The Railway Navvies by Terry Coleman

Author:Terry Coleman [Coleman, Terry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784082314
Publisher: Head of Zeus

8

Chadwick, Parliament, and Do-Nothing

Some good did come out of the building of the first Wood-head Tunnel. It created a scandal which at least brought to the notice of Parliament and public the wretched life of the navvies. The protest was led by Edwin Chadwick, barrister, civil servant, one of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the labour of young persons in factories, one of the Commissioners of Inquiry also into the means of establishing an efficient police force, and the man who was to secure after ten years of agitation the Public Health Act of 1848, the first in a series of sanitary reforms.

Chadwick was a friend of John Roberton, the surgeon who was also president of the Manchester Statistical Society. When Roberton found the men at Woodhead in a state of brute degradation he told Chadwick, who was eager to agitate for reform. He had long thought the State should have built the railways as a rational system and not left them to be created haphazardly and run for profit by individual companies. The railway labourers were among the most exploited and least protected of all workers; their employers were not bound even by the early Factory Acts. Chadwick knew that on average half the capital spent in building railways went on the earth works and tunnelling, and in late 1845, at the beginning of the second railway boom, he foresaw that if the sanction of Parliament was given for any considerable proportion of the new railway works presented for its consideration, and if no new precautions were taken in the way these new lines were built, then both the works and the men would suffer. Some £8,000,000, £10,000,000, or £12,000,000 a year, or as much as the annual cost of the Army and Navy put together, would soon be paid in navvies’ wages. A great number of new works would be thrown up all at the same time. Competent railway engineers and managers were already scarce and there would not be enough to go round, nor would there be enough experienced navvies. Rabbles of new men would have to be quickly assembled, and they would work under equally inexperienced engineers. The result would be greater disorder and evil than ever before. And after these works had been completed, what then? The men, said Chadwick, drawing on his long experience of the working of the Poor Law, would be discharged penniless. Some would return discontented to their villages, reckless, deteriorated in body and mind; others would join the dangerous and increasing swarm of able-bodied mendicant vagrants and depredators who had been cluttering up the workhouses.

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