwick…………184…………

  Mr Govan,

  At the request of.………… No…………, give him goods to the amount of…………, to account, or in advance of wages which may be owed to him by Messrs Wilson and Moor, and place the same to their debit.

  Truck shops, sometimes also called tally shops or tommy shops, were owned either directly by the contractor or subcontractor or were let out to shopkeepers on the understanding that a certain proportion of the profits went back to the contractor. Systems varied, but the effect of all of them was to exploit the navvy for the greater profit of his employers. Even if a man had ready money it would not help him. Labourers were often taken on only on the say-so of the tally shopkeeper, and a man would find that somehow or other he could not keep his job unless he took the ganger’s tickets and spent them at the tommy. But all this was done in an under-the-counter way. As Chadwick said, contractors and even railway company directors had been seen in the back parlours of tally shops looking over the account books. But who could swear that they were not looking over their own accounts, or performing some act of disinterested kindness to the shopkeepers? How to prove what was well known, that they owned the places?

  The law offered no remedy. Truck Acts had made the system illegal in factories, though because there was no inspection the factory owners continued to do as they pleased, but even these ineffectual acts did not extend to railway works. The men had no legal redress, as four navvies working at Barnes on the Richmond Railway found in November 1845 when they attempted to take out summonses against a ganger called Davis, who had taken them on at two shillings and sixpence a day and then refused to pay them in anything but tickets for his tommy shop. They had to eat, so at first they accepted the tickets, but then they demanded to be paid in money. John Nagle, who spoke for the four men, told the magistrate that he was certain one shilling in money was worth more than two shillings in tickets, and asked the court to order Davis to pay in cash. The magistrate explained that he could do little. They had accepted the tickets and that was that. He could issue a summons re
quiring Davis to pay cash in future, but that would cost two shillings in legal fees. The men said they had not got a farthing in the world and left the court. Even if they had got their summonses they would have been hardly better off, because Davis could thereupon have dismissed them.

  A more effective answer was to strike. At the village of Quidhampton, two miles from Salisbury, navvies were given tickets to the value as they supposed of about half their wages, but when they came to be paid some were found to have less than a shilling coming to them. So they struck, and left to go to the Basingstoke and Salisbury line which was then being started. This was in April 1846, and the men were lucky, because it was a time of great railway-building in the south and south-west, when men were scarce.

  Many liberal-minded people deprecated the evils of truck. Brunel did, but he was not a contractor, and they were the ones who stood to gain by truck and who therefore defended it against what they called interference in their private affairs. Some reformers did what they could to put an end to the evils of the system. But it was not easy. Peto, though he detested truck and would not allow it on his own contracts, doubted whether the system could be done away with. He said,

  It has been the custom for the last hundred years, ever since they commenced making canals, to pay the men in this way; and I think it requires a very strong hand indeed to bring about a transformation.

  Nevertheless, he did his best to suppress the racket. In 1854, when he was one of the Members of Parliament for Norwich, he supported the Payment of Wages Bill, which was designed to make the Truck Acts more effective. He told the House that when he first became connected with public works the payment of money was the exception and not the rule, but from twenty-five years’ experience he could conceive no reason why there should be a departure from the rule that a man’s wages should be paid in the current coin of the realm. The firms with which he had been connected had employed 30,000 navvies in England, Canada, Denmark, Norway, and various parts of the Continent, and never paid their wages other than in money. Let Parliament make the Act as stringent as it could.

  A few years earlier John Roberton, a Manchester surgeon, had also urged rigorous laws against truck. Many contractors, he said, made a profit, often an enormous profit, out of the bowels, as it were, of their navvies. The Government should teach such people that the law was their master, and had an arm long enough to compel them to cease this plundering of their own workmen.

  But throughout the century truck continued to flourish to the greater glory of the contractors. Truck Acts were passed but never properly enforced. Men on railway works continued to have no option but to take their ticket to the tommy where they paid long prices for short weight, and where the food, anyway, was mostly tommy rot.

  6

  Riots and Randies

  During these trials the utmost interest prevailed in court – and among the spectators were to be seen a great number of navigators. They seemed much surprised at the severity of the sentence on Hobday – fifteen years transportation for maiming another navvy – but that worthy turned around and laughed at them. The prisoner Hobday is a remarkable man, and may be considered a type of the class to which he belongs. His stature is rather below the common height, but his broad frame gives evidence of immense strength. His countenance is forbidding in the extreme. Every feature indicates habitual crime.

  For evil passions, cherished long,

  Have ploughed them with expressions strong,

  while his rough matted hair completed the aspect of the finished ruffian. We understand he has said that for nine years he has never slept in a bed, or worn a hat; that his custom was to put on his boots when new, and never remove them until they fell to pieces, and his clothes were treated very much in the same way, except that his shirt was changed once a week.

  Carlisle Patriot, 27 February 1846

  The Patriot was not a bad newspaper, but these were difficult times up near the Scottish border, and in printing this hodgepodge of abuse and hearsay the editor was only expressing popular feeling. Navvy riots had become habitual, had constantly to be put down by the military, and the local population lived so much in fear that it must have seemed no more than reasonable to condemn a navvy because, among other things, he had never worn a hat for nine years.

  Throughout the previous year the railways had been extending through the English border country and into Scotland. A third of the navvies were Irish, a third Scots, and a third English: that was the beginning of the trouble. Easy-going Roman Catholic Irish, Presbyterian Scots, and impartially belligerent English. The Irish did not look for a fight. As the Scottish Herald reported, they camped, with their women and children, in some of the most secluded glades, and although most of the huts showed an amazing disregard of comfort, ‘the hereditary glee of their occupants seemed not a whit impaired’. This glee enraged the Scots, who then added to their one genuine grievance (the fact that the Irishmen would work for less pay and so tended to bring down wages) their sanctified outrage that the Irish should regard the Sabbath as a holiday, a day of recreation on which they sang and lazed about. As for the Scots, all they did on a Sunday was drink often and pray occasionally, and it needed only an odd quart of whisky and a small prayer to make them half daft with Presbyterian fervour. They then beat up the godless Irish. The Irish defended themselves and this further annoyed the Scots, so that by the middle of 1845 there was near civil war among the railway labourers. The English, mainly from Yorkshire and Lancashire, would fight anyone, but they preferred to attack the Irish. The contractors tried to keep the men, particularly the Irish and Scots, apart, employing them on different parts of the line, but the Scots were not so easily turned from their religious purposes. At Kinghorn, near Dunfermline, these posters were put up around the town:

  NOTICE IS GIVEN

  that all the Irish men on the line of railway in Fife Share must be off the grownd and owt of the countey on Monday 11th of this month or els we must by the strenth of our armes and a good pick shaft put them off

  Your humbel servants, Schots men.

  Letters were also sent to the contractors and sub-contractors. One read:

  Sir, – You must warn all your Irish men to be of the grownd on Monday the 11 of this month at 12 o’clock or els we must put them by forse

  FOR WE

  ARE DETERMINED

  TO DOW IT.

  The sheriff turned up and warned the Scots against doing anything of the sort. Two hundred navvies met on the beach, but in the face of a warning from the sheriff they proved not so determined to do it, and the Irish were left in peace for a while.

  But in other places the riots were savage. Seven thousand men were working on the Caledonian line, and 1,100 of these were paid monthly at a village called Lockerby, in Dumfriesshire. Their conduct was a great scandal to the inhabitants of a quiet Scottish village. John Baird, Deputy Clerk of the Peace for the county, lamented that the local little boys got completely into the habits of the men – ‘drinking, swearing, fighting, and smoking tobacco and all those sorts of things’. Mr Baird thought that on a pay day, with constant drunkenness and disturbance, the village was quite uninhabitable.

  A minority of the navvies were Irish, and they were attacked now and again, as was the custom. After one pay day a mob of 300 or 400, armed with pitchforks and scythes, marched on the Irish, who were saved only because the magistrates intervened and kept both sides talking until a force of militia came up from Carlisle, twenty-three miles away.

  The worst of the riots were to come a few months later, at Penrith in Cumberland, and at Gorebridge, ten miles from Edinburgh, both in February 1846. The Penrith disturbances started in a trivial way. Reports conflict, but it seems that an Irish navvy was told by an English ganger to use a shovel instead of a pick. He refused to be ordered about by an Englishman, and this so inflamed national feeling that the English, who were in the majority, promptly drove all the Irish off the excavations, wrecked and burned their huts, and turned out their wives and
children into a cold February to find shelter where they could. Next day 500 Irishmen assembled from neighbouring works around Penrith and marched with their shovels and picks towards the English, to avenge the defeat of the day before. The English prudently fled, so that when the Irish came to the navvy encampment there was no one there. They then acted with great moderation – not burning and destroying as the English had done, but just resigning themselves to the sad fact that there was no one to fight – and returned to Penrith. On the way back they met a couple of stray Englishmen, but these they let go, saying they would not be bothered with only one or two.