‘Will you describe what a randy is?’
‘A randy is a drunken frolic.’
‘Which not uncommonly terminates in a serious fight?’
‘Yes.’
Robert Rawlinson, engineer, described how, when the London and Birmingham Railway was being built, the men went off on drawn-out randies:
In Northamptonshire, after midsummer, the annual feasts, first in one village, and then in another, go on for three months. Nothing would keep these men from the feasts, and joining in revelry and drunkenness, as long as they had a farthing to spare.
These were exceptionally long and lively randies, but contractors came to accept that after a monthly pay the men would not be back at work in any numbers until they had drunk themselves broke, and that generally took four or five days.
During a randy a wise man kept away. The Rev. James Gillies, chaplain on the notorious Lancaster and Carlisle line, that of the Penrith riots, usually took three services on a Sunday which he conducted in the tap-room of a place built for the navvies to drink in after the pays. It could hold 160 and the innkeeper kindly gave him the use of it on Sundays. But not every Sunday, as Mr Gillies explained: ‘On the Sabbath after the monthly pay, I thought it prudent not to go near it; it was generally pretty full of those who were in a state of intemperance.’
The several days of a randy were devoted to a celebration of drunkenness, fighting, poaching, robbery, and, occasionally, high-spirited murder. The drunkenness was everywhere, and a sort of prize-fighting was common. Matches were arranged, preferably between men with a grudge against each other, and the navvies assembled to see the match fought with bare fists and until one man could go on no longer. These fights were generally long and bloody, but the fun at one scrap in the Marley Tunnel, on the South Devon line, was short. The two opponents were stripped and ready for the combat when one of them fell dead before a blow was struck.
Poaching was sport for the men, and helped provide the fresh meat that was seldom to be got at the tommy. Many navvies kept lurcher dogs and a few owned shotguns. At Bedfordshire Quarter Sessions, in the late 1870s, Mr Magniac, a magistrate, spoke urgently about a serious evil. The landowners in the district were, he said, practically at the mercy of bands of navvies who were accustomed to go about in groups of eighteen or twenty, with guns and dogs, breaking down hedges and fences, and poaching. At other times they amused themselves by occasional assaults on the clergyman of one parish and on a building used for divine service. The men, he complained, were obviously not properly supervised – look at the way they were housed, 300 to 500 of them camped on swampy ground, with pools of green water in front of their wretched huts.
Landowners – many of whom were not in any case the best friends of the railway, whose construction they had sometimes bitterly opposed – often sat on the local bench of magistrates and imposed harsh sentences on the few poachers who were caught, thus doing one more thing to create a thriving enmity between the navvies and the ordinary people of the countryside.
When they were drunk packs of navvies were apt to steal or destroy for the delight of it, and at times their depredations were distinctly witty. Towards the end of 1845 at Katrine, on the Muirkirk and Ayr line, the Scottish population was enraged, and the navvy camps vastly entertained, when some railway men enticed a wandering tinman into a pub, got him drunk, and then ran away with eleven shillings from his pockets and with the new shoes off his feet, for which they substituted a worn old pair of boots. And at Ridgeway, in Devon, when a party of thirty navvies fancied themselves overcharged at the Old Ship Inn, they threatened to pull the whole place down, and it took the under-sheriff of the county and his forces to stop them.
As the missionary had said, more drunken than vicious. But sometimes the mischief turned savage, as it did in June 1846 on the Leeds and Thirsk Railway. On one section there was no pub near the works, so the shanty owners began to make and sell beer without a licence. These mushroom beer houses were run by the men themselves and not by the contractors, who were therefore taking no cut, and when the men began to spend more and more of the day drinking their own cut-price brew, and less and less working on the line, the employers, fearing that the contract would never be finished on time, gave orders that the illicit traffic should stop, and locked up the barrels. The navvies were contumacious, broke the dens open, staved in the barrels, and drank the lot. Having got fearfully drunk, they then fell to fighting, to the terror of the inhabitants of the village of Wescoe Hill, one of whom told a newspaper reporter that they were all ‘frightened out of their wits at the horrible noise and reckless cruelty with which the men prosecuted their savage conflict’. There were hundreds all fighting together in a field of mowing grass, their blood flowing in torrents and reminding the villagers, as they afterwards put it, of what they had heard of the Battle of Waterloo. When the navvies had enough they wandered off, leaving a field of ruined grass and one dead man, whom a villager, Joseph Cunliffe, of Otley, found lying on a heap of stones. The navvy had two terribly bruised eyes and his face was cut in an awful manner. No one knew at first who he was or where he came from, but then one of his mates came forward. The poor man, he said, had been drinking all the week, with the rest of them, but on Wednesday things went a bit far and his companions amused themselves by stripping him and pumping water all over him. Then they blacked him all over with soot, and carried him about for a show. After that they sluiced him down once more, then blacked him a second time, and in the fight he was forgotten and left in the field, where he died.
Samuel Morton Peto, the great contractor, 1847.
This ready brutality is one side of the popular view of the navvy character. Many railway historians and newspaper reporters (like the one who wrote the report of the Carlisle Patriot given at the beginning of this chapter) seem unable to mention navvies without using words like forbidding countenance, evil passions, finished ruffian. This you might call the Chartist-rabble doctrine. But at the same time there are other writers who, whenever they describe navvies, write of giant thews, right spirit, and fine fellows. This you might call the dignity-of-labour doctrine, and it stresses particularly the loyalty of these men to each other and to their employers. Peto said:
There is a feeling amongst all these men exceedingly creditable to them; any man who comes there, and is at all in want, his brother navvies will take care he shall have plenty of tommy. They will divide their dinner with him.
It was this same virtuous loyalty, leading men to help each other and rally round the common cause, that was one cause of many virtuous riots, particularly when the cause was religious or patriotic. And even when the men’s loyalty was not to themselves but (and this was accounted an altogether higher thing) to their employers, the contractors, it often turned to violence.
Take the Norwich election riots of 1847. There were three candidates for the two seats: the Marquis of Douro, later to become the Duke of Wellington, put up by the Conservatives; Serjeant Parry, who stood as a Nonconformist; and Peto the contractor, whose supporters called him a Freetrader. The election campaign was long and vigorous, and Peto, whose liberal reputation had preceded him, became a favourite. On polling day, Thursday, 29 July, the state of the voting, which was in those days announced at hourly intervals, showed him to be leading comfortably, with the Marquis second, and Serjeant Parry nowhere. As four o’clock drew near, the hour at which the poll would close, the roads in the centre of the city were crowded with thousands of people who had come to hear the result proclaimed. About this time a group of 200 navvies arrived from the Eastern Counties Railway where they were working for Peto. They paraded through the town, cheering their employer and boasting about his success, when a number of Parry’s supporters, seeing their own candidate had lost, decided to take it out on the navvies, whom they began to hoot and hiss. Someone threw a stone, which struck a passer-by on the head, and this started a running riot, up St Andrews Street, up Post Office and Exchange Streets, into the market place. The police mix
ed in and made many arrests, but they could not hold the mob, which chased the navvies to the Castle Inn. The railway men saw themselves overpowered, and ran inside for shelter. This was the inn at which more than 150 people connected with the railway, contractors and shareholders, had already gathered to celebrate Peto’s victory, so when the navvies crowded inside and barricaded the doors there was a regular siege – the railway party inside the inn, and the Parry mob outside. Showers of stones were hurled at the place, every window on the ground and first floors was broken, and furniture was damaged. No one was seriously hurt but in the melee several people in the crowd were hit by flying stones, and one was carried off with his head laid open.
This was just another navvy riot, but what is most revealing is the way it was reported in the Press. Two local papers, one of which had been markedly in favour of Peto during the election campaign, did not report the riots at all, as if wishing not to publish anything that would embarrass Peto. A third Norwich paper carried a full and sympathetic account, and The Times of London gave a report which fell over itself to be fair to the navvies and to vilify the town rabble. The railway men, it said, had come into the city
wishing probably to give an extra cheer to their master, Mr Peto... and as is frequently their wont, regaled themselves rather too plentifully with ale, till the jolly god, as he too often does, stole away their powers of self control, and they perambulated about the streets, shouting the most vociferous cheers for Mr Peto, keeping up their perambulations, their waving of hats, and their loud ‘hurrahs’, till the close of the poll.
The report goes on, after speaking of the ‘ill blood of the Norwich mob’ which attacked the railway men, to describe how the navvies (‘jolly fellows’) were belaboured somewhat unmercifully until they were rescued by the police who drove back the mob, took the navvies for their own safety to the police station, and then afterwards drove them in horse buses to the railway station, still followed by the infuriated mob, where they were packed into a special train and taken back to the railway works. The navvies’ touching loyalty to their master seemed, in The Times’ eyes, to excuse a mere riot. Peto paid for about £70 worth of damage said to have been caused by his men. Two days later, in a procession after which the two newly elected Members of Parliament were formally presented to the mayor, the navvies, now more loyal than ever, carried banners reading: ‘Stand by the Queen who has Stood by You’, and ‘Peto, the Generous Employer’.
The best example of the navvies’ lawless loyalty is that of the Battle of Mickleton. This village was on the Oxford, Worcester, and Wolverhampton Railway, and a tunnel there had caused constant trouble since it was begun in 1846. After only a few months, Brunel, who was engineer to the company, appointed a new contractor, but the work still went on slowly and in 1849 was suspended. Brunel’s contractor, Marchant, started work again in 1851, but in June of that year a series of disputes between him and the company – over the exact terms of the contract, and the payment, and the ownership of the plant being used to build the tunnel – came to a head, and the company decided to take possession of the works and hand them over for completion to Peto & Betts, the contractors for the rest of the line. Marchant would have nothing of it. He declined to hand over the works or the plant, and kept his navvies on guard against the company’s men. Whenever the new contractors tried to take possession they were driven off by Marchant’s men, and after several such skirmishes Brunel resolved to finish the matter off himself. On Friday, 20 July, he and his assistant, Varden, went to the tunnel with a considerable body of men to take over. But the contractor had heard rumours of this and complained to the local magistrates, saying that if they did not attend and read the Riot Act there might be a fight. So when Brunel and his party arrived they were confronted by magistrates, who warned them not to commit a breach of the peace. Brunel retired until the next day, when he returned to the tunnel early in the morning, hoping that the magistrates would have considered their duty done and left. He was wrong. The magistrates were still there, and they had been joined by a large force of policemen armed with cutlasses. On one side stood Brunel and his navvies, on the other Marchant and his men guarding the works, and between them the law. A fight seemed inevitable, but a magistrate mumbled through the Riot Act twice, and under this threat and that of the police cutlasses the navvies again withdrew.
Later that Saturday Brunel and Varden, playing at generals, discussed how they could mount a surprise attack. They did not scruple to take the works by force from Marchant, but they thought it unwise to get into a fight with armed policemen. What they had to do now was what they had failed to do before – mislead the magistrates into thinking they had given up hope of taking the works and then, after the magistrates had gone happily home, swoop on Marchant and catch him on the hop. So that evening, and all day Sunday, Brunel’s men made no move, and the magistrates left the tunnel. They were deceived, because although Brunel appeared to be doing nothing he used that Sunday to organize reinforcements. Navvies were marched up from other parts of the line, from the works of the Birmingham and Oxford Railway at Warwick, and from the Great Western. In the darkness of Sunday night and early Monday morning gangs of navvies awoke village after village as they tramped through, alarming the whole countryside but not stopping long enough to do any damage. Reports vary, but it seems likely that about 2,000 navvies assembled under Brunel’s command. His idea was to overawe Marchant by a show of strength, and to persuade him to hand over the works. At three o’clock on Monday morning the navvies began to close in on the tunnel and the Battle of Mickleton began.
At the Worcester end of the tunnel, a Mr Cowderey and his band of 200 men from Evesham were met by Marchant, who brandished pistols and said he would shoot the first man who went any farther. In the face of the pistols Cowderey was discreet and told his men – who were ready to devour the handful of labouring boys escorting Marchant – on no account to strike a blow. The navvies waited with their pickaxes and shovels. Then Brunel gave his orders for a general attack on the works. The navvies dodged round Marchant, who did not shoot, and launched into the boys with fists, using spades only on one man who drew a pistol. They hit him on the head, but gently, so that he survived. In fact no one was killed, though several heads were broken and three men had shoulders dislocated.
Marchant retreated for the moment, leaving his opponents in full possession of the tunnel, but after an hour he came back with three dozen policemen, some privates of the Gloucestershire Artillery, and two magistrates, who immediately began reading the Riot Act again. While they were doing this a fight broke out on an embankment overlooking the tunnel. Several men suffered broken limbs, and one John M. Grant was nearly trampled to death but was rescued just in time. Brunel’s reinforcements continued to increase. Another 200 from Warwick arrived, and a similar force from the Great Western. The main bodies just stood and faced each other, but odd fighting went on around the edges and in the half-darkness. The magistrates, who had all along favoured Marchant as the man who was being attacked, suggested that he might occupy his men by setting them to work. He did this, but the Peto men were immediately ordered to stop them, by force if necessary. Two small batches of navvies again met, and in the affray one little finger was bitten off and one head badly wounded. All day long little fights started and petered out, until Marchant saw at last that he was outnumbered, and gave in. He went to Brunel and they agreed to refer the whole dispute to the arbitration of the firm of Stephenson & Cubitt, celebrated railway contractors. The peace was concluded at four in the afternoon, just before the troops, called in to help the police, arrived from Coventry. The battle was over.
In their August report the directors of the company were mainly concerned about other things. The shareholders were critical of the way the company’s financial affairs were being handled, and The Times’ report of the meeting was punctuated by explanatory words in brackets like (Oh, oh! and confusion) and (Hear, hear, and shame). But the Battle of Mickleton Tunnel was mentioned, the
directors reporting that the company had taken possession of the works, ‘without absolute violence... although the menacing conduct of the contractor had at one time rendered such an issue probable’.
Once again great bands of navvies had rioted, but this time, as with the Norwich affair, it was all in the cause of loyalty to their employers and was therefore all right. The most telling point was made by poor Marchant in a letter printed in the Railway Times. He said that he and his partner had paid £10,000 for the plant at the works and that attempts had been made to take this plant from him violently; he denied that he had ever drawn a pistol in the fight, and then went on to say this:
I may leave Messrs Peto and Betts to defend themselves against the charge of having consented to the march of two thousand men on a Sunday for the purpose of taking possession of my property by force.
Just so. Did Peto, the good Baptist, know that his men were being marched about on a Sunday? Did Peto, the Member of Parliament, know that what was virtually a private army was being used to take the tunnel by an illegal show of force? And what of Brunel? Peto may not have known what was being done by his assistants, but Brunel was there. At the least he was promoting, organizing, and then leading a series of riots, playing soldiers to the great danger of some hundreds of men and incurring casualties of several broken bones and one little finger. The violence of navvies looks mighty innocent compared with this lawlessness of the men who used them. But then, as the company directors said, the tunnel was taken ‘without absolute violence’, whatever that may mean.
The Railway Navvies Page 11