How Britain Worked Read online

  The stationmaster would probably have to move several times during his career, with his earnings increasing as he took over larger stations and had more staff to manage. Winning a ‘Best Kept Station’ award was a major achievement for an ambitious stationmaster. His ultimate aim would be to snare the top job at Paddington Station, where he would have to wear a top hat and frock coat to work and meet members of the Royal Family passing through on a regular basis.

  I had a spell doing a spot of painting and weeding on the Severn Valley line and I have to admit that I preferred working on the engine. Keeping everything spick and span – including your own appearance – isn’t really my strong point, but it was a huge part of the stationmaster’s job. He was the public face of the railway and the railway companies were real public relations pioneers, persuading the whole country that taking the train was the only way to travel. The companies commissioned well-known artists to produce posters advertising holiday trips, something that was to become a huge part of the railway business.

  MAKING A POINT

  Another key player on any stretch of railway line was the signalman. These unsung heroes had one of the loneliest jobs; stuck out in a signal box for a twelve-hour shift, yet having to stay constantly alert. Their job, after all, was to pull levers to let engine drivers know whether it was safe to proceed. The levers were mounted on a lever frame inside the signal box (in the early days the signalman would have to trot between levers at different points on his stretch of track) and either changed the signal arms on signal towers at the side of the track, or operated points. Points were, and still are, moveable lengths of rail that can swing in and out of position on the track to guide the train into a siding or onto a different stretch of track. The signalman, whose job was deemed so important to the safe running of the railway that he had to sit a qualifying exam, be nominated by three company directors and appointed by two Justices of the Peace, was regularly required to work a seventy-two-hour week in his freezing signal box. Like other railway employees, he could be fined or sacked for the slightest misdemeanour and worked whatever shifts he was told to – all for the princely sum in the 1860s of about £1 per week.

  Despite the fact that as early as the 1860s, well-respected doctors were publicly testifying that overworking staff like signalmen would inevitably lead to them making mistakes through fatigue (sometimes with tragic consequences), it wasn’t until the industrial reforms of the early twentieth century that such key personnel were able to work sensible hours.

  CHANGING TIMES

  Sensible hours takes us on to yet another way that the railways changed the lives of people in Britain – railway time. Before the railways, accurate timekeeping didn’t really matter that much. Within your own town or village, you would go by the church clock or the town hall clock and if you arranged to meet someone at 12.00 p.m., that would be 12.00 p.m. by the church clock – local time. Because nobody really travelled very far from their home towns, nobody cared that it was midday in London but in Bristol it was only twelve minutes to twelve. There was no TV, no radio, no telephone and, until it started being introduced on God’s Wonderful Railway in 1839, no telegraph system.

  The arrival of the railways changed all that. It wasn’t only that if you didn’t know the time you would miss your train. Best case scenario, you would miss your train – worst case scenario, your train would have a head-on collision. In order to have trains running between cities safely, to a rigid timetable, on a sensible schedule, everybody had to agree what time it was. This sounds totally sensible, but it was revolutionary thinking back in the nineteenth century. Remember that there are huge differences in Britain at different times of year between when the sun rises and sets in the north and in the south. For years, people had lived their lives by the rising and setting of the sun and many objected to the railway companies deciding what the time should be. GWR eventually decided in 1840 that, when it was 12 p.m. at Greenwich (GMT) it was 12 p.m. everywhere. It took years for all the other railway companies to accept the idea, but it did become known as ‘Railway Time’. It wasn’t until 1880 that the government put its foot down and said, ‘Look, none of this mucking about, when it’s 12 p.m. in London it’s 12 p.m. everywhere.’ Then everyone in Britain had to keep the same time. Yet Britain was the first country in the world to decide to adopt one standard time.

  By 1880, the telegraph system had spread along the railway lines and that linked everywhere with London and GMT. Engine drivers, however, needed to know whether or not they were running on time and there was no way they could have a telegraph machine on the footplate. Instead, they carried the most accurate pocket watches of their era. I went to take a look at one in a workshop where antique watches are repaired and restored and was allowed to help adjust it. It was running fast, so it needed to have tiny weights screwed onto a flywheel cog that was part of the mechanism to slow it down.

  I’ve got hundreds of screwdrivers and tools for my work but I don’t have anything that would have fitted the delicate little screw heads I had to work on. I had to use watchmakers’ micro tools and for someone who’s used to working on trucks and had just been working on massive great steam engines, I suddenly felt like the clumsiest creature on the planet. I was like a giant trying to pick up single grains of sand with his fingers, except I couldn’t actually use my fingers: not just because of the grease and oil that’s usually caked on them, but because the cogs and gears in the watch were so delicate that the sweat from your hands could corrode them. You have to use tweezers and special tools to dismantle an antique watch, and I was warned that with something as old as this it only takes a second to destroy it. As if I wasn’t nervous enough already! I could hardly stop my hands shaking.

  I had to strip the watch down so that extra washers could be added to the balance mechanism. These were tiny, tiny washers the size of a pinhead, kept in a test tube like some kind of alien insect. You have to pick them up with a special screwdriver attachment: it was all so intricate and I was concentrating so hard that I had to remind myself to breathe. The two little washers seemed to weigh nothing to me, but they made sure that the watch was running sweetly and the only thing that I really did wrong was having oily truck mechanic fingers that left marks on the dial. These were cleaned off by rolling a piece of Blu-Tack® across it, so all was well in the end. It’s amazing how careful a Victorian engine driver must have been with such a timepiece, especially when his whole world was full of grease and oil and soot and coal dust.

  WHISTLING FOR IT!

  Now that I had a shovel and a watch (actually, I used my own rather than risk an antique) I was finally ready to serve on the footplate of 5164. The old girl herself, though, still needed one last touch before she could leave Bridgnorth: a whistle. It is illegal for an engine to set out along a railway without some kind of whistle, horn or other highly audible, unmistakable warning device.

  The steam whistle, so the story goes, was first introduced in 1833 after an accident on a level crossing between Bagworth and Thornton in Leicestershire. Engine driver Martin Weatherburn smashed his engine, Samson, into a cart carrying hundreds of eggs and fifty pounds of butter: it made quite an omelette! Weatherburn himself was in serious trouble over the incident, despite the fact that no one was hurt. In those early days, the railway owners took a very dim view of anything that brought bad publicity and might affect business. It was all very well for navvies to die while the railways were being built, but accidents on a railway that was open to passenger and freight traffic would discourage people from using the service – and that meant less profit.

  Weatherburn claimed that he had sounded his horn – he would have blown a horn like the ones they used for fox hunting – but either the cart driver hadn’t heard him or just ignored it. Actually, the cart driver might have thought he had plenty of time as he probably didn’t have a clue about steam engines or how fast they could move. As it happened, Weatherburn’s father was good friends with George Stephenson, who discussed the matter with
the railway company’s directors. They all agreed that a better warning sound was needed, preferably steam powered to make it really loud.

  Stephenson visited a musical instrument maker in Leicester. He worked with him to produce a steam trumpet that was demonstrated to the company directors just ten days later. The steam trumpet was about eighteen inches long with a mouth about six inches wide and worked well enough for the directors to approve it for installation on all of their locomotives. The idea quickly caught on: different types of whistle were developed and it soon became compulsory to sound them under certain circumstances, such as approaching a level crossing.

  The whistle for 5164 was made from scratch from plans for a GWR whistle dated 1930, so it was pretty much spot on in terms of being from the right period. It was different from Stephenson’s steam trumpet in that pulling a lever opened a valve that let steam into a brass cup, from where it escaped via a thin opening up into an elongated bell. The steam alternately compressed or rarefied in the bell, all of which produced the vibration and resonance that created the sound.

  The final part to be made was a nut that screwed onto the top of the whistle and held it all together. Even making this one small component needed a horrendous amount of preparation to set up the milling machine for total accuracy. Working out the exact cutting speed required took a lot of maths: that was never my strong point but I had a Bridgnorth engineer called Tom to help me. A few sums and several cups of tea later, our nut came out perfectly and polished up a treat. It was just the job for the top of the whistle.

  FULL STEAM AHEAD

  Once we had fitted the whistle on top of 5164, we were finally ready to set off for the old girl’s first day out in a long while. We had a passenger roster of specially invited guests, mainly friends and relatives of the Severn Valley Railway team, and I couldn’t get over how excited they all were. From the oldest among them, who could remember when steam power ruled the railways, to the smallest kids, they were all bubbling over. You don’t get that on the 8.45 to Waterloo! People love steam trains. I think it’s because they seem almost alive, like great, big fiery monsters – friendly monsters, though. If the passengers were all excited, and they were only riding in the lovely old carriages, I was on cloud nine. Not only was I to have a go as a fireman but this was also to be my first train-driving lesson! When I climbed up onto the footplate, it all felt a bit familiar. I’d been up there before, when I climbed inside the firebox, but this seemed familiar in the way that climbing into the cab of a truck is familiar. We were about to take this massive machine for a spin, after all. It’s only when you reach the locomotive’s cab that you immediately see there is no steering wheel. Suddenly it’s not quite so familiar after all...

  The thing that really strikes you when you’re on the footplate of a steam locomotive, all fired up and ready to go, is the smell. It’s a lovely mixture of warm oil and grease and the smell of a roaring coal fire. My first job was to feed the fire, using my wrought-iron shovel. It’s hot work shovelling coal into a furnace like that, especially when you’re using a shovel made from solid wrought iron. Looking back, we might have done well to put a wooden handle on the thing, because you really felt the weight of it when the blade was piled with coal. While I was shovelling, enjoying the hard graft and nattering away, wired for sound with everything I said going straight back to the director’s earphones, I said something like: ‘By heck, much more of this and I’ll have muscles on me...’

  ‘GUY!!!’

  When it came to driving 5164, I was feeling a bit nervous. The old girl had only just gone back on the rails and I didn’t want to do her any damage. On the other hand, I wasn’t up there all by myself and the Severn Valley guys weren’t about to let me wreck their pride and joy! Apart from anything else, there were too many gauges and dials for me to take in all at once. Any steam loco in passenger service had controls that operated everything from the cylinder drain cocks (these allow any water from condensed steam sitting in the cylinders to be blown out in a cloud of steam as the locomotive starts to move) to the steam-heating pressure valve, which fed steam to heating pipes in the train carriages.

  The controls that I needed to concentrate on were as follows: the brake valve (you have to apply the brakes really gently to avoid locking the wheels); the regulator, which controls the flow of steam to the cylinders and is, basically, the accelerator; and the screw reverser. You have to be as gentle with the regulator as you do with the brake valve for completely the opposite reason: too much steam too fast will have the wheels spinning. The screw reverser, meanwhile, controls how far the pistons travel and which side of the piston is supplied with steam. If you have that turned the wrong way you could easily set off backwards instead of forwards!

  I don’t think that I did too badly on my first outing as an engine driver. I did briefly spin the wheels slightly once, but I don’t think anyone noticed. Well, no one except the Severn Valley lads, the film crew and most of the passengers! All in all, we had a fantastic day for our run along the Severn Valley Railway, riding in a beautifully restored tribute to Britain’s past industrial achievement, calling at lovingly maintained, nostalgic stations and steaming through gorgeous countryside in glorious sunshine. I even managed to heat up my shovel in the firebox to fry up a traditional, engine driver’s bacon-and-egg sandwich on the hot blade. That’s what I call a heck of a day out.

  The answer is the machine age, spawning new industries that were drawing workers into the towns from the countryside just as the machines were also depriving those in the countryside of work. Britain’s great Industrial Revolution was sweeping the people off the land and into the factories, and these factories were predominantly in the north.

  Before the factories were built, there was no such thing as mass production. Instead there were ‘cottage industries’, where people would be making things at home or in a workshop. The village blacksmith, for example, would make and repair all sorts of things from horseshoes, spades and nails to plough blades, hooks, hammers and swords. A local weaver would have a handloom set up in his own house, producing cloth from wool that would be produced nearby, and spun into yarn even closer to home – perhaps by his wife. Before the factories the majority of people in Britain weren’t involved in manufacturing, they were primarily employed in agriculture... working on the land.

  Throughout the course of the eighteenth century, farmworkers had seen different machines make their jobs redundant. It was when the threshing machine came along in 1784, however, that they really started to feel they were being squeezed out. Threshing – the process of separating harvested grain from the stalks and husks – had always been labour intensive. It was hard graft, but proper work for farm labourers. The threshing machine, though, could do the whole job more quickly and more efficiently than even the most experienced gang of farm workers. When portable steam engines (and later self-propelled traction engines) came along to power the threshing machines, it was the beginning of the end for mass employment in the countryside.

  Even before the arrival of the threshing machine, farm workers had been feeling the pinch as many of them had been accustomed to being able to keep a few animals themselves, to make ends meet. They grazed sheep or cows, kept geese or even grew their own food on common land, but between 1770 and 1830, more than six million acres of common land was taken from the ordinary people, snatched by rich landowners, who had been given the right to do so by Acts of Parliament – the Inclosure Acts. By enclosing common land, the lords of the manor and their wealthy tenant farmers gave the local populace no option but to work for them – and that gave the rich landowners even more control over working conditions and wages. The poor were getting poorer as the rich were getting richer.

  In 1830, the desperate situation of the farm workers led to the Swing Riots. Beginning in Kent in August, 1830, the riots had spread across the whole of southern England by the end of the year. The farm workers did not attack the landowners and burn their mansions, as you might expect, but in
stead directed their anger at the machines. In Kent alone, over a hundred threshing machines were destroyed. Threatening letters, often signed with the fictitious name ‘Captain Swing’, were sent to local farm owners and magistrates, demanding better wages. The tactics worked to a degree, but at a huge cost to the protesters: 2,000 were arrested, almost 650 were sent to prison, nearly 500 were sent to penal colonies in Australia, and nineteen sent to the gallows. Four years later, a group of farm workers in Dorset were arrested for forming a Friendly Society – basically a trade union – and refusing to work for less than ten shillings a week.

  The Tolpuddle Martyrs, as they became known, weren’t arrested for threatening anyone or for wrecking machinery; they were charged because a landowner discovered an old law that made it illegal for ordinary people to swear an oath to each other, and the union men had sworn to remain true to one another and their cause. Half a dozen men were transported to Australia to face hard labour, and though the men’s families and supporters collected 800,000 signatures calling for their release, it took two years for them to be set free.

  It’s no accident that these incidents took place in the south of the country, where farmers faced very little in the way of competition in the labour market. Up north, those who could no longer make a living working on the land were better able to find work elsewhere – in the new factories. Just as the spread of steam power was unstoppable, so the great exodus from the countryside to the cities was well underway.