Back in England Peto and Brassey’s faith in their navvies was being more than justified, as the office in London’s Waterloo Road was besieged by volunteers; men who had worked in vile conditions around the world and saw no reason to believe the Crimea could offer anything worse. Some were moved by patriotism, others were attracted by the good rate of pay – from 5 shillings to 8 shillings a day – and a six months’ contract. In popular mythology, the navvy was a rough, tough, boozy, brawling, immoral threat to decent society. Suddenly, he was a hero. The Illustrated London News wrote,
The men employed in our engineering works have been long known as the very elite 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 navvies, who seldom got a good press when constructing railways at home, were seen as heroes when they left for the Crimea: shown here laying in to Russian troops.
The navvies were, in reality, neither as wicked as the myths suggested nor as heroic as the popular press would have wished. They were hard men with a hard life, but their preoccupations were no different from those of other workers. There was a delay in the departure of the train taking the men from London to Liverpool, as the navvies queued to sign a paper allowing the contractors to make regular payments to their families while they were away. The first detachment consisted of 500 men: 300 navvies, 100 carpenters, 30 masons, 30 blacksmiths, 12 engine drivers and men from assorted specialist trades. Along with them went three doctors and three scripture readers. The care taken of these workmen was in marked contrast to the conditions imposed on the hapless British soldiers, the first batch of whom, maimed by injury and wracked by illness, was now returning to Britain. Each navvy was fully equipped, and the list of his supplies would have astonished the average soldier. He was given:
1 painted bag
1 painted suit
3 coloured cotton shirts
1 flannel shirt (red)
1 flannel shirt (white)
1 flannel belt
1 pr. moleskin trousers
1 moleskin vest lined with serge
1 fear nought slop [a heavy woollen jacket]
1 pr. long water-proof boots
1 pr. fisherman’s boots
1 pr. linsey drawers
1 blue cravat
1 blue worsted cravat
1 pr. leggings
1 pr. boots
1 strap and buckle
1 bed and pillow
1 pr. mittens
1 rug and blanket
1 pr. of blankets
1 woollen coat
1 pr. grey stockings
2 lb. tobacco
The Duke of Newcastle went to see the first embarkation and asked Peto what a collection of tarpaulins was for, and was told that they were for use by the men until wooden huts could be completed. ‘What a good thing it would be if some could be sent out for our poor soldiers, who have to sleep on the bare ground!’ said the Duke. Peto told him he could get as many as he wanted in two or three days. The Ordnance Department who had completely failed to provide anything in the way of decent accommodation, expressed outraged horror at such ‘irregular’ proceedings and Peto’s offer was refused.
The ships set off, laden with rails, sleepers and stores. It was originally intended to work the line using horses and stationary engines, but locomotives were later to be added to the cargoes leaving England. The ships were held up for days by severe storms in the Bay of Biscay, but the navvies were not going to let a little matter like seasickness affect their way of life. On the stopovers at Gibraltar and Malta they got splendidly, riotously drunk and consequently arrived in the Crimea in fine form. Views of the navvies and the railway they were to build were mixed. Sir John Burgoyne wrote of them as ‘fine, manly fellows’, but Captain Clifford was a good deal less impressed. In his diary for 8 February 1855 he wrote, ‘The Navvies look “unutterable things” at Balaclava, but have set to work at “The Railway” more because it is their nature to do so than anything else. For my part, I wish they would make us a good road, for I have little faith in the proposed Railway.’ It took him less than a week to change his mind. On 11 Feb 1855 he wrote, ‘I was astonished to see the progress of the Railway in Balaclava on Friday. The navvies in spite of the absence of beefsteaks and “Barkeley & 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.’
Progress was indeed phenomenal. Beattie had been instructed to push ahead as fast as possible, and not to be too particular about the standards of construction – the railway would not, everyone hoped, have to last for very long. As early as 11 February, Sir John Burgoyne was able to write,
I am happy to say the railway works are progressing. They have a line of rails from the centre of the town to a little way out; from about half a mile farther they will have a very steep incline, and a stationary engine, and, when workable to the top of the heights, will be of vast service.
The one voice not raised in praise of the builders of the Crimean Railway was that of Russell of The Times. Many of the men were living in hulks in the harbour and Russell described a fight that broke out and almost became a full-blown riot. What they need, he declared, is a sharp lesson from the Provost Marshal – but that would not happen. The contracts specifically excluded the navvies from martial law. But though he grumbled about the men, he could not deny the speed and efficiency with which they worked. He went off one day to view a part of the besieging forces, to return a day later to find his quarters unrecognizable; where once there had been a walled courtyard, there was now a railway track. And before he had got over that surprise, the whole house was shaken as a somewhat inaccurate lumberjack felled a tree, which landed on the roof and carried away one whole balcony. Perhaps one of the navvies had read his report.
Within ten days of the first landing, track had been laid to the village of Kadikoi and ammunition was being sent by truck, where a fortnight before shot and shell was being passed hand to hand down a line of men. Within seven weeks, the track had reached the 660-foot-high col on the heights above Sevastopol, 4½ miles from the coast. There was a branch line to the Ordnance depot, the Balaclava to Kadikoi line had been doubled and a network of lines lay across the plain, amounting altogether to 39 miles of track. Whatever Russell may have reported, it seems unlikely that men who worked at this rate had too much energy left for fighting between themselves. A splendid example of speed was on show in the building of a bridge across a stream. A pile driver was landed off a supply ship in the afternoon. It was taken that evening to the site in pieces, erected, set to work and within twenty-four hours, the piles were driven, the bridge was complete and the rails had already moved on another hundred yards. The London press as a whole had no doubt as to where praise was due. The Illustrated London News wrote in March 1855,
Navvies at Balaclava, photographed by Roger Fenton
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.
The line was completed well ahead of schedule. The navvies had worked night and day to complete the supply route for the Army – now it was the Army’s turn to use it. The C
ommissariat at once introduced regulations: no supplies could be sent before 8.00 in the morning or after 5.30 in the evening. The military had been vociferous to praise or damn the navvy army: one would dearly love to have heard the views of the navvy on the gentlemen of the other army, with their petty, bureaucratic rules. Beattie for one had worked ceaselessly once reaching the Crimea only to be injured in an accident on the line. He came home and died, as much from total exhaustion as from physical injury. The army wanted the navvies to stay on to help build new fortifications, but the contractors were insistent that they were there for civil duties only, though they had armed them with pistols just in case the Russians took a different view of their status.
The Crimean railway played a vital role in the war, shifting over a hundred tons of supplies a day up to the troops camped around Sevastopol. Seven months after the first rails were laid, the railways job was completed; in September 1855 the fortress fell. Peto received recognition for his part, and was knighted. The navvies collected their pay and moved on.
There was, however, one other railway engineer who made a contribution. The senseless carnage of the Crimea, exacerbated by the almost criminal incompetence of generals, horrified Isambard Kingdom Brunel. His first practical proposal was for a floating siege gun. This was a quite extraordinary device. The hull, largely submerged, was manoeuvred by steam jets which would allow the gunner to bring the weapon round to bear on the target. The gun itself was set in an armoured hemispherical shield that emerged above the waves. The vessel would be brought to the location in a specially adapted small-screw steamer ‘made to open at the bows and its contents floated out ready for action’. Brunel had just created the landing craft. Sir John Burgoyne was an enthusiast for the idea, but then the plans made their way to the Admiralty, a notorious home of reaction and mind-numbing conservatism. Brunel could only write to Burgoyne,
You assume that something has been done or is doing in the matter which I spoke to you about last month – did you not know that it had been brought within the withering influence of the Admiralty and that (of course) therefore, the curtain had dropped upon it and nothing had resulted? It would exercise the intellects of our acutest philosophers to investigate and discover what is the powerful agent which acts upon all matters brought within the range of the mere atmosphere of that department. They have an extraordinary supply of cold water and capacious and heavy extinguishers, but I was prepared for and proof against such coarse offensive measures. But they have an unlimited supply of some negative principle which seems to absorb and eliminate everything that approaches them.
When a messenger was later sent to retrieve the model, the Admiralty bureaucrat seemed not to have the slightest idea of what the model was for, and then, at last, he remembered it – ‘the duck-shooting thing’.
This print from The Illustrated London News gives a clearer idea of the railway at Balaclava, showing the very simple construction used with light rails and sleepers and no ballasting.
Brunel’s foray into military planning was a failure, but he turned to another aspect of the war. The Times reports, in particular, had highlighted the appalling conditions of the Crimea. In the winter of 1854-5 there were 25,000 British troops in the region, and 12,000 of these were in hospital. Those who were sent to the notorious sick quarters of Scutari had little chance of recovery. Frequently, it was not their wounds that were to kill them but disease bred in the filth of the hospital. The bureaucracy sat complacently by while Florence Nightingale alone campaigned for the sick and dying. She saw her main enemy as Sir Benjamin Hawes, Permanent Under Secretary at the War Office. He was ‘a dictator, an autocrat, irresponsible to Parliament’. The original immovable object, he was also Brunel’s brother-in-law, and in February 1855 the autocrat approached Brunel to ask if he would design a pre-fabricated hospital for the Crimea. Brunel replied immediately: ‘This is a matter in which I think I ought to be useful and therefore I need hardly say that my time and my best exertions without any limitations are entirely at the Service of Government.’
He set about designing a hospital complex based on standard units, each one of which would have essentials – a nurses’ room, water closets and out-houses. There was to be plenty of space for each patient, and a fan would blow air in for ventilation. There were wash basins, invalid baths, and a wooden trunk drainage system was provided. The majority of buildings were of wood, but metal was used for kitchen, bakehouse and laundry to avoid fire risk. In April, the hospital and staff were shipped off together. Brunel sent strict instructions:
By steamer Hawk or Gertrude I shall send a derrick and most of the tools, and as each vessel sails you shall hear by post what is in her. You are most fortunate in having exactly the man in Dr Parkes that I should have selected – an enthusiastic, clever, agreeable man, devoted to the object, understanding the plans and works and quite disposed to attach as much importance to the perfection of the building and all those parts I deem most important as to mere doctoring.
The son of the contractor goes with the head foreman, ten carpenters, the foreman of the WC makers and two men who worked on the iron houses and can lay pipes. I am sending a small forge and two carpenter’s benches, but you will need assistant carpenters and labourers, fifty to sixty in all … I shall have sent you excellent assistants – try and succeed. Do not let anything induce you to alter the general system and arrangement that I have laid down.
Throughout the planning, Brunel showed a scrupulous attention for everything from how to lay a floor to the provision of boxes of paper for the WCs. The one thing he could not have foreseen was the total absence of local labour to build the hospital. The gang of eighteen men sent over from Britain had to do it all themselves, and even with such a minute workforce they were able to admit the first patients just seven weeks after work began – a huge compliment to Brunel’s planning skills.
Railway engineers and railway builders were among the few who emerged with credit from the sorry mess of the Crimean War. Brunel’s hospital saved hundreds of lives, possibly thousands: of the 1500 sick and wounded who passed through the wards only fifty died. Little more than half of the hapless patients who entered the hell-hole of Scutari left it alive. The railway too saved lives, by shortening the miseries of the campaign. The war was a minor affair in railway building terms but it provided ample evidence of what practical men could do in the way of solving technical problems, wherever they might occur. Such talents were needed in good measure as railway building moved out of Europe to the rest of the world.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Americas
North America was the one area outside Europe which was also marching forward into the new industrial age. The Orders of Council of the Napoleonic Wars, ostensibly passed to deny France any commercial traffic, by denying the rights of any merchantman to carry goods to or from any French port or colony, acted against the rapidly growing merchant fleet of North America. When the United States emerged from the War of Independence it was largely an agricultural nation. In order to survive the embargo, the Americans were increasingly forced back on their own resources. Somewhat belatedly, the British Government appreciated its mistake. A Parliamentary commission reported, ‘It clearly appears that those manufacturers have been greatly promoted by the interruption of intercourse with this country, and that unless that intercourse be speedily restored, the United States will be able to manufacture for their own consumption.’ The comments were already too late: America was set on the road to self-sufficiency. Cotton mills and iron foundries were established, while inventive entrepreneurs such as Eli Whitney and Samuel Colt were establishing a system of manufacture using ‘interchangeable parts’, which was to form the basis for mass production. The go-ahead republic was never again to rely for long on the Old World of Europe for anything – and railways were no exception.
The first American railways, or railroads to use the local term, developed as in Britain to supplement the canal system. The most bizarre example of a canal an
d railway combination came on the Pennsylvanian main line canal; designed to link Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, it was begun in 1826. There was an all too obvious barrier in the way of canal construction, the ridge of the Allegheny Mountains which crossed the proposed line and rose to a height of over 2000 feet. The answer was the Portage Railway which crossed the mountains on a series of inclined planes and levels. The inclines were worked by stationary steam engines and the remainder at first by horses and later by locomotives. It was, in a sense, not unlike the Cromford & High Peak Railway in Derbyshire which linked the Peak Forest and Cromford Canals. But the Cromford & High Peak Railway used conventional trucks and carriages for its line: passengers on the Portage Railway went all the way by boat. The packet boats were split into two parts for the rail section and floated on to special wheeled trolleys. They then set off for a 36½-mile journey over the mountains, at the end of which the two halves of the boat were reunited and continued in a more conventional manner afloat. One of the early travellers on the line was Charles Dickens who described the boat as ‘a barge with a little house in it, viewed from the outside; and a caravan at a fair viewed from within’. The author was not over impressed by the sleeping arrangements. He ‘found suspended on either side of the cabin three long tiers of hanging book-shelves, designed apparently for volumes of the small octavo size. Looking with greater attention at these contrivances (wondering to find such literary preparations in such a place), I descried on each shelf a sort of microscopic sheet and blanket; then I began dimly to comprehend that the passengers were the library, and that they were to be arranged, edge-wise, on these shelves, till morning.’ Other canal-railway conjunctions were more conventional.
The Stourbridge Lion built by Foster and Rastrick, the first locomotive to work on an American railroad.
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