Mutual esteem was another matter. Brunel and Robert Stephenson were the most bitter of professional rivals, yet they were personal friends and Brunel was on hand to support his friend during the nerve-wracking week when he hoisted his prefabricated bridge high above the Menai Straits separating the Welsh mainland from the Island of Anglesey. Their successors are often equally appreciative. Russian engineers still celebrate the achievements of Constantine Ya Mikhailovski, who built much of the Trans-Siberian railway at a rate of over two miles a day. Although much of his track had to be rebuilt (like his American counterparts, his first priority was to get some sort of track laid, knowing that improvements could come later when it was earning some revenue) yet many of the steel bridges he built remained in use for over half a century.
Even his achievements were surpassed by Alexander Yugovich, the ‘stout and deceptively dull-eyed engineer’ who built the Chinese Eastern railway through Manchuria.
Other engineers throughout the world have contended with deserts and mountain ranges, arctic cold, rampaging floods, pestilence, bandits, saboteurs and obstructive officials, but Yugovich and his associates were perhaps unique in that they coped with all of these formidable impediments simultaneously … the few roads were fantastically rough, and, during the rainy season, remained impassable quagmires until tediously filled in with brush and innumerable logs … In parts of the eastern section, there was wood but no stone; in the western, stone but no wood for upwards of six hundred miles. Fourteen major water-ways – icebound for at least four months annually – would require spans of anywhere from eight hundred feet to a half-mile in diameter … Along the entire northern route of 927 miles, there were no utilizable laborers and fewer than six towns, each the periodic prey of Manchurian outlaws.7
Navvies on the Trans-Siberian, the world’s longest railway.
Then the workers were struck by bubonic plague which claimed 1,400 victims.
Originally engineers like Joseph Locke were the dominant force, employing, and trusting, contractors like Thomas Brassey. For a time, as we saw in Chapter IV, the contractors moved to the front of the stage as the movers and shakers of the railway business. But their dominance was confined to Britain, and lasted only until the Overend Gurney crash of 1866 put paid to their independence. They remained formidable characters – as the sketch below of George Pauling’s work in Africa makes clear – but even he was an agent, relying on British bankers. Similarly a powerful American banking syndicate backed Andrew Onderdonk, the most successful contractor on the Canadian Pacific Railway, who built the appallingly difficult section over the Rockies to the Pacific.
Onderdonk, the dignified, reticent scion of a distinguished New York family, was less typical of the breed than the men who supervised the building of the first railroad across the United States. The western half was built by the Big Four themselves (partly because no one would have trusted them to pay), led by the bull-headed Charlie Crocker, who employed a notoriously foul-mouthed slave driver of Irish extraction, James Harvey Strow-bridge. A teetotaller, who habitually carried a pickaxe as a ‘persuader’, Strowbridge successfully controlled the largest labour force ever assembled in the United States (in peacetime). The eastern half was farmed out to two equally formidable characters, iron-hard, red-bearded brothers, Jack and Dan Casement. Jack dominated thousands of navvies through sheer force of character, reinforced by the bullwhip he habitually carried, while Dan kept the books and organised the flow of material to his brother in the field.
Their achievements bordered on the fantastic. To get a desperately-needed steam engine to help haul material for Summit Tunnel, Crocker and Strowbridge enlisted the help of a legendary mule driver called Missouri Bill. But it took even him seven weeks to haul the twelve-ton engine, nicknamed the ‘Black Goose’, the seventy-five miles to the top of Mount Summit. Some years ago a film company tried to duplicate the feat, using modern machinery and a smaller engine. After five hundred yards they gave up.
As the century wore on, the pace of building quickened – partly because railway builders became increasingly obsessed with the need for their line to earn revenue as quickly as possible, even if this meant that the track was laid directly onto the earth. Three, four, and even six-mile days became possible.
The acceleration bred a spirit of competitiveness. In one famous bet8 Charles Crocker of the Central Pacific won $10,000 from that infamous financier Dr Durant of the Union Pacific when his men laid ten miles and fifty-six feet of track in a single day, track which Crocker immediately tested by driving a locomotive along the line at forty miles an hour.
Chinese workmen loaded each handcar with sixteen rails, bolts, spikes and fishplates, which they doled out at the right intervals. The advance guard were the tie crews, followed by the eight aptly-named iron men who picked up the six-hundred rails with tongs, followed by the straightenders, the levellers, twenty spikers (each hammering only one blow on this assembly line in the desert) and the fishplate men. Finally came hundreds of tampers smashing home the ballast.
The unquestioned heroes of the operation were eight Irish track layers. They had lifted over two million pounds of iron that day, over a hundred tons each. Their 850 colleagues placed over 25,000 ties, laid over 3,500 rails, hammered home 28,000 spikes and turned 14,000 large bolts in establishing a record which has proved unbeatable by even the most sophisticated machinery.
A few engineers, like Louis Favre, or George Totten, the American who built the railway across the isthmus of Panama, were commemorated with modest plaques or statues. More typical was the story of Wilhelm von Pressel. He had started work on railways in his native Wurtemberg, had constructed much of the network in North-East Switzerland for the Pereires, then spent eight years building the Sudbahn lines from Vienna to the Adriatic. He believed that the Ottoman Empire could be saved by a proper railway network which would recreate the medieval caravan routes from Europe to Central Asia. As adviser to the Sultan he naturally became a passionate enthusiast for the railway from Berlin to Bagdad and sketched most of the route. Nevertheless he died alone, impoverished and forgotten, in Constantinople in 1902.
His fate was characteristic of that of the many engineers who worked in foreign countries whose politicians were anxious to believe that their railways were all their own handiwork. Major George Washington Whistler, who built the line between Moscow and Saint Petersburg, then as now Russia’s pride and joy, is forgotten, whereas his wife was immortalised by their painter son, James Macneill Whistler. But then the Russians, like most other nations which had relied on foreign expertise to build their first railways, later naturally played down the foreigners’ contribution.
The French seized on the fact that it was an English engineer, Joseph Locke, and an English contractor, Brassey, who had built a viaduct at Barentin, twelve miles from Rouen, which collapsed even before the line had opened. Brassey took on the responsibility for rebuilding the viaduct before the question of blame could be apportioned – in the end it was found to be due to defective mortar from local lime. Nevertheless the French naturally blamed the British, as well as the French directors, ‘for employing foreigners, who swallowed up the money of the country in return for scamped-up works, which jeopardised the lives of their fellow-subjects’. In fact the line was opened on time and the viaduct survives today in all its Victorian splendour.
There was endless room for misunderstanding. The Brazilians had established their own company to build an important railway from Rio de Janeiro over the coastal escarpment, the serra. They admitted they lacked the knowhow and hired a British contractor, Edward Price. The equally British engineer, Christopher Lane, insisted that Price improve the line by reducing the gradients and replacing wooden bridges with iron ones. Nevertheless the Brazilians got it into their head that the two were in collusion and replaced them with Americans after the first thirty miles of track had been built. Soon afterwards the company went broke.
A few of the foreigners were treated as heroes, as the standa
rd bearers of the new age. William Wilson, who arrived with the engine used on Germany’s first railway, from Nuremberg to Furth, was paid more than the director, and remained a local hero during his twenty-year service. Japan’s first railways owed a great deal to two British engineers, both grandsons of the great Richard Trevithick. The first trains in Japan were driven by English drivers, and for a long time an Englishman was always called upon to drive any train used by the Emperor Meiji. But the Japanese learned quickly. In 1877, 120 British advisers were working for the Japanese Railway Administration: by 1880 only three remained. The learning period was short enough for the Japanese not to feel any hang-ups about the help they had received. Joseph U. Craw-ford, a distinguished American engineer sent to Japan by President Hayes at Japanese request, was decorated by the Emperor after building the first line in the island of Hokkaido and planning a number of others. Even after he had retired to Philadelphia Japanese engineers continued to consult him.
Most of the ‘mercenaries’ or other ranks in the armies of steam were those anonymous heroes, those simple workmen, the navvies. The ‘navigators’, the Irish in Britain, the Irish or the Chinese in the United States and Canada, have contributed most of the more spicy, sordid, picturesque folklore connected with the building of railways. To Marx they were ‘the light cavalry of capitalism’, to Eric Hobsbawm, ‘the shock troops of industrialization’. To the inhabitants of the countryside they invaded they were the devil’s own army. To objective observers they were miracle-workers. Samuel Smiles reckoned that in building the London to Birmingham Railway twenty thousand of them had shifted more rock, earth and stones in five years than the hundred thousand Egyptian slaves who spent twenty years building the Great Pyramid.
They were aware of being a race apart. In conversation with a parson, one of them compared navvies with the Israelites: ‘We goes about from place to place, we pitches our tents here and there, and then goes on.’ The average working man worked in factories and sweat shops, but the navvy was different. ‘His life’, wrote Terry Coleman, ‘was a strange one, isolated and free, quite different from that of his fellow-countrymen, and unknown to them’ (The Railway Navvies).
The work required not only a capacity for grindingly hard labour, but also the willingness to leave their homes, and usually their homeland, for long periods at a time. The motive was sometimes merely the availability of the work, as it was for the Chilean rotos, though they worked only in their home country and in Peru. The Irish, their ranks swelled by thousands fleeing from the potato famine of 1845–46, worked the world over and, not unfairly, dominate the popular image of the breed as a whole.
Then contractors in the New World, notably the builders of the California end of the Transcontinental Railroad, found that the Chinese, especially those from round Canton, made even more admirable recruits. In the 1840s and 1850s their homeland was devastated by civil wars in addition to the normal cycle of flood, drought and famine. Fugitives were the more welcome because they were highly disciplined, kept to their traditional healthy diet and bathed frequently. Unlike the Irish with their noisy drinking, their favourite vice was a quiet one, gambling, and their drug, opium, made them soporific rather than aggressive.
Opium did lead to one major tragedy. The company building the Panama Railway was legally registered in New York, a state which banned drug trafficking. In the absence through fever of the railway’s chief engineer, George Totten, an officious clerk cancelled the Chinese’s regular allowance of the drug. By the time Totten recovered he found a scene of total despair and carnage, for hundreds of the ‘Orientals’ had hanged themselves from the trees, and hundreds more had drowned. He was forced to ship the remainder to Jamaica, hoping that their compatriots there had sufficient supplies of the life-saving drug.
In East Africa Indian coolies did most of the work and although many of them, unlike the Chinese and most of the Irish, eventually settled in their new country, this was only after they had served a hard apprenticeship on the railways.
Southern Africa, then as now, was a special case. Whatever the financial inducement, the Afrikaners would not desert their farms. In Cape Colony the authorities tried to encourage white immigrant labour to avoid giving the natives ideas (and wages) above their station. The policy proved counter-productive – in the 1870s the blacks were simply not prepared to work for the wages the builders were prepared to offer. Immigrants proved little better. The railway commissioner in Cape Colony complained that ‘your continental agents [mainly in Belgium] appear to be mere tools in the hands of the police, who have palmed off the scum and refuse of the large towns’.9
The same problem confronted C. Minor Keith when he was building a railway in Honduras. The police chief in New Orleans used the opportunity to rid the town of nearly seven hundred undesirables. When they arrived in Honduras most of them had fever, for which their only remedy appeared to be whiskey. In the end only nine of the twenty real railroad men survived, but they kept the work going, supervising the Jamaican Negroes. They alone could work in the climate and were so loyal that they worked for nine months without pay when Keith was short of cash. The Jamaican Negroes also replaced the two hundred Italians he imported to help build his railway across Costa Rica. Half of the Italians had promptly bolted into the jungle, hoping to avoid the work and thus avoid paying for their passage, and sixty died before they could be induced to return.
Italians generally had a bad reputation. In South-West Africa their German masters found them sullen and often rebellious and soon replaced them with the local Ovambos, ill-nourished though they were. The only exception I can find is that Italian stone-masons were responsible for most of the stoutly-built bridges on the Trans-Siberian. An American civil engineer recounted how ‘they agreed pretty well with the severe climate, but missed the good, pure cheap wine of their own country, which was a sore trial to them, and the Russian gin (fodka) they wisely avoided’.
In many countries, especially in autocratic societies, local rather than immigrant labour was the norm. In the first sixty years of the century the Russians had an unlimited supply of serfs to help build their railway system. Just as old Bolsheviks refused to hold Stalin responsible for their unjust fate, so the serfs on the railways refused to believe that the Tsar of all the Russias knew about their working conditions. In the summer of 1844 they ran towards the Tsar’s summer palace, begging to tell him of their wormy bread, their broken shoes, their inadequate wages. The soldiers’ swords soon put an end to their delusions.
The term ‘navvy’ covered a variety of skills. John Hoyt Williams described the make-up of the Union Pacific’s assault force: ‘3,500 graders – some working as far as two hundred miles in advance of track – 450 trackmen, 350 of the “train force”, and another 400 or so masons and bridge builders, plus 100 surveyors. To that force in the field must be added … several thousand tie cutters and lumberjacks, some floating their products hundreds of miles from the distant Black Hills, and as many as a thousand shopmen and uniformed personnel.’
The main contractors employed hundreds of sub-contractors, many merely the foremen of a gang of a dozen men. Samuel Smiles describes how ‘ten or twelve of these men would take a contract to cut out and remove so much “dirt” (as they denominated earth-cutting) fixing their price according to the character of the “stuff” and the distance to which it had to be wheeled and tipped. The contract taken, every man put himself to his mettle, if any was found skulking or not putting forth his full working power, he was ejected from the gang.’
In the Rockies, on the Canadian National Railway to Prince Rupert, ‘station men’, in charge of their own gangs would get through two or three times as much work as normal employees. The most famous was led by ‘Swansie the Tireless Swede’,10 described by a sub-contractor as,
The greatest raw-meat man of them all and in every respect the most uncooked specimen that I have ever seen. Swansie’s men would work right through the hours of daylight, which in summer meant from three in the mo
rning to nine or ten at night. ‘Got to work,’ Swansie told the sub-contractor, who went on, ‘no time to boil porridge or make bread. No time to suck water with a carrot or tomato flavour, which is all a vegetable is. Give him meat, every ounce the solid right stuff. Dried meat, brined meat, smoked meat, canned meat, and if it comes fresh and raw, just gulp it like a dog. Total elapsed time preparing dinner, three minutes. Total elapsed time eating, nothing. Eat it while driving the stone boat.’ [The boat carrying the stone for the railway].
‘Got to work,’ says Swansie. Inevitably the gang got scurvy; the sub-contractor sent them a barrel of lime juice, threatening to take the job away from them if they didn’t drink it. Some of the gang used the $2,400 they earned to buy 160 acres each of good Saskatchewan farmland. ‘Fixed for life’, recounted the subcontractor, ‘but not the rest of them. And particularly not Swansie. He is a railway builder. Got to work’.
Railways got people that way.
Inevitably the navvies were blamed for any havoc, riot, male-factions of any kind which occurred in their passage through a district. Sometimes, one suspects, English gentlefolk rather enjoyed the thought of these hordes of hulking evil-doers being let loose on their once-tranquil countryside. A classic picture of depravity – in contrast to Samuel Smiles’s romanticised vision quoted on page 209 – was provided by the Carlisle Patriot in February 1846, when describing a navvy accused of wounding one of his fellows. Apparently, ‘for nine years he has never slept in a bed, or worn a hat; that his custom was to put on his boots when new, and never remove them until they fell to pieces, and his clothes were treated very much in the same way, except that his shirt was changed once a week.’11
The World the Railways Made Page 23