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.
NB: Further details of Joseph Pannell’s life story will be added shortly.
Joseph James Pannell was born in Titchfield in 1823. For a while he was a mariner, but he joined the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway in Portsmouth in 1854.
Joseph was a ‘checker’ – someone who compared goods unloaded against shipping notes. He worked in the goods yard that once stood beside Portsmouth and Southsea station’s passenger platforms.
On 13 December 1881 he was killed in an accident while unloading wagons. Questions were raised at the inquest about staffing levels and the space in which the work was being carried out – as well as about the four workers killed on site since 1880.
Around 120 fellow railway workers attended Joseph’s funeral – he was ‘held in the highest respect by his fellow employees’ according to a news report.
He left a widow, Anne, and three daughters over the age of 18. At this time the railway company would be unlikely to pay compensation for Joseph’s death. As he was a member of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants trade union, it made Anne a one-off ‘death benefit’ payment of £10 (around £1350 now) to cover immediate costs.
Mike Esbester