We’re pleased to be able to feature another guest contribution, from family historian Enid Rispin looking back at the railway ancestors in her family – though with a tragic tale. It helps to illustrate the lasting damage of workplace accidents that stretched beyond the physical – something not generally revealed in the official accident reports, […]
Archive | Accident aftermath
Death of a platelayer
In this week’s post, guest author Rob Langham takes us back almost to birth of the railway age in England – a time when railways were rather more dangerous for passengers and, of course, staff than at the end of the century. The post arose from the research into his new book, The Stanhope & […]
Accident, mental health & possible learning disability in railway service
By Stephen Lamb on November 18, 2019 in Accident aftermath, Blog, Disability, Disability History Month, Guest contribution, Health
In this guest post, project volunteer Stephen Lamb looks at one of the cases he’s transcribed from the records of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, held at the Modern Records Centre at the University of Warwick. It highlights just one of the many sad cases, and appropriately enough deals with occupational disability – this […]
New data release: Great Eastern Railway Benevolent Fund book, 1913-23
By Mike Esbester on November 26, 2018 in Accident aftermath, Blog, Disability, Disability History Month, Updates
We’re thrilled to release a new data set for you: details of Great Eastern Railway (GER) staff who had been injured at work and applied for assistance to the Company’s Benevolent Fund between 1913 and 1923. The information comes from a ledger book kept by the Company and now found at the National Railway Museum […]
William Harwood’s missing leg
By Mike Esbester on December 3, 2018 in Accident aftermath, Blog, Disability, Disability History Month, Linking sources
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, […]
Life after an accident
By Pete Coveney on September 28, 2020 in Accident aftermath, Blog, Disability, Family History, Guest contribution
In this week’s post, we welcome a contribution from Pete Coveney. He was put on to us by long-time project friend and support, genealogist Jackie Depelle, as she thought we might be able to help him find out more about his father’s accident. Unfortunately everything we suggested didn’t lead to anything – so if you […]
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 […]
1918: Spanish flu and the railways
For this week’s post, we’re delighted to have another contribution from Helen Ford, the project co-lead at the Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick. One of Helen’s final actions before the MRC was closed as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic was to photograph some more pages of NUR records for the MRC volunteer team […]
Jonathan Rogers: only a year on the railways
In this guest post, Linda Whitaker has kindly written up the death of one of her ancestors, Jonathan Rogers. His accident was one of the many that took place before records of staff accidents were kept, so it’s great to be able to get some information about his case which otherwise wouldn’t feature in the […]
