How Britain Worked Read online

  LAUNCHING THE ROCKET

  To decide whether steam locomotives would be up to the job and, if so, what kind of steam engines should be used on the L&MR, a competition was held over several days at Rainhill in Lancashire on a stretch of the L&MR track, beginning on 6 October 1829. Ten locomotives entered the competition but on the first day only five actually competed. They had to make ten runs on the measured track, equivalent to the distance between Liverpool and Manchester. They had to pull a load three times their own weight; and they had to achieve a speed of at least 10mph (at that time the average speed of a locomotive on the S&DR was only 8mph).

  The only engine successfully to complete the trials was George and Robert Stephenson’s famous Rocket, which achieved an impressive top speed of 30mph, and an average speed of 12mph. The Stephensons won a prize of £500 and a contract to build locomotives for the L&MR. When the line opened in 1830, it was the first railway freight and passenger service with steam trains running to a set timetable, although on a couple of stretches of the track the trains were actually cable-hauled.

  The success of the L&MR inspired a boom in the railway business in Britain. In the ten years up to 1835, Parliament sanctioned fifty-four new rail lines and by 1837 a further thirty-nine had been agreed. By 1845, there were 2,441 miles of railway carrying thirty million passengers annually, with proposals before Parliament for a further 9,500 miles of track the following year. Investors were clamouring to buy shares in railway companies. They saw it as a quick way to make a fortune and some families sank their entire life savings into the railways, but many of the new railways simply never transpired. A downturn in the economy and the fact that some of the supposed railway companies were fly-by-night operations that quickly went bust meant that a lot of people lost a lot of money in the investment frenzy that became known as ‘Railway Mania’.

  The sums involved in building a railway were pretty hefty. The L&MR had cost £637,000 – probably equivalent to about £53 million nowadays, although, as we’ve already seen, a mere £53 million wouldn’t buy you much of a railway today!

  A TOUCH OF CLASS

  Nevertheless, by 1851 6,800 miles of track had been laid and over the next fifty years that total would more than treble, with the number of passengers carried soaring to 1,100 million annually. From her first journey in 1842, even Queen Victoria became a regular rail user, preferring the comfort and speed of the train to tiresome travel by horse and carriage. Not everyone travelled in such luxury, however, and passenger comfort had become a real issue on the railways. First-Class passengers travelled in some style, in carriages that were as well appointed as the horse-drawn carriages the railways were tempting them away from. Second-Class passengers had more basic coaches but were still travelling in relative comfort. Third-Class passengers, on the other hand, were lumped into the same sort of open wagons that were used for lugging coal or iron ore. If there was any kind of accident, and there were quite a few, Third-Class passengers could easily be flung out onto the track. On Christmas Eve in 1841 a train hauling three Third-Class passenger carriages and a variety of goods wagons was derailed by a landslide at the Sonning Cutting just outside Reading. The passengers were mainly stonemasons returning home for Christmas after working on the new Parliament building in London. Nine of them were killed and sixteen badly injured.

  The safety of the newly mobile masses was at the heart of the Railways Act, which was introduced in 1844. This stipulated that at least one train should run on every line once a day in each direction, with adequate provision made for Third-Class passengers. Fares were set at a penny-a-mile, the passengers had to be in covered coaches, protected from the elements and the train was required to travel at at least 12mph. By setting out these rules, the government hoped to encourage working-class people, the poorest in the country, to ‘get on their bikes’ and travel to where workers were urgently needed – in the factories and mills of the fast-growing industrial cities.

  Not everyone was altogether chuffed about this. The Duke of Wellington reckoned that it was a mistake to let common people start to stray from their home territory and that the railways would encourage the poor and the criminal classes to come to London – he felt the capital had enough of those already! The middle class and more genteel passengers were also none too pleased at having to share their station platforms with the great unwashed. But once it started, there was no stopping the transport revolution. Some rail companies, which had always seen passengers as coming second to their main business of transporting goods in bulk, quickly realised that passenger transport was bringing in twice as much revenue as freight. Rather than invest in expensive new rolling stock for Third Class, however, they simply did away with Second Class, rebadging the Second-Class carriages as Third Class. Regular Second-Class passengers were horrified at first, seeing this as an affront to their social status, but by all accounts they soon got used to the situation. They had little choice. People were now coming to rely on the railways rather than seeing them as an entertaining novelty.

  The trains themselves improved enormously as the rail network expanded across the country. The first toilets appeared on trains in the 1860s (most people at that time didn’t even have one indoors at home), there were sleeping cars on longer routes by 1873 and you could tuck into a proper meal in a dining car by 1879. By the end of the nineteenth century, trains were travelling the length and breadth of the country at speeds of up to 70mph. The rail network boasted almost 40,000 tunnels and bridges, including the great bridges over the River Tay, the Forth and the Severn.

  THE MEN WHO REALLY BUILT THE RAILWAYS

  The rail network had been laid at an unbelievable pace, and that was down to a group of remarkable men: surveyors and engineers like Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who planned and designed the Great Western Railway (GWR – people called it God’s Wonderful Railway) linking London to Bristol; and Robert Stephenson who engineered the London and Birmingham Railway. Brunel, Stephenson and others are remembered as the architects of the railways, but the men who actually built the railways were the ‘navvies’.

  The word ‘navvy’ is a short form of the word ‘navigator’ and the navigators were the workmen who dug or ‘navigated’ the canal system in the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century, navvies were the men working on the railways. These were not educated men like the surveyors, architects and engineers. They were raw, strong blokes who worked with picks, shovels and wheelbarrows. Power tools and mechanical diggers were still in their infancy and were not as reliable as the brute force of the navvies. What the navvies achieved is the most easily overlooked accomplishment of the railway boom. You can’t run a railway without rails – it’s in the name, after all – but the rails are the part of the railway that most of us really do take for granted. They’re not glamorous like a steam locomotive or pretty like a country station, but they do have an elegant beauty all of their own. It’s the never-ending symmetry, the perfect curves and the parallel lines that sweep off into the distance. I don’t suppose everybody appreciates that, but I get it, and I know there are plenty of others who do, too. Unlike the steam locomotives and so many of the pretty country stations, we are still using the basic tracks that the navvies laid when we travel by train today. Their hard graft is there for all to see.

  The work rate of the navvies was mind blowing. Every man would shovel 20 tons of muck or ballast a day. When they first started out as navvies, they might not be physically strong enough to keep up and would work only half a day so that they didn’t drop from exhaustion. It could take up to a year before a man regularly took on full shifts as a navvy – it was a dangerous enough job without working yourself to death. At least three men were killed every day building the railways and one of the most notorious casualty sites was at the Woodhead Tunnels that were dug through the Pennines between 1837 and 1852 to link Manchester and Sheffield. At one time there were 1,500 men working on the three-mile-long tunnels and when a doctor, Henry Pomfret, visited Woodhead he reported that he
had discovered twenty-three cases of compound fractures, seventy-four simple fractures, over a hundred cases of serious burns from blasting – and thirty-two deaths. On top of this, the navvies lived in a shanty town out on the moors and an outbreak of cholera in 1849 caused a further twenty-eight deaths. It was said that a man had more chance of being killed working on the Woodhead Tunnels than he did at the Battle of Waterloo.

  It was normal for the navvies to live in a collection of ramshackle huts close to where they were working. These shanty towns followed the rail lines and the navvies slept twenty to a shed. They paid a penny-a-night for a bed and a penny-a-week to sleep on the floor, and that came out of a wage that might be five shillings a day. For those of you, like me, who know only our modern decimal currency, there were twelve pennies in a shilling and twenty shillings in a pound. That meant that, in the middle of the nineteenth century, a navvy was reasonably well paid. Yet no one, except perhaps the local publicans, wanted them coming into their towns and villages to spend their wages. When the railway workings approached a town and the navvies were in the area, police leave was cancelled. Navvies consumed two pounds of beef, two loaves of bread and ten pints of beer a day. It wasn’t exactly an athlete’s diet, but it was certainly the kind of high carbohydrate intake that they needed to do the work that they did. If they went on what they called a ‘randy’ – a drinking spree that might last a couple of days – the beer intake went through the roof, work on the railway ground to a halt and the local town descended into a shambles of drunkenness and brawling.

  To us nowadays, that sort of behaviour is simply unacceptable, but you can understand why the navvies notoriously acted this way. There were 250,000 of them working on the tracks at the height of the railway boom – more men than there were in the army and the navy combined – and they were just as expendable as the lowliest infantryman. The railway owners didn’t care how many men died: they just wanted their railway built, and built as quickly as possible. Because the navvies never knew when their number would be up, they treated every day as if it were their last. At the end of their gruelling shift, they were down the pub, if they could get to one, making the most of the fact that they had survived another day working on the railway. The pub, as it happened, might well be where they gathered to collect their company wages. As likely as not, the pub would be also owned by the same company and happily accepted the men’s wages back over the bar!

  For all the drinking, the navvies’ work rate was legendary. European railway companies tried to tempt British navvies abroad by offering them up to twice the wages they could earn at home. Their skills were in great demand: the navvies didn’t just dig, they also knew about tunnelling, how to prop up the roof, how best to blast or dig different kinds of rock or soil and how to lay the rails sweet and level.

  TIME TO GET MY HANDS DIRTY

  I joined a track-laying gang on the Severn Valley Railway to get a taste of at least part of what a navvy’s job was like. The Severn Valley Railway is a hugely popular heritage route that operates sixteen miles of track in Shropshire and Worcestershire following the valley between Bridgnorth and Kidderminster. This was where I really learned about the railways, working with some real enthusiasts who put an enormous amount of work into preserving and restoring the line, the rolling stock and the stations. They’ve turned the railway into a little slice of the past. When I was there they also arranged for the sun to shine, which made it all the more magical.

  I was to spend quite a bit of time with the people who run the Severn Valley Railway and worked for a whole day with the track gang relaying a section of track to remove a hump. This was proper hard graft – hammering, lifting, carrying and digging. Each length of rail weighs one ton and manoeuvring it into place was no easy task. Then we had a train come past while we were working: a klaxon sounded and everyone cleared off the track sharpish. I picked up the tools I was using, gave the rail one last knock and then heard someone shouting, ‘Get off the track, Guy!’ I thought that I had all the time in the world, but it was explained to me that a train can’t stop or swerve to avoid me if I’m on the track in front of it. All it would take would be for me to stumble or trip, maybe a slight panic wondering which way to jump, and they’d be picking up bits of me for hundreds of yards down the line. A navvy didn’t only have to worry about being blown up, buried, crushed or killed by cholera – he could easily be run over as well. Lesson learned.

  Working with the track gang was hard graft but I enjoyed it, and when I’m enjoying myself like that I do sometimes tend to natter on a bit. I had a radio microphone attached so that I could describe what we were doing for the film crew, but it’s easy to forget that you’re wired for sound. Levering rails into place and hammering in the retaining clips, I said something along the lines of, ‘By heck, much more of this and I’ll have muscles on me shit!’ It was then that the TV director’s voice boomed out, ‘Guy! Could you please use a phrase that’s a little less colourful?’

  It took fifteen of us in the track gang all morning to lay about 60 feet of track. Back in 1869, eight Irish navvies went over to America and laid ten miles of track in twenty hours. The Irishmen had a few Chinese labourers working for them, but that’s still some going. I don’t think that our track gang could keep up with the hardcore navvies of the nineteenth century. In the novel To Kill A Mockingbird, the lawyer Atticus Finch says, ‘Never judge a man until you have walked a mile in his shoes.’ I don’t think I came close to walking a mile in a navvy’s shoes – a yard or so maybe.

  The people at the Severn Valley Railway were able to show me what it was like for all sorts of workers on the railways, not just the navvies. In 1851, there were fifty-five women and around 54,000 men working on the railways. How many is that really? Well, you wouldn’t get them all in a phone box, but neither would they fill Wembley Stadium. Ten years later, there were enough men (and 160 women) to fill Wembley – and the capacity there is 90,000. These weren’t navvies, but they were railway workers. So what were their jobs?

  GOING LOCO

  If you’re building a railway, once you’ve got your tracks in place, the next thing you need is a steam locomotive. Dozens of companies throughout Britain built steam locomotives, from Nielson and Company in Glasgow to Peckett and Sons in Bristol, although the different railway companies eventually had their own workshops building, maintaining and repairing their locos. Today, the Severn Valley Railway (SVR) has more than two dozen such locomotives, some of which are on display and some of which are undergoing restoration: they generally have about six locos in full working order.

  The Severn Valley Railway offered me the chance to help carry out some of the restoration and repair work required to put one of these locomotives back on the rails.

  At Bridgnorth, where the SVR’s main locomotive workshop is, I was introduced to 5164 – no fancy name or anything, just a number – a 140-ton legacy of the steam age. It was every small boy’s dream, to have a steam loco to play with, but she was looking a bit sorry for herself when I first saw her. I felt really proud that I was going to help lick her back into shape. 5164 is a Large Prairie Class or GWR 5101 class engine that was the backbone of God’s Wonderful Railway, used on local passenger services all over the network. More than 200 of them were produced at GWR’s Swindon engine works between 1903 and 1949 and they stayed in service until 1965. It’s a real novelty when we see a steam engine on a railway line nowadays, isn’t it? It’s hard to believe that up to the end of the 1960s, almost every train was pulled by a steam locomotive. Steam powered the railways for over 140 years.

  In order that I could understand all of the jobs that were carried out on an everyday basis when 5164 was in service, I started out on the bottom rung of the ‘engine’ ladder, as an engine cleaner. The engine cleaners were the lowest of the low and they had the dirtiest of jobs. One of the lads at Bridgnorth – everyone called him ‘Monkey’ – showed me the ropes. We had to flush out all of the gunge that had accumulated in the steam pipes in the boi
ler and in the air tubes that run through the boiler. It’s a regular maintenance job and would have been done after the engine had come out of service and after it had cooled down. You have to wash out all the muck and limescale – the same sort of stuff you get bunging up your kettle. This was the donkey work.

  It’s dirty work. The lads doing this in the 1860s, when navvies were earning five shillings a day, were on just ten shillings a week and if you didn’t do it properly, you were sacked. A train would come in at night and had to be made ready to go back out in the morning again. The engine cleaners would work a twelve-hour shift and during the winter, when the temperatures dropped, the metal parts of the train got so cold that in the morning they would find lads frozen to the train. It gets cold in my garage when I’m working on trucks but I’ve never yet been found frozen to one in the morning. We don’t know we’re born with our cushy jobs nowadays, do we?

  We used a petrol-soaked rag torch on the end of a wire to inspect the waterways inside the boiler, poking it through inspection holes and peering in to look for blockages. I was shown how to use a little hand mirror so that I could check areas that I couldn’t see directly, and was surprised at how little corrosion there was. On the inside, most of the pipework looked like the day it was put in. It turned out I had only been playing at engine cleaning so far. Monkey then showed me how to crawl inside the actual firebox, where they shovel in the coal, and use a ‘stay testing hammer’ to bash all the stays or rivets, and check that they are sound. The boiler on an engine like 5164 has two metal skins to contain the steam pressure and these are riveted together with hundreds of rivets. When you give the rivet a bash, there is a distinctly different, flatter, lower ring to a broken rivet. You are allowed just two broken rivets in a firebox and 5164 only needed a couple to be replaced before her boiler was passed fit for service.