23 cases of compound fracture, including two fractured skulls.
74 simple fractures, including three of the clavicle, two of the scapula, one of the patella and one of the astralagus.
140 serious cases, including burns from blasts, severe contusions, lacerations and dislocations.
One man, said Pomfret, lost both his eyes, and another half his foot. One man had his arm broken by the blast, which also burnt the arm, one eye, and all that side of his head and face. Several men had broken ribs. There were also about 400 minor accidents, including trapped and broken fingers (seven of which had to be amputated), injuries to the feet, lacerations of the scalp, bruises and broken shins, though some of these smaller injuries were caused by the men fighting among themselves.
This is not a complete list of all injuries on the tunnel, because the men on the eastern end had, for two years out of the six, been attended by another surgeon. Furthermore, at the time Pomfret drew up his list, in July 1845, there was still another four months’ work to be done.
Later Edwin Chadwick was to write:
Thirty-two killed out of such a body of labourers, and one hundred and forty wounded, besides the sick, nearly equal the proportionate casualties of a campaign or a severe battle. The losses in this one work may be stated as more than three per cent of killed, and fourteen per cent wounded. The deaths (according to the official returns) in the four battles, Talavera, Salamanca, Vittoria and Waterloo, were only 2.11 per cent of privates; and in the last forty-one months of the Peninsula war the mortality of privates in battle was 4.2 per cent, of disease 11.9 per cent.
An eminent engineer of mining works in Cornwall, where mining was still at this time a thriving industry, said that the number of lives lost on the Woodhead Tunnel was evidence of gross mismanagement.
One of the commonest causes of accidents was the use of iron stemmers in blasting. A stemmer is a ram used to pack first the powder and then the filling of clay into a drilled hole. Stemming was dangerous because sometimes the stemmer struck against the rock into which the bore hole had been made, and the sparks ignited the powder. After several men had been wounded two or three times each, Pomfret suggested to Purdon that the stemmers should be made of copper, which was softer and less likely to strike sparks. But Purdon only told him to mind his own business and leave that sort of thing to the engineers. Purdon had strange ideas of an engineer’s responsibilities, and the next year, 1846, he was to have a rough time with the Commons Select Committee. Towards the beginning of his evidence he was to tell them: ‘An engineer should see that no improper materials are used, and no system of operation involving danger: he should not permit weak ropes in shafts; high lifts in tunnelling.’
But when he was questioned about stemmers he said the copper kind were too dear. Question and answer then went like this:
‘You thought, on the part of the company, that it was worth while running the risk of two or three men’s lives rather than go to the expense of more expensive tools?’
‘You must prove to me that any man’s life was lost.’
‘I will read to you from Mr Nicholson’s pamphlet [this was Thomas Nicholson, who had published a pamphlet defending himself and the company against allegations of neglect]: “William Jackson, miner, No. 5 shaft. He was looking over John Webb’s shoulder, while he was stemming a hole charged with powder, when the blast went off, blowing the stemmer through Jackson’s head and killed him on the spot.”’
‘The copper stemmers are so very soft on the head, that they are objectionable.’
The committee left the subject of stemmers. In response to other questions Purdon said he had taken a great aversion to ‘anything like Government officers interfering with details in the case of engineers’, and then that perhaps twenty-six deaths had occurred. ‘I think it may be possible,’ he said, ‘one or two more or less, somewhere thereabouts.’
A few moments later he was asked if patent fuses were used in blasting. No, he said. The committee persisted. Wasn’t this sort of fuse safer? Purdon made his celebrated reply.
‘Perhaps it is; but it is attended with such a loss of time, and the difference is so very small, I would not recommend the loss of time for the sake of all the extra lives it would save.’
He was then asked:
‘Would not a jar or two of acid, and a few yards of wire, be all that was required?’
‘That is all the material but the application of it is a great loss of time.’
At Woodhead neither the contractors nor the company paid any compensation to the families of men killed. Purdon, asked if he had ever made representation to the Board that they should make any such compensation, replied that he had found ‘great unwillingness on the part of the Board to listen to such a thing; they did not wish to admit the principle’. The company admitted few principles, and the work was done to no known rules. Pomfret said: ‘It has been said that there were certain rules (I never saw them or knew what they were) for the men to go by.’
So the men worked by day and night up to their knees in water, the injured were patched up and left to recover in the boiler houses at the shafts (the warmest places, though rain still dripped in on them as they lay), and the dead were given a hasty inquest and burial. These inquests were formal: in the six years he was surgeon at the tunnel, Pomfret was never once called upon to give medical evidence of the cause of death.
But among all this bodily misery it was the irreligion of the men which seems most to have concerned those who were prepared to be concerned at anything at all. Roberton said:
The forlorn condition, in a religious sense, of the hurt and the sick… cannot be imagined by those who are in the habit of regarding England as a Christian country…. There have been examples of destitution in this particular, such, it is probable, as would scarcely occur in one of our most remote colonies.
But the clergy, shocked by this religious destitution, did little about it. There was a small chapel of St James at Woodhead, about three miles from the western entrance to the tunnel; it was not a parish church in its own right, but a curate from Mottram in Longdendale, nine miles away, used to conduct services there. For a short time he lived at Woodhead and went occasionally to give lectures to the navvies, but he scarcely considered the men at the tunnel to be his parishioners. At the other, eastern, end of the tunnel, the nearest parish church was at Penistone, six miles away, where the vicar, from 1841 onwards, was Samuel Sunderland, who had the reputation of being a humane man. But over those moors, and over the cart-tracks, six miles was a long way, and Mr Sunderland appears to have done little but bury some of the men. Only the nonconformists seem to have done more than pray for the navvies. Devey wrote in his life of Locke:
They were visited by dissenting ministers who preached to them in rainy weather under tarpauling canvas, and who appeared more zealous in proportion as their eyes were opened to the utter hopelessness of their mission.
The services of a surgeon, said Devey, were far more in request than those of his clerical colleagues.
Roberton said that until he told his friend the superintendent of the Manchester and Salford Town Mission – ‘an excellent Moravian’ – of the moral state of the men, little had been done to visit the sick or wounded, or to give the men religious instruction. He said:
One or two clergymen, and the Methodists... have occasionally done a little – nothing, however, worth mentioning. The missionary’s journal, and the aspect and manners of the people, furnish evidence of a state of neglect and destitution, in reference to all that concerns religion, utterly disgraceful to the directors of the railway, and to the conductors of the works; and to the public also, who have for so many years heedlessly and criminally winked at it.
The Salford missionary did what he could. Of course he sold bibles, and the navvies bought from him, ‘at somewhat reduced prices’, twenty-two bibles, seventy Testaments, and thirty-six prayer books. But he also visited and comforted the men. In his journal for 8 July he writes:
Going over the moor, this morning, met two women. One said: ‘Have you not sometimes been to pray for Johnson?’ I said I had. He is dead, said she; I have just laid him out; it is but little more than six years since I came to live on these hills, and he is the twenty-ninth man I have laid out, and the first of them who died a natural death.
The deaths of most of these men are remembered only in burial registers. That for Penistone church records the burial there on 5 March 1845 of ‘A Stranger (Excavator) from Kendal’. The entry says he died in the workhouse, that the burial was conducted by S. Sunderland, and guesses that the unnamed man was fifty-five years old. There was not even a nickname, or perhaps the nickname was not thought proper for the register.
The register at Woodhead includes the names, among others, of Robert Blackburne (‘killed from the falling in of earth from a cutting on the railroad’), John Young, John Thorpe, Mark Shepley, John Elliot. The children died too. Lucy Kenning (Tunnel, No. 3 shaft) aged one; Samuel Ollerenshaw, infant; and many more.
Although the graves are today unmarked, and perhaps there never were any headstones, the navvy funerals were decently conducted. Thomas Nicholson wrote:
A good oak coffin, provided at my expense, and the person at his death, if he had friends, was given up to them, to be interred wherever they thought proper, the club paying the expenses. If they had no friends they were buried either at Penistone or Woodhead: and I have heard the public remark their entire satisfaction of the way in which these men were interred. The usual allowance for parties attending the funeral is a dinner and one quart of ale.
Nicholson was convinced not only of the public’s entire satisfaction, but also that there was ‘no instance of any misconduct at a funeral’. Except, he added, at William Lee’s. Now the death of this man Lee concerned many people. Only Nicholson mentioned him by name, but he had, as Nicholson complained, been ‘said much about’. Lee was a miner, aged about fifty-five, and very corpulent. One day in January 1842 he was walking near the capstan of the horse gin. It was windy and he was walking with his head down when one of the arms of the capstan struck him on the breast and threw him to the ground, terribly injuring him. He lived for ten days, until 28 January.
The first to mention the man was Roberton. ‘Take the case,’ he said,
of a fine, powerful workman, who had the spine fractured in such a way as to preclude all hope of recovery. Although this man pleaded again and again to have the scriptures read to him, with religious counsel, the request was in vain; for, after remaining many days in a sinking state, he was suffered to expire without having received the least attention of the nature he so earnestly craved.
The Commons Select Committee was to hear more. When Pomfret gave his evidence he said he remembered a man with a broken back who had for several days asked for a clergyman to visit him. No clergyman came, said Pomfret. The chairman of the committee then asked:
‘How near does the clergyman reside to the place where this man lay?’
‘Nine miles. I think the neglect may be attributed to this circumstance, there was some little disagreement about the district.’
‘Do the clergymen ever think it their duty to attend?’
‘I conveyed a message about this man myself to the clergyman, and he said he would attend, and I borrowed a horse for him, but he never availed himself of it.’
‘Did you ever hear what reason was assigned for his not attending in the case you alluded to?’
‘Engagements about home, I believe.’
‘The result was that this man went without?’
‘The result was that I went to a Methodist and offered him a day’s wages to go, and the man died before he got to the house.’
Pomfret probably means, when he talks about a ‘little disagreement about the district’, that it was not certain in which parish the man lay. The boundary between Cheshire and Yorkshire runs across the moors between the two entrances to the tunnel, and neither the vicar of Penistone in Yorkshire, nor the vicar of Mottram in Cheshire, wanted to claim the man as his own.
Nicholson later became angry over all the fuss. After writing sorrowfully of Roberton’s ‘allusion’ to Lee, he turned on Pomfret and criticized him, plainly in ignorance of what had happened. Writing of Lee’s wish for a clergyman, Nicholson added: ‘... now, I ask, who was a more suitable person to convey this wish to a minister than the surgeon who was visiting him daily? Did the surgeon convey such a message?’
But Nicholson seems put out not so much because Lee died unconsoled as because there was some misconduct at the funeral. Lee had been living with his second wife. At the funeral his two sons by his former wife caused ‘some confusion’ by insisting that the money paid by the sick club to the dead man’s relatives should be given to them and not to the second wife. Nicholson refused and paid the woman.
Nicholson was altogether most indignant that the tunnel should have got such a dreadful reputation, and in his pamphlet, which he had printed in defence of his employers and more particularly of his own character and that of the workmen, he denied nearly everything. True, some men had died, and he gave a list. Samuel Hawkins, a miner aged fifty, had been coming up No. 4 shaft when he banged his head on a horse tree (a cross-beam) and fell out of the bucket. He lived fifteen hours afterwards. Then there were William Holt and George Cook, and James Holt – who fell only eleven feet but broke his neck – and Thomas Houghton and Neal Livingston and Joseph Leaver, the last three killed all at once by one fall of rock, but it was their own fault. Often, he said, the men just did not look out for themselves – take the case of Richard Moore. He was a labourer, and on 13 August 1844 he left a pub at about ten at night and promptly killed himself by falling down the west face of the tunnel. There had also, said Nicholson, been some minor accidents, but the men hadn’t suffered much. James Derbyshire and William Chadwick, miners at No. 1 shaft, had been drilling the stemming out of a blast hole that had hung fire when the lot went off in their faces. Derbyshire lost an eye but was able to go back to work again later, and as for William Chadwick, he was ‘one of the greatest blackguards that ever came to the tunnel’, and after drawing pay from the sick club for eighteen months he was sacked for getting drunk and fighting. Both his eyes had been hurt and he was a little disfigured, but he could still see and got work in Manchester as a bricklayer.
As for Pomfret, said Nicholson, that talented surgeon had been so anxious to make up the number of injured that he had included a few men with scratched faces they had probably got from their wives. The Moravian missionary? – they might as well have sent a Moravian horse, which would have understood tunnelling just as well. And the woman who had told the missionary she had laid out twenty-nine men – Nicholson knew all about her. She was Sarah Alberson, a woman who used to get drunk with her husband while their children were left to fend for themselves. She would say anything for a glass of gin. Was she a woman whose word was to be trusted? Anyway, why send a missionary to a wilderness like Woodhead where about a thousand men were collected and expect to find them all perfect, well educated, and of religious habits? Clergymen should worry about the labourers of their own parishes, and not concern themselves with those working on a wild mountain.
The food, too, had been pretty good. Treacle, sugar, tea, flour, butter, cheese, bacon – Nicholson recited this list of wholesome things as if to convince the world that his navvies had lived off nothing but the best. The tobacco now, that had been supplied by Mr Smith of Sheffield; warranted genuine, threepence-halfpenny an ounce. The beef Nicholson had bought himself in Rotherham market, and he could bring some of the most respectable butchers to prove that it was the best in the market. He could also distinctly prove, and did most solemnly declare, that he had never had any connexion, direct or indirect, with any beer house and had never taken any percentage from beer sold to the men. Look what he had done in the case of Thackray, who kept a public house in Wakefield which was supported chiefly by the loose characters of the town. This man got
a grant of land at Dunford Bridge from one George Hall, a religious man supposed to be a Methodist, and they applied for a licence. But Nicholson and Purdon used their influence with the magistrates, the licence was refused, and Thackray went back to Wakefield. ‘Now mind you,’ said Nicholson, still touchy about the accusations that the tunnel works had been dangerous, ‘he did not work in the Sheffield Summit Tunnel, but he fell downstairs and broke his neck.’ Thus was Thackray prevented from bringing with him the loose characters who frequented his place at Wakefield. But then one George Wilson, also from Wakefield, appeared on the works, having leased a bit of land from Hall. About a week before every pay, said Nicholson, Wilson brought a number of loose girls from Wakefield, but again the contractor used his influence to break this up and gave orders that any man who went there was to be discharged. ‘We succeeded in smashing them,’ he said, ‘and the place is now a cow shade.’
Nicholson maintained that he had allowed only two pubs to be used by the men, Mr E. Taylor’s at Saltersbrook, and Mr George Whitfield’s at Dunford Bridge, and had never permitted any tickets to be given for beer except as a reward for extra services, such as working in wet weather. There had, however, been a great quantity of malt sold on the works. What with its being a wilderness, and with no milk to be got, he had encouraged brewing among the families.
Of course, there had been the occasional bad worker. He had known men who pinched themselves and their families for nine weeks so that they could have a good randy at the pay, and there was one Richard Kenyon who had drunk so excessively that he had starved his own family, though he had since reformed. But generally, Nicholson insisted, there never was a public work more respectably conducted, or with fewer depradations, insults, or crimes committed by the workmen, throughout any part of England.
Throughout the summer, autumn, and winter of 1845 the work dragged on until at last the tunnel, which had been thought impossible and which had cost so much, was completed. On 20 December 1845 the Board of Trade inspector rode through the tunnel, thought it a fine piece of work, and declared it fit to be opened to the public. The great day was fixed for the following Tuesday, the 23rd. The navvies had finished their work, and only a few would stay to maintain the tunnel. As the work came to an end, fewer and fewer men were needed and the navvies had drifted off to find work on other lines. But there were still 300 left on the western part of the tunnel, under Hattersley, and on Monday the 22nd they were, as the Manchester Guardian reported, ‘treated by the railway company to a roasted bullock, with every other requisite for the making of a good and substantial dinner’.
The Railway Navvies Page 13