In the past we’ve featured cases from our database involving railway employees who were what we’d now understand as children: R Kennedy, for example, who sprained his wrist and ankle in 1914 aged 14, or James Beck, killed at work in 1914, aged just 15. Obviously, legal, social and cultural standards change: at the start […]
Tag Archives | 1912
‘she was thrown violently down’
We’ve posted about accidents to women railway workers before (see here and here). Each time we’ve noted that there are relatively women in our data so far (here) – only 3 in our original data release of 3,928 cases, with a further 3 in our most recent release covering the Great Eastern Railway (GER) and […]
The Fighting Wounded
Over the last 4 years a great deal of attention has been focused on the First World War and its devastating and wide-ranging impacts. We’ve thought – as nations, communities, families, and individuals – about what happened, and about how we remember and talk about the war and its aftermath. That has included people looking […]
The ‘excusable mistake’ that injured three
In many of the cases found in our database the Railway Inspectorate report provides an attribution of responsibility for the accident. Around a quarter of these mention things like a ‘lack of care’, and individuals’ ‘own want of reasonable care’ (even in one case their ‘stupid want of care’). What is less common is finding […]
Forgotten pasts at Glasgow Queen St
At the moment, Glasgow Queen St station is undergoing a major redevelopment, which has included exposing the Victorian glass frontage, concealed for the last 40 years by a concrete carbuncle now demolished. However, what isn’t so easy to see is another hidden past: the human cost of working on the railway, in employee accidents. This […]
Demolishing Wolverton Works
It was reported last week that the proposed demolition of most of the remaining original parts of the London and North Western Railway’s Wolverton Works had been given the go-ahead. This is a good moment, then, to think a little about an intangible part of the Works’ heritage: the experiences of the staff, without whom […]
Further July multiples
We started our posts this month with another 2 cases of workers having 2 accidents each, with the promise (threat?) of more multiple accidents to come. It’s to this we return now, with another 2 cases of 2 accidents. We start on the south coast of England, at Brighton station appropriately on the London, Brighton […]
July: the month of many multiples
We’ve already blogged about a couple of cases of multiple accidents: when our database has shown a worker had more than one accident. We’ve considered shunter Tom Oliver, who injured his ankles whilst working around York; and labourer Joseph Brown, unlucky enough to be hit by trains twice in 3 weeks (though he survived both […]
A miscellany of Waterloos
In railway terms, Waterloo generally brings one thing to mind: the London mainline station, in our period the terminal point of the London & South Western Railway. It was of course named for the famous 1815 battle in which Napoleon was defeated, which took place 203 years ago today – and it wasn’t the only […]
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 […]
