In this guest post, Francis Howcutt recounts the accidental death of Arthur Bott, a brother of his great grandfather. Arthur’s history is an example of how the railways helped provide the children of agricultural labourers with opportunities beyond their ancestral villages, as well as the associated dangers. One of the particularly nice things about this […]
Archive | Accident aftermath
A few ASRS cases from our new dataset
By Mike Esbester on January 29, 2020 in Accident aftermath, Blog, Family History, Linking sources, Transcription Tuesday
Just over a month ago, we released our third dataset – the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants (ASRS) legal book, covering 1901-1905. It contains over 2000 cases in which the ASRS had an interest, around half of which were accidents. The data came from the 2019 ‘Transcription Tuesday’ event which the project took part in, […]
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 […]
On the Scope and Methods of Transcription
By Mike Esbester on December 30, 2019 in Accident aftermath, Blog, Guest contribution, Transcription Tuesday
The majority of this post was contributed by one of our anonymous volunteers, who had been doing the fiddly but essential job of going over the data and trying to spot and correct issues, as well as add in the historic counties in which accidents took place. We’re extremely grateful to the volunteer, both for […]
Filling in some more gaps
By Gordon Dudman on December 23, 2019 in Accident aftermath, Accident reports, Blog, Family History, Guest contribution, Linking sources, Transcription Tuesday
As part of Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine’s ‘Transcription Tuesday’ earlier this year, our project made available a set of records produced by the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, one of the major railway trade unions. It listed over 2000 cases involving members, many of them accidents. In this blog post, one […]
New data – new disabilities, old ‘solutions’
By Mike Esbester on December 19, 2019 in Accident aftermath, Blog, Disability, Disability History Month
Earlier this week we launched our third set of data about accidents to railway staff (see here). It comes from a record of legal cases kept by the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants trade union, between 1901 and 1905. As you’d expect, those records reveal all sorts of things about railway work – including where […]
New dataset! ASRS legal cases, 1901-1905
By Mike Esbester on December 17, 2019 in Accident aftermath, Accident reports, Blog, Disability, Linking sources, Transcription Tuesday
From Tralee and Belfast to Inverness, and Wrexham to Ashford and Penzance, our newest data release shows the impact of staff railway accidents in the early 20th century – and the ways in which one of the major trade unions, the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants (ASRS), defended workers. The cases come from a record […]
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 […]
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
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 […]
George Page (1845 – 1899)
By Sue Page on October 14, 2019 in Accident aftermath, Blog, Family History, Guest contribution, Linking sources
In this guest blog post, Sue Page looks at the life & death of her Great Grandfather and the impact it had on his family over a longer period. Sue came along to the workshop session the project put on at Family Tree Live hoping to find out more – hopefully she did about the […]
