Despite the concerns of Gooch and his fellow grandees, the railways survived this upheaval and, remarkably, started to expand again quite soon. But the financial collapse of 1866 had done untold damage to their reputation and, worse, this was to be compounded by a series of disasters that put the spotlight on their safety record.
EIGHT
DANGER AND EXPLOITATION ON THE TRACKS
Although the railways were now accessible to a much larger proportion of the population by the 1870s, thanks to the spread of the network and cheaper tickets, there was still an important public relations battle to be won. The railways were accepted and well used, but not loved or even, for the most part, trusted. Some of their nicknames say it all: the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire was the ‘Mucky, Slow & Lazy’ while the Oxford, Worcester and Wolverhampton was the ‘Old Worse & Worse’.
The big companies were singled out for frequent criticism in the newspapers and consequently their image was very poor. The task facing the railways in winning over the public was a complex one. When they tried to improve the comfort of their passengers, offering such amenities as steam-heated carriages and picnic baskets, and better service by speeding up trains and providing better timetables, their profitability went down. They provided the best train services in the world, faster than those of any other country, and competition, together with the provision of the parliamentary trains, kept the fares down, but the financial crash of 1866 had dented confidence in the railways. Share ownership was more widespread now and many widows and the genteel poor depended on dividends to eke out a respectable living. The financial collapse had ruined many of these middle-class investors and quite understandably they pointed the finger at the railways.
If it had just been financial incompetence and the sense that the rail companies were rapacious Leviathans exploiting their passengers, the railways might have won over the public through the improvements in the service they were making. Their Achilles heel, however, was safety, with the number and seriousness of accidents inevitably increasing as more trains crowded on to the system at ever greater speeds. One of the most famous men of the age, Charles Dickens, was caught up in a rail accident and became a major advocate for improved safety. Surprisingly, up to this point, safety had been less of an issue than might have been expected, given the disastrous start with the death of Huskisson and the widespread fears about this new fast form of transport. Initially, there was virtually no oversight of safety considerations and it was not until two Acts, passed in 1840 and 1842, that a body of inspectors was created (invariably men from the Royal Engineers) with responsibility for both checking new lines and investigating accidents.
The early trains were light and travelled slowly, which meant that accidents tended to be relatively minor. The first serious crash was in 1841 on the Great Western at Sonning, near Reading, when a train ran into a land slip. Many passengers, most of whom were workmen building the Houses of Parliament and returning to the West Country for Christmas, were thrown out of the open wagons and eight people lost their lives. The subsequent story of rail safety was characterized by gradual improvement as lessons were learnt from these accidents; this first one was no exception, resulting in all wagons being enclosed by a roof, a welcome measure for many poor passengers travelling in third class who had to brave the elements.
The potential risk of a major catastrophe on the railways was highlighted by an accident in France the following year when a train at Versailles burst into flames following a collision. Fifty-two people were killed, many of them incinerated as they had been locked into their carriages to prevent them jumping out between stations. Unsurprisingly, the accident mostly put an end to that practice and on this side of the Channel it was nearly half a century before there was a disaster with a higher death toll (at Armagh, described in the next chapter).
Accidents became more frequent, however, not simply because there were more trains, but because the number of services increased at a faster rate than the growth in mileage of the system, and this higher intensity of use of the tracks exposed passengers to greater risk. It is no coincidence that many of the major accidents in railway history have taken place in and around London, by far the busiest part of the network. With more trains using the track, the system of time interval signalling was inevitably put under pressure, leading to more collisions. At Lewisham in June 1857 one train went into the back of another, killing eleven people on a busy Sunday night when both were full of day-trippers. It is a recurring theme that many of the worst rail disasters have taken place when people were travelling on excursions or on other special services like troop trains, partly because they were by definition very full but also because they were not in the usual timetable and railway workers, on occasion, forgot about the unscheduled trains.
A similar rear-end collision four years later, in the Clayton tunnel on the Brighton line, was more significant in prompting the public and politicians to put pressure on the railway companies to improve their safety standards. The tunnel is 1.5 mile long and the dangers of a collision had been recognized by the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway, which had installed a crude type of semaphore system with a signalman at each end. The two could communicate with each other through a telegraph system and indicate when a train was through the tunnel. This was an early form of ‘block’ working, the system by which the track is divided into sections that can only ever be occupied by one train, thereby preventing collisions. Telegraphs, a way of communicating along electric wires that was a precursor of the telephone, had first been introduced on the railway as early as 1836 with a trial on the Liverpool & Manchester Railway. A telegraph system was installed on the Great Western between Paddington and Slough in 1843 and its usefulness was demonstrated a couple of years later when it enabled a murderer, who had jumped on a Paddington-bound train at Slough, to be apprehended, a full sixty-five years before the more infamous Dr Crippen.1 Soon the telegraph became symbiotic with the railways, both for their own purposes and as the spine of the Post Office’s public system.
However, on that fateful day on the Brighton line, Sunday, 25 August 1861, the telegraph did not help and even added to the confusion. Three trains left Brighton in quick succession, two of them excursions filled with day-trippers heading for London, and the two signalmen became confused about which was which. The signalman at the south end thought he had received a clear signal from his colleague, and sent in a train which smashed into the earlier one, killing twenty-three people, many burnt alive as hot coals from the engine started a fire when the second locomotive toppled over, and injuring 176. By coincidence, within a week another sixteen people were killed and 300 injured in an accident at Kentish Town on what is now the North London line. An excursion service from Kew, ironically organized to raise money for a railway benevolent fund to help compensate staff injured in accidents, collided with a ballast train as result of a mistake by a signalman, sending several carriages tumbling down an embankment.
Despite these disasters, there was great reluctance among railway managers to accept any outside interference in their methods of operation and the Clayton tunnel accident did not bring about the obvious improvements to the signalling system that were clearly necessary. Over the previous two decades, there had been several other accidents caused by the time-interval signalling system and the Board of Trade Inspectorate was constantly urging the railway companies to abandon it. However, the companies drew the rather perverse conclusion from Clayton that introducing a space-interval system – i.e. one where sections of occupied track would be protected by a danger signal – would not only slow up traffic but increase the risk as drivers would become lazy and less alert.2 Specifically, the managers argued that the signal in the Clayton accident had not worked properly and that the space-interval block had failed to prevent the crash. But this was rather like arguing that because a faulty watch does not show the right time, timepieces as a whole are a bad idea! Nevertheless, the railway companies’ view prevailed for sev
eral years since the inspectors had only an advisory role and could not enforce changes. Nor, in truth, would they have wanted to. The inspectors valued their independence and they did not want to become an arm of government. This, after all, was still at the height of a laissez-faire attitude and no government wanted to become wholly responsible for enforcing safety on the railway. The rather loose arrangements over safety regulation suited all the parties until the roll call of accidents simply became too great.
Four years later there were two further accidents in quick succession, which led to renewed calls for action on railway safety. Both crashes were caused by the failings of trackmen working on the line. In the first, a train went off the rails on the Great Western at Rednal in Shropshire on 7 June 1865, killing thirteen, and just two days later at Staplehurst in Kent on the South Eastern, another derailment resulted in the loss of ten lives. This second accident added considerably to the pressure on the train companies because Charles Dickens was a passenger and not only ministered to the injured and dying but later became a high-profile campaigner for safety on the railways. Thanks to him, we also know far more than we would otherwise about the accident, which demonstrated the lack of any but the most rudimentary safety devices. Indeed, while the immediate circumstances of the crash may have been somewhat unusual, the accident highlighted the way that one simple mistake could lead to disaster if there was no back-up system – now a characteristic of the safety systems of all public transport. In other words, the railways relied on its workers to get it right every time, or else risk causing a major disaster.
In the case of Staplehurst, the hapless individual whose mistake led to the accident was the foreman of the track gang, one John Benge, whose men had to replace a timber on a small bridge that crossed a muddy stream. Astonishingly, they planned to carry out the work in an eighty-five-minute window of opportunity between scheduled trains. Benge made two mistakes and the events leading up to the disaster reveal the patch-and-mend nature of the railways at that time. First, he failed to check the train timetable properly. There were no normal services scheduled during that period but there was a boat train whose timings varied because it connected with a cross-Channel packet that could dock only at high tide. Its times were shown in the working timetable3 but Benge misread it, believing the train was due to arrive at 5.20 p.m. rather than 3.15 p.m. Secondly, he failed to instruct his men to place warning detonators on the line or to stand far enough from the bridge to be able to warn a train in time for it to stop. By the time Dickens’ train arrived at 50 mph, the timbers had been replaced but not the track, and five of the carriages hurtled off the bridge into the stream.
Dickens, whose carriage fortuitously had not plunged into the ditch, immediately turned himself into a type of human St Bernard’s. After ensuring that his mistress and her mother, with whom he was travelling, were all right, he grabbed his brandy flask and began administering it to the injured and dying. When the drink ran out, he returned to his compartment to get his other full bottle of brandy. While Dickens suffered no more than bruises and sprains, he never really fully recovered from the accident and died on its fifth anniversary, aged only fifty-seven. As L. T. C. Rolt puts it in his classic book on accidents, Red for Danger, ‘we cannot estimate the loss which English literature sustained as a result of John Benge’s tragic mistake. Certainly he deprived us of the solution to the Mystery of Edwin Drood.’4
Disasters were now occurring regularly, notably the awful derailment and consequent fire at Abergele in north Wales in August 1868 on the Irish Mail, which attracted attention not only because the death toll of thirty-three was higher than in any previous accident but also because among the victims were an aristocratic couple, Lord and Lady Farnham. The circumstances, too, were particularly horrific because the passenger train had hit trucks containing paraffin, which burst into flames on impact, and the dead had to be identified by their watches and jewellery.
Very slowly, safety was improving as a result of the hard lessons learnt from such accidents. While that process may appear to be somewhat callous, the development of safety procedures was an entirely new concept and it would have been impossible for an inspectorate to have imposed hard and fast rules from the outset. As ever, the railways were pioneers. Concepts like ‘fail-safe’5 and risk-assessment had simply not been developed, which is why fundamental mistakes were made which, with hindsight, created unnecessary risks. For example, many early signals, notably one controlling the entrance to Reading station in the 1840s, showed only a ‘proceed’ aspect. The Reading signal was a ball hoisted up on a pole when the line was clear, which meant that the regulations were a double negative: ‘If the ball is not visible, the train must not pass it.’ This was certainly a recipe for confusion but an understandable mistake to make because the railways had to work out from first principles how to deal with the safety problems posed by transporting unprecedented numbers of people at unprecedented speeds. The series of disasters did prompt some action with the passing of two new regulatory Acts in 1871 and 1873, though they were exhortations rather than regulations, requiring companies, for example, to provide returns on the mileage of their lines that were protected by block, rather than time interval, signalling (as opposed to making the railways fit it as standard). The new legislation also empowered the Board of Trade to set up special courts of inquiry following an accident, but the emphasis remained on self-regulation rather than policing by an external body.
The 1871 Act did, belatedly, recognize that the staff were the group most at risk from the railways’ activities. The statistics required by these new Acts reveal the shocking death toll of railway employees: in the five years up to the end of 1878, the railways killed an average of 682 of their workers every year, twenty times the number of passenger deaths. Astonishingly, the railways were the third most dangerous profession after mining and the Merchant Navy. Indeed, being a shunter in a busy yard was acknowledged by a parliamentary inquiry to be the most dangerous job in Britain,6 exacerbated by the onerous working conditions. Adrian Vaughan, an ex-signalman and author, cites the example of shunters at Didcot as late as 1891 who, according to time sheets in his possession, ‘routinely worked 14 hours day or night’.7 Given they worked six shifts weekly, this amounted to eighty-eight hours per week.
The staff were not just a danger to themselves. Long hours, lack of training and inadequate pay were universal and contributed to many of the fatal accidents on the railway. The poor fellow responsible for the 1861 Kentish Town accident described above was a nineteen-year-old partially deaf youth who worked a fifteen-hour day as a relief signalman for just 14 shillings a week. Even an experienced driver working for the Great Western in 1867 was earning just 42 shillings per week. They were the elite and other railwaymen were on far less. The investigation report of a head-on crash at Radstock on the Somerset & Dorset revealed that those involved were equally overworked and under-educated.8 The telegraph clerk, a boy of eighteen, was on duty from 6.30 a.m. to 9.30 p.m. for 17s 6d per week, and the signalman was a novice who could not read the telegraph instruments. The station-master worked from 5.30 a.m. to 6.30 p.m. and his boy assistant from 8 a.m. to 10.30 p.m.
This was not untypical. The working conditions set by the Liverpool & Manchester, outlined in Chapter 2, became pretty much the norm. As a chronicler of railway workers puts it, ‘since a highly successful and profitable railway was the end result, the practices of the Liverpool & Manchester were taken up by most of the early railways in Britain and overseas’.9 Railway workers were expected to work very long hours for what seemed like meagre wages. At the same time, working for the railways was perceived as an attractive job with wages above those offered in other large industries and well above the pay of an agricultural labourer. Not only did the railways offer long-term stable employment but, for the most part, the work itself was far more pleasant than, say, in a Victorian mine or a factory. Moreover, the low pay was often leavened with perks such as the cheap rental of a railway cottage: the polic
emen of the London & Birmingham could rent one at Wolverton for a mere 1s 6d but given that their shifts were routinely from 7 a.m. to 10.30 p.m., or 5.30 a.m. to 9.15 p.m., with no meal break, six days per week, they did not need many home comforts apart from a bed. Promotion might take years through the Buggins’ Turn system but the prospect was enticing and it was hardly surprising that agricultural and other labourers who were used to a hand-to-mouth existence jumped at the chance of a permanent job on the railways, however long the hours.
From the beginning, the railway companies recruited extensively from the army and navy and created a uniformed service. Soldiers and sailors were accustomed to an even harsher discipline, since flogging was still routine in the forces, and were also used to dressing smartly. Farm labourers were able to take on portering jobs, which required considerable strength in manhandling goods and luggage. White-collar posts would be snapped up by anyone with a modicum of education and, during the 1840s and 1850s when expansion of the railways was at its fastest, there was the opportunity of rapid progress through the ranks for a junior clerk who could perhaps expect to run a small station after a few years. Employment practices were basic with new staff often taken on only after an interview with the board and training was on the job.
The companies almost completely shunned women. According to the 1851 census, there were just fifty-four female workers in the industry, mostly gate-keepers. As Helena Wojtczak puts it eloquently in her history of railwaywomen: ‘The railways are imbued with maleness to their very core. Everyone connected with the creation and operation of railways was male: businessmen and financiers, architects and engineers, navvies and bricklayers, managers and operating staff.’10 That masculinity was also reinforced by the military-style uniforms. Level-crossing keepers were an exception because they could be taken on with no training, frequently on the death of a husband with whom they had shared the task anyway, and they did their job largely hidden from the passengers. There were a few tasks such as ladies’ room attendants, which in Victorian society clearly could not be undertaken by men, but there were remarkably few female clerks, in contrast with several European countries where such jobs were routinely filled by women. It was not until the First World War that women en masse were considered for employment on the railways as it then became essential for them to replace the men who had gone to the front (see Chapter 11).
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