Cleaner> Fireman> Engine Driver - Positions, Promotion and Pay at Faversham in the 1870s

Today I will be heading to Faversham with friends to visit friends. With this in mind I thought I would see if I could find some information on the railway workers that were based in the town in Victorian times. Faversham station was opened in January 1858 and it soon developed in importance given it was at the junction of two lines; one heading off towards Margate via Whitstable, the other heading towards Dover via Canterbury. Being a junction station, it is unsurprising that the London, Chatham and Dover Railway decided to build an engine shed there. In this post I will briefly look at the members of locomotive department staff that were assigned there in (and around) 1875 and give some insight into their careers.

I have determined that the locomotive department was employing thirty-one men at Faversham Shed in 1875. Nineteen of the men stationed there were on the ‘Engine Driver promotional tree.’ Beginning as locomotive cleaners, they would be promoted to firemen and then engine driver.

Engine drivers were the most numerous type of employee at Faversham in 1875, with seven being assigned there. Curiously, there were only five firemen, and because each locomotive needed one of each for operation, initial analysis may suggest that an error is present in the records. However, on closer examination it is clear that two of the enginemen, Arthur Trowell and John West, were in training as they had been promoted from firemen’s positions that year and were paid less than their colleagues.

The period that individuals were employed with the company before becoming drivers was seemingly formalised by 1875 at nine years. Both Trowell and West were made engine drivers six years after their appointments as firemen in June 1869. Furthermore, R. Clackett and Thomas Jones were promoted from being cleaners to firemen after only three years. Clackett was appointed as a cleaner at Faversham in September 1874 and became a fireman in August 1877. Jones had started in August 1873 and was promoted to fireman in June 1876.

Naturally, the rates of pay increased as individuals were promoted. I am uncertain whether the LC&DR adopted the same practices as other railway companies, however, its employees had a daily rate.  Cleaners received very poor pay and J. Gates, who was appointed in November 1875, started his career on 1s 3d per day. If it is taken that individuals worked six days a week, this equated to £19 10s per year.  As the cleaners gained experience their pay rose to 3s per day or £46 16s per year, at which point they were promoted to being firemen.

However, despite the fact individuals spent six years as firemen, their wage increases advanced at a slower rate than when they were cleaners. As cleaners, the men’s pay increased by an average rate of 3.5 pence for each day’s work per year. Yet, as firemen the maximum pay they could receive was 4s per day or £62 2s per year, equating to an average rate of increase of 2s for every day’s work per year.    

On being promoted to being a driver individuals stayed on 4s per day for around two years, after which an extra six pence per day was added for each year of service. The maximum that drivers received, or so it seemed, was 7s 6d, which was the very considerable sum of £117 per year. [1] Indeed, this was more money than all but one clerk at the Longhedge works was earning in 1875 and reflected the prestige in which engine drivers were held in the late Victorian period.[2]

Of course, even becoming a driver had its risks and the Faversham drivers were no exception. One F. Wilson was probably the unluckiest of all those I have found. On the 1^st of October 1881 he had his ‘eye cut with a stone thrown on [the] Sheerness line’ when working the 6.40 am Blackfriars to Faversham goods train.[3] In January 1882, while on his way home, he ‘caught his leg against the lever of points’ in the Faversham Goods Yard and did not return to work for a few days.[4] Then in February 1882 one of the glass gauges on his locomotive broke, scolding his left hand with boiling water.[5] However, Wilson was not the only Faversham driver to get injured and on the 19^thMarch 1886 Richard Broadbridge ‘when waiting at Chatham in stepping over the buffers of carriage caught his foot in communication chord and fell and injured his left leg.’[6] Lastly, J.Powles in July 1889 had two fingers cut by stones ‘thrown from over bridge near East Margate Station.’[7] It seems that accident an injury were a fact of life for the Faversham engine drivers. Yet, there is no doubt others were injured also.

This small study has shown is that by 1875 there was a rigid promotional structure for and pre-determined career path for those the LC&DR employees starting as cleaners. Thus, unless they did something to warrant dismissal or disciplinary action, they would have had a very high level of job security as from day one they would have known the post they would have ended up in. Indeed, Broadbridge spent forty-seven years in the company and finished his career as a driver at Faversham in 1907. J. Powles also stayed at Faversham for all his career and left the company in 1906 after forty-three years’ service.[8] Thus, careers with the railways were, potentially, careers for life.

---------------------

[1] The National Archives [TNA], RAIL 415/109, Register of staff at Longhedge works and outstations, 1860-1881, p.125-128

[2] The National Archives [TNA], RAIL 415/109, Register of staff at Longhedge works and outstations, 1860-1881, p.4

[3] TNA, RAIL 415/108, Register of injuries to workmen, 1880-1891, p.23

[4] TNA, RAIL 415/108, Register of injuries to workmen, 1880-1891, p.29

[5] TNA, RAIL 415/108, Register of injuries to workmen, 1880-1891, p.31

[6] TNA, RAIL 415/108, Register of injuries to workmen, 1880-1891, p.96

[7] TNA, RAIL 415/108, Register of injuries to workmen, 1880-1891, p.123

[8] TNA, RAIL 415/108, Register of staff at Longhedge works and outstations, 1864 – 1918, p.219

The Loneliest Man on the Railway - The Victorian Signalman

‘Trains thundering by; nine bells dinning in the signal-box, one against another; a score of telegraph indicators before his eyes; three telephones behind him; and under his sure an powerful hands a row of levers, keys of life and death. I am to write the praise of the railway signalman.’[1]

The signalmen, the individuals who were the overseers of railway safety, were the loneliest employees in the Victorian railway industry. While those stationed in major signal boxes at large stations or yards would be in contact with many human beings, the majority of signalmen sat alone atop mountains, in cuttings and at junctions. Indeed, the signalmen were unique in the Victorian railways as being some of the only solo workers in an industry where human contact and interactions were common place.

This had always been the case from the earliest days of the railways. Stationed next to the primitive signals, the early signalmen inhabited boxes that were modelled on army sentry huts. Indeed, many were pivoted at the base so they could be turned against the elements. However, the standard signal box, that we would readily identify today, developed quickly complete with windows, stoves and occasionally cats.[2]

Most Victorian signalmen would start their careers by entering the company’s service at the age of 14 as either a porter (then being promoted to porter-signalmen) or as a signal learner. They would have to undergo a strict eye test and then would shadow the work of a permanent signalman until they were proficient. Subsequently, once qualified they would be placed in an unimportant or branch-line signal box. Career advancement would occur through the movement to signal boxes of greater importance, with the rare possibility that they would eventually end up in charge of a major box on the main line.

The pay of signalmen was quite low and dependent on the company may have been anywhere between 12s and 30s per week. However, the general rate was around 16s or 17s.[3] While a children’s publication, The Big Budget, would write in 1899 that ‘an ordinary signalman does not have a very great deal of actual hard work to do,’ it was the duration of the work and the lack of pay that was the real issue for these men.[4] A letter to the editor of the Railway Service Gazette in 1872 detailed the long hours of service of signalmen:

‘I myself am a signalman and have been in the employ of the London, Chatham and Dover Company for eleven years next June, during which time I have averaged eighty-four hours per week. As there are only two of us, we relieve each other on a Sunday morning at 8.30 am to change over from night to day. We remain on duty till 7.30 the following Monday so as to enable us to have twenty-three hours off duty once a fortnight…and to make things worse, if we are fortunate to get a week’s leave of absence (say once in two years) they do not fail to stop our pay.’[5]

Indeed, while testifying to the Parliamentary Select Committee of 1890, James Thomas, a Cambrian Railway signalmen, stated that the hours of work that he had been expected to work were unlimited, there was no Sunday pay, and on occasion he had worked eighteen consecutive hours. Furthermore, he only time and a quarter for those hours worked after the twelfth.[6]

While the hours and pay of the signalmen were improved over the late-Victorian period, usually by union activity, the one problem they were unable to solve was that of their isolation. The signalmen themselves tried to mitigate this problem by keeping their boxes in pristine condition, through cleaning the instruments, making sure the paint work was fresh and the flower boxes, for which there were competitions, were well-tended. Indeed, the signal box was the man inside’s territory, and no one entered without his say-so. Furthermore, signalmen would keep in contact through a series of bells with their colleagues on the line. Yet, these relationships were ones in which they never saw each other. Yet, the tedium of isolation still remained, and the adage developed that ‘if you are unmarried when you take over a box, chances are you will never marry.’[7]

It was this isolation that Charles Dickens used to great effect in his 1866 short ghost story The Signalman. The narrator visits a signalman at an isolated signal box in a cutting, only to find him haunted by a spectre that was appearing in association with two tragedies. Pertinently, on the narrator’s second visit to the box, the signalman sees the spectre again and believes may be warning of a third accident. However, the narrator cannot see it and, thus, one of the suggestions for this is that the signalman had suffered mentally from his isolation. When the narrator visits for a third time, he has found that signalman was been killed by a train while looking at something at the tunnel mouth. Whether the spectre had been warning the signalman of his impending doom during the last conversation is left for the reader to decide.

Thus, the isolation was the key to making The Signalman work as a story. In 1882 a lighter side to the isolation of the signalman was published in Fun. Thus, the publication’s whimsical poem, The Neglected Signalman, can be found below.[8]

-----------------------

[1] Snowden, Keighley, ‘The Man Who Works the Points,’ The Pall Mall Magazine, Vol. 39 No. 166 (Feb 1907) p.169

[2] McKenna, Frank, The Railway Workers 1830-1970, (London, 1980) p.67

[3] McKenna, The Railway Workers 1830-1970, p.67

[4] The Big Budget, ‘The Road to Take: Or What a Boy Can Become,’ Saturday, July 15^th 1899, Issue 109, p.79

[5] Letter to the Editor, Railway Service Gazette, 3^rd February 1872, p.7, quoted in, McKenna, The Railway Workers 1830-1970, p.67-68

[6] McKenna, The Railway Workers 1830-1970, p.70

[7] McKenna, The Railway Workers 1830-1970, p.75

[8] ‘The Neglected Signalman,’ Fun, Vol.35 No.872 (Jan 25^th 1882) p.41