Railway Empire

by Anthony Burton

  A less merry noise was subsequently heard in the camp – the roar of two man-eating lions. The first encounter came when one of the lions burst into a tent where seven men were sleeping, grabbed one of them, a Sikh named Ungan Singh, by the throat and dragged him away while the others watched helpless. His dismembered body was found with only the head intact, eyes open and staring. As time went on, the lions grew ever bolder, leaping over or breaking through barriers. When the railhead moved on, leaving the bridge workers behind, the chances of being next on the lions’ menu increased startlingly.

  Patterson soon had other problems. He was not a popular man with the workforce, particularly when he substituted piece-rates for wages, contrary to the assurance given to the Indian government. His own explanation was that men had arrived, claiming to be skilled masons and demanding the extra rates to skilled men, when in fact they were imposters and cheats. There was a small riot and, more seriously, a plot to kill Patterson himself. He was lured into a narrow ravine where two men tried to grab him – rather half-heartedly it seems for he was able to push them off. He leapt onto a rock and spoke to the men in Hindi.

  They all knew that I was just and fair to the real worker; it was only the scoundrels and shirkers who had anything to fear from me, and were upright, self-respecting Pathans going to allow themselves to be led away by men of that kind?

  That was not to be the end of the trouble; the end only came when the ringleaders were arrested. Now the problems again centred on the lions.

  The beasts hunted in pairs at night and became bolder all the time. One day several hundred men rushed out in front of a supply train, clambered on board and demanded to be taken away. Those that remained took elaborate precautions. Some dug pits inside their tents and covered them with logs, and there they slept through the sultry African night. Water towers were very popular, and ‘every good-sized tree in the camp had as many beds lashed on it as its branches would bear – and sometimes more.’ One tree collapsed under the weight; fortunately for its occupants, the lions had already fed. The District Officer, Mr Whitehead, was coming from the station down a narrow cutting when he was attacked and his sergeant carried off. Next day he was accosted by Patterson. He had gone looking for Whitehead, and found him looking ‘very pale and ill’. Patterson recounts the conversation:

  Where on earth have you come from?’ I exclaimed. ‘Why didn’t you turn up to dinner last night?’

  ‘A nice reception you give a fellow when you invite him to dinner,’ was his only reply.

  ‘Why, what’s up?’ I asked.

  ‘That infernal lion of yours nearly did for me last night,’ said Whitehead.

  ‘Nonsense you must have dreamed it!’ I cried in astonishment.

  For answer he turned round and showed me his back. ‘That’s not much of a dream, is it?’ he asked.

  His clothing was rent by one huge tear from the nape of the neck downwards, and on the flesh were four great claw marks, showing red and angry through the torn cloth.

  Patterson, an enthusiastic hunter, waged war on the lions. He tried everything, including building a huge trap with two coolies as bait. They were at the far end of the cage, ‘safe’ behind bars. The idea was that the lion would come in and they would shoot it: a lion did come in and the terrified men shot almost everything in sight except their target, which escaped. They almost shot Patterson – and one would hardly have blamed them if they had. In the end however he was able to bag the lions and work proceeded more or less as normal.

  Not an encouraging sight for the footplate crew of this North British built Class 500 4-8-2 locomotive as they approach the wreck of another member of the same class in the Sudan

  A Class 500 undergoing repairs at the Kasti Depot, Sudan.

  Patterson was then sent off to establish a headquarters for railway administrators. The spot selected was on an empty plain ‘three hundred and twenty-seven miles from the nearest place where even a nail could be purchased … Roads and bridges had to be constructed, houses and work-shops built, turn-tables and station quarters erected, a water supply laid on, and a hundred and one other things done which go to the making of a railway township.’ A bazaar soon mushroomed, but disease broke out and Patterson had it all torn down. The railway headquarters was destined to become the civil headquarters as well and was to grow to become the city of Nairobi. When Whitehouse arrived at Nairobi he found the local population on the verge of starvation. He handed out his railway supplies but as news spread more and more people crowded in. Whitehouse was in despair.

  Why is it our responsibility? We are building a railway. We are not a relief organisation. These poor people must be helped but I have fifteen thousand coolies to feed.

  He decided it was the government’s job not his, and stopped the relief. The inevitable result was that the Africans began a series of raids.

  They several times swooped down on isolated railway maintenance gangs and utterly annihilated them in order to obtain possession of the food which they knew would be stored in the camps.

  They attacked at night using poisoned arrows, but Turk was on hand to exact his customary rough retribution. He attacked the native village: ‘We shot two or three but they were half dead from starving and the pox.’ Even he complained that food would have done more good than bullets. Eventually government relief arrived, ending the whole miserable affair.

  The engineers also had some daunting problems of a purely engineering nature to face. The line that had begun at sea level at Mombasa was to climb to a height of 8700 feet, where the heat of the plain was replaced by ice and sleet driven by a howling wind. And it also had to cross the Great Rift Valley. There was a fall here of 2000 feet, and the escarpment had to be conquered, as others had been elsewhere in the world, by a complex zigzagging route of steep gradients. For actual construction purposes, inclines were used, worked by stationary engines. Even then the slopes were so steep that material tipped out of the wagons; special wheeled frames had to be built, with a triangular frame, so that one set of wheels was higher than the other. Once set on the incline, the platform was level and could carry a conventional truck on top. Even with the inclines, work was extraordinarily difficult. ‘No. 2 Incline was so steep’, wrote Preston, ‘that the workmen, even empty-handed, could hardly keep their feet.’

  The British no longer build steam locomotives or build railways for Africa. These are the sad remains of an imposing 4-8-2 locomotive Prince of Wales built by Nasmyth Wilson that ended its days in Ghana.

  Far from being empty-handed they were manhandling rails and sleepers into place in situations where a slip could send them plunging as much as 400 feet down a precipice. On the approach to the Mau summit, a total of twenty-seven viaducts were built, ranging from 156-881 feet in length and from 37-111 feet high. At last, five years and nearly 600 miles from the start, the lines reached Lake Victoria. Florence Preston drove home the last key and gave her name to the terminus.

  This was not the last line to be built by the British in Africa. As late as the 1920s, they were working with the Portuguese to create the Benguela Railway, stretching right across Angola from Lobito on the coast to the Congo frontier, 838 miles away. Much of the rolling stock came from Britain. The African dream was never quite realized: the direct line from the Cape to Cairo was never completed, but there was a true element of heroism in what was achieved. The gangs run by the indefatigable Pauling even made it into the age of the cine-camera. The last half mile of the Rhodesia route to Broken Hill was filmed by Pathe, and the platelayers worked so fast that the train carrying the rails was never actually brought to a standstill. It somehow typifies the world of African railways that although the movie camera was by then in use, railway building was still down to human muscle and brawn.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Australasia

  In 1849 the Melbourne Herald listed the benefits that railways would bring to Australia:

  No more sticking in the mud then, no more badgering about the condition o
f the roads, no losing of bullocks, nor plundering of bullock-drivers, no leaving grain in the ground to rot, or wool on the way to spoil with rain, no escaping of prisoners under escort, no stopping the mail by bushrangers, no being at the mercy of servants for want of change, no dying for want of a doctor, no broomstick marriages for want of a priest, and no loss of time, money and patience, by detention in town, beyond the time absolutely required for the want of business.

  If it does rather overstate the case for the virtues of rail travel, then it was doing no more than many another polemic on the subject had done in the past, and would do again in the future. What is remarkable is how little time had passed since the first settlers arrived in the colony before this absolute need for a rail system was perceived. It was only in January 1788 that the first convict ship dropped anchor in Botany Bay and a small party sailed north and discovered ‘the finest harbour in the world’. The description was Arthur Phillip’s, a retired naval officer who had been appointed Governor-in-Chief of New South Wales. He called the natural harbour Sydney Cove. Phillip had come to oversee a penal colony; there was little thought of trade. Future prosperity and transport meant little more than the packing off of prisoners from Britain. The indigenous population had no roads, no bridges. No one knew what lay in the interior, no one had even the faintest idea how big the place was. It was only with the first circumnavigation in 1802-3 the settlers became aware that this was not a country, but a vast continent. It is a mark of the extraordinary vigour that characterized Australian development that it took little more than half a century from tentative beginnings in an unknown land before the settlers were demanding railways, the most potent symbols of the modern world of commerce and industry.

  The argument over convicts was to last for forty of those years: should they work for free settlers or for the government? Would they ever be allowed the same rights as freemen? What status would their children have? These were serious issues in the strangely unbalanced county of New South Wales, which in 1828 was recorded as having a total population of 36,598 of whom 16,442 were convicts and only 1544 women. The other pressing problem was one of how to prosper in the new land. In 1813, three explorers – Blaxland, Wentworth and Lawson – found a route through the Blue Mountains and looked out on a seemingly endless plain of good grazing land. One answer to future wealth had been found – sheep. And all the time the settlement was expanding. In the 1830s plans were laid for a new settlement in the Cape St Vincent area. The South Australian Land Company was formed and in 1834 South Australia became a province in its own right, with a capital at Adelaide. It was in New South Wales and South Australia that the railway movement began.

  The Great Lithgow zigzag in New South Wales, Australia in the 1870s.

  Although the two provinces had their own governments, there was a general understanding that it made sense to work towards a unified railway system for the whole country. In 1848 the two legislatures took the obvious step of settling for 4 ft. 8½ inches on the rational grounds that as Australia had no manufacturing industry of its own, everything needed for railway building would be brought across from Britain, and life would be simpler, and cheaper, if the principal British gauge was used. The argument, indeed, seems so sensible that it is difficult to see what could be said against it, and it had the strong support of the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, William Gladstone. He reinforced the argument by pointing to the mayhem of the gauge war in England. Nor were there other serious precedents to follow in Australia. There was a tramway, built on the English model, that carried, appropriately enough, coal from the mines to Newcastle on the coast; and Tasmania had a wooden railway which at a shilling a time took passengers across the Tasman Peninsula to Port Arthur penal settlement. The former used gravity for power, and the latter used convicts, who pushed uphill and acted as human brakes going downhill. Neither of these needed to have much influence on the rational planning of a national steam railway system. Everything seemed set fair for a period of logical development. Then the Sydney Railway Company appointed F.W. Shields as chief engineer.

  Shields was an Irishman who had worked with Vignoles. He took the view that in an overcrowded little island like Britain, the modest gauge of 4 ft. 8½ in. might be adequate, but with all the vast spaces of Australia to build in, a more generous view could be taken. He persuaded the Board to adopt the Irish gauge of 5 ft. 3 in. South Australia, willing to be accommodating, went along with the change, and put in orders for locomotives and rolling stock. In the meantime, the Sydney Company found itself short of funds and asked Shields to take a cut in salary. Grievously offended, Shields at once resigned and his place was taken by the Scottish engineer, James Wallace, who was as devout a believer in the Stephenson gauge as Shields had been in the Irish. Plans were reassessed in Sydney and New South Wales, but neighbouring Victoria and South Australia had already invested heavily in the 5 ft. 3 in. gauge and were in no mood for expensive changes. The war that Gladstone had warned against had come about. To make matters worse, when Queensland began building lines, much later on in the 1860s, it was decided that cash was paramount, and they opted for a cheap 3 ft. 6in., also well fitted to the difficult terrain. Australia ended up, like India, with three systems, broad, standard and narrow. No doubt it all made sense at the time.

  In the 1850s, the whole nature of railway building, and of Australian society as a whole, changed very suddenly. A digger called E. Hargraves came to Australia from California and thought the landscape very like that of the gold fields he had recently left behind. He found gold and set off a gold rush that led to the discovery of the great alluvial deposits at Ballarat. Everyone, it seemed, headed for the gold fields – even sea captains could be seen at work; they had little choice since their crews had already deserted. For a time there was no labour for railway building, but in the long term it brought a flood of immigrants. The new Australians felt quite able to settle the land for themselves and neither needed, nor wanted, convict labour. Hence the transportation of convicts came to a halt. The immigrants did, however, need better transport, to serve both the gold fields and the rapidly growing communities.

  Once the first excitement of the gold rush had died down, railway work was resumed. The broad gauge track was first in use when 2 miles of track was opened from Melbourne to Port Melbourne. It was hurried along in order to get supplies to the goldfield. A year later, the 13-mile route from Sydney to Parramatta followed. The Sydney line was not a huge success and was taken over by the state, renamed the Great Western Railway and gradually extended westward to the foot of the Blue Mountains. John Whitton arrived from England in 1857 as chief engineer for all the New South Wales lines; he was to stay on in Australia to oversee more than 2000 miles of track construction, including an amazing 289 miles in one year. There would have been no possibility of building at such a rate with the meagre supplies of local labour, and Whitton turned, as so many others had done, to Thomas Brassey.

  Brassey himself never went to Australia, but handed the job to one of his agents, Samuel Wilcox, who had worked with him on the Paris and Caen Railway. Wilcox set off for New South Wales in 1859. At first local men were taken on at wages varying from 7s. a day for labourers to 12s. for skilled tradesmen. It was considered a very generous wage. Wilcox was closely questioned on the standard of living by Brassey’s biographer, Arthur Helps:

  Q. Take a man spending 10s. a week there; if he had been living in England would it have cost him 8s.?

  A. He would get as much bread and meat there as he could eat, but here he could hardly look at it. As long as a man with a family is kept from drink there, he can, in a very short time, get sufficient money to start and buy a piece of land, and become ‘settled’.

  Q. May it not be said that a good stout labourer in England could not live as a navvy for less than 8s. a week?

  A. Not living as a navvy does. I do not think that he could live on 8s. a week; living generously as a navvy has to live. Out there he could live very much more amply
supplied at 10s., and really on less than 10s. In the case of some of the men I have known camping out together, the rations did not come to more than 8s. 6d. per week.

  Unfortunately, the rosy picture of independent labourers saving up for their own land does not take account of the navvies’ habit of taking the occasional tipple.

  Q. Did you find that a working man, placed as he appears to be in Australia in exceptionally advantageous positions with regards to means, drinks more?

  A. Yes; he does.

  Q. In short, there is a great deal of drunkenness there?

  A. Yes; and the drink is more expensive; they charge you more there; they charge you 6d. for a glass of beer, and they charge for a bottle of beer 2s. 6d., which you get for 1s. in England.

  It was soon obvious that more men were needed, and Brassey sent his recruiting agents to Scotland. This was a period when the government was trying to encourage emigration, so that Brassey fitted the men out at an average cost of £5 each, while the government contributed a further £12 for the passage. Brassey had no contract with the men, but was on pretty firm ground as Wilcox explained:

  Launching a caisson out into the river during the construction of the Albert Bridge, Australia in the 1890s.

  Having men in the country, we knew that they must work for somebody; and we also knew that we were in a position to pay them as much as, or more than, any one else. They were at liberty, on landing, to go where they liked; and some few, not a great number, but some few, never came to the works at all; but we found that we got a great part of them, and more came out by other ships.

  Initially, Brassey helped pay for 2000 Scots to travel to Australia.

  Whitton having pushed the route on to the foot of the Blue Mountains was faced with a climb to the ridge at 3336 feet – not something where his experience on the Oxford, Worcester and Wolverhampton Railway would be of a great deal of use. Early suggestions were for a charge up the mountain at the ludicrous slope of 1 in 20, later modified to a rather more modest 1 in 30, though that was only possible if a 2-mile tunnel was blasted half way up the mountain. In the end, Whitton settled for a zigzag which involved the construction of a large number of viaducts and the blasting away of vast quantities of rock. The largest single mass, estimated at 45,000 tons, was reduced to rubble by an explosion detonated by the Countess of Belmore, wife of the Governor-General. Thanks to the zigzag, with its two reverses, a very reasonable 1 in 60 was maintained, but it gave spectacular views as the track made its way to the summit up a narrow, spiny ridge. Having got to the top, there was no comfortable plateau, but instead a switchback ride over the mountains, before plunging down the other side in the even more exciting Lithgow zigzag.