Fire and Steam (25 page)

Four years later there were two further accidents in quick succession, which led to renewed calls for action on railway safety. Both crashes were caused by the failings of trackmen working on the line. In the first, a train went off the rails on the Great Western at Rednal in Shropshire on 7 June 1865, killing thirteen, and just two days later at Staplehurst in Kent on the South Eastern, another derailment resulted in the loss of ten lives. This second accident added considerably to the pressure on the train companies because Charles Dickens was a passenger and not only ministered to the injured and dying but later became a high-profile campaigner for safety on the railways. Thanks to him, we also know far more than we would otherwise about the accident, which demonstrated the lack of any but the most rudimentary safety devices. Indeed, while the immediate circumstances of the crash may have been somewhat unusual, the accident highlighted the way that one simple mistake could lead to disaster if there was no back-up system – now a characteristic of the safety systems of all public transport. In other words, the railways relied on its workers to get it right every time, or else risk causing a major disaster.

In the case of Staplehurst, the hapless individual whose mistake led to the accident was the foreman of the track gang, one John Benge, whose men had to replace a timber on a small bridge that crossed a muddy stream. Astonishingly, they planned to carry out the work in an eighty-five-minute window of opportunity between scheduled trains. Benge made two mistakes and the events leading up to the disaster reveal the patch-and-mend nature of the railways at that time. First, he failed to check the train timetable properly. There were no normal services scheduled during that period but there was a boat train whose timings varied because it connected with a cross-Channel packet that could dock only at high tide. Its times were shown in the working timetable
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but Benge misread it, believing the train was due to arrive at 5.20 p.m. rather than 3.15 p.m. Secondly, he failed to instruct his men to place warning detonators on the line or to stand far enough from the bridge to be able to warn a train in time for it to stop. By the time Dickens' train arrived at 50 mph, the timbers had been replaced but not the track, and five of the carriages hurtled off the bridge into the stream.

Dickens, whose carriage fortuitously had not plunged into the ditch, immediately turned himself into a type of human St Bernard's. After ensuring that his mistress and her mother, with whom he was travelling, were all right, he grabbed his brandy flask and began administering it to the injured and dying. When the drink ran out, he returned to his compartment to get his other full bottle of brandy. While Dickens suffered no more than bruises and sprains, he never really fully recovered from the accident and died on its fifth anniversary, aged only fifty-seven. As L. T. C. Rolt puts it in his classic book on accidents,
Red for Danger
, ‘we cannot estimate the loss which English literature sustained as a result of John Benge's tragic mistake. Certainly he deprived us of the solution to the
Mystery of Edwin Drood.'
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Disasters were now occurring regularly, notably the awful derailment and consequent fire at Abergele in north Wales in August 1868 on the Irish Mail, which attracted attention not only because the death toll of thirty-three was higher than in any previous accident but also because among the victims were an aristocratic couple, Lord and Lady Farnham. The circumstances, too, were particularly horrific because the passenger train had hit trucks containing paraffin, which burst into flames on impact, and the dead had to be identified by their watches and jewellery.

Very slowly, safety was improving as a result of the hard lessons learnt from such accidents. While that process may appear to be somewhat callous, the development of safety procedures was an entirely new concept and it would have been impossible for an inspectorate to have imposed hard and fast rules from the outset. As ever, the railways were pioneers. Concepts like ‘fail-safe'
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and risk-assessment had simply not been developed, which is why fundamental mistakes were made which, with hindsight, created unnecessary risks. For example, many early signals, notably one controlling the entrance to Reading station in the 1840s, showed only a ‘proceed' aspect. The Reading signal was a ball hoisted up on a pole when the line was clear, which meant that the regulations were a double negative: ‘If the ball is not visible, the train must not pass it.' This was certainly a recipe for confusion but an understandable mistake to make because the railways had to work out from first principles how to deal with the safety problems posed by
transporting unprecedented numbers of people at unprecedented speeds. The series of disasters did prompt some action with the passing of two new regulatory Acts in 1871 and 1873, though they were exhortations rather than regulations, requiring companies, for example, to provide returns on the mileage of their lines that were protected by block, rather than time interval, signalling (as opposed to making the railways fit it as standard). The new legislation also empowered the Board of Trade to set up special courts of inquiry following an accident, but the emphasis remained on self-regulation rather than policing by an external body.

The 1871 Act did, belatedly, recognize that the staff were the group most at risk from the railways' activities. The statistics required by these new Acts reveal the shocking death toll of railway employees: in the five years up to the end of 1878, the railways killed an average of 682 of their workers
every year,
twenty times the number of passenger deaths. Astonishingly, the railways were the third most dangerous profession after mining and the Merchant Navy. Indeed, being a shunter in a busy yard was acknowledged by a parliamentary inquiry to be the most dangerous job in Britain,
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exacerbated by the onerous working conditions. Adrian Vaughan, an ex-signalman and author, cites the example of shunters at Didcot as late as 1891 who, according to time sheets in his possession, ‘routinely worked 14 hours day or night'.
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Given they worked six shifts weekly, this amounted to eighty-eight hours per week.

The staff were not just a danger to themselves. Long hours, lack of training and inadequate pay were universal and contributed to many of the fatal accidents on the railway. The poor fellow responsible for the 1861 Kentish Town accident described above was a nineteen-year-old partially deaf youth who worked a fifteen-hour day as a relief signalman for just 14 shillings a week. Even an experienced driver working for the Great Western in 1867 was earning just 42 shillings per week. They were the elite and other railwaymen were on far less. The investigation report of a head-on crash at Radstock on the Somerset & Dorset revealed that those involved were equally overworked and under-educated.
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The telegraph clerk, a boy of eighteen, was on duty from 6.30 a.m. to 9.30 p.m. for 17s 6d per week, and the signalman was a novice who could not read the telegraph instruments. The station-master worked from 5.30 a.m. to 6.30 p.m. and his boy assistant from 8 a.m. to 10.30 p.m.

This was not untypical. The working conditions set by the Liverpool & Manchester, outlined in
Chapter 2
, became pretty much the norm. As a chronicler of railway workers puts it, ‘since a highly successful and profitable railway was the end result, the practices of the Liverpool & Manchester were taken up by most of the early railways in Britain and overseas'.
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Railway workers were expected to work very long hours for what seemed like meagre wages. At the same time, working for the railways was perceived as an attractive job with wages above those offered in other large industries and well above the pay of an agricultural labourer. Not only did the railways offer long-term stable employment but, for the most part, the work itself was far more pleasant than, say, in a Victorian mine or a factory. Moreover, the low pay was often leavened with perks such as the cheap rental of a railway cottage: the policemen of the London & Birmingham could rent one at Wolverton for a mere 1s 6d but given that their shifts were routinely from 7 a.m. to 10.30 p.m., or 5.30 a.m. to 9.15 p.m., with no meal break, six days per week, they did not need many home comforts apart from a bed. Promotion might take years through the Buggins' Turn system but the prospect was enticing and it was hardly surprising that agricultural and other labourers who were used to a hand-to-mouth existence jumped at the chance of a permanent job on the railways, however long the hours.

From the beginning, the railway companies recruited extensively from the army and navy and created a uniformed service. Soldiers and sailors were accustomed to an even harsher discipline, since flogging was still routine in the forces, and were also used to dressing smartly. Farm labourers were able to take on portering jobs, which required considerable strength in manhandling goods and luggage. White-collar posts would be snapped up by anyone with a modicum of education and, during the 1840s and 1850s when expansion of the railways was at its fastest, there was the opportunity of rapid progress through the ranks for a junior clerk who could perhaps expect to run a small station after a few years. Employment practices were basic with new staff often taken on only after an interview with the board and training was on the job.

The companies almost completely shunned women. According to the 1851 census, there were just fifty-four female workers in the industry,
mostly gate-keepers. As Helena Wojtczak puts it eloquently in her history of railwaywomen: ‘The railways are imbued with maleness to their very core. Everyone connected with the creation and operation of railways was male: businessmen and financiers, architects and engineers, navvies and bricklayers, managers and operating staff.'
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That masculinity was also reinforced by the military-style uniforms. Level-crossing keepers were an exception because they could be taken on with no training, frequently on the death of a husband with whom they had shared the task anyway, and they did their job largely hidden from the passengers. There were a few tasks such as ladies' room attendants, which in Victorian society clearly could not be undertaken by men, but there were remarkably few female clerks, in contrast with several European countries where such jobs were routinely filled by women. It was not until the First World War that women en masse were considered for employment on the railways as it then became essential for them to replace the men who had gone to the front (see
Chapter 11
).

The railway companies' attitude to their workforce was a rather typical Victorian mix of paternalism and autocracy. On the Great Western, for example, staff who kept out of trouble and were good at their work received a bonus every six months. From 1847, a doctor on site was provided, though only the initial consultation for the administration of first aid was free.
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All Great Western staff were given cheap or free coal and apart from locomotive men who had to find their own white corduroy clothes – the poor womenfolk who had to wash these clothes must have been aghast at such a bizarre choice of colour – all other grades were supplied with a uniform, a practice that was typical of the better-run railways. The porters of the Great Western were decked out in an attractive green and wore an elegant glazed top hat, conferring immediate respectability on men from the most modest of backgrounds. Not surprisingly, these uniforms were a source of great pride for any new recruit and helped to create the sense of belonging that was deliberately fostered. The companies may have been authoritarian and considered that it was a privilege for the men to be ‘in service' but the corollary of that was that they inspired fierce loyalty – even when it was not merited. The companies divided and ruled through the increasingly Byzantine grading structure that was based
along military lines. There were different grades for every type of task and each job had its own promotion ladder, which was a great inducement for long service. Locomotive men, for example, started as cleaners then became ‘passed' cleaners, who were able to fire locomotives, then firemen and ‘passed' firemen who were permitted to drive occasionally but were still on relatively low wages. Then, at last, they became drivers but at first were confined to shunting engines around the yard or the occasional short goods run. It was only in their fifties that they would get the freedom of the rails and become one of the elite, driving passenger expresses around the country. In the same way, porters and ticket clerks could aspire, eventually, to become station-masters (and, if they were lucky, then enjoy progression to ever bigger stations) and telegraph boys might eventually qualify as signal inspectors. All this differentiation stimulated jealousy and rivalry between grades, which suited the employers as it ensured that strikes were normally confined to one group of dissatisfied men, making walkouts across the board difficult to organize and, consequently, rare.

Treatment of their employees varied too, with some companies taking a greater interest in the well-being of their workforce than others – but all were pretty ruthless in making workers redundant in bad times and in failing to pay compensation to those injured at work or to the relatives of those killed. The immediate assumption among the employers was that accidents were the fault of the employees and their cursory reports of incidents make cruel reading, such as these from the Caledonian railway: ‘Henry Hughes, platelayer, standing too close to a passing train at the Belmont Station, had his foot so severely crushed that death ensued; John Scott, pointsman, in the act of shifting points, lost his balance and fell under the wheels of a mineral train', and so on. For those who broke the rules, there was little mercy: drivers who went too fast were summarily sacked, as were porters who were rude to passengers, or policemen who fell asleep at work. Yet, shifts of sixteen or even eighteen hours a day, six days per week, were routine and the terms of employment were weighted heavily in favour of the employers, with overtime frequently not recognized but any time off immediately penalized. While a worker wanting to better himself elsewhere would have to give three months' notice, in the absence of any labour laws he
could be summarily dismissed if he transgressed or simply became surplus to requirements. The railways expected their ‘servants', an expression that was current right into the twentieth century, to do their bidding. The very word suggests that the companies treated their workers rather like the staff of a stately home, and they expected them to be like their children, well behaved, going to church and well turned out: ‘The object was to [create] a body of men with instinctive reactions of safety to train operating [a bit of a contradiction given the tiredness engendered by the long hours], willing to work where and when required, for as long as required, whose unquestioning loyalty could be taken for granted, but who could be sacked, fined or suspended for any infractions of the multitude of rules.'
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