But Mrs Garnett was not content merely to condemn. She was always ready to help, and in the Letter of December 1885 she wrote:
If any of you dread drink and want to leave it off, the following recipe will soon stop the craving and strengthen you. Gentian I oz., Quassia ¼ oz., Lemon ¼ oz., ½ gallon of boiling water to be poured over these things; bottled when cold, half a tea-cupful to be taken twice a day.
This is followed by a recipe for rheumatism embrocation, which had to be rubbed in every night before going to bed for three nights, and then left off for the next two ‘for fear of bringing skin off’.
Mrs Garnett frequently reported thefts and swindles among navvies. On one occasion she had great pain in saying that five men, claiming to be sent by her, had visited a clergyman and scrounged money from him to buy tools, as they said, promising to repay the next Saturday. They were never seen again. Mrs Garnett was much offended. She had not, she said, known the men, who were liars and thieves and brought disgrace on the honest name of navvy. And in the Letter of June 1883, she published this warning:
Beware Landladies: A dark navvy, ‘Soldier’, is wanted. Soldier was wounded in the leg in India, has a pension of Is. a day, drew last quarter on July 4th at Gravesend, drank it, was in Boston streets, without food, money or kit. Joe Chapham took him home and gave him tommy and lodge on August 6th. Soldier got up between four and six and showed how he liked their kindness by stealing in money £33. 8d. out of the men’s pockets, pilot jacket, moleskin trousers, handkerchief, waistcoat, etc., all good, of Jethro Bird’s. Jethro says ‘he turned out respectable in my rigs, and he skinned me.’ Mates, either send his address or pay him out yourselves. Such a rascal is a disgrace to us all, do not give him a lodge, landladies, or work in the same gang with him, mates; turn him off the works.
A little later the readers of the Letter were warned to beware of a certain Sinker, who had sunk his mates’ sick-club money in beer, and in the issue of March 1888 George Williams (Ene-eyed Conro) was requested to return the fourteen shillings he got by forging a letter in the name of James Williams, better known as Three-fingered Jack, from J. Gardner, who was laid up with a broken leg at Newhead.
Some of these warnings against rogues came from Mrs Garnett herself, but others were inserted in the form of notices, like ‘Wanted’ small ads in a newspaper, asking for the return of money stolen or the payment of money owed. Among the most frequent advertisers were sloped landladies demanding the rent their navvy lodgers had left without paying. But Mrs Garnett knew that landladies as often cheated the men as were cheated by them. ‘All slopers, men and women, are a shame and a disgrace,’ she said.
Reports of accidents and deaths were inserted free, but other notices cost a shilling. These notices were many and various. One asked: ‘Will W. Davis Wingey write for his artificial arm that he left at Dinston Bassett with Bradfield Dale Wingey,’ and one in 1883 announced that at the Hastings Penny Bank a lot of money put in years before by navvies working there had never been claimed, and that the men could have their money, with interest, if they could prove their right to it. By 1888 so many notices were pouring in for the Letter that Mrs Garnett made a rule that communications from ‘clergymen, missionaries, ladies, or advertisers’, would not be answered, or their inquiries inserted, unless the shilling was sent in advance. She then went on:
When inquiries are made for missing husbands or wives, the inquirer must give proof to the Missionary or the friend who writes that the parties are lawfully married. Persons who live together without being married know they have no claim on one another, and must take the consequences in this world as well as in the next of their sin.
She knew that most of the men and women on navvy works were not married and must have known the distress her new rule would cause. She was a great castigator of sinners, but at times hers was a mingy sanctity.
Mrs Garnett explained the shilling charge by saying that if she did not make it the Letter would have been full of notices. She probably knew, to her disappointment, that the Letter was read more for the bits of news and notices that it carried than for her hellfire. Requests were made from time to time for the Letter to give what Mrs Garnett called more business information, such as descriptions of the progress of the works, whether men were wanted or not, and what money was paid there. To this she replied:
It is impossible in the Letter to do this, and the Committee of the Navvy Mission Society would never consent that the Quarterly Letter, whose object is to bring you to Christ, should have religion crowded out by business.
The Navvy Mission’s real concern was to campaign for God, and it did this by constantly railing against what it called the three great evils on the works – Sabbath desecration, immorality, and drink. ‘Sunday,’ said Mrs Garnett, ‘is marked only by a better dinner, much beer, dog fighting, and strolling about. And this is in Christian England?’ She did not know which was the greatest evil – for Sunday to be an ordinary work day, or for it to be used by the men as a holiday, as hair-cutting and dog-washing day. As for her attitude to the sin of men and women living together unmarried, Mrs Garnett summed that up in her Christmas message of 1883:
Some of you dear friends have spoiled many a past year by living in sin. Now, can years be bright when they are full of shame? Make things right in 1884. Get married, and be able to look your own children in the face. No sin binds a man or woman with such a heavy chain as this. What right have you to disgrace innocent children thus? Have done with it.*1
Whenever one of the society’s missioners brought a man to God there was great rejoicing. Mrs Garnett tells one piquant story of a sick man, who had seen the light, asking with much anxiety after a fortnight’s feverish delirium:
‘What have I said these last three weeks?’
‘Nothing of any count.’
‘Have I said any bad words?’
‘Not one.’
‘What have I said?’
‘Mostly hymns and texts, and such like.’
And then, says Mrs Garnett, a look of peace stole over the man’s face as he murmured earnestly, ‘Thank God.’
The missionaries were very strong against swearing. It was asserted that the horses didn’t like foul language either, and knew the evil words quite well, and the good ones too, and preferred the navvies to address them properly.
At times the missionaries were assisted by undergraduates who came in the vacation to preach to the men. Four Cambridge gentlemen went down to Devonport at Easter 1888, and it was hoped that their words might not be forgotten. The universities made another contribution to the railway works, as Mrs Hunter of Hunterstown related. Mrs Hunter worked among the men in the hills near Paisley, and one day she saw a dark, middle-aged navvy whose face showed he was a drunk. But, she said, ‘Still there was something left – wreck as he was – which whispered, “gentleman”.’ So she went up and spoke to him.
‘You are doing very heavy work, are you not?’
‘Yes, it is rather so.’
‘I cannot be mistaken in thinking it is not labour to which you have always been accustomed?’
‘Ah, you are right there. I took a double-first at Oxford.’
‘Then, how is it you came to be here?’
‘I am possessed by the demon of drink. Look, look at this shovel; I am actually fond of it, for by tomorrow night it will have earned me ten shillings, and then I can go and have a drink.’
But though the Navvy Mission’s main activity was to preach at the men – and a naïve sort of preaching it seems – it also did much for them in other ways: building huts, lending books, and even organizing entertainments. The mission huts were grim to look at, bare structures with wooden benches to sit on and texts round the walls, but any hut where the men could sit and play dominoes when they had no more money left to go to the pub, was welcome to them. The books, too, were mostly devotional, but they were something. The society employed librarians to go round the works with cases of books to be lent out at a penny a time.
One librarian, Walter Symes, said he had been mistaken for a cobbler and a watchmaker, and one navvy had asked him if he was John Bunyan. As for entertainments, the society encouraged its missionaries to teach the violin and any other instruments they might be able to play. The Letter said:
Music is a great counter attraction to young men to the public houses and theatres…. There are now very good mouth organs with metal reeds, price 2/6, to be carried in the waistcoat pocket.
Missionaries helped to establish a cricket club and a printing press at Newhaven in 1881, a newspaper was started at East Grinstead the next year, and magic-lantern lectures were often given in the mission huts. At the Grimstone Tunnel, on the Nottingham and Melton Railway, the navvies, with the help of the missionary and the contractors, Lucas and Aird, put on a Negro entertainment in aid of the sick fund at which the labourers appeared as the Nottingham and Melton Christy minstrels.
The society also did what it could to relieve the distress of the men in winter, when they were often out of work. In the severe winter of 1878–9 there were sixteen weeks of frost. ‘Oh,’ said Mrs Garnett, ‘how my heart has been wrung with aching to see groups standing idly about in the frozen snow, looking up at the dull grey sky, which gave no signs of breaking; gaunt and thin, their faces yellow from pining, so patient, so brave, suffering silently.’ Navvies who went through that winter never forgot it, and twenty years later young men new to the works who had been children in 1879 were told the story of the year whose hardships became a navvy legend. Soup kitchens were set up in some towns, and navvies walked miles to get a bowl of soup and half a loaf.
The winter of 1881 was a bad one too. At Whitby and Loftus the Rev. H. Pearson, vicar of Lythe, gave soup to the men during one long storm, and at Long Buckley a soup kitchen was opened by a clergyman and three other gentlemen who gave £5 each towards the cost. A quarter of beef was cooked every day and the broth given to the men, until they could go back to work.
In June 1884, Mrs Garnett was exhorting the men to save something against the winter, but many of them were in distress long before the cold weather came. At Hull and Barnsley the works came to a stop in July for want of money, putting thousands of men out of work. The local clergy and the Navvy Mission gave away free grocery tickets for bread and cheese and bacon, and organized teas at which as many as 940 women, men, and children sat down together. Children’s dinners were also given, at one of which more than 1,000 boys and girls ate meat-and-potato pie. Next year at Christchurch in Hampshire the work stopped and the navvies starved until the vicar and missionaries went round begging for them. All this was long before the days of the dole.
The mission not only fed soup to starving navvies; it also tried, without much success, to teach them to help themselves. In March 1889 the Leicester plan was announced. A missionary and a few gangers had formed themselves into a committee and had some tickets printed, which were covered in blue cloth and would fold into a waistcoat pocket. Each ticket showed the name of the owner and the place and date it was issued. Gangers would sell a ticket for twopence to any regular navvy, but not to casuals or to local labourers. The advantage was that a man with a ticket could go to any works, show himself by producing the card to be a thorough navvy, and that way stand a better chance of work than a man without a card. Ticket-holders were to pay twopence a week into a fund held by a committee who would use the money to give supper, bed, and breakfast to any ticket-navvy who came to the works penniless. Perhaps the men did not like to pay their twopences: the plan failed.
Much good was done incidentally – by feeding the men when they were starving; by building huts where they could rest; by telling them where they could buy mouth-organs for half a crown – but the mission probably failed in its main evangelical purpose. It made its converts (like the praying navvy of Maindee who used to go upstairs on the horse-bus and pray aloud, much to the annoyance of the conductor who was, however, eventually converted himself) but they were few. In spite of all her fervour, perhaps because of it, Mrs Garnett was a little lacking in charity. She was at times jealous even of other missionary movements. In March 1888, in the obituary of a navvy called Devon, she said: ‘He did not run about to other places of worship, but stuck to the Navvy Mission.’
The Quarterly Letter to Navvies, though it changed its name in 1893 to Quarterly Letter to Men on Public Works, continued to appear long after the great railway works were completed, until, in 1920, it was merged into another misson paper, The Torch. Mrs Garnett remained editor until 1917. She died on 22 March 1921 at the age of eighty-one, and a memorial tablet to her was unveiled in Ripon Cathedral in 1926.
To the end the tone of the Letter remained as it was in the beginning, fervid. The Christmas message it carried in 1878 from the Rev. D. W. Barrett, formerly chaplain on the Kettering and Manton line, is typical. He asked:
1. Have you prayed much to God during the year?
2. Have you read your bible very often?
3. Have you been as often as you ought, or at all, to a place of worship?
4. Have you or have you not made yourself like one of the beasts that perish by the sin of drunkenness?
5. Have you been a swearing man?
6. Sisters, what about your lives, have they been the lives of Christian women?
And then, continuing his message of good cheer, he asked the navvies to think of the future:
Perhaps you will be killed suddenly by a fall of earth, by the blasting of a rock, by the crushing blow of an engine, by a bruise which may fester, and mortify, and poison the life blood, by a fall, by the slow torture of disease, or by the burning heat of fever…. But however it may be, or where it may happen, let me ask you, are you ready now? Shall you be ready to meet death then?
*1 After the first edition of this book was published in 1965 Mr Herbert Johnson of Styal, Cheshire, wrote saying that in about 1900, when he was seventeen, he was secretary of a navvy mission hall. Mrs Garnett was a frequent visitor, it was evident how much she was loved, and she was a power for good. Mr Johnson wrote: ‘I know that Mrs Garnett was a fanatic on irregular unions, but she used to say, “I hate the sin but I love the sinner.”’
11
Women not their Wives
Bury – At the petty session, on Friday, Mary Warburton, a female about thirty years of age, was charged by Mr Ramsbottom, relieving officer, under the following circumstances: – Mr Ramsbottom stated that, about seven months ago, the prisoner left her husband and four children and ran away with an excavator, taking with her a new suit of clothes, which she had purchased in her husband’s name, and for which her husband was now imprisoned. The children became chargeable on the township of Tottington Lower End. The prisoner, who had been residing with her paramour at Tidsley Banks, near Huddersfield, was committed to the Salford house of correction for six weeks, with hard labour.
Manchester Guardian, 19 September 1846
Mary Warburton was only one of many women who ran away with navvies. It was frequently observed, and much deplored, that navvies consorted with women, more often than not with women not their wives – and this in Christian England. Certainly navvies found their women where they could, and behaved in this way very much like so many soldiers, but whereas the soldiers could offer fine red uniforms and a sweet smell of patriotism the navvies had only moleskin breeches and hearty appetites. It was not, in the early years at any rate, the navvy custom to marry. They lived freely, and a myth grew up, that of the extraordinarily potent navvy man. The picture is a splendid one, that of a fine muscled animal, standing with legs braced apart, grasping in one hand a pick by the shaft, and in the other a woman by the waist.
One clergyman even turned this proper fear of the rampaging navvy into cash. When the London and Birmingham Railway was being built, and the landowners near the line were claiming compensation for the damage to their property, Peter Lecount, the engineer, found that one reverend and afflicted proprietor complained bitterly that his privacy was ruined, that his daughter’s be
droom was exposed to the unhallowed gaze of the men working on the railway, and that he must remove his family to a watering place, to enable him to do which he must engage a curate. All this was considered in the compensation demanded, and paid; yet no curate was engaged, no lodgings at a watering place taken, and the unhappy family, said Mr Lecount, still dwelt in their desecrated abode and bore with Christian-like resignation all the miseries heaped upon them.
Of course the men were sometimes wild, and it was then that the public read about them in newspaper reports. On the Caledonian line in 1845 a barmaid refused a man another drink and he attacked her and broke her leg. A few months later at Penrith, which was a great place for riots, four navvies accosted two women and raped them, and the magistrate who tried the men said he thought no case so bad had ever been tried in England. On randies, too, the men were apt to behave somewhat freely, and a missionary on the Croydon and Epsom Railway complained that at such times there was ‘every sort of abomination, lewdness and bad women’.
Tales of wife-selling were common. In the 1880s, Mrs Garnett said that wives not many years before had been sold openly by navvies, and that one she heard of had fetched a shilling, and another only fourpence. At Woodhead, thirty years before, the going price for a wife was said to be a gallon of beer, but Thomas Nicholson would have none of this. ‘Now I dare venture,’ he said,
that never such a thing happened on these works as a man selling his wife for a gallon of beer; but I can tell you what happened – I have paid miners and masons from £8 to £16 on a pay; the moment they had got it, they have gone down to the large towns in Yorkshire, Lancashire, and Cheshire, and what do you think they have done with their money? Spent it in the filthy dens of those large towns. Aye, in the back streets amongst the girls. These men have come back again impregnated with a disease which has cost the [sick] club more money than all the sickness besides.
The Railway Navvies Page 19