Railway Empire

by Anthony Burton

  He arrived in Borneo to be greeted by the agent and the news that rebellion had broken out among the Dayak head-hunters. They set off on the survey with a contingent of Sikh soldiers. That night there was an alarm, and the Sikhs began firing into the dark. Bullets whistled everywhere – up in the air, into trees, even straight through the engineers’ tents. Next morning the Sikhs were sent marching back to base – facing head-hunters seemed less of a risk. In fact, shortly after the Sikhs had gone a Dayak informed them that the rebellion was over, and proved his point by unwrapping a cloth and proudly displaying the head of the chief rebel. If Dayaks proved not to be a problem, the labour-force was. The Chinese coolies were in poor health, largely because they were badly underpaid and poorly fed. Pauling called in the subcontractor and suggested they should increase the pay. The subcontractor decided that Pauling was mad and left the meeting bewildered at such a bizarre suggestion. But if the locals refused to listen to the Europeans, the Europeans were equally reluctant to listen to the locals. One of the surveyors, Inerny, wanted a large tree chopped down so that he could get a sighting, but the men pointed out that there was a huge bees’ nest in the branches. Inerny however insisted. The axemen did their work and fled leaving Inerny sighting down his theodolite. Not for long. The irate bees descended and the surveyor had to leap into a swamp to avoid being stung to death. Unhappily the swamp was full of leeches who greeted this unexpected meal with great enthusiasm. Pauling found the story ‘very amusing’. Inerny, who nearly bled to death, failed to see the joke.

  Pauling’s excursion into Asia was not a great success. He was soon back at the site of his real triumphs, Africa.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Africa

  When railway building began there were, in effect, three Africas. To the north were the mainly Arab lands, with a centuries’ old history of intercourse with Europe; to the far south was what had become colonial Africa, slowly but steadily spreading out from the Cape. In between was ‘the dark continent’, an area largely unknown and unexplored as far as Europeans were concerned. The railway histories of the three regions were as different as the regions themselves, though they did have one thing in common: every single line, at least up to the beginning of the First World War, was built to further European interests, either directly or in the role of colonial power.

  The key to Africa’s first railway was to be found in Asia. The ever-growing trade between Britain and India was hampered by poor communications. Ships either took the long sea route round the southern tip of Africa, or dumped off passengers and goods at Alexandria, to be taken overland to Suez, where they could continue their journey down the Red Sea. The P & O Company had their very own overland service, with some 3000 camels for freight and decidedly rough horse-drawn carriages for passengers. These jolted their hot, steamy and bumpy way to Cairo and on again to the sea. Passenger delays were acceptable to those who did not have to travel the desert roads; freight delays could be allowed; but for many a far more serious matter was the length of time the Indian mail took. Officials in India still looked to London for advice and for ratification of important decisions, and it could be months between a letter being sent and an answer being received. Something clearly had to be done. The ultimate answer was the Suez Canal, but that was not yet even a dream, let alone a plan: the immediate, and obvious, answer was a railway. In 1851, the Khedive, Abbas I, gave permission for a line from Alexandria to Cairo, and Robert Stephenson was appointed chief engineer.

  The theory behind railway building in Egypt was very little different from that of building the pyramids: employ enough workers and the job will be done. In this case 24,000 were employed to lay down sleepers, haul out rails and hammer home spikes. There was, however, a need for two major bridges, one over the Nile at Kafr-el-Zayat and the other over the Karrineen Canal at Birket-el-Saba. Once again, as he was to do in Canada, Stephenson opted for a tubular bridge. This time, however, there were to be differences. Both bridges crossed navigable waterways at a low level, so they had to be supplied with swinging mid-sections, and here the trains ran on top, not inside the tubes. The bridge parts were prefabricated in Britain under the supervision of Robert’s cousin, George Robert Stephenson. The Nile crossing proved the more troublesome, and until it was completed, passengers had to be ferried over the river. At first, this was done in a conventional way, but soon a specially built vessel was introduced with rails on the deck, so that trains could roll on at one bank and continue their journey on the other side – a genuine train ferry. The journey across the Nile took a modest six minutes. By 1856, however, the bridge was open and the ferry retired. The line was dignified by grand termini. A correspondent writing to the Illustrated London News described Edwin C. Barnes’ station at Alexandria as ‘the most substantially constructed edifice in that city, partaking more of a European or Anglican character than most civil structures in Alexandria.’ Cairo Central was more magnificent, but a good deal less Anglican, with minaret-like towers and Moorish arches. Between 1857 and 1858, the route was extended by the ‘Desert line’ to Suez. It enjoyed a brief prosperity until the Suez Canal was opened in 1869, when trade withered and died and the track was lifted – to be replaced in 1934.

  A 2-6-0 standard gauge locomotive being loaded at the Armstrong Whitworth Scotswood works in 1928 for the Egyptian State Railway.

  A 4-4-0 designed by Francis Trevithick and built in Germany for the Egyptian State Railway

  It was 1874 before any lines were continued south of Cairo, but at much the same time work got under way along the Nile Valley even further south in the Sudan. The Nile itself remained the great route of commerce, but as navigation was brought to a halt at the cataracts, it was decided to bypass them by a 35-mile railway from Wadi Haifa. The chief engineer was John Fowler and a surveying party was marshalled on a grand scale: eight English engineers with doctor, four Egyptian engineers, a substantial army unit of officers and men, together with a train of some 400 camels accompanied by over 100 drivers and guides. When the survey was complete in 1876, work could begin, but first there was to be an impressive inauguration ceremony. Normally the route ahead would have been indicated by posts, perhaps flying flags for the ceremony. Here, however, soldiers standing rigidly to attention took the place of flag poles. It must have been exceedingly uncomfortable for them since there was a sandstorm blowing at the time. Out of the whirling clouds of the storm came the local dignitary, or Cadi, with his entourage and he at once began a lengthy address which was followed by an interminable poem. Long before it reached an end, the governor, Chatsim Pasha, indicated that enough was enough, the congregation said a devout ‘amen’ and the ceremony was over. The line was eventually extended to a total length of 60 miles, and then the money ran out.

  The railway was not destined to have a long career. Sudan had been invaded by Turkey in 1820, and had continued under joint Turkish-Egyptian rule until Britain invaded Egypt in 1882, acting largely in the interests of the creditors of the Suez Canal Company who had not been paid by the bankrupt government. They acquired Sudan in the process, but already the Mahdi had declared a holy war against the European interlopers which culminated in the famous siege of Khartoum and the death of Gordon. The relief force retreated and Khalif Abdullah who succeeded the Mahdi ordered the railway to be destroyed.

  The early lines in North Africa could hardly be called a triumph, although that was certainly not the engineers’ fault. There were, however, some other minor works. Peto and Betts, for example, were contractors for the short line from Algiers to Blida. Edward Pickering promoted a couple of suburban routes around Tunis – a mere 20 kilometres of track all told – but they certainly had a very British flavour. John Chester Craven of the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway came over as chief engineer with his son William as assistant and when the system opened in 1874, the line was worked by 2-4-OT engines by Sharp Stewart. It lasted just two years before being sold off to the Italians. By then, in any case, the emphasis on rail building had moved to t
he opposite end of the continent.

  European settlement in Southern Africa developed largely as a byproduct of the lucrative trade with the Far East. The Dutch East India Company encouraged a moderate amount of colonization, mainly so that the settlers could produce food for provisioning the Company’s ships. In 1795 William V of the Netherlands fled the revolutionary armies of France to find sanctuary in England and passed over Cape Colony to Britain for ‘temporary protection’. The Cape colonists had no wish to be ceded to anyone, but there were too few to resist great power manoeuvring. There were then 15,000 white settlers, mostly Dutch but with a proportion of French Huguenot refugees, and 17,000 slaves which the British were to free. It was a small colony, but one hungry for land. It was estimated that each cattle-raising family needed at least 6000 acres to feed their stock. There was not, however, any great pressure to extend colonization at this stage. The British were simply not interested: other regions, notably India, offered far richer pickings. The Cape Colony developed so slowly that there was no obvious need to rush into railway building.

  The first attempt to get construction in South Africa under way began, predictably perhaps, in England at the height of the railway mania. The Cape of Good Hope Western Railway held its first meeting in London in 1845. It had apparently impeccable credentials. The legal adviser was named as William Porter, the Attorney General of the Cape Colony, but unfortunately nobody had asked him if he wished to act in this capacity. He did not, and went on to describe the whole scheme as ‘hopeless’. No more was heard of it. There was a pause until another company was registered in London, the Cape Town Railway and Dock Company with a registered capital of £600,000 and more importantly a guarantee of interest payments by the government. Sir Charles Fox was appointed chief engineer but as in other cases had little to do with the project himself and sent over one of his assistants, William George Brounger, to be the man on the spot. Brounger was, in fact, destined to stay on for a successful engineering career in South Africa. On 1 March 1859, the first sod was cut before what was, for the region, a massive crowd of around 6000. It was 1863 before the line reached Wellington, but already in 1859 the first locomotive had been delivered from Hawthorn’s, an 0-4-2T which came complete with its own engineer-fitter-driver, William Dabbs. It was curiously numbered No. 9; 1 to 8 were destined never to appear. Dabbs having built the engine obviously became attached to it, for he remained as driver of No. 9 throughout his working life. Locomotive No. 9 was not the only arrival from Britain, a navvy gang also came to work on the line, and proceeded to live up to their reputation, with a riot at Salt River. Nonetheless several of the navvies, like Driver Dabbs, stayed on in the country. The line was intended from the first to encourage settlement, and anyone building a house worth at least £70 within a mile of any of the new stations was given free tickets for eight years.

  Surveyors A. E. Pike and D. E. Mercer at work in dense bush in Eastern Nigeria in the 1900s.

  Other small lines were built at much the same time. Brounger built a branch line to the Cape Town suburb of Wynberg, chiefly notable for one of its unusual rules. One thinks of anti-smoking campaigns as being very much a late twentieth-century phenomenon, but on this line anyone choosing to use one of the second-class smoking cars had to pay the full first-class fare. A second system was begun in Natal in 1860, on the opposite coast from Cape Town – a 2-mile route from Durban to the Customs House at Durban Point.

  By 1875, a mere 155 miles had been completed in the whole region, but it was quite clear that more were going to be needed, and rather belatedly the question of gauge was considered. Up to then the main lines had been ‘standard’ 4 ft. 8½ ins, but the government decided, wisely, given the fact that railways would be penetrating ever more difficult country, to settle on a new standard of 3 ft. 6 ins. There began a period of rapid rail expansion, given a great fillip by the opening up of the diamond mines at Kimberley. They were rumbustious times in Southern Africa. In 1887 the Netherlands South African Railway decided to build a line through to the east-coast port of Lourenco Marques in the Portuguese colony of Mozambique. Work began under an American contractor, Edward McMurdo, but he soon sold out to the Delgao Bay and East African Railway Company of London. Sir Thomas Tancred was appointed chief engineer. The major part of the workforce consisted of around 3000 African labourers, but the old habit persisted of ‘stiffening’ the local force with a backbone of tried and true British navvies. Many of the batch who came over turned out to have been ‘tried’ in a different sense, in the courts rather than on the diggings. There was a hard core of mainly army deserters who came to be known as ‘The Irish Brigade’ and they terrorized whoever they settled amongst. At Lourenco Marques they took offence at the Portuguese authorities’ attempts to discipline them, and sent a note signed ‘Captain Moonlight’ announcing that they would wreck the fort and the Portuguese gun boat in the harbour. The police followed a group of the navvies back to their hotel where the sounds of revelry suggested that a great party was going on. The police waited until peace descended then crept up to arrest the surviving drunks – and found there was only half a dozen there, whooping it up as decoys. In the meantime the fort and gunboat had been duly wrecked as threatened. Working out in the Transvaal they managed virtually to destroy an entire township. They did, however, do their job, and do it well under appalling conditions, pushing the lines on through mosquito-infested malarial swamps. When the lines reached the border, a great celebration was planned and dignitaries waited for the train full of food and wine to arrive. It arrived late, empty apart from a brief note informing the guests that the food was excellent and assuring the chief engineer that his health was being copiously drunk. It was signed, of course, by the Irish Brigade.

  Sub-contractors pose at an engineers’ camp in the Gold Coast in Eastern Nigeria.

  Building the approach to Carter Bridge for Nigerian Railways in 1900.

  In such a country, and under such conditions, it needed a man of particular qualities to hold the whole system together and make it work. One such man was the contractor George Pauling, already mentioned for his work in Borneo. He was a man largely forced to make his own way in the world, mostly thanks to an improvident father. In about 1870 he managed to get work with Ralph Firbank, whose uncle Joseph Firbank was an important railway contractor. Pauling was soon gaining valuable experience as a time-keeper on the Wood Green to Enfield railway, but it all ended when his father did one of his none too infrequent disappearing acts, with numerous creditors in close but unavailing pursuit. The young Pauling went on to get what work he could, which included a spell on the notoriously difficult Settle and Carlisle line, excellent training for his later life. In 1874 his father was given an engineering appointment on the Cape Government Railway and young George followed to seek his fortune. He was sent to work on the Grahamstown line in the Eastern Province, but very quickly realized that the world was full of competent engineers, but desperately short of able contractors. He leaped boldly in, quite undeterred by the fact that he had no experience as a contractor and not one penny of capital. He went into partnership with an English foreman, Billy Frith, for work on a tunnel, and financed the enterprise by setting up a store at the tunnel end to sell goods to the work force – a splendid system as far as Pauling was concerned and one by which the workers subsidized their own wages. He tried for more contracts, but the company were, not unreasonably, unconvinced of his ability to manage a major undertaking. Pauling was undeterred and tendered again using an unlikely front – a consortium consisting of an Italian, a Scot and an old English navvy. It worked up to a point, but Pauling had not allowed for the astonishing ability of the navvy to spend cash, regardless of commitments. He ‘developed an unfortunate habit of remaining in Grahamstown and disposing of it in riotous living.’ On one occasion Pauling tracked him down to a brothel where he had been fleeced out of £400 which was only retrieved with a good deal of difficulty. At the same time, one cannot help feeling that Pauling had found a kindred sp
irit. His own verdict on the navvy partner was far from unkind:

  With all his faults he was an affectionate old chap and really very fond of me. He was incapable of bearing malice, and during the intermittent periods when he was sober he invariably acknowledged that I was his best friend.

  Pauling’s work schedule was exacting.

  By four o’clock in the morning I was generally out of bed and away on horseback to inspect the work that was in progress beyond Ross’s camp. I then visited practically every bit of work that was being carried on and was back at my camp at Wadi Nek tunnel before breakfast. After a bath and a morning meal I supervised my own work in the tunnel until the middle of the day. Then a snack and on horse again to ride right through the work and back to my camp. But I was not indifferent to the enjoyment of ordinary pleasures and, considering myself entitled to a little recreation, it was my habit to go into Grahamstown to the Masonic Hall, 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.

  What he does not mention in that account was the party trick he would perform at the Masonic Hall. This was to pick up his pony, weighing around 450 pounds, and carry it on his shoulders right round the billiard room. One night he overreached himself, and wagered he could carry the pony upstairs. He failed and toppled down with the pony on top of him. Pauling was alright, but the pony refused to co-operate in any more shenanigans. He was, in every sense, larger than life, with gargantuan appetites to match his physique. He recorded how, on one occasion, he and two companions breakfasted on eight bottles of champagne and a thousand oysters. He did, however, add modestly that ‘the oysters were small.’ His friends matched him for zest and extravagance. One of them, ‘Old Dr Williams’, succumbed to one of the many brands of fever that raged in tropical Africa. Pauling and the rest began to lay bets on how long he would live. The old man lay there, soaked in perspiration and at last opened one eye and crooked a finger. Pauling leaned over to catch his words: ‘Bet another £10 for me.’ Naturally, with such a large sum resting on the issue, he recovered. Pauling was prepared to accept any challenge and travel anywhere in the world to build a railway. This was the man who was to be for Africa what Brassey and Peto had been for Britain and so many other parts of the world.