Digitising Records - Thoughts on Ancestry's New Digital Archive of Railway Staff Records

Within the last week there was an important development for genealogists and railway historians. It is something that I have been waiting for some time, even if I never knew whether it would come. On Wednesday I became aware through one of my followers on Twitter that The National Archives and Ancestry.co.uk had made available on-line vast swathes of 19^th and early 20^th century staff records from Britain’s major railway companies.

My first thought was ‘oh crap.’ As some of my long-time readers will be aware, part of my PhD focuses on the lives of the London and South Western Railway's (L&SWR) managers and I have done extensive research on the company's staff records. Indeed, I spent many long hours photographing 3000+ L&SWR clerks' staff records held by the archive. As such, you can understand my initial frustration that the digitised records did not appear two years ago, as it would have saved me monumental amounts of effort. However, on reflection this was more annoying than anything else and there are massive benefits for my work as now I can access with ease all the records I hadn’t photographed.

The records cover the staff of seven railway companies that existed before 1^st January 1923, and three of the ‘Big Four’ companies that existed after it. They are as follows:-

Pre-1922 Railway Companies

Great Western

London and North Western

London and South Western

London, Brighton and South Coast

London Chatham and Dover

Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire (Great Central from 1899)

Midland

Post-1922 Railway Companies

Great Western

London and North Eastern

London, Midland and Scottish

Furthermore, what has been digitised is more than just individuals’ employment histories, and also included, where available, are accident books, books of disciplinary action and pension details.

Therefore, for historians, as opposed to genealogists, this opens up a number of research opportunities from the comfort of their home. Social historians can investigate labour relations, women's employment, accident rates, poverty, railway employees’ backgrounds and ages of appointment. Business historians can also get data on internal labour markets, pay scales, discipline, company hierarchies, promotional trees and the companies’ management class. Furthermore, because the companies served different parts of the country, regional variations in all these subject areas can be drawn out.

However, this isn’t to say that everything to do with the records is rosy for the historian. As with all things on Ancestry, my feeling is that its search engine is geared to genealogists. I understand why this is so. After all, it is a website for genealogists and it is predominantly their subscriptions that pay for records to be digitised.

Nevertheless, the ‘family history’ perspective doesn’t make it easy for individuals wanting to use the records for historical research that is non-genealogical. On the positive side, I can search for employees by region, date of entry into service, birth date and by railway company. Yet, there are some annoying things that the search engine won’t allow. Apart from a few individuals, I cannot search for all employees that worked at a particular site, for example Hampton Court Station. Furthermore, I cannot search the database it by gender (which can be done on the rest of the Ancestry site) and nor can I have listed all the individuals that worked in a particular position, for example porters. Therefore, if Ancestry had the time or the money to add these features to the search engine it would be useful.

Additionally, I think there is scope for the database to be expanded. In the back of David T. Hawkins’ Railway Ancestors there is a list of the railway companies whose staff records survive in The National Archives. Thus, it seems that vast numbers of records were not included in the digitisation project. A couple of large companies that existed before 1923 did not have their records digitised, such as the North Eastern and Taff Vale Railways. Additionally, some smaller companies, such as the Somerset and Dorset and Welshpool and Llanfair Light Railways, were also left out. Records from companies that were absorbed in larger ones were also omitted, for example the London and Birmingham and Whiteness and Furness Junction Railways. Lastly, some records survive from the Southern Railway.

I presume the the staff records from these and other companies were left out because there aren’t great numbers of them. Indeed, from some railways only one volume of staff details survive (it should also be pointed out that for some companies no records remain). Nevertheless, to expand the project to all these surviving files would be of immense value to historians.

Of course, I am now getting into wish-list territory. I do appreciate that to improve the search engine and to add all surviving railway company staff records would be a massive task that ultimately may not be remunerative. The reality is that I have no cause whatsoever for complaint. I have available to me now something that I never thought I would, a searchable database of all surviving L&SWR staff records. For that I am immensely grateful. Overall, it is a significant achievement on the part of The National Archives and all involved should be proud.

I will, however, try to get the most from this new resource. Thus, to show its value I will be using it to inform my next few blog posts.

You can see Ancestry.co.uk's railway staff record search page HERE.

The Problem with the Late Victorian British Railway Industry

The declining performance of the British railway industry in the late Victorian period is something that I have referred to repeatedly in my blog, but which I have never fully explained. Indeed, this topic is central to my PhD, which will, hopefully, determine how well the London and South Western Railway was managed between 1870 and 1914. Generally, we know that across this period, while gross railway company profits continued to rise, the profit margin of the industry declined.

Probably the best way to measure this decline is through studying the industry’s the operating ratio. This shows what cost of running the railway industry was as a proportion of its total revenue. Using figures provided by Pollins in Britain’s Railways: An Industrial History, the operating ratio for the British railway industry increased as follows between 1870 and 1902:-

1870 – 48%

1874 – 55%

1878 – 53%

1882 – 52%

1886 – 52%

1890 – 54%

1894 – 56%

1898 – 58%

1902 – 62%

Thus, running Britain’s railways became progressively less profitable and more costly. Thus, historians, mostly writing in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, tried to determine why this was so. Yet, there has not been any consensus on the issue.

On the one hand, many historians have argued that the railway industry’s decreasing profitability was caused by external pressures. Ashworth argued that in the mid-1870's traffic growth occurred in low-margin sectors, such as third class passenger and short-haul bulk goods. Companies were subsequently forced into building new facilities because they were too vulnerable financially and politically to refuse carrying traffic. Further, 'pricing and service policies enforced by government and transport pressure groups,' worsened the companies’ situations after this.[1] Irving added to this, arguing that because the public and politicians saw the railways as a service, and put pressure on them to act in such ways, that the companies tried to preserve their commercial freedoms by increasing the 'quality and supply of transport.' This 'involved disproportionate increases in costs and staff.'[2] Further, in an environment where the cost of labour was rising, expensive railway technology was required by law, and there were proportionately falling charges, this meant that the companies' rates of return fell. [3]

On the other hand, the opposing view is that the railway industry became progressively poorly managed over the period 1870 to 1900. Aldcroft accepted that the industry faced the external pressures cited,[4] however, he charged railway managers with a range of failures such as excess line capacity, corporate empire building, under-utilization of fixed equipment, duplicate facilities[5], a failure to relate prices to costs[6] and poor traffic handling.[7] These factors all forced costs up. Further, Cain argued that 'managerial motives,' such as the appointment of overbearing department heads and corporate empire building, were a factor in the decline in profitability. Yet, his main point was that competition between companies increased costs, subsequently doing the greatest damage profitability.[8]

Lastly, Arnold and McCartney, while rejecting the thesis that the railways built too much infrastructure, argued that the period 1870 to 1914 was one of 'structural stasis' in the industry, where the interests of ordinary shareholders were progressively abandoned. In their opinion there was a 'tacit alliance' between railway directors and senior managers that satisfied the short term interests of 'industrial customers and the state.'[9]

Therefore, the state of play in the literature is that no comprehensive answer has been given to the question of why the railway industry declined in profitability up to 1900. Yet, in that my opinion these studies suffer a sever weakness that hampers their pursuit of an answer. None of these historians looked at what was going within the companies themselves. Rather, these historians only used the financial results of the railway industry to make conclusions about the quality of management. Therefore, in my PhD I hope to look at what was going on within one company, the London and South Western Railway, to determine how the quality of management and decision-making affected the company’s profitability. Hopefully, any answers I find can add to the debate.

---

[1] Gourvish, T.R., Railways and the British Economy 1830-1914, (London, 1980) p.44

[2] R.J Irving, 'The Profitability and Performance of British Railways 1870-1914', Economic History Review, Vol.31 No.1 (Feb., 1978), pp.55

[3] Irving, 'The Profitability and Performance' , pp.65

[4] Gourvish, Railways, p.44

[5] Aldcroft, British Railways p.11

[6] Aldcroft, British Railways p.18

[7] Aldcroft, British Railways p.19

[8] Cain, P.J. 'Railways 1870-1914: the maturity of the private system', in Freedman, Michael J. and Aldcroft, Derek H. Transport in Victorian Britain, (Manchester, 1988) p.115

[9] A.J. Arnold and S. McCartney, 'Rates of return, concentration levels and strategic change in the British Railway industry 1830-1912', The Journal of Transport History, 25 (2005), pp.57

1 Railway + 1 Railway = Answers

The things that I don’t know about my chosen railway, The London and South Western Railway, could fill endless journals. I have talked on a few occasions about the fact that I feel that there could be vast swathes of material sitting in draws that could answer the many mysteries about the operation of Britain’s railways. In fact, I am convinced that if everyone who had a collection of documents committed them to archives then we could learn vast amount. But hey, I can wish. It’ll never happen. As I have found, some individuals that own documents are very possessive about sharing, staunchly guarding what they consider to be their documents. Yes, the document may be theirs in a technical sense, but the information is not. Anyway I digress.

I think, however, that I have found a way to uncover more details about the operations of my chosen company. The L&SWR had joint ownership of a number of railways in its sphere of influence. The two most notable were the Somerset and Dorset Joint Railway (S&DJR) and the West London Extension Railway (WLER). It owned the first with the Midland Railway, and the second with the London North Western, London Brighton and South Coast and Great Western Railways. Thus, in both these cases the L&SWR would have had to merge their operational procedures with their co-owners of the railways for smooth operations. Some of these operational systems would have been the same and integration and combination would not have been a problem. This was the result of being in an industry where there was very little influence from external businesses and much inter-company communication through the Railway Clearing House. But, there would have been some areas where the companies operating procedures may have diverged and as such the owners would have had to reach compromises.

Subsequently, examining the operation of the jointly owned companies may show the process of negotiation each of the owning companies engaged in, thus revealing each’s operating procedures. This would, therefore, go some way to uncovering some of the mysteries about how the L&SWR and other owner companies operated their railways and made decisions. Up to this point, I have done some research on the West London Extension Railway and while I didn’t find any details of any inter-company negotiation regarding operations, I did find some very interesting (well for me anyway) information on how the WLER costed their parcels service. This data was found in the Minute Books of a conference that consisted of all the different companies’ officers. I won’t go into it here as I did write a blog entry about it a few months back.

There was one problem with this information, in that I couldn’t be sure from where the decision to cost the parcels service came from. I have found no information that it was done within the L&SWR, but this is may be because little information has survived below committee and board level. Indeed, if this was something that was discussed amongst the company’s officers, and not at board or committee level, then the information has been lost. Conversely, it may be that the L&SWR didn’t do parcels costing and, therefore, the procedure came from one of the other companies.

Up until the brainwave I will now describe, I was resigned to never knowing the answer. But, I had a thought. The Somerset and Dorset Joint Railway also had a committee of officers that would have been made up of officials from the S&DJR, Midland and L&SWR. The common co-owner of the WLER and the S&DJR was the L&SWR. If I fail to find an explicit series of negotiations over policy within the S&DJR files, and I do find within the S&DJR officers committee details of parcels costing, in addition to the fact that I have already found it on the WLER, then this increases the likelihood that the L&SWR undertook it within its own network because it is a common policy (or that this was a standard procedure within British railways).

Now, I realise that this is not a full proof method for discovering those operational details that have eluded railway historians, but it may be a way of at least determining the likelihood that some operational systems were used by different railway companies in the Victorian period where explicit information does not survive within the companies’ own files. The shame for me is that the L&SWR didn’t jointly own many more companies. If I were to increase my survey to look for operational details within three or four railways, this would inevitably increase the chances of finding common policies, increasing the certainty that they were either used, or originated within, the parent company. However, for companies that jointly owned a multitude of companies, it may work to more accurately determine operational procedures.

Locomotive Superintendents - The Subject of Bad History

I wrote a few weeks back about how Dugald Drummond, (shown) Locomotive Superintendent of the London and South Western Railway, significantly hurt that company's finances through his independence from any form of control or oversight. Indeed when he got the job in 1893 he was reputedly given a 'very free hand' by the General Manager of the company Charles Scotter. This 'free hand' continued to work under Scotter's successor Charles Owens who took up the post in 1898. This allowed him to build what locomotives he liked, disrupt train services for his own personal journeys around the L&SWR network, and control investment policy in the department. This said when looking at the books on my shelf something strikes me.

I have many books on the L&SWR, some of them were written at the time and some of them shortly after the company expired in 1922. However, most have been written in the last 40 years and therefore are distant interpretations of parts or the whole of the company's story. An awful lot of them tell the story of the company's locomotive stock and on balance more is said about this topic than any other. I can understand why this occurs. Enthusiasts understandably have an almost romantic association with the locomotives of the railway. They were what made the railway run, they were its driving force. Yet I fear that this understandable love for the locomotive has a somewhat negative affect on the author's views of the people who orchestrated the building of them, the Locomotive Superintendents and Chief Mechanical Engineers of the companies.

In the third volume of D.L. Bradley's series of books The Locomotives of the London and South Western Railway he covers the locomotives designed by Drummond. In his short biography of the Locomotive Superintendent at the start of the text he stated that:

'In recent years most South Western historians have mentioned Drummond's irascibility and fiery rhetoric, traits which were undoubtedly present, but these same writers failed to remark that they were reserved for those who failed to apply the company's safety code or display the high standard of diligence that Drummond demanded of himself and his employees of all grades. Those performing their duty had little to fear and much to gain. Drummond may not have been as well liked as William Adams [his predecessor], but he was equally respected.' (Bradley, 1986, p.3)

So Drummond was a little grumpy eh? The historians of the company generally have indeed criticised the man for being a bit of a live wire, a stickler for duty and somewhat unreasonable. Yet they do not necessarily see this as a wholly negative thing, looking on it as a bit of colour in the company's rich historical tapestry. Whereas the historians of the company's locomotives, and indeed Drummond's own biographer, have tried to defend the man from these not unreasonable criticisms on the grounds cited by Bradley. Even if he did have a temperamental personality, he was fair to the men and they respected him (even if they were nervous around him).

My concern is therefore this; that none of the histories of Drummond, his locomotives or the company even talk about the fact that he fundamentally failed to do his job as a senior manager within a business (for more detail on this please may I refer you to my Blog post of the 29th March). Now in real terms I really don't care about the financial health of businesses, being a bit of a leftie. But I do care about individuals writing good history. Therefore, if a true picture of Drummond is to be painted it does need to start from a different point than all previous studies of him.

Firstly we do not need the perspective of those who just study his locomotives. They invariably see the locomotive before they see the man, and they usually try and rescue Drummond from criticism. In their eyes he was wonderful by virtue of what he designed. Secondly, we do not need the view of those historians of the company, who see the railway company in a romantic light, before they see the man. They look on him as a highlight within the L&SWR

What is therefore required to assess the role of Drummond within the L&SWR? I believe that the best place to start would be a closer definition of what Drummond's role within the company was. Lets make this clear Drummond's role was not solely to design an orchestrate the building of Locomotives. It was also not to primarily manage the staff. These were only elements of his job. Drummond in reality was to:

1)Manage effectively and efficiently the Locomotive Department of the L&SWR.
2)To respond to the requirements of the General Manager and Traffic Superintendent in supplying locomotive power and building locomotives as they required.
3)Once in service he was to monitor mechanical efficiency of the Locomotives and and the efficiency of the staff manning them.

Lets fact it, Drummond did none of these things the best he could and the company's finances suffered. Yet none of the written histories of the L&SWR, its locomotives or even Drummond's biographer acknowledge that principally he was a senior manager that failed in his duties. This is, however something I hope to rectify in my work. I will not fail to put in Drummond's colourful personality, it is an integral to the L&SWR's story, however most importantly I will tell a proper history of his place in the company.

In an interesting postscript, in January 1912 Herbert Ascombe Walker became General Manager to the L&SWR. He also was strong willed and a stickler for duty. While Chacksfield, Drummond's biographer, states that he was unsure what the two men made of each other (Chacksfield, 2005, p.113) I was given a clue through an article in the South Western Circular that was written by the son of Urie, Drummond's works manager and successor, in 1997. During the 1911-12 coal strike Walker ordered some American coal without telling or consulting Drummond. Angered by this Drummond had a bucket of the coal brought to Waterloo and emptied the contents over Walker's officer floor. (Urie, J.C. 'Tips for aspiring CME's' South Western Circular, Vol.10 No. 9, (January, 1997) pp.221), Clearly, Walker was tried to bring Drummond into line, to make him subservient to the needs of the company. This, therefore, I think was not unreasonable on Walker's part. Drummond died in November 1912 so the conflict never really materialised.

Looking for Albinus

One of the joys of studying History is that sometimes I don't know something. The fact that I am ignorant of a topic or of an aspect of my work, is what spurs me on to shed light on the missing links. However, unfortunately for me I am one of those historians who does not like leave a stone unturned. OK you may say that that is what a historian is supposed to do, to search every archive or documentary source for information on a particular topic, yet most historians don't have the capacity to search everything. Yet while I accept the limitations on historical research, I do sometimes push it, holding the fervent belief that the information I'm, missing must be somewhere. Its like the time I went to the Dorset record office to look at three inconsequential files. They were mildly interesting, but even before I had bought the ticket to go to Dorchester, I knew that they probably wouldn't add much. You see it was that one little hope that one line may have been important. I was proved right, there was nothing, what a waste of time. The truth is I can spend inordinate amounts of time looking for information that in reality I may not, or do not, need, becuase I am petrified that I may miss something small. This leads me onto Albinus Martin.

In my research at the National Archives the general area of research is the London and South Western Railway's (L&SWR) management between 1864 and 1914. However on April 22nd (and yes book it in your diary) I present my first ever paper at History Lab, the Institute of Historical Research's Postgraduate Seminar. The title is 'Managing the 'Royal Road': The Development and Failings of Managerial Structure on the London and South Western Railway 1836-1900.' Therefore I have had to do more research on the early period of the company's history.

We are generally under the impression the General Manager or Chief Executive were mainly an invention of the later Victorian railway companies. Yet on the 8th August 1845 the L&SWR's Resident Engineer, Albinus Martin, was appointed by the Board to take charge of the 'whole concern' of the L&SWR. WHAT!!! This made him, if not in name, the first General Manager of the L&SWR, and probably one of the earliest examples in the industry. Special lad! On reading this my brain did its irritating little habit of thinking that there must be masses of files somewhere; correspondence, letters, diaries must have survived, he must of left SOMETHING. I'll get this out of the way now, he didn't. The man died and left literally nothing. He is a historical enigma. But before I knew this fact, my compulsion to look under every stone kicked in!

First of there was the problem of the name. In Williams' three volume history of the L&SWR he names Martin, frustratingly, Albino, rather than Albinus. Secondly the documents that I looked at, including the source above, only refer to him as simply as 'Mr Martin. So therefore I went looking for more information on him, and the only thing that came up was Wikipedia, which didn't say anything. Therefore frustrated by my lack of information I searched every combination of 'Martin' and 'London and south western' that I could in Google. Google is a sobering experience when having to trawl through all the tosh! How can an estate agent have a reference to the L&SWR on its website? Don't ask me, but there it is, extending my research! After 2, or was it 3 hours, and much pounding of the keyboard, I finally came up with a biography of an 'Albinus Martin' on archive.org, which had his obituary from the journal of the Institute of Civil Engineers. Huzzah, eureka!

Now the engine was running, I could act! Next I placed a notice in the South Western Circle newsletter for any information. I got a nice letter (and it is nice to recieve an actual written letter) from a Circle member detailing Martin's life before and after working for the L&SWR. Lovely as the letter was, it only embellished a little more that which was in the ICE's obituary. So I was still nowhere. I then went back to Google and searched the correct name...after surprisingly less tosh, I found something about some signals he invented, but nothing that would really help me. Then I used the 19th Century on-line newspaper and journal archives to see if there was anything. Again after a day of searching every combination of 'London and south western' and 'Albinus Martin,' no new information came to the fore. Therefore with no archive of letters, very little information and no new leads, I hit a dead end...I'm still here after wasting what must be at least two working days.

The problem, in 'looking for Albinus,' was that I spent so much time searching for information that I failed to realise that I had all the material I needed for my work from within the company files. Therefore if there is a lesson I should learn it is that I occasionally shouldn't get carried away with flights of fancy and letting my work be led by just my curiosity about a subject or personality.

Some months after, while out for a run, I was listening lecture about Richard Trevithick's demonstrations of the first steam train in 1808. In it the lecturer said that one of his sources of evidence was a book from the 1850s. In it one Albinus Martin gave a recollection of the event having been a witness. The lecturer then said, "now I can't find much information of Albinus Martin." 'Well,' I thought, 'you're not the only one,' and kept on running...