The men assembled in a tent at Saltersbrook near a store shed in which the bullock, ‘above the ordinary size’, was roasted whole. The butchers also cooked it. They contrived to fix through the carcase one of the rails used on the railway, and with the help of the blacksmith, who fastened the carcase to it by means of large iron bolts, they made an excellent spit which was turned by two men, at intervals, from noon on Sunday until about one o’clock on Monday. Then it was cut up into large pieces and sent to tables put up in the tent. The Guardian said:
The workmen seemed much to enjoy themselves, having more provided for them than they could possibly eat or drink; and around the tent were fixed up various flags, which were left waving in the breeze in honour of the event.
Next day, at ten in the morning, a train of twenty carriages left the Sheffield terminus drawn by two new engines. In it rode the directors of the company, the engineers, the local gentry, the shareholders, and various mayors. It had snowed, and it was cold. The train reached Dunford Bridge, about eighteen miles, in three-quarters of an hour, and stayed there for twenty minutes to take on water. Then it entered the tunnel. The Illustrated London News said:
It was 10¼ minutes in passing through this great subterranean bore; and on entering into the ‘region of light’ at Woodhead, the passengers gave three hearty cheers, making the mountains ring. It speedily passed over the wonderful viaduct at Dinting, and arrived at Manchester at a quarter past twelve, the band playing, ‘See, the Conquering Hero Comes’.
That night, back at Sheffield, the directors and their friends banqueted at the Cutlers’ Hall. Having worked so long and anxiously for their profits, they sang ‘Non Nobis Domine’; having broken poor Vignoles and afterwards completed the line substantially according to his plan, they toasted his successor Locke; having scattered the lives and health of their army of navvies, they never mentioned the men. But Purdon was mentioned. The great tunnel, said John Parker, Esq., M.P., chairman of the company, had been under the special superintendence of Mr Purdon, and he must say the work did him the greatest credit. Mr Appleby, one of the directors, then gave the health of the assistant engineer, without whose services he believed they would not have been able to celebrate the opening of the line that day. (Applause.) Mr Purdon, in acknowledging the compliment, said that the work just finished, and with which he was more than immediately connected, had certainly been a very stiff job. (Applause and laughter.)
The first tunnel was built. But this was far from the end of the Woodhead story. The miserable history continued. On 10 July 1846, a rumour went round Manchester that the tunnel had caved in, but it was only a landslide. The Manchester to Saltersbrook turnpike road, which ran thirty yards above the western entrance to the tunnel, had been washed down by a stream on to the line, taking with it several small huts built on the side of the hill, in which some excavators lived. The landslide happened at two o’clock in the morning and the men in the huts escaped and were reported to have run about in a state of near nudity.
Diagram of the two original tunnnels at Woodhead.
The next year, 1847, the second tunnel was started. Although the first had originally been planned for two lines of track, it had soon been decided to economize and make do with a narrower tunnel to take a single line. The making of the second tunnel, immediately to one side of the first, was much less hazardous and costly than the first. The soil and rock formation was known, and no new shafts were necessary because the engineers of the first tunnel, foreseeing that one day it might be necessary to widen the tunnel, had driven twenty-five arches at intervals into the side walls of the first tunnel, and the excavations for the new one were made from these arches. The second bore was completed in 1852. Working conditions were better and fewer men were killed, but in 1849 the cholera, which was epidemic over much of England that summer, came to Woodhead. The outbreak at the tunnel, in which twenty-eight people died, is still remembered by the inhabitants of Woodhead and Dunford Bridge as ‘the plague’: they do not know it was cholera and think of it rather as some black death. It was a sudden and violent outbreak, ‘evidently originating [said the Manchester Guardian] in the grossest imprudence and intemperance’. Altogether 750 men were at work on the tunnel, in three shifts, working day and night. Saturday, 26 May, was the first pay day for eight weeks, and as the next week was Whitsun the works were closed to give the labourers a holiday. Many went off to Ashton and other places where they drank themselves stupid and had no regular meals, some of them eating only once or twice during the whole eight or ten days. When they returned to the tunnel, sober because they were now too broke to buy more drink, they were so weak from lack of nourishment that many developed what was at first thought to be dysentery. It was not. A few died, others sickened daily, and a doctor was called in. He diagnosed cholera. More men died, and when the navvies saw an extra supply of coffins which had been thoughtfully brought up to Woodhead to meet the expected need, they fled in panic to Ashton, Dukinfield, and other towns. Only 100 men remained by the Tuesday.
Dr J. G. Harrison of Manchester – whose principal qualification seems to have been that he had once, in the 1832 epidemic, seen forty people die of cholera in one night – went round renewing his old acquaintance with such symptoms as vomiting, cramp, collapse, shrivelling of the fingers, sinking of the eyes, and rice-water evacuations, and doing his best to help by prescribing port wine as a remedy. One by one the men died. John Collins, aged twenty-five, who had been on the tramp and worked only one night at the excavations, died in a few hours. James Green, aged twenty-two, an able and sober young man, was found dying in a barn and lasted only until the next morning. The corpses were rapidly buried, and even the residents of the village began to leave in a hurry. Dr Harrison prescribed another preventive – hot coffee and brandy.
A married woman named Foulkes, from the Dunford Bridge end of the tunnel, volunteered to act as nurse, the previous nurse – called Peg Leg because of her wooden leg – having just died of the disease. Mrs Foulkes came forward on a Friday, in the second week of the epidemic, when she seemed in good health, but on the Sunday morning she became almost without pulse, turned blue, and died the next morning. Why she volunteered is not clear, for she was terribly afraid from the moment she came. Rachel Foulkes, aged thirty-six, was buried at St James’s, Woodhead, on 18 June, the day she died. She is No. 248 in the burial register. Her last patient, Thomas Fidler, is No. 247.
By then the place was nearly deserted. Even the foremen and overseers had gone, which was thought to be unmanly conduct, as they at least should have had the strength of character to remain. Throughout the epidemic, in which twenty-eight people died, medical opinion was that regular meals, a little port wine, and above all strength of character, could ward off cholera. It was frequently explained with satisfaction that those who died were drinkers, as if such moral weakness induced the disease. When a steady, sober man died this was noted with surprise.
A week or so after the epidemic died away the men straggled back to the village. But because the gangers and supervisors had gone the works were still closed, and the navvies hung around, played leapfrog, and were then condemned not only for want of character in having gone but also for laziness when they returned.
Because of this epidemic, and for much else, the two old tunnels have a dark reputation among the moorland villages. While the first tunnel was being built a man could look through it on a fine day and see, more than three miles away, a needle point of light at the other end. Not until the tunnel was closed, in 1956, could this light be seen again, because while the tunnel was in use the smoke of trains gathered so densely and lingered so long that it was often difficult for the gangers maintaining the line to find their way through even with lamps. Many of these men suffered from silicosis, and some became invalids after as little as six years in the damp and smoke and darkness ‘under the hill’.
The engineers of the third tunnel, which was completed in June 1954, after five and a half years, had a great respect f
or the makers of the first tunnels, and used a geological map made in 1846 for the second bore. After all, said one of the modern contractors, why shouldn’t they rely on the map: the man who made it had been an engineer, hadn’t he?
Now the old tunnels are disused and have long been closed off by metal bulkheads. At the Woodhead end you can still open a heavy trap door in the bulkhead and see into the tunnel. The wind roars through, and up the old shafts, and the floor is littered with fallen masonry.
Above the Woodhead entrance, where the Manchester road curves steeply round to Saltersbrook, the old public house, called by some the Angel and by others the Crown, where the navvies drank and rioted after the pays, is now derelict. Of the three gargoyles above the old arches, one is gone altogether, the face of the second is broken, and the third looks out on its own. In the wall of the cutting leading up to the tunnel mouth there still remains a powder magazine, built in stone eight feet deep into the rock. Nothing is found in it these days except, now and again, a dead sheep.
The place is deserted. But the wretched spirit of the tunnel remains. It is the spirit of the contractors manning the work in very masterly style; the spirit of the engineer who would not use the safety fuse, for all the extra lives it would save; the spirit of the public remarking their entire satisfaction of the way in which these men, except for William Lee of course, were interred; the spirit of the directors singing ‘Non Nobis Domine’ and agreeing, after dinner, that it had certainly been a very stiff job. (Laughter and applause.)
8
Chadwick, Parliament, and Do-Nothing
Some good did come out of the building of the first Wood-head Tunnel. It created a scandal which at least brought to the notice of Parliament and public the wretched life of the navvies. The protest was led by Edwin Chadwick, barrister, civil servant, one of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the labour of young persons in factories, one of the Commissioners of Inquiry also into the means of establishing an efficient police force, and the man who was to secure after ten years of agitation the Public Health Act of 1848, the first in a series of sanitary reforms.
Chadwick was a friend of John Roberton, the surgeon who was also president of the Manchester Statistical Society. When Roberton found the men at Woodhead in a state of brute degradation he told Chadwick, who was eager to agitate for reform. He had long thought the State should have built the railways as a rational system and not left them to be created haphazardly and run for profit by individual companies. The railway labourers were among the most exploited and least protected of all workers; their employers were not bound even by the early Factory Acts. Chadwick knew that on average half the capital spent in building railways went on the earth works and tunnelling, and in late 1845, at the beginning of the second railway boom, he foresaw that if the sanction of Parliament was given for any considerable proportion of the new railway works presented for its consideration, and if no new precautions were taken in the way these new lines were built, then both the works and the men would suffer. Some £8,000,000, £10,000,000, or £12,000,000 a year, or as much as the annual cost of the Army and Navy put together, would soon be paid in navvies’ wages. A great number of new works would be thrown up all at the same time. Competent railway engineers and managers were already scarce and there would not be enough to go round, nor would there be enough experienced navvies. Rabbles of new men would have to be quickly assembled, and they would work under equally inexperienced engineers. The result would be greater disorder and evil than ever before. And after these works had been completed, what then? The men, said Chadwick, drawing on his long experience of the working of the Poor Law, would be discharged penniless. Some would return discontented to their villages, reckless, deteriorated in body and mind; others would join the dangerous and increasing swarm of able-bodied mendicant vagrants and depredators who had been cluttering up the workhouses.
Edwin Chadwick, barrister and social reformer.
On 13 November Roberton wrote a long circumstantial letter to Chadwick setting out the number of dead and injured at the tunnel, and describing the evils of drink and truck and filthy huts. Soon after, Chadwick wrote to the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, and received this reply:
He [Peel] fears that the accounts sent by Mr Chadwick as to the demoralization which is the result of such Employment have but too much foundation – but no satisfactory solution of the great difficulties which would attend Legislation on such a Subject has at present occurred to Sir Robert Peel.
Chadwick was also friendly with Robert Rawlinson, who was engineer to the Bridgewater Trust and had formerly worked on the London and Birmingham Railway. On 27 December Rawlinson wrote a long letter in which he told Chadwick of his experience with navvies. The question to be decided, he said, was whether the crime, disease, misery, and danger then attendant on public works could be abated, and, if so, how. He described a typical contract, with the contractor pushing on regardless of safety because he stood to lose a lot if he did not complete on time, and the men wretched and reckless and diseased – ‘I have seen men with smallpox thick out upon them wandering about in the lanes, having no place of shelter to go into.’ All this degradation was not, Rawlinson argued, a necessary consequence of public works. If the spiritual and temporal welfare of the men were looked after they would become as orderly as any other part of the community. Abundance of work, and money to pay for it, ought to be a blessing to the whole community; but readily earned money spent in vicious pursuits was the greatest curse that could afflict a civilized society. Large bodies of uncontrolled men were a scourge to each other and a terror to the countryside.
Chadwick took the two letters from Roberton and Rawlinson, added a long commentary of his own, and combined them into a paper which he sent to the Statistical Society of Manchester, where it was read on 16 January 1846 by Dr Philip Holland. In his part of the paper Chadwick argued the need for legislation to control the railway works. At that time there was only a statute of 1838 – ‘An Act for the Payment of Constables for Keeping the Peace near Public Works’ (1 and 2 Vict c 80). This recited that
great mischiefs have arisen by the outrageous and unlawful behaviour of labourers and others employed on railroads, canals, and other public works, by reason whereof the appointment of special constables is often necessary for keeping the peace, and for the protection of the inhabitants, and the security of the property in the neighbourhood of such public works, whereby great expenses have been cast upon the public rates of counties, and the districts chargeable with expenses,
and went on to make the railway directors and shareholders liable to pay the cost of any special constables appointed by the magistrates. But this power was little used, and at best it was only a way of repressing a riot once it had started. Chadwick was more interested in regulating railway works so that riots would never begin.
He also proposed a form of workmen’s compensation, in which the employer should prima facie be responsible for accidents and liable to compensate the injured man or a dead man’s family. If the company had to bear the expenses of maintaining and educating orphan children of men killed on their works, the directors would pass this responsibility on, by means of a term in the contract, to the person best capable of avoiding accidents, the contractor. Seeing it was in his own pecuniary interest to work safely, the contractor would enforce proper precautions and superintend the work closely.
Robert Rawlinson, engineer and public health reformer.
Chadwick estimated the value of a labourer, by what he called contract prices for maintenance and education, at four shillings and sixpence a week from birth. Thus the capital invested in a man of twenty was £245, and in one of thirty, £350. ‘In general,’ he said, ‘every adult trained labourer may be said to be, in this pecuniary point of view, as valuable as two hunters, or two race horses, or a pair of first rate carriage horses.’
Both in France and the United States, he said, the employers had been made responsible for accidents, and this had checked reckles
sness. Much the same principle had been most effective in Britain, not on the railways but in the shipping of convicts to Botany Bay. When the first prisoners were shipped out as many as half of them died on the voyage. The shippers were no doubt honourable merchants, who didn’t mean to kill anybody; but because they were interested in profit they packed in as much freight as they could, not seeing it mattered that convicts should put up with mere inconvenience. Unfortunately the convicts were so inconvenienced that half of them died, and this was regretted. But then, by a practical adjustment of the shipowners’ interests, things were entirely changed; by a small change in the terms of the contract, the shippers were paid not for the number embarked in Britain but for the number who reached Australia alive, whereupon the mortality rate wonderfully declined to as low as 1½ per cent. The shipowners, without any law to compel them, paid medical officers and put the whole conduct of the transports in their charge.
It worked. When the doctors themselves were paid according to the number of prisoners delivered whole, the passengers suddenly found they had room to breathe. The doctors not only took great trouble to treat illness, but also did all they could to prevent it, going so far as to take the wet clothes off exhausted convicts so that they should not catch cold. And when there was an unavoidable casualty, the percentage of his salary thereby lost to the doctor ensured the dead man at least one sincere mourner.
The Railway Navvies Page 14