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.
William Edward Maynard was born on 26 July 1876, near Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire. His father, Henry, was a farm bailiff; William would have grown up surrounded by an agricultural life. How he made the move to railway work isn’t clear, however, but on 3 October 1894 he joined the London and South Western Railway (LSWR) in Salisbury, Wiltshire, as an engine cleaner.
How did William come to be working for the LSWR? It looks rather like he might have been living in Salisbury by 1894, hence joining the dominant railway company close to home. By 1901, age 24, he was still in Salisbury, but had been promoted to fireman. He was lodging with Henry and Elizabeth Tutt. He married Geraldine Emilie Kendall Weeks in Salisbury in 1902. But none of this takes William close to the Portsmouth area – at least on paper.
Railway mobility and William’s accident
Railway work often involved occupational mobility, particularly moving within a company’s network to secure promotion. For firemen and drivers, that mobility wasn’t just in terms of the sheds they were based at. Clearly, as they fired and drove the trains, they themselves moved. That was the case with William’s accident, at Cosham, in 1903.
On 13 April 1903, William was fireman on board a passenger train from Salisbury to Portsmouth. Cosham, just outside Portsmouth, was nearly the end of that run – though it wouldn’t have been the end of William’s turn of duty that day. He was booked on for a 10-hour shift, and by the time they reached Cosham had been working for around three and a half hours.
After the train left Cosham station, he left the locomotive’s footplate (the cab space, where the engine was driven from). He went to the back of the tender, the bit behind the engine that carries the coal. He needed to retrieve one of the tools used to help manage the engine’s fire. Whilst there, the back of his head was injured, and he was off work for three weeks. So what happened?
An inconclusive investigation
At this time, a small proportion of railway worker accidents were investigated by the state accident investigation body, the Railway Inspectorate. William’s was one of them. The investigation noted that while he was on the tender, one of two things happened – but no-one knew which. William’s head either struck an overbridge, or he slipped and fell, with his head striking the top of the tender.
He was held responsible for the incident, as he ignored or forgot special instructions about not going on the tender when the engine was moving. Railway Inspector JJ Hornby, who investigated the accident, noted that William could have got the tool he wanted when the engine was stopped at Cosham, or should have left it in a position that could be reached without going on the tender.
Hornby did clear driver Harry Collins of any blame. He decided that Collins’ attention was given over to looking for signals, and so he didn’t see William leaving the footplate.
William’s subsequent life
William’s accident evidently didn’t deter him from his railway career. By 1911 he had been promoted again, to driver. He and Geraldine were by this time living in Twickenham. In 1921 they were living at 6 Windsor Road, Teddington, where they were to be found in 1939. They don’t seem to have had any children.
Geraldine appears to have died in 1947, and William re-married in early 1948, to May Golding. It looks like William died in December 1948. His probate record shows effects to the tune of £2444.7.11 (around £100,000 today). Curiously the original grant, to ‘May Maynard, widow’ was subsequently struck out. It was then re-proven, to ‘May Maynard and Alice Gertrude Hopkin, widows’, to the same value. So far we’ve been unable to unpick this, but it looks like more of William’s life story remains to be uncovered.
A moving life
All told, then, we can see in William’s life some of the aspects of railway work that were common to many. There was an element of moving around the network for work – both for promotion and because of the nature of work. Whilst we have one documented accident, William may well have had others that went unrecorded/ haven’t made it into the documentary record. Given the movement, how must he and Geraldine have found it to put down roots in a place and engage with the communities around them?
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.