Joseph Locke

by Anthony Burto

  Once again Locke was the Chief Engineer and Brassey his contractor. It should all have been fairly straightforward but the work did involve the construction of a tunnel at Fareham. This was built through clay and just before the planned opening in July 1841 a major landslip occurred. Repairing the damage was severely hampered by long periods of heavyrain and, in spite of the best efforts of Locke and the contractor, the opening was delayed until November of that year. However, the works had still not stabilised, and a further landslip caused a closure and a reopening in February 1842. It was an embarrassment to Locke, who prided himself on bringing in his work on time and on budget, but the consequences for Brassey were even more severe. He was, as ever, prepared to stick by the terms of his original contract, and as a result was almost made bankrupt. The station at Gosport was a very grand affair, and from there passengers could take a chain ferry across the water to Portsmouth.

  The completion of the railway provided a great boost for the docks at Southampton. Paddle steamers were now making the crossing to Le Havre and the opening of a brand new dock in 1843 brought more deep-sea shipping to the port. It was a development aided by Locke’s work – and in the near future he would also be a beneficiary. In the meantime, there were other lines in Britain demanding his attention.

  Chapter Seven

  THE GREAT TUNNEL

  Many schemes were being proposed in the years following the success of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, one of which, for a line linking Manchester to Sheffield, has a history that goes back even further in time. This was always going to be a problematical route, as a glance at an Ordnance Survey map will easily demonstrate. The two towns, not at that date cities, are separated by the Peak National Park, a sparsely populated region of the Pennines dominated by high, peaty moorland. The first proposed line was set out by the man of the moment, George Stephenson. It avoided the worst of the high ground, the bleak expanses of Hallam and Burbage Moors, by taking a route to the south via Hathersage. Even so, the line as laid out contained 6½ miles of tunnels in a 43-mile route and several gradients that could only have been worked by stationary engines and cable haulage. In spite of the difficulties, an Act for the Sheffield & Manchester Railway was obtained in 1831, authorising capital of £530,000. There was widespread criticism of the whole concept and the scheme had to be abandoned.

  In 1835 a group of prominent citizens from Sheffield, Manchester and the towns of Ashton-under-Lyne and Stalybridge, headed by Lord Wharncliffe, revived the idea and formed a new company, the Sheffield, Ashton-under-Lyne and Manchester Railway. Charles Vignoles was invited to provide plans for a new route and Locke was also involved, though it was mainly in order to offer a critique of the senior engineer’s work. Vignoles’ route was described in the document put out by the committee:

  It is intended that the station at Manchester shall be in or near Store Street, and from thence the Railway will proceed by Gorton, Woodhead, Ashton-under-Lyne (with a very short branch to Staley Bridge), Hyde, Glossop, Woodhead, Turleston, Penistone and Wortley to the Town of Sheffield.

  There was to be a 2-mile long tunnel under the Pennines and the whole line could be worked by locomotives. Locke basically approved the route, but had variations of his own to propose. There was a certain amount of bickering by the Committee, some of whom preferred Locke’s ideas to Vignoles’, which tried the patience of both men. Eventually, the route was finalised, with some changes. The line was now to be 40¾ miles long, with Glossop and Stalybridge now served by branch lines. The most important change was the lengthening of the summit tunnel, which was to be extended from 2 miles to 3 miles, reducing the summit level to 943 feet and ensuring that gradients on the main line could be kept no steeper than1 in 120. The need for stationary engines had gone: the whole route could now be worked by locomotives.

  Locke’s report had been far-sighted, pointing out the advantages of having a line that would promote the development of the rich and extensive South Yorkshire coalfield: ‘the great, I may say the greatest, unworked coalfield in England.’ He also envisaged an eventual extension eastwards towards the Humber, bringing grain from Lincolnshire to the rapidly developing industrial towns of northern England and allowing manufactured goods to be sent to the east coast.

  Vignoles’ report was a model of clarity and utterly convincing in its arguments. He pointed out that it was essential that the Chief Engineer should have the complete backing and trust of the investors, and that this was particularly necessary when the route contained imposing viaducts and the longest railway tunnel yet planned. But, he also pointed out that seeing a job well and efficiently done was as much in the engineer’s interest as anyone’s: ‘he must build up his reputation as much, if not more, upon the economy with which his designs may be executed as, than upon their merits. In this country, an Engineer’s Career in his profession depends mainly on the success of the works as commercial enterprises.’ This was a statement with which Locke would have wholeheartedly agreed: he built his entire career on just such a premise. Vignoles then went on to lay out in detail how he proposed to proceed with the work.

  First of all, he said, the whole line had to be laid out ‘with geometrical accuracy’ and for that to be done in the wild countryside of The Peak would probably take a year. After that, the lengthy process of negotiating to purchase the land should begin and, while that continued, work should start on the great tunnel. As originally envisaged this was to be dug by sinking eleven shafts at equal intervals along the line, the deepest of which would be sunk 600 feet below the surface. He had consulted with local engineers from the Derbyshire lead mines and he was sure that they would cost an average of £500 per shaft, not counting the costs of any pumping engines that might be needed. There would, he declared, be no problem in attracting skilled workers:

  I conceive there will be no difficulty in the Country as there are many Gangs of Working Miners as will enable the whole number of shafts to be worked at once, first building huts on the Hills for the men; a measure absolutely necessary for the absence of all accommodation for them otherwise.

  He estimated that it would be possible to sink 7 yards a week and once the bottom level was reached, exploratory small tunnels could be worked to determine the nature of the ground. The final optimistic forecast was that once the shareholders who had raised the initial finance saw how well things were progressing, there would be no trouble finding the funds to complete the work.

  He also forecast that locomotives would be found ‘which will be able to travel with four or five passenger carriages, averaging 18 or 20 passengers each between the two great Towns in about two hours and a half’, while goods trains could haul 60-ton loads in three and a half hours. As the first plan only called for a 2-mile tunnel, the trip through would only take ten minutes and the whole tunnel would be lit by lanterns to make it less terrifying. It all sounded wonderfully logical, but somehow or other the potential investors remained largely unmoved. In order to get work started, Vignoles bought a large body of shares himself and persuaded friends and relatives to invest, while standing surety for them. He did so on the basis of a verbal understanding with Lord Wharncliffe, the company’s Chairman, that if extra funds were needed, there would be no further call on his shares or those of his associates. All his optimistic forecasts and intentions were to fail to materialise.

  Work finally got under way on 1 October 1838, with the ceremonial cutting of the first sods at a site near the western entrance to the proposed Woodhead tunnel. The first sod was cut by Lord Wharncliffe, the next by Vignoles and then the rest of the directors took their turn with the spade. According to the report in the Manchester Guardian, ‘The ladies, whom the difficulty of descent prevented them forming part of the group, witnessed this ceremony from a neighbouring knoll, and appeared much amused with the awkward performance of some of the Directors and young men.’ It was arguably the last amusing event to occur on that windswept moor.

  As funds were scarce, to save time it was decided to
build a first tunnel to take a single track. It would be just over 3 miles long, and work would be carried out from just five shafts, the deepest at 600 feet and with an average depth of 450 feet. Work could also start from the portals at either end. Once the shafts were sunk, twelve teams of men could be used, two working in either direction from the bottoms of the shafts and the remainder working inwards from the ends. With such large gaps, good surveying techniques were essential if the different sections were to meet, something which both Locke and Vignoles were acutely aware of from their work on the Liverpool & Manchester tunnels.

  As anyone who has ever walked the Peak District in winter will know, conditions can be extremely harsh, hence Vignoles’ insistence that the men should be provided with properly built huts. It never happened. Instead, the Company reluctantly sent tents to relieve the men, who at first were sleeping out in the open. Contracts were handed out, but on a piecemeal basis. The Company was reluctant to release funds, largely because the coffers were low from lack of subscriptions. Work stuttered on, instead of proceeding in the speedy orderly manner anticipated by the Chief Engineer. Progress was not helped by the fact that there were three committees representing the interests of the two termini and one on the middle. They argued among themselves and interfered with the engineering: it was not unknown for a committee member with no engineering experience whatsoever to arrive at the tunnel workings and give orders to the men, contrary to the engineer’s instructions. Not surprisingly, it was soon necessary to make a call on the existing shareholders for more money.

  In spite of the agreement with the chairman, Vignoles was asked to make further payment on his shares. He appealed to Lord Wharncliffe for help and offered to relinquish his existing shares, provided that the matter was then declared closed. Wharncliffe agreed, pointing out that he was being asked to find a further £140,000 over and above his initial investment: ‘I know that gentleman can no more pay that than I can pay the national debt.’ On 15 May 1839, Vignoles retired. In his diary he wrote: ‘Thus ends my connection with the Sheffield & Manchester Railway, after great attention bestowed on it for nearly four years, and having sustained on its account, in one shape or another, an actual loss of £10,000 in hard monies.’ Worse was to follow: the Company sued him for the call on his shares and he lost the High Court action. ‘Good God!,’ he wrote, ‘that men whom I have served so faithfully, and for whose railway I had done so much, should act like this!’ Lord Wharncliffe did the honourable thing and also resigned from the Company that had behaved so shoddily.

  There was now only one obvious candidate to take over the work: Joseph Locke. Given his well-known aversion to tunnels in general, he must at least have had some doubts about taking on the biggest of them all and one that had to be built in a terrible environment. Nevertheless, he accepted the challenge and duly took over as Chief Engineer. His first step was to rationalise the haphazard system of letting out the works to a series of small contractors. The work on the tunnel was divided between two contractors: Richard Hattersley was given the western end and Thomas Nicholson the eastern. The Resident Engineer, William Purdon, who had worked for Vignoles, was kept on in his job and was to be the only engineer who worked on the line from start to finish. The tunnel was notorious for the high rate of injuries and deaths among the navvies, and although the rate of injuries dropped after the new contractors took over it remained distressingly high: in all 32 men were killed, 200 were severely injured and a further 400 received minor injuries. The official records do not include those who suffered from serious and even fatal diseases, largely caused by the insanitary conditions in which the men were forced to live. Inevitably, the contractors had to offer higher wages than normal to persuade anyone to take on work at Woodhead.

  Locke had to take ultimate responsibility for the working conditions at Woodhead, but he faced a dilemma. He had already had to break the bad news to the cash-strapped committee that the original estimates for the tunnel were hopelessly low. Vignoles had allowed £106,000: Locke estimated the cost at £207,000. The only way the costs could be recouped was from revenue once the line was open. The pressure was on for Locke to finish the job both as quickly and as cheaply as possible. That was his prime consideration and these requirements had repercussions on the works at Woodhead.

  Conditions had been bad from the first. Devey described the first problem:

  The difficulties of getting provisions to the place proved almost as great as victualling Balaklava. There is no town of any description for ten miles off, and provisions having to be dragged up a steep acclivity could not be sold at any price the navvies could afford to pay. The contractors had to open shops of their own, and pay their men partly in food.

  Devey was more than a little disingenuous. A Manchester surgeon, John Robertson, visited the site in 1841, long after Locke had taken on overall responsibility, and reported in length on the conditions that he found. Far from offering food at prices the navvies could afford, the contractors were operating what were known as Tommy shops. The men were given tickets they could exchange for food, but prices were generally more than 50 per cent higher than those in Manchester. On site, potatoes, for example, that could be bought for eight pence a score, cost six pence more on site, an increase of 75 per cent. Matters were made even worse by the fact that the men were only paid once every two months – according to Devey again, this was to prevent ‘hebdomadal excesses’, in other words to prevent them getting drunk every week. But in practice, though the Tommy tickets for food were only issued at specified regular intervals, to ensure that all workers had enough to eat to keep their strength up, beer tickets were available at any time. Robertson discovered the pernicious effects of this system. A man could take a five-shilling ticket to the beer shop, where beer was available at sixpence a quart. He could get drunk and then be told he had spent all his ticket – as this would have meant he had consumed twenty pints it was unlikely to be true, but the unhappy man was in no condition to argue. Drunkenness was unquestionably a contributory factor to the accident rate, but it was not the whole story.

  The work itself was arduous and inherently dangerous. Most of the material through which the tunnel had to be bored was millstone grit, a form of sandstone, which as its name suggests was so hard that it could be used for grindstones in mills. The men had to drill holes into this tough material by hand, then pack the holes with gunpowder to blow the rock apart. In 1846, Parliament set up a Committee on the Conditions of Labourers, and among those who were examined was the Resident Engineer at Woodhead, William Purdon. There were two particular lines of questioning. The first dealt with the stemmers, which were used to pack the powder into the drilled holes, after which the ends were plugged with clay. At Woodhead, iron stemmers were used, and if in the process the iron hit the rock and caused a spark, there could be an instant explosion. An alternative was available, copper stemmers, but Purdon did not use them. The Committee took a dim view of this:

  ‘You thought, on the part of the company, that it was worth while running the risk of two or three men’s lives rather than go to the expense of more expensive tools?’

  ‘You must prove that any man’s life was lost.’

  The Committee then referred to a pamphlet produced by none other than the contractor Thomas Nicholson, and read out the following extract:

  ‘William Jackson, miner No.5 shaft. He was looking over John Webb’s shoulder, while he was stemming a hole charged with powder, when the blast went off, blowing the stemmer through Jackson’s head and killing him instantly.’

  To which the only reply Purdon could make, was: ‘the copper stemmers are very soft in the head, that they are objectionable.’

  The Committee then moved on to another aspect of blasting. To light the charge, the usual procedure was to insert a rod into the clay plug, withdraw it, fill the hole and create a trail of powder. The man given that task would light the trail then scamper to the shaft to be hauled out of harm’s way. Things did not always go according to
plan. In other evidence, the Committee heard how at Box tunnel and on the Great Western Railway, the cage had jammed in the shaft, and the man was just able to scramble out in time to shut off the powder trail before he was blown to smithereens. There was an alternative available, the safety fuse. This had been invented by William Buckford in 1831 and consisted of a varnished cord with a core of gunpowder that burned slowly and, more importantly, at a constant rate. The Committee suggested that this had to be safer than the method used at Woodhead, to which Purdon replied, ‘Perhaps it is, but it is attended with much loss of time, and the difference is so very small, I would not recommend the loss of time for the sake of all the extra lives it would save.’

  How far Purdon’s views represented those of the Chief Engineer we have no means of knowing, but Locke’s philosophy of the importance of moving work along as fast and as cheaply as possible, without actually jeopardising the engineering works, may well have played a part. The dangers from explosions were not the only perils faced by the tunnellers. Although gritstone predominated, the workers often ran into areas of loose shale, where rock falls were all too common. And whatever section was being worked, the conditions were bad. Water was a constant problem – Locke had to bring in more powerful pumps than had been allowed for in Vignoles’ plans. Even so, the floor of the tunnel was always thick with mud, through which the men had to struggle to remove the rubble. The men were required to work day and night, including Sundays, much to the disgust of the non-conformist ministers who made the trek up to the workings to do what they could for the men.

  In spite of all the difficulties, work on the tunnel was completed in December 1845. On the 20th, a party consisting of General Pasley, the Government Inspector of Railways, Locke and his staff and a group of directors made the first trip through Woodhead tunnel. The Manchester Guardian reported the event: