The Railway Navvies

by Terry Coleman

  He thought as he would poor fellow, his life was a useless one,

  Many another to labour when he was buried and gone,

  Men were so very plenty, an’ work was so sparin’, or

  Since life had so little to give him, what was he livin’ for;

  An’ the child might have brighter prospects….

  So Jim throws the child aside, and is himself run down.

  In the introduction, MacGill says:

  Some day – when I become famous – I will take immense pleasure in reminding the world, like Mr Carnegie, that I started on the lowest rung of the ladder, or, as is more correct, in looking for the spot where the ladder was placed…. I hope you will have more pleasure in reading these verses than I have had in writing some of them. Imagine a navvies hut, fill it with men shaggy as bears, dressed in moleskin and leather, reeking of beer and tobacco. In a dark corner of the hut aforesaid place your humble servant scribbling for dear life on a notebook as black as his Satanic Majesty, while on one side a trio of experts in fisticuffs discuss the Johnson–Jeffries match and on the other side a dozen gamblers argue and curse over a game of banker, and you have a faint idea of the trials of a versifier.

  This first book got a few good reviews. Harry Beswick in The Clarion asked, ‘How the deuce did this versifier find himself in a navvies’ hut instead of a literary salon?’ The Illustrated London News said MacGill had a considerable gift, the Daily Express that he was not afraid to be original, and the Westminster Gazette found his verses racy and virile. Then in 1912 his second book appeared, called Songs of a Navvy. Like the first it was printed by the Derry Journal, but this time it is also described on the title page as ‘published by himself from Windsor’. In its pages MacGill remarks that swearing is not a habit but a gift, says that all that glitters is not mud, and writes of navvies ‘padding it’ on tramp. He writes of his navvy shovel, which has the grace of a woman and the strength of an oak, and says the time is near when the shovel will rise over sword and sceptre as a mighty power in the land. At times he has the gift of a vivid phrase: in his verses lots of navvies are run over, and one is ‘burst like a flea by the wheel’. Here is a poem entitled ‘The Navvy Chorus’.

  And the demon took in hand

  Moleskin, leather, and clay,

  Oaths embryonic and

  A longing for Saturday,

  Kneestraps and blood and flesh,

  A chest exceedingly stout,

  A soul – (which is a question

  Open to many a doubt),

  And fashioned with pick and shovel,

  And shapened in mire and mud,

  With life of the road and the hovel,

  And death of the line or hod,

  With fury and frenzy and fear,

  That his strength might endure for a span,

  From birth, through beer to bier,

  The link twixt the ape and the man.

  His best pieces all have this bitterness. Take a stanza of ‘Played Out’.

  As a bullock falls in the crooked ruts,

  he fell when the day was o’er,

  The hunger gripping his stinted guts,

  his body shaken and sore.

  They pulled it out of the ditch in the dark,

  as a brute is pulled from its lair,

  The corpse of a navvy, stiff and stark,

  with the clay on its face and hair.

  Or consider ‘L’Envoi – To My Pick and Shovel’.

  When the last, long shift will be laboured, and the lying time will be burst,

  And we go as picks and shovels, navvies or nabobs must,

  When you go up on the scrap heap and I go down to the dust

  Will ever a one remember the times our voices rung,

  When you were limber and lissom, and I was lusty and young?

  Remember the jobs we’ve laboured, the beautiful songs we’ve sung?

  Perhaps some mortal in speaking will give us a kindly thought –

  ‘There is a muckpile they shifted, here is a place where they wrought’,

  But maybe our straining and striving and singing will go for nought.

  Then in 1914 MacGill published Children of the Dead End: the autobiography of a navvy. Once, he says, when he was on the tramp, he met Moleskin Joe outside Paisley:

  He had knee-straps around his knees, and a long skiver of tin wedged between the straps and the legs of his trousers, which were heavy with red muck frozen on the cloth. The cloth itself was hard, and rattled like wood against the necks of his boots. He was very curiously dressed. He wore a pea-jacket, which bore marks of the earth of many strange sleeping places. A grey cap covered a heavy cluster of thick dark hair. But the man’s waistcoat was the most noticeable article of apparel. It was made of velvet, ornamented with large ivory buttons which ran down the front in parallel rows. Each of his boots was of different colour; and they were also different in size and shape. In later years I often wore similar boots myself. We navvies call them ‘subs’, and they can be bought very cheaply in rag stores and second-hand clothes shops. One boot has always the knack of wearing better than its fellow. The odd good boot is usually picked up by a rag-picker, and in course of time it finds its way into a rag-store, whence it is thrown amongst hundreds of others, which are always ready for further use at their old trade. A pair of odd boots may be got for a shilling or less, and most navvies wear them.

  He met Tom MacGuire who was sitting on the roadside reading an English translation of Schopenhauer. Tom had just served six months for shooting the crow in a Greenock pub: shooting the crow was ordering and drinking whisky with no intention of paying. MacGill read Victor Hugo in tunnels by the light of a naphtha lamp, and wept over Les Misérables. He read Sartor Resartus, and Montaigne, and his books got covered with rust, and sleeper-tar, and grease. A ganger called Horse told him he read so much he would end his days in a madhouse or the House of Commons. He detested missionaries, and said the church allowed a criminal commercial system to continue and then wasted its time trying to save the souls of the victims of that system, ‘A missionary,’ he wrote, ‘canvasses the working classes for their souls just in the same manner as a town councillor canvasses them for their votes.’

  MacGill earned his first money as a writer when a newspaper sent him two guineas for his description of the death of a navvy on the works. He worked briefly as a reporter in London, and there his autobiography ends. The war came. He wrote a war book, and then comic novels of Irish life. MacGill married Margaret Gibbons, a novelist who wrote for the same publisher; she was to write twenty-two works, some of which appeared as Red Letter Novels.

  MacGill, of course, was writing late in the day, after the navvy age proper. He did work as an excavator, but mostly as a surfaceman in a maintenance gang. But his writings record many of the earlier navvy traditions. In his autobiography there is a song called ‘The Bold Navvy Man’. He may have written it himself: on the other hand, it is attributed in the book to a navvy named Two-shift Mulholland, and may have been traditional. Here it is:

  I’ve navvied here in Scotland, I’ve navvied in the south,

  Without a drink to cheer me or a crust to cross me mouth,

  I fed when I was workin’ and starved when out on tramp,

  And the stone has been me pillow and the moon above me lamp.

  I have drunk me share and over when I was flush with tin,

  For the drouth without was nothin’ to the drouth that burned within,

  And whene’er I’ve filled me billy and whene’er I’ve drained me can,

  I’ve done it like a navvy, a bold navvy man.

  A bold navvy man,

  An old navvy man,

  And I’ve done me graft and stuck it like a bold navvy man.

  I’ve met a lot of women and I liked them all a spell –

  They can drive some men to drinkin’ and also some to hell,

  But I never met her yet, the woman cute who can

  Learn a trick to old Nick or the bold
navvy man.

  I do not care for ladies grand who are of high degree,

  A winsome wench and willin’, she is just the one for me,

  Drink and love are classed as sins, as mortal sins by some,

  I’ll drink and drink whene’er I can, the drouth is sure to come –

  And I will love till lusty life runs out its mortal span,

  The end of which is in the ditch for many a navvy man.

  The bold navvy man,

  The old navvy man,

  Safe in a ditch with heels cocked up, so dies the navvy man.

  10

  Sin and Sanctity

  The navvies were great sinners. They spoke of God, it was said, only to wonder why he had made them so poor and others so rich; and when they heard, from the lips of an evangelizing clergyman, of the coming state, it was only to hope that there they might cease to be railway labourers. The general view was that they were a godless lot. Yet, on the other hand, Wordsworth celebrated their piety in his ‘Sonnet at Furness Abbey’.

  Well have yon railway labourers to this ground

  Withdrawn for noontide rest. They sit, they walk

  Among the ruins, but no idle talk

  Is heard; to grave demeanour all are bound;

  And from one voice, a hymn with tuneful sound

  Hallows once more the long-deserted quire,

  And thrills the old sepulchral earth, around.

  Others look up; and with fix’d eyes admire

  That wide-spanned arch, wondering how it was raised,

  To keep, so high in air, its strength and grace;

  All seem to feel the spirit of the place,

  And by the general reverence God is praised.

  Profane despoilers, stand ye not reproved,

  While thus these simple-hearted men are moved?

  Wordsworth, of course, was no railway-lover either, and he had opposed the building of the Lake District lines. Yet here he is praising as delicate amateurs of art and reverent worshippers of the spiritual, navvies whom others, and most others, condemned as herds of infidels. Probably he was lucky in finding them at a quiet moment: he might not have felt the same if he had seen them on a randy. But the common view of navvies as hell-bent savages was equally overwrought. It was perhaps a little harsh to condemn men for working on Sundays when if they did not they would very likely be dismissed.

  Behind the condemnation of the navvies was the Church’s instinctive dislike of the railway. As men of God the clergymen could always be relied upon to scrape up a few reasons to show that the railway was against the natural order of things: as men of property they could often be relied upon to extract the last halfpenny from the companies who had to cross their lands. In the early days of the railway, the London and Birmingham Railway passed through one estate in such a way that it was obvious to the company that the clergyman who owned the land really required no bridges at all. But this clergyman not only demanded great compensation (considering, doubtless, that his own temporal advantage was essential to the spiritual good of his parishioners), but also required five bridges to be erected. In the course of the negotiations he came down to four, accepting some slight extra compensation in place of the fifth. It was essential to get the land, because the contractors had already been held up by the haggling, so the company was forced to submit and the agreement was signed, guaranteeing to the proprietor bridges at A, B, C, and D. Soon after the owner received the purchase money he wrote to say that he could do without the bridge at A, if the company would give him half the value of it; this was to the company’s benefit and so it was agreed, bridge A was done away with, and half what it would have cost was paid to the clergyman. Encouraged by this further payment, he then discovered that he could do without bridge B and offered to commute that with the company on the same terms as bridge A. This being agreed and paid for, he then in succession found that he could dispense with bridges C and D on exactly the same terms and so in the end he made do with no bridges at all.

  William Barlow’s 245ft wide arch for St. Pancras station, c. 1866.

  The Church and the railways also clashed at times when a company wished to carry a line through a graveyard. In Manchester, about 1842, one line was driven through a burial ground opposite the Old Town. The partially decayed bodies were heaped up just as they were exhumed, and piles were driven into new graves, so that the water oozed out of the swampy ground pregnant with putrefying matter and filled the district with the stench. Later the Church became more careful of its dead, and when the Midland Railway took a deep cutting through the old St Pancras churchyard in 1865 the work was supervised on behalf of the Bishop of London by a firm of architects. At a previous, smaller, excavation a year or so before, supervised by the same firm, something had gone wrong; the bodies were supposed to have been reburied but there were stories of mysterious sacks full of something that rattled being carted off to the bone-mills, so at St Pancras the architects took no chances and employed a clerk of works to oversee the railway workmen. To make doubly sure, a young architect’s assistant called Thomas Hardy, later to become the novelist and poet, was ordered to visit the works at odd hours to check that everything was conducted decorously. After nightfall, within a high hoarding that passers-by could not see over, the exhumation went on by the light of flares. New coffins were provided in place of those that came apart in the lifting, and for loose skeletons: those bones that held together were carried to the new burial place on a board. It was at this works that the incident of the celebrated Roman Catholic divine took place. Orders had been given for the bones of this high French dignitary to be shipped to France, but when the navvies opened the grave they found the remains of three men. The shrewdest of the diggers suggested that since the man was a foreigner the darkest coloured bones would be his, so the blackest bones were sorted out and put together until they had the right number of lefts and rights, and the selected skeleton was screwed into a new coffin and sent across the Channel, to be re-interred with all due ceremony.

  Thomas Hardy as a young architect.

  The navvies who did this were not without a rough sort of tact, which is more than can be said of the many members of the Church who preached the word of God to the labourers with the very apparent aim of keeping them in their ordained places. Typical of this kind of man was a Mr Fox, an engineer and not a clergyman, but a fervent preacher, who spoke at a tea-party at Chester on Easter Monday, 1890. Addressing many navvies from the works, and with a bishop in the audience, Mr Fox told the men that they were all fellow workers, the only difference being that he worked with his brain while they were horny-handed sons of toil. He mentioned, among other things, the nobility of labour, and supported his argument by declaring that Jesus Christ had been a carpenter.

  Altogether the Anglican Church did not cover itself in glory in its dealings with the navvies. In the early years the country clergy seem carefully to avoid having anything to do with them. The men were not members of the parish in which they were working for the time being, and the extent of many a country vicar’s interest in the men was to send his curate along to bury a few of them every now and again. Of course the drinking and loose living of the men were fit subjects for sermons, and the navvy way of life was frequently condemned. The clergy would have done the same for any sinners. In the mid forties, however, concern began to grow for the men’s spiritual welfare, and some railway chaplains were appointed. The minutes of the Chester and Holyhead Railway Company for 26 February 1845 say that the directors, knowing from experience the damage inflicted on property near the line, the annoyance to the resident gentry, the delay in the progress of the works, and the loss sustained by the contractors from the loose and unsettled character of railway labourers, felt it their duty to hold out some inducement to constant and steady industry and to promote among them the growth of moral habits. They had, therefore, stipulated in the contracts for the building of the line that the contractors should put up huts for the men where there was no room for the na
vvies to stay in the village along the line, and also that the men should be paid on stated days and in money, that is, with no part paid in truck goods. After stating this the minutes go on:

  In addition to these precautions your directors believe that very many and great benefits would arise to the company, no less than to the men themselves, if some suitable means were adopted, under due authority and supervision, for enabling or inducing the men to attend Divine worship on Sundays.

  The minutes add that the local churches could not hold the number of navvies expected to be at work on the line, but that other buildings could be used for the time being, if some minister could be found to officiate. The directors then agreed to pay up to £300 to promote the men’s spiritual welfare, if a similar sum could be raised locally from other sources. It was. Altogether £380 was subscribed, and to this the company then added its £300. The Chester and Holyhead was unusual in its solicitude for the men, but then it was altogether an exceptionally saintly undertaking. Captain Constantine Moorsom, the resident director, said he had never heard any complaints about truck. He had ‘seen paragraphs’ in the papers, but had never seen it himself and never asked the men. ‘It is my business,’ he said, ‘to attend to grievances, but not to hunt for them.’

  Generally the initiative in appointing chaplains was not the railway companies’, or the Church’s, but that of groups of gentlemen, who not only feared for the men’s souls but also felt that a course of religious instruction might induce them to conduct themselves less ferociously along the line, and instil into them a sense that it was wrong to poach the neighbouring landowner’s game. Thus in 1846 the Rev. James Gillies and the Rev. William St George Sargent were both ministering to the men on the Lancaster and Carlisle line. Mr Gillies, whose stipend was paid by a committee of gentlemen in Kendal and by the Church Pastoral Aid Society, looked after a thousand men on ten miles of the line. Every Sunday, he conducted three services, each in a different spot, and his average congregation at first was about ninety. But after a while the work got behind and the contractors started to work Sundays as well, robbing Mr Gillies of his congregation. He was indignant. The men lost all distinction, he said, between the Sabbath and any other day, taking out horses and wagons. At the farm-house where he stayed some of the navvies lodged too, and he had often seen them deliberately leaving for work, stripping off, and working all day, and returning in the evening after a full day’s work. ‘In my humble opinion,’ said Mr Gillies,