Muscles And Moleskins

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30919, 27 November 1965, Page 12

Muscles And Moleskins

IBu

KENNETH BRASS

in the

“Sydney Morning Herald.”!

TT is 1846 ... the railway age has begun and brought with it a race of men more ferocious and voracious than any England has seen since Cromwell’s Ironsides.

Stories of the cruel and animalistic lives these men lead have reached London. The Commons has set up a committee to inquire into the evils of the most exalted engineering works of modern times.

Witnesses have been called to the capital. One of them is Thomas Eaton, perhaps more intelligent than the average railway worker, but bearing the usual. marks of his trade —great steely muscles garbed in moleskin trousers, doublecanvas shirts, velveteen square-tailed coats, hobnail boots, gaudy handkerchiefs, white felt hats with the brims tunned up, and the ability to down 21b of beef and a gallon of beer a day. Eaton is one of the 1100 navvies who made a railway tunnel three miles long through the Pennines. It took six years, from 1839 to 1845. No-one kept an exact account of how many men died blasting through the millstone, or how many were buried by sudden falls of sandstone, or were tipped out of a swaying bucket halfway up a 600 ft air shaft. But Eaton knew at least 32 men who died, and the surgeon, whom he knew well, seeing so much of him, said another 140 had been badly hurt.

The navvy tells the committee of a man who lit a fuse to blast rock at the bottom of a tunnel and as he was being pulled up in a bucket got stuck part way up the shaft. “There was one man, the engine was stopped, and he lighted a match, then the engine could not draw him up, and he was there, and stopped there while the sliot went off, and he did not get hurt in the least. Several were killed, though; sometimes when the engine was drawling them up, sometimes striking at the side, it threw them out and killed them. . . . These two men, thrown out of

number four shaft, the pricker catched in the shaft and turned the bucket over; and men fell out.”

These were the railway navvies, the men who in the 80 years from 1822 made 20,000 miles of railways in Britain and then went abroad with the great British railway engineers to build thousands of miles more all over the world. Thomas Eaton’s three miles of death and legalised torture is made to look like a tiny tramline. The glory went to the engineers, the profit to the entrepreneurs . . . and it has taken more than a century for the navvies to have their story told, but brilliantly told, in “The Railway Navvies,’’ by Terry Coleman.

The ,word came from “navigators”—the name given the canal diggers of the eighteenth century, inherited by the railwaymen and later applied to building workers. Hard, Hazardous They were not to be confused with ordinary labourers. Navvies did the hardest and most hazardous work, the blasting and the cutting, and left truck-filling and menial jobs to the boys and locally recruited casual labourers. They followed the rail and travelled with one contractor until he had no more work to offer or until they heard of higher wages alsewhere. In 1846 Thomas Carlyle wrote:

“The country is greatly in a state of derangement, the harvest, With its black potato fields, and all the roads and lanes overrun with drunken navvies; for our great Caledonian Railway passes in this direction and all the world here, as elsewhere, calculates on getting to heaven by steam. I have not in my travels seen anything uglier than that disorganic mass of labourers, sunk threefold deeper in brutality by the threefold wages they are getting.”

Yet eight years later it was the navvies, rushed to the Crimea, who built the famous railway that saved the British Army at Sevastopol.

In 1846 there were 200,000 men like Thomas Eaton working on about 3000 miles of new track. They were often known to the contractor, and

to everyone else, only by their nicknames —Gipsy Joe, Belerophon, Fisherman, Fighting Jack.

Paid In Beer

Often they worked drunk and on many contracts a man would not be given work unless he took part of his pay in beer. Publicans toured the line and where whisky was forbidden, as it sometimes was by magistrates, is was brought up in kegs marked paraffin. Some deserted their families to make a life of nawying, others took wives and children with them on long treks across England. It was a violent century. The railway companies were convinced of the value of the railways but hardly of the value of their men’s lives. Railway engineers rarely kept any count of the men killed. In Scotland there was not even a formal coroner’s inquest held on the victims. It was customary to ignore the navvies, as if the railways built themselves.

“The , intrusive, repulsive life of a navvy was not commonly a long one,” says Mr Coleman. “An old navvy was rare. Many navvies, died as boys, run over by the waggons they were leading to the tip-head. The few who survived until they were 60 looked 70, and most died at 40 — a good age for a navvy.” Typical of the employer's attitude to the navvy was that of Lieutenant Peter Lecount, one of Robert Stevenson’s ,25 assistant engineers on the London and Birmingham railway: “These Banditti . . "These banditti,” he told the Commons committee, “are generally the terror of the surrounding country; they are as completely a class by themselves as the gipsies. Possessed of all the daring recklessness of the smuggler, without any of his redeeming qualities, their ferocious behaviour can only be equalled by the brutality of their language. “Woe befall any women, with the slightest share of modesty, whose ears they can assail. They put at defiance any local constabulary force: consequently crimes of the most atrocious character are common, and robbery, without an attempt at conceal-

ment, has been an everyday occurrence wherever they have been congregated.” They poached the women along the line, and they poached the game (though not the Earl of Harewood’s, because Lady Harewood was known and beloved by the men for her many kindnesses) They contaminated the population by easy vice and easy money.