In today’s post Tarquin O’Flaherty continues his exploration of the building of railways in Great Britain (and the Colonies and the Crimea). See the preceding Man as Machine post here.
So, the building of the railways followed long established ideas. To implement those ideas massive earthworks, tunnels, viaducts and bridges were required. Contractors like Peto and Brassey realized very early on that the work was so huge, and good labour so important, that the only way to keep the best of the navvies was to treat them well, feed them well and pay them well. This was precisely what Robert Owen had learnt at New Lanark. The contractors were not, like a lot of factory employers of the period, deliberately aloof from the ‘common workers’. Instead they made a point of getting down into the diggings with the navvies, listening to suggestions and, a great deal of the time, acting on those suggestions. They knew the gangers and the people in the gangs and addressed them by name. The contractors organised doctors and surgeons to minister to the sick and injured, and even a clergyman if the need arose. If a man was crippled or killed, his wife and kids were cared for, and received a form of compensation. This was highly unusual for the time. Gradually, as time passed, both Peto and Brassey (amongst others), built fiercely loyal groups of navvies around them.
A great deal of the work was difficult and dangerous and carried out across relatively uninhabited country. This meant that accommodation, food and drink had to be imported. Where gangs of many hundreds were involved, toiling away in the most primitive and isolated of conditions, the contractors would arrange for animals on the hoof to be taken to the site, professionally slaughtered, spit roasted whole and divided up amongst the gang. As near as it is possible to imagine, a complete catering service operated day and night at these more remote sites. Demountable cabin accomodation was sometimes provided but more often than not the navvies threw up rough huts and shelters for themselves using any material they could find. It would not take very long for a gang of two or three hundred men to provide temporary dry accommodation for themselves using mud, rock and stout tarpaulins.
If a tunnel were to be dug through a hill then the engineer would mark the route across the hill directly above the proposed tunnel. At several points along this route shafts were dug down, through the hill to precisely the point where the tunnel was to be excavated. These shafts, in some cases 600 feet deep and 25 feet in diameter, not only provided access to allow the navvies to begin tunnelling but would eventually serve as tunnel ventilation shafts. Navvies were lowered into the depths by bucket, and drawn out by the same method. Using a sledgehammer and a chisel as big as a crowbar, holes were driven into the face of the tunnel, the hole filled with gunpowder, and then rammed home. The rammer, inexplicably, was made of steel. Steel on rock produces sparks. Men were blown up, maimed or blinded again and again until they eventually replaced the steel ramrod with copper.
There are countless stories of the travelling bucket being caught against the side, tipping the navvies out, and killing them, or tipping its material out and burying them. Horrifying rockfalls were commonplace and, in the appallingly ill-ventilated depths, simple, suffocating lung diseases were not uncommon. Men were also killed when explosive charges they had prepared exploded either accidentally or prematurely.
Somehow, surviving all this, the navvies built the railways. They built gargantuan earthworks without the help of bulldozers. All they had, and all they used, were picks and shovels, horses and carts. Without any of today’s equipment, they built tunnels and bridges, cuttings and viaducts,which are still robustly in everyday use today. And out of all this back-breaking work came a fellowship, a rough freemasonry of men, a group of legendary characters who dressed distinctively, looked after each other and, when it came down to it, misbehaved to such an extent that questions concerning their lawlessness and immorality were asked ‘In the House’ (in the British Parliament).
TO BE CONTINUED . . ..