This page is one of a series introducing railway staff who worked on the Isle of Wight’s railways before 1939. It’s a collaboration between the Isle of Wight Steam Railway and the Railway Work, Life & Death project. We’ve tried to share more about the social history of the Island’s railways in the past, via the people who kept them moving. Where we can we’ve looked at the individual and their wider working and family lives.
The workers featured were selected from staff who appear in the Railway Work, Life & Death project database of accidents to pre-1939 British and Irish railway employees. This worker is one of those featured in the leaflet produced collaboratively between the Isle of Wight Steam Railway and the Railway Work, Life & Death project, available at the Railway or as a PDF here.
More often than not we end up tracing the life story of a single person. That’s because they come to our attention as a result of an accident at work. Those accidents typically happened to individual workers – but sometimes the incidents affected more than one person. That was the case in 1929, near Ashey – today on the route of the Isle of Wight Steam Railway.
A wild night
The evening of 6 December 1929 was ‘exceedingly stormy’. This was to play a role in the accident which befell bridge inspector E Bates and bricklayer G Mitchell. Both men were employed by the Southern Railway. Along with two track workers, they went to Ashey, from where they were to inspect an overbridge on the way to Smallbrook Junction.
They waited for the story to quieten down before setting off along the line at about 11pm. Railway work might take place at any hour of the day or night, even on comparatively quite lines on the Isle of Wight. As today, this was a single track line. Rather than using mechanical power, like a steam engine, maintenance work often relied upon a trolley pushed by hand. That evening, the trolley had been rigged up with a platform and staging, to allow inspection of the bridge they were interested in.
The four men pushed the trolley uphill out of Ashey. As they reached the summit and prepared to move onto the downhill section of the track, Mitchell tried to brake the trolley using one of his tools. Perhaps surprisingly by the standards of 2026, at the time the trolley’s lack of proper or effective brakes was not remarkable. Some aspects of railway work existed on a spirit of ‘making it up as you go along.’
The wind takes charge
In the darkness, Mitchell found it difficult to see what he was doing and couldn’t apply his improvised brake effectively. Bates got on the trolley to shine a light, but the wind blew it out. According to the official state investigation into the incident, ‘the wind then took charge of the vehicle.’
towards the photographer.
Courtesy Isle of Wight Steam Railway Photographic Archive.
Mitchell was thrown off, injuring his right arm and stomach. Bates jumped off the vehicle, injuring his head and legs. The trolley then ‘ran for a considerable distance’. The report held the weather to be the main cause of the incident, but did note that, if the trolley was fitted with a brake ‘as it should have been’, the accident wouldn’t have happened. It went on to recommend that the trolley should either be withdrawn from use, or fitted with a brake.
No first names?
Usually we like to refer to the workers involved by their first names. This helps us to see them as individuals. However, here we haven’t – we’ve only got E Bates and G Mitchell. It’s fairly standard that the industry-produced accident reports only gave initials. From that it’s often possible to locate enough information to name those concerned.
However, it hasn’t been the case here. There were no obvious contenders for either man on the Isle of Wight on any of the usual sources of information, like the census. Might they have come across from the mainland, in order to do this (and no doubt other) job? At this point, it’s hard to know – leaving frustrating silences in the story of the Isle of Wight’s railway staff.
If you know more about any of the railway workers featured we’d be keen to hear from you – do please let us know.