The Railway Navvies

by Terry Coleman

  7

  Woodhead

  Woodhead is a small Cheshire village of never more than a few houses and now almost deserted, whose only distinction is that it gave its name to the most degraded adventure of the navvy age – the Woodhead Tunnel. The village is on a narrow peninsula of Cheshire which reaches out eastward through Lancashire and Derbyshire into Yorkshire. It is high and wild moorland where the wind is bitter even on a soft day. The only things that seem to belong to the place are sheep and railway tunnels – the sheep because the heath and bogs are good for nothing else, and the tunnels because Woodhead is midway between Sheffield and Manchester and because, although the engineering was almost impossibly hazardous, this was the easiest way to take the line through the Pennines. The first tunnel made there was three miles thirteen yards long, and at the time was the longest in Britain, more than twice the length of Brunel’s magnificent Box Tunnel near Bath.

  There have been three Woodhead tunnels. The first, for a single line of rail, was built from 1839 to 1845. The second, to take another single line for the uproad, was bored alongside the first in the years 1847 to 1852. The third tunnel, a modern work which takes a double electric line, was completed in June 1954. At the official opening ceremony on 3 June, the then Minister of Transport said, ‘All of us here believe that the railways have a future as important as their very great past.’ The story of the very great past at Woodhead is that of the two old tunnels, and that is a story of heroic savagery, magnificent profits, and devout hypocrisy.

  Two Woodhead tunnels – the old (on the left) and the new under construction in 1953.

  The Sheffield, Ashton under Lyne, and Manchester Railway Company was formed in 1835, and its proposed line was authorized by an Act of Parliament of 1837. Plans were commissioned both from Charles Blacker Vignoles, a military engineer of high reputation, and from Joseph Locke, one of the finest railway engineers of the age, whom The Times, in his obituary, was to call one of the great triumvirate, the others being Robert Stephenson and Brunel. Vignoles’s plans were preferred, he was appointed engineer to the company, and Lord Wharncliffe, the first chairman of the railway, cut the first sod with a ceremonial spade at Saltersbrook, a mile or so east of Woodhead, on 1 October 1838. The tunnel was to run from Woodhead in Cheshire on the western side, to Dunford Bridge in Yorkshire on the east. Vignoles estimated the cost first at £60,000 and then at £100,000. Things did not go well. There was animosity between Vignoles and Locke, who seems to have been retained as a consultant engineer, and between Vignoles and the board of the company, who were reluctant to spend anything more than they had to. It was only after a struggle that the company agreed to provide tents for the 400 men who had begun the first shaft at the western end, and who had been sleeping in the open. But most of the men had to look after themselves, and as the winter drew in they bivouacked in huts run up with loose stones and mud and thatched with ling from the moors, and slept on truckle-beds in groups of twenty.

  For Vignoles nothing went happily. Often there was no money for the works, and when there was the constant rain made the mining difficult and the construction of access roads impossible. Vignoles was pursued by rain. In August 1839, at a house he had taken at Dinting Dale, a few miles away from the works, he gave a banquet in honour of the coming of age of his eldest son, Charles. All the county was invited, marquees were erected on the lawns, and the festivities were to spread over two days. It rained: for two days it rained.

  By this time Vignoles was in serious difficulties with the board. Two years before, when the company had been in some financial distress, he had himself bought shares which were otherwise unsaleable. When the company recovered somewhat, he declined to sell these shares at a profit and retained them. In 1839 the company’s affairs were again precarious and the shares were not only worthless but a liability. Vignoles was unable to pay the calls made by the company. He went to the chairman, Lord Wharncliffe, and they made a gentleman’s agreement that Vignoles should renounce his shares, in effect that he should lose the money he had already paid for them but should be released from his liability to pay the calls which were due. But this agreement was repudiated by the board, Lord Wharncliffe resigned, and Vignoles, knowing he could not pay, also left the company. The directors did not forget their old animosity to the engineer and sued him, forcing him to assign all his property to pay what he could of the calls. In all he lost £80,000. In later years Vignoles was to recover his fortune, but in 1841 he was broken. He wrote in his diary for 15 January of that year: ‘Good God, that men whom I had served so faithfully and for whose railway I had done so much, should act like this.’

  Meanwhile Locke had been appointed in Vignoles’s place, and the work went on with vigour. The new engineer dismissed the small contractors who had undertaken the work in the first years, and in 1842 let the western part of the work to Richard Hattersley, and the eastern to Thomas Nicholson. Wellington Purdon, the man engaged as assistant engineer by Vignoles, was retained, and his name and that of Nicholson crop up again and again in the history of the first tunnel. Nicholson was a self-made man. He began as a labourer, worked on the Stockton and Darlington Railway, and originally came to Woodhead as one of the company’s supervisors of the works. The contract for the eastern tunnel was his first big venture as a contractor. He lived till the age of seventy, and died in 1861 when he was knocked down by an engine as he inspected a viaduct at Ingleton. Purdon was the only engineer to stay for the entire six years it took to complete the first Woodhead Tunnel, and he was later to achieve notoriety for his refusal to use safety fuses because they wasted time.

  In 1842 the new contractors needed more navvies, and this is where conditions, which had always been bad, became much worse. The original force of 400 men had grown to nearly 1,000, who were living in something hardly less than out-and-out savagery. All the company had done was build about forty stone shelters for them. Most of these men had been working under the supervision of Nicholson at Woodhead on the western side, and when Nicholson got the contract for the eastern side at Dunford Bridge he took his men with him. These navvies were decidedly the better sort, because he had been able to pick them at a time when hands were plentiful and work scarce. They had had some time to settle in huts they built themselves, and perhaps to bring their families with them, and were by then experienced in the work.

  But Hattersley, when he came to the Woodhead end, had to take what he could get. He advertised for labourers when jobs were plentiful and at a time when the works were getting a bad name because of the number of accidents. It was also being confidently predicted that the tunnel would never be finished. The tunnelling was proving more and more difficult; the first estimate of £60,000 had by then risen to £200,000, and this in a period of tight money when more and more shareholders were finding themselves, like poor Vignoles, unable to pay their calls. The sceptics were remembering George Stephenson’s remark, made some years before when the plans were first drawn up, that he would eat the first locomotive to go through the tunnel.

  So Hattersley had to pay higher wages to get anyone, and he assembled a rabble. The average number of navvies on the works is generally put at about 1,100, but at one time there were 1,500 and more, tunnelling into twelve different rock faces at once. One gang worked in from each end, and two (one eastward and the other westward) from the foot of each of the five shafts which had been bored down into the moor-side. Some of the men suffered a sort of claustrophobia, because the shafts were only ten feet in diameter, and the tunnel only fifteen feet high and eighteen across.

  Map of Woodhead Tunnel.

  At its highest point the moor above Woodhead is more than 1,500 feet above sea-level. The tunnel itself goes through the Pennines at a height of about 1,000 feet, and the depth of the longest shaft is 579 feet. The miners had to blast their way through millstone grit, shales, softer red sandstone, slate, and clay. Much of the rock was treacherous, and all but 1,000 yards of the tunnel had to be lined with masonry to prevent falls fro
m the roof. All this was done by fits and starts. When there was no money there was no work; when the company had raised some more cash the work went on uninterrupted by day and night. Purdon explained the need for this night work.

  In great railway works, the interest [upon the money borrowed] is so great when it is spread over a number of years, and the company sacrifice that interest until the line comes into operation, and they bind their contractors to knock off the work quickly to save the enormous amount of interest; this requires them to man the work in a very masterly style.

  Shortage of money was one difficulty, but a far greater one was the isolation of the place. The nearest town of any size was Glossop, nine miles off, and even when the railway was built up to the two ends of the uncompleted tunnel, provisions had to be lugged up the steep hills on to the moors to the navvy encampments round the shafts. In his Life of Joseph Locke, published in 1862, Joseph Devey wrote that the difficulties of getting provisions to the place proved almost as great as those of victualling Balaclava. In June 1845 John Roberton, a Manchester surgeon, went to see these encampments. The huts, he said, were a curiosity, mostly of stones without mortar, or of mud, with a roof of thatch or flags, and generally put up by the men themselves. One workman would build a hut for his family, and also lodge some of his fellow navvies. Some huts contained as many as fourteen or fifteen men. Many were filthy dens.

  While he was inspecting the huts at the Woodhead end of the tunnel Roberton met Henry Pomfret, also a surgeon, who lived at Hollingworth about eight miles away, and who went up to the tunnel three days a week to treat the injured. He also went up whenever he was called, often at night-time, if there had been an accident. He was retained not by the railway company or the contractors but by the men themselves, who paid so much a week as a voluntary contribution, and had chosen Pomfret by a vote. The men liked him, and he faithfully slogged up to the tunnel in all weathers and at all hours, but since he lived so far away it frequently took him two hours to get there. He had contracted to treat the men for ordinary sicknesses as well as for injuries, but he spent most of his time operating on the smashed-up limbs of men caught by rock falls. When he met Roberton that day Pomfret said he did what he could, but that it was difficult to conceive of a set of people more thoroughly depraved, degraded, and reckless. They were utterly drunken and dissolute – a man, he said, would lend his wife for a gallon of beer – and more than half of them, men and women, suffered from syphilis. Most of the accidents, he said, were caused by the general recklessness and drunkenness; many men habitually went to work drunk.

  Before he left that day Roberton asked Pomfret for a list of casualties, which he agreed to prepare, and Roberton returned to Manchester ‘painfully impressed’, as he said, and went to tell his tale to a friend, the superintendent of the Manchester and Salford Town Mission. The superintendent went to the tunnel himself on the following two Sundays and reported to Roberton that the men were indeed in a demoralized condition, ‘for the work goes on by night as well as day, and on Sunday the same as other days, and such has been the case from the commencement’. The superintendent went into the huts, talked to the men, whom he found in a ‘most brutish state’, and found himself agreeing with everything Roberton and Pomfret had said, except that he seemed to find the wife-lending less serious than he had feared because, as he put it, ‘many of the women in the huts were not wives, but “tally-women”, i.e. women who had followed the men as their mistresses’.

  Anyway, the superintendent thought the men’s need was great, so he sent a missionary to live among them for three months. This man kept a journal, and from this and from Roberton’s remarks it is possible to piece together a detailed picture of the way the navvies worked and lived during that autumn of 1845.

  As the superintendent had said, work went on as usual on Sundays, and the missionary was particularly concerned about this. It was not just the pumping of water from the shafts and other maintenance work which was done on the Sabbath -this was felt to be essential and therefore allowable – but the main work of blasting and digging. On Sunday, 3 August, the journal records:

  Went into the tunnel, passed to No. 2 shaft, and saw about a hundred miners, labourers and others at work; also outside the tunnel at the Manchester end of the entrance, about eighteen or twenty men were employed boring and blasting the rock: a number of shots went off, and shook the school-house, at the time when we were engaged in prayer, at our afternoon meeting.

  The work itself was not only dangerous but thoroughly miserable. The tunnel was generally ankle-deep in mud, sometimes knee-deep. Water ran down the side of the walls, and the men, parched by the work and the closeness of the tunnel, drank this muddy effluence and suffered from chronic diarrhoea. But the wages were good. Joiners earned five shillings and masons six shillings for a ten-hour day, miners four to five shillings for an eight-hour day. But when the work was urgent, and men scarce, navvies were asked to work double and treble shifts, and the horses, and the boys who drove them, worked on as well.

  The men were paid once in nine weeks, sometimes once every thirteen weeks. Out of the wages the contractors withheld three halfpence a day from every man, to pay the surgeon, to help pay the schoolmaster (a school was at one time established at No. 3 shaft, but later abandoned because so few attended), and to pay into the sick fund, which provided a man with eight shillings a week when he was hurt or ill. Besides this it was the custom, when a navvy was killed, for each man to pay a shilling to cover the expenses of the funeral and to leave a bit over for the widow.

  The navvies suffered greatly from the truck system. By 1845 the railway had already been built up to the mouth of the western end of the tunnel and so there was cheap and easy carriage of goods from Manchester and Ashton. Despite this, said Roberton, it was perhaps to be expected that a crowd of people camped on a desert moor should have to pay rather dear for their provisions, but he was astonished at the prices demanded at the tommy shops, 20 to 50 per cent above Manchester prices.

  Flour was 2s. 8d. a stone, tub butter (of very indifferent odour) 1s. 1d. a pound, but the most surprising thing was the price of potatoes, 1s. 2d. a score. At first Roberton doubted this, as the highest price in Manchester was only eightpence, but he asked at several huts and the story was the same everywhere. Beer, too – ‘represented as very inferior’ – cost dear, sixpence a quart. The shops belonged directly or indirectly to the contractors, and the interval of nine weeks or so between pays was so long that the men had to rely on tickets to get food. And at Woodhead the contractors, with their eye on the greater profit, made beer tickets easier to get than food tickets. A man could have a food ticket only at certain times, but a beer ticket could be had at any time of the day, up to the amount of a man’s earnings and sometimes even beyond that, so that he was living on double credit. Roberton gave this example of the way beer tickets drained a man’s earnings:

  ...A workman carries a five-shilling ticket to one of the beer shops, and asks to have out of it, a quart of beer. The drink is furnished, and the ticket with ‘quart’ written on the back of it goes up on the file of the publican. The man has, it may be, glass after glass, gets intoxicated, and at length, in this state, goes home. On returning again, the following day, trusting to the ticket in the file, it will often happen that he finds his credit exhausted; he must bring another ticket: altercation ensues, the man accuses the publican of cheating, and thus uproars, fights, and (it may be surmised) the grossest roguery, are of perpetual occurrence... It was evidently a sore subject with the workpeople, one of whom exclaimed to me, ‘They give us great wages, sir, but they take it all from us again.’...

  The men, women, and children, Roberton said, did not give the impression of enjoying vigorous, comfortable health, though there were some exceptions. Some of the younger children appeared flabby and others very pale, and the adults wore a look of exhaustion and dissipation which the mission superintendent thought was caused by the universal drunkenness and irregular sleep. Many of t
he night workers, he said, drank all day when they ought to have been in their beds. The infrequent pays, which were conveniently made at a public house, were followed by days of rout and rowdiness. July 11, 1845 was a pay night, and on the 14th the missionary wrote in his journal that everywhere were fights, disorder, and drunkenness. The six constables employed to keep order on the whole works, kept their distance.

  For days the men were so drunk they just reeled around and were incapable of anything except casual violence. Asked if he had seen any gambling among them, Pomfret replied: ‘I cannot say I did; I think they used to be too far gone to think of that.’ But there was, he said, plenty of fighting.

  The men’s exhaustion was not caused only by their own drunkenness and brutality. Many had chronic coughs, which they blamed on the moistness of the tunnel. Their clothes became soaked before they had been at work a quarter of an hour. Roberton asked a woman in one of the huts how ten or fourteen lodgers in one hut could dry all their wet clothes by a single fire. She answered that the clothes were seldom half dry. Pomfret said the coughs were caused by this perpetual dampness and also by the inhaling of dense gunpowder smoke with which the tunnel was commonly filled.

  The men also suffered most atrociously from accidents. When Pomfret prepared the list he had promised Roberton, it showed that thirty-two men had been killed, several maimed, and what Roberton called an almost incredible number less’ seriously injured. The list included: