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.
Unlike many of the people we’ve explored in the Portsmouth Area Railway Pasts project, Joseph Simmons’ life, on the railway and beyond, seems to have been relatively static. Once he found his way to Havant, he stayed put for the rest of his life.
Life in Sussex
Joseph was born in Twineham, Sussex, in approximately 1860. Like many at that time, there is some variation in the records about his birth year – documents give anywhere between 1859 and 1861. His parents were Martha and Walter Simmons; Walter was an agricultural labourer. In 1871, aged around 10, Joseph followed in his father’s footsteps, and became an agricultural labourer boy.
In 1878 Joseph married Mary Anne Turrell, probably in Ashurst, Sussex. By 1881 they had two children, Joseph and Reuben, and were living in Brighton. On the 1881 Census Joseph (snr) was given as a bricklayer’s labourer. However, it looks like that work might not have lasted much longer.
A Joseph Simmons appears on a London, Brighton & South Coast Railway (LBSCR) employment record in December 1881. It’s from the Locomotive and Carriage Department, which was based in Brighton – this was the location for the LBSCR’s major works. This Joseph was aged 22, so a slight discrepancy with the Census return from the same year. However this was certainly within the margins of error, given the uncertainty that persisted across Joseph’s formal documentation throughout his life. He was working as a labourer, and was paid three shillings per day. He wasn’t provided with clothing as part of his job – and neither was anyone else listed on the same page (including three needlewomen – a reminder, once again, that women have long been employed on the railways).
Life between Sussex and Hampshire?
Joseph next appears in surviving records as employed at Havant station in Hampshire, as a porter, from May 1885. He was recommended by the ‘Loco Dept’ – so this looks like an internal transfer within the LBSCR. Others on the same page were recommended by individuals or by their schools.
Did Joseph and his family – by that time, including a third son – all move to Hampshire? It’s unclear, as Mary and Joseph’s fourth child, Bertie, was born in the third quarter of 1885, in Brighton. Might Mary have returned to Brighton to give birth? Or was Joseph commuting to Havant to work? Though technically possible, that seems less likely – shift patterns would have made for very long days. Joseph and the family were definitely in Havant by 1890, as his and Mary’s fifth child, Lawrence, was born there in 1890.
Family and work in Hampshire
Joseph’s LBSCR employment records show that he started at Havant on a wage of 16 shillings per week, as a porter. A staff census taken in 1891 noted that in addition to his wage, still at 16 shillings per week, he was provided with uniform. By 1895 he was paid 18 shillings per week, and he then stayed at that level until 1912. This was a relatively slow increase in wage, and no change in job role. Those around Joseph on the pages of the employment registers have lots of moves against their name – moving to a new location was a frequent part of advancing in the job for railway staff. However, Joseph stays put, with limited change to role or income. Possibly he was unwilling to move leave Havant.
Might a reluctance have been to do with his family life? In 1891 he and Mary had five children, living at 5 Waterloo Road in Havant. They couldn’t have been much closer to Joseph’s work, either, as Waterloo Road ran alongside Havant station’s southern boundary. By 1901 they had a further two children, plus a nephew living with them. If Joseph moved station, they would probably all be uprooted.
Joseph’s 1908 accident
Joseph initially came to our attention, of course, because he’d had an accident at work on the railway. On 24 November 1908 he was just under an hour into a 12-hour shift. At nearly 7am, he was unloading ‘small consignments for the Hayling Island branch train’ from a wagon in the ‘tranship shed’. Presumably this was the covered space near the station building, on the Hayling Island side of the station.
Courtesy National Library of Scotland Maps.
Whilst inside the wagon being unloaded, he heard more wagons being moved on the same siding. He placed his left foot on a jar of spirits to prevent it falling over, and braced himself by holding onto the wagon door frame. When the other wagons hit the one he was in, the impact made the doors close, crushing Joseph’s thumb between door and frame.
The investigation, by state-appointed Railway Inspector Amos Ford, found that those involved hadn’t been following the rules. Interestingly, however, rather than simply blame the men concerned – which was often the outcome – Ford focused his attention on the general working culture at the station. He noted that ‘the practice in force at the station rather than the particular men concerned in this case, is to blame’. He recommended that in future the LBSCR should ensure staff were following the rules.
This systemic failure to follow the rules wasn’t an issue confined to Havant, either. One of the other workers we looked at in the Portsmouth Area Railway Pasts project exposed a similar problem at another location. Charles Howard’s 1910 accident at Petersfield, on the London & South Western Railway, was another manifestation of regular disregard of the regulations – something we explore here.
Joseph after his accident
Returning to Havant and Joseph, he was relatively fortunate. His accident was comparatively minor. He would likely have been back at work very quickly – if, indeed, he had any time off. A little over three years after his accident, on 17 January 1912, he was made up to a signal gatesman, at a wage of 19 shillings per week. This was a step on the route to joining the signalling grades.
On 1 January 1920 he became a crossing keeper, with a wage of £2.16.0 per week. That appears quite an increase on his 1912 wage, though no doubt it would have been incremental over the preceding eight years. Part of it was probably also the ‘war bonus’, paid during and after the First World War to help workers (on the railways and beyond) keep pace with inflation-driven cost of living increases.
Joseph’s wage incremented again on 14 June 1920, to £2.18.0. However, just over a year later, on 1 July 1921, he wage decreased by one shilling. The page of the LBSCR employment register shows that everyone lost a shilling from their pay at that point. One year later still, on 1 July 1922, Joseph’s wage dropped to £2.13.0 – most others also lost four shillings from their pay, too. Presumably this was the government and the railway industry gradually reducing the war bonus.
Joseph’s employment records stops at that point – presumably a result of the ‘Grouping’ of railway companies in 1923. At this point, in the Portsmouth area, the LBSCR and LSWR merged to become part of the newly-formed Southern Railway. Its staff records haven’t survived, so we don’t know when Joseph retired from railway service.
The ‘railway family’ in Havant
Over the years Joseph appeared on the same pages of LBSCR employment registers for Havant as some of the other railway workers we’ve researched for the Portsmouth Area Railway Pasts project. This included John Hooker, Robert Spicer, George Stanford (who appears in the life story of his son, Alfred Stanford), George Abbott and Henry Griffin – possibly a relation of Trayton Griffin.
The railway connection was evident in Joseph’s life in another way, too. In 1891, as well as living with his wife and five children, the property was shared with two boarders. Percy Wales was a ticket collector and Samuel Warder was another porter. Taking in railway colleagues as boarders was fairly common for railway staff – they would have understood the patterns of each other’s work, as well as sharing some sense of occupational identity.
These are nice demonstrations of the interconnected nature of railway employment, and a reminder of the sense of occupational community – the ‘railway family’ – that existed. Indeed, though the industry today is much smaller, that sense of cohesion remains strong.
Filling in Joseph’s life story
For many of our railway staff life stories we’ve had to rely upon the formal records, produced to meet the demands of either the railway company or the state: employment registers or things like the census and birth, marriage and death registration. That tells us something – but it still leaves a rather official, and less personal, sense of the individual concerned. Sometimes other sources give us a little more to work with.
Very often those sources concern moments where something notable – often less than ideal – has happened. In Joseph’s case that includes his accident at work – but also two other events. Firstly, in 1891, as a result of his job, he was called as a witness in a prosecution by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. George Lanning, of Landport, on Portsea Island, was accused of cruelty to poultry. He had packed 19 fowls into two baskets big enough for 12 only, which he brought to Havant station to send by rail. Joseph gave evidence about the state of the birds, having released them from the baskets. Lanning was fined 10 shillings and ordered to pay 15 shillings costs.
The other note perhaps demonstrates the financial challenges that Joseph and Mary faced with a sizeable family and a relatively low wage. In January 1896 the family were given order to quit the property they were renting in Waterloo Road. They paid five shillings per week – just under one-third of Joseph’s wage at the time – for a tenement and garden. The brief note of the case in the Portsmouth Times and Naval Gazette recorded that despite the notice to quit, Joseph remained in the property. He claimed that they could not find another house to live in, but an order for ejectment was given. As we know, the family were still living in Havant in 1901, so they clearly found another property.
One final railway family connection
Joseph died on 16 August 1927, living at 6 Lymbourne Terrace in Havant. He left effects worth £1012 (around £75,000 now) to his widow Mary. Mary remained at the same address until her death on 19 October 1938. Her estate was split between a solicitor and Henry Malcolm Dray – a railway guard.
I thought the name sounded familiar, so had a look back over the Havant employment registers for the LBSCR. There he was: Henry Dray joined the railway on 1 May 1909, as a porter at Havant. He went on to marry Mary and Joseph’s second youngest daughter, May, in 1920 in Havant. By that point he was working as a shunter in Brighton, so on the 1921 Census May and Henry were living in Sussex – back to May’s ancestral roots.
This was an interesting find at the end of the story – another demonstration of the nature of the railway family, conceptually and quite literally. It only emerged by following up on all of the leads that were available, showing the value in chasing down as many of the details as possible. As a result, via Joseph’s life story, we can see how deeply the railway connections spread throughout the lives of one biological family and through an occupational family.
Mike Esbester
I’m Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Portsmouth, and one of the wider Railway Work, Life & Death project co-leads. I’ve greatly enjoyed the Portsmouth Area Railway Pasts project and have valued the chance to learn with and learn from Neil, Ann, Geoff and Alan – and to share what we’ve uncovered here.