These initiatives came to little. Alarmed by the potential costs, railway interests within Parliament lined up to defeat the bill. Even on lines where enthusiasm for the idea was real, there was no broad agreement as to which new coupling system would be best. In effect, this was yet another instance of an all-or-nothing reform faltering from a lack of official support. It was a different story in the USA, where a federal law of 1893 compelled the use of safer automatic couplings. The accident rate to shunters on the railroads halved as a result. (The type may be remembered: they are the big knuckle-like fixtures cowboys and outlaws grapple with in Westerns when someone tries to detach part of a moving train.)
The campaign for safer braking and labelling of wagons did better, but it was a slow business. Things began to look up after the Railway Employment (Prevention of Accidents) Act of 1900, which at last empowered the Board of Trade to impose binding safety measures on the railway companies. The Act addressed some of the other booby traps that the ASRS had long sought to banish from everyday operation. First, any places where shunting was carried on after dark were now to be adequately lit by fixed lamps, not merely the hand lamps carried by the men. Second, any point rodding or signal wires that crossed such areas of outdoor working were to be properly enclosed as a safeguard against tripping. Action on the matter of wagon brakes took longer: a definitive rule compelling the provision of a lever on both sides of every wagon was not made until 1911. Even then, the companies were allowed up to twenty years’ grace to modernise their existing stock. Thus the wagon-chasing, brake-stick-waving shunter of the twentieth-century marshalling yard was in effect working under conditions formalised just before the First World War. It follows that the more intensive handling of wagons in hump-shunted, floodlit yards was feasible only because of changes already forced on a reluctant industry by Parliament, urged on by the railwaymen’s own representatives.
One of the hazards of shunting, from a British Railways safety booklet, 1961
What railway safety was like in the years of self-management can be measured by their employee casualty figures. The peak death rate for all ranks combined, at over 700 per annum, came in the mid 1870s. Well into the twentieth century, the number of shunters killed at work remained above 100 a year. Platelayers and gangers also suffered in large numbers, as already described. Senior railwaymen were themselves sometimes numbered among the dead. The Somerset & Dorset lost its locomotive superintendent W. H. French in November 1889: pausing in his own station yard at Highbridge to discuss the quality of the hay loaded into one of the wagons there, he was crushed between the buffers when an oblivious driver began to shunt them. The same month claimed Mr Carter, stationmaster at Reading (South Eastern), ‘knocked down and fatally injured by an engine while he was superintending some shunting operations’.
Among train crews, the riskiest occupation was that of goods guard, whose normal duties included a large share of shunting work. In 1906 the annual death rate among this working grade was 2.7 per 1,000. Put another way, if a thousand goods guards had been recruited in that year and continued working under the same conditions for the full pensionable span of forty-five years, only 885 would have been left alive.* Cumulatively, this survival rate is not much better than that of British Empire service personnel during the six years’ duration of the Second World War. The impact of these losses was diluted also because fatalities came in small numbers – a shunter here, two gangers there and so on. Railway work produced no hecatomb headlines to match the pit disasters of the period, or ships lost with all hands. And when a passenger train suffered a serious accident, the fate of the railwaymen inevitably took second place in the public interest to that of their fare-paying charges.
Underlying many fatal errors and misjudgements, whether the harm was self-induced or directed at others, was a regime of long hours. Shifts that would poleaxe all but the fittest and most hardened employee of today were routinely undertaken by the very workers whose fatigue was potentially the most dangerous to others – signalmen, guards and drivers. It was the same story for those whose fatigue was potentially the most dangerous to themselves, notably shunters and platelayers. Viewed in the light of the Factory Acts of 1833 and after, which limited the hours worked in certain industries to twelve and then ten hours daily, the situation was outrageous. But these laws were themselves atypical, for they did not fix a universal standard for every type of workplace. Sailors and dockers (to draw parallels with other kinds of transport work) enjoyed no such protection. Neither did the farm labourers who toiled to bring in the harvest with the new steam-powered traction engines and threshing machines.
Not everybody regarded this situation as acceptable. In 1871, Bass told the House of Commons how things stood for drivers on the Midland Railway. Their standard working day was ten hours long, but he knew of thirty or forty men who were putting in almost double that figure, and one instance of a man who had not left his engine for twenty-nine and a half hours. Meanwhile one of Bass’s allies, the journalist James Greenwood (1832–1929), put the frighteners on the readership of the Daily Telegraph with his articles on the life of the passenger guard. One piece told of a guard who had gone on shift at 6.35 p.m. on 23 December, finishing at 2 p.m. on Christmas Day, forty-three hours and twenty-five minutes later. On Christmas Eve, the guard was found asleep, standing upright by his own brake wheel. Rather than replace him with a less exhausted guard, a porter was assigned to travel with him and watch over his wakefulness. Greenwood asked how his readers felt about the prospect that their impending Christmas journeys might depend for their safe conclusion on a man ‘gaping leaden-eyed and hanging in a state of semi-sensibility over his wheel, only kept from dropping down on to the floor by a friendly “nudging” on the part of the man expressly provided to keep him awake’.
Gruelling feats of endurance were also routinely expected from men out on the tracks. ‘Lamps’, Dickens’s uncomplaining lamp-man at Mugby Junction, worked shifts of ‘fourteen, fifteen, eighteen hours a day. Sometimes twenty-four hours at a time’. Such a way of life was no fiction. Altogether, it is a wonder that the network was not clogged with fresh wreckage and corpses every single day.
Much of the history of railway labour from this time onwards therefore concerns the protracted struggle to achieve shorter working hours. The ASRS also did what it could to make the management accept a share of responsibility for accidents caused by negligence. The companies clearly had a vested interest in preventing collisions, derailments and other costly accidents, as they readily pointed out. After the Fatal Accidents Act passed in 1846 they were also liable for deaths or injuries caused to members of the travelling public, where negligence could be shown. But as long as the principle of common employment applied, there was relatively little incentive to invest in reducing casualties among the workforce. Put simply, it worked out cheaper for the companies to regard a proportion of their workers as expendable through injury or death than to spend extra money on keeping them alive and in one piece. To abandon the customary under-staffing that underpinned the practice of hazardously long working hours represented another unwelcome addition to operating costs, at a time when margins were shrinking inexorably.
So things remained until a general reform of the liability laws in 1880. Employees now had the right to compensation in cases of negligence by individual workers, including signalmen and drivers. A loophole remained, in that the companies were permitted to contract out the business of compensation to the provident societies which they themselves sponsored, and which paid out at much lower rates. This was the policy adopted by several big lines, including the London & North Western, a decision that this hard-nosed railway chose to represent as having been accepted willingly by its men. In truth, when open meetings of LNWR workers were held, opinion went strongly the other way. Official pressure to suppress this restiveness followed: name-taking, summonses to the office for warnings and so on, up to the point of dismissal from service. This was no more than the usual response to dissent,
for the railway companies expected loyalty from their servants and usually equated internal criticism with insubordination. Parliament alone could amend this situation, and further Acts in 1898 and 1900 finally removed this option of discounted compensation, putting all railway workers on the same legal footing at last.
Why did railwaymen put up with being treated like this for so long? Part of the answer lies in their collective weakness before the 1870s, when the legal position of trades unions was clarified in their favour. Before then, strikers could expect to be sacked, and commonly were. Collective weakness was mirrored by the diverse terms and types of employment: so many independent companies, each with its own practices, pay rates and division of responsibilities. The ASRS campaigned for universal rights, adopting a ten-hour working day as a standard demand in 1887, but there was as yet neither a single negotiating body to represent the companies, nor any consensus in favour of fixing national rates and conditions in the first place. Change happened incrementally, each company managing the pressure for reduced working time in its own way. In practice, the hours worked did not approach those common in other sectors until the 1910s.
By that date the railways had witnessed the most famous of all their labour disputes – famous because it ultimately changed the course of employment law concerning liability for damages arising from a strike. This was the Taff Vale dispute of 1900–1901. The Taff Vale Railway was a smallish but highly profitable line that sweated its men hard, and wanted them to sweat harder. Its workers went on strike after a victimisation case ignited a general sense of grievance arising from unsatisfied claims for better wages. The company won its resulting claim for damages, which exposed striking unions anywhere to the risk of financial ruin, only for the law to be changed six years later in the unions’ favour.
That reversal effectively opened the way for the first national railway strike. It was not long in coming. The second half of the 1900s was a time of broad and severe industrial unrest, as prices rose while wages stagnated. Matters came to a head on the railways in 1911. The stoppage was tied up with the wider question of how far the fast-growing unions should be recognised, and ended in their favour, with modest improvements to hours and pay. Two years later, three of the largest unions involved came together as the National Union of Railwaymen. National pay scales, a basic eight-hour day, and an effective forum for negotiations with the railways on a collective basis were finally put in place after the First World War. Yet the practice of punishing key workers for insufficient faithfulness outlasted these changes, as the aftermath of the General Strike showed.
The Taff Vale Case is perhaps less resonant now than it used to be, before the ancestry of the labour movement was displaced from the centre of the history curriculum. That story belonged firmly to the post-war national narrative, in which the mixed economy and a heavily unionised work-force represented both the culmination and the resolution of class conflict. Now that this settlement has been overturned, it is perhaps easier to understand some other perspectives from within the nineteenth-century railway workforce.
Anyone who joined the industry in its first few decades would have encountered a culture in which service on the railway required unquestioning obedience in all matters. As in the army or navy, seniority and authority were not centred in a few, remote superior officers – as the railways liked to call their senior staff – but were embodied and delegated throughout the network. Lateness and other infringements of company rules were punished by fines and stoppages, on the quasi-military model common to the railways and the factory system alike. From early on, the culture was reinforced by the wearing of uniforms by many grades of railway worker, like the Manchester & Leeds’s guards noted in 1841 by the spa expert Dr A. B. Granville (1783–1872), ‘smart, active-looking fellows, clad in red, and wearing a glazed, round hat, with the name of the railroad in gold letters upon it’. Uniforms – the property of the company, not of the wearer – implied a status something between that of the armed services and the liveried servants of the upper classes. Some lines indeed preferred the term ‘livery’ for the dress of their traffic staff. On the Great Western, this derived in turn from Sir Robert Peel’s new Metropolitan Police: tall hats, and tailcoats with big brass-gilt buttons. Everything about this working culture encouraged acceptance of the principle that dangerous errors committed at work were a matter of personal responsibility, rather than a direct and foreseeable consequence of cost-trimming exploitation directed from the top. Besides, many workers were financially dependent on overtime work, especially when this came to be paid at higher rates, and took all the hours they could get. And the more worn-out by toil a worker became, the less likely that he would have energy or time left over for union agitation.
Individualism of this older kind is the keynote of one of the earliest books by a former railway worker, Michael Reynolds’s Engine-Driving Life, or, Stirring Adventures and Incidents in the Lives of Locomotive Engine-Drivers (1881). The author had worked on the footplate himself, and set out to explain how a boy recruit might achieve the driver’s rank. There was already a customary progression, in which preparing fires and cleaning engines at the running shed were the earliest stages. A boy cleaner might become a junior fireman when he was older and physically stronger, having learnt how locomotives worked from the attentions required to keep them in good order. Reynolds presents this progress in terms of moral as well as physical dangers: ruses, excuses, lies, ill-temper and profanity should all be treated with the same aversion in the running shed as the perilous space between the buffers of engines in steam. At every stage, ‘the elixir vitae is self-help’. The first ventures out on the line were usually shunting trips, the front line in terms of workforce injuries, and Reynolds explains how the young fireman should draw lessons from finding himself among damaged men each with a cautionary tale to tell: the glass eye, the plate in the head, the false nose and the artificial arm. As a qualified fireman, charged with his share of maintaining the engine, he will himself risk death under its wheels should the driver inattentively set the machine in motion; thus brother has killed brother in the service, and father has killed son. Altogether, ‘there is scarcely another calling in life in which hope and death are so blended together’ as that of the engine driver.
It is easy to mock a writer who can extol his drivers as ‘men who die at the post of duty, in all the pride of manhood’, like a jingo journalist; tempting also to dismiss him as a patsy for the bosses, representing hazardous practices as moralised tests of self-preservation. Yet every book published implies an expected readership, and Reynolds’s volume (one of several by him on similar subjects) was popular enough to reach three editions; somebody out there wanted to read this stuff. Nor was Reynolds’s sense of vocation misplaced: many of those who worked on the footplate kept themselves consciously and proudly apart from the mass of ordinary rail-waymen. The division lives on even now in the split between the general union and the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen (ASLEF), which refused to join in the amalgamation of 1913. It is telling that Sidney Weighell and his brother, both footplatemen, should have signed up with the National Union of Railwaymen in the 1930s instead of ASLEF, ‘because its craft-union ethic stood for the opposite of the working-class solidarity we had been brought up to believe in’.
That statement alone is enough to temper the idea that the railway-men ever formed a homogeneous bloc, acting and thinking collectively according to the predictions of the cruder kinds of Marxism. In truth, railway work was always a mixture of the enviable and the deplorable, the paternalistic and the callous. The ingredients and the proportions of this blend varied greatly from company to company, from generation to generation, and from job to job. Some skilled grades and crafts remained aloof from the labouring masses, and watchful against any erosion of their own responsibilities and privileges. The balance between loyalty and discontent within the workforce reflected this diversity.
Even in the earliest days, the casual acceptance
of preventable deaths and injuries, and the companies’ steadfast refusal to accept liability, were also tempered here and there by some basic welfare measures. Like the better railway contractors, companies might sponsor hospital beds, giving men injured at work a chance to recover properly. Chester Royal Infirmary was subsidised in this way from as early as 1838. After a fatal accident it was customary to meet the expenses of a worker’s funeral, and often a payment was made to the man’s widow. Permanently disabled men also had a good chance of being found further employment, although this was a privilege to be grateful for rather than a right that could be claimed. The mutilated shunters described by Michael Reynolds are evidence of the practice. Some larger lines took over the production of prosthetics themselves. The National Railway Museum preserves drawing no. 7629 from the London & North Western’s works at Crewe: ‘Artificial Leg, General Arrangement and Details’. Skilled carpenters at the Great Western’s works at Swindon likewise turned out wooden limbs, wooden feet and wooden hands.
In other corners of the mighty works at Crewe, men busied themselves preparing materials for the LNWR’s standard workers’ houses, which were built of brick for £350–£400 each, complete with fittings. At the peak the railways owned some 58,000 staff houses, with especially dense concentrations in railway towns such as Crewe (surviving in part), Wolverton (levelled in the 1970s) and Swindon (preserved miraculously almost intact). Rents were stable and moderate, when the house did not come rent-free with the job. Nor do Victorian railways stand out as exceptionally careless or negligent employers by comparison with other highly capitalised industries, such as coal mining or construction. The management certainly wished the men under their control to think themselves fortunate to hold their posts. On their part, the workers would not have signed up in the first place had the railways not offered an attractive combination of secure and decently paid employment, usually with some prospect of promotion. Changes to these attitudes depended on wider shifts in working culture and class consciousness: the railwayman of 1850 and his descendant of 1910 might have the same job to do, but they conceptualised it in different ways.
The Railways Page 49