The University of Portsmouth History team’s Mike Esbester has recently had a co-authored open access article published, in Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal. It’s part of a special issue, marking the 50th anniversary of the Modern Records Centre (MRC) at the University of Warwick.
The MRC is the major repository for archives of trades unions and employers organisations, with a particular strength in transport collections. Mike has been using the MRC for his research for over 20 years.
Over the last five years the MRC has been an integral part of the ‘Railway Work, Life & Death’ project, as a collaborator and institutional co-lead, alongside the University of Portsmouth and the National Railway Museum. The project also works with The National Archives of the UK and the RMT Union. The project is looking at accidents to British and Irish railway workers before the Second World War.
Working with small teams of dedicated volunteers, the project is transcribing accident records and making them freely available for researchers to use, via the project website. So far the project has made available over 48,000 records, and the volunteers are working on a further 70,000 cases.
Page from a booklet, with text describing an accident, accompanied by a posed photograph, showing a fireman on top of a steam engine’s tender as it was moving, about to be struck by a bridge.
Given collaboration is integral to the Railway Work, Life & Death project, when the MRC wanted to mark its 50th anniversary in 2023, Mike and the project team were keen to be involved. Mike spoke about the project, alongside volunteer Cheryl Hunnisett and RMT President Alex Gordon. Having voices outside the traditional higher education setting was fundamental to the talk, another way of putting into practice the co-creative ethos of the project.
This has followed into the publication, ‘Collaboration in the Archive’. It looks at the Railway Work, Life & Death project and the MRC, reflecting on the project’s work, including the successes and challenges of working collaboratively. As a point of principle, it was co-authored. It features two of the project volunteers, Cheryl Hunnisett and Stephen Lamb, the MRC’s Senior Archivist James King, RMT President Alex Gordon, and Mike.
Just as importantly, in terms of reaching outside higher education, the article is open access, meaning it’s free to download!
Our own Dr Mike Esbester is co-lead of the Railway Work, Life & Death project at the National Railway Museum. This post from the project, written by co-lead Karen Baker, looks at the work of one of the project’s placement students, Connor Scott, who used the dataset to interrogate just how dangerous it was to work on the railways, with 23,000 accidents investigated by state inspectors between 1900 and 1939, including 504 deaths.
The data show that shunting accidents were particularly common, and the blog details how this has led to new displays at the museum to illustrate this for visitors. Another display shows a prosthetic leg made by the railway companies for use by a worker who lost his leg in a shunting accident. The fact that it was thought necessary to design a replacement leg, suggests there was a regular need: the dataset indicates 806 workers lost a body part(s) and 150 of these were shunters.
Artificial Leg. Source: The Wellcome Collection.
The project also worked collaboratively with colleagues at the Modern Records Centre at Warwick who were able to digitise their trades’ union accident records and share them with the NRM volunteers. These records show the human impact of accidents, the financial help received by wives and children from trades’ union funds, which provided an income when husbands/fathers were no longer able to work. This information will help contextualise and add human stories to objects in the collection, such as Laddie the Railway Collecting Dog, previously on display as an oddity, with no explanation of why he was important.
The University of Portsmouth is supporting a new PhD project looking at railway worker accidents and their wider impacts on those affected. The student will be drawing upon the RWLD dataset and the collections at the NRM and other institutions like the MRC.
In this post, Mike Esbester, Senior Lecturer in History, introduces the new dataset he’s been working on for the ‘Railway Work, Life & Death’ project. He shows the working behind the data and what’s in it – including why a book of legal cases reveals so much about one of the most dangerous industries of its time. You can find the all the project data here.
Back in February 2019 the ‘Railway Work, Life & Death’ project took part in Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine’s ‘Transcription Tuesday’ event. This made a primary source available digitally – scans of a volume detailing a railway trade union’s legal cases between 1901 and 1905 – and invited anyone, from anywhere in the world, to transcribe as little or as much as they fancied. We didn’t know what sort of a response we’d get, but we were delighted at what happened. The volume, of something over 2,000 entries, was complete by mid-afternoon on the day of the event! The volunteers were excellent, and did really good service: it would have a very long time for just one person to do the equivalent transcription. It was also another brilliant way of getting people involved in the project and its work – including some who started doing more detailed research into some of the accidents they discovered in the volume (for example, see this account of one worker’s family after his death).
The initial transcription was
only part of the equation, however. With so many people involved – we estimated
around 60 – despite our best attempts to cover all scenarios and set protocols
in place to ensure standard ways of entering data, inevitably there were some
variations. Not everyone was familiar with reading the nearly 120 year old
manuscript. Some of the terms used or locations noted were obscure, at best, to
those without some specialist railway background. To make the data as easily
useable as possible, all of these things needed to be ironed out.
That was no small task. A
number of volunteers were exceptionally helpful with elements of this –
particularly Gordon and one anonymous volunteer, who between them came with an
excellent knowledge of railway locations and working or historic county
boundaries. Together we went over the data with a fine toothcomb. It took time.
Everyone has been doing this around the margins of their day-to-day activities.
But now it’s done …and the data is public!
So what’s in it?
There are 2,152 entries,
covering Britain and Ireland for 1901-1905. They record cases where the Amalgamated
Society of Railway Servants trade union (now known as the RMT) had some sort of
legal interest, to defend its members. Many of these relate to accidents –
around half of them, which goes to show how prolific accidents at work once
were in the railway industry, and the importance of health and safety issues to
the trade union movement.
The entries give us some
detail about who was involved, what happened, where and when. Sometimes they
have more detail, including about the wider impact of an accident – whether on
the injured worker or the family and dependents in the case of a fatality.
There are some mysteries, too.
How did relief porter Faraday, a member of the Todmorden (Yorkshire) branch of
the ASRS, come to be injured at Portsmouth on 18 August 1903? We know he was
knocked down, paralysing his left arm and leg, but he was a long way from home
(railway) territory. He received 8/5 compensation per week. This ended up being
a long-running case – possibly because the railway company was unwilling to settle
up. In July 1906 Faraday was offered £100 in compensation, which he declined.
Instead he went back to the Company with a counter-offer: that he was willing
to accept £260 and compensation. Unsurprisingly the Company didn’t opt for
that; instead they offered £110, which Faraday accepted – a telling
demonstration of where the power in the relationship lay.
Some of the cases are
indisputably sad. On 29 September 1903 shunter J Wood had an accident at
Longsight, Manchester. His hand was crushed between buffers on two railway
vehicles. He was awarded 15/3 compensation per week. The details are scare, but
in the ‘remarks’ column of the book an entry starkly notes ‘committed suicide
23 Sept 1904’. Did his accident have anything to do with his death? Impossible to
say, but this was certainly the case for others.
Altogether through cases like
these we get a better impression of the sometimes harsh realities of railway
work at the turn of the 20th century.
There’s
more than accidents, too. Around half of the cases relate to other matters.
Pilfering features, as do embezzlement, furious driving, slander, and the
occasional good deed with an unintended consequence, like signalman Walker of
the Dunford Bridge branch, who was summarily dismissed in 1905 for lending a funnel
to a farmer to help him drain a leaking barrel of oil! Non-railway employees
appear, too, so there’s all sorts of detail in there that helps us understand
railway spaces and their relationships to wider society in Edwardian Britain
and Ireland.
What
next for the project? Well, there’s plenty still left to do: we’re currently
working on cleaning 1000s of cases from the volunteer team at The National
Archives. We’ve just received a run of 9,000 cases from the volunteer team at
the National Railway Museum (NRM), covering 1921-1939. And we’ve had the go
ahead to move the NRM team on to a new run of data in the new year, covering
1900-1910. Busy times – watch this space for more in the future!
In this blog, Mike Esbester, Senior Lecturer in History at Portsmouth, updates us on recent progress on the Railway Work, Life & Death project, including a new project partner, international collaboration, engagement with audiences beyond the academic – and on taking the project to out to a huge new venue.
Alexandra Palace is an iconic
venue – and not somewhere I’d envisaged taking a history research project: yet
at the end of the month, that’s exactly where I’ll be with the Railway Work,
Life & Death project!
We’ll be exhibiting at the Family Tree Live show, a huge family history fair taking place on 26 and 27 April this year. Family historians and genealogists have been a key component of our project from the outset, both in terms of envisaged audience and as co-producers, so reaching large numbers of people via events like this fulfils some of our major objectives.
With thousands of people expected
to attend, this will be an excellent means of spreading the word about what we
do, how people can use our resources, and how they can get involved. We’re also
hoping that we’ll be able to gather some more feedback on the project and how
we can make it even more useful to this audience. Most importantly, we’re
hoping that we’ll be able to make connections with people who have relatives in
our database, so that we can contribute to their understanding of their
relatives’ cases and so that we can learn more about the wider impact that
accidents had on railway workers.
Image author’s own
So what will we be doing at the show? On the stand we’ll have our project resources to demonstrate, archive film of railway work to show, reproductions of primary sources to show and work with, as well as our project information sheet and infographic for people to take away. I’ll be leading a number of small group workshops across both days of the event, giving people a more structured introduction to the project area and some hands-on time with the sources. And we’re taking part in the kids’ detective trail, with some engaging material about railway dogs – dogs which collected money to support widows and orphans left behind after railway staff were killed at work. So, we should have something for everyone!
We’ve put together a short video with a little bit more detail (though be warned: awkward on-screen appearance from me!):
As our project is dependent on the hard work of volunteers, we’re immensely grateful for their efforts – especially those who will be coming along to help staff our stand at Family Tree Live. I’m really thrilled that people are willing to be involved in all aspects of what we’re doing, and can think of no better way to represent the project than the presence of a number of the volunteers.
We’re expecting this to be a
great occasion, meeting new people, helping them with their research and
contributing to our work, and spreading awareness of our resources: work,
certainly, but fun and enjoyable, too. What’s even nicer is we’re going to be
able to meet up in person with some of the contacts, supporters and indeed
friends we’ve made on Twitter. Twitter has been an immensely valuable tool for
our project, so it’ll be lovely to put faces to names.
Taking the project to Family Tree
Live is just one of the developments in the project over the past months, many
of which have resulted from the sabbatical I was awarded by the Faculty of
Humanities and Social Sciences and which happened in the second half of last
year. The sabbatical gave me the time to put the day-to-day project
administration on a better footing, as well as extend the scope of what we’re
doing.
As well as submitting and revising the first project publication, we’ve brought a new collaborator into the project, alongside the University and the National Railway Museum: the Modern Records Centre at the University of Warwick (MRC). The MRC holds an amazing repository of trades union records – including those of one of the major railway trade unions, the wonderfully-titled Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants/ National Union of Railwaymen (now the RMT). We’re working with them to bring in records of accidents to trade union members, from the 1870s to 1930, via a wonderful team of volunteers. We’ve had several co-production sessions with them, to fully involve them in the research process, with some great results so far. There’s more on the extension here.
One of the related outcomes of the sabbatical and the relationship with the MRC was our involvement in Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine’s ‘Transcription Tuesday’ event in February. We made available a volume of early 20th century trade union legal cases, mostly involving accidents, and asked people across the world to join in on a single day and transcribe the records – which they did, in droves. The volume we’d originally set up was completed by mid-afternoon on 5 February, and we were able to release a second set of records. All told, around 3,800 new cases were transcribed by volunteers from around the world – a fantastic contribution and a real demonstration of the power of crowd-sourcing. Once again, we owe a debt of gratitude to all the hard work of volunteers. There’s more on Transcription Tuesday here.
Out of all of this – and particularly the work with family historians and genealogists – there’s been another direction that is looking promising. This is also something that started as a conversation on Twitter, another demonstration of the power and virtues of social media. For some time a number of academics – Tanya Evans, Laura King, Julia Laite, Nick Barratt and others – have been thinking about, working with and advocating for greater academic engagement with family history: and vice versa. That message hasn’t been one-sided, as family historians and genealogists have also been attuned to the potential that greater cooperation can bring. In recent months we’ve had a scoping meeting, involving archivists, family historians, genealogists and academics, to work out how we might better facilitate working together. This is set to develop, with more to come soon – watch this space. For now, some of the initial areas of interest can be found on Twitter under #HistoriansCollaborate. It’s been great to be a part of these founding conversations and I and the project are looking forward to contributing as we develop this movement.
For more on the Railway Work,
Life & Death project, see our website (www.railwayaccidents.port.ac.uk)
and follow us on Twitter (@RWLDproject).
In this blog, Dr Mike Esbester, senior lecturer in history at Portsmouth, discusses your chance to get involved in the research project he co-leads, looking at safety and accidents on British and Irish railways at the start of the 20th century. Mike’s research and teaching focus on the everyday, including ideas about mobility and accidents in modern Britain.
One of the great aspects of the ‘Railway Work, Life & Death’ project, which I co-lead with colleagues at the National Railway Museum in York (NRM) and the Modern Records Centre at the University of Warwick (MRC), has been its collaborative nature. As well as working across institutions and professional boundaries (being led by an academic, a librarian and an archivist), the element that has been key to our success has been our volunteers.
We’re now working on records about railway worker accidents with teams of volunteers at the NRM, MRC and The National Archives. From a relatively small start about 18 months ago, we’ve been growing in size and coverage – our recent project extensions will expand our current dataset from about 4,500 individuals involved in accidents on Britain and Ireland’s railways between 1911 and 1923, to perhaps 70,000 between the 1870s and late 1930s. (You can read more about these developments on the project’s blog, here.)
Some of the volunteering has been done remotely, and some of it has been done in person, at the archives. In both cases, though, it has involved an enthusiastic and dedicated band of volunteers – a select few. Now, though, we’re delighted to be working with the UK’s largest family history publication, Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine, to take our project to a much wider audience – and to get them (and you!) involved in the research!
Every year WDYTYA?Magazine runs ‘Transcription Tuesday’: a single day, on which anyone and everyone is invited to help out nominated projects by transcribing records into an electronic format. In 2019 we’re thrilled to have been invited to be one of those projects – so on 5 February you can join in with the research: more detail on that here.
Our MRC partners have digitised a volume of trade union records produced by the wonderfully-titled Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants (ASRS) – a forerunner of today’s RMT Union. The volume covers legal cases between 1901 and 1905 in which the ASRS had an interest – including things like compensation for accidents, or inquiries into accidents.
We’re asking for help in making the contents of the volume more readily accessible. At the moment if you wanted to know what was in it, you’d need to go to the MRC in person, and search through it page by page (as there isn’t an index). We’re hoping that on Transcription Tuesday we can work through the whole volume and transcribe each of the 2,150 cases into an easily searchable spreadsheet.
There’s more detail here about what the day involves and what exactly we’re asking people to do (including our comprehensive guide!) – do go and have a look. The transcription itself is relatively quick and easy, and it’s a great way to immerse yourself in the past.
We’ve already transcribed the first page, and it has revealed a number of stories – some we’re detailing via our project Twitter feed (@RWLDproject) and some via blog posts on our website. One of these is William Mercer, a guard on a mineral train and a member of the York No. 1 branch of the ASRS. He was killed on 25 January 1901 in a mineral siding in York, knocked down by wagons. The volume shows us that the inquest was held on 28 January 1901, where Mercer’s interests were represented by J Bickerdike, the branch Secretary. At the inquest it was decided that Mercer’s death was accidental, a result of a misunderstanding in signalling. He left a widow and two children, who were awarded a payment of £248.17.2 (around £25,500 at today’s prices) in compensation. We also know from the volume that the ASRS pursued this claim with the assistance of Brumbie and Sons solicitors, at a cost of £3.10.6. Mercer might otherwise have evaded the historical record, but for this volume and his unfortunate death.
A posed accident prevention photo, taken at Doncaster in 1930. It was warning of the dangers of going between wagons – a frequent source of crush injuries. Courtesy: National Railway Museum
We’ve been really amazed by the support and enthusiasm we’ve had for this – particularly as it’s come from all sorts of people and groups, from enthusiastic individuals to huge organisations. The RMT Union has been helping out – really pleasing, as of course this volume is part of its past – and so have other players in the current industry, as well as academic, archivist and museums colleagues.
Some of the strongest support has come from family history and genealogical worlds. When we set the project up we knew that it was likely to be of great interest to them, as the data we’re using was virtually unknown but full of details about people and their work – and ultimately in a great many cases, their deaths. The willingness that family historians and genealogists have shown, not just to use the data we’re providing, but to help out producing more and to think critically about it, has been brilliant.
Indeed, one of the things we didn’t foresee when we started was the links that we’d build with these communities – and that other academics were also making similar moves. There are exciting developments afoot here, including in the next couple of weeks a preliminary discussion between all sorts of researchers about how we might better cooperate and work together – more on that in a future blog post, after the meeting!
For now, we’d warmly welcome you to join us on February 5 for Transcription Tuesday – let’s get that volume fully transcribed!
In this blog, Dr Mike Esbester, senior lecturer in history, provides an update on the ‘Railway, Life & Death‘ project he has been working on in conjunction with the National Railway Museum. A database that details the stories of nearly 4,000 individuals who were killed or injured at work, including 16-year old James Beck, who Mike discussed briefly in an earlier blog (http://history.port.ac.uk/?p=315), is now available online. Mike’s research focuses on the cultural history of safety, risk and accident prevention in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The ‘Railway Work, Life & Death’ project has just made available the database of nearly 4,000 individuals killed or injured at work on the railways between 1911 and 1915. In it you’ll find details of railway worker’s stories, taken from state accident reports: you’ll see men and women from across the UK and Ireland, aged between 14 and 75, and from all grades of the railway industry.
The database is a key outcome of the project, and was only possible thanks to the hard work and dedication of the team of volunteers responsible for reading the original accident reports and transcribing the data. The project, which is jointly led by Portsmouth’s Mike Esbester and the National Railway Museum’s Karen Baker, has been a great demonstration of the success and possibilities of crowd-sourcing historical research. The volunteers have found some fascinating material, and have been asking some penetrating questions which will be invaluable in shaping the next stages of the project and research. And just as importantly, their feedback suggests that they’ve enjoyed the work and benefitted from it – as one volunteer noted ‘I am looking forward to seeing the spreadsheets on the website. I believe this is an important project which will benefit a range of audiences and shed light on working life in an industry which touched the lives of many people and their families.’
Through the database we can see how varied railway work was – and we’ve got a flexible tool, searchable by grade of employee, type of accident, location, railway company, details of the accident, who was held responsible, and any recommendations made to prevent a repeat occurrence.
Many cases were relatively ‘mundane’ – single incidents that resulted in relatively minor injuries like bruises. But some were much more severe involving multiple casualties, like two separate incidents which each injured eight men at once, or the group of workers maintaining the tracks at Battersea on 19 January 1911, three of whom were killed and two injured when they were hit by a train at 45mph.
This resource exposes to our view something of the experiences of the 3,911 individuals involved in accidents that were investigated by the state inspectors. We hope it will put at least a little bit of the human story on what otherwise might seem a large and unmanageable figure.
Now that the database is available we want people to make use of it! We’re promoting it widely, across all the audiences interested in the project – health and safety professionals, museums and archives specialists, academics, family historians, the current railway industry, and more. We’re keen to gather your feedback, particularly as we develop the next steps and try to make even more data available – so do please tell us what you make of it: there’s a feedback form on the project website, or you can contact us via railwayworkeraccidents@gmail.com.
In the short term, we’re continuing to update the project website regularly, including details of some of the cases found in the database and what they say about life, death and disability on the railways – do be sure to keep checking back (www.railwayaccidents.port.ac.uk).
