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 […]
Archive | Disability
What happened to William Watson?
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
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
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, […]
Accident, mental health & possible learning disability in railway service
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
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
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, […]
Disability History Month: ‘very nervous and trembling a good deal’
Wednesday marks the start of 2020’s Disability History Month, something that our project speaks closely too, given the large numbers of railway staff who were made disabled in the course of their work. Over the years we’ve blogged about a number of cases involving disabled staff, detailed here, and over the coming month we’ll highlight […]
Life after an accident
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 […]
Barking, 1878
In this guest post, National Railway Museum volunteer Philip James takes us back into an era outside project coverage, and to an accident not usually seen by the project – a member of the public, but not a passenger. He also puts the accident location in its local context, something important for the project. Originally […]