It has been proclaimed in many places, at many times that
before 1914 a job on the railway was a job for life.
Railway workers' careers apparently followed
a set course: starting out in their teenage years, employees would undergo some
form of apprenticeship, gradually move up through the ranks of their department,
and would eventually retire at the age of 60 or 65. Throughout, in return for
diligent and obedient service – a form of supplication to the law of the
railway - employees received a high degree of job security, the opportunity to
rise into positions of authority and, at the end of their careers, that rarity
of the Victorian world: a pension.
[1]
But these patterns of employment had to have been instituted
by company managers and directors at some point. The idea of a career railway
worker would have been an alien concept to all railway staff in 1840, perhaps
even as late as the 1850s. Yet by the 1890s, if you wanted it, obeyed the rules
and did not find better employment (or for that matter were killed when doing
your duties – a sadly not uncommon occurrence), the railway could easily be
your home for life.
Pinpointing when the ‘career’ railway employee came into
existence is not easy. Amongst a multitude of small railway companies, by the
1860s Victorian Britain was the possessor twelve large ones, each of which
instituted different employment policies at different points. To add to the
melee of confusion, railway workers were divided amongst themselves with regard
to pay, working conditions and status. The status and pay of a platelayer,
fixing and maintaining the track day in day out, was far lower that the
engineman driving the train past him. The clerical staff – who were the only staff in Traffic Departments who had any realistic chance of entering management if they had the talent and ambition –
likely looked down on the porters, pushing suitcases and boxes around station
all day. This staff separatism, which management frequently encouraged to keep
the staff divided, lest they undertake some collective action over wages or
working conditions, meant that industry decision-makers usually determined recruitment
and employment policies on a grade-by-grade basis. Standardisation within a
company was definitely not the norm.
Nonetheless, despite these issues, general conclusions
about when the career railway worker emerged onto the industrial landscape are possible.
As early as the 1850s the career railway clerk started appearing. Before then clerical
work on the railways was not acknowledged as being particularly unique – the
industry being very young – and so the companies recruited the talented, of any
age, from wherever they could. For example, on joining the London and South
Western Railway[2] as a clerk at the age of thirty-five in 1835, no
doubt after being in some other clerical position, William Mears would likely
never have entertained the idea that he would retire in 1881.
Yet, very gradually, from the 1840s onwards, the railways
established regulations for the recruitment and employment of clerks. In 1846 the
London and North Western Railway (LNWR) laid down regulations for incremental
pay and promotion amongst clerks, a preference for filling vacancies internally
and a set age range for new apprentice clerks – fourteen to sixteen. [4] Other
railways did the same around this time; the LSWR brought in some rules around
1843;[5] although rigid formalisation of its promotional and pay
procedures was not deemed necessary until the early-1850s.[6]
For the rest of the staff – known as the ‘wages grades’ -
the structured railway career started much later. The 1870s saw the Great
Western Railway (GWR) progressively specify the route careers should take, when
staff should be promoted and their pay each step of the way.[7] Similar
rules for new police and porters on the LNWR, as well as a minimum height of
5ft 7in (although this likely came into force earlier), were formalised in 1860.
Such regulations, which governed recruitment and the notion of career on the railways
into the twentieth century, had become the norm throughout the industry by the
1870s. [8]
Despite the institution of these rules, they did not immediately
give birth to a culture where railway employment was automatically considered a
lifelong vocation. Did the teenager joining the railway as a junior clerk, lad
porter or engine cleaner in the 1870s think they would be with the company
until retirement? It is improbable they could be sure of this. Surrounding new
recruits were old hands. These older men may have believed in the security
railway work provided, they may even have realised the jobs they were doing were
their last, but they would have understood that not everyone stayed with the
railway until the end of their working lives. They had been losing colleagues
to pastures new (or destitution) for decades – a fact they would undoubtedly have
imparted this fact to newcomers. In the London, Brighton and South Coast
Railway’s case, sixteen per cent of all employees resigned or were dismissed in
1865-69.[9]
The understanding that working on the railways was a
lifelong vocation only emerged around 1880s and 1890s, when almost all staff
had been with the industry from their teens. Within the Great Eastern Railway,
for example, the recognisable facets of railway employment – recruitment at an
early age, clearly defined career paths and vacancies being filled by
individuals on a lower rung of a promotional ladder – became embedded between
1875 and 1905, with the decisive years being between 1885 and 1895.
The developing idea that railway staff were in a lifelong
career manifest itself in other ways in this period. The first railway staff
magazines, the South Western Gazette and
Great Western Railway Magazine (and
Temperance Union Record), appeared
in 1881 and 1888 respectively. The magazines’ content of news, reports and
informative articles about the railways’ activities reflected employees’ deep connection
with the railway and its family of staff, which in part were bound together by their common state: a railway employee for life. Railway employment as a lifelong
pursuit was also a factor in the rise of the railway labour movement after 1870. The Amalgamated
Society of Railway Servants started in 1871, the General Railway Workers
Railway Union established itself in 1889 and the Associated Society of
Locomotive Engineers and Firemen came into existence in 1880. [10] Railway
workers took pride in their work, looked out for each other and, thus, fought
hard as a group for the improved pay and working conditions they deserved. Had railway
workers believed their time on the railway was limited, fleeting even, the establishment
of such movements would have been unlikely: the fight would have been a redundant
enterprise.
There was no such thing as a lifelong railway worker in
1840. This idea, which constitutes a fundamental part of the popular conception
of the railway history, developed slowly over many decades, at different speeds
in different places. There was an evolution; in the early years of the industry
men (and some women) just happened to work on the railway, by the 1890s they proudly
called themselves ‘railwaymen’ (and railwaywomen).
------------
[1]
Peter Howlett, ‘The Internal Labour Dynamics of the Great Eastern Railway
Company, 1870-1913', Economic History
Review, 57, 2 (2004): 404
[2]
Then named the London and Southampton Railway.
[3]
The National Archives [TNA], RAIL 411/492, Clerical staff character book No. 2,
414
[4]
TNA, RAIL 410/1876, London and North Western Railway Company: Records. STAFF RECORDS.
Salaries alteration book, 1-3
[5]
TNA, RAIL 411/1, Court of Directors Minute Book, 11 August 1843
[6]
TNA, RAIL 411/216, Special Committee Minute Book, ? January 1859
[7]
Mike Savage, ‘Discipline, Surveillance and the “Career”: employment on the
Great Western Railway 1833-1914’, in Foucault,
Management and Organisational Theory, ed. Alan McKinlay and Ken Starkey,
(London: Sage, 1998), 81-82
[8]
TNA, RAIL 410/1829, Conditions of service; retiring allowances; scales of pay
and other general staff matters: papers, Regulations as to Appointments,
Extracts from the Minutes of the Board of Directors, 10 March 1860
[9]
P.W. Kingsford, Victorian Railwaymen,
(Frank Cass & Co., 1970), 42
[10]
David Howell, Respectable Radicals:
Studies in the politics of railway trade unionism, (Aldershot: Ashgate,
1999), 6
