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!
Plaque erected at Thorpe St Andrew Church in Norfolk to the victims of the disaster.
On the 9 September, our own Dr Mike Esbester had this piece on the Thorpe St Andrew train crash of 10 September 1874 published in The Conversation. Mike compares how memories of the loss of lives in such dramatic events compares with the often forgotten deaths of working class railway workers, whose deaths lack the single point of reference that such events provide.
Our own Dr Mike Esbester was featured on BBC 1’s ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ on 5 September 2024, helping Rose Ayling-Ellis learn more about her ancestor’s railway accident. The episode is available to watch on BBC iPlayer: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0022n0p
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 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 post, the third in our series of blogs looking at sites of historical interest in Portsmouth, Mike Esbester, Senior Lecturer in History at Portsmouth, explores what might be learnt from an apparently unexceptional piece of the city’s built environment. Mike’s research and teaching focus on the everyday, including ideas about mobility and accidents in modern Britain.
Not far from my office, there’s yet another mundane object that for most of the time, most people don’t notice – for 140 years it was part of the background to life around Burnaby Road. For a week or so earlier this year, however, it became very noticeable – particularly its absence, which left a hole in the eyeline. And then, once replaced and the shock of the new subsided, it has once again become a part of the background.
This post is about a bridge. To be precise, the railway bridge over Burnaby Road, on the final trundle from Portsmouth & Southsea station to the Harbour station. Erected by the London & South Western Railway in 1876, the bridge was certainly functional – yet also not without a faded decorative element, at least by the time of its removal. I like these everyday things; if we stop and notice them, they tell us all sorts about the societies that produced them and the society of the present moment.
The bridge was life-expired. It looked a little the worse for wear if one remembered to look up whilst walking underneath (not advised when it was raining!). It was also in need of strengthening, as age and changing technology had taken their toll on the original design – not unreasonable given it was carrying well over 100,000 trains a year. It might have been a relatively straightforward decision to remove the bridge and replace it with a plain girder bridge. But this isn’t quite the way it worked out.
The process of removing the bridge and installing the new one required extensive planning, preparation and a road closure for a week. The new bridge was assembled nearby and moved into place – no mean feat given the physical constraints around the site and the need to move the 88-tonne structure around 200 metres. Over the course of a week in February the old bridge came down and the new one went in.
A decision was taken – and I don’t know where or by whom – that the replacement bridge show mirror the aesthetic of the original. So, whilst never particularly ornate, the look of the bridge – including its new paintwork – at least referred back to its predecessor. This bridge wasn’t a heritage asset in the way that say the nearby Mary Rose or HMS Victory might be. But it was a part of the working heritage of the area. That was reflected in the colour scheme used on the new bridge, which referred to Portsmouth’s city colours. This was a relatively subtle marker of civic belonging, a means of siting the bridge in its locale.
So clearly the bridge might not be ‘just’ a bridge: it can be used in particular ways. This raises questions pertinent to transport museums and the preservation movement more widely: how do you retain the essence of things that are functional? Did the original bridge have some sort of intrinsic worth or value ‘just’ because of its age? Remove it from its context and purpose and does the bridge retain that value? Just like trains that are preserved in museums, as static exhibits: they were designed to move, so when still have they lost their raison d’etre? Or has the value and meaning changed? What values do we, as a society, place upon these mundane artefacts – particularly infrastructure, like the bridge – without which our world would be very different, but for most of the time we don’t notice because they function smoothly?
There’s another element to the story, which ties in with my research: safety. A quick glance at the ‘before’ and ‘after’ images flags up some prominent differences between the old and new bridges. There’s the yellow and black hazard warning bar and the height limit notice, obscuring some of the paintwork replicating the original but designed to deter bridge strikes (a major problem on the rail network). Of greater interest to me, for my work on the history of workplace safety & accidents (particularly in the rail industry), there was additional consideration: safe access across the bridge for railway workers.
The old bridge was narrow, without adequate provision for workers to cross at track level. This meant they had to watch carefully and squeeze past when there were no trains coming: hardly safe in anyone’s imagination. Indeed, some of the cases of railway worker accidents coming out of the ‘Railway Work, Life & Death’ project I co-lead with the National Railway Museum are of exactly this scenario: narrow bridges and workers being struck by passing trains, sometimes with fatal results. This was either the original engineers being blind to the workers, who were not high up in their considerations especially when weighed against extra cost, or a deliberate decision to put worker lives at risk. This might (hopefully!) seem shocking by today’s standards but it was not surprising for the 19th century.
In a sign of how times have changed, proper access routes were built into the new bridge, seen in the walkway (including safety rail) on either side of the bridge, away from the moving trains. It changes the look of the bridge, certainly, but this again relates to the discussions about how far built heritage can or should be adapted for modern standards. Given this was a new installation the debate was, hopefully, minimal; it would have been a much easier proposition than trying to adapt an original structure. Thankfully we have a higher regard for safety now than 140 years ago – which isn’t to suggest that things are perfect today, but to acknowledge that priorities and who is valued have shifted.
So, via a number of routes, an initially unpromising structure can be interrogated to reveal interesting glimpse of the values of the societies which both produced the original and the replacement bridges. If we look closely at such objects we can see where particular concepts and values are built into the fabric of any mundane item.
