As travellers today (when we’re able to resume travelling) we may be less than enamoured of the toilets on trains – all too often cramped, unclean or even out-of-order. But at least they’ve been provided for us. That isn’t always the case for staff – and that’s a long-standing issue. Earlier this year I wrote […]
Tag Archives | London and North Western Railway
Jonathan Rogers: only a year on the railways
In this guest post, Linda Whitaker has kindly written up the death of one of her ancestors, Jonathan Rogers. His accident was one of the many that took place before records of staff accidents were kept, so it’s great to be able to get some information about his case which otherwise wouldn’t feature in the […]
Dowler’s double – with under 3 months between them
We return to one of the great things about our database for today’s blog post: the way it makes it possible to search the accident records more easily and identify links that might otherwise be missed. One way we’ve shown this in the past has been via the ‘double accidents’: those where a single person […]
Fools rush in where angels fear to tread?
We’ve noted in the past how a great many accidents happened in mundane circumstances, to a single railway worker – and how this obscured the accidents, as they weren’t spectacular or newsworthy (by the standards of the day). Sometimes accidents affected more than one worker – as in this case, which injured two men at […]
Disability History Month – What happened to the workers after the accident?
So far our project has only focused on the accidents railway workers suffered: what happened after that, for them, their families and their communities has been largely left unspoken. That’s a product of the sources we’ve been using: the accident investigation reports cover the incident only and don’t go into the aftermath. But in other […]
Demolishing Wolverton Works
It was reported last week that the proposed demolition of most of the remaining original parts of the London and North Western Railway’s Wolverton Works had been given the go-ahead. This is a good moment, then, to think a little about an intangible part of the Works’ heritage: the experiences of the staff, without whom […]
Histories of medical humanities and attitudes: Examining class and shock via the accident reports
The accidents and reports from which our database draws reveal much about all sorts of aspects of British and Irish society around the time of the First World War. Plenty of this relates directly to the lives – and sometimes deaths – of railway workers. But underlying this we might find other aspects that speak […]
Disability History Month – rehabilitating injured workers? The case of the one-legged engine driver
In our previous post we mentioned some of the immediate post-accident care that injured railway workers might have received – first aid at the scene and then hospital treatment. This time we want to say a little more about longer-term provision for disabled workers. Where and how disabled workers might receive treatment and after-care might […]
Disability History Month – a guest post on the NRM’s blog
Just a quick post today – to say that we’re thrilled that as part of our collaborative work between the University of Portsmouth and the National Railway Museum, we’ve contributed a guest post to the NRM’s blog, for Disability History Month. We’ve only scratched the surface of industrial disability and the railways, so there’s great […]
The impact of the First World War on accident investigation
It seems perhaps trite to say that the First World War had an impact on virtually every aspect of life in Britain, but we can see it in the evidence from the worker accident reports. A previous post, for example, has noted how wartime expediencies were probably involved in the death of one worker on […]
