Chapter 12 - Railways and Railwaymen

Summary

In the world of commerce every corporate body can be divided into the shareholders who provide the capital ; the employees who do the work and take something out of it; and finally the public, who form the customers, and therefore put in money to pay the wages and provide a dividend. The employees can be subdivided into two parts - the management who steer the company to provide greater efficiency and profits, thereby increasing their salaries; and the wage earning workers who are concerned mostly with the manual effort to supply the goods. This book would be incomplete unless some reference were made to the relationship between management and employees.

The attitude of the management was to keep a firm hand on the army of employees, and, indeed, no one will quarrel with the maintenance of discipline when public safety is at stake. The railways offered permanent employment to their men, and the specialised work and the security gave rise to a sense of vocation. Generation after generation served on the iron road so that you had ‘railway families’, who had railways in their blood, and the companies and the public benefited from the men’s devotion and their pride in their own particular line.

From the start, the public enjoyed better protection than the employee; if their goods were lost or damaged in transit they were covered by the Carriers’ Act of 1830, while in the case of personal injury they had rights at Common Law for compensation. But what of the railwayman? His work whether as driver, shunter or lengthman was dangerous and personal injury was frequent. In the event of accident he could rely only on his rights under Common Law which meant that he had to prove negligence by the company before receiving a penny. In 1837 his rights were further reduced by the text book case of Priestley v. Fowler which established that a workman was deemed to accept the risk of accident caused by the negligence of any one working for the same master, i.e. a fellow employee.