The Railways

  Brassey was perhaps the closest thing to a railroad baron that the British network produced. As for a British counterpart to the mighty folk heroes of the American frontier, the railway navvy has a very good claim. The archetype is described in Terry Coleman’s classic study The Railway Navvies (1965). Distinctive in his dress of bright velveteens, impenetrable in his slang, contemptuous of religion and hostile to the conventions of marriage and homemaking, the navvy lived apart from society in temporary shack-towns, until a rumour of better-paid work elsewhere sent him off ‘on the tramp’ once again. As disciplined in his toil as he was ungovernable in his free hours, as free with his fists as he was thirsty for beer and grog, the navvy introduced to thousands of quiet parishes the near-anarchy of the urban slum. Often there was a tribal element to the navvies’ clashes: English against Scots, or English, Scots and Welsh – together, or separately – against the Irish, who were suspected of being ready to work for lower pay. Men even abandoned their old identities, picking up vivid new monikers as they went from place to place: Coleman lists Skeedicks, Moonraker, Mountainpecker, Concertina Cockney, Jimmy-the-new-man, Johnny-come-lately, Beer, Brandy, Fatbuck, Scandalous, Rainbow Ratty and Reeky Hoile, all employed on the Midland Railway’s line from Kettering to Manton in the late 1870s. (Reeky Hoile was a Yorkshireman, named from a remark he made when looking down a smoking tunnel-shaft in which a blast had just been set off.) Only when the railway was complete could squire, magistrate and parson resume control, men be known by their true names and modest maidens walk freely abroad once again.

  The 1960s were a lively time for labour history. Coleman’s book came close on the heels of E. P. Thompson’s influential doorstopper of 1963, The Making of the English Working Class, with its mission to rescue the forerunners of the modern labour movement from ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’. Coleman’s hard-drinking, quarrelsome navvies may fall short of Thompson’s radical pioneers in terms of solidarity and class consciousness, but the exploitation to which they were subjected evoked some passages of justified anger. For navvies were killed and maimed by the hundred, sometimes from their own reckless haste to get the job done, but also as victims of cynically exploitative contractors. Coleman devotes a chapter to the first Woodhead Tunnel, driven through over three miles of Pennine strata in 1839–45. During this time, up to 1,500 men and their dependants were billeted all year round in squalid dry-stone cabins out on the moors. Even these were provided grudgingly, the men having been expected at first to make do with tents, or even to sleep out in the open. Their sustenance came from rip-off ‘tommy shops’ run by the contractors or their confederates, which were stocked with inferior produce at inflated prices. The men were paid at irregular and widely spaced intervals, and when the money did arrive nothing was done to deter them from bingeing it all away on tommy-shop beer.

  Drunk or sober, the men faced deadly risks at work. One example: the powder charges inserted into the rock prior to blasting had to be rammed into place by means of metal tools called stemmers. The task was safer if these were of copper, which was less likely to make sparks against the rock, but the contractor insisted on using iron, a cheaper and harder-wearing material. The results were predictable: ‘William Jackson, miner, No. 5 shaft. He was looking over John Webb’s shoulder, while he was stemming a hole charged with powder, when the blast went off, blowing the stemmer through Jackson’s head and killed him on the spot.’

  The social reformer Edwin Chadwick later compared the chances of death or serious injury among the workforce during the whole course of the job with those at one of Wellington’s battles, concluding that a private soldier had a better chance of coming away unscathed from Waterloo or Salamanca than a navvy from Woodhead (where he counted thirty-two fatalities). Pardonable exaggeration, perhaps; but the conditions at the tunnel did result in a broader enquiry by a Parliamentary Select Committee into the human cost of railway construction. As presented in 1846, the Committee’s recommendations would have subjected the railways to some of the legal controls already in force at certain other workplaces, including the stipulation that deaths or injuries should be treated as the companies’ responsibility unless the victim’s carelessness could be proved. Another proposal was that men should be paid weekly and in money, rather than in ‘truck’ or vouchers for the tommy shops. This moderate, humane and wholly achievable report was then shelved, leaving the contractors free to carry on as before.

  Not all contractors were as bad as Thomas Nicholson, the worst of the men in charge at Woodhead. At the other end of the scale was Brassey, who understood the value of a loyal, experienced and well-rewarded workforce. Brassey paid better than others in the business, and banned tommy shops and beer sellers from his sites. His reward was a cohort of super-workers, each capable of lifting twenty tons of spoil a day. From the profits of their labours he subsidised hospital places for men who fell ill, and if a man perished during the course of his work Brassey would assist his dependants. In an age of boom-and-bust, he also tried to arrange his contracts so as to secure steady employment from job to job. Brassey’s navvies were even ready to follow their master abroad: half of the work-force on the Paris-to-Rouen contract, to a total of 5,000 men, came from the English side of the Channel. They were paid twice as much as French labourers engaged on the same line, and their unrelenting rate of work was the cause of local astonishment. Here was a reincarnation of the venerable stereotypes of Hogarth’s anti-French pictorial satire ‘The Roast Beef of Old England’ – 15lb of beef per week being the reported diet of an 1840s navvy in his prime.

  Other aspects of Coleman’s composite picture have held up less well to historians’ scrutiny. For one thing, brawn was not enough on its own to make a railway. Much of the necessary work in railway-making depended on skills learned in the building trade, and bricklayers, masons and carpenters by the thousand laboured alongside the men charged with mere digging and moving spoil. There were temporary brickworks to be built and manned too – Robert Stephenson allowed 20 million bricks to line his tunnel at Kilsby, on the London & Birmingham – and pumping engines to be established so that the shafts and bores for the tunnels could be kept clear. Nor were lawless shanty towns of the Woodhead type a normal adjunct to railway-making. Such settlements were superfluous in places where lodgings could be had with local households, for whom the navvies and artisans were a welcome source of extra income. This certainly applied to urban work, where the concentration of skilled labour on making tunnels, bridges and viaducts was often higher than in open country.

  Census returns also demonstrate that many lines were built not by Coleman’s sturdy itinerants, but by local labourers, especially in economically stagnant areas where employment was scarce. In south-west England, as many as four navvies in ten were working within ten miles of their birthplace. Youth was no barrier: in an age when unschooled boys were put to work in the fields, there was nothing to stop them trying their hand at the local railway diggings either. Sonning cutting is among the earthworks that were built partly by child labour. The age-old link to the land reasserted its pull in harvest time, when agricultural wages rose high enough to draw the labourers back to the fields. And once the lines were finished, the need for heavy labour did not go away. Many of the local men who had toiled in the gangs that built the railways must have been glad to find settled employment along the new-laid tracks, rather than tramping off to lands unknown in search of fresh navvying. Even the concept of the navvies as a rolling crime-wave has been challenged, if only to point out that their offences were rarely serious enough to land them in the dock at the assize or quarter-session courts, rather than before the magistrate.

  Yet the navvy should not be over-domesticated. Regardless of whether anything untoward actually happened, settled populations lived in dread of an outrage of some kind. In some parts of Britain any work on the Sabbath remained taboo. Magistrates at several points along the Great Western route pounced on some of the offenders and protested to the contractors and
committees at the top of the hierarchy. These struggles prefigured the arguments over Sunday trains; it may seem obvious now that the Sabbatarian party were bound to lose, but it would not have felt like that at the time. And there was always the hazard of bad behaviour of the kind that could not be punished in law. Arthur Waugh, father of the novelist Evelyn, recalled in his autobiography a childhood encounter while out walking with his nurse at Chilcompton in Somerset in the 1870s. Here they came upon the works of the Somerset & Dorset Railway’s Mendip extension, where ‘rough, loud-voiced men’ shouted unspecified words at them. Nurse fled, blushing, with her pram. A gang of regular platelayers would not have done this: they knew the risks of being reported and disciplined. The navvies did not care.

  The collision of cultures when squire met surveyor or nurse met navvy was real enough. Yet the country before the railways came should not be thought of as a changeless, immemorial place. More than that of many societies, agriculture in Britain was in a state of vigorous evolution long before railways arrived. In some regions the surveyors first came knocking even before the parliamentary enclosure movement had finished parcelling out shared fields and common lands among individual owners. At Cholsey in Berkshire, for example, the Great Western route ran across a common parish field comprising over fifty separately owned strips of land, which entangled the company in some unusually intractable compensation meetings. Enclosure encouraged more highly capitalised forms of farming, and railways in their turn widened the markets for what was produced. The nation’s two chief agricultural trades, grain and cattle, were both changed profoundly as a result.

  The inland carriage of grain over long distances had been encouraged by the canal network, but the railways helped to foster even stronger regional concentrations of cereal farming, and its dependent industry of malting for the brewers’ and distillers’ trades. Especially on the eastern side of the country, large warehouses and maltings were constructed alongside many stations. Made redundant by changes in brewing techniques, a good number of the maltings along the commuter routes in Essex and Hertfordshire have been converted to dwellings. Where the housing market is weaker, the abandoned maltings may simply stand derelict, like the astonishing red-brick citadel of the former Bass site at Sleaford in Lincolnshire: an apparition of pigeon-haunted decay six storeys high, stretching block after block for over 1,000ft along the rails.

  Distilleries of the railway era have lasted better. Although many of the smaller sites in the Highlands have never had a direct railway connection, those distilleries that were newly established after railways penetrated the region gravitated towards the new routes. Six of the seven Victorian distilleries at Dufftown in Banffshire, the quintessential whisky town, were founded after the little settlement was reached by the Great North of Scotland Railway in 1862. The single malts of Glenfiddich and Balvenie are, in this sense, drinks of the railway age – as is the familiar blended whisky in which Highland malts are combined with cheaper, neutral-tasting Lowland spirits distilled from unmalted grain.

  As for the cattle trade, the most immediate change concerned the extinction of the ancient drove routes. These lost their livestock almost instantly when a competing railway opened. Farmers and dealers did not need to be told that a lean and hungry animal that had been walking the dusty roads for days would fetch less at market than a plump one that had made the same journey by train. Jack Simmons cites the case of the Bird-in-Hand inn at Tasburgh in Norfolk, which put up 9,300 beasts in 1845. The following year, there were just twelve. Railways also allowed greater freedom in choosing when to send livestock to market, as prices rose or fell. Besides the sale of beasts for slaughter, there was also a large traffic from upland farms to lowland pasture, where the animals were fattened ready for sale. A cattle dock thus became a common feature at stations. As late as 1962, just before British Railways cut the number of livestock facilities by nine-tenths at a single stroke, the total stood at 2,493, as against circa 4,300 stations open to human passengers. Cattle wagons, and some horse boxes too, were routinely included in market-day trains on certain lines, for the convenience of those who had made purchases in the auction ring.

  London, naturally, was the greatest devourer. Sir Francis Head described the ‘polished horns, bright eyes, streams of white breath, and healthy black wet noses projecting above the upper rail of their respective wagons’ at the Camden Town depot of the London & North Western in 1850. These beasts could well have been of Scottish origin. Dickens, less prone to put a gloss on things, observed the ‘dull oxen in their cages, with heads depressed and foam hanging from their mouths’, in a nighttime vigil at the same railway company’s Carlisle station in 1857. There was always plenty of four-legged traffic on the LNWR, which carried much of Ireland’s exports of cattle and pigs in addition to its tonnage of Scotch beef on the hoof. Infamously, much of this Irish trade continued during the famine of 1845–9; it is possible that some of Head’s bright-eyed cattle at Camden Town had begun their lives amid the stricken peasant cabins of Munster or Connaught. The same railway even used its cattle wagons now and again for the ultra-cheap conveyance of migrant agricultural labour, notably Irish workers – some of them refugees from hunger or eviction – travelling south from Liverpool. The Irish cattle traffic through Holyhead had a long innings: it was the last of its kind on Britain’s railways, lingering until 1975.

  The rapid migration of existing traffic on to the rails was followed by long-term changes, repeated on other continents, as the railways encouraged livestock farming by giving access to more assured markets. Stimulated by easier transhipment, the number of beef cattle raised in Ireland may have doubled between 1841 and 1851. Cattle-rearing in Wales also increased, as corn-growing declined. This brought a corresponding reduction in farm labour (73,300 workers in 1851, 44,900 in 1871). In this sense, the railways of Wales were agents of rural depopulation.

  Dairying depended on the network too. Thanks to its canal connections, Manchester had already developed a modest market for milk, which travelled much less well than butter or cheese. Railways began to augment this flow in 1844. Within two years, between 100 and 150 milk cans of all shapes and sizes were arriving each day, and the average Mancunian was consuming up to an estimated 1.4 pints weekly. By 1869 most of Manchester’s supply came by rail. The London story was similar. Here the habit of taking fresh milk was already current, thanks to the practice of keeping dairy cows in odd urban corners. In the absence of pasture, they were fed largely on spent grain supplied by the breweries. The railway trade was stimulated after 1865–6, when most of London’s cows perished in the aftermath of a rinderpest epidemic, and took off in earnest in the 1870s. Essex and Suffolk contributed first, then Berkshire, Wiltshire, Dorset, Somerset and counties as far north as Derbyshire joined in. The long-lasting trade name Express Dairies originated in the period, making explicit the railway connection.

  Milk trains usually ran through the night to be ready for delivery in the morning, to reduce risk of souring. Standard designs were adopted for the churns, including the once-familiar tall tapering shape (easier to roll along on the edge of the base), with a capacity of ten or seventeen gallons. The ‘tall cans’ feature in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1892); when Tess Durbeyfield and Angel Clare embark on their fateful drive across the dark Wessex moor together, it is to take a wagonload of churns to the station on behalf of Dairyman Crick, bound for the London market. In the 1920s bulk transportation in glass-lined tank wagons began, despatched from creameries to which the neighbouring farms now consigned their yields for pasteurisation. The last of these trains ran in 1980, by which time only south-west Wales, Devon and Cornwall were still sending milk to London by rail.

  Railways also helped to break open the national market for foreign imports. One crucial development was refrigeration, which allowed frozen meat from the New World, Australia and New Zealand to be brought to the British market in the 1870s. The new technology was installed in shipping and in the national network of cold st
ores that were built to receive the frozen cargoes, but the market for their contents would have been limited had the railways not been ready to carry it briskly onwards in special insulated or refrigerated vans. Fresh meat of domestic origin was conveyed too, a practice at first largely limited to the cooler months. Hampers and canvas bags sufficed to protect these early cargoes, which were placed under tarpaulins in open wagons. The traffic was already vigorous enough by the mid 1860s to justify the construction of a huge underground meat depot beneath the new Smithfield Market in the City of London. Hydraulic lifts delivered the cargo from this four-acre underworld to the market buildings above. The depot was served via the Metropolitan Railway, which happened to be under construction through the area at just the right time. The entry to this cavernous space can still be glimpsed by underground travellers, on the south side of the line between Farringdon and Moorgate stations.

  The symbiosis between cattle farming and railways did not end after the distribution of meat. The railway photographer Colin Garratt, growing up in Leicestershire during the 1950s, would time his lunchtime sandwich-eating to avoid the ‘smelly bone train’ which conveyed raw materials from Leicester cattle market to a glue factory near Market Harborough. Organic waste of other kinds was valuable as well. Manure, animal or human (‘night soil’), could be enhanced in value by means of a railway journey. There was a lot of this to go round. Each working horse produced three or four tons of droppings a year, which when made up with straw litter provided twelve tons of good manure. Some of London’s night soil found its way up the Great Northern’s line through Bedfordshire, where market gardeners at places such as Biggleswade and Sandy used it on their vegetable fields. Trains then took this produce back for sale to the London market. This exchange of muck for food was centuries old; the innovation lay in the distances that could now be covered.