The Railway Navvies

by Terry Coleman

1 woollen coat

  1 flannel shirt (white)

  1 tug and blanket

  1 blue worsted cravat

  1 pr. grey stockings

  1 flannel belt

  1 pr. of blankets

  1 pr. leggings

  2 lb. tobacco

  1 pr. moleskin trousers

  Then there were the materials – 1,800 tons of rails and fastenings, 6,000 sleepers, 600 tons of timber, and a further 2,000 tons of fixed engines, cranes, pile engines, trucks, wagons, barrows, blocks, chainfalls, wire rope, picks, bars, capstans, crabs, and a variety of other plant and tools, besides forges, carpenters’ and smiths’ tools, one portable stove for each ten men, and a quantity of Deane and Adam’s revolvers. This arming of the navvies was widely criticized, though presumably the guns were to be used only in an emergency, if the Army was overrun and the men had to defend themselves. To issue the revolvers was a mistake, it was said. The navvies were too valuable and expensive to be put in the way of shot if it could be avoided.

  Everything was set. At Balaclava, Beattie had found a wharf from which the ships could unload. Raglan admitted that the railway was life and death to many of his soldiers, if not indeed to the Army. Through January, and through storms in the Bay of Biscay, the contractors’ fleet sailed out. The navvies rioted in Gibraltar and Malta, demonstrated prizefighting in Valletta, and then, at the beginning of February, began to disembark at Balaclava into the cold of a Russian winter.

  They got to work. In ten days they built their own hutted camp and the first five miles of line. Captain Clifford (later to become Major-General Sir Henry Clifford) wrote home that the navvies looked ‘unutterable things’, and had set to work on the railway ‘more because it is their nature to do so than anything else’. He would have preferred a simple road, but later admitted he was astonished at the railway’s progress. He said:

  The navvies in spite of the absence of beefsteaks and ‘Barkley and Perkins Entire’ work famously, and as I have before mentioned do more work in a day, than a Regiment of English soldiers do in a week. To be sure the navvies have yet in them the stamina of English living, which has long been worked out of our poor fellows.

  William Russell, the correspondent of The Times who caused such a furore with his dispatches which revealed the state of the Army in the Crimea, wrote that the railway, where it ran through the main street of Balaclava, had cleared away the crowds of stragglers who used to infest the place. The navvies had pulled down the rackety houses near the post office to clear a way for the terminus of the first bit of what Russell called the Grand Crimean Central Railway. It was, he reported, inexpressibly strange to hear the well-known rumbling sound of the carriages and wagons as they passed to and fro with their loads of navvies, sleepers, and rails. It recalled home more strongly than anything he had heard in the Crimea. He, too, was astonished at the speed of the work. He left one post day, to visit the neighbouring forces, and returned on another, and only with difficulty recognized the place where he had been staying. A railway was running across his courtyard, the walls of which had been demolished; and the navvies gave him a startling welcome by pulling down a poplar right on the roof, which carried away part of the balcony, smashed the roof tiles, and broke two windows.

  Navvies and their railway in the Crimea.

  Russell seems not to have liked the navvies, whom he described in another message as hard at work picking and growling and fighting among themselves. There had, he said, been a regular battle on board one of their ships the night before, and the Provost Marshal would have to ‘give them a taste of his quality ere they are brought to a sense of their responsibility in a state of martial law’. Later he reported, in spite of what he had already said about the rapidity of construction, that the only obstructions to be dreaded would arise from the navvies, some of whom had been behaving very badly.

  They nearly all struck work a short time back, on the plea that they were not properly rationed or paid, or that, in other words, they were starved and cheated.

  There is no other report of any such complaint. The navvies’ wages were assured by their written contracts, and it is unlikely that Peto, Betts, and Brassey starved them or that starved men would build a railway so fast. Nor did the navies complain when they returned home. It looks, then, as though Russell was a bit irritated by the growling and fighting, and would just have liked to flog a few of them, to encourage the others. But Sir Morton Peto had quite distinctly refused to allow his men to be placed under martial law as some of the officers wanted, and maintained that his was a civilian force under his own humane discipline. One navvy was, however, convicted of robbery along with some soldiers, and sentenced to be flogged. He was tough, his courage won him great admiration, and he boasted ever after of his flogging.

  Whatever Russell thought of them, General Sir John Burgoyne, the engineer commander, considered the navvies fine, manly fellows, and unsuccessfully asked for some of them to help dig military defences. And the Illustrated London News wrote, in March 1855:

  It ought to be consolatory to Mr Carlyle and the mourners over the degeneracy of these latter-Days, that there is at least one institution, and that a pre-eminently English one, which, despite climatic drawbacks and all sorts of deteriorating influences, exhibits all its original stamina and pristine healthiness – to wit, the British navvy. Everything we hear and read, from every quarter, testifies to the energetic, skilled, and matured progression of the great undertaking now progressing between Balaclava and the cannon-bristling heights of Sevastopol, and there cannot be a doubt that, when it has reached its terminus, those engaged upon it may safely adopt the motto of their honoured chief, Sir Morton Peto – Ad Finem Fidelis.

  Though the Army had promised to lend the contractors soldiers to use as temporary navvies, little help was in fact given. At first about 150 men of the 39th Regiment worked for Beattie, and were becoming fair navvies when they were withdrawn. He was then given 200 Croatians who were practically useless, so the entire burden was borne by English navvies.

  The railway, which was laid as a double line from its beginning on the quays of Balaclava right up to the hilltop encampments, was worked by horses which walked on planks specially laid between the rails, by stationary engines, and also, as had not at first been intended, by locomotives shipped out from Britain. As a railway it was a bit rough, Brassey having told Beattie not to be too particular about levels and that his principal task was to build a reasonably serviceable track, but it did a lot to save the Army. The engineers had expected to take until the end of April, but by the middle of March things were going much better than they had hoped. A quarter of a mile was being laid every day; the pace was fast. In one instance, a piledriver was landed from the supply ship on one evening, carried in pieces up to the spot where the piles had to be sunk for a wooden bridge across a stream, erected the next morning, and, before that evening, in less than twenty-four hours, the piles were all driven, the machine removed, the bridge finished, and the rails laid down for 100 yards beyond.

  By the end of March the line had reached its farthest point and in a week or so more the tributary lines were laid and the railway completed. In all, twenty-nine miles of track were laid. In a letter to his employers Beattie praised his navvies, saying their example had showed the soldiers how to work, and that he was convinced that fifty soldiers would now do more than a hundred would have done before. Soon after it was opened the railway was estimated to have carried 246,600 tons of food and forage (112 tons a day), 1,000 tons of shot and shell, 3,600 tons of commissariat goods. Even then, the idiots of the commissariat refused to make full use of the railway which the navvies had worked night and day to build, incredibly declining to run supplies before eight in the morning or after five-thirty in the evening. But the Army was relieved. Its supplies were assured. Things were never so bad again as in the early winter of 1854, and in September 1855 the fort of Sevastopol fell.

  In the Crimea the navvies were perhaps, in the eyes of such an off
icer as Henry Clifford, unutterable things. They were undisciplined and wore moleskin jackets: the soldiers drilled admirably and wore fine red coats. But the navvies were fit, well fed, well clothed, well paid, experienced in icebound winters, and well led: the soldiers were diseased, starved, tattered, flogged, not expecting it to get cold, and led by a gentleman who is best remembered for lending his name to an overcoat.

  The British Army had not fought a war since 1815, but the likes of Peto and Brassey and their men had prospered through many hard campaigns in Britain, Europe, and America. In 1846, for instance, while the Army was suffering occasional defeats in African skirmishes and flogging a man to death at Hounslow for insubordination, the railway contractors had an army of 200,000 navvies at work in Britain alone. It is not, then, strange that the British government was at its wits’ end to maintain an army of 30,000 in the Crimea, which was only half the number of Brassey’s habitual workforce, or that Brassey, together with Peto and Betts, the two biggest contracting firms in the world, should have found it a simple matter to transport a few hundred navvies to the Crimea and build twenty-nine miles of railway. The contractors came out of the war well. As the Illustrated London News said, it was once more proved that the men who had ‘made England great by their skill, enterprise, and powers of organization, were of far different calibre from the officials the Government employs’. And the navvies, who returned to a great welcome, were for the time being heroes, having confirmed in the minds of all Englishmen the judgement, which happened to be true at the time but which would have been believed anyway, that the English navvy was the king of labourers.

  Another Punch cartoon, after navvies had rescued Raglan’s bogged-down army in the Crimea. One navvy is saying to the other: “Ah, Bill. It shows the forward march of the age. Fust the brute force, such as ‘im’, and then the likes of us to do it scientific, and show the might of intellect.”

  13

  Last Fling

  The last great work executed in Britain by navvies working in the classical way was the Settle and Carlisle line, which was started in 1869 and completed by 1875. This is late in the railway age. George Stephenson died in 1848, Hudson was ruined by 1849, Brunel and Robert Stephenson died in 1859, Locke in 1860, and Brassey in 1870. But the Midland wanted a direct route to Scotland, and so in the late 1860s their engineer, Sharland, walked the seventy miles from Settle to Carlisle in ten days, making a first survey of the line. These works, over moors as bleak and wild as those at Woodhead but much vaster, were among the heaviest of any British railway – a farmer said he bet there wasn’t a level piece of ground big enough to build a house on between the two towns – and they were the last of any size to be constructed by navvies and horses, picks and tip-trucks. There was other railway building afterwards. Old lines were widened, new loops were built, but they were small works. One main line, the Great Central, did remain to be built in the 1890s, but that was to be the work not of the navvy alone but also of the mechanical excavator, which was only at this last moment to be used in Britain as extensively as the Americans had used it for forty years and more.

  Boys with tip truck on the Great Central, 1899.

  The two horrors of Settle and Carlisle were bog and boulder-clay. To carry supplies the navvies used bog carts, which ran on barrels instead of ordinary narrow-rimmed wheels, which would have sunk hopelessly up to the axles. An engineer said he had often seen these bog carts hauled over the moss by three horses, till they sank up to their middles and had to be drawn out one at a time by their necks to save their lives. Once when four horses were dragging a telegraph pole over such a swamp the exertion became so great that one of the beasts tore a hoof off. In Ribblesdale the clay was normally so hard that it had to be drilled and blasted, yet after rain it turned into a thick, gluey mess, so adhesive and tough that when a navvy stuck his pickaxe into it he could hardly get it out again; and when he did he would not have loosened a small teaspoonful of stuff. Then, when the clay was blasted out as dry rock and put in the tip-wagon, a shower of rain and the jolting of the ride to the tip-head would shake the load into a near-fluid mass of slurry, which settled like glue at the bottom of the wagon, would not be thrown out when the wagon tipped, and so took wagon and all over the embankment. Crossley, one of the Midland engineers, resigned himself to dealing with stuff that was rock one moment and like soup in buckets the next, but the navvies never really became reconciled to it. A man would stick his pick in what had up to then proved to be soft clay, strike a boulder underneath almost as hard as iron, and so shake his arms and body that he would fling down his tools disgusted, ask for his money, and go off. The men trod on wet heather and sinking peat; the little rills, draining the fells and winding and leaping into the valleys, turned to floods and drenched everything; the wind moaned in the brown heather in sympathy with the people. The rain reduced the working days from six a week to three or two, and the men left for other parts of the country where the weather and the work were more settled. One man who had worked in the Rocky Mountains said he had never known such weather as on the moors. At Intake Bank, a thousand feet up, tipping went on for a year without the embankment advancing a yard. The tip-head stayed where it was, while the masses of slurry rolled over one another in mighty convolutions, spreading uselessly out, and going anywhere but the place they were wanted. Swardale viaduct alone took four and a half years. It became impossible to induce the men to remain unless they were allowed to work short time at wages of up to ten shillings a day. As soon as one gang was organized several men left, and works in full swing one day were almost deserted the next. No more than 1,700 or 2,000 men worked on the line at any one time, but more than 33,000 navvies came, stayed for a while, and jacked. ‘They are a class of men,’ said an engineer, ‘very fond of change.’

  The rain was torrential – ninety-two inches in 1872 at Dent Head, compared with twenty-five inches in London. Some works just melted in the incessant downpour and had to be started all over again. One gullet, a sort of preliminary cutting, was made big enough to take a few wagons through it, and the rails were laid. But in the night the rain fell, the walls of the gullet slipped, the road was buried several yards deep in slurry and mud, and there it was left. Two years later another and deeper gullet was made, and the men found the remains of the former tram road. ‘A splendid discovery for a geological fellow,’ said an engineer.

  He could prove lots from this. Here is a railway in the glacial period, rails, sleepers and all. Then the world must have been inhabited then; and they had railways then; there is nothing new under the sun.

  A few of the navvies came with the contractors and stayed with them throughout, a few miners came specially from Cornwall, and a few were recruited from the men of Yorkshire and Northumberland, counties from which many of the best of the original navvies had come. Most drifted in and drifted out – Irish, Scots, men of all sorts who came on tramp and stayed until the boulder clay got the better of them. In the beginning they invaded the little towns of Settle and Appleby, but out on the moors there were no towns, no villages, not as much as a farmhouse for miles. And so, as at Woodhead thirty years before, they built shanty towns, and called them Sevastopol – the navvies were proud of their part in the Crimea and did not forget it – Salt Lake City, Jericho, and Batty Green. The last was the biggest, and housed at one time nearly 2,000 people, navvies, their women and children. Batty Green was built near Batty Wyf Hole, which had been named after a most navvy-like legend. Batty was a man of the moors who wooed and won a girl who lived in Ingleton Fells. But after a while he fell into evil ways and his wife threw herself to her death into a deep fissure, locally called a hole. There is also another, rather deflating, legend that the place got its name merely because Batty’s wife did her washing at the hole.

  However it was named, the place was like a gold town in the 1870s. That is to say, it was a great deal nearer to civilization than Woodhead had been. At Batty Green not only were there huts laid out in rows but there was a school wit
h a schoolmaster, a mission house with a missionary, a library, a post office, and a hospital which the contractor built during a smallpox epidemic in May 1871, when eighty died. Bread was baked in Settle and brought up to the camp. Beef-on-the-hoof was driven to Batty Green and there slaughtered to feed the navvies. They ate and drank and fought, but at this camp even the fighting was better organized. Sunday was the big day, when contenders fought bare-knuckled for the title of cock of the camp, the champion later to be matched against a professional fighter brought in for the occasion.

  The camps became notorious, and in October 1872 the Daily News sent a reporter to see how the men lived. He went to Batty Wyf Hole asking for William Ashwell, the contractor there, but was told he had just left to go up the line. The reporter followed, tramping along the line, a temporary way winding across a hollow already partly spanned by a huge skeleton viaduct. Scrambling along through knee-deep bogs on to piers whose foundations were just level with the surface, past batches of stone-hewers hammering away at blocks of blue stone for more piers, he came to part of the viaduct which had already been erected and looked up at the tangled scaffolding, at the trucks and engines traversing tramroads at great heights, at derricks and blocks and pulleys, and at the silent masons working so far above. From the hollow beneath the viaduct he climbed to the embankment leading to it and picked his way along, using sleepers for stepping-stones but sometimes slipping mid-leg into half-liquid mud. Between the end of the viaduct, and the beginning of a tunnel more than a mile off, was a cutting through the moorland morass, and as the reporter hesitated, wondering whether to go on, he was overtaken by the missionary, an elderly and wiry man with a white beard who was sent by the Manchester City Mission, the same society whose superintendent had visited Woodhead so many years before.