The Railway Navvies

by Terry Coleman

  ‘Yes, what is it?’

  ‘Find me a nice wife.’

  ‘Ah, but you must do that for yourself. The sort of wife for you is a nice, tidy, good servant girl.’

  The man replied there was no chance of this, but Mrs Garnett provided a happy ending, of course, and he found ‘a very nice wife for himself’.

  Now there was no condescension in that woman’s advice to the navvy. In those days a servant girl was definitely a cut above a navvy – several cuts – and the man would be bettering himself, and the girl marrying rather beneath her. So the advice was kind, and the story shows how there could, now and again, be some sort of rapport between labourer and lady missionary. It must have been at times a pleasantly ambiguous relationship, that between low-born navvies and high-born ladies (in 1884, navvies were carrying around photographs of Lady Harewood, which she had given to members of her bible class at Eccup), but no story has come down with such a title as ‘The Navvy and the Lady’.

  What seems to be the only navvy novel was published in 1847. It was called The Navvies, was written by Henrietta Louisa Farrer, although the book was published anonymously, and was in two parts. The first, ‘Harry Johnson, a tale’, tells the story of Agnes, who travels in search of her husband Harry – ‘such a good husband,’ she says, ‘till those cruel railroads taught him to love drink and seek high wages, and then he left me, and, oh, this is what it is come to’. She finds him at last, crippled for life at the age of twenty-eight; they live happily ever after, and the novelette ends with the words:

  There is no reason why the navigators should not be as respectable a set as any other labourers, if they each try to do his duty in his own station, and beware of the beershop.

  The second tale, called ‘Frank Meade’, starts in a churchyard where Martha and her children are paying their respects to the grave of her husband, a navvy who had led a bad life. One of these children is the Frank Meade of the title, and, of course, Martha does all she can to prevent him, when he grows up, from going to be a navvy like his poor father. But alas, young Frank, meeting a friend who already works on the railway, is seduced by the sight of the ‘velveteen jacket, the yellow handkerchief tied loosely round his sun-burnt neck, the knowing-looking cap and tassel, on one side of the head’, and off he goes. He too is slipping into the ways of unrighteousness when he does an heroic act, rescuing the notorious bully Bob Cradock from a fall of earth, is rewarded by the directors, comes to a proper understanding of himself, marries, lives happily ever after, and achieves final respectability when one of his sons becomes a schoolteacher.

  This is poor stuff, surprisingly so from an author whose works fill three whole pages of the British Museum catalogue, and who produced, among many other things, a life of one of the saints and a translation of Pascal’s Thoughts.

  But by far the gentlest portrait of navvy life was written by a woman, and also by a Henrietta. She was Henrietta Cresswell, a doctor’s daughter at Winchmore Hill, who wrote her memories of the village which was slowly becoming, in mid-Victorian days, just another North London suburb. In 1869 the railway came, the Great Northern line through Enfield. That summer, rather to the astonishment of the villagers, there arrived loads of barrows, shovels, and tip-trucks, and the line was begun by the turning of a few sods in a large field in Vicarsmoor Lane, near where the goods station was later to stand. In a few days rows of wooden huts arose, and gangs of navvies were soon in full possession. Work on the line was also begun at the Wood Green and Enfield ends. There were few houses between Winchmore Hill and Wood Green, except the old cottages on or near the high road, and some gentlemen’s houses standing in their own grounds, and no part of West Enfield was built up with the exception of a few large villas. The great business was the spanning of the valley between the village and the hills to the north. The summer was one of heat and drought, the stream was nearly dry, and the engineers did not realize the strength of the watershed from the hills on either side. When the villagers talked of lakes of flood water, of bridges washed away and piled one on top of the other, they were listened to with bare politeness. Later the engineers were to regret their disbelief. The soil was dug from a cutting in Bratt’s Field and tipped to form an embankment towards Filcap’s Farm, and soon an imposing earthwork was made.

  The pretty rows of cottages where Miss Cresswell’s grandfather had lived were pulled down, the great ash arbour was relentlessly destroyed, and the garden devastated. The holly hedge, dense as a wall, was grubbed up, scarcely anything remaining but the tall yew and a golden-knob apple tree, which for years after blossomed and fruited on the top of the cutting by Vicarsmoor Bridge. The lane was closed to traffic, and a notice board proclaimed, ‘This road is stopped time the Bridge is being built.’

  Often the doctor’s daughter watched the navvies at work. ‘The excavations were beautiful in colour,’ she said,

  the London clay being a bright cobalt blue when first cut through, and changing with exposure to orange. There were strata of black and white flints and yellow gravels; the men’s white slops and the red heaps of burning ballast made vivid effects of light and shade and colour against the cloudless sky of the excessively hot summer. There were also dark wooden planks and shorings to add neutral tints, and when the engine came the glitter of brass and clouds of steam were added to the landscape. On Sundays and holidays the men were, many of them, resplendent in scarlet or yellow or blue plush waistcoats and knee breeches.

  It was not until 1 January 1870 that Dr Cresswell’s house, which had to come down to make way for the line, was given over to the railwaymen, and he had to move. It was then deep snow, and the cutting was so close to the side of the house that the garden shrubs were constantly slipping over the edge and having to be brought back and replanted. The garden became a thoroughfare for the navvies at their work.

  ‘There had been much fear in the village,’ said Miss Cresswell,

  of annoyance from the horde of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire railway men brought in by Firbank, the contractor; but on the whole their conduct was very orderly, and they can hardly be sufficiently commended for their behaviour… A noticeable figure was ‘Dandy Ganger’, a big north countryman, decorated with many large mother of pearl buttons and a big silver watch chain. He instantly checked all bad language in the neighbourhood of the doctor’s garden. Many of the navvies brought their food or their tea cans to be heated on the great kitchen range, and never once made themselves objectionable.

  There were delays, caused by the unexpected wetness of the clay in the valley, and also by the thoughtless action of one gentleman who moved the guide posts planted by the engineers in his kitchen garden, which marked the limits of the proposed railway, and by doing this caused the centre line, as originally surveyed, to become incorrect. One of the biggest pieces of building was a skew bridge, which ran over a cutting on the site of the doctor’s old garden. For two summers afterwards, that cutting was a forest of rose and carnation poppies, three feet high. They revelled in the new soil and made gigantic blossoms in every shade of crimson, scarlet, white, purple, and grey.

  As usual there were accidents. ‘Five men,’ says Miss Cresswell,

  were killed in making the five miles of railway. A man who sleeps on a ballast heap on a cold night never wakes, the fumes are poisonous as those of a charcoal brazier, and this fatality occurred more than once, besides other mischances.

  All through 1870 the navvies worked. Clay and gravel were excavated, and tip-trucks filled the valley at Bowes and the much deeper one below the Enfield hills. A viaduct was built over Dog Kennel Lane and the roadway itself raised twenty feet, the streams were imprisoned in culverts and bridge after bridge was built, either to carry rail over road or road over rail. Station platforms were built, sections joined, and the temporary metals became continuous for the whole length of the branch. Miss Cresswell was now and again given an unofficial ride on ‘The Fox’, one of the engines used on the workings. She thought these trips a wild delight; one lurid
night ride home from Palmer’s Green seemed to her faster than the Flying Dutchman itself, as the little engine bucketed along the roughly laid tracks with no weight of trucks behind to steady it.

  More ballast was laid to settle the permanent way, and heavy rail and cast-iron chairs were put down. Another winter passed, and it was said the railway would be opened early in the year. Then a definite date was given, 1 April, but the villagers had waited so long they only laughed at the day named. But at last the line was completed.

  It was the night of the 31st March, 1871, the permanent way was completed, the station was finished and smelled strongly of fresh paint, everything was ready. It was late in the evening, all was very quiet, the familiar sound of the working engine and attendant trucks attracted no attention, but suddenly the village was startled by a loud explosion, a perfect volley of explosions! Many people ran down to the bridge expecting to find some unlooked-for accident had occurred. It was the navvies celebrating their departure with their last train of trucks by a fusillade of fog signals under the bridge….

  It was a small work, only five miles, but the navvies who built it were remembered by the doctor’s daughter. No one wrote more sympathetically of the coming of the railway, or of the navvies, than Henrietta Cresswell.

  12

  King of Labourers

  British navvies built more than British railways. At one time or another they worked all over Europe and in America, Africa, Russia, and even in Australia. The English contractors boasted about their English, Irish, and Scots navvies, who were themselves quite conscious of their self-evident superiority. Supervising what he derisively called ‘native labour’, the British navvy would point to the earth to be moved and the wagon to be filled, say ‘damn’ with some emphasis, and stamp his foot. The foreigners generally understood.

  The first foreign railway on which British navvies worked in any numbers was the Paris and Rouen, which was started in 1841. In the early days France lagged behind in railway-building, lacking both capital and engineering know-how. Britain supplied both; two-thirds of the money to construct the Paris and Rouen line came from Britain, and the railway was built by a British engineer (Locke) and by British contractors (Brassey and William Mackenzie). Most of the navvies, too, had to be British. Brassey needed about 10,000 men to complete the eighty-two miles of line on time. He was not sure he could find that many Frenchmen, and even if he could they would be raw and unused to heavy railway navvying. So in the spring of 1841 he and Mackenzie recruited 5,000 British navvies, assembled them at Southampton, and shipped them across to the villages along the Seine valley where they would be billeted. Five thousand was not enough, but Brassey did not want to send over to France men whom he needed on his other contracts back in England, so he had to take on Frenchmen and anyone else he could get. It was a mixed crew, and on that one line thirteen languages were spoken. The English spoke English, the Irish Erse, the Highlanders Gaelic, the Welshmen Welsh, and then there were Germans, Frenchmen, Belgians, Dutchmen, Piedmontese, Spaniards, Poles, Savoyards, and one Portuguese. When shouting ‘damn’ and stamping feet was no longer enough, a lingua franca grew up – one-third French, one-third English, and the rest made up of bits and pieces from half a dozen other tongues. This lingo, with its own forms and a sort of grammar, was spoken on railway works throughout Europe. Some of the Savoyards became so skilled in it that they were engaged as cheap interpreters between the English engineers and the polyglot navvies.

  Building the bridge at Faubourg Saint Antoine, c. 1843.

  The British navvies remained resolutely British. They persisted in dressing as they always had, wearing, as a defiant sort of uniform, a bit of string tied round the leg below the knee, and in drinking as they always had, except that they now found French brandy cheaper than spirits. They were, as one English director of the line said, not inclined to abstinence, he could not boast of that; but though they were, as ever, inclined to rioting, they found the French gendarmes better organized and better able to keep order than the scrappy English police.

  The British navvies, said Locke, spread all over Normandy, where they entertained the curious Frenchmen by their dress, their uncouth size, habits, and manners. They were generally used on the most difficult and dangerous work. They scorned the wooden shovels and basket-sized barrows which the French peasants brought to the work, and used picks and shovels which only the most robust could wield. To watch them work became a new entertainment. ‘Often,’ said Locke, ‘have I heard the exclamation of French loungers around a group of navvies – “Mon Dieu, ces Anglais, comme ils travaillent.”’ At first the French were suspicious, but the abundance of five-franc pieces after the weekly pay soon made the navvies popular. The reputation of the British increased, so that in tunnelling and other dangerous work Frenchmen could not be induced to join unless there was an English ganger. Even the gendarmes began to get on with the men, learning that sometimes the best way to control them was to humour them.

  The French had one lasting grievance – that they were paid less than the British, two and a half francs a day compared with five or six or seven. This was simply because the French could not do anything like the same amount of work. They ate lightly, bread and an apple or pear, compared with the Englishmen’s beef and bacon and beer, and they were by nature prudent, of more civilized and settled habits, and unwilling to take the risks which the navvy took for granted. The English navvies, like the English engineers, had an urgency which the French lacked. They were extravagant in everything, in drinking, in eating, in working. The Piedmontese, too, were good. One Mr Jones, an agent for Brassey, remarked that

  all the people born in the mountains, and on poor lands, have more virtue than those who are born in the plains, and in luxurious places.

  This is a fine Victorian Calvinist remark, though Mr Jones himself had a reputation for throwing his half-sovereigns about and drinking too much. The Germans had less endurance than many others, and the Frenchmen, when after a year or so they were becoming accustomed to the work, sometimes amused themselves harrying the Germans working alongside them, setting such a pace that the Germans were distressed and exhausted. The Belgians did not like tipping, thinking it too perilous. They were also so frugal that they asked to be paid monthly instead of fortnightly, so that they could save the money. They never asked for a sub, and never bought anything from the truck shops. One English contractor remarked that they had complete confidence in Englishmen, whom they trusted to keep their money for the month. Perhaps some of the sub-contractors were more trustworthy than they might have been back in England because the French police kept a closer eye on them, and were anxious to see that the men should be paid at the proper time. A director of the company said that whenever it became known that a certain sub-contractor ‘did not stand well with the people’, a policeman or two would appear at the pay table, to see that he did not run off with the money.

  Some of the works on the Paris and Rouen were difficult. There were four bridges across the Seine, and four tunnels, one of them one and five-eighths miles long, through hard limestone, and of course there were accidents. But the men suffered less on this line than on many English railways. By French law the works were supervised by district surveyors who had to be satisfied, among other things, that the method of working was safe. Apart from this, the contractors also had two real inducements to keep the work safe. First, navvies were difficult to come by and not easy to replace, so the contractors kept an eye on the works and appointed doctors to treat those who were wounded or ill. Second, the company was obliged by French law to compensate all those injured on the works, or the families of those men killed. This compensation was a matter of right. The remedy was certain, and it hardly mattered whether the injured man had been careless or not; the company was still liable. In the contracts for the building of the railway, the company transferred this liability to the contractors, who were, therefore, in their own interests, rather more careful than they might otherwise have been. At first
it was thought that only Frenchmen could claim this compensation and the families of those Englishmen who were killed went home with such little gratuities as were offered by the contractors or collected on the spot by the navvies, but later the English learned that they too could claim compensation by law. If the amount of damages was not agreed between the injured man or his family and the contractors the aggrieved party could go before either the Police Correctionelle or the Tribunal du Premier Instance and demand his remedy. When a boy’s foot was crushed one contractor was ordered to pay an annuity of 200 francs during the boy’s life, and to invest enough money in French funds to produce this amount. At another time, when two gangs of men were pile-driving, one navvy went over, during a break, to ask a man in the other gang for a light. While he was lighting his pipe this man rested his hand on the top of the pile and the piece of iron called the monkey came down and crushed his thumb. He was awarded £60, even though the injury was not sustained, strictly speaking, in the course of his work.

  William Reed, a director of the Paris and Rouen, was astonished that men were compensated where they had been plainly careless and where the fault was theirs. In one tunnel some miners were using powder to blast a rock. They made a hole, primed it, inserted the powder, and expected it to go off. It did not, and, as Mr Reed put it, ‘a foolish Irishman was silly enough positively to go and blow’. Two men were severely hurt. The man who blew had both arms blown off, and both eyes blown out. A claim for damages was brought, and Reed spoke to the company’s advocate about it.