Buffer buffs
Alan Gibson
The Railway Navvy David Brooke
(David & Charles £9.95)
The Railway Builders R.S. Joby
(David & Charles £9.50) The Railway Heritage of Britain Gordon Biddle, O.S. Nock and others (Michael Joseph £12.95)
David St John Thomas, who founded the publishers David & Charles a few years after the war, had begun his career as railway correspondent for The Western Morning News, and railway books have We're holding a party within a party. always featured prominently in his list. The firm was both a cause and a beneficiary of the surge of interest in railway history as the age of steam approached its end. They have now offered us two books about the building of the network in the 19th century. Although they have different emphases, in- evitably the books cover much of the same ground. You cannot write about the railway contractors without writing about the railway navvies, and vice versa.
Furthermore, we already have The Railway Navvies, by Terry Coleman. It was first published in 1965, but does not seem to have been outdated in any major respect, and it is — though David Brooke and R.S. Joby are competent enough craftsmen far better written. No doubt for the specialist in the field, these new books are valuable, but for the interested layman (and I suspect that is what most readers of railway books are) Coleman is much the best. Still, we can't all write like Colemans, and I expect David St John Thomas knows his market. Did he not publish, to mirth from his friends equalled only by benefit to his profits, reprints of an early Bradshaw and of a London telephone directory?
Dr Joby, as his title declares, deals prin- cipally with the contractors: Stephenson, Peto, McAlpine, some of them master builders and even architects, in their own right. One's picture of them is of swagger- ing Victorian entrepreneurs, ruthless drivers of men, but Joby shows that they were subtler characters than that. Peto was an earnest evangelical who gave good and regular pay to his labourers. Where he went, it was said, 'the gin shops were deserted, and the schools were full'. He taught them and their families to read (though, like Hannah More, only so that they could read the Bible). He was a courageous man, and visited the most dangerous sites of work. But Peto went bust in the end, less through his own fault than the chaotic state of railway investment and planning. Gladstone had realised from an early stage that this industry was a case for nationalisation.
The Railway Navvy broadly confirms the traditional navvy pattern, though David Brooke's careful study of the census returns demonstrates that they too were a mixed bag of men. They were not all Irishmen,. Many of them were local agricultural labourers, and railway works would sometimes almost come to a stop at harvest time. But the navvies were mostly hard ma for a hard job, and their shanty-towns, as they slowly moved up the new line, were often brutal places. Ribblehead was one of the most notorious, and today it seems that the great viaduct, built so expensively In human as well as financial terms, is to he pulled down.
Brooke has a good chapter on the building of the Balaclava tramroad in 1855, and another on the navvy missions, 11" lustrating the pros and cons of being well" meaning. Mrs Garnett, for many years the editor of the Quarterly Letter to Navvies, was a remarkable woman. She liked to ad'
dress her readers as `Mates!': a kind of in- land navigators' Aggie Weston.
The Railway Heritage of Britain is a large, handsomely illustrated book, remarkably cheap because it has been sub- sidised by British Rail. It is about the ar- chitecture of railways, a kind of extra volume to Pevsner (this is of course intend- ed to be a compliment). It does not tell you much about the lines themselves, how they flourished or failed, but it does give an im- pression of the impact of the railways on the landscape, which has not been altogether to the bad. 'There was a rocky valley between Buxton and Bakewell... divine as the vale of Tempe,' wrote Ruskin: You enterprised a railroad ... you blasted its rocks away... And now, every fool in Buxton can be at Bakewell in half-an-hour, and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton.' But Buxton station still stands, and is a listed building; you can even get a train there if You don't mind a second-class stopper. The railways have left less hideous scars upon the country than the motorways. It would be difficult, 1 conjecture, to write an ar- chitectural book about The Motorway Heritage of Britain in 100 years from now. I
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should warn prospective purchasers that if they are unfamiliar with terms such as Porte-cocheres and queen-post roofs they will sometimes find the text of this book baffling. But the pictures are superb.
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