The Railway Navvies

by Terry Coleman

  Chadwick proposed that the Parliamentary committees who examined new railway Bills should impose upon the companies the responsibility of controlling and caring for the men who would carry out the works. The companies should be required to answer these questions:

  How many labourers will be needed, where will they and their wives and children live, and at what rent?

  How will they be fed? What will be done to prevent drunkenness? How will the sub-contractors be prevented from running a truck racket?

  What will be done to educate the men’s children?

  Will the promoters provide medical care for men who are injured or fall ill?

  How will the company keep the peace on the works?

  Chadwick proposed that Parliament should oblige a company to care for its men in all these ways, and appoint an inspector to see that it did. He knew the companies would say all these regulations would be impediments to public works, and inconsistent with the spirit of such enterprises. Reckless enterprises, he admitted, they certainly would clog, but on the whole proper regulations would improve the works. To take one example – working on Sundays. Quite apart from religious objections, it was inefficient to work men without a break.

  Merely considering the labourer as a machine, it is as improvident a waste of power as running post horses every day in the week is found to be.

  The night the pamphlet was read to the Statistical Society the directors of the Sheffield and Manchester Railway were invited to attend, but they did not. Chadwick then had 2,000 copies of the paper (Demoralization and Injuries occasioned by the want of proper regulations of labourers engaged in the construction and working of railways) printed at his own expense, and spent £30 distributing them to members of both Houses of Parliament and to the Press. The newspapers took little notice: as Lord Campbell said in a letter to Chadwick in February, legislation could not be long delayed, but at the moment, ‘only Corn was attended to’. This was a time of great agitation against the Corn Laws, and of famine in Ireland. Later in the year Peel was to repeal the Corn Laws and split his own party. The politicians and Press were also more concerned about a resurgence of Chartism than about the condition of navvies.

  But the Manchester Guardian was concerned. Woodhead, after all, was only ten miles away. On 7 March that newspaper said in a leading article:

  The contractors, being exposed to fierce competition, are tempted to adopt the cheapest method of working, without any close reference to the danger to which the men will be exposed.... Life is now recklessly sacrificed: needless misery is inflicted; innocent women and children are unnecessarily rendered widows and orphans; and such evils must be not allowed to continue, even though it should be profitable. The rights of property are very sacred, and must not be uselessly encroached upon; but life is holier still.

  Four days later, on 11 March, another leader appeared, which said, after mentioning the mock wedding ceremony described in the pamphlet, in which navvy and woman jumped over a broomstick and were thereupon put to bed while the wedding party caroused in the same room, that a large body of people could not be allowed to live in a state of such fearful savagery without inflicting serious mischief upon society. The leader went on:

  We are glad to learn that it is probable the matter will be formally brought under the notice of parliament, and that a petition on the subject is in course of preparation; towards promoting which, we shall be happy to give all the aid in our power.

  In the meantime Chadwick went on collecting evidence. After the pamphlet was published, Thomas Beggs, a scripture reader on the Muirkirk and Ayr line, wrote to say that the contractor on that stretch of railway was ‘a tall powerful Highlander, a man of mere brute passions, who drinks, dances and fights with the men... he often incites the men to drink and provokes them in that state to fight, in which amusement he seems to take an intense delight’.

  The directors of the Sheffield and Manchester Railway defended themselves. In one breath they claimed that nothing improper had happened at Woodhead; in another they conceded that rather a lot of men had died (though not so many as thirty-two, they said) and then blamed the contractors for it. The sub-contractors, they said, had been particularly difficult to handle, and two of them had been killed by their own carelessness – one when he stuck a candle in a barrel of loose gunpowder, another when he stood under a block of stone as it was being hoisted and it fell on him. They were furious with Pomfret, the surgeon who had given the accident tables to the Statistical Society. He was written to, called upon, and threatened with every kind of punishment, for having, as the directors said, shamefully betrayed his employers. On 30 March Roberton wrote to Chadwick that he had received such a letter from Pomfret that he had ridden over to Hollingworth to see him early in the morning, to console him. But Roberton found things even more tangled than he had supposed – ‘His wife’s uncle is one of the Directors of the Sheffield Railway, his father-in-law a large proprietor, and many of his friends besides interested parties’. But, in fact, Pomfret could not be accused of any disloyalty: he had not been the employee of the company, but had been retained directly by the men.

  Eventually the matter came to Parliament. In the Commons, on 30 April, the Hon. Edward Pleydell Bouverie, member for Kilmarnock, moved for a Select Committee. Sir James Graham, the Home Secretary, said he would save the Speaker the trouble of putting the question by at once stating that it was not his intention to oppose the inquiry.

  He was obliged to the hon. Member for bringing the matter under the consideration of the House, although he did not anticipate that anything very important would result from the inquiries of a committee. He considered that the companies did not sufficiently avail themselves of the powers with which they were vested, in keeping an efficient police force along their respective lines; and he thought they should be compelled to do so. He must say, that in many districts it was absolutely necessary that the payments made to the labourers should be in kind, and not in money. He mentioned more particularly Westmorland, where railway labourers were sometimes eight or ten miles from any town, and could not possibly get even the common necessaries of life unless they were paid in that way. He knew, however, that the system was open to great abuse; he altogether condemned the principle of paying the people in paper notes, and he hoped that something might be done to put an end to it. He also admitted that the subject was of great importance, and worth inquiring into before a Committee; whatever suggestions they should make on the subject, it would be his duty to attend to.

  It sounded very much as if the Government was not greatly concerned, and considered the easiest way out was to set up a committee and then take no notice of it.

  Viscount Ebrington, Member for Plymouth, said he considered the inquiry absolutely necessary, if for no other reason than because of the large number of labourers recently killed or wounded on one public undertaking. (He seems to have meant Woodhead.) From the immense number of these people who were congregated together, away from their friends and relatives, and without possessing any tie to connect them with their superiors, except that of receiving their weekly payments, and being, as he might add, altogether devoid of control and discipline, they possessed all the evils, without any of the benefits, of a standing army.

  Mr T. Wakley, Member for Finsbury, did not know what was to be gained by the inquiry. The people themselves had not complained of their condition, and if they had, he would venture to say, this complaint would not have been attended to – as he knew that when the people petitioned the House for the redress of any grievance, their petitions were never taken notice of; but when there was no petition from the people themselves, then the greatest alacrity was displayed in granting any motion made by an hon. Member. They had business enough before the House already, without superadding this discussion. The Member for the West Riding of Yorkshire, Mr E. Beckett Denison, a railway promoter who had won an independent route for his Great Northern Railway direct from London to York after incurring Parliamentary expenses of
£400,000, did not agree. These poor men, he said, ought to be protected. Though they received high wages, they worked harder and exhausted themselves faster than any other class.

  The general feeling of the House was probably expressed by George Hudson, king of railway promoters and then Member for Sunderland, when he said he had no objection to the inquiry because he was satisfied that it would redound to the credit of those gentlemen who had the honour to be connected with public works. He believed that it was the wish of these gentlemen to improve not only the social but also the moral conditions of their labourers. The Government did not oppose the motion and it was ordered: ‘That a Select Committee be appointed to inquire into the Condition of the Labourers employed in the Construction of Railways and other Public Works, and into the Remedies which may be calculated to lessen the peculiar Evils, if any, of that Condition.’

  A week later the fifteen members of the committee were named. They included Mr Bouverie who was chairman, Viscount Ebrington, and George Hudson. In eight long meetings the committee heard thirty-two witnesses. Pomfret the surgeon, Purdon the engineer, Thomas Eaton the navvy –all gave evidence of the Woodhead disaster. The Sheriff of Edinburgh, the superintendent of Edinburgh police, and the deputy clerk of the peace for Dumfriesshire all told the same story of drunkenness and riots on Scottish lines. Three clergymen and two scripture readers told a sad tale of sexual immorality and religious infidelity on the works. One railway director, three contractors, two labourers, and one tommy shopkeeper were called to Westminster to face the committee. Among the more celebrated witnesses were Brunel, who spoke against truck – ‘If you can trust a man with a shilling’s worth of provision you may as well trust him with a shilling’ – and Peto, whom the committee had earlier heard described by Brunel as probably the largest contractor in the world, though Brassey is usually thought to have been the bigger of the two. Robert Rawlinson gave evidence also, and told the committee much the same as he had written in his part of the Statistical Society pamphlet.

  Chadwick, who urged the committee to recommend legislation for workmen’s compensation on the French style, gave evidence that on the Paris and Le Havre line, where reasonable compensation was paid as a matter of right whenever a man was killed or injured on the works, only £5,000 had been paid out of a total expenditure of £1,000,000. Supposing the earthworks to have cost half the total (this was the usual proportion), then the money expended in compensation amounted to no more than one per cent of the navvies’ wages. The wages were 22s. a week, so compensation had cost the company only about twopence-halfpenny a week for each man. At Woodhead, he said, thirty-two men had been killed and 140 seriously injured in six years. Suppose £200 had been given to the relatives of each man killed, and £50 to each man maimed, this would have cost only £13,400 out of £343,200 paid in wages. About sixpence per week for each man would have paid the insurance charge for ‘this work of excessive danger, conducted in an excessively dangerous manner’.

  Then he addressed himself to the principle of employers’ liability, which he said Brunel opposed as interfering with the temper, boldness, and freedom of action of Englishmen and tending to put them in leading strings. ‘Now the complaint is,’ said Chadwick, ‘that they are strings pulled, at the risk of life, by irresponsible persons, whom it is necessary to make responsible.’

  Bouverie vacated the chair to give evidence before his own committee about the number of labourers he estimated would be working on the railways in the next three or four years. Sir Robert Peel, he said, had stated at the beginning of the session that an expenditure of £23 millions on railways had already been authorized, and if half went in navvies’ wages that would be £11,500,000. There were also many more schemes which would be submitted to Parliament, and he assumed that these would add, say, another £5,000,000 in wages, making £16,500,000 in all. The average pay of a navvy was 20s. to 22s. a week, but the increased demand might make this 30s. Allowing for that, £16,500,000 would give employment to nearly 200,000 men – exactly 198,717. The total effective force of the Army, Navy, and Ordnance was only 160,000.

  Bouverie was asked why he thought the Truck Act did not apply to railway works. He explained that at the time the Act was passed (1831) there was hardly any railway work going on. One clause of the Act enumerated all the classes of labourer to which it was intended to apply; all the rest, therefore, were not caught by its provisions, and railway labourers were not among those named. The main provisions of the 1831 Act as it applied to other workers were very much the same as witnesses before the committee had proposed should govern the employment of railway navvies. Contracts had to be made in terms of money; the men had to be paid in money; goods could not be supplied in payment of wages; a set-off for goods supplied would not be allowed against a claim for wages; and an employer who did so supply goods was liable to a fine. Asked if he knew of any objection to extending the Act to cover railway labourers, Bouverie replied: ‘The chief objection I have heard stated is, that it might be evaded.’

  The committee members asked 3,115 questions, and the answers they received, taken together, revealed the navvies as drunken and perpetual rioters and yet as men who, for all that they were condemned by some witnesses as savages and the refuse of the community, and by the commissioner of Liverpool police as persistent utterers of forged sixpences, were not vicious. The contractors, with few exceptions, were revealed as men who happily fed their men on rotten food, got them drunk on truck beer, and worked them seven days a week.

  The abuses and evils stood out plain. The need for reform was obvious. The committee was convinced. Its report was a strong one and made these recommendations:

  1. The Truck Act should be extended to the railways, and the men should be paid in money, weekly.

  2. Before a new line was constructed a railway company should notify a Public Board where the men were to live and how they were to be looked after if they were ill or injured, and the work should not begin until the Board was satisfied. Inspectors should be appointed to supervise the works.

  3. Magistrates should be given wider powers to enforce payment of wages. Contractors should be obliged to guarantee the navvies’ pay, so that if a sub-contractor ran off the men would not be left penniless.

  4. Wider powers should be created to appoint special constables to prevent rioting.

  5. Companies should be made prima facie liable for all deaths and injuries on their lines. The burden of proof would be shifted from the person injured to the company, which would be held liable unless it could prove the victim had been wilfully careless.

  6. Railway companies should make periodic reports on the welfare of the navvies to a public authority.

  [The principle of workmen’s compensation seems particularly bold, but some years earlier the Factory Acts had made employers absolutely liable for injuries done to workmen by unfenced machinery.]

  On 28 July the report was ordered by the House of Commons to be printed. The recommendations covered twelve pages, there were two hundred and two pages of minutes and evidence, and an index which took another fifty-four pages. The case was well stated and cried out for action.

  Nothing was done.

  The report was formally received. It was not even debated. There was no public outcry. It was as Sir James Graham had said – nothing very important was expected to come out of it. And probably George Hudson, who had attended only the first of the committee’s eight meetings, still preserved his satisfaction that everything redounded to the credit of those gentlemen who had the honour to be connected with public works.

  Nothing was done. But then, what was to be expected of a House of Commons where one railway company alone was said to have eighty Members in its pocket?

  9

  Wellington, Cat’s Meat, and Mary Ann

  They called him Contrairy York. York because that was where he came from, and Contrairy because that was what he was. He was a character on the railways for many years, and the landlady of any hut where he had lo
dged could always tell a few tales about him. One day when there was bread and milk for breakfast – a strange breakfast for a navvy, but so the story goes – all the others had theirs boiled into a sort of pap, except Contrairy, who insisted on having his fried, as he called it. Another day, on the tramp, he and his mates came to a river which was quite deep. They looked for a bridge farther upstream, but not Contrairy; he waded through. As the same men climbed the hill beyond, Yorky was conspicuous again, not only because his clothes were dripping from the stream, but because now his trousers were rolled up, showing one blue sock and one white. And peeping over his shoulder was the cat he usually carried out with him – because most other navvies, if they had a pet, preferred a dog.

  Nicknames like Contrairy’s were part of the navvy character. It was not just that navvies, like any other body of men, used such names familiarly among themselves. It was more than that. The historian Williams, after calling navvies herds of brutes, went on to say that

  the last relics of civilization seemed to disappear as they even changed their names into the uncouth and barbarous epithets by which they preferred to be known.

  The navvies were in a real sense outside society, shunned and feared and living apart, and because of this they built up a freemasonry of their own, of which the names were part. John Smith, when he left the farm to work for better wages on the railway, became, after a time, a navvy. He was then no longer just John Smith. He left that name behind when he became one of a body of men who worked, lived, and occasionally rioted, together. He now had a new identity. His true name now became the one given him by his colleagues. He became Hedgehog, because he looked like one, or Gorger, because he gorged, or Gentleman Sydney for no discoverable reason, and would hardly be recognized by his fellows if he was caught poaching and written down on the magistrates’ charge sheet as John William Smith. Once, when a visitor wanted to see a navvy whom he knew as Richard Millwood, he searched the wholy navvy village without finding anyone who knew the man, and was about to give up when a woman told him: ‘Hang it, thou means my feyther. Why doesn’t thee ask for Old Blackbird?’