The Industrial Revolution spawned a range of occupations closely linked to the expansion of the transport network, particularly railways and canals but also improvements to the roads and highways. The records described in this chapter allow you to piece together the lives and careers of workers in these industries, as well as establish more about the impact the new communication networks had on daily life.
From the eighteenth century a lot of money was invested in improving British transport systems to aid industrial growth. Inland waterways were dug to carry products for export from isolated provincial towns to the docks where they would be shipped by cargo boat. The network of canals constructed from the mid-1600s provided work for travelling labourers known as navigational engineers, or ‘navvies’, employed by construction companies. The waterways network, which covered around 4,000 miles by the early nineteenth century, was more cost effective and efficient for transporting goods than the alternative of horse-drawn wagons on roads that were poorly maintained and plagued by highwaymen.
‘Britain’s communications networks changed our ancestors’ environment beyond recognition.’
Some of the problems of road transport were addressed at the beginning of the eighteenth century when a number of Turnpike Acts were passed, setting up turnpike trusts to ensure the maintenance and safety of major routes financed by a toll. As more turnpikes were constructed around the country journey times by coach were reduced by up to a half and more people were encouraged to travel further distances as instances of highway robbery fell. Travel was made even more affordable and accessible to a wider section of society with the advent of the railways from the 1830s, allowing ordinary workers the possibility of travelling further afield in search of work and a better standard of life.
Railways were first designed for commercial purposes, transporting finished products at a much faster speed than canal boats so that manufacturers could meet growing demands from consumers. A Cornish engineer, Richard Trevithick, designed the first locomotive-drawn train in 1804, though design failures in the tracks hindered the success of his experiments and it was not until 1811 that John Blenkinsop developed a railway worked by a steam locomotive to transport coal on the Middleton Railway. In the same year William Jessop engineered the Kilmarnock and Troon Railway in Scotland. In 1829 the world’s first inter-city line, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, was built and used to test various locomotive systems in the Rainhill Trials, which proved Stephenson’s Rocket to be the fastest and most advanced design. This marked a turning point in the history of British transport and established rail as the dominant form of land transport for the next hundred years.
In 1801 London covered a relatively small area, but a hundred years later villages like Leyton and Hampstead had been swallowed up into the mass of suburbs now surrounding the city, a commuter belt feeding the capital with a new class of white-collar workers.
Britain’s communication networks changed our ancestors’ environment beyond recognition during the nineteenth century. The statistics extracted from nineteenth-century census returns demonstrate an unprecedented population boom and, coupled with evidence from maps of the countryside and towns, we can see where this burgeoning population was concentrated, giving us an insight into migration patterns. The expansion of Britain’s towns and villages, at times merging to form cities, was principally the work of the railways. These allowed populations to migrate more easily and industries to grow quickly and accommodate more workers.
‘Railways allowed people to migrate more easily and industries to grow quickly.’
The British Library has a fascinating collection of London maps that help you to see at a glance how urbanization has spread since Roman times and how communication networks and transport links have been at the centre of these changes. The library’s Collect Britain website at www.collectbritain.co.uk has digital copies of the Crace Collection, over 800 maps and plans of the capital from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries collected by the Victorian designer Frederick Crace, as well as a link to the British Library’s virtual exhibition, London: A Life in Maps.
Improved communication networks had far-reaching effects beyond the obvious impact on population mobility. With transportation carrying goods faster than ever across a larger geographical area, publishers began printing national newspapers to distribute across the country, raising public awareness of central politics and national issues. With the Education Acts of the nineteenth century improving levels of literacy, the popularity of the ‘penny post’ really took off with the help of the railways. In the Post Office’s heyday it was possible to send a letter by post and get a reply the very same day.
The development of turnpikes, inland waterways and railways changed the nature of rural life, altering the British landscape and fuelling urbanization. Improvements in transport had an immense effect on the demography of the population, speeding up industrialization and creating jobs for thousands of people, not just in the transport industry but also in the areas to which people could travel more easily, quickly and affordably. The opening of new transport links was often shortly followed by a surge in migration to that area, so if you’ve been wondering why your family suddenly upped sticks and moved 20 miles away the answer might lie in the date the local station opened.
Prior to the eighteenth century, parishes were responsible for the maintenance of roads, but their failure to keep them safe and in good condition led to turnpike trusts being formed from 1663 with the permission of a local Act of Parliament. Some turnpike trusts improved the roads that were already there while brand-new turnpikes were also constructed from 1706, which totalled 22,000 miles of turnpike road covering the country by the 1830s. The mid-eighteenth century has been described as a period of ‘turnpike mania’ with over 400 Turnpike Acts being passed between the 1730s and 1760s. The new turnpike trusts financed the maintenance and construction of roads by introducing a toll on road users. Tollhouses were built along sections of the road to collect the toll, which began to deter highwaymen who could no longer escape the scene of a robbery unnoticed.
• Geoffrey N. Wright wrote a guide to Turnpike Roads in 1992, which includes a map showing all the turnpikes in 1750.
• Records of turnpike trusts and Highway Boards are kept at local county record offices, where you may find maps, plans, agreements between the parish and the owners of any private land a turnpike adjoined, as well as accounts and records of payments to labourers working on the road and merchants supplying construction materials.
• If your ancestor was a member of a turnpike trust or on the Highway Board their name will probably appear on the committee’s minutes. The National Register of Archives at www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/nra has details of repositories for over 600 turnpike trusts across the United Kingdom and Ireland. The advanced search option under the Corporate Name search allows you to narrow down the search criteria by selecting ‘Turnpike Trusts’ from the Category list so that you can find records such as those of the Great Western Road Turnpike Trust, whose minutes are held at Glasgow City Archives.
• The National Archives in Kew holds some stray records concerning turnpikes, kept principally among documents inherited by the Transport Departments in series MT. Use the online catalogue to search for these, which include accounts and reports concerning the Holyhead and Shrewsbury Roads in MT 27.
• The National Archives of Ireland has a small number of documents concerning turnpikes kept with records of the Office of Public Works, details of which can be found on the National Archives of Ireland online database.
• The most comprehensive collections of turnpike trust records are held among local collections, however, so use resources such as the Archives Hub found at www.archiveshub.ac.uk to locate records in university and college collections and the Scottish Archive Network (SCAN) at www.scan.org.uk and National Register of Archives for Scotland at www.nas.gov.uk/nras for documents held in Scottish archives and local studies centres.
Generally speaking, it was propertied men who managed the turnpike trusts, and their success in constructing a national road network lay in the quality of the materials used and the regularity of maintenance. A coach journey from London to Bath would have taken around three days before smooth turnpikes transformed the boggy paths and made the journey easier for the horses and more comfortable for passengers, so that Bath could be reached within twelve hours in 1779. By the 1780s every region of England and some parts of Scotland and Wales had a local turnpike network that linked into a national system connecting London with modern industrializing centres like Manchester and Glasgow.
More affordable coach journeys could be made if a passenger was prepared to travel on the open-air top of the carriage, while those who were better off would pay for an inside seat and the very rich would only travel in a private carriage.
Highway Boards made up of groups of parish authorities gradually replaced the turnpike trusts from 1835.
Descriptions of the administrative and staff records of the Post Office from 1636 to 2000 can be found in The National Archives online catalogue under the POST series, although none of the records are actually held at Kew. Records of employees of the Post Office can be found at the Royal Mail Archive held at
The British Postal Museum and
Archive
Freeling House
Phoenix Place
London WC1X 0DL
The archives date back to the seventeenth century, with establishment books listing senior members of staff from 1742, and appointment books from 1831 to 1952 recording all staff appointments. Files about staff pensions survive for all employees from the nineteenth century, with name indexes from 1921 onwards, and the collection includes a large photographic archive. The British Postal Museum website has an online catalogue with descriptions of 50,000 records from its collections at www.postalheritage.org.uk.
The Post Office was also responsible for the national telegraph service, with the entire telephone service being taken over by the GPO in 1912. In 1947 Cable & Wireless Ltd was nationalized and absorbed into the Post Office. The GPO became responsible for more fees and licences, particularly with the growth of the television and media industry, which made it too large and complex to manage effectively and so its powers were devolved and in 1969 the Post Office Act made the GPO a public corporation rather than a government branch, splitting it into Post and Telecommunications. In 1981 the telecommunications side of the Post Office became a separate corporation under the name British Telecom, which was privatized in 1984.
Records of the Telecommunications department of the Post Office and earlier private telephone and telegraph companies have been transferred to the BT Group Archives, whose records date from the nineteenth century. The British Telecom Archives have teamed up with the commercial website www.ancestry.co.uk to digitize historical phone books and make them available to search online.
Charles I established the Post Office in 1635, employing postmasters on the main routes between London and the major cities to collect and distribute mail and to collect revenues on behalf of the Crown. The General Post Office (GPO) was established between 1656 and 1660 in the City of London and comprised the Inland Office for all internal mail, the Foreign Office for overseas mail, and the Penny Post Office for local mail; a Postmaster General oversaw the entire department. The GPO building and the majority of its records were engulfed by the Great Fire of London in 1666, so documentation prior to this date is scarce.
The number of routes and towns covered by the postal network grew during the 1700s as the ever-expanding network of turnpikes made it easier for mail to be delivered further. This necessitated regional administrators to be established, to ensure local post offices were run efficiently. In 1715 regional surveyors were appointed to fulfil this requirement.
The introduction of the world’s first adhesive postage stamps, the Penny Black and the Two Pence Blue, in 1840 gave the postal system a huge boost in the nineteenth century. Increased adult literacy also led to a rise in the amount of mail sent and the Post Office became responsible for telecommunications in 1870 and a banking service.
Although the construction of turnpikes from the late seventeenth century onwards increased the speed at which people and small loads of commercial goods could be transported, the roads did not solve the problem of getting large quantities of industrial produce to the ports. Thus, developing inland waterways was seen as a way to overcome the limitations posed by wagon loads on the roads. Canals were the principal mode of transport for commerce during the eighteenth century and only went into decline from the mid-nineteenth century when a vast network of railway track started to cover the British countryside and took business away from canal companies.
‘Canals were the principal mode of transport for commerce in the eighteenth century.’
Though few records survive proving that our ancestors helped build these waterways and navigations, there are plenty of records helping us to understand the history of each canal – when construction began, how long it took, how many people were employed on it, how it benefited surrounding areas and how long it proved vital to the local economy. It is possible to find out who invested in canal construction and sometimes the names of those people who worked on the canals as boatmen, as well as information about specific barges and canal boats.
• The Waterways Archive: The Waterways Trust administers the Waterways Archive, a collection of material held in several county record offices as well as at two of the three National Waterways Museums located in Ellesmere Port and Gloucester Docks. Ellesmere Port is home to the David Owen Waterways Archive and Gloucester Docks to the British Waterways Archive. The Waterways Archive collections include records of boat owners and registered boatmen, toll records, and large carrying companies’ archives, plans, drawings, technical records, documents, books, periodicals, oral history recordings and photographs. The collections from 15 archives, including the British Waterways Archive, David Owen Waterways Archive and National Archives of Scotland, can be searched on the Virtual Waterways Archive catalogue at www.virtualwaterways.co.uk. The Waterways Archives at Ellesmere Port and Gloucester Docks provide a research service at a fee for those unable to visit in person. You can find out more about these services from the National Waterways Museum website at www.nwm.org.uk. While the Virtual Waterways catalogue is a great place to begin your search for canal records, it does not have a comprehensive list of all documents held in British repositories, which is why a search of the county record office or local studies centre nearest to the canal is also wise.
• Scottish Canal Records: The first canal to be constructed in Scotland was the Forth and Clyde Canal in 1792, with Scotland’s canal network being completed in 1822. The National Archives of Scotland website contains company histories for the Caledonian Canal, the Crinan Canal, the Edinburgh and Glasgow Union Canal, the Forth and Cart Junction Canal, the Forth and Clyde Canal, the Glasgow Paisley and Johnstone Canal and the Monkland Canal, although some records of these companies are also held at The National Archives in Kew. The NAS has an online research guide explaining how to find canal records there with a list of document references for each company at www.nas.gov.uk/guides/canal.asp. The NAS warns researchers that no lists of canal employees survive among its records, though names of canal proprietors and commissioners may be found.
• Irish Canal Records: Many labourers employed to construct Scottish canals were in fact Irish. To locate records of Irish canal companies it is worth contacting the National Archives of Ireland, the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland and the Ulster Folk & Transport Museum who have their own archive and library collections.
• Records in The National Archives: Railway companies started to take over ailing canal companies and in the 1850s the Board of Trade Railway Department assumed responsibility for them all. This link means that much documentation regarding canals at The National Archives is found with that of railways, docks and roads in the RAIL series.
A Railway and Canal Division of the Board of Trade was established in 1873 and the administration of canals became the duty of the Docks and Canals Division in 1934. The Transport Act 1947 nationalized the canals as well as the railways, and responsibility for operating inland waterways was transferred to the Docks and Inland Waterways Executive of the British Transport Commission, whose archives now form part of the British Transport Historical Records Section (BTHR) kept at The National Archives.
The BTHR Section has a card index at Kew where records relating to particular companies, photographs, maps, plans, special collections, books, pamphlets and periodicals can be searched. The records of this section, mainly held in RAIL and AN series, date back much earlier than the 1850s because the rail companies inherited records from canal companies that may have been operating since the 1600s. The earliest substantial canal records held at The National Archives are those for the Wey Navigation, built between 1651 and 1653. Papers consisting of claims to the canal’s profits can be found in E177.
• Parliamentary Archives: After 1792 the construction of a canal required Parliament’s permission, and as such Parliamentary Papers contain local and private Acts of Parliament and the Parliamentary Archives at the Houses of Parliament in London hold some plans and prospectuses for proposed canal constructions from 1794. From 1837 duplicates of canal scheme maps also had to be placed with the Clerk of the Peace and those records may be found among the Quarter Sessions’ papers at the local record office. From 1795 the Clerk of the Peace also kept Registers of Boats and Barges for inland waterway craft that had to be registered with the name of the proprietor.
• River Transport Records: River transportation for passengers was vitally important before large-scale bridge-building programmes made it possible to cross rivers at several points. The Thames in London, for instance, could only be crossed at London Bridge until 1750 when Westminster Bridge was opened. Watermen operated ferry crossings to carry people between the north and south banks of the river Thames. The Company of Watermen was formed in the 1500s to ensure passenger safety and fair charges. Officers were appointed by the Lord Mayor to issue licences to watermen, printed tables of fares were published from the early eighteenth century and in 1700 the Company encompassed lightermen as well as watermen. Lightermen unloaded cargo from ships and carried it to the port by lighter. Members of the Company of Watermen and Lightermen came from all parts of the river Thames between Gravesend and Windsor, and the Company’s records can be found in the Guildhall Library Manuscripts Section in London. The Library’s records, dating from the 1600s to the 1940s, include apprentices’ bindings and affidavit books, quarterage books, records of contracts and ferry services, records of the Court of Complaint, and registers of lighters, barges and passenger boats. These documents hold the names of watermen and lightermen; some apprenticeship records include dates and places of baptism, while others hold addresses, places of mooring, dates of death, and information about earnings. The Guildhall Library has a research guide explaining more about their records for watermen and lightermen at www.history.ac.uk/gh/ water.htm.
If you are unable to visit the Guildhall then Robert J. Cottrell has compiled indexes of Thames Watermen and Lightermen Apprentice Bindings 1692–1949, Apprentices’ Affidavits 1759–1949 and Contract Licences 1865–1926, and offers a search service of his indexes for a fee. Enquiries should be sent to 19 Bellevue Road, Bexleyheath, Kent DA6 8ND.
Another set of records that you can apply to be searched by post is John Roberts’s Waterway Index, containing the names of around 10,000 people employed on inland waterways, from boat builders, canal agents, lock-keepers and toll collectors to boatmen, watermen, flatmen and navvies. The names have been extracted from a number of original sources and Mr Roberts will search his indexes if an enquiry is sent to 52 St Andrews Road, Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands B75 6UH.
The Inland Waterways Association (www.waterways. org.uk) and the Inland Waterways Association of Ireland (www.iwai.ie) are run by enthusiasts keen to keep the culture of canals alive. They may be able to help you locate information about the history of a particular waterway and their websites have links to associations linked to specific canals and navigations.
The London Canal Museum is a great place to learn all about the heritage of canals in the capital and their website has a useful Family History Checklist for anybody researching canal ancestors, at www.canalmuseum.org.uk/collection/family-history.htm. The website also has a comprehensive list of links to other useful sites for researching the history of canals and waterways. If you are researching ancestors who worked on the Thames in London then take a look at the Bargemen website at www.bargemen.co.uk, which has information about boat builders, owners, watermen, lightermen and dock workers around London and contains some family histories. The site is packed full of research guides for those exploring different types of Thames workers as well as indexes to wills of lightermen, the names of barges involved in the evacuation from Dunkirk, directories for lightermen and bargemen, and other useful sources for family historians compiled from various original documents.
While many canals were filled in or fell into disrepair after their demise, there has recently been a push to conserve some in the interests of heritage, to promote tourism and as a means of exploring a greener method of transport in the modern age. There are many canal associations who work hard to preserve the inland waterways that have weaved their way through the British landscape for around 300 years now, and they can often point you in the direction of surviving records documenting the canal’s history and the lives of the people to whom they were important.
Private railway companies operated all lines in Britain until the Transport Act 1947 nationalized the railways in 1948 to form British Rail. The 1921 Railways Act had already merged most railway companies into the ‘Big Four’ – the Great Western Railway, the London & North Eastern Railway, the Southern Railway and the London, Midland & Scottish Railway. In 1948 the British Transport Historical Commission collected the records of the several hundred rail, canal and dock companies that were absorbed into the State. The records were initially kept at London, York and Edinburgh but have since been relocated: those records kept in Edinburgh were transferred to the National Archives of Scotland and those records held at London and York are now at The National Archives in Kew.
County record offices also hold a lot of material about the impact of the railways locally, and a search of the main archive databases mentioned already, in particular the National Register of Archives, can unearth many of these collections. The local county record office website for the area where your ancestor worked may shed light on their railway collections, like that of Cheshire Record Office, which has an online index to the staff registers they hold for Cambrian Railway, London & North Western Railway, Great Western Railway, and London & North Western and Great Western Joint Railway. The publication Was Your Grandfather a Railwayman? by Tom Richards contains a directory of the record offices around the British Isles that hold papers for various railway companies. Staff records for those people who worked after the Second World War are still with the railway industry for pension purposes, but staff records of workers employed on the railways since the 1960s can be obtained by writing to
The Strategic Rail Authority
55 Victoria Street
London SW1H 0EU
Staff records exist for many railway companies but they are difficult to use and are often poorly indexed, with no central index to the names of all railway employees. The records are arranged by company and some company papers will only give names, details of pay and positions, whereas others give a full service history and some companies have very few surviving staff lists at all.
It is necessary to know which of the 1,000 or so railway companies in operation since the nineteenth century your ancestor might have worked for in order to start looking for any records of his service. Simply knowing that your great-grandfather worked as an engine driver in Liverpool will not be enough information because there were often several companies operating in most towns and each of their records is kept separately. Most companies merged to form larger companies so the company names changed frequently, and in this case it may be necessary to check the records of more than one company. Railway Ancestors by David T. Hawkings lists all the railway companies in England and Wales between 1822 and 1947 in alphabetical order with dates of the merger and details of name changes.
Griff Rhys Jones made the discovery that his maternal great-grandfather, Daniel Price, worked as an engine driver when he ordered the birth certificate for Daniel’s daughter, Louisa Price (Griff’s grandmother), from 1891. This one document allowed Griff to start a series of searches for more information. Of most importance was the address where the Daniel lived with his family in 1891 – Garston, Liverpool – which was confirmed by finding the family in the 1891 census. By investigating the local history of the street, Griff was able to establish that the house in which his great-grandfather lived had been built by the London and North Western Railway Company to provide accommodation for its workers. In turn, this led to a search at The National Archives for further information about Daniel’s career with the company – but, although some staff records were identified in record series RAIL 410, there were none for the period in which Daniel served.
… find which railway company your ancestor worked for
1. Census returns for railway ancestors sometimes give the initials of the company they worked for next to their job title, and the British Railways Pre Grouping Atlas and Gazetteer published by Ian Allen has a list of these abbreviations to help you decipher the company name they refer to.
2. The Gazetteer has a map of England, Wales and Scotland showing the lines that ran through each station as well as a list of stations with the companies that owned or operated them. You can establish where your ancestor lived through certificates and census returns then draw up a list of all the possible stations in that area and the companies that your ancestor may have worked for. The next step will simply be a case of working your way through all those companies’ records to see if you can find anything.
3. The Irish Railway Record Society preserves many historical records about Irish railways. Their website at www.irrs.ie has histories for 14 railway companies operating in Ireland since 1946.
Each company’s staff records are divided into departmental registers, such as those for the Locomotive Carriage and Wagon Department, Traffic Department, or Electrical Engineer’s Department. There was no uniform way of structuring departments so it can sometimes be tricky working out which department your ancestor’s job title fell under. Appendix 6 in Railway Ancestors contains lists of staff trades and occupations with the type of department they might come under, and The National Archives’ research guide ‘Railways: Staff Records’ has some more common examples. Within the departmental records there are generally three types of records where you may find a mention of your ancestor:
• Salary registers were kept for clerical salaried staff and tend to include names, dates of birth, career changes, salary increases and bonuses.
• Staff registers were kept for financial purposes and record names, occupations, places of work, starting pay, pay rises, bonuses and allowances.
• Personnel records vary widely in their content from company to company and may cover a whole group of workers with registers of new employees, attendance logs and discipline registers. Usually the records are arranged numerically by staff number though sometimes an alphabetical index will accompany them.
Salary and staff registers can be interesting if they mention a fine incurred for misdemeanours or any allowances paid and time off due to sickness.
‘Salary and staff records mention fines incurred, allowances paid and time off for sickness.’
You need to be prepared to spend a long time searching among the various types of records for different departments because the records for railway companies are still largely arranged in the format they were when used by clerical staff at the time, and no modern form of indexing has been adopted to make them easily accessible for genealogists’ purposes today.
If you know the name of the company your ancestor worked for, or once you have gathered a list of all his possible employers, there are many resources available to point you in the direction of where to find their records.
• The National Archives’ research guide entitled ‘Railways: Staff Records’ has an appendix listing all the companies they hold records for and the exact RAIL series where those records can be found. Not all records for staff are listed in the appendix, so once you have established what RAIL series those records are kept in it is worth looking at the paper catalogue to get a fuller picture of the series’ holdings. There is also a list of all the railway companies and their RAIL series at the beginning of the RAIL catalogues in the Research Enquiries Room, and a keyword search of the online catalogue for the company’s name restricting the department code to ‘RAIL’ should also tell you which series it is held in. It is important to also consult lists provided in the guide Was Your Grandfather A Railwayman?, which covers documents for railways in England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland and overseas, and Railway Ancestors for railway companies in England and Wales. Railway Records: A Guide to Sources by Cliff Edwards takes a closer look at railway documents kept at The National Archives in Kew.
• The National Archives of Scotland not only holds railway records formerly kept by the British Transport Historical Records Department in Edinburgh but also some useful private collections deposited at the archives and modern records deposited by the British Railways Board, British Railways (Scottish Region), Scotrail and Railtrack Scotland. Most railway records are found under NAS reference BR, and their collections comprise staff records, accident reports, station traffic books, letter books, civil engineer records, photographs and much more. The principal employers of Scottish railwaymen prior to the 1921 Railways Act were North British, the Caledonian, the Glasgow & South Western, the Great North of Scotland, and the Highland. The Railscot website at www.railscot.co.uk contains histories of Scottish railway companies as well as a map showing where each company operated and a chronology of Scottish rail history. The NAS has a research guide for people tracing Scottish railway ancestors on their website, and the NAS publication The Scottish Railway Story is a must-read.
• The Public Records Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) holds information about railway companies in Northern Ireland, and the Ulster Folk & Transport Museum has a library and archive containing transport material as well as private collections encompassing rail timetables, pictures, books and articles about the history of Ireland’s railways. You can search the National Archives of Ireland’s online database for their railway collections, which include Railways Companies Returns for the twentieth century.
Sue Johnston had been told several legends about her family’s period of employment on the railways – the most exciting one relating to the fact that her grandfather, Alfred Cowan, had been the driver for the Flying Scotsman. However, by checking details of where he was based throughout most of his career, and comparing this with known information about the route of the Flying Scotsman at the National Railway Museum, York, it was fairly easy to disprove this; the Flying Scotsman operated on the East Coast Main Line, which originally comprised three earlier railway companies, whilst Alfred Cowan was based in Warrington in the north west, nowhere near.
The other myth related to Alfred’s father, James Cowan – and the rumour that he had been station manager at Carlisle Citadel station, one of the busiest in the country throughout the mid to late nineteenth century when James was alleged to be working there. Sue decided to search for employment records at The National Archives, and struck gold when she found a series of appointment books. They confirmed that he had indeed started work at Carlisle station, but as a porter in 1856, having spent the previous 7 years in some other form of work – unspecified in the documents. James gradually rose through the ranks, and by 1861 he was second assistant platform attendant. However, despite 25 years of service at the station, he never made it to stationmaster, leaving just 7 months after the death of the previous incumbent.
When searching staff records, in addition to the name of the company and your ancestor’s job title it is helpful to know their date of birth, rough period of employment, date of death and place of employment or residence. This information will help you to narrow down your search results and can be found from analysing information given on civil registration certificates and census returns. Look out for changes in the description of your ancestor’s employment; for example on his marriage certificate he may have been described as a locomotive fireman but five years later, on his daughter’s birth certificate, he is described as an engine driver, so you know he received a promotion in that space of time. You might need to look at records for different departments if his job description changed. (The covering dates given for records held at The National Archives are sometimes misleading, because the description includes the earliest and latest dates mentioned in the records, which might be a date of birth and death, rather than giving the dates for years of service.)
Railway Police were employed by the railway companies from the 1830s to regulate the lines, which included signalling and station duties as well as preventing criminal activity. If you have an ancestor who was a railway policeman prior to the 1920s, his records should be found within the collections of the railway company that he worked for. After the merger of all railway companies into the ‘Big Four’ in 1921, each had its own police force controlled by a Chief of Police who joined up to form a Police Committee during the Second World War. The National Archives holds most records for railway police from 1921 onwards in series AN.
In 1949, following the nationalization of the railways, the system was replaced by the British Transport Commission Police, encompassing all the former railway company police forces as well as those of some canal and dock companies. British Transport Police was formed in 1962 to replace the British Transport Commission Police, and they still hold record cards for staff dating back to the 1860s, though these are not complete. More information about them can be found on the History Archives pages of the British Transport Police website at www.btp. police.uk. Copies of the Railway Police Journal for 1949–81 are kept at The National Archives in series ZPER 61. If you have a particular interest in this subject then read a copy of Pauline Appleby’s A Force on the Move: The Story of the British Transport Police 1825–1995.
If you find out from a death certificate that your ancestor was killed by a train accident (and there were very many railwaymen – not to mention passengers – who were killed in this way) there are plenty of surviving reports kept among company papers, and also in the records of the Board of Trade Railway Department, Ministry of Transport Reports and Railway Inspectorate at The National Archives, in series RAIL 1053, MT 114 and MT 29.
The records of the Railway Benevolent Institution, which granted financial aid to those former railwaymen and their families who had paid a subscription, are held at The National Archives in RAIL 1166. This is a useful source for those family historians who are unsure which company their ancestor worked for, because the institute drew subscriptions from railwaymen across the country. The Annual Reports in RAIL 1166/1–80 covering 1881 to 1959 contain lists of supporters as well as reports from the railway’s orphanage at Derby. The Railway Benevolent Institution’s Minutes are found in RAIL 1166/87–149 for 1858 to 1982. The most useful source for family historians can be found in the records of grants in RAIL 1166/81–86 for the years 1888 to 1919, which give details of grants awarded to railwaymen or their widows and orphans after an accident, illness, death or during old age. Each volume is indexed, but if a grant was given to a railwayman’s widow or family after his death then the entry does not always name the deceased worker but may give the name of his company and his position instead.
Armagh County Museum and Library has a Railway Collection with a display highlighting one of Ireland’s worst railway disasters, which killed 89 people and injured 400 others in 1889 when a train loaded with Sunday school children bound for a seaside trip was involved in a collision. Contact the library to find out what material and photographs they hold and to book an appointment on 028 37 523070.
The records of the British Transport Historical Collection Library are held at The National Archives in series ZPER and contain railway periodicals that may be of interest to those researching the history of the railways.
• Railway House Journals are a potential source of personal information for employees of British Railways, Furness Railway, Great Central, Great Eastern, Great Western, London, Midland & Scottish, London & North Eastern, London & North Western, North Eastern Railway and Southern Railway. These are sometimes indexed and contain photos of staff and personal announcements in the Staff News section.
• The Railway Gazette may provide obituaries or details of service on retirement and information about special achievements for senior employees.
Copies of these two journals are held at the National Railway Museum Library and Archives.
The National Railway Museum Library and Archives in Leeman Road, York, does not hold any staff records but is a brilliant source for photographs, books, maps, periodicals, timetables and archives valuable to anyone studying railway history. The photographic collection in particular dates back as early as the 1850s and consists of over 1.4 million photos, 200 of which have been printed in Ed Bartholomew’s book Railways in Focus – Photographs from the National Railway Museum, and a further 50,000 are available to view on the Science and Society Picture Gallery website at www.scienceandsociety.co.uk. The NRM archive collection contains more technical records of those companies whose staff records are kept at The National Archives and the National Archives of Scotland, and also includes records of railway workers’ associations and engineers’ drawings.
‘The National Railway Museum is a brilliant source for railway history.’
• If you hit a brick wall in your research or would like to contact other researchers with railway ancestors, then the Railway Ancestors Family History Society is the place to go. The society helps its members to trace their railway ancestry in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, and also to find British railwaymen overseas. It can point you in the direction of records, documents, books and special collections that exist in record depositories around the world and they are constantly discovering and investigating previously unknown sources. The society is currently compiling a Railway Workers Index, and the website – www.railwayancestors.org.uk – has a surname index where other researchers have posted messages about the people they are looking for and you can ask others for help when you get stuck. There is also a list of British and Irish railway companies with RAIL references. Another useful point of contact is the Railway and Canal Historical Society (www.rchs.org.uk).
• Ingenius is an online project sponsored by the National Railway Museum, Science Museum and National Museum of Photography, Film and Television that provides free access to 30,000 images including a whole section dedicated to transport, from water and road transport to a large amount of railway imagery, found at www.ingenious.org.uk/See/Transport.
• If you have ancestors who worked on the transport system in the Suffolk area then the Ipswich Transport Museum will be of interest to you. Their collections cover many historical forms of transportation that we have not had time to look at here, such as horse-drawn and electric trams, horse buses, trolleybuses and motor buses, as well as the railways and airports and the histories of some major companies that monopolized the transport industry in that region.
• Cyndi’s List is an online directory to thousands of genealogical sources and has a whole section dedicated to Canals, Rivers and Waterways, and one entitled Railroads. Visit www.cyndislist.com/ canals.htm where you will find links to plenty of associations, societies and individuals who have researched the history of canals in their local area, including the Basingstoke Canal Authority, Pennine Waterways, Beverley Beck Canal, Lancaster Canal and Driffield Navigation in Yorkshire, and Wilts & Berks Canal.
• Canal Boating in the UK and Europe, at www.canals.com/biwaterway.htm, is another fantastic online source for locating heritage pages and societies for canals across England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland.
• The GENUKI website has some localized indexes to canal and railway workers, such as a surname index for boatpeople of Wolverhampton compiled from baptism and marriage registers. Check the page for the county in which your ancestor worked for similar transcriptions. The Occupations page also has sections dedicated to Canal People, Railwaymen and Postal Workers where you can find useful links for researching these jobs.
Suggestions for further reading:
• Railway Ancestors: A Guide to the Staff Records of the Railway Companies of England and Wales 1822–1947 by David T. Hawkings (Alan Sutton, 1995)
• Was Your Grandfather a Railwayman? A Directory of Railway Archive Sources for Family Historians by Tom Richards (Federation of Family History Societies, 4th edition, 2002)
• Railway Records: A Guide to Sources by Cliff Edwards (Public Records Office Publications, 2001)
• The Canal Boatman, 1760–1914 by Harry Hanson (Sutton, 1984)
• Transport in the Industrial Revolution edited by Derek Howard Aldcroft and Michael J. Freeman (Manchester University Press, 1983)
• Transport and Economy: The Turnpike Roads of Eighteenth Century Britain by Eric Pawson (Academic Press, 1977)
• The National Archives Research Guides, numbers 69, 75, 82, 83 and 97.
In addition to the publications mentioned, there are plenty of websites run by enthusiasts to give you a quick idea of the general history of transport in Britain. These are often very helpful because they draw upon a number of secondary and primary sources, though you should always verify any information you intend to use as part of your own research.
The Industrial Revolution and The Railway System at www. mtholyoke.edu/courses/rschwart/ind_rev/index.html presents a wide variety of information on the nineteenth-century railway system. General histories about canals and inland waterways can be found on the Waterways History website at www.jim-shead.com/waterways/ History.htm maintained by Jim Shead. Mike Stevens has put online the Inland Waterways of England and Wales: Their History in Maps from 1750 to 1950, found at www.mike-stevens.co.uk/maps/index.htm. Canal Junction organizes holidays on canal boats but its website also has some great links to heritage sites, at www.canaljunction.com/ canal/heritage.htm. These are great starting places to give you a taste of the world in which your ancestors found themselves.