Life in a Railway Factory

by Alfred Williams

To all the superfluous attentions and mock regard of his fellow-mates Baltimore preserves a good-natured and even an indulgent attitude; he is not at all disconcerted with their wit and sarcasm. Though not one of the most skilful of workmen, he is very shrewd and painstaking; his whole heart and soul are in the business. From morning till night he is toiling and sweating over his blooms and forgings, and when he is off the premises he is still concerned with his occupations at the hammer. He will sometimes tell one of his mates how he lay awake the greater part of a night working out in his mind some problem connected with a difficult piece of forging and then came in the next morning and triumphantly finished the job.

Sambo’s father was an army veteran, a sergeant, who took for his wife an Indian woman and became the parent of a family, of whom Samuel is the eldest. He is of medium height, thin, but very erect, with low shoulders and long neck. The forehead is sloping, the nose rather thick. He has large dark eyes with tremendous whites, short woolly hair, high cheekbones, skin very dark and sallow. The whole countenance is long and the head angular; he has the clear characteristics of the half-cast. The general opinion is that Sambo is out of place in the shed. He ought rather to have been trained for a life on the stage; without doubt he would have made a good pantomimist. Both his appearance and manner are comical; he causes everyone to smile by reason of his ludicrous expressions and grotesque facial contortions.

Sambo is quite aware of his own funniosity and readily lends himself to the amusement of the small fry that sometimes come to gaze upon him. Snatching up a shovel, he claps it to his shoulder as though it were the traditional nigger’s instrument and, rolling his eyes and turning up the whites of them, pretends to be fingering the banjo while he sings a few lines of the “Swanee River” or other coon song. Sambo has always been the butt of the rougher section in the shed and has been forced to suffer many indignities. It was a common thing for the bullies of the place to throw him on the ground and disgrace him. This they continued to do long after he had married and become the father of children.

Working just beyond Sambo, at the next furnace, is the very shadow of a man — a mere frame, a skeleton, which a good puff of wind might very likely throw down. He is stripped to the waist and hatless. His hair is long and it stands upright. His flannel shirt is thrown open; his trousers merely hang on him, and he is as black as a sweep with the smoke and grime of the furnace. This is “Strawberry,” sometimes also known as “Gooseberry.” His features are remarkably small and fine, and his neck is no bigger round than a span. He does not appear strong enough to do any work, but, for all that, he is very tough and wiry. Many a one laughs at him and tells him that he is melting away “like a tallow candle,” but he answers them all boldly and tells them, with a merry twinkle in his tiny dark eyes, that he is all right. “You look after yourself, mate, and don’t fret about me,” says he.

Strawberry was at one time a cobbler, and used to get his living by the patching up and renovation of old soles. Long after he entered the shed he kept up the employment in his spare time, but by and by he discontinued the work and betook himself to the more genteel though less lucrative pursuits of flute-playing and photography. For a time he donned uniform and played in the local band, and then, after a while, that had to be discontinued. Now all his thought and care is to take photographs and make models of steam-engines, magic lanterns and cinematographic instruments. Mounted on a cycle, and provided with a camera, he scours the country round at week-ends for customers and comes home and does the developing and printing on Sundays. He is thoroughly versed in time exposures and the various mysteries of photographic development. Wherever he goes he carries a book of instructions in his pocket, and if you stop to speak with him for a moment he is sure to tell you of some new lens or snap-shot arrangement he has lately made, or wearies you nearly to death with an attempted explanation of the compounds in his home-made developers — “Hypo-tassum” something or other, and the rest of it.

Another of Strawberry’s hobbies is the blind poring over fusty books, several hundreds of years old, bought at auctions and usually fit for nothing but the fire or dust-heap. These he treasures with great care, and he is frequently trying to expound the contents of them to his workmates, and to any others who will suffer to listen to him for a few moments. His latest passion is to seek out old caves, ruins and legendary sites; he is musician, artist, engineer, archæologist and antiquarian combined. What he will become ultimately no one knows. I much fear, however, that he will suffer the furnaceman’s fate in the end and perish of the smoke and heat of the fires.

Strawberry succeeded Gustavus, who died under very sad circumstances. Poor Gus was most unfortunate, though such cases as his are not of uncommon occurrence. He had been through the war in South Africa, and had fought there for his country. He had not been long on the furnace. His health was not good at the best of times. If regard for a man’s health were had at the time of putting him on a job Gus would never have gone to the fires, but there is a ruthless, and very often a sinister, disregard of a man’s physical condition when he is wanted to fill a difficult post. About a year before Gus’s wife contracted milk fever, after confinement. This affected her reason and she had to be removed; her case was pronounced hopeless — absolutely hopeless. This came as a great shock to Gus; there were five little children, all babies, one of them new-born. He had no friends to come and take care of them and he was poor — very poor. Accordingly, with a little assistance from the neighbour, he determined to look after them himself. The oldest boy prepared the meals by day; Gus saw to the general needs at night and did the washing Sundays. Very soon one of the mites fell ill and had to go to the workhouse hospital. All the others but one suffered sickness, and Gus very soon followed suit. Worn out with the day’s work at the furnace and obliged to toil and watch half the night over his infants, he soon fell a prey to ill-health, and was compelled to stop at home from work.

Then the little stinging insects of the shed began to cavil and sneer. “He’s oni shammin’. Ther’s nothin’ the matter wi’ he. He’s as well as I be. He oni wants to shirk the furnace. Kip un to’t when a comes in.” By and by Gus started work again, but not till the overseer had played a treacherous trick upon him and tried to have him rejected at the medical examination through an innocent and incautious remark he had chanced to let fall concerning himself. The fact of the matter was, Gus was a broken, ruined man. His general health was gone. His sight was failing; his constitution was wrecked. For several weeks he dragged himself to work, in a last desperate effort to keep a home for his babes and supply them with food, though anyone might have seen that he was in positive torture all the while. At last he could bear up no longer. He came to work the fore part of the week, then stopped at home; in three days he was dead. His little boys and girls went to the workhouse, or to charities. One has to die before his mates in the shed think there is anything the matter with him. Then, in nine cases out of ten — especially if he happens to be one of the poorest and most unfortunate — he is mercilessly sneered over. Probably that was his own fault. They even blame him for dying; in three days he is almost totally forgotten. Cruel hearts and feelings are bred in the atmosphere of the factory.

There is one “Fire King” and only one; all the others are mere apprentices — nobodies. He comes from “The Noth,” from Middlesborough, of great iron fame. Without doubt he is a marvel. He is always talking about the “haats” they used to draw “way up there.” It was prodigious. There is nothing like it down south. “Wales! I tell you Wales is a dung-hill; they can’t do it for nuts.” He looks at you with inexpressible scorn. Then he plunges the bar into the furnace hole and stirs up the coals, “stops up” again, peers through the iron door and comes back mopping his face with the wiper. “I tell you tha be a lot o’ cow-bangers about here. Tha never sin a furnace nor a haat afore. When I was at Sunderland” — here he gives an especially knowing wink, and scratches one side of his nose with his forefinger, drawing his head near to your ear and speaking in an undertone — “when I was at Sunderland, though I says it myself, there wasn’t a man on the ground as could hold a candle to Phil Clegg. The manager allus used to stop and talk to me about the haats, and slip a crown piece into mi hand for a drink. ‘Clegg,’ says he, ‘I’ve learned from you what I never knew before.’” All this is accepted with reserve in the shed. It may or may not have been true; one is not compelled to believe all the extraordinary reports circulated by the forgers and furnacemen.

Some years ago the doughty one was set to do some initial forging in steel blooms and spoiled three parts of the material by overheating. “Bad steel! damn bad steel! ’Twunt stand a bit o’ haat,” said he. The matter was accordingly reported to the managers, and word was sent to the firm that had manufactured the blooms — “Bad steel! Bad steel!” passed all along the line. Then the manufacturers’ representative came to inspect the process and to report upon the quality of the metal. The Fire King scraped his leg and scratched his nose and talked much of “kimicals,” winking at his mates and getting his metal to a fizzing heat. “Too hot, too hot,” said the representative. “Aye! man, but we must get it so hot or the hammer wunt bate it down,” the Fire King replied. “Get a heavier hammer,” said the inspector, touching the spot immediately, and walking off in disgust. The steel was all right, it was merely overheated. Thereafter the Fire King’s prestige visibly diminished. He became the scorn of the furnaces; he was humbled and disgraced for ever. He was subsequently put in charge of the damping-up of the furnaces, and he styled himself foreman of the night shift there, which was one, besides himself.