This page is one of a series introducing railway staff who worked on the south coast of England before 1939. They’ve been researched as part of the ‘Portsmouth Area Railway Pasts’ project – which you can read more about here, including accessing details of the other railway workers featured.
Research was undertaken from November 2024-July 2025, by a small group of volunteers from the Havant Local History Group, working with the University of Portsmouth’s History team. The work was funded by the University of Portsmouth’s Centre of Excellence for Heritage Innovation.
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 workers.
Tragedy struck twice for this family.
George William Hillary was born at Catherington in 1875. He grew up in Lovedean, where he was an agricultural labourer in the 1891 census. In 1895 he started work as a shunter at Portsmouth goods station, aged 21.
In August 1897 George married Ada Florence Preskett, whose father was a signalman at Copnor. A year later, on 11 August 1898, Hillary was run over by a fish train and decapitated, while working as a shunter near the entrance to Portsmouth Town Station (now Portsmouth and Southsea station).
At his inquest the Jury returned a verdict of accidental death but stated that the railway authorities should make better provision for the safety of their employees, at the dangerous spot in question.
George was buried at Kingston cemetery and his daughter, Ivy Florence, was born two weeks later. Ada was only 21 at the time. Tragically, in 1905 when Ivy was almost seven, her maternal grandmother, Ann Preskett, was killed by an express train at Copnor level crossing, near her home and where Ann’s husband, Henry, was a signalman.
In October 1898 Walter Cull also a shunter, died at Portsmouth Goods Station when he was jammed between two passing trucks. The Jury found that the station was inadequate for the volume of traffic and the coroner stated that it was his sixth inquest on Portsmouth railway employees since December 1896.
Ada Hillary married again and had more children. Ada’s second husband, Robert John Roads, was a coffee house keeper but sadly, he died in 1901 leaving Ada a widow for the second time, when still under 25 years old. With her third husband she had a further four daughters, half-sisters for George and Ada’s daughter, Ivy.
Ivy did well at school. When she was fourteen the local paper reported that she was never absent or late for school in eight years ‘although every morning she had to walk 2 miles’. She was presented with a watch and silver chain. She went on to marry twice and have three children. She died in Portsmouth in 1992, as Mrs Ivy Trewin, aged 93.
Ann Griffiths
Ann has lived in Havant for over 50 years. She is a volunteer genealogist at The Spring Arts and Heritage Centre.