Continuing our Disability History Month exploration of the new Great Eastern Railway (GER) data (see last week’s post, here), this week we’re focusing on a cross-over case between our two datasets. We’re fortunate we can trace the moment of the accident for William Harwood as well as a little about what happened to him afterwards, […]
Archive | Linking sources
Who Was Cricpante Rego?
By Chris Jolliffe on November 2, 2020 in Accident reports, Blog, Family History, Guest contribution, International, Linking sources
Around two weeks’ ago, we put out a request on our Twitter account to find out more about ‘Cricpante Rego’ – and as well as receiving some helpful ideas very quickly, one of our project volunteers, Chris Jolliffe, was inspired to dig further. She came up with this guest post, which reveals a fascinating story. […]
A World War Two case
So far we’ve largely confined ourselves to the cases found in our database, to give you more detail on a small – but increasing – number of the 3,915 individuals involved in accidents, and to demonstrate some of the value of our project. Today’s post, however, strays beyond existing territory – and is a precursor […]
Connecting people through the project
People are central to our project in so many ways. Obviously the railway staff who had the accidents, details of which we’re making more easily findable (via our database). Their families, too, as the accidents rarely simply affected one person. Their work colleagues also appear in the records. Behind the project work are several small […]
Irish Accident Records – untapped potential
In this guest post Norman Gamble, the Archivist of the Irish Railway Record Society (IRRS), introduces the Society and its archives – including the great potential offered by their holdings of staff accident registers. As yet these volumes are, like their British equivalents, unindexed and untapped – something we’d like to change, working with the […]
How Robert Henry Stanbury became Tylwch’s one-armed stationmaster
By Derek Savage on June 22, 2020 in Accident aftermath, Blog, Disability, Family History, Guest contribution, Linking sources, Local History
We were delighted to receive an email from this week’s guest author, Derek Savage, offering further information on one of the more intriguing cases from our database we’ve featured recently – an accident involving Robert Stanbury, though not one in which he himself was injured. Always happy to have such an offer, we gratefully accepted […]
Improvising to work with a disability
By Mike Esbester on December 9, 2019 in Accident aftermath, Accident reports, Blog, Disability, Disability History Month, Linking sources
In the course of looking for something else in our database of British and Irish railway worker accidents, I recently stumbled across a fascinating case that gives us a little glimpse of the ways in which disability was a common part of everyday life on the railways. We could read this as a positive: in […]
Edinburgh shunting accidents – a connection
In previous posts we’ve extolled the virtues of our database as a means of making connections between accidents, whether by location, company, grade of employee, circumstances or a host of other possibilities. In some cases, however, our work is done for us by the Inspectors’ reports – they too found these connections significant, as they […]
Project work – and an accident at Chadwell Heath
By Philip James on June 8, 2020 in Accident reports, Blog, Guest contribution, Linking sources, Local History, Non-company employee
In this week’s post, National Railway Museum volunteer Philip James outlines more of what working on the project involves, and one case from our current extension, covering the Board of Trade inspectors’ reports for 1900-1910. Philip has been working on the project since we started in 2016, so must now have seen well over a […]
Finding staff, preventing accidents
People are absolutely central to our project. Thanks to the hard work of our volunteers, we’re able to get at the individuals behind the big figure statistics of British & Irish railway staff accidents in the later 19th and early 20th century (something recently discussed in relation to Covid-19 in this media comment). Our database […]
