The Railway Navvies

by Terry Coleman

  Navvy woman, unusually prosperous, c. 1899.

  When the North British Railway was being built, Alfred List, the superintendent of the Edinburgh County Police who helped to clear up the riots at Gorebridge, said that in the navvy huts there were sometimes one or two women servants, but generally these were of the worst description, ‘in fact from the lowest part of Edinburgh and, in many instances, I had every reason to believe, kept for improper purposes’. At about the same time the deputy clerk to the peace for Dumfriesshire was lamenting the ‘going together of navvies and women without marriage’. It was common, he said, for a man, when he came to a works, to pay his addresses to one of the young women and live with her for the time he stayed there, and then leave her on the parish when he moved on. Robert Rawlinson said this sort of thing had happened often to his knowledge. The navvy huts were overcrowded, there was no separation of the sexes, and ‘demoralization’ was rife –

  the females were corrupted, many of them, and went away with the men, and lived amongst them in habits that civilized language will hardly allow a description of.

  The missionary of the Croydon and Epsom line had a similar experience. ‘Indeed,’ he said,

  that is one great drawback of doing anything with them; they bring women that are not their wives; but I have been able to do some good in that way, by sending several of them away.

  The Rev. James Gillies, of the Lancaster and Carlisle line, said that in the huts there were

  generally a man and his wife, or a female that passed for his wife; I think, in nine cases out of ten, they were not married.

  There were lodgers, too, he said, sometimes as many as eighteen – ‘consequently there were nineteen men and one woman in a hut.’

  It was the custom to talk of women on navvy works as fallen women, but most had never known anything else, or had anything from which to fall. It was a hard life. Thomas Fayers knew a navvy’s wife called Old Alice. She told him she had known many ‘hard doos’, and that the story of her life, ‘would make the best book as was ever written, bar none’. She didn’t write it.

  Out on the moors, along the new tracks of railway lines where the tarred huts sprang up, girls were born, grew up untaught, and went early – at thirteen or fourteen – to live with the navvy men. Whether or not a girl married the man she lived with made little difference. The life was no less hard. All the year round the work went on, keeping house and bearing children in a hovel, and with perhaps a dozen lodgers to look after as well. No wonder, then, that some of the women talked of God, as the missionaries found, only to curse Him for having made them navvy women. Women detested the life, and it was a common ambition to retire to a farm, or a shop, or a public house. But this took money, and how could it be made? Not by merely taking in lodgers, who paid only two and six a week for bed and washing, or six shillings for bed and some meals. This barely covered the cost of the food they ate, and no honest landlady made a fortune. The only way was to sell drink. The profit on the beer and spirits was itself great, but this was not all; a half drunk man was content with half-cooked and poor food and with a dirty, comfortless home which he would not have stood if he was sober. So the house became disreputable, the children were neglected, quarrels arose, the men cursed and fought, and there was no peace in the home. If the men did not drink hard and help increase the profits they were made to feel unwelcome. Money entrusted to the landlady for safe keeping disappeared, and was not produced when a man wanted to leave. The woman, like the tommy shopkeepers before her, made her profit out of beer and bad food. Then, thus depraved, she forgot she wanted the money to leave the railway works. She took her profit and drank most of it herself. One such woman was Mrs J., who was known only by that initial. She was the wife of a sergeant-major in the Guards; one of her sons became a Baptist minister, and one daughter married an architect. Mrs J. took to drink, was found wandering and put into the workhouse where she met a navvy, a widower with a family. She went off with him, became known as his wife, and they set up a shanty on a railway works. Of course she sold drink. When she was sober she was a fine-looking, quiet-mannered woman, but when drunk she was a noisy fury. The older children stood as much as they could and then left home, leaving only the two youngest, both little girls, and one of them deaf and dumb. The clergyman of the parish and a scripture reader on the works arranged for this child to go to a Deaf and Dumb Institution, and the navvies made a collection of more than £8 so that she could go away with a set of new clothes, but Mrs J. spent only part of this on the child and drank the rest. The child, however, went to the Institution and stayed there, until the woman in a fit of drunkenness fell and broke her shoulder-blade, and called the girl back to act as servant. The drink-selling and drunkenness went on, and one night at about ten o’clock, with the rain pouring down, a man at the camp heard a child crying bitterly in the darkness. It was one of the little girls; she had been beaten and turned out. The navvy took her in and next day agreed to adopt her on condition that Mrs J. gave up all claim to the child. This was done, and that left only the deaf and dumb little girl, who continued to live miserably. Once they had to rescue her from her stepmother who was laying into her with a poker. Then, one Christmas Eve, Mrs J. got drunk once too often, with four or five of her lodgers. They became boisterous and for a joke they put her on the fire. She died five weeks later.

  When they first began to visit railway works the missionaries and well-meaning ladies immediately condemned the immorality they found there, but even they admitted that there was little outright prostitution. One woman missionary said:

  Lost women, who live by their sin and go about in flashy clothes vaunting their shame, are unseen on our public works. Young girls carrying babies, and calling their wickedness, in which even their mothers abet them, a misfortune, I have only once or twice met with.

  But though there were few formal prostitutes there were the occasional predators among the women. One such woman, who had lived with a man for a year, sold all his furniture as soon as he left her for a few days to try for better work along the line, and went off with another man. She did not act secretly, but, as the missionary said, with pride and grandeur, the guilty pair hiring a cab, unusual thing on a navvy works, to take them off. Some older women were pests wherever they went, trapping young men: it was not unusual to find such women living with men half their age. One woman drove her man to suicide and then, while he lay still unburied, dressed herself in new clothes and went through a mock marriage with a newcomer.

  Many of the marriages on the works were no more than shams, men and women accepting each other and living together without benefit of a church service or civil ceremony. As Mrs Garnett put it, ‘The sin is there, and all the harder it is to uproot, because it is covered by the idea, though not the fact of marriage.’ Respectable women, she went on, kind neighbours, good nurses, who cooked well and sent well-ordered children off to the mission schools, where there were any, women whose lives were otherwise a credit to them, were not married to the men with whom they were living, and indeed their children might have different fathers. Marriage was just not the custom, but the missionaries were never able to bring themselves to understand that. And where the missionaries and scripture readers and chaplains came and preached a Christian morality in which the wages of sin were hellfire, and thereby persuaded a few of the navvies and their women to enter into Christian marriage as a sort of insurance, it achieved little. A navvy had to roam. The circumstances were all against a settled family life. A young couple, in all honesty, could marry in church, take a hut on the works, live together, moving with the line, for some years and have two or three children. The woman lost all connexion with her own parents, if they were still alive, and had only her husband, her children, and her shanty house. Then one day her husband came back early and told her he had jacked it, or been given the sack. He had to find other work, and she must wait for him. He bundled up some clothes, tied up his kit, slung it on his back, and off he went. A trying time for
his wife began. If he was tired of her and of supporting his children he just left her there and then: he did not intend to return and she would never see him again. But suppose he honestly sought work and hoped to come back to them, or to send for them when he found a new job, they might still have parted for good. He might wander for hundreds of miles without finding anything, particularly if it was autumn or winter and work was slack. Before he settled down months might pass, and he might be in Cumberland and his family near London where he left them. For the first two or three weeks of his wandering his wife knew she was safe in the hut where he left her, but she also knew only too well that the navvy law said no one could live in a hut save the family of a man working on the job. Occasionally, if a man was killed doing his work, the contractors made an exception and let his family stay, and the woman could make a living and keep her children by taking in lodgers. But this was unusual. So the wife knew that in two or three weeks at the most she must go. Yet her only means of earning enough to stay alive was to remain in the hut and take lodgers. She never dreamed of going on the parish, because there she and her children would be separated, she would have to dress in workhouse clothes, and would be deprived of her liberty. On navvy works she had at least freedom of a sort; the workhouse was unthinkable. So she went day by day down to the works, inquiring after her man. Sometimes a tramp navvy newly arrived at the works would have some fragment of a rumour about him, but it was all garbled and she did not know what to believe.

  If she was a loving woman she fretted and was wretched: if she was not she saved herself a little anguish. But either way she knew perfectly well what she had to do. When the timekeeper called for the rent at the end of the fortnight he said, perhaps indifferently, perhaps not, ‘I suppose you’re going to enter it this week in so-and-so’s name?’ So-and-so was one of the lodgers. The wife would say yes. Only a fortnight before she had been living contentedly with her real husband; now she was the wife of another. The children took the new man’s name, and the neighbours said nothing.

  Mrs Garnett realized why so many women had to live as they did. But she still could not concede that it was acceptable for man and woman to live together without marriage. It was a sin before God. The one remedy she suggested was almost absurd. Divorce, she said, and added that it would cost £30. It was a lot, she agreed, but it would be the price of freedom, of a good conscience, and a happy home. ‘The deserted wife,’ she said,

  has her furniture to help her towards this. A man has his strong hands; two summers of not spending one useless penny and he might do it. The only way into the kingdom of God is through much tribulation; take it we must if we are ever to get there.

  Now this was so much rubbish. Thirty pounds? The middle-class Mrs Garnett had no conception how much this was to a navvy’s wife. But, above all, her crass error was to consider that Christian marriage was necessary to a good conscience. To the likes of Mrs Garnett it was, but navvy women were not the likes of her. As late as the 1860s it was not the navvy custom to marry, and when the missionaries got organized twenty years later and went round preaching holy matrimony, the chief result was a few consciences made miserable, and a lot of bigamous marriages. A man married, went on to another works and married again, and so on. As for the women, they were arguably better off under the old system of casual living together. Then, when a man left and did not return, a woman could quite properly find another protector, and take herself and her children off to the new man. But if she felt her marriage to be a holy sacrament, what could she do? She could not stay alone in the navvy camp: there was no hut for her there. She could either go to the workhouse or go on tramp after her husband – and that way she would very likely end up in a workhouse anyway. Marriage and the navvy life hardly went together.

  The best way to get to know how navvy women lived, and to understand the frequent distress of their lives, is to read the inquiries, warnings, and notices in the Quarterly Letters.

  Weddings at first were few, and the reports sparse. In March 1880 Henry Pugh (Fisherman Harry) married Sarah Ann Brierley. Pincher Martin also married, but the bride was not named and the editors of the Letter asked: ‘Will friends kindly in future give dates, and the names of the wives as well as the husbands?’ In the same year, on 19 August, J. Walker married Dora Mortimer at Barden Moor, and Mrs Garnett, who was waging a hopeless struggle against the iniquity of drinking at the wedding party, triumphantly commented that this was the first teetotal wedding she had had the pleasure of recording. There were other dry weddings, though not many. One was that of Edwin Osbourne (Teetotal Teddy) to Emma Burr at Boston in 1883.

  The warnings were many. In September 1885, navvies were told:

  Don’t buy your girl finery and sham jewellery, nor let her buy them. Make her understand it is not respectable to be dressed in finery.

  It is not clear why such finery is to be avoided, unless Mrs Garnett feared it would make a girl more attractive to such men as Devil-driving George of the Salvation Army, who had disgraced himself earlier that year. The man was twenty-one or twenty-two, pale, with no whiskers, and had left Whitchurch, Hampshire, in January in company with his landlady, a stout woman aged thirty-five. They took the poor husband’s watch and clothes, besides about £7, leaving him without a penny and with a quarter’s rent due.

  Women were also advised from time to time to lock up their daughters. In June 1888, the Letter carried a paragraph in big type warning all mothers to beware of Peter (surname not known, called Black Lank), and next year all young women were warned to beware of a married man – ‘a make-shift navvy and not fit to walk in navvy’s shoes’. He was known as Curly, went around as a single man, and had cruelly wronged a woman at Skipton.

  Women advertised for their lost men. Here are three such notices:

  June 1882 – Gipsy Tom’s wife and child, who he left at East Grinstead, recovering from smallpox, have tramped north. They are at South Cave, on the Hull and Barnsley line, and will be glad to hear where he is. Surely he does not intend to desert them.

  June 1884 – S. Gunn (45): your wife wants you.

  September 1888 – Mrs Barnes, Anderony, Leatherhead, wishes to know if her husband, Jesse William Barnes, who went to Egypt, is dead. Mates please send word.

  Children, too, were deserted. On 18 January 1881 Josiah Smith, a little boy, died in Norwich Union workhouse, one of five children left by their parents six weeks before.

  We hope the father and mother will see this; and be ashamed of their conduct and fetch the other poor little ones.

  Navvy children, in atypical Sunday best, c. 1899.

  And in December 1884 this notice appeared:

  Wanted by the four little children, one a baby in arms, left on August 25 at Tilbury, the mother (is she worth the name?).

  It is strange that in a magazine run by a woman the most indignant notices should often have been those addressed not to straying husbands but to wives who had run off. One such notice, in December 1888, had a headline all to itself. It read:

  Wicked behaviour of a wife – Thomas Harris, of Bere Alstone, a respectable steady man, writes to me: ‘My wife, after being married eleven years, and the mother of eight children, went on tramp on September 18 with a man called Cat-eating Scan and took every penny in the house. She broke open even a box our eldest daughter had, and took her money. She took our youngest one with her; but I should like to have that one and all, because she took against the rest of them, and no doubt but that she will serve it the same as it gets older. But I never want to see her again. The seven I have got are getting on well, thank God.’

  A woman’s life on navvy works, as wife or mistress, mother and shanty-keeper, was hard enough, and on British lines women did not take part in the actual excavating work – though at Glasgow, in March 1846, a woman disguised as a labourer applied to the recruiting sergeant to enlist, and when her sex was discovered and she was rejected she left very disappointed, declaring she would turn navvy. Women did, however, labour on railway
s overseas, for instance on a line near Pisa in 1862. The digging was done lightly with a sort of adze, and the loosened dirt was lifted slowly in a long-shanked scoop and carried away in small baskets on the heads of women and girls. A British engineer on a visit said it was a sorrowful spectacle to see bands of barefooted women tipping their little loads on to a slowly accumulating heap. In Britain the only way a woman could labour on railway works was to live with the navvies or preach to them.

  Mrs Garnett, the most vigorous of the evangelizers, was solid middle-class, but some of the women who worked among the navvies for years were ladies of rank. Among them were the Hon. Emily and Gertrude Kinnaird, daughters of Lord Kinnaird; and Diana, Lady Harewood. They provided occasional soup kitchens and frequent bible classes, and their purpose was to preach the good word, but they must have seen that their evangelism was not all that successful. Few navvies went to any sort of church service except when their mates were buried, and navvy life went on much as it ever had. At times these good women despaired, but perhaps they were, indirectly, more of a civilizing influence than they knew – white parasols and little shoes among the black moleskins and big navvy boots. Their mere presence meant something at a time when most people shunned navvies as they did gipsies. The odd chat between a navvy and the Hon. Mrs This-or-that did more than all her hellfire preaching, and even Mrs Garnett, who mostly wrote in a sustained religious rant, must have been capable occasionally of mere conversation with a navvy’s wife. Such little acts of kindness meant much in an age of very clear class distinctions. Mrs Garnett tells one story of a navvy and a servant girl. A very nice young fellow, she says, good-looking and well dressed, once amused a lady teacher when they were quietly walking together by saying, ‘There is something I wish you would do for me.’