In last week’s blog, starting our contributions to Disability History Month, we considered where we might see learning disabilities in our project work. This week we return to physical disabilities, by looking at a case of a disability resulting from the work that railway staff were asked to do. It’s also a case local to […]
Tag Archives | porter
Major Keaton Kay 1871–1935
By Derek Walford on November 29, 2021 in Blog, Disability, Disability History Month, Family History, Guest contribution
This week’s blog post is another that came about via an enquiry received by the project. Derek, this week’s author, was researching his family history, including a railway staff accident. Whilst we weren’t able to help directly – the date was earlier than our current project coverage, though we are moving backwards deeper into the […]
John Preece, his bravery, and his terrible injuries
By Steve Jackson on February 22, 2021 in Accident aftermath, Blog, Disability, Family History, Guest contribution, Linking sources, Local History
We’re delighted to have received this timely guest post from long-time project friend and support Steve Jackson. It’s timely because, as Steve notes, it meshes nicely with this month’s focus on tragedies centred on a particular place. One of the virtues of our project is that it will increasingly allow us to take a place-based […]
Dying for a wee – 1
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 […]
The Great Eastern Railway and accidents to staff
By Ian Strugnell on April 13, 2020 in Accident reports, Blog, Guest contribution, Linking sources, Local History
We’re grateful to Ian Strugnell for this guest blog post. Ian is a member of the Great Eastern Railway Society, and got in touch after we contributed a piece about the project to the Society’s Newsletter. Of particular relevance was the work we’d done on the GER’s Benevolent Fund book (see here). Ian has been […]
Not learning from past experience – with fatal consequences
We’ve blogged in the past about those cases in our database where staff had two accidents (see here for the most recent of those posts). This week we return to another such case: Great Northern Railway porter George Lewis of Leicester. The first time he appears in our database was for an accident on 27 […]
Volunteers’ Week 5: The fatal dangers of shunting
By Cheryl Hunnisett on June 5, 2019 in Accident reports, Blog, Family History, Guest contribution, Linking sources, Volunteers’ Week
In the latest of our Volunteers’ Week posts, project volunteer Cheryl Hunnisett, working with us at the Modern Records Centre, takes a look at one case she encountered in the records of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants trade union. This is another great example of the ways in which our volunteers are actively taking […]
Forgotten pasts at Glasgow Queen St
At the moment, Glasgow Queen St station is undergoing a major redevelopment, which has included exposing the Victorian glass frontage, concealed for the last 40 years by a concrete carbuncle now demolished. However, what isn’t so easy to see is another hidden past: the human cost of working on the railway, in employee accidents. This […]
Portsmouth-London, in accidents
Each case in our database is interesting (and often sad) in its own right. But one of the powerful things the database allows us to do is to make connections – whatever our interest, we can search the data and make the links that interest us. So, it might be by a particular family name, […]
Joining the dots: how our project links accidents, pt 1 – or, the terrible death of a porter
One of the things we wanted the ‘Railway Work, Life & Death’ project to do was to make it easier for you to find out about railway worker accidents. Hopefully you’ll agree that the project database has done this in its own right. But one huge strength is that it also makes it easier to […]
