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.
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 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.
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).
Image courtesy of the author.