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.
John Hooker worked at Havant railway station as a porter and then a shunter. He was reported to have had seven accidents at work by 1894.
He was born in 1848, in Hambledon, Hampshire, where his father was a gardener. The 1861 census shows him as a bricklayer’s labourer, aged 12. However, by 1881 he was working at Havant for the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway Company as a ‘goods porter’. He was living in Waterloo Road, Havant, with his wife Maria and their first two children.
In March 1888, John was admitted to the Portsmouth Branch of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants trade union. By 1891 the family had moved to North End Cottage, New Lane.
In May 1893 the Hants and Sussex News reported ‘a shocking accident’. John Hooker, now a shunter, had got jammed between a horse box and the buttress at the entrance to the goods shed, while crossing the lines. He sustained serious injuries and was removed to Portsmouth hospital on the 8.40 a.m. train. The house surgeon found Hooker to be badly bruised but no bones were broken. Less than a year later, in April 1894, John managed to get his right forearm crushed between the buffers of two trucks. According to the News this was his seventh accident.
In April 1905 John died at home, aged 56. He had gone to work at 6.30 a.m. as usual but returned home at 8.30 feeling ill. The doctor arrived to find him dead in his chair. He concluded that Hooker had died from severe aortic degeneration ‘due doubtless to hard work’. At his inquest the jury expressed the wish that in consideration of his long and faithful service on the railway the widow might receive adequate recognition from the Company.
In May the joint railway staff arranged a concert at Havant Town Hall, in aid of the ‘widow and orphans of the late John Hooker, who died after working for 26 years at Havant Station’. Over £40 worth of tickets were sold in advance, and the concert was a great success.
On 9 August 1916, John and Maria’s son, Sergeant Harry Wright Hooker, died of wounds in France. He is commemorated on Havant War memorial. He had been married less than a year but left a daughter, Emily Ellen (Jane), born 18 August 1916, who became Mrs Brannan and died in Minnesota in 2000.
John Hooker’s widow Maria died at North End Cottage, New Lane, in 1927, aged 79.
Ann Griffiths
Ann has lived in Havant for over 50 years. She is a volunteer genealogist at The Spring Arts and Heritage Centre.