This is not surprising. In his autobiography Chronicle of a Contractor, he states bluntly that, ‘there is much virtue in a good appetite, as long as one is able to foot the bill’, although ‘my appetite, both for liquids and solids, has always been a source of amusement, and sometimes of concern, to my friends’. This was something of an understatement. With the help of two friends he consumed three hundred bottles of ‘this excellent refreshment’, German beer, while stuck for 48 hours on the Beira railway. On another occasion he and two other friends consumed a thousand oysters at a sitting – apparently they were ‘small, but of very delicate flavour’.
He was very much a self-made engineer, who had started work in a contractor’s office at the age of 15, his only asset a family connection to that eccentric contractor, Joseph Firbank. Pauling would go anywhere there was work to be found. While in Jordan he formed the idea of selling a ready-made mixture of whisky and Jordan water. He also surveyed part of the projected Berlin-to-Bagdad railway, losing the contract, he claimed, after his partner had failed to bribe that crucial intermediary, the Sultan’s barber.
Like so many British nineteenth-century adventurers he drifted to South Africa where he was involved in hotels, in gold and diamond mining, floating a number of companies (including the ‘Big Golden Quarry’), but his schemes mostly centred round railways. While supervising work on Waai Nek tunnel near Grahamstown he realised that there was more money in contracting, and persuaded a firm of merchants in Grahamstown to finance him, getting their profit from the company store they would establish – on which he took a third of the profits.
The first contract was so profitable that ‘the contracting fever took hold of me’. This was not surprising. In rough country where absolute accuracy was not crucial ‘he was a genius at railway contracting,’ wrote Erlanger, ‘he would ride over a projected route, and without consulting the surveys, forecast to his associates the construction costs of the railway per mile; and he was almost invariably within a fraction of the actual figures.’ He would insist on being paid according to the line specified by the engineers, but ‘reserved the right to make any deviations calculated to shorten the line without increasing the gradient. He made his profits from the mileage he saved by these deviations while, at the same time, he improved the layout of the railway.’
His work, like the man himself, was rough and ready. On his ‘pioneer’ lines he didn’t wait for bridges to be built, he would run the tracks across the beds of rivers, and though in the wet season there might be occasional delays, a few hours’ work would repair any damage done by floods. He knew his work was reliable and durable and was confident enough to promise Cecil Rhodes, who chose him to build the line from Mafeking to Bulawayo, that he would build a 400-mile line at the rate of a mile a day.
Pauling worked hard, and played harder. Up at four o’clock for a tour of the line, after a fourteen hour day he still found the energy ‘to go into Grahamstown to the Masonic Hotel, enjoy a good dinner, drink freely with congenial spirits, and play billiards till the hotel closed. Riding back to camp I usually arrived there before midnight.’
Like all contractors he inevitably faced cash-flow problems. Once these led to a declaration of bankruptcy, incited by a malevolent railway inspector. Pauling was ‘mad with rage, I went up to him, and after a few brief but incisive words I knocked him down. He refused to get up. I gave him one or two gentle kicks, just to help him up, when his wife appeared on the scene. I was so enraged that I picked him off the ground, and although he weighed over twelve stone. I threw him against his wife and both of them fell into the doorway of the cottage. It all seems very funny now, after the lapse of years, but I saw no amusement in it at the time.’
Fortunately Pauling was always protected by his friends – on one occasion in South Africa a High Sheriff warned him to stay at home during the hours of daylight to avoid arrest. One particularly useful contact was the fearsome President Kruger. When they met ‘Oom Paul’ remarked that someone called Pauling had given him and two companions a bed for the night when they were stranded in a small town overnight. The Good Samaritan turned out to be Pauling’s brother, and Oom Paul promptly entrusted George Pauling with the construction of the line from Pretoria to the frontier with Angola, which was making indifferent progress in the hands of another contractor.
During the Boer War Pauling took the opportunity to tour the United States. He was not impressed. All he could get in his hotel room was iced water, ‘never a favourite beverage of mine’. Lynching proved that ‘you have not even got sufficient confidence in your justice to see that your laws are carried out’. And the transcontinental railways, as he pointed out to his American fellow-travellers, were slower than those running from Cape Town to Johannesburg (‘on a three foot six-inch gauge line – which they would probably consider a toy railway’). Eventually Pauling retired with a fortune and his memories to a palatial home at Effingham in Norfolk.
Lion Fighting with Station
Tsavo, a small riverside camp on the line from Dar es Salaam through Kenya to Uganda, was the unlikely scene of one of the most famous railway mortalities. The aggressors were two lions, immortalised as The Man Eaters of Tsavo, in a best-selling book of that name written by Lt Colonel J. H. Patterson, the man who eventually shot them.
Apart from Mount Kilima N’Jaro in the distance, the River Tsavo, ‘always cool and always running’ was the only relief in the ‘interminable nyika, or wilderness of whiteish and leafless dwarf trees’ which confronted Patterson, an experienced railway engineer sent from India to supervise the railway from Dar es Salaam to Lake Victoria through what became Kenya.
Even without lions, life at Tsavo was never dull. If the Indian workers weren’t all pretending to be stone-masons in order to get higher wages then Nature would take a hand. ‘When the camp was not being attacked by man-eating lions, it was visited by leopards, hyenas, wild dogs, wild cats, and other inhabitants of the jungle around us.’
The lions kept at a respectful distance while Tsavo was a large scattered camp housing hundreds of workers. They moved in for the kill after the railhead had moved on, ignoring the all-night fires and a stout thorn fence round the encampment. The workmen believed that it was useless to try and shoot them because the lions ‘were the angry spirits of two departed native chiefs who had taken this form in order to protest against a railway being made through their country.’
Before Patterson finally shot them the two lions – each nine and a half feet long – had bagged between them no fewer than twenty-eight Indian coolies, in addition to scores of unfortunate African natives of whom no official record was kept. Patterson kept watch in an old closed wagon, but missed the first one by a foot. The lion then ‘swerved off in his spring, probably blinded by the flash and frightened by the noise of the double report which was increased a hundred-fold by the reverberation of the hollow iron roof of the truck in the absolute silence of the African jungle’.
After the first had been shot Patterson ‘sat in my eyrie like a statue, every nerve tense with excitement … very soon, however, all doubt as to the presence of the lion was dispelled. A deep long-drawn sigh – sure sign of hunger – came up from the bushes.’ The rustling started again as Patterson cautiously descended. ‘In a moment a sudden stop, followed by an angry growl, told me that my presence had been noticed.’ It took six bullets to kill the second monster.
But that was not the end of the menace. Another man-eater killed a road engineer called O’Hara, and a wretched Indian clerk sat shivering in Kina station while a lion prowled over the roof, bleeding copiously from the wounds it had inflicted on itself trying to tear up the iron sheeting. The incident evoked what must surely have been the most extraordinary message ever transmitted over a railway telegraph line: ‘Lion fighting with station. Send urgent succour.’
* The Peruvian name for Henry Meiggs.
* The tunnel actually passes under the Col de Fréjus. It acquired its present name because it replaced the old ca
rriage road near Mont Cenis, fifteen miles away.
* The origin of the word is unknown. By the end of the 19th century it had come to mean the labourers who drilled and blasted their way through the hardest of rocks.
2
The Railway Community
The completed railway systems brought together unprecedented numbers of workers into individual enterprises. These in turn produced an unparalleled community consciousness. Railways were – and to an astonishing extent still are – worlds of their own, in-bred, complete with their own systems of law and order. ‘I’ve heard of the call of the wild,’ wrote one railwayman, ‘the call of the law, the call of the Church. There is also the call of the railroads.’
‘Thus was created’, wrote Frank Mckenna, ‘a new form of industrial anthropology, a tribalistic grouping of men based on an elaborate division of labour, a hierarchy of groups and a ritualistic adherence to territory, myth, symbolism and insignia unknown outside the specified boundaries … From the earliest days, the railway companies sought a new type of loyalist, nothing less than a prototype, an “organisation man”.’ Mckenna was referring to British railwaymen, but his analysis rings true world-wide.17
Moreover, and notably unlike virtually every other nineteenth-century industrial organisation, major railway companies were not family businesses. Even when they were the creation of one dominant personality, the sons rarely took over, so the companies very soon became impersonal organisms, requiring a vast range of skills to build and operate. As such they were the prototype of the modern industrial corporation.
‘Railwaymen are cut of the same cloth everywhere. The calling moulds a type, just as the ocean does,’ wrote Brian Fawcett.18 The variations were between trades, not between countries. ‘Maintenance-of-the-way crews,’ wrote Walter Licht19, ‘lived together out on the road, often in the homes of their section bosses, they comprised a strange mixture of young immigrants, farm boys, and college men seeking respite from the boredom of study in the romance of hard labor. Trackmen were invariably bachelors who lived, worked, drank and caroused together in the absence of other company.’
Even the most militant railwaymen were intensely proud of their line. For a century after Brunel’s time the Great Western was known, only half jokingly, as God’s Wonderful Railway – it was the top regiment, employees of other companies were ‘foreigners’. More narrowly, drivers identified with their engine, signalmen with their signal box. This loyalty was of enormous benefit to the railway companies in controlling their workers, a control made the easier because of the habit of family loyalty to railway work.
The most obvious example of the railway community was the railway town.* The name could be loosely applied to existing towns like York and Derby, ‘railway towns’ only in the broadest sense that the railways were the biggest employers there. But the British also created complete new towns devoted exclusively to railways, like Crewe, Horwich, Swindon and Wolverton – the last two conjured up from nothing because they happened to be half-way between the termini of the lines they served.
The railway towns developed into medium-sized towns rather than major cities, which demand a greater flow and variety of employment than even the railways could provide. By the 1850s, a mere decade after its foundation, Frank Mckenna quotes a distinguished visitor (Sir Francis Head) as noting that Crewe had ‘514 houses, one church, three schools and one town hall … the new houses at Crewe were originally built solely for railway servants, yet it was soon found necessary to construct a ‘considerable number for the many shopkeepers and others who were desirous to join the new settlement, and accordingly, of the present population of 8,000, about one half are strangers.’
There were few such towns outside Britain, although the German engineers building the railway across what is now Turkey transformed the little village of Eskishshir into one of the busiest places in Anatolia.20 The biggest in India was – and is – at Jamalpur, nearly three hundred miles west of Calcutta. It is near a deep-water port and was thus convenient to help importing locomotives. By the end of the nineteenth century it employed 250 Europeans and 10,000 Indians. Its isolation ensured ‘that its workers would not be enticed by the bright lights and vices of the metropolis. In this Jamalpur proved to be an excellent choice, for it still remains inhospitable and God forsaken.’21
Jamalpur had all the attributes of a company town.22 ‘The company had supplied houses for all its employees, and in addition there was a church, a club, a Masonic lodge, and several schools.’ Most of these facilities, more especially the sporting ones, were reserved for Europeans. Indian railways, with their infinite variety of rank, were divided by the minute gradations of a thoroughly stratified society. As the Railway Magazine put it, ‘the wife of the general traffic manager may refuse to patronise the club because forsooth! she may meet there the assistant storekeeper’s sister – a person whom she considers her social inferior.’
Jamalpur had been chosen because it was well away from metropolitan temptations. For the same reason American companies chose small, isolated towns as the site for their workshops, trying especially hard to isolate the mechanics from those independent-minded aristocrats, the engine drivers, whose status was enhanced by the American description ‘engineers’.
The most famous railway town in the United States was Pullman, the pride and joy of George Mortimer Pullman. Unlike its utilitarian English equivalents, built up haphazard by speculative builders, it was created by an individual who could permit himself the expensive whims not permissible to railway managers elsewhere answerable to directors and shareholders. So Pullman was much praised for its flowers, its elegance, its magnificent site on Lake Michigan. Pullman resembled other model industrial settlements, like Saltaire, also created by a single employer.
But an iron hand was visible under the flowerbeds. ‘The blacklist was used against employees who found fault with Pullman the town, or Pullman the company, or the preachers and teachers employed in Pullman schools and churches.’23 In 1894 wages were cut while rents remained the same. Driven to desperation the inhabitants of this model town began a strike and thus set off a major national dispute in which they became the most obvious victims and martyrs of labour mythology.
The railway industry took time to develop. By 1850 most of Britain’s main-line network was already complete; nevertheless railwaymen were only the country’s 33rd largest single occupation, totalling a mere one per cent of the working population. Twenty years later the percentage had trebled and the railways were the sixth largest employers. And by then most of the workers were employed by a few major companies.
In many countries, most obviously in Prussia, but also in France, the railway companies imposed standards of discipline familiar to us now in any major industrial organisation, but then confined to the armed forces. In Prussia, indeed, stationmasters, signalmen, and lower ranks used to stand to attention when trains passed, as if the trains housed a senior inspecting officer. But everywhere the stationmaster, with his shiny top hat, was a highly visible symbol of authority, and the railway director at the very peak of the industrial hierarchy.*
The type of organisation the railways required was different from even the biggest of individual factories. The building and running of the networks demanded industrial discipline as strict as those found in an army, but exercised over an ever-expanding sprawl, perhaps extending over thousands of miles of track. Even in Britain, least militaristic of societies, many of the leading early railway managers were former army officers who retained their ranks in civilian life.†
These militaristic tendencies were inevitable, not only because of the nature of the work, but also because, initially, army officers were the only people with the necessary experience of disciplining and controlling large bodies of men scattered over a wide area. ‘Such men,’ wrote O. S. Nock,24 ‘were experienced in establishing chains of command, and the setting up of posts and outposts at which all the men concerned were required to act in a disciplined manner according
to a clear set of rules.’
The organisational structure, hierarchical, regimental, remained much the same for a hundred years. It proved immensely effective in organising the armies of steam, but it led to an institutionalised rigidity which has proved fatal since World War II in trying to compete with those supremely flexible means of transport, the car, the coach and the lorry.
From the very beginning, every ‘regiment’ had to trade with dozens of others. In Britain this led to the establishment, as early as 1842, of the Railways Clearing House, which devised exceedingly sophisticated criteria for apportioning the costs incurred by the different companies in handling any business which involved more than one of them. The costs were divided between an allowance for handling at the terminals, and a rate per mile, the sort of division between fixed and marginal costs familiar to all modern businesses.
Even more complex were the negotiations between the railways and its biggest customer, the Post Office. The success of the British Post Office after the invention of the penny post in 1840 was very largely due to the speed and reliability of the service it received from the railways. Nevertheless it still expected to pay only the marginal cost involved in handling the additional freight, while the companies naturally asked for their fixed costs to be taken into account, and generally won their case when the disagreement reached the courts. The arguments continue. Today British Rail incurs a penalty if mail trains are more than ten minutes late.
To cope with their sheer size, the railways inevitably became innovators in industrial management. In Britain the pioneer was Captain Mark Huish, general manager from 1846 to 1858 of Britain’s largest industrial enterprise, the London & North Western Railway, which controlled all the traffic from Euston through Birmingham to the North West and Scotland.
The World the Railways Made Page 25