History of the Wye Valley Railway

Navvies and the equipment used

Several hundred navvies were needed to build the line under the contractors, Messrs. Reed Bros and Co. These navvies not only worked with shovels and wheelbarrows but included trades such as bricklayers, blacksmiths, rock drill operators and carpenters.

The navvies would have lived in encampments in temporary wooden cabins as there would not have been adequate local accommodation. Some families accompanied the navvies as they travelled across the country from job to job. Single navvies generally lived in dormitories with a landlady cooking food that the navvies bought. There would have been several food shops and public houses. Farm labourers were attracted to become navvies because of the higher wages despite the dangers of the work.

The spiritual needs of the navvies would have been attended to by a navvy missionary and a mission hall. The Navvy Mission Society was formed in 1877 just after the line was completed.

The work was heavy manual labour. Labour saving equipment such as steam excavators were not employed on navvy sites until later.

An insight into the plant and equipment used by the navvies can be obtained from auction sales after the line was completed. This auction notice from The Star of Gwent, 9 December 1876 identifies:

• A newly developed Ingersoll pneumatic tunnel boring machine with enough air tubing to supply the machine from an engine outside the tunnel.

• 80 tip wagons which were used to unload excavated earth and rock onto embankments or spoil heaps. These wagons also brought the navvies and equipment to the work locations. The tip wagons were designed to act like a wheelbarrow. They could pivot on the front axle. Considerable excavation was required north of the Tidenham tunnel where the sloping banks of the river are very steep. In addition to excavation, embankments were required to level the trackbed.

• Horses. A large number of horses would have been employed and stabled close to the work. A newspaper sale advertisement, 15 July 1876 described them by name: Short Legged Active Cart Horses – including Polly, Bay Mare, six years old and; Harness horses including Dick, Bay Gelding, 5 years old.

• A six-wheeled saddle tank engine by Manning and Wardle who built a significant number of steam engines used in the construction of the railways. This locomotive was despatched on 23 November 1874 to Reed Brothers, Monmouth who were the contractors building the line. It was a K class locomotive No 527 and was named ‘TINTERN’. After finishing work in the Wye Valley Railway it was sold to Messrs Lucas and Aird, a major Victorian civil engineering business. It was probably put to use in the construction of the Royal Albert Dock which was completed in 1880. Manning and Wardle built a significant number of steam engines used in the construction of the railways. Wheel washing equipment was often installed on these locomotives as the nature of their work meant that the wheels were regularly covered in mud and dirt. One of the main duties of the locomotives was to haul the tip wagons.

• 3 river barges which would have probably been the shallow river barges known as trows.

The working life of the navvies is illustrated below from the S W A Newton Collection at the Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland Record Office.

The compressed air boring machines, otherwise known as rock drills, operated just as pneumatic drills used by road repair contractors do today. They would have been exceptionally loud. Without ear defenders and in the confined space of the tunnel the sound would have been deafening. After holes were drilled in the rock, they were packed with explosives using a ramrod. Unless the ramrod was copper-tipped dangerous explosions could occur. The tunnel would have been dimly lit by candles and, probably, the smoke from previous dynamiting would be hanging in the air.

The following photographs were taken at a re-enactment of Victorian gang workers for a Channel 4 programme in 1988 at the Dean Forest Railway. They are reproduced here courtesy of Peter Holmes. They show how navvies would have laid the track.

There are conflicting accounts of the drunkenness of the navvies.

Handley and Dingwall (The Wye Valley Railway and the Coleford Branch) record that the navvies, mostly from Ireland, were a hard-drinking crowd and on pay day they headed for the cider houses of Chepstow. This disgusted Christiana Morgan who organised evangelical services with coffee at a building in Woodcroft partly to combat the drunkenness where they could attend bible classes and learn to read. Local sources in Tidenham believe that parenting skills were taught to the navvy’s wives.

Geoff Mead records (Ref Dissertation-Railway influence upon a country parish. Tidenham 1845-1925 - courtesy of the Tidenham History Group) that Charles Monks was arrested while working at the Tidenham Tunnel in May 1876 for stealing tools at the Severn Tunnel site where he had been working a few days previously. By February 1875, ‘a great many complaints had been made of the damage done to property by navvies going to and from their work during the night and it was high time a stop was put to it.’ The most typical offence was drunkenness, but the local magistrates constantly charged them for such activities as stealing from gardens, damaging fences, or taking away clothes. The magistrates could be very strict as one navvy found when being ‘fined the full penalty’ of £5 for keeping a dog without a license.

In contrast the Bristol Mercury reported on the opening of the line that Samuel Hansard Yockney, the senior partner of the Engineers, said in his speech that ‘he understood from one of the clergymen living in the district that the conduct of the men had been most exemplary, and that the disorder which so often followed the introduction of a body of navvies into a district had not shown itself there (hear, hear)’.

A similar alternative view as Samuel Yockney’s was printed in The Chepstow Weekly Advertiser on 25 October 1862 at a time when other local railways were being built. At that time a viaduct across the Tay had just been built and the Duke of Athole observed at the opening ceremony that ‘I was so much pleased, on the whole, by their conduct’ and ‘on the whole they have behaved themselves remarkably well ...and if they quarrel a little among themselves it seems to me that they rather like it’.

At Brockweir the navvies were ferried across the Wye to the Moravian church on a Sunday. The Moravians were pacifists. At the church they attended special gospel services, those present were apparently most orderly and devout at meetings.

Accidents to navvies were common duration railway construction. The Monmouth Merlin of 4 December 1874 records the death of Peter Pidsley age 41. On 9 March 1875 his brother was severely burnt after an explosion. Peter was born at Sowton near Exeter where he was a farm labourer. His father was born in 1796 at Topsham also near Exeter and worked as an agricultural labourer.

In France the English navvies were paid twice the French because the French could not do anything like the same amount of work.

When a force of navvies was being assembled to build a railway in the Crimea to carry supplies to the siege of Sevastopol. The Illustrated News remarked:

‘The men employed on our engineering works have long been known as the very elite of England as to physical power – broad, muscular, massive fellows, who are scarcely matched in Europe.’

The navvies were close knit, they worked exceptionally hard, they could be unruly but could also be very well behaved. They were the king of labourers.

‘The Railway Navvies’ by Terry Coleman is a well-researched social history of the navvies that explains how their working conditions gradually improved throughout the 19th century.

The Supply Chain

Rails, sleepers, ballast (the crushed limestone supporting the tracks), tipper wagons, locomotives, horses and horseshoes, tools, food and drink for the hundreds of navvies and for the horses are examples of the large, complex and efficient supply chain required to support the navvies building the line.

Contrast this with the performance of the British Generals in the Crimean War. Pedantic supply officers left 150 tons of vegetables to rot on the quayside as they had arrived without the right paperwork, 2500 rugs arrived but only 800 were issued despite the extreme cold and shoddy boots of the wrong sizes were delivered. So we can see that the professional organisation of the railway builders was not always common practice in Victorian times-far from it.

Sleepers

Iain Yockney, the great great grandson of Samuel Yockney, who was the senior partner of the engineers that built the line has recalled that a relation of his wife owned a timber merchants in Hereford that supplied the many thousands of sleepers necessary to build the line. This photograph of an accident in 1880 at Redbrook shows the original sleepers in place.

The River Wye was made navigable up to Hereford by the 1695 ‘Act for the Navigation of the River Wye’ under which the weirs up to Hereford were removed. However only smaller boats could use the upper reaches. These boats were hauled by groups of men from the towpath as shown in the aquatint. The river would have provided an effective transport route to the railway.

Rails

The large number of rails would, most probably been supplied by the Dowlais Ironworks either from their establishment near Merthyr Tydfil or from their Cardiff Works. Dowlais was at one time the largest steel producer in the UK and were the first business to license the Bessimer process using it to produce steel in 1865. The Works closed in 1987. They exported rails all over the world. It is quite likely that barges carried the rails from Newport of Cardiff up the River Wye to an offloading point such as Faggot’s Wharf just north of the Tidenham tunnel.

Further Reading: A Short History of the Dowlais Ironworks 1759-1936, John Alaister Owen, Merthyr Tydfil Borough Corporation (1 Dec 1972)

Railway Chairs

Around 150,000 “chairs” were used to fixed the rails to the sleepers on the Wye Valley Railway.