Friday the 13th – unlucky for some, at least according to Western superstition. Even if you (like us) don’t buy in to the idea, as in idea it’s pervasive. We thought we’d take a look at the Railway Work, Life & Death project database of accidents to British and Irish railway workers before 1939, to see how Friday the 13th appears.
A few observations
Given the project database now has over 115,000 entries, it’s no simple task to go through it all. At the time of writing, we’ve been through a lot of it … but not all. We’ve yet to complete the period from 1912-1922 (inclusive). That window will contain a reasonable number of accidents, across the 17 Friday 13ths currently missing. So, what follows are very much some preliminary and surface observations. We’ve also focused on accidents, and have excluded health conditions and old age.
The database covers 1855-1939. Across those years there were 131 Friday 13ths. So far we’ve looked at 113 of them – and found incidents on 80 of them. (We’ve not taken a ‘control’ of non-Fridays and non-13ths to form a comparison!) The distribution of those ‘non-accident’ Friday 13ths needs a bit of unpicking, of course. Twenty-five of the 34 Friday 13ths we know don’t show recorded accidents occurred in the 19th century. Unsurprisingly, on a straightforward tally, there were fewer Friday 13ths in the 20th century on which no accidents occurred – only nine we’ve identified so far.
This distribution simply reflects the rudimentary approach (of both companies and state) to recording non-passenger casualties in the 19th century. The records that were kept at the time were patchy at best, as it wasn’t until the end of the century that railway companies were required to keep detailed records. Not all records survive, too, and we’ve also yet to bring all the available records into the database. We’re working on bringing more in, of course, and when we do, the number of incidents will only increase. That will be particularly true of the later 19th-century, with further trade union records improving our coverage.
So, although a very crude metric, we’ve identified 287 accidents over 80 Friday 13ths. That’s well and good – but how do those numbers translate into people?
Friday 13th in the 1850s
The first Friday 13th with an accident that appears in the database was 13 February 1857. The location was North Shields, on the North Eastern Railway (NER)’s Tynemouth branch. A coupling between the locomotive and carriages broke on the 4.45pm service from Newcastle, about half a mile from North Shields station. The coaches ran off the rails, and passenger Delchon suffered a broken arm, and two female passengers with the surname Green suffered from shock. The cause of the incident was put down to a broken axle on the leading carriage. As this was a passenger train incident, the state took notice. The Railway Inspectorate (the state-appointed body that investigated accidents) issued a report, available here.
(Incidentally, the NER Tynemouth branch and its passengers had a rough few days. Just four days later, there was another incident which injured four passengers. The 9.25am express departure from Tynemouth ran into an earlier departure that had been delayed by fog. Interestingly, the report made at the time notes that ‘None of the carriages were thrown off the line; trains were at the Central Station Newcastle by 10 o’clock.’ This suggests a rather different approach than today to both safety and post-incident resolution! Again, the Railway Inspectorate report is available here.)
Clearly these earlier records mix railway worker and public cases. We don’t have to wait long for the first recorded worker casualty on a Friday 13th – only a month, in fact, after the Tynemouth branch passenger incidents. On Friday 13 March 1857, NER guard George Fish was working at Bridlington Junction, Hull. Adjusting wagon couplings, he was crushed between two wagons and killed. And that’s the sum total of the information that was recorded at the time – rather a contrast to the full scale Railway Inspectorate investigations that the passenger incidents received. This reflects the difference in status and perceived seriousness of passenger and staff incidents – something that would persist until the 1890s, and arguably much longer.
< I’m having to pause with the post for now, but will return to it as soon as possible – there’s plenty more to come, needless to say, including the last case in the database, where women feature, a note about incidents in the countries making up the UK, where disability appears (ahead of Disability History Month, which starts tomorrow), an incident with multiple casualties, and where the same person features across a number of different records in the project database. Watch this space! >