The Railway Navvies

by Terry Coleman

  Sabbath working wants to be put a stop to; without that, every other effort will be almost in vain, whilst the men are allowed to go in bands to work on the Sabbath.

  Mr Sargent agreed. ‘Without some stop is suddenly put to the public national sin of Sabbath desecration it is sure,’ he said, ‘to bring down public judgements.’ Like his colleague, he was paid half by a benevolent family pitying the moral destitution of the men, who subscribed £75, and half by the Pastoral Aid Society, who found a similar sum. He distributed lots of bibles, and was not altogether without success. He converted one man in particular. This was a navvy who, when Mr Sargent first came to the works, went round, supposing that the men would have a voice in the matter, and got up a petition to put an end to the chapel. ‘That person,’ said Mr Sargent,

  came for the purposes of opposition to my first service, but the first sermon I preached there induced him not only to give up his opposition, but produced some better impressions: and from being a drunken, ill-conditioned man, he is now respectably dressed and quite a credit to the railway labourers, and has given his wife a very happy life since.

  The Rev. John Thompson, who worked on the South Devon Railway, considered himself perfectly acquainted with the nature and character of the men. They were, he said, in perfect darkness; when he had lent them money they had not repaid him; when he gave the men bibles they sold them for drink; and there was, to sum up, not an atom’s worth of honesty in them. But though he was able to do little for their souls, he did help to end a strike. The navvies were paid monthly, as was usual, but wanted to be paid fortnightly instead. The contractors refused, and the men struck. Mr Thompson agreed to act as referee, and spent the whole of one Sunday riding backwards and forwards from the contractors to the men, until the employers conceded that the complaint was fair and agreed to pay every two weeks. Mr Thompson had his reward – ‘After I had been the means of reconciling that strike my chapel was full the following Sunday.’

  But clergymen were not, on the whole, the best people to spread the word of God. Peto, who was himself very much concerned with religious instruction of his navvies, put it like this. It was difficult, he said, to get a man who had received a university education and moved in a higher class of society to come down to the level of the men. Some could, but they were the exceptions. Generally clergymen could not get through to the men as well as a lay reader who lived among them. It was, Peto thought, not the preaching that did good, but the being among them, sitting down together and talking matters over in a more familiar way.

  One such lay reader was Thomas Jenour, who worked among the 400 men on the Croydon and Epsom Railway. He started a school in the winter evenings, where he taught reading, writing, and arithmetic, and where the men read the Bible, sang hymns and prayed. Not more than twenty of the men could read at first, but he found that in two months he could teach the others to read a little. One man who had left the line wrote from Leeds to thank him. The men he taught could not read with facility, but they could get through a passage from the Bible. When the long summer evenings came the school broke up because the men stayed later at work, but then Mr Jenour used to meet the men at dinner, twenty or thirty at a time, and talk with them. He also wrote letters for them, and thought his presence among them acted as a sort of social restraint. In this he was like William Breakey, who was sent by the Town Missionary Society to work among 800 navvies on the Chester and Holyhead line. His influence among them seems to have been considerable. They were generally a peaceable lot, but one Sunday morning some Englishmen got drunk and started a riot in a lodging house. Mr Breakey heard the noise and immediately went off to see if he could help. Several of the men who were standing by advised him to keep his distance but he insisted and pushed his way into the house. When the rioters saw it was him they stopped straight away.

  ‘Is it you making use of this shocking language?’ he said. ‘I am quite grieved.’ One of those who had been fighting looked abashed, and let the missionary see him off to bed.

  Most of the missionaries and scripture readers were sent by the nonconformists. At Woodhead, for instance, the Methodists and Moravians were the only people who took the trouble to travel from Manchester to do what they could for the men, and these attentions angered the contractors, who did all they could to denigrate them. Occasionally a Roman Catholic priest appeared on a line where many Irishmen were working. These Irish navvies, as naturally devout as they were drunken, welcomed the padre among them, and had the reputation of subscribing liberally for his upkeep. The Irishmen on the Caledonian line at one time presented their priest with a gold watch and purse.

  It is easy to criticize the average Anglican clergyman for taking no notice of the gangs of navvies who happened to pass through his parish, but the Anglican Church at the time was not evangelical, and if the parish priests were not to go out and seek to convert the railway sinners they might just as well leave them alone altogether. As it was, it must sometimes have been difficult, when the occasional navvy or his woman came to church, for a conscientious priest to reconcile his duty to the laws of the Church with his humane instincts towards people in need. At Woodhead, for instance, where more than a thousand men worked for years on end throughout the forties, most of the children born were illegitimate, and few were baptized. But the baptism register of St James, Woodhead, shows two who were. The first child (226 in the register) was Sarah, daughter of Thomas and Margaret Nicholson: this ceremony was conducted on 27 February 1842 by George Bamford, curate. Thomas Nicholson, who was at that time employed by the company as superintendent of the works, is described as head engineer. He is the man who was later to become such a scathing critic of those missionaries and dissenting ministers who went preaching to the men on his works. It was a straightforward enough christening. But the very next entry in the same register was not. The ceremony was a month later, on 27 March, and this time the child was illegitimate. Mr Bamford did what he could to help, and entered the child in the register as George, son of Henry Wilkinson and Martha Charlesworth: the parents’ surname he wrote down as Charlesworth, their abode Woodhead, and the father’s quality, trade, or profession as labourer. Anyone who examined the entry would learn that the parents were not married, though this would not be apparent at a glance. But this compassionate tact was too much for the Church, and later the entry was altered, perhaps by Bamford, perhaps by the vicar when he saw what his curate had done. By the child’s name the abbreviation ‘Ill.’ was added, the father’s name was struck out altogether, his occupation of labourer was also struck out, and the words ‘single woman’ written in its place.

  At about this time, and rather more than a hundred miles away, Peto was building the Eastern Counties line from Ely to Peterborough. Three years before he had married for the second time. His new wife, Sarah Ainsworth, was a staunch Baptist and he became one too, caring very much for the spiritual welfare of his men. In 1846 he was employing ten or eleven scripture readers on his works, and if a navvy asked for a bible his name was put on a list, inquiries were made to find out whether he really wanted it and would use it, and then he was given one. All down the Peterborough line Peto’s agents gave the men religious books and distributed school books for their children. The Bishop of Norwich noticed this and said that Peto’s attempts showed that education could civilize the mind, reform the habits, and elevate the understanding. The gin shops were left deserted and the schools were full. Mr Peto was a dissenter, said the bishop, but he felt that as a catholic Christian it would be dereliction of his duty if he did not express his respect for the exertions used by the contractor for the moral benefit of the railway labourers. Two men who died on this line are commemorated on a tombstone in the porch by the south door of Ely Cathedral. The inscription records the deaths on 24 December 1845 of William Pickering, aged thirty, and of Richard Edger, aged twenty-four, and continues:

  THE SPIRITUAL RAILWAY

  The line to heaven by Christ was made

  With heavenly truth th
e rails are laid

  From Earth to Heaven the Line extends

  To Life Eternal where it ends

  Repentance is the Station then

  Where Passengers are taken in

  No Fee for them is there to pay

  For Jesus is himself the way

  God’s Word is the first Engineer

  It points the way to Heaven so clear,

  Through tunnels dark and dreary here

  It does the way to Glory steer

  God’s Love the Fire, his Truth the Steam,

  Which drives the Engine and the Train.

  All you who would to Glory ride,

  Must come to Christ, in him abide

  In First and Second, and Third Class,

  Repentance, Faith and Holiness

  You must the way to Glory gain

  Or you with Christ will not remain

  Come then poor Sinners, now’s the time

  At any Station on the Line

  If you’ll repent and turn from Sin

  The train will stop and take you in

  Later on, the Anglican Church was to follow the example of the dissenters, but in the middle of the century the missionary work continued to be done mainly by the nonconformists and by irregular preachers. One such was Thomas Fayers, who worked among the men in Westmorland in the late 1850s and published a tract called A Navvy’s Dying Words, or Lessons from the Death-bed of a Railway Worker (limp cloth, sixpence), which the Christian News favourably reviewed, recommending it as ‘a glorious death-bed narrative’. In 1862 he published a longer work called Labour Among the Navvies, which contains practically nothing about navvies but is almost wholly given over to an immoderate and incoherent evangelism. One thing Mr Fayers did, however, notice about his navvies. Those who smoked short pipes lived, he said, ‘all in a skow’, in filth and confusion, whereas those who smoked long ones had tidy homes.

  Other preachers were former navvies, like Peter Thompson, known as Happy Peter. He died at his chosen work, one evening in July 1869 when he was addressing a large audience in Chatham. It was intensely hot and he had just finished and said amen, when he staggered and dropped dead. The Gentleman’s Magazine, in reporting his death, said that he had been very successful and had done much good among many of the depraved classes in Chatham.

  Memorial in the shape of a tunnel at Otley, Yorkshire, to navvies killed in the Bramhope tunnel, 1845-49.

  In the 1870s – rather late in the day – the forces of good began to organize. A Yorkshire vicar called Lewis Moule Evans worked among navvies at Lindley Wood, had recreation huts built for the men, taught them, and above all was liked by them. He did not so much preach to them as work among them, and he used to say, ‘I am a navvy too: I work on public works.’ He wrote a pamphlet called Navvies and their Needs, founded the Navvy Mission Society, and did not lack helpers, mostly ladies of means and Christian conviction who were able to devote their leisure to evangelism. The best known of these women was Mrs Elizabeth Garnett. She was born in 1839, the daughter of the Rev. Joshua Hart, vicar of Otley, Yorkshire. When she was ten she heard, and long remembered, a sermon he preached at the unveiling of a memorial to twenty-three miners and navvies who lost their lives on the Bramhope Tunnel works on the Leeds and Thirsk line. In early middle age she married a parson, Charles Garnett, who died on their honeymoon. After this she threw herself into missionary work, visited Lindley Wood, and then in 1875 formed, within the aegis of the navvy mission, an organization she called the Christian Excavators’ Union. She looked upon the union as ‘the salt for Christ on our public works’, but she must have been in many ways a disappointed woman, for there was not much salt. Membership of the C.E.U. was open to all navvies and to teachers, whether volunteer helpers or those paid by the Navvy Mission, on public works. It started with thirty-seven members and after ten years had collected only 296, and this out of a navy population which Mrs Garnett herself estimated at 70,000 men at least, not counting their families. A survey of twenty-one public works made by the society in its first year, showed that the average number of huts at each place was eighty-three, the average number of men 919, that only one of these places had a missionary, and that at only three were regular services taken by the local clergy. These were the larger works, and the society then wrote to the managers of seventy-two more. Only thirty-four replied, but this was enough to convince the society that very little was being done for the men’s Christian education. But one or two of the managers who did reply offered some sound advice. ‘Working people,’ wrote one, ‘like the prayers offered up in a clear, distinct, audible and reverential voice, not monotoned.’ The society was also told that Moody and Sankey’s hymn-book was best liked. As an evangelical movement the C.E.U. itself failed, and so did the Christian Excavators’ Temperance Pledge. When she asked men who had taken this pledge to wear a bit of blue ribbon on their shirts Mrs Garnett overstretched herself: even those men who were willing to give up beer were not willing to make themselves so conspicuous. The blue ribbons were rare, and so were the badges of the C.E.U., but Mrs Garnett persisted. She had faith, and was always ready to address herself in heightened style to anyone who would listen, or to anyone who might contribute to the funds of the mission. Out on the windblown moors, she said, by the sea-lashed shore, and in the verdant garden land of our England the Lord Jesus had walked, and shown himself as ever seeking and mighty to save our navvies, who had gone astray and were as lost sheep. Every now and again she was consoled by a sudden inclination to Christianity induced on a particular stretch of line either by a heavy crop of accidents or by an unusually diligent scripture reader. At one time twenty-three men from one works saw the light and were confirmed together by the Bishop of Manchester, and that pleased her much. But the mission was making few converts and would probably have remained practically unknown had it not been for Mrs Garnett’s instinct for propaganda.

  She had visited navvy encampments and had seen how avid the navvies were for news. At the weekend, sporting papers and Police News (in style a forerunner of the News of the World) were brought into the huts, and those men who could read recited aloud from them for the benefit of the others. Seeing this, Mrs Garnett thought it a great pity that the religious papers of the day were not made more attractive. If, she argued, there could be such a publication as ‘a newspaper up in all the news of the day, with striking illustrations, takingly written, yet with a high moral tone’, it might in time oust Police News and the rest.

  She never produced her takingly written and illustrated newspaper. It would have cost far too much. But in August 1878 she did bring out something less ambitious but none the less effective, the first issue of the Quarterly Letter to Navvies, which she was to run for more than thirty years.

  The first issues of the Letter consisted largely of Mrs Garnett denouncing sinners and calling on them to repent. She was inclined to intolerance and her sermons, which thumped home their moral messages with frequent use of bold type, would probably not have been read for pleasure except by her most ardent converts. It is just as well, in the early days at least, that the Letter was given away for nothing, because few would have bought it. Quite soon Mrs Garnett began to realize that if she was to get her own preachings read she must also find space for the kind of news the men were eager for. A list was carried of the railway works in progress, which would help men who were on the tramp looking for work, and reports from local branches of the C.E.U. appeared. In the third issue, in the spring of 1879, the death of the Rev. Lewis Moule Evans was reported. He had died young, of consumption, and navvies walked miles to attend his funeral.

  A column of notices was started, giving the names of men killed or injured on the railway works, and later on marriages were reported too. The list of deaths is always a long one, even though it cannot have been anything like complete. At Grafton, Marlborough, on 18 May 1881, Charles Baldwin (Upper Leather Punch) slipped as he was tipping, both legs were taken off and he died – ‘he was a steady man, worked under M
r Adams nineteen years’. At Tavistock on 5 July 1888 Lendew Davis, aged twenty-seven, of Bristol, took a lighted candle to a powder box. He lived ten days. And so on. Some killed themselves, like Thomas Dawson of Denshaw, who ‘hanged himself, low in mind’, and one man, John Hicks (Bible John), was gored to death by a cow at Leeds.

  Elizabeth Garnett, evangelist.

  All these things are noted briefly and without comment. After all there was nothing anyone could do about falls of earth. But whenever a man was killed after he had been drinking Mrs Garnett rubbed it in. In January 1882, at East Dereham, James West got drunk and was run over. ‘The wages of sin,’ she commented, ‘is death.’ On 28 February 1882 George Williams, aged forty-eight, fell asleep drunk and choked – ‘No drunkard shall inherit the kingdom of heaven.’ On 12 August of the same year, at Hull, Henry Shirley, a ganger, was ‘randying the money among his men at the Sportsman’ when he fell down dead in a fit. At Guisborough on 12 June 1883 Thomas French, aged thirty-seven, collapsed from a heart attack brought on by drink. He was said to have died happy, but Mrs Garnett would have none of this – ‘If he did it was a false peace, and I cannot believe in it.’ At Accrington on 6 March 1887 Dick Wilson got drunk and was frozen to death: his nickname is given as Swillicking Dick. And in the issue of March 1891, the Letter reports the death on the previous 15 November, in Bolton Hospital, of Thomas Skinner, ganger – ‘from having his finger bitten by Lady-killing Punch, while drunk. Skinner died in great agony. See what drink will do. A warrant is out for Punch.’