‘Really, it is too bad,’ he said,
that the company is obliged to pay not only for the carelessness of common accidents which arise in the course of conducting public works, but here is a man, by a positive act of folly of his own, does that which creates this awful injury to his person, and then comes and asks us to step in the gap, and prevent the pecuniary results of his own act of folly.
The advocate said, ‘It is true, but it is so.’
Reed asked, ‘What can the man say for himself when he goes before the tribunal?’
‘He will say nothing,’ replied the lawyer. ‘He will go and present his sightless eyes and his armless trunk, and he will have a very large damage awarded him.’
The man was given £200 and sent home.
But Reed came to think the law a good one, and to assert that the amount paid as compensation, ‘a miserably small percentage upon the whole of the work’, had saved a great many men from extreme misery.
But though conditions were better than on many English lines, the men suffered badly during the long winter of 1842–3. Brassey’s son Thomas travelled with him to France, and one of the boy’s earliest memories, which he spoke of fifty years later, was of standing by his father’s side in the boulevard of Rouen surrounded by hundreds of famishing Englishmen. The works had been held up, there was little work in England for the men to go back to, and so they had nothing. The navvies, he said, were not a provident class, and had not saved enough to support themselves for many weeks without work. Their sufferings, which would have been great in England, were worse in a foreign country. Soup kitchens were opened, but, said Thomas, ‘philanthropy is no adequate substitute for brisk and well-paid employment’. He never forgot ‘that dreadful winter’.
Roasting a whole ox for the navvies’ feast, 1843.
Work restarted in the spring, and the line to Rouen was ceremonially opened on 3 May 1843. Though the railway had been made by Protestant sinews, out of Protestant capital, and with Protestant implements, the Roman Catholic French priests came forth in their chasubles, and with their books and candles, to bless the great new marvel. At Pont de Maisons, near Rouen, the navvies sat down to an open-air feast, which the Paris magazine L’Illustration called:
A meal in harmony with English manners that recalls the Homeric feasts; whole oxen were roasted and served to six hundred workers.
The national guard stood by while the men ate. An article in the magazine asked:
What sweeter reward could these hardworking men wish for, who, after two years, added their names to this enduring legacy?
By this time most of the English navvies had returned home, but about a thousand remained. Some of these went up to Paris and tried to contract with the government engineer for some of the earthworks then being thrown up for the defence of the city. They took some of the work, at the current French prices, and then organized themselves into butty gangs. There was a fosse all round the works, and the stuff from this ditch was taken out and put behind the masonry of the new forts. The Frenchmen there were taking the muck out of the ditch in barrows, which they wheeled up a zig-zag arrangement of planks until they got to the top of the wall. To the eyes of the Englishmen it was all indescribably slow. They immediately put a pulley on top of the wall, and made a swing run. Horses on top of the wall were attached to ropes slung over this pulley, and pulled the loaded barrows up vertically. The empty barrows then descended of their own weight. The navvies worked this way for six weeks, and earned fifteen francs a day each. Then the French engineers began to see that the Englishmen were making them pay an enormous sum for the work, and reduced the price. The navvies, having no other work to go to, had to take it. When the next pay day came round there was another reduction, this time to five francs a day. Then the Englishmen muttered that they were being cheated. If they were going to be paid only five francs they would do no more than five francs’ worth of work, and they thereupon slackened off and took things easy.
Though most went home, some navvies stayed on. They could hardly be said to settle in France – they never settled anywhere while they still worked as navvies – but some married French wives and travelled from one of Brassey’s French contracts to another, from the Rouen and Le Havre line in 1843, to the Amiens and Boulogne the next year, and to the Rouen and Dieppe in 1847.
The extension of the Paris and Rouen line fifty-eight miles north to Le Havre began in 1843, over more difficult country than the first part of the railway. The works included ten tunnels, many bridges, and, at Barentin, twelve miles from Rouen, a great viaduct 100 feet high, of twenty-seven arches, each fifty feet in span. Many Englishmen worked there, and special omnibuses were run from Barentin to Rouen on the Sunday after the pay, which was monthly on this part of the line. One of these omnibuses, which the navvies called the Great Western, could carry sixty men. In Rouen they crowded the streets and spent their money in the cafés and cabarets, and got so drunk that the work horses back at the viaduct had a monthly rest of three days until the men were rounded up, brought back from Rouen, and given time to recover. After a pay work never started again until the following Wednesday.
But between these outings the work at Barentin pressed on fast through the winter of 1845, until on 10 January 1846, when the viaduct was almost finished, it collapsed, just as the Ashton viaduct had done the year before. Locke was engineer on both lines. No one was hurt this time, but it was a great blow to Brassey. He came from Rouen, inspected the wreckage of the viaduct which had been put up too quickly, in wet weather, and with poor lime, and decided to rebuild straight away. It took six months, cost him £40,000, and occupied nearly all the masons he had in France, but, as he said in his report to the company:
I have contracted to make and maintain the road, and nothing shall prevent Thomas Brassey from being as good as his word.
This greatly enhanced his reputation, though he was still, like all English contractors in France, suspected and denigrated at every opportunity. When the viaduct fell the French Press set up a howl of triumph, charging the English with blundering stupidity, and abusing the French directors for employing foreigners who swallowed up the money of the country in return for scamped-up works. But by 1848 Brassey and his partners had built, mostly with British capital, three-quarters of the railways of France that then existed.
And the coming of Brassey and his navvies had, said Locke, considerably improved the condition of the French working classes. Though the French labourers had at first been capable of much less work, and received much less pay, they soon learned the use of new tools, gained strength, and after a few years were nearly, but never quite, as good as the Englishmen. By the late forties most of the railway work was being done by Frenchmen, who were earning much greater wages than they ever could have in the fields, sometimes double or treble what they had earned before. One sub-contractor who employed Belgian labourers near Charleroi said that when he began to pay them up to two and a half francs a day, about three times their usual wage, they thought he was an angel from heaven. In the fifties, on the Caen and Cherbourg line, English navvies were still doing the most dangerous work, like blasting, and being paid more for it, five francs against the Frenchmen’s three and a half, but the local labourers were very competently doing the muck-shifting that they had previously been incapable of.
After the English railway boom had died down, railway building became a service which Britain could dump abroad when there was for the moment no use for it at home. In the early fifties Brassey was at work in Italy, France, Norway, and Austria, taking his English agents, engineers, and gangers with him, but relying now mainly on local labourers except where he had to complete a line rapidly. Some of these native workmen were slower even than the Norman peasants Brassey had found when he first came to France. On one line the Neapolitans came in large troops under their chieftains. Each chief, with a thousand men, would take perhaps ten miles of earthworks and cuttings, but would refuse the heavy work. They left their women behind, but
brought their old men and boys, and built huts of wood, which they left in charge of the old men, who also cooked the food. At Maremma these men worked six hours a day for one franc, sometimes staying at work for as long as fifteen hours at a time for two francs. Those who came to work on the line south of Naples near the Abruzzi ate only bread and vegetables and drank water and goat’s milk. After six months they would take their money and return to the mountains.
The Danes also had strange ways of working. They began at four in the morning and did not finish until eight at night, but they took five half-hour intervals of rest during the day. The Swedes drank more than the Danes, and had the reputation of being energetic, polite, but troublesome.
But when in 1852 Brassey undertook to build the Grand Trunk of Canada, 539 miles from Quebec to Lake Huron, there was no local labour worth speaking of, and he had to ship out 3,000 navvies from England. Some French Canadians were used, but they were useless except for light work. The only way they could be used was to let them fill the wagons and then ride on the train to the tip, to give them a rest. They could work fast for ten minutes and then they were done. They were not idle, just weak, small, and ill-fed, living on vegetables and scarcely ever eating meat. Even where Canadians could be used they had to be led by Englishmen, who built most of the line themselves. Frequently it was as cold as fifty degrees below freezing. If there was any wind the men’s faces and hands immediately froze. They had to work in thick gloves, heavy coats, fur caps which covered their ears, and with heavy handkerchiefs over their faces. When the wind blew upstream the men working near the St Lawrence became covered with icicles and had to stop. In 1854 a third of Brassey’s men were in hospital at one time, with frostbite and cholera. They were well paid, 7s. 6d. a day, compared with 5s. at most in England, but even this could not induce them to stay. They began to return home, and labour became so scarce that, probably for the first time, an English contractor used that American device the steam excavator. The work was at last finished in 1859, at a loss to Brassey of nearly a million pounds. But before then the Crimean War had broken out, a war from which a few hundred British navvies were to emerge with considerably more credit than Her Majesty’s Government.
By September 1854, 30,000 British soldiers, together with a larger French army, were laying siege to the Crimean stronghold of Sevastopol, which they could already have taken with little trouble if the generals Raglan and St Arnaud, surpassing each other in incompetence, had not dithered about until new Russian armies arrived to reinforce the defenders. By the late autumn the British Army was dug in. Two months later it was in rags and disorder and nearly freezing to death, the generals having forgotten the Crimean winter. There was nothing to eat, nothing to drink, no roads, no commissariat, no medicine, no clothes, no organization; the only thing in abundance was cholera. Raglan’s army was disposed along a ridge outside Sevastopol, about seven miles from the port of Balaclava, where a British fleet lay. From the ships to the army there was one bad road which, after the storms of mid-November, became no road at all. Not even a cart could get through, and supplies were carried up on horseback or on the backs of men. There were also a few camels. It was hardly war at all – just an army starving and catching cholera. If the generals had been railway contractors they would long before have gone broke; and, as it was, it was railway contractors who saved them.
Punch’s view of navvies routing the Russians.
As the news and the casualty lists got back to London, and as it became quite plain that the British Army was about to be defeated if not by the Russians then by the winter, Peto had the idea of a railway to connect the port and the camp. He was by then a Member of Parliament, so he spoke to Palmerston, who sent him to the Duke of Newcastle (the Secretary of State for War), who in turn spoke to Aberdeen, the Prime Minister. Peto, his partner and brother-in-law Betts, and Brassey offered to build a Crimean railway at cost, expecting no profit. They proposed to ship all their men and materials, to engineer the line, and then run it. The government accepted. On 30 November Edward Betts, who was organizing the transport of men and materials, wrote to Newcastle saying they proposed to send 200–250 platelayers, navvies, and miners, ten gangers, twenty rough masons or bricklayers, eighty carpenters with three foremen, twenty blacksmiths and foremen, ten enginemen and fitters, four timekeepers, one chief clerk, one draftsman, two practical assistant engineers, and one chief engineer. He also stipulated that this force must come under the direct superintendence of the contractors’ engineer. The men were civilians; they were not to be subject to military law, and were to be known as the Civil Engineer Corps. Peto, Betts, and Brassey advertised for men, and on Saturday, 2 December, and on the following Monday, their office in Waterloo Road, on the Surrey side of the bridge, was besieged by navvies, masons, carpenters, blacksmiths, and gangers. They came in crowds, and the contractors could pick and choose. The outer room of the office was filled, and those out in the street tried to elbow their way in. It was like a theatre crush. Many of the men seemed to want to fight rather than shift muck.
‘Hope we shall get out quick,’ said one. ‘Hope they’ll hold out till we come.’
‘We’ll give it to them with the pick and crowbar, them Roosians, instead of the rifle,’ said another.
On the second day the door was closed and a notice put up saying: NO MORE MEN WANTED. But some still lingered about, hoping to be taken on after all.
Many of those engaged had already served for a while in Canada, on the Grand Trunk, as had Beattie, who was to be chief engineer of the Crimea Railway. They knew what sort of winter to expect, and how to live through it. The pay was good, from 5s. to 8s. a day, and the men’s food and clothes and passages out and back were to be found by the contractors. The engagement was for six months. Beattie’s plan was for a double line of rails from Balaclava to the encampment near Sevastopol. From a point near the English positions single lines would then radiate to all the batteries. The line would be worked by stationary engines, four or five of them, pulling the trucks along by wire ropes.
For their generous offer the contractors were lionized. Peto, Betts, and Brassey, it was said, would go about things in a businesslike manner; they were not likely to land their men, as the Army had, without tents or tools, or to fill the hold of a vessel with medical stores and put tons of shot and shell over them, or send out an entire cargo of right-footed boots, any more than they would lay the rails of a line and then tip an embankment on top. The navvies too – the big, bad, demoralized, infidel navvies – were suddenly heroes. The Illustrated London News said:
The men employed in our engineering works have been long known as the very élite of England, as to physical power; – broad, muscular, massive fellows, who are scarcely to be matched in Europe. Animated, too, by as ardent a British spirit as beats under any uniform, if ever these men come to hand-to-hand fighting with the enemy, they will fell them like ninepins. Disciplined and enough of them, they could walk from end to end of the continent.
The same week that the navvies were scrambling to volunteer, the survivors of Inkerman were arriving at Southampton. When the Indus docked at Southampton the remnants from the Crimea walked ashore on crutches, or were led, or carried. A lane of spectators formed. The pale and maimed appearance of the soldiers prevented anything like cheering. The labourers on the docks stopped work and looked on in silence.
By the end of December several hundred navvies had sailed or were ready to sail. The first body, of fifty-four men, sailed from Birkenhead in the Wildfire on Thursday the 21st. They had been delayed by one thing and another, and had started from London on the Wednesday of the previous week, when they gathered at the North-Western Railway terminal at Euston, en route for Liverpool. Many of the men’s wives came along to see them off, and before they left the navvies were invited to sign allotment papers directing the contractors to pay part of their wages to their wives at home. The idea caught on, one of the waiting-rooms was requisitioned, and the men queued to sign the papers.
Most of them made £1 a week over to their wives. They were due to catch the nine o’clock train, but as all the papers were not signed by then, they refused to leave until ten. They eventually got away to loud cheers.
Men surrounding Peto, Brassey and Betts’s office in the Waterloo Road hoping to volunteer for the Crimea.
Their ship was to have sailed from Liverpool on the Friday, but because of the gales there was another delay of nearly a week. The Wildfire was a clipper of 457 tons, which the contractors had bought and fitted out between decks with cabins and berths for the men. She was one of the twenty-three vessels which took the navvies to the Crimea, and one of four (the other three were screw steamers) which the contractors were obliged to buy because they could not easily charter enough ships for such a hazardous venture. Other ships were borrowed from Peto’s North of Europe Steam Navigation Company.
With the men and the materials and the horses sailed five doctors, four nurses, and three scripture readers – one of them Thomas Fayers, who was to preach in the dark hulk of a navvy ship in Balaclava harbour. Years later, in the Lune valley in Westmorland, he was delighted to be recognized as ‘our Crimea parson’. By army standards the force was extravagantly equipped. Each man was issued with:
1 painted bag
1 pr. boots
1 pr. long water-proof boots
1 moleskin vest lined
1 painted suit
with serge
1 pr. fisherman’s boots
1 strap and buckle
3 coloured cotton shirts
1 fear nought slop
1 pr. linsey drawers
1 bed and pillow
1 flannel shirt (red)
1 pr. mittens
1 blue cravat
The Railway Navvies Page 22