Early Victorian Britain: 1832–51. Литагент HarperCollins USD

The mechanic sees his weekly newspaper over his pipe and pot; but the clod-hopper, the chopstick, the hawbuck, the hind, the Johnny-raw, or by whatever name, in whatever district he may be called, is everywhere the same, – he sees no newspaper, and if he did, he could not read it; and if he hears his master reading it, ten to one but he drops asleep over it. In fact, he has no interest in it…. He is as much of an animal as air and exercise, strong living and sound sleeping can make him, and he is nothing more.’¹³

      Allowing for Howitt’s middle class, townsman’s prejudices, this unflattering passage is a fair example of the educated early Victorian’s view of the agricultural labourer. It was an attitude of pity and contempt, mixed sometimes with compassion and occasionally with fear.

      Probably the most upsetting thing that could happen in an agricultural village in the 1830s and 1840s was the arrival of the railway. The decision to bring the line through a particular district had far-reaching economic and social consequences for that area. But the immediate impact was the arrival of a small army of construction workers to build the track. These were the navvies, a body of men who in the space of a few decades accomplished feats of construction which dwarfed the building of the pyramids in the ancient world (as the Victorians noted) or (moderns might add) the motorways of the present day. Strictly, the navvies were not common labourers. Originally they had worked on the canals (hence the name navigators, shortened to navvies), and they stayed together as a body, moving from one line to the next as it was completed. They were prepared to go anywhere that the railway contractors wanted them, later to France, South America, Canada, Australia and the Crimea. Not all of the 200,000 men working on new lines in 1845 were true navvies: some were agricultural labourers who were recruited locally, but it is probable that some of these remained to become regular navvies. The main attraction of the job was its relatively high pay. In a bad year such as 1843, weekly wages were 15s or 16s 6d; in 1846 (a good year) they were 22s 6d and 24s. These rates were for pickmen and shovellers. Skilled men such as masons and bricklayers could earn up to 21s in 1843 and 33s in 1846.

      The work was extremely hard and often dangerous. A navvy was expected to shovel about twenty tons of earth and rock a day on the basic jobs of cutting, banking and tunnelling. Excavating was done with pick and shovel, the navvies working in rows. The men worked in gangs under the direction of a ganger who could be either a foreman paid by the sub-contractor or an independent agent who contracted the work from the sub-contractor. In either case the ganger recruited the navies. Wet weather frequently created slippery, and therefore dangerous, conditions. The earth from the bottom of a cutting, for instance, had to be taken out in barrows hauled up the steep sides of the cutting, and it was easy to slip and fall beneath the overturned barrow-load of ‘muck’. Tunnels were nearly always deep in mud, and in addition there was the danger hazard of the crude methods of blasting. The casualties on the notorious Woodhead tunnel between Sheffield and Manchester (1839–45) read like battle figures: 32 killed, 140 seriously wounded, 400 lesser accidents. Edwin Chadwick, the Poor Law and sanitary reformer, calculated later that this was 3 per cent of the labour force killed and 14 per cent wounded. Compensation for injuries and death was seldom paid by the contractors or railway companies: a small payment from the navvies’ own contributory sick club was all that was available. Because navvies were constantly moving on as the line advanced no settled mode of life was possible. They lived in rough shanty towns, hastily thrown together, miles from any village. Their huts were made of mud or wood, with tarpaulins for the roof. They slept in tiers of bunks, twenty or thirty to a room. No family or home life was possible; they might as well have been in Van Diemen’s Land.

      The reputation of the navvies was fearsome, and not without good cause. Superior physical strength, combined with barbarian bravado and high spirits marked them off from other labourers. They ate and drank more than any other men: two pounds of meat, two pounds of bread and five quarts of ale a day was normal navvy fare. Most of their earnings went in drink. After a payday (which the companies preferred to keep as infrequent as possible in order to strengthen their truck system) navvies would be drunk for days together, and there were plenty of stories of navvies (always known by their nicknames – Rainbow Peg, Gipsy Joe, Streaky Dick) who worked in a perpetual state of inebriation. Above all there were the fights and riots. Once the navvies had got the drink in them they were a terror to the surrounding countryside. Their drunken revelry (called a ‘randy’) ended in personal fighting and violence, and sometimes in riots between Irishmen and the rest. Few women lived in the camps; only old women to cook and wash, and some girls who were concubines. The popular image of the navvy as a violent, godless, drunken fellow, far removed from the ‘refining’ influences of home and family, contained much truth. At the same time it also had to be admitted that the navvy was ‘the king of labourers’.¹⁴

      Another worker who performed the same type of sheer, hard muscular toil as the navvy was the coalminer. Traditionally he too was regarded as an uncouth savage, whose job and living habits segregated him from other sections of the labouring poor. Like the navvy he earned rather more than most labourers, but again his job was specialised and some aspects of it required skill. Wages varied between districts and between good and bad years, but a range of 15s to 25s was usual in the period 1830–50. For this the miner worked an 11- to 12-hour day for 4½ days a week. The work was hard and dangerous. At the coal face the hewers, naked and on their knees, hacked away at the coal with their picks. In narrow seams, which could be as low as 2ft 3ins in parts of the Yorkshire coalfields, the face worker had to lie on his side, use his elbow as a lever, and pick away at the coal. Behind him the ‘hurriers’ dragged away the cut coal in wheelless tubs or small trucks to the pit bottom, where it was hoisted to the surface or, in more primitive pits, carried up ladders in corves on the backs of women and boys. The transport of the coal underground, heavy and laborious as it was, was done by older children and women in some areas. Small children, as young as five to eight years, were employed as ‘trappers’, whose job was to open and close the doors as the tubs went by so that the air circulation would be maintained. The 1841 census showed 2,350 of the 118,000 coalminers in Great Britain as women, and these were mostly in the West Riding, Lancashire and Scottish pits. Some miners still worked by the flickering light of a candle, even after the perfection of the Davy safety lamp which, they complained, did not give enough light. The danger from an explosion of firedamp was great. For those who were spared this holocaust the daily accidents of broken limbs and lacerations, and the final inflammation of the lungs (‘black spittle’) left them scarred for life. In the coalfield areas it was easy to pick out a miner from among other people by his peculiar physical development and his habit of squatting on his heels. The coalminer was not normally a town worker, but lived in industrial villages in Northumberland and Durham, South Yorkshire or the Midlands. Mining communities tended to be self-contained and semi-rural, dependent on the single industry.

      The urban labourers were much less homogeneous. They included dock workers of many different kinds; labourers in gasworks, brickyards, breweries and ironworks; hodmen and helpers on building sites; carters, draymen, porters and sweepers. None of them enjoyed anything that could be called security of employment; they were paid by the week or the day. In ‘good’ times they could normally look forward to having a job for most of the year, subject to the important fluctuations of the weather and their own health and strength. But in times of depression, which were all too numerous in the 1830s and 1840s, the job outlook was bleak indeed: the weakest quickly went to the wall, and the strongest were reduced to the position of casual labour. In some occupations, such as work on the docks, labour was always hired by the day. The following account of the London coalheavers, based on Mayhew, gives a fair impression of what the term casual labour really meant in a pre-mechanised industry.