In this post, guest author Jane Jarrett outlines her Grandfather’s life and career, including the accident that cost him his arm and changed his life in a variety of ways. It’s another reminder both of the personal impacts of railway accidents and of the ways in which the railway companies treated injured staff. The personal […]
Archive | Disability
My railway
This guest post breaks new ground for the project – by focusing on the experiences of railway staff, written in their own words. As he describes, Dave Wilson started on the railways in BR days, and has been good enough to put a few recollections down ‘on paper’ for us, so far as his experiences […]
John Rigby of Long Buckby Wharf
By Julie G on April 26, 2021 in Accident aftermath, Blog, Disability, Guest contribution, Local History
In today’s guest blog post, Julie G takes us back to a place-based approach. She’s interested in Long Buckby Wharf, in Northants – a transport hub, of sorts, with road, rail and canal links. Needless to say, that involved accidents, and she’s blogged about several – rail and canal – on her One Place Study […]
Did illiteracy kill James Coughlin?
We might tend to question the extent to which many of the working classes – for it is the working classes who are largely the subject of these accident reports – could read or write. For the railway industry the indications are actually that the workforce was highly literate, but the ability to read certainly […]
The treatment of railway workers injured in accidents
By Arthur Moore on April 19, 2021 in Accident aftermath, Accident reports, Blog, Disability, Guest contribution
In this guest post, NRM project volunteer Arthur Moore returns to consider some of the cases he’s encountered when transcribing state accident investigations for the period up before 1911. He draws together some threads to think about what might have happened to injured staff after their accident – raising more questions we should be considering. […]
‘Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!’
Our project is documenting the many risks incidental to railway working – including at times animal dangers. We’ll be coming back to the more usual of these in a future blog post, including horses, cows, and sheep. But for today, we’re taking a brief look at some of the more exotic animal dangers encountered on […]
John Preece, his bravery, and his terrible injuries
By Steve Jackson on February 22, 2021 in Accident aftermath, Blog, Disability, Family History, Guest contribution, Linking sources, Local History
We’re delighted to have received this timely guest post from long-time project friend and support Steve Jackson. It’s timely because, as Steve notes, it meshes nicely with this month’s focus on tragedies centred on a particular place. One of the virtues of our project is that it will increasingly allow us to take a place-based […]
What happened to William Watson?
By Mike Esbester on February 15, 2021 in Accident aftermath, Blog, Disability, Family History, Linking sources
In January 2021 we received a comment on one of our blog posts. Sid Harbour had contacted us, saying ‘I have just discovered your website. Could you please tell me if the info is searchable. My Grandfather lost his leg while working on the railway possibly 1900. We know the Family story how it happened […]
Disabilities in railway service
By Mike Esbester on November 30, 2020 in Accident reports, Blog, Disability, Disability History Month
Disability features in our project heavily. Mostly frequently it’s cases where accidents have caused disability (see here for some cases we’ve featured in the past). But another of the great things about the project data is that it’s showing where already-disabled staff were employed or re-employed. So for today’s Disability History Month post, we’re going […]
A Sad and Unusual Discovery in Family Research
By Enid Rispin on December 31, 2018 in Accident aftermath, Blog, Disability, Family History, Guest contribution
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, […]
