The status of the north east as a producer of coal in the 19th and 20th centuries is well-known; it was one of the important sources of revenue for the railway companies, which vied with each other to build lines and facilities that would service a big income-stream. This included the construction of vast dock […]
Tag Archives | 1914
Trap & Drag – 1914 style
By Peter Munro on July 8, 2019 in Accident reports, Blog, Family History, Guest contribution, Passenger
In this guest post, project supporter Peter Munro looks at a passenger accident from 1914 – what would today be known as a ‘trap and drag’ incident, something that the Rail Accident Investigation Branch flagged as a real concern on our recent visit to its Farnborough office. Peter has also helped the project in a […]
Two scalds, same cause
Of all of the types of injuries that appear in our database, burns and scalds are relatively infrequent. This might just be an artefact of the cases that were chosen for investigation by the Inspectors – or it might be a reasonable representation of the actual numbers of these types of cases. Regardless, the accidents […]
Reading 1914: passengers, workers, family
Our project has focused on accidents to railway workers, rather than passengers, as numerically far more workers were killed or injured on the railways and they remain understudied. When we started out, in 2016, we were using just one set of records – the Board of Trade reports into worker accidents. We took the decision […]
Safety glass now – unsafety glass then
Recently in my household, we had an object lesson in how government regulations have helped improve our health and wellbeing – via one (big) pane of smashed safety glass. A glancing blow, with very little force behind it but obviously the right (or wrong, as you look at it!) angle, and the sheet shattered. Not […]
‘a question whether a man who suffers under this disability should occupy such a position’
Perhaps surprisingly, the question of literacy doesn’t seem to come up in the worker accident reports too frequently. It appears as though in most cases railway staff had at least a functional level of reading. Presumably their level was more than just functional, too, given the key document employees were reading, so far as the […]
Getting more than your fingers burnt
We’ve featured a burns case in the past – in that instance, it was electrical burns. But often lumped together with burns are scalds, something we’ve not discussed until now. As you might expect, working around steam locos exposed some staff to hot steam. There are relatively few of these cases in our database, though […]
14, learning the craft – the hard way
From time to time we’ve commented on the young age of some of the people encountered in our database – for example, the case of 15-year old James Beck. Given the school leaving age was 14 at this time, it’s unsurprising – if sad – that Beck’s case wasn’t the youngest we have encountered. There […]
New data release: Great Eastern Railway Benevolent Fund book, 1913-23
We’re thrilled to release a new data set for you: details of Great Eastern Railway (GER) staff who had been injured at work and applied for assistance to the Company’s Benevolent Fund between 1913 and 1923. The information comes from a ledger book kept by the Company and now found at the National Railway Museum […]
The Fighting Wounded
Over the last 4 years a great deal of attention has been focused on the First World War and its devastating and wide-ranging impacts. We’ve thought – as nations, communities, families, and individuals – about what happened, and about how we remember and talk about the war and its aftermath. That has included people looking […]
