The men and women who built our railways, revisiting the Railway Navvies by Terry Coleman

I don’t think that when I bought The Railway Navvies back in the September of 1970 it would still be on the bookshelf today or that I would be sitting down rereading it  for the third time.*

And yet I don’t know why I am surprised.

It was one of those books that addressed a group of people few historians had bothered to look at in any great detail.

They were the stuff of walk on parts which has been the plight of most working people in history books until relatively recently.

I grew up reading about the good and the rich, the clever and the powerful sprinkled with a selection of Kings and a few Queens, but how ever important these contributors to history were they were not my history.

None of them would be seen going into the Co-op at Well Hall, or catching the early morning bus to Metro Vics or for that matter cleaning the stairs at Central Ref.

And yet their lives, their aspirations and what they did were equally important.

After all the armies of Napoleon, Wellington and Alexander needed cooks and blacksmiths while the good and the great wouldn’t have got far without a host of servants, clerks and tradesmen.

All of which brings me back to the men who built the railways with little more than shovels, wheelbarrows, their own physical strength and the odd bit of gunpowder.

They were often feared by the locals who saw their temporary encampments as blots on the landscape worse even than the railway the navvies were constructing.

But it makes fascinating reading from the opening chapter on the Navvy Age, to ones on their work, the encampment, and dangers along with much on their wives and individual workers.

Moreover it has stood the test of time and was recently singled out Christian Woolmar the railway historian as one to read.

So there it is, and I shall close with the concluding lines of the book,  “Of the navvies, Samuel Smiles said that their handiwork would be the wonder and admiration of succeeding generations.  Loking at their gigantic traces, the men of some future age might be found ready to say of the engineer and his workmen, that there were giants in those days.”**

Picture; Working Shaft – Kilsby Tunnel from a lithograp published by J C Bourne London and used on the cover of the Railway Navvies

* The Railway Navvies, Terry Coleman, 197, Pelican Books

**ibid page 237