All of the cases we’re cataloguing in our project database are sad, as at the very least they represent pain having been inflicted. Often they extend into the tragic, with deaths. In some of these cases we can only imagine the misery for the surviving family and friends must have been compounded by the young […]
Tag Archives | Glasgow
Romance is Dead: Glasgow Railway Workers, Burns and Hospital Treatment at the Cusp of the Twentieth Century
By Rebecca Wynter on January 20, 2020 in Accident aftermath, Blog, Guest contribution, Linking sources, Medical humanities
We’re delighted to feature this guest post, from Rebecca Wynter, one of the team working on the excellent ‘Forged by Fire’ project, looking at burns prevention and treatment over a 200 year period. They’re doing important work to open up all sorts of avenues into a neglected topic, and so it’s great that where there […]
15 years old, & 2 limbs injured in 3 months
One of the virtues of our database is that we can cross-reference cases. By doing so, we’ve identified a number of instances in which a worker had more than one accident (see the most recent such blog post here). Today’s post looks at the final of these cases found in our dataset as it currently […]
Do as I say, not as I do!
How did railway employees learn their craft in the late 19th century and on into the 20th? For most grades it was by learning on the job, from more experienced colleagues. That created all sorts of things – not least a sense of craft identity, and an understanding of what was necessary in order to […]
A runaway engine, a dismissed driver & a no show
The lot of the Railway Inspector wasn’t always a happy one. Finding out what happened in an accident was never going to be an easy task: sometimes they were unwitnessed, sometimes those involved were uncooperative for fear of being implicated in rule-breaking, and sometimes they key players were unavailable. In a previous blog we’ve discussed […]
A signal injury
To date, signalling is one area of railway work that hasn’t featured prominently in these cases taken from the Project spreadsheet. Signalling was of course vital to keeping trains safe and ensuring the efficient operation of the system. But behind it lay people – and those people were exposed to a variety of dangers. One […]
A Valentine’s Day special
Accidents of any sort aren’t particularly romantic, it has to be said, but given it’s St Valentine’s Day this week, we thought we’d have a topical tour through our database and see what, if anything, it held. With so many cases to choose from, it’s perhaps unsurprising that there are some cases that are relevant. […]
They started – and died – young
Volunteers working on the ‘Railway Work, Life & Death’ project have uncovered the stories of nearly 4,000 individuals who were either injured or killed whilst working on Britain’s railways between January 1911 and June 1915. Amongst the casualties was 16-year old James Beck, a ‘wagon greaser’ (someone responsible for ensuring the axle boxes of freight […]
