Rambles on Railways

by Sir Cusack P. Roney

[61] “I know, gentlemen, that I have detained you at considerable length. There is, however, one most important subject upon which I must speak, and you must bear with me for a while. I claim that during the whole course of my political and private life I have been, and I will continue to be, the friend and well-wisher of the working classes; and I think I know those classes well enough, and more especially in this my own immediate neighbourhood, to know this, that there is nothing they wish for so much as plain speaking and plain dealing, and I venture in their presence, I hope of many of them—and I trust my words may reach many of those which are not present—I venture to warn them against one danger which I, in common with others, foresee as a possible consequence of the great measure which we have given. Apprehensions are entertained that the working men, not satisfied with overcoming that political influence to which they are entitled, will be disposed to lend themselves as dupes to designing persons, who may endeavour to cajole them, with the idea of returning representatives to Parliament, with loud professions of being the only friends of the working classes, and of being sent to Parliament especially to promote legislative measures intended to conduce to their welfare. Now, I believe that there never was a Parliament more disposed than the present to look to the interests of the working classes, and to consult for their benefit. I can only hope that the next Parliament may be equally desirous of effecting that object, and equally acquainted with the best modes of carrying it into effect. But I warn as a friend—as an earnest and sincere friend, and speaking from the deepest conviction—I warn the working classes not to be led away by the flattering delusion of men who will tell them that they can induce Parliament to pass a measure of exceptional legislation for their especial and immediate benefit. They cannot induce, I hope, any Parliament to pass any such measure; and if such a measure were to be passed, the workmen would find to their misfortune that it was the greatest injury that could be done them—I mean a measure attempting to regulate the rate of wages. To interfere between labour and capital is beyond the legislation of any Parliament; and, indeed, it would be, in short, only to lead Parliament to adopt such a course of legislation as has been recommended in some of the bye-laws we have heard so much of lately in connection with the various Trades’ Unions in the country. Do not let me be misunderstood. I am no adversary or opponent of Trades’ Unions. I think that, confined to their legitimate object, they are useful and salutary instruments for maintaining the rights of the labouring classes; and forty-three years ago I was the member of the House of Commons who first recommended and succeeded in carrying the abolition of those laws which made it illegal for workmen to agree to combine together not to work under a certain amount of wages. I therefore hope that what I say may be understood as not proceeding from one who desires to oppress the working man. I say that even strikes, objectionable as they are in principle, and injurious as they are to the working classes, are not an illegitimate or an illegal mode of proceeding. I say that if capital and labour cannot agree together, the only mode of bringing them together is the absence of one or the other—the capital to employ the labour, or the labourer to give the capital. I go further, and I say that so long as Trades’ Unions are charitable associations, and their contributions go to the relief of those who are thrown out of work by no fault of their own, they are unobjectionable and meritorious; but, from the disclosures we have recently heard, it appears they have gone far beyond those acts. I do not mean to refer to those gross acts of intimidation, picketing, rattening, and acts leading to murder. They are acts which no person will defend, and the members of Trades’ Unions themselves shrink from acknowledging their participation in them; but I say that these associations go beyond their limits when they agree not only themselves not to work, but to prevent and intimidate other persons from working. For my own part, looking to the public and private interests of the members, I cannot for the life of me understand how English workmen, entitled to make the most of their own industry and science, can submit to the tyranny under which they are groaning. Gentlemen, the whole course of our legislation for the last, I won’t say how many years, has been a protest against class legislation. It has been an argument in favour of the free admission of all foreign goods, an argument in favour of free-trade, an argument opposed to all class protection. What would you say if, in the city of Manchester, Government were to impose, as in Continental countries, an octroi duty on the importation of every article of agricultural produce? The whole city would be in an uproar; and yet you submit to the bye-laws of associations which say that not only shall a tax be paid, but that not a single brick shall be laid in Manchester that is imported from a foreign country, that is, from beyond a single district, even from beyond the breadth of a canal. We are speaking here in the Free-trade Hall. What do you say of bye-laws which say that not a stone shall be worked in a quarry, to save an enormous additional amount of labour in carting it to the place where it is to be deposited, but that it shall be brought in bulk and worked by the workmen; and if it should have been worked in the quarry, then the farce is to be gone through of working it again by workmen in Manchester? If this system is to prevail, what is to become of your threshing machines and your steam ploughs, your mowing and reaping machines? You would have to resort to your old flail and other obsolete implements, and in manufactures to old handloom weaving; you would have to do away with the power-loom and all those inventions of genius which, while they have multiplied, to an indefinite amount, the productive capital of the country, have at the same time multiplied to an extent almost equally indefinite the amount and number of persons employed. I say that the British workmen would do well seriously to consider these things. Let me add that I have now been for two and forty years a married man; and let me advise the workmen when they fall into any difficulty to consult their wives. If the workmen are the bread winners, their wives are the bread managers; and let them ask their wives and their children, if they cannot answer for themselves, what they think in the long run they have gained from those strikes which they have carried on with so much perseverance and so much loss, greatly to the advantage of those who apply the strings and manage the puppet.”—Speech of the Right Hon. the Earl of Derby at Manchester, 17th of October, 1867.

The author avails himself of this opportunity to give his experience of a strike, which he went through as principal officer of the Eastern Counties Railway Company in 1849. In that year the locomotive superintendent had frequently to direct engine-drivers of passenger trains, not to leave their engines at stations, except to oil or look after them. The order not having been attended to by some of the men, the locomotive superintendent issued a notice to the effect that a shilling fine would be inflicted upon any driver who quitted his engine except for the purposes above stated. A man, notoriously not a first-class man, but with an abundance of that quality which is vulgarly, though effectively, expressed by the word “jaw,” undertook, as was afterwards learned, to set the rule at defiance. Accordingly on the next day, he alighted from his engine at a first-class station, and ostentatiously walked up and down the platform with his hands in his trowser’s pockets; he was, of course, fined. He declined to pay the shilling; and, owing to what is unfortunately usual in such cases, the influence of outsiders, men who had never done the honest day’s work of an honest workman in their lives, the engine-drivers to a man, gave notice of their intention to leave the service in a week, unless the order were withdrawn. Had the demand been complied with, the discipline of the line was at an end. The Board, for it now became a Board question, therefore, after much serious and protracted deliberation, took this view. Orders were consequently given to the principal officers to lose not a moment, and to spare no expense in procuring engine-drivers elsewhere. This was no easy task to accomplish in so short a time as a week, but by arranging for the diminution of the number of trains, and through the sympathy of the public, which in the first instance had been altogether with the men, but was totally changed when the real facts became known, the service of the line was continued, and within nine days from that on which the old hands had given notice of retirement, almost all the usual trains were restored to the time table. The anxieties of a strike on a great leading railway are of a fearful character; those only who, like the author and his other brother officers, had to go through one, can attempt to describe them, and the very best description that could be written would fall far short of their reality.

But as regards the men; at first their leaders and the outsiders who were urging them to destruction, were very sanguine of success; in fact, at the meetings that were held three or four times a day (for there was a species of sittings en permanence) it was assured to them. But as days passed on and the order was not withdrawn, the passions of the leaders rose; not only were threats uttered, but notwithstanding apparently most careful watching on the part of men whose trustworthiness there was no reason to doubt, some of the engines were tampered with, tow was introduced along the piston rods to prevent their acting; parts that should be oiled were not oiled, and some other things were done that at the time were described as “not intended to do serious damage, just to maim and lame the engines a bit, not to destroy them.”

But in this strike, that happened which has happened in every other strike, combination, or conspiracy of men of the humbler classes, since the days that strikes, combinations, or conspiracies first existed—that is, there was what is usually known as “a traitor in the camp,” for the author knew, within less than an hour after each meeting broke up, all the material facts that had occurred at it. It is needless to say that the information given was of great value in check-mating the men, and leading to their eventual defeat.

So far as regards the strike during its progress, and until its death; and now for its consequences. The men were no sooner completely beaten than they were of course deserted by the leaders and the puppet-movers. The subscriptions that were promised by “the trades” during the strike were not forthcoming when the strike was over. The very word implies that the workers work not, but that, nevertheless, the employers require their service. But, unhappily for the men, this had ceased to be so on the railway.

The reverse of the picture was now seen by the men whom Lord Derby so happily describes as the “bread-winners,” as well as by the wives, whom His Lordship, with equal aptitude, names the “bread-managers.” The two pounds sterling a-week—or more—that the men were accustomed to receive each Saturday afternoon, were no longer ready at the pay-table; no, they did not even have the ten, fifteen, or twenty shillings a week, so vauntingly promised just a fortnight previously. “Strike-pay” was promised for six months certain, actual payment was for one week only.

Engine drivers, as a rule, are not more provident than the other sections of the working community of the railways; yet, some had saved a little money, with which they expected to hold out a few weeks, by which time they believed they would easily get into work again. But, in this respect, they were mistaken. There is a rule on railways that when an engine driver applies for a situation, the locomotive superintendent of the company at which employment is sought, writes for the man’s character at his last place. This is obviously requisite, not only as an ordinary precaution, but as an act of necessity, in case a man should have been dismissed in consequence of intoxication, or owing to having caused an accident. In the case of the Eastern Counties engine drivers, the locomotive superintendents of the already opened lines throughout the country refused to engage them for fully a year after the strike had ended.

The more necessitous of the men appealed to the author, and to his brother officers, to be reinstated. Many a man, hard working, honest, and worthy, accompanied his appeals by tears, caused by bitter sorrow and anguish at their positions; and, some of them, when reproached, that they, so esteemed and respected, as they knew they always had been, by their officers—yet had deserted—invariably replied, that they were told, in the plainest terms, that if they did not join the strike, they, their wives and children, should be made to suffer for it in their persons. No doubt they then knew, what the world at large has only recently known, that such threats were meant, not as threats, but as realities. It was felt, however, that it would be unjust towards the new men if the old were re-admitted, at all events at first; but, by degrees, as vacancies occurred, some of those who had not emigrated, or who had not been taken on lines which just then were opened in various parts of the kingdom, came back into the service. But they came back at the bottom of the list of drivers, with six shillings a-day, as goods engine drivers, instead of seven shillings and sixpence a-day as passenger drivers of the first class, and it took some of them two years after re-admission, before they regained their former first-class pay. Of the distress in many forms which the strike caused to men who had no alternative but to join in it, innumerable instances could be cited, and the author was able to confirm by personal experience what he had always believed to be the case, that in strikes, workmen are usually beaten, and that, if even apparently successful, they are, they must be, losers.

[62] We would not dare to invent a word of bi-lingual derivatives if we had not the authority of all the bishops for so doing, and to this we may add that the member of the Episcopal Bench, who is a distinguished philologist, especially sanctions word-coining. Dr. Chenevix Trench, Archbishop of Dublin, says (page 151 et seq. of his “Study of Words,”) that poets may at all times coin them, and prose (not prosy) writers occasionally, and His Grace refers, in proof, to Cicero and St. Augustine. “Pan,” is of the old Greek, but “Anglican,” as well as “Anglia,” are Latin words, that were coined two or three centuries after Latin was living and every-day-spoken. “Anglia” is in reality derived from the Angles, an ancient German nation, an off-shoot of the Suevi, who migrated to the parts of Denmark, now known as Schleswig and Holstein. In process of time they came over to this country in greater numbers than the inhabitants of the other nations that dwelt along the East Coast of Northern Europe. Tracing the derivation of “Angli,” we fear that the name comes from nothing more dignified than the Saxon word angel or engel, which signified a fish-hook. Being the most daring of all the pirates that infested the Northern Seas, they were specially distinguished as such among other nations, who said of the Angli, that they were like hooks, they caught all that was in the sea and made prey of it. Such were our ancestors of 2,000 years ago and upwards. (Has the vulgar saying of “with a hook,” any connection with our origin as an Anglo-Saxon nation?) But hear what Professor Henry Morley says of Englishmen, through Saxon and English Literature, for more than thirteen centuries. “Our writers before Chaucer, were men speaking the mind of our country during the period of the formation of the language, either in Latin, the common tongue of the learned, or in Anglo-Saxon, or in Anglo-Norman, or in English, of which the original elements were so variously proportioned and so incompletely blended, that it differs much from English of to-day. But with occasional impediment of a word that has passed out of use, the language of Chaucer, and those of his contemporaries who did not, like the author of “Piers Plowman,” write in the less developed English of a rural district, speaks to us all yet with a living warmth. With Gower and Chaucer, therefore, begins the literature of formed English; and as the best fruit of John Gower’s genius is contained, not in his English, but in his Latin poetry, it is by common consent to Geoffery Chaucer that we now look back as to the very spring and well of English undefiled.

“But our Chaucer was only a middle link in a long chain. Before his birth, the literature of this country had maintained, for a longer time than has passed since his birth, a foremost place in the intellectual history of Europe. To say nothing of the yet earlier Beowulf, English Cædmon poured the soul of a Christian poet into noble song 650 years before Chaucer was born. Six centuries before Chaucer, Bede, foremost of Christian scholars, was the historian of England, and Chaucer wrote his “Canterbury Tales,” not quite five centuries ago. It is only because we have done so much during these five centuries, and every stroke of the work has told upon our present, that we are content to look on Wycliff, Chaucer, Gower, and the author of “Piers Plowman,” as men of a remote time who lived in the dim caves about the bubbling source of our literature. They did not live at the source of our literature, and they are not remote. Their aspirations were ours, their ways of thinking ours, their battle ours, except that we have the advantage of a few points gained.