Navvies and Legerdemain: Who Built the Railways?
Two thousand miles of bucket-lift airshafts,
A million men in diseased shanty towns,
Or lost on the tramp in city or county,
No Navvy’s Head or Arms in the country,
A damp clay embankment instead for a bed –
Or cutting or brickworks, a bridge or a wagon,
A platform, a tunnel, a claypit or trench;
Then making the running up Sonning’s deep Cutting:
A forty-foot climb with barrow and earth,
Two miles of running and landslide bone-crushing,
With pick and with shovel, gunpowder and shot;
Tunnelling through the mud and flood water,
Conned by contractor and ganger and truck,
Calumnied by the press and the pulpit –
We travel today on their muscle and sweat,
And trains now today tell of white-collar fame,
But who can remember a navvy’s true name?
Their fustian skill and anonymous strength
Built so many lines on their steam power length,
But it’s hard to discover a navvy’s true name
In railway history ledger’s domain.
But as regards our local line …
There is a photograph of what was probably the replacement of the timber Wyatt’s Viaduct (Merrywalks Viaduct) with brick, showing men at work – some forty-five years after the Railway Mania.
You can see over 50 men standing or squatting somewhat precariously upon and within the struts and scaffolding. Proud of their labour, skill and fortitude.
But no names.
And as regards Sapperton Tunnel …
Let us remember a representative fragment: George Freeman and Henry Stokes crushed to death, Edward Harrap who died after three tons of matter fell on him, and George Dratsy who lost an eye in an explosion. And William Rice who fell 160 feet yet rose virtually unscathed, physically. But what did that do to his mind …?