Railway Empire

by Anthony Burton

  A huge workforce was required for construction. There was an early insistence on importing British navvies, but the men who could perform prodigious feats in northern climates were generally unable – and unwilling – to cope with the tropics. The ones that were brought some of their old habits with them. C.O. Burge described a rowdy crowd carousing on the Madras line. The native policemen tried to restore order, but with little success: ‘each navvy took two constables, one under each arm, and chucked them outside the railway fence.’ Some stayed on as overseers and gangers, and a number were to be found on the GIPR. Sir Bartle Frere was concerned about the situation and issued an edict that any European striking a native should be instantly dismissed and would forfeit his return fare which had been paid by the company. This news did not percolate down to the men on the ground. On an inspection of the works, he met a ‘big brawny navvy’ who was in charge of a native gang.

  ‘Well, my good man, you appear to be the manager here.’

  ‘Yes Sir,’ was the reply.

  ‘And how are you getting on?’

  ‘Oh, Sir, we are getting on very well.’

  ‘How many natives have you under your orders?’

  ‘Well Sir, about 500 on ’em altogether.’

  ‘Do you speak their language?’

  ‘No Sir I don’t.’

  ‘Well then, how do you manage to let these natives understand what they are to do?’

  ‘Oh Sir I’ll tell you. I tell these chaps three times in good plain English, and then if they don’t understand that, I takes the lukri [the stick] and we get on very well.’

  The modern railways still use the routes pioneered in India. The greatest challenge facing the 19th century engineers was conquering the Western Ghats to join Bombay to the central plateau. The train is little more than a thin streak as it zigzags its way up the mountainside.

  Further enquiries revealed that this navvy was in fact far from being the ogre he claimed to be, but was ‘a most kind hearted fellow, much loved by the natives under his charge, who would do anything for him.’

  The Bhore Ghat represented an immense labour, with a rise of over 2000 feet, 25 tunnels and 22 bridges. As many as 40,000 were set to work and they suffered terribly, with nearly a third dying from disease. It was not just the labourers who were affected. Solomon Tredwell sailed from England to take a major contract, arriving at Bombay on 15 September 1855. By 30 September he had succumbed to fever and died. That was not the end of the contract. His widow, Alice Tredwell, simply took over and saw it through to completion. It was a daunting task, as the engineer Berkley admitted when he described the problems of gathering together a workforce:

  This great force has not been collected without considerable trouble; it is not entirely supplied by the local districts, but is gathered from distant sources. Labourers sometimes tramp for work as in England, and on the same work may be seen men from Lucknow, Guzerat, and Sattara. The wants of the works have, however, been supplied by unusual exertions in sending messengers in all directions, and by making advances to muccadums, or gangers, upon a promise to join the work with bodies of men at the proper season. Country artisans and skilled labourers have their own methods of doing work, but are capable of improvement and are not averse to change their practice. For operations requiring physical force, the low-caste natives who eat flesh and drink spirits, are the best; but for all the better kinds of workmanship, masonry, bricklaying, carpentry, for instance, the higher castes surpass them. Miners are, on the whole, the best class in the country. The natives strictly observe their caste regulations, yet will readily fall into an organisation upon particular works, to which they will faithfully adhere, and in which they are by no means devoid of interest. Although they cling closely to their gangers, they will attach themselves to those European inspectors who treat them kindly. The effective work of almost every individual labourer in India, falls far short of the result obtained in England.

  The account is interesting for the light it throws on attitudes. It could seem from reading this account that the ravages of cholera – it killed literally tens of thousands of workers – were chiefly notable for the delays they caused in the works. The account, in fact, raises more questions than it answers. It continues:

  This photograph was found in an anonymous photo album, but appears to have been taken shortly after the opening of the Darjeeling-Himalayan Railway. It shows one of the reverses that enabled the little engines to climb the hillside.

  One of the famous loops on the Darjeeling Himalayan

  The fine season of eight months is favourable for Indian railway operations, but on the other hand, fatal epidemics, such as cholera and fever, often break out and the labourers are, generally, of such a feeble constitution, and so badly provided with shelter and clothing, that they speedily succumb to those diseases, and the benefits of the fine weather are, thereby, temporarily lost.

  But why were the local navvies so badly fed and housed? The answer is that they had low pay because they could not perform as well as the British navvy. And the reason for this was partly that they were badly fed and housed and hence prone to disease. They were caught in a circle of poverty from which, it seems, there was no escape. The Europeans who employed them were not callous monsters, but followers of the rules that governed behaviour in England as closely as it did in India. It was the duty of the employer to pay no more than was absolutely necessary, otherwise the economy of the country would have been thrown into chaos: It has enabled the Company to draw largely and advantageously upon the resources of the country, both in labour and materials, without suddenly, or unduly affecting the public markets. The attitudes that permeate the thinking of those who came to build railways for the great Indian Empire are, not surprisingly, those of conventional Victorian England. They congratulated themselves for not disturbing the labour market and, at the same time, encouraging the spirit of entrepreneurship among a developing Indian middle class. There was general satisfaction at the success of one Indian contractor, as Berkley noted:

  A Parsee contractor, Mr. Jamsetjee Dorabjee, has executed four main-line contracts as satisfactorily, as expeditiously, and as cheaply, as any of the European firms, and is now about completing his fifth, which comprises some of the heaviest works on the lines.

  The railway company was a microcosm of British India. There was a willingness to encourage ‘the best’ of the Indians, combined with a deep-seated belief that the native could never be expected to take control of his own affairs. The guiding hand would be European.

  The Company’s Engineers, Assistant Engineers, and Surveyors are generally Europeans, but one native Engineer has won his way to the office of Assistant Engineer, and has skilfully discharged its duties for three years. In the office establishment of draftsmen, accountants and clerks, all the situations have been held by natives. As inspectors of work, natives have been chiefly employed. As district inspectors of the line, when opened, native agency is already partially adopted, and is, by encouragement, gradually becoming more useful. The principle to be kept in view is, that only by means of European and native co-operation, can the great railway undertakings which are required in the Bombay Presidency, be accomplished with due despatch. European skill, experience, and management, are of primary importance, but native agency has proved much more valuable and efficient than was anticipated, and will, undoubtedly, be found capable of considerable and rapid growth, if it is adopted without prejudice, and is treated with equity; and if native employees of all classes are stimulated to improve themselves, by the assurance of their gradual advancement, according to merit.

  The military took responsibility for building much of the Indian rail network: this sketch of a wooden bridge was made for the War Office by Lt. F.W.Graham.

  A Class A/1 2-8-4T built by Hudswell Clarke in 1913, seen here on a central Railway branch line near Nagpur

  Yet the belief that Europe knows best was to lead to absurdities. Material was sent to India that was already availabl
e locally. For instance, creosoted sleepers were shipped out from England many of which by the time they reached the workings were split and useless. More incongruous was the use of wholly inappropriate technologies. India was not short of local building materials or of building expertise – how could anyone who had seen the great cities and temples of the Moghul Empire believe that it was? Yet it was still thought to be sensible to prefabricate booking halls and engine sheds and ship them to India. And what material was used for these buildings? Iron! Could anyone have seriously believed that an iron building was appropriate for a waiting room in the blistering heat of an Indian summer? Apparently they could and did. Fortunately for the future of Indian railways, there were others who realized that Indian methods had developed that were appropriate to the land and its climate and that the best results were likely to be obtained by combining the traditions of the East with the new technology of the West. It is worth quoting Berkley at length in a description of working methods where he explained how he eventually discovered that ‘some Indian modes of doing work, which seemed barbarous and clumsy, were the cheapest and quickest means which could be employed.’ He starts, however, with the negative side of working in India, where techniques were previously wholly unknown. Tunnelling provided an excellent example.

  The whole process, except blasting and excavation, was unknown to native workmen. In the earliest tunnels, where the top was heavy, it was found, at first, impossible to keep native miners in the heading, and the timbering was done chiefly by Europeans and one or two Parsee carpenters, and the arch was keyed in by the former alone. Native miners use the churn drill, with which they are very handy, and they have sometimes been brought to work in pairs with the hammer, and strike with dexterity. They will work hard in close contact, and in the foulest atmosphere. They are careless in blasting operations, and consequently, the loss of life has been considerable; miners have been seen to fire a shot with a bamboo, and lie upon the ground while it exploded.

  On the other hand when it came to more conventional building the old methods were shown to be perfectly satisfactory.

  In staging and scaffolding it is only rarely, and in very large works, that the English example has been followed, nor are crabs and derricks so often met with as might be expected. The reason for this is afforded by experience, which has taught how cheap and expeditious it sometimes is, to use the native process. The bamboo coolies, or carriers of heavy weights, will lift their loads up the roughest staging and the masons and labourers require but little help, to find their way to the work at the top of the highest piers. The centering commonly adopted in the country, was to fill up the arch with stone and earth, and to shape the top to the form of the soffit, or at other times, to use almost a forest of jungle wood in scaffolding a rough centre. For these, centres of English construction have invariably been substituted, with, as may be conceived, immense advantage to the work.

  Even today, quite sophisticated building sites in India can only be glimpsed through a thicket of bamboo scaffolding that looks to the uninitiated as if it needs no more than a mosquito to alight on one corner for the whole complex structure to topple to the ground. Yet it is a system which has, literally, stood the test of time.

  It was not by any means always, or even usually, the fault of Indian contractors and workmen when things went wrong. Robert Maitland Brereton came to India to work on the GIPR in 1856 and his greatest difficulty lay with the European contractors and their poor, skimped work. Cement was left out in the sun, and instead of being regularly soaked was allowed to dry out and was then simply layered between stones in the form of a useless crumbling mass. Stone piers were supposed to be held together by ‘binders’, long stones that run the whole width of the structure to give added strength: these were simply left out and the stone which looked so fine was no more than an outer cladding. On one contract, No. 12, a score of viaducts and bridges collapsed. Brereton himself detected sharp practice on another contract and issued a critical report. He was inspecting other examples of the same contractor’s handywork when he was almost laid out by a blow on the head. He had just enough time to see the contractor’s agent wielding the stick. Brereton’s lip remained resolutely stiff: ‘I did not condescend, in the presence of the native workmen, to assault him in return, but quietly wrote out on a leaf of my pocket book an order for him to stop all masonry work.’ But whatever the problems met by the engineers, contractors and workmen, the GIPR, with its spectacular ascent of the Ghats, remains one of the great triumphs of nineteenth-century civil engineering.

  For the young engineers who came out from Britain, India was an exotic experience and a challenge. C.O. Burge came from Ireland in the 1860s to work, or so he expected, as assistant engineer on the Madras Railway. His arrival was exciting enough. There was no harbour at Madras, so he came ashore in a ‘masula boat’, an alarmingly flimsy looking vessel about 40 feet long made of bamboo and leather. This was to carry him in through the surf. The boatmen hovered on the swell, picked a likely looking wave and headed for shore.

  The momentum carries the masula boat high and dry on to the bank, when all the occupants who do not hold on like an attack of influenza are thrown into a jumble of boxes and portmanteaus, so that the astonished traveller is literally hurled into India.

  He reported for duty and found he had arrived a fortnight before the rest of the young engineers were expected. So, on a simple first-come-first-served principle, he was promptly put in charge of an entire section – leaping up several rungs of the promotional ladder in one jump. He then went up country, an experience which constituted a crash course in self-sufficiency. The first stage of his journey was by train, and where the tracks ended he continued on horseback, his luggage and few sticks of furniture slowly trundling along by bullock cart. He stopped at simple guest bungalows or the homes of his fellow engineers spread out along the line, until he reached his section, nearly 40 miles from his nearest fellow-European colleague. It was the custom for the engineering staff to build their own bungalows, but common sense dictated that local practices were followed. Houses were generally built with a verandah all the way round providing shade in the summer and protecting the building from the downpours of the monsoons. Burge’s predecessor had scorned precedent and built a verandah along one side of the building only. The monsoons came, the rain lashed at the exposed walls, washing away the mud that held the stones in place, and the whole place came crashing down. Burge rebuilt it – in traditional style.

  A neat Bagnall locomotive built for the Indian States Military Railway

  He solved the problem familiar to other engineers in winter, the rivers that could turn overnight from trickles to waterways three times the width of the Thames in London. He learned to improvise. Temporary tracks were laid across river beds in the dry season, which were used not just for construction purposes but for regular passenger services as well. Above all, he learned to delight in the mixture of racial types, men and women, who made up his workforce. Because of a local labour shortage, he found himself employing workers from all over India including Afghans and Pathans who arrived with alarmingly long, sharp knives stuck in their belts. ‘Their features, or sometimes the absence of them showed that they usually settled their differences by private enterprise without troubling Government legal machinery.’ Some learned English, but inevitably produced the occasional howler. Three men appeared with a note which read, ‘Sir – herewith I have the honour to enclose three bricklayers’. And official documents combined the starchy language of bureaucracy with startling outbursts of colloquialism: I have the honour to inform you that Mootheswamy and Soobarou have booted it on Friday last, and I have replaced them by two good masons.’ Men like Burge enjoyed India and served the country well. They were not always so well served themselves.

  A Bombay& Baroda Central locomotive.

  In 1868, Robert Brereton was appointed chief engineer for the Calcutta and Nagpur line. He picked his own staff and was confident enough to tell the Board h
e would have the work finished by May 1870, eighteen months ahead of schedule. He drove the storekeepers mad, harrying them for materials. One of the main sources of delay on a good many lines was lack of even the basic materials – so that gangs would be sent around with, for example, a full stock of rails and sleepers but no chairs. Brereton made sure this never happened. He also followed the American practice of laying temporary track over obstacles, ranging from rivers to gulleys, to keep his supply lines open. Even so, there were some elements over which he had no control. In 1869, cholera came to the Nerbudda valley: hundreds died and workmen fled from the area. Brereton himself succumbed and was lucky to survive. In spite of this, the line was ready as promised, at which point the successful engineer was given his notice with not so much as a thank you.

  The railways discussed so far were all built as part of the usual process of establishing a rail network for a country that would carry the people and commerce of a nation. In India, other considerations came into play: some railways were built primarily to meet military rather than civil needs. The outbreak of the Afghan wars in the 1870s brought a new urgency to the need to provide rails to the troubled North-West Frontier. The result was the Kandahar Railway which was planned to run from Sukkur on the Indus, a spot which could be supplied by barges and steam tugs, north to Kandahar, actually across the old Indian frontier in Afghanistan. The first stage was only to run from Sukkur to the entrance of the Bolan Pass through the mountains. That presented problems enough. First came the broad plain, crisscrossed by hundreds of irrigation channels, then 40 miles of dense jungle, followed by the greatest challenge of all, 94 miles of ‘dry, barren, treeless plain’ crossed by spill channels that would remain empty for years on end, then quite suddenly be filled to overflowing by flash floods. The natural difficulties were, by any standards, bad enough but construction was made doubly difficult by the demands of time.