The Railway Navvies

by Terry Coleman

  Some men kept one nickname throughout their working lives, but others were given a new name at every works they came to. There was nothing sinister in aliases, or in constantly changing names. It could happen that two men, coming new to a contract, would tell the timekeeper that their names were, say, Smith and Jones. The timekeeper already had more than a hundred men on his books, and several Smiths and Joneses among them. So look, he would say to them, you’re Lock and you’re Key. Or the men might choose their own nicknames. One timekeeper told a story of two men who when they were asked their names gave those of the contractors, Lucas and Aird, which the clerk refused to write down because the two newcomers were known rough characters and he thought it improper for them to take their employers’ names in vain.

  Some names, then, were given off-hand, without any reason, and were the more striking for that. Coffee Joe so little deserved his name that he was dismissed for drunkenness, and a navvy had to be far gone in drink before he was sacked for it. But most were given for a reason, which might be a man’s looks, the way he talked, some tale about him, or the place he came from. The Punches, the Slens, and the Nobbies were as common among navvies as the Robinsons, Browns, and Smiths among other people.

  Punch was not usually one who drank punch, or a comic, but just any man who was shorter than usual. And if he was in any other way peculiar he could expect to have a prefix tacked on as well. If he was nearly as broad as he was high it might be Ten-ton Punch; or if he came to a works with his hair long it might be Pigtail Punch; if short and thin, then Fanny Punch; or it might be Sore-eyed Punch, Chattering Punch, Teapot Punch, or Jack Brett’s Punch, if he happened to be in the gang overseen by Brett. There was one Dolly-legged Punch, and this is how he got his name. The washing in many of the huts was done in a dolly tub, in the bottom of which the clothes were twirled around by a three-legged wooden instrument called a dolly. Punch objected to his landlady washing his belongings with this instrument because he was certain it would wear out the clothes. The woman laughed at him, so one night he quietly took a saw and cut the legs off the dolly, and was ever after known as Dolly-legged Punch. The Slens were the thin ones, the name itself being short for Slenderman. There were also other names for such men. Two brothers, both thin, were given the titles of Shadow and Bones, and others were called Straight-up Gip and Starch-’em Stiff. Nobby, a name given for no particular reason, became so common that its possessors needed another added to it to give them their full identity of Sumphole Nobby or Scented-soap Nobby.

  If a man had lost a leg or an arm he was likely to be Peggy or Wingy. One man was called Rainbow Peg, not because he had painted his wooden leg in many colours but because whenever he stood he put all his weight on his one sound leg, which was somewhat bowed in the first place and later became, with the constant pressure on it, curved like a rainbow.

  The colour of a man’s whiskers could get him called Streaky Dick, Ginger Bill, or Black and Tan. But perhaps the most common sort of nickname was that which revealed where a man had come from. There were Bristol Jacks, Brummagem Joes, Devon Bills, and Yankee Toms. Navvies who came from Lancashire or Yorkshire were called Lanks or Yorkeys. Bacca Lank smoked hugely, and Contrairy was the most famous of the Yorkeys.

  On the Kettering and Manton line there was a marvelous assortment of names. Among them were Skeedicks, Moonraker, Mountainpecker, Concertina Cockney, Jimmy-the-newman, Johnny-come-lately, Beer, Brandy, Fatbuck, Scandalous, Rainbow Ratty, and Reeky Hoile, who had one day looked down a shaft at the fumes which rose after a blast had been set off, and exclaimed in his Yorkshire accent, ‘What a reeky hoile.’ That was in the 1870s. But the most famous of all navvy names were those borne thirty years before by three men who were known on public works all over England as Wellington, Cat’s Meat, and Mary Ann – the first because of a fine nose, the second because of a previous profession, and the last because of an effeminate voice.

  The different gangs also attracted nicknames. On one line two gangs lodged at an inn called the ‘Horse Shoes’, and were known as the Horse Shoe Gang and the Horse Shoe Shoe Blacks. A celebrated gang in the early days was the Old Ninety-fifth – perhaps they were old soldiers. New men were often called the Boys’ Gang, and a gang which did its work fast might be known as the Fly Away Gang. Clergymen were called the Billycock Gang.

  The Black Gang on the Manchester Ship Canal, c. 1890.

  Nicknames had their drawbacks. A scripture reader called Dennis, at Worsthorne, appealed to navvies in June 1887, asking those who gave wrong names at the office to carry their proper names and addresses on a piece of paper in their pockets. Mr Dennis had had a lot of trouble with a man who had been killed on the works. He had given his name as Charles Fisher, and was also known as Reed. He had in his pocket a ticket for a pair of trousers pawned at Skipton, made out to J. Wilson. Eventually his real name was found to be Peter Lendall, from Askham.

  Then there was another navvy, the son of a widow, who left home and found work on a line only twelve miles off. He took a new name, was unknown by his old one, and when he fell ill with fever was nursed and then buried by strangers. After he had been away for some time the widow became alarmed and asked a clergyman to help find her son, and they eventually traced the man. But it was too late, and the only consolation the priest could offer the mother was to show her the grave to which her son had been carried six weeks before. Another navvy lost his inheritance because of his nickname. An old man died leaving a considerable sum to be divided among his nephews and nieces. But one nephew had not been heard of for many years. He had become a navvy and adopted an alias, and so could not be traced. When the man did hear of his uncle’s death many years had gone by, he had been presumed dead, his share had been apportioned among the others, and he had lost a thousand pounds.

  But the strangest story is that of a navvy called Warren, who had taken the harmless alias of George Brown. In the autumn of 1882 he was working on the Midland Railway, widening the line near Irchester. On 29 August he was injured by a fall of earth and taken back to his lodgings, opposite the Dog and Duck at Wellingborough, where he died a few days later. An inquest was held, a verdict of accidental death returned, and two days later the man was buried. Then, as the Northampton Herald put it, ‘an event took place which proved that truth was stranger than fiction’. Under the headline, ‘A Strange Occurrence’, the newspaper report read:

  Soon after the funeral a man named George Warren, from Kislingbury, presented himself, and said he believed that, from what he had heard, the deceased was his son. He said he had not seen his son for a number of years, but he should know him by a peculiar scar on the breast, received from a scald during childhood, and he expressed a strong desire to see the body. An application was made to the Coroner, but he said he could not interfere. Other officials were applied to with the same result, and at last the grave-digger at the cemetery re-opened the newly-closed grave between eleven and twelve o’clock on Saturday night. The carpenter who made the coffin took off the lid, and the father by means of a ladder descended into the grave, removed the clothes, and there saw the scar which proclaimed the dead man to be his long-lost son.

  Apart from these nicknames, the navvies also had a talent for slang, some of it very like the rhyming slang of Cockney tradition. ‘Now, Jack,’ says one navvy to another, ‘I’m going to get a tiddly wink of a pig’s ear, so keep your mince pies on the Billy Gorman’ – meaning he is going to get a drink of beer and wants Jack to keep an eye on the foreman. If he had wanted something stronger than beer he might have spoken of ‘Bryan o’Lin’, or, ‘Tommy get out, and let your father in’, meaning gin.

  At the end of a contract one man might say to another, ‘Well, you’ve jacked up, what’s your little game?’

  ‘I’m going to get my kit and be off on the frog and toad.’

  Frog and toad is road; as one clergyman put it, ‘The motion of the two reptiles is suggestive, I suppose, of a man on tramp.’

  Before the man started on the tra
mp he might blackbird and thrush his daisy roots – black and brush his hobnail boots.

  Sometimes this strange language was used to baffle newcomers to the works, who were always good for a joke. So the ganger might say, ‘Now then, my china plate, out with your cherry ripe, off with your steam packet, and set your bark and growl a going.’ This meant, ‘Now then, mate, out with your pipe, off with your jacket, and set your trowel going.’ This is bricklayers’ lingo. Their slang was by tradition the most picturesque, involved, and unintelligible of the lot.

  If a man ran short of bricks he called to his mate for more Dublin tricks, if he wanted water he demanded fisherman’s daughter, and if he was drunk he said he was elephant’s trunk. The same clergyman who explained frog and toad surmised that elephant’s trunk not only rhymed with drunk but also indicated, in the capacity of the trunk for sucking up water, the amount of beer the man had taken.

  A man who was tired of the long walk he had to make to his work, and intended to get his money and go on to another job, might say, ‘I can’t stand this Duke of York to my Russian Turk; I shall go and get my sugar and honey and be off to another Solomon.’ Solomon meant job.

  There was a huge vocabulary of rhyming slang: ‘bird lime’ was time; ‘Johnny Randle’, candle; ‘Charley Frisky’, whisky; ‘Charley Prescott’, waistcoat; ‘Jimmy Skinner’, dinner; ‘penneth o’bread’, head; ‘weeping willow’, pillow; ‘bo-peep’, sleep; and ‘Lord Lovel’, shovel. In another system, which did not rely on rhyme, a shovel was generally called the ‘navvy’s prayer book’. The earth carted away was called crock or muck, and the men spoke of each other as muck-shifters or thick-legs. When the Sheffield, Ashton under Lyne, and Manchester Railway was building the Sheffield to Penistone line in the mid 1840s, a pub was opened for the navvies just north of the Thurgoland tunnel and called the Rest and Be Thankful. The navvies soon changed this name to the ‘Rompticle’, the nearby viaduct was named after it, and is still known as the Rompticle viaduct.

  You might think that men who spoke such a flourishing lingo of their own, and showed such a gift for words, might also have had many worksongs. But it seems there were few –spectators often remarked on the concentrated silence as a gang of navvies got down to their work – and those few have disappeared. The following navvy song comes not from Britain but from America, where it was bellowed by Irishmen as they pressed on across the continent.

  Every morning at seven o’clock

  There were twenty tarriers working on the rock

  And the boss comes along and he says, kape still

  And come down heavy on the cast iron drill,

  CHORUS:

  And drill, ye tarriers, drill.

  Drill, ye tarriers, drill,

  It’s work all day for the sugar in your tay,

  Down behind the railway,

  And drill, ye tarriers, drill !

  And blast I And fire !

  The new foreman was Jean McCann,

  By God, he was a blame mean man,

  Last week a premature blast went off,

  And a mile in the air went big Jim Goff,

  [CHORUS]

  When the next pay day came round,

  Jim Goff a dollar short was found.

  When he asked what for, came this reply,

  ‘You’re docked for the time you was up in the sky.’

  [CHORUS]

  There is another, of which only the refrain has been recorded. It lasted until the First World War and was sung in the trenches. The refrain goes:

  I’m a navvy, I’m a navvy, workin’ on the line,

  Choppin’ up the worms, makin’ one worm into nine.

  Some jobs is rotten jobs, other jobs is fine,

  But I’m a navvy, I’m a navvy, working on the line.

  Probably the truth is that there were songs, but they were considered unprintable and so were lost. In Britain the only line where much singing is recorded was the Chester and Holyhead, where many of the men were Welshmen, a most devout and un-navvylike lot who supported six scripture readers, went to chapel on Sunday, and sang fervent hymns, in Welsh, as they travelled to their work on weekdays. In the later years of the century, when missionary ladies began to take an interest in the salvation of the navvies, abstinence songs were printed and distributed along the works. One of them, which was published in 1880, ran:

  I am an English navvy, and I tell the tale with glee,

  Though thousands curl their lip in scorn, and mock at chaps like me;

  But round and round our kingly isle, on meadow, glen and hill,

  Ten thousand mighty monuments proclaim our strength and skill.

  Yes, I’m an English navvy; but, oh, not an English sot,

  I have run my pick through alcohol, in bottle, glass or pot,

  And with the spade of abstinence, and all the power I can

  I am spreading out a better road for every working man.

  But it is unlikely that this song commended itself to more than a few.

  There were two navvy poets whose work has survived – Alexander Anderson, who wrote in the 1870s, and Patrick MacGill, who published his first book in 1910. Anderson, from Kirkconnel in Dumfriesshire, worked as a labourer on the Glasgow and South Western Railway. He published several books of verse, notably Song of Labour, and a few years later, in 1878, Songs of the Rail, which he dedicated to his fellow workers on the railway in the hope that it might heighten their pride in the service and help them ‘to look upon the iron horse as the embodiment of a force as noble as gigantic... a power destined, beyond doubt, to be one of the civilizers of the world’.

  Alexander Anderson, navvy poet.

  At his worst Anderson becomes all mystical and litters his work with German quotations and allusions. In ‘A Song for my Fellows’, under the title of which he places the explanatory line ‘Ambos oder Hammer sein – Goethe’, he writes:

  Then brothers let us rise up from our fears,

  No anvils are we, but men

  Who can wield the sledge-hammer, like mystic Thor,

  For the daily battle again.

  In much the same tone he describes the whistle of an engine as the ‘great nineteenth century watch-cry for the world to go ahead’, but he could also do a most vigorous descriptive piece of a locomotive:

  Hurrah for the mighty engine;

  As he bounds along his track;

  Hurrah, for the life that is in him,

  And his breath so thick and black.

  And hurrah for our fellows, who in their need

  Could fashion a thing like him –

  With a heart of fire, and a soul of steel

  And a Samson in every limb.

  He wrote his best when he forgot this ‘joy through strength’ philosophy of his and just wrote about what he had seen. Even then he is inclined to be melodramatic, writing one poem about an engine-driver who runs over the woman he loves as she stands by the line to wave to him on the night before their wedding day, and another in which an engineman runs over his brother, whose severed head is then dragged along on the front of the engine. But violent death was common on the railway and, as Anderson explains, nearly all his poems were based upon facts, on real incidents on the line where he worked.

  His verses received what might be called mixed reviews. The Ayr Observer said:

  An educated surfaceman, a polished and gentle-minded wielder of hammer, pick and shovel, is truly a rara avis in terra; as remarkable a producer of verse as any that our century has seen.

  The Scotsman said:

  He is apparently familiar with German literature, talking glibly of Schiller and Goethe, and prefixing to his pieces German quotations, which we presume him able to translate...

  The Chicago Tribune merely remarked that Anderson’s poetry had a hearty earnestness.

  It also had, at times, a hearty bathos, as in ‘The Wires’, in which telegraph wires along the line talk about the messages they are carrying. The sixth stanza reads:

  A sound of bel
ls is in my tone,

  Of marriage bells so glad and gay,

  It comes straight from the heart of one

  A thousand weary miles away.

  O sweet to see in a foreign land

  An English bride by the altar stand,

  Her eyelids wet with tears that seem

  Like dews that herald some sweet dream,

  As, blushing, she falters forth the ‘Yes’

  That opens a world of happiness;

  But hush, this is all I have got to say,

  ‘Harry and I were married today’.

  The best of Anderson is probably ‘Old Wylie’s Stone’. The stone of the title stood by the rail and commemorated a man’s death.

  We stood clear of both lines, and were watching the train

  Coming up with a full head of steam on the strain,

  When all at once one of our men gave a shout –

  There’s a shovel against the rail! Look out !

  The shovel was Wylie’s, and swift as a wink,

  He sprang into the four feet with never a shrink;

  Clutched it; but ere he could clear the track,

  The buffer beam hit him right in the back.

  In a moment poor Wylie was over the slope

  And we after him, but with little of hope;

  Found him close by the stone, with his grip firm set

  On the shovel that cost him his life to get.

  Patrick MacGill wrote much later. He was born in Ulster about 1890, left school at twelve, began work as a navvy a year or two later, came to England and Scotland where he worked on railways and waterworks, and then in 1910 published his first book of verse, Gleanings from a Navvy’s Scrapbook. This cost sixpence, and contained translations of La Fontaine’s fables made with the aid of a dictionary, and many navvy verses. A typical poem, and one reminiscent of Anderson, is called ‘The Greater Love’. Jim the navvy sees a seven-year-old child on the line and knows a train is coming. He runs to the child, but the engine is upon them.