The Railway Navvies

by Terry Coleman

  All this was part of the navvy legend, which, in the late nineties, was dying with the navvy age itself. Only a last fling remained. In 1896, as the London Extension progressed, John Horwood married Ellen Frances Wootton at Leicester; Thomas Walker died at Nottingham of asthma, bronchitis, heart disease, and consumption; Alfred Winser, working at Marylebone, had his temple pierced, his intellect in consequence impaired, and was taken to Claybury Asylum; Septimus Creber, missionary, said his open-air services in the Finchley Road were ‘well attended, thank God!’ and at Loughborough that Christmas 130 children were each given a bun, an orange, sweets, and biscuits.

  As the line came near its end Thomas Saltenstall (Virgin Slen) died of pleurisy at Leicester; a missionary called Barnfather was bitten by a dog; Walter Wright (Ginger Suffolk), with an impediment in his speech and ‘Love’ tattooed on his left arm, left his wife. Booklets called, A Navvy, a Saint of God, were offered at 8s. 6d. a hundred. Harrison Hayter, past president of the Institution of Civil Engineers, said in an address to the navvies that he had often thought they were unconsciously preparing the way of the Lord by exalting valleys, lowering mountains and hills, making crooked places straight, and rough places plain (Isaiah xl, 3 and 4). Mr Barnfather recovered of his bite. One W. Shackles went mouching about, begging an idle living, as he had done for years, by pretending he was a disabled navvy, and navvies were warned not to be generous to William Grime, also described as a ‘professional moucher’.

  Barrow run in Canada at the turn of the century.

  Mrs Brown of Stockport, a poor old widow of seventy-one, was sloped by eleven lodgers in nine weeks; at Winterbourne Downs, William Moss, known as William Rice, sloped off with the pay of fifty of his mates; William P. Cox, scripture reader, closing his mission house at Woodford when the works there came to an end, exhorted his men not to neglect the means of grace and God would bless them; and Patsey Brain, last heard of by his wife at Walthamstow, sloped off with a girl of seventeen.

  The men finished the last main line and left. Some went overseas. To the South African lines, then building. To Siberia, a few of them, where the third section of the great railway was starting – ‘an awful country,’ said one, ‘the conditions of life are not fit for dogs.’ To the Canadian line from Glenora to Teslin Lake, part of a line designed to take emigrants from the ocean to the Klondike in six days. To Gibraltar. A few to the Simplon Tunnel. To Australia, where the Archbishop of Sydney joined the Christian Excavators’ Union, and where Pincher King, writing from 55 Fraser Street, Melbourne, said he met Teetotal Devon and Jimmy Dean, two of his old mates from English days.

  But in a way this question, ‘Where did they go?’ is misleading, because it assumes that there was some great and sudden exodus. There was not. From the beginning British navvies had worked abroad, and since the seventies many had gone to settle. Probably no more went in the last years of the century than had gone ten or twenty years before. Most stayed at home and just looked for the next job, though this was harder to come by than it used to be.

  But this was the end of the navvy age, and for these reasons:

  First, all the great work was done. There were no more main lines.

  Second, those contracts that did remain, and there were seventy railway works in progress in 1900, were mostly patching – making a new diversion here to make the journey a few miles shorter, widening the track there.

  Third, what work remained was done more and more by machines. A couple of steam excavators tended by twenty men did work that fifty years before would have taken 200 navvies.

  So by 1900, although there were many thousands of labourers (the Navvy Mission Society was still giving away 10,000 copies of each Quarterly Letter), they were scattered. As a force they no longer existed. The London and Birmingham and the Settle and Carlisle were many years in the past. Never again would such vast bodies of men be assembled for public works. Never again, after the railways came, would communications be so bad that a thousand navvies, halfway between Manchester and Sheffield, would be working in a wilderness, cut off from civilization, nine miles from a priest and eight from a surgeon. In an increasingly organized society, the forces of order would never again be so weak that the navvies in their shanty towns could be a law unto themselves and a terror to the countryside. Today perhaps the only proper descendants of the nineteenth-century navvies are those who make the motorways, but the scale of building is different, so much smaller. Lecount, or Brunel – any one of the railway engineers – would have been astonished that such roads should be built in little pieces here and there, and take so long.

  In medieval times there was a distinct order of monks called the Bridgebuilders, who kept the roads in repair. To build bridges and clear forests were deeds of salvation for the next world as well as for this, and so to make a highway on earth seemed to them the most likely road to heaven. St Benedict began to earn his canonization with the first stone he laid at the bridge of Avignon, which Pope Nicholas V said was built by the inspiration of the Holy Ghost. A railway is a kind of highway, so perhaps the navvies, in spite of themselves, were closer to salvation than Elizabeth Garnett thought. But whether or not they were saved by their own muck-shifting, the railways they built remain their monument. Of the navvies, Samuel Smiles said that their handiwork would be the wonder and admiration of succeeding generations. Looking at their gigantic traces, the men of some future age might be found ready to say of the engineer and his workmen, that there were giants in those days.

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  Endpaper

  Sources

  Selected Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

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  About Terry Coleman & Christian Wolmar

  About Christian Wolmar’s Railway Library

  An invitation from the publisher

  Endpaper

  Sources

  Little has been written directly about navvies. Much of the material for this book comes therefore from incidental references scattered about in early railway literature and, most of all, from contemporary magazines and newspapers. To avoid footnotes these sources are set out, chapter by chapter, as follows. Some sources are clearly named in the text (as, at the beginning of Chapter 6, the report of Hobday’s trial is attributed to the Carlisle Patriot of 27 February 1846) and such information is not repeated in the main list.

  1. THE NAVVY AGE

  Eaton’s evidence is from the Report of the Select Committee on Railway Labourers, Reports, Committees (9) 1846, 13, hereafter called the 1846 Committee. Details of the Stockton and Darlington Railway are mainly from The History of the First Public Railway, ed. M. Heavisides, 1912. Horses on the Liverpool and Manchester from the Liverpool Mercury of 18 July 1828. Booth was writing in his Liverpool and Manchester Railway, 1830. Lecount describes the navvies as banditti in his History of the Railway Connecting London and Birmingham, 1839; and these references also occur in the much inferior book The London and Birmingham Railway by Thomas Roscoe, 1839. The Chartist meeting is from the Manchester Guardian of 8 August 1846, and the Penmaenmawr riot from the same paper of 27 May 1846. Thomas Carlyle’s comments are from a letter of 29 August 1846, to Gavan Duffy, quoted in the Railway Magazine of June 1907. Mr Barrett on alligators is from his Life and Work Among the Navvies, 1880. Mr Walker on tramp navvies is from the Quarterly Letter to Navvies of June 1884, published by the Navvy Mission Society. The two histories referred to are Our Iron Roads by Frederick S. Williams, first edition 1852 and another edition of 1883, and A History of the English Railway by John Francis, 1851. The comments of the engineer (Robert Rawlinson) and of Peto are from the 1846 Committee.

  2. THE WORKS

  Lecount on the pyramids comes from his own book (see Chapter 1) and is quoted by Roscoe and F. S. Williams (also Chapter 1). Robert Stephenson at Newcastle is from Our Iron Roads, 1852, p. 35. Brassey on a day’s work for a navvy is from Life and Labours
of Mr Brassey by Arthur Helps, 1872. The description of Chat Moss is from The Struggle for the Liverpool and Manchester Railway by George S. Veitch, 1930, from the Story of the Life of George Stephenson by Samuel Smiles, 1857, and from the Liverpool Mercury. John Masefield’s description of tipping is from his Grace Before Ploughing, fragments of autobiography (Heinemann, 1966). The timekeeper’s remarks are from Helps on Brassey. The description of blasting, with twanging of horns, is from The Life of Joseph Locke by Joseph Devey, 1862. Round Down Cliff is from Our Iron Roads. The description of the tunnel under Liverpool is from The Liverpool and Manchester Railway by Henry Booth, 1830, from An Accurate Description of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway by James Scott Walker, 1830, and from the Liverpool Mercury. The Samaritan Society of England is from the Manchester Guardian of 10 March 1849. Visit to the Belsize Tunnel from the Life and Work of Joseph Firbank by Frederick McDermott, 1887.

  3. NAVVY AND CONTRACTOR

  Much information on railway contracts is from Work and Wages by Thomas Brassey, M.P. (the son of the contractor and later created an earl), 1872 and later editions up to 1919. Peto’s organization on the Peterborough and Ely line is from his evidence to the 1846 Committee. The terms of the typical contract are quoted from Our Iron Roads (see above). The story of Sir Edward Banks is from the pamphlet of Thomas Nicholson referred to in detail in Chapter 7. The story of Firbank is from his life by McDermott, and that of Brassey from his life by Helps (both see above). The story of Wythes’s estimating is also from McDermott. Rawlinson’s account of the difficulties of a contractor is from Chadwick’s pamphlet referred to in Chapter 7. Benjamin Bailey gave evidence to the 1846 Committee. Benley and Leech are from the Manchester Guardian of 19 September 1846. The table of wages is from Work and Wages (above). Hawkshaw’s remarks are from Helps on Brassey. Peto’s Commons speech and other details of Peto, from Sir Morton Peto, a memorial sketch by Sir Henry Peto, his son, printed for private circulation, 1893.

  4. DEATH AND DISASTER

  Anecdotes of courage and recklessness from Our Iron Roads (above). Navvy describing danger of work, from Our Navvies by Elizabeth Garnett, 1885. Death of Huskisson from the Manchester Guardian of 18 September 1830 (a better report than that of The Times which is often quoted). The list of accidents at Bath shown to Brunel, and also the lists from Manchester and Salisbury hospitals, are from the 1846 Committee. Peto on small compensation, from the 1846 Committee. Aged Navvies Fund, from the jubilee edition of the Railway News, 1914. Ashton viaduct disaster, from the Manchester Guardian of 23 April 1846, and following issues. The story of the navvy killed on a fine evening, and other Shedlock anecdotes, from Our Iron Roads, 1883. Body of navvy raffled, from Life and Work Among the Navvies, p. 80 (above). The death of Clerrett, from the Poole and Dorsetshire Herald.

  5. SHANTIES AND TRUCK

  The article in Household Words is quoted at length in Life and Work Among the Navvies (above). The description of early huts and camps is largely from the evidence of Speirs, Ramsay, Beggs, Thompson, List, Baird, and Jenour to the 1846 Committee, and so is Pearce on landladies. Many details of the Kettering and Manton line are from Life and Work Among the Navvies. The tale of the navvy and the gin is first told in Lecount (above, Chapter 1) and by many others later. Much material on truck is from Chadwick’s pamphlet (see Chapter 7). The truck ticket was presented in evidence to the 1846 Committee, who also heard the remarks of Bailey, Deacon, Brunel, and Peto. Quidhampton strike, from the Poole and Dorsetshire Herald of 29 April 1847.

  6. RIOTS AND RANDIES

  Reports of the Penrith riots are from the Carlisle Patriot, the Scottish Herald, and the 1846 Committee. The 1845 riots from the Scottish Herald and the 1846 Committee. The Kinghorn threatening letters from the Railway Times of 28 May 1846, the Kendal riot from the Manchester Guardian, the Gorebridge murder from the Manchester Guardian, the Illustrated London News, and the Scottish Herald, and the Bathampton trial from The Times. The remarks of Sir T. Acland are from the 1846 Committee, the incidents at Marley and Ridgeway from the Poole and Dorsetshire Herald of 11 June 1846 and 28 January 1847, the Wescoe Hill riot from the Manchester Guardian, the Norwich election riots from the life of Peto by his son (see notes to Chapter 3), from the Norfolk Chronicle, and from The Times. The Battle of Mickleton is from the History of the Great Western Railway by E. T. MacDermot, 1927, fromthe Railway Times of 26 July 1851, and from the Illustrated London News of the same date.

  7. WOODHEAD

  The incidents are too many to make detailed reference possible. The principal sources are the report of the 1846 Committee, in particular the evidence of Robert Rawlinson, Henry Pomfret, Wellington Purdon, Edwin Chadwick, and Thomas Eaton. Chadwick’s pamphlet, Papers Read Before the Statistical Society of Manchester, on the Demoralization and Injuries occasioned by the want of proper regulations of labourers engaged in the construction and working of railways, presented to the society on 18 January 1846, and containing a letter from Roberton, a statement from Rawlinson, and a commentary by Chadwick. Strictures on a Pamphlet published at the request of the Manchester Statistical Society by Thomas Nicholson, being his reply to the Chadwick pamphlet. The burial and baptism records of St James, Woodhead, and of Penistone parish church. Reports from the Manchester Guardian and the Sheffield Iris. Woodhead is also referred to in the lives of Brassey and Locke (see above), in the Life of C. B. Vignoles by O. J. Vignoles, 1889, and in the History of Penistone by John Dransfield, 1906.

  8. CHADWICK, PARLIAMENT, AND DO-NOTHING

  Sources are mostly the same as those for Chapter 7, with these additions: Hansard reports of Commons proceedings. Letters of Chadwick (in the library of University College, London). And ‘Edwin Chadwick and the Railway Labourers’ by R. A. Lewis, Economic History Review, 2nd series, Vol. III, No. 1, 1950.

  9. WELLINGTON, CAT’S MEAT, AND MARY ANN

  The story of Old Blackbird is from Mrs Garnett’s Our Navvies, and so is the tale of the several Smiths or Joneses. Contrairy York is from Barrett’s Life and Work Among the Navvies. Many other anecdotes in this chapter are from these two books. The story of Warren, alias Brown, is from the Northampton Herald of 9 September 1882. The temperance song is from the Quarterly Letter of June 1880.

  10. SIN AND SANCTITY

  Principal sources are the Quarterly Letter to Navvies (quoted from throughout this chapter), the annual reports of the Navvy Mission Society, and the two books of Mrs Garnett and Mr Barrett referred to above. The story of the clergyman and his five bridges is from Lecount’s London and Birmingham (see notes to Chapter 1). The St Pancras exhumation from The Life of Thomas Hardy by F. E. Hardy, 1962 edition, p. 44, and the incident of the priest’s bones from McDermott’s life of Firbank (see above). The minutes of the Chester and Holyhead Railway are from the archives of the British Railways Board. Moorsom is quoted from his evidence to the 1846 Committee, and so are Gillies, Sargent, Thompson, Peto, Jenour, and Breakey. The story of the double-first turned navvy is from Our Navvies (see above). The description of Peto’s religious work is from his son’s memorial sketch (see notes for Chapter 3). Fayers is from his own book Labour Among the Navvies, 1862.

  11. WOMEN NOT THEIR WIVES

  The anecdote of the clergyman’s daughters is from Lecount’s book (see Chapter 1). The broken leg, the rape, and the missionary on the Croydon line (Jenour) are from the 1846 Committee, and so are the remarks of Alfred List. Nicholson is quoted from his own pamphlet (see notes to Chapter 7). Mrs J. is from Our Navvies (see above). The British engineer who watched women navvies was William Chambers, who is quoted in the 1883 edition of Our Iron Roads (see above). Henrietta Cresswell’s picture of navvy life was published in Winchmore Hill, Memories of a Lost Village, 1912.

  12. KING OF LABOURERS

  The ‘damn’ anecdote is from Helps’s life of Brassey (see above), which also gives an account of the Paris and Rouen line. Much other information on this line comes from Devey’s life of Locke (see above) and from the several editions of Work and Wages by T
homas (afterwards Lord) Brassey, son of the contractor, and from the evidence to the 1846 Committee of William Reed, secretary of the Paris and Rouen. The navvies and the fortifications of Paris, from Helps on Brassey. Details of the Grand Trunk from Sir Morton Peto by Sir Henry Peto (see notes to Chapter 3), from Helps on Brassey, and from The Grand Trunk of Canada by A. W. Currie, 1957. Details of the Crimea come from Helps, from Sir Morton Peto, from The War by W. H. Russell, 1855–6, and from Letters from the Crimea by Sir Henry Clifford, 1958. The description of the navvies’ recruitment and embarkation, from the Illustrated London News.

  13. LAST FLING

  Details of the Settle and Carlisle line from The Midland Railway by F. S. Williams, 1876, from the fifth (1888) edition of the same author’s Our Iron Roads, from the Daily News of 29 October 1872, and from the Story of the Settle–Carlisle Line by F. W. Houghton and W. H. Foster, 1948. The letter from Miles is from the Quarterly Letter of September 1882, and that from Lieutenant Gibbon in the Quarterly Letter for September 1888. Details of the Great Central from The Last Main Line edited by R. D. Abbott and published by Leicester Museums, from contemporary issues of the Nottingham Guardian, and from the Quarterly Letters and annual reports of the Navvy Mission. The stories of the injured navvy and of the man who starved to death are from Our Navvies by Mrs Garnett, and that of the French and English navvies buried together from the 1883 edition of Our Iron Roads. The detailed personal incidents on the London Extension are mainly from the Quarterly Letter. The last quotation, from Samuel Smiles, is from his Life of George Stephenson, 1857.