The supposedly unexampled scenes of horror at the navvies’ camps were matched every night in the slums of Britain’s industrial towns, but railway-building did bring an, admittedly rather exaggerated, version of working-class reality into forcible contact with the respectable classes, who would never have gone near, say, Whitechapel. (The British rural middle-class underwent a similar culture-shock a century later when they received lice-ridden, ill-nourished evacuees from those same slums).
The first British navvies who ventured abroad were respected, rather than feared. ‘My God, how they work’, was the French comment on the 5,000 British navvies brought over to France by Thomas Brassey to work on the railway from Paris to Rouen. The other 5,000 navvies on the line spoke twelve other languages, from Erse and Gaelic to Polish. A lingua franca soon evolved, a third English, a third French, the rest made up from half a dozen different languages, flexible enough to be understood wherever railways were being built throughout Europe.
Further afield the refusal of many of the supervisors, especially the Irish and the Americans, to learn any foreign language could result in sheer farce. An observer watched Sam Norris, an American surveyor, trying to retain control of his local navvies in Costa Rica:
As I watched [old Sam] whistled, untied a huge red bandana handkerchief which he wore around his neck, waved it frantically a few times and then threw it on the ground with considerable violence along with his Stetson. Then he stamped on the handkerchief and hat, grinding them both into the dirt. I asked what was wrong.
He said, ‘Oh there’s nothing really wrong. I was just signaling my foreman. I don’t understand any Spanish and he only speaks a little English, so we have arranged a signal code. One long whistle means cut to the right, two means cut to the left, three means that the line is all right and four long blasts is to tell the gang to come to dinner.’
‘That’s all very well, but it doesn’t explain your removing your hat and handkerchief and stamping all over them.’
‘Oh, that’s a supplementary signal,’ Sam explained, ‘when I go through those motions it means that everything has all gone to hell, the work is all wrong, and that Cinforiano is to bring in the gang to get their time checks.’12
Everywhere the locals were afraid for the same reasons as the British, afraid for their womenfolk, afraid for their property values. The navvies on the line running north from Cape Town to Worcester drank deeply of Cape Smoke (the local firewater); they obtained it from wagons travelling north, which they would stone if they had run out of cash. They would then raid13 ‘Coloured and Hottentot locations … The aboriginals fought fiercely to retain their native brews and their womenfolk,’ and one poor Boer farmer complained that his property had fallen thirty per cent in value.
Chinese manpower conquers the Sierra Nevada mountains for the Central Pacific Railroad.
On the railway across the desert to Delagoa Bay in Mozambique, the navvies organised themselves in racially separate gangs. The Irish brigade, not surprisingly, were the most feared, though no individual Irishman on the line was as ferocious as another navvy, the legendary ‘Kentish Jim’ who, it was said, had once brained a man with a single blow of his fist. The gangs fought each other, and quite overwhelmed the wretched Portuguese police. The Irish brigade even hi-jacked the official train bringing the Portuguese governor and his retinue to the frontier with the Transvaal. By the time it arrived only broken chicken bones and empty bottles remained of the official banquet. At the coast the police kept the navvies’ usual haunt, ‘an inn of ill-repute’, under surveillance, but the navvies slipped out one by one and ransacked a gun-boat the Portuguese had sent to keep order. This last episode was unusual enough to be treated as an international incident.
Similar, unreported, fracas were equally frequent wherever railways were built, for railway camps made indifferent melting pots. Racial problems had dogged railway construction from the very beginning, since British navvies, not unfairly, believed that the Irish were undercutting them. But outside Britain the most frequent clashes were between the two very different races, the Chinese and the Irish.
The Chinese were suspect everywhere they went. Leland Stanford, the politician among the ‘Big Four’ who controlled California’s railways, had actively campaigned against what he called the ‘dregs of Asia’ and ‘that degraded race’. He forgot such epithets when he found how hard the ‘Celestials’ worked, much harder, indeed, even than Cornish miners on his Central Pacific Railroad. But the prejudice remained. In 1870 only two whites in the whole state were convicted, although ninety Chinese had been murdered that year.
The Central Pacific had to rely on immigrants because there was a desperate labour shortage in California. By contrast the Union Pacific, builders of the eastern half of the Transcontinental railroad, which also employed many Irishmen, could also choose from amongst a ‘crowd of ex-Confederates and Federal soldiers, mule skinners, Mexicans, New York Irish, bushwackers and ex-convicts, tens of thousands of Civil War Veterans and newly-liberated Negroes’.
The weirdest of all culture clashes occurred when a gang of French labourers on the Panama Railway suddenly stopped work one day, hoisted the tricolor, sang the Marseillaise and refused to discuss their grievances except in their native tongue, which foxed the Irish foreman. The company’s chairman, who could speak French, refused to negotiate except in English. The stalemate was resolved when he cut off their rations for a couple of days and the men went back to work, their grievance unknown and unresolved to this day.
The racial tensions were merely light relief from the danger inherent in the work itself. Samuel Smiles had noted how the labourers, ‘seemed to disregard peril. Indeed the most dangerous sort of labour – such as working horse-barrow runs, in which accidents are of constant occurrence – has always been most in request amongst them, the danger seeming to be one of its chief recommendations.’ Even in peaceful New England Henry Thoreau lamented how ‘every sleeper marks the death of an Irishman who died that the road might be built’.
In the mountains, when the line, often unapproachable even on foot, was being blasted from the solid rock, no one needed to exaggerate the dangers. Deaths from gunpowder, or rock falls, were routine, unreported. On the Erie Railroad:14
the pick of the Irish drilling crews were lowered in great wicker baskets from the high ledges and there suspended in mid-air while the tarriers drilled like devils, then tamped their powder into the holes, lighted the fuses, and yelled for the boys above to haul them up before the blasts let go. Lives depended both on the ropes and on quick response, and sometimes the ropes broke, again the windlass was slow. And then there was sure to be another wake …
On the Central Pacific the death rate was artificially increased by the unamiable Irish habit of exploding their blasts while the Chinese were still working in the cuttings beneath.
Tunnels were more dangerous than the steepest hillsides. Even today, with the most modern machinery, the most rigorous safety precautions, a dozen or more deaths can be expected on a major tunnel like that under the English Channel. In the nineteenth century the accidents were inevitably more frequent and deadly. Twenty-four workers died in a single accident on the Simplon tunnel, but the grimmest record was accumulated during the fifteen-year agony of building the Saint Gotthard:15
Some twenty five deaths and hundreds of casualties were reported each year due to accidental explosions from unignited cartridges, rock falls, train accidents, burst air-pipes etc. More serious, however, were the diseases induced by the wretched working conditions. Rock dust, explosive fumes, exhalations from men and animals, temperatures that at times rose to 122ºF caused numerous ailments, and an untold number of men died from ‘miner’s anaemia’. A man became incapable of working after three or four months; if he persisted, he died or became incapacitated for life. The tolls among animals was just as bad, about thirty horses and mules dying each month.
In the tropics natural conditions in the days before quinine were enough to p
roduce an even more frightening death rate. In South West Africa, ‘it was said that there was a dead man under every sleeper from Komatipoort to Nelspruit’. Fever was routine – indeed the contractor George Pauling’s doctor made a game of it, organising a daily pool in which every patient bet a shilling, the winner being the one with the highest temperature. It seems to have helped morale. As Pauling put it, ‘frequently several of the patients with temperatures of from 105 degrees to 107 or 108 were off their heads when their temperatures were taken, but with a falling temperature the first indication of incipient consciousness was an enquiry as to the result of the previous pool’.
The record for fatalities was probably set by the Panama Railway – at one point one worker in five was dying every month. They were a veritable foreign legion, known only by their nicknames or their number on a payroll. As a result the railway’s doctor, J. A. Totten, brother of the line’s engineer, found it difficult to dispose of the bodies. During the five years the railway was under construction he, ‘pickled the bodies in large barrels, kept them for a decent interval to be claimed and then sold them in wholesale lots to medical schools all over the world … the bodies brought high prices, and the profits from the sale of the cadavers made the railway hospital self-sustaining during the construction years’.16
The navvies’ only preventive medicine was hard liquor. ‘It could almost be said,’ wrote one observer, ‘that the Union Pacific was built on whiskey.’ In the famous song of Pat, ‘who worked upon the railway,’
In eighteen hundred and forty eight,
I learned to take my whisky straight,
’Tis an illegant drink and can’t be bate,
For working on the railway.
Pat was also typical in having a more or less faithful female follower:
In eighteen hundred and forty three,
’Twas then I met Miss Billy Macghee
An’ an illegant wife she’s been to me,
While working on the railway.
*
In eighteen hundred and forty-seven,
Sweet Billy Macghee she went to heaven,
If she left me one child she left eleven,
To work upon the railway.
Navvies even devised their own wedding ceremony. According to Terry Coleman, ‘At Woodhead [tunnel] in 1845, where 1,100 men were camped in shanty huts, they even had their own marriage ceremony which consisted in the couple jumping over a broomstick, in the presence of a roomful of men, assembled to drink upon the occasion, and the couple were put to bed at once, in the same room.’
Most railway sex, however, was casual. Generations of historians have dwelt with considerable relish on the ‘hells on wheels’, the mobile groups of saloons, whore-houses (and the occasional chapel) which housed the camp-followers of the armies of steam across the American prairies. Unfortunately for the prurient, the surviving photographs of these clusters of dens of iniquity show merely a few dusty shacks. Standing in front are a handful of unremarkable, if cross-looking, ladies, totally indistinguishable from their respectable contemporaries.
In East Africa the Indian coolies happily harnessed natives of both sexes for their sexual purposes, while British observers huffed and puffed about ‘dens of iniquity’ and ‘unnatural vices’. ‘Some tribes’, wrote Charles Miller, ‘were able to view the Indians’ sexual habits with a certain amused detachment … the Nandi, on the other hand, were not amused, and sought redress of their wrongs with the time-honoured tribal penalties of pillage and murder.’ (The Lunatic Express).
Inevitably, in a religious age, clergymen were obsessed by the need to bring the word of God to these obvious heathens. It was not easy. According to Samuel Smiles, ‘Robert Stephenson used to tell a story of the clergyman of the parish waiting upon the foreman of one of the gangs to expostulate with him as to the shocking impropriety of his men working on Sunday. But the head navvy merely hitched up his trowsers, and said, “Why, Soondays haint cropt out here yet.”’ Nevertheless one contractor, Sir Samuel Morton Peto, ensured that these ‘savages’ were given Christian instruction, books and lessons, gifts which did actually moderate their behaviour.
Peto was always an exception. Unlike most of his brethren he would not allow a company store to increase the contractor’s profits by monopolising the supply of food and, more especially, drink. In Britain there were a number of rather perfunctory efforts to outlaw the practice. The better employers, like Peto and Brassey, frowned on the practice, partly through benevolence, but also through enlightened self-interest. Their navvies were noticeably more loyal than the average, so they had the pick of the best men. But most of their fellow-contractors could not resist the chance of extra profit. As Pat complained,
Our boss’s name it was Tom King
He kept the store to rob the men,
A yankee clerk with ink and pen,
To cheat Pat on the railroad.
The bosses almost invariably had the upper hand, although the navvies’ wages never fell as low as those of unskilled factory workers. Migrant labour is notoriously difficult to organise, and the few recorded strikes seem to have ended within days – usually with the dismissal of the strikers – though the Chinese on the Central Pacific did get a pay rise on the one recorded occasion when they went on strike, a stoppage conducted with their habitual impeccable politeness. In general, though, protest was confined to songs. The last two verses of a famous railway song, ‘Drill, ye tarriers*, drill’, summed up the feeling of generations of navvies:
The new foreman is Dan McCann,
I’ll tell you sure he’s a blame mean man,
Last week a premature blast went off,
And a mile in the air went big Jim Goff.
When pay day next it come around,
Poor Jim’s pay a dollar short he found,
‘What for?’ says he, then came this reply,
‘You were docked for the time you were up in the sky.’
In the United States, where local labour was always expensive, it was the steam shovel, rather than the worker, which was given the name of navvy. But the human navvies’ work rate, their reliability, and the contractors’ perpetual shortage of capital ensured that they competed successfully with machinery. Even in Canada – where men had to be brought expensively from Britain and paid the, higher, local rates – the Grand Trunk used steam excavators only because labour was so short, and then only when faced with very hard material. In Britain the navvies retained their monopoly for a generation after technocrats would have used machinery, a tribute to their legendary qualities, which have never been surpassed. For the builders, like the monuments they left behind, were incomparable.
Samuel Smiles’s Navigators
In his Lives of the Engineers Samuel Smiles traces the navvies back to the canals – hence the term ‘navigators’ – to the Durham railways, and to the fen districts of Lincoln and Cambridge, where they had been trained to execute works of excavation and embankment.
‘Their expertness in all sorts of earthwork, in embanking, boring and well-sinking – their practical knowledge of the nature of soils and rocks, the tenacity of clays, and the porosity of certain stratifications – were very great; and, rough-looking though they were, many of them were as important in their own department as the contractor or the engineer.
‘During the railway-making period the navvy wandered about from one public work to another – apparently belonging to no country and having no home. He usually wore a white felt hat with the brim turned up, a velveteen or jean square-tailed coat, a scarlet plush waistcoat with little black spots, and a bright-coloured kerchief round his herculean neck, when, as often happened, it was not left entirely bare. His corduroy breeches were retained in position by a leathern strap round the waist, and retied and buttoned at the knee, displaying beneath a solid calf and foot encased in strong high-laced boots … their powers of endurance were extraordinary.
‘In times of emergency they would work for twelve and even sixteen hours, with o
nly short intervals for meals. The quantity of flesh-meat which they consumed was something enormous; but it was to their bones and muscles what coke is to the locomotive – the means of keeping up steam.
‘Working together, eating, drinking, and sleeping together, and daily exposed to the same influences, these railway labourers soon presented a distinct and well-defined character, strongly marking them from the population of the districts in which they laboured. Reckless alike of their lives as of their earnings, the navvies worked hard and lived hard. For their lodging, a hut of turf would content them; and in their hours of leisure, the meanest public-house would serve for their parlour.
‘Unburdened, as they usually were, by domestic ties, unsoftened by family affection, and without much moral or religious training, the navvies came to be distinguished by a sort of savage manners, which contrasted strangely with those of the surrounding population. Yet, ignorant and violent though they might be, they were usually good-hearted fellows in the main – frank and open with their comrades, and ready to share their last penny with those in distress. Their pay-nights were often a saturnalia of riot and disorder, dreaded by the inhabitants of the villages along the line of works.’
George Pauling
George Pauling, a throwback to the heroic days of railway contracting, flourished in Southern Africa in the last years of the nineteenth century. His regular backer and banker, Emile d’Erlanger, described how he was, ‘endowed with a physique that made light of any feat of strength and enabled him to defy fatigue or illness’ – even though Pauling admitted that in conditions of over 100 degrees heat he ‘was never able to reduce my weight below sixteen stone.’ (Rhodesiana July, 1968).
The World the Railways Made Page 24
