The bowler hat was a popular choice of headgear amongst the Victorian working classes. The hat is believed to have been commissioned by Edward Coke (pronounced ‘Cook’), who approached the London hatters Locke & Co. Coke wanted a hat for his gamekeepers at Holkham Hall that could withstand a blow from low hanging branches when they were on horseback and, if tales are to be believed, a thump over the head from a poacher’s stick. The resulting stiff felt hat withstood Coke stamping on it twice and, satisfied with its strength, he replaced his gamekeepers’ previous headgear of choice – the top hat.
Both the top hat and the bowler hat were originally designed with a practical, hard-wearing purpose in mind, as opposed to being mere fashion statements.
The bowler hat does have other names, such as the Billycock or the Derby. One thing that is certain: it has become an iconic piece of headwear. It is very similar to a modern hardhat. It has a rim that gives the eyes protection from either debris falling from above or from catching yourself on a protruding nail when turning your head. It keeps the rain off and is relatively hard. If I were a navvy and had the choice, I would definitely have worn a bowler hat.
During the twentieth century, the bowler became synonymous with gentlemen working in the city. It is part of the guards’ walkout uniform for officers, along with a pinstriped suit and a tightly furled umbrella. This has meant that the hat’s original working class origins have faded. Indeed, while wearing my own bowler hat at navy camp, I lost count of the number of people who, upon spying it, said to me ‘you must be the foreman’. My reply was to inform them that if they ever travelled to South America they should try and visit one of the indigenous ethnic groups known collectively as the Quechuas. British railway workers introduced the hat to the continent in the 1920s, and to this day many of the Quechua women still wear bowler hats.
For many men in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a bowler hat was part of standard everyday attire.
SAW MILL
One of our first jobs at the navvy camp was tarring sleepers. However, before we could do that we had to make the sleepers in the first place. The railways were a new technology. No one knew how a train powered by steam would behave as it moved along rails. In the early days (the 1830s) it was thought that the track had to be rigid. It is easy to see how that idea could gain credence, as powerful, heavy but inefficient engines moved slowly along the permanent way.
Early sleepers were made out of stone, and to ensure maximum rigidity these sleepers were often concreted into position. The rails that made the track were initially quite short and simply spanned the gap between the rigid sleepers. Stone was a cheaper material than wood, but as the railway technology rapidly progressed and rails were made longer, it soon became apparent that something had to give – both literally and economically! Although it was more expensive, the plain fact was that wood offered the extra degree of flexibility that was required by several tons of train and freight moving at speed.
So, in time, the stone sleepers were removed and wooden ones took their place. As an interesting aside, the spire at St Walburge’s church in Preston is the third tallest spire in the UK after those of Salisbury and Norwich cathedrals (and the tallest spire of any parish church). It is constructed exclusively from the limestone sleepers that were removed from the Preston and Longridge Railway.
Presenters Peter Ginn and Alex Langlands making ready to fell a tree for the production of wooden railway sleepers.
In 2007, road excavations uncovered a number of intact stone sleepers that were used as long ago as 1825 for the Stockton and Darlington railway. These were the very first sleepers to be laid down and weighed only 75lb, so that they could be carried by one person. However, they soon proved to be too flimsy and were quickly replaced by larger ones. Most of the 64,000 original sleepers were destroyed, but some were used in a retaining wall and it was these that were uncovered during the works for the Darlington Eastern Transport Corridor.
The sheer number of main lines, branch lines and sidings mean that the total number of railway sleepers in use in Britain is absolutely colossal. In the 1930s, at arguably the height of Britain’s railways in terms of infrastructure, the Great Western company owned an estimated 9,000 miles of track which equated to almost 20 million sleepers in use. However, sleepers, like rails, had to be replaced and during the same period the London, Midland and Scottish railway had an annual requirement of 1.25 million sleepers.
By the 1930s, sleeper production was big business, involving the mass importation of wood and extensive mechanical processing and treating. One hundred years earlier, it was a different story. Some early wooden sleepers were manufactured in the half round. This would mean harvesting young managed woodland, sawing the wood to length (which in the Victorian era was nine feet, becoming eight and a half feet in the twentieth century), and splitting the log in two. Splitting a log is a lot easier and quicker then sawing it, and if the tree has grown in relative shelter and the grain is straight, the split should result in a nice, flat face.
These half-round sleepers persisted for a while and crossed over with the uniform square-cut sleepers that are well known today. A type of wooden sleeper that was very short lived was the triangular sleeper, with the apex of the triangle driven down into the ballast stones. A triangle is the profile that one would achieve when splitting a tree with a much larger circumference into sleeper-sized chunks. The problem with split wood is that each face is unique and will be governed by the grain. Mass production requires order and uniformity. The nine-foot wooden sleeper with a square-cut end of ten by five inches was quickly adopted as standard.
The permanent way had to be as level as possible, as trains struggle with inclines and steep gradients are out of the question. The steepest sustained gradient on Britain’s railways, that does not employ a third rail for traction like a fell system, is Lickey Incline. At two miles long, it has a gradient of 1 in 37.7 or 2.65 per cent. Steam trains ascending this incline would often need bankers, which are other steam engines, to help them push their load uphill.
Alex Langlands and Peter Ginn inspecting the angle of the ‘gob’ they have cut in the tree. This initial cut dictates the direction in which the tree will fall.
The creation of the permanent way involved building bridges, boring tunnels, digging cuttings and compiling embankments. As the navvies constructed the permanent way across a landscape that had not been significantly altered since the time of James I, they encountered many obstacles that either had to be avoided or demolished.
Often the navvies would have to remove trees that could be used as sleepers. Hardwoods such as oak were the most sought after for this purpose. At navvy camp, we felled an oak tree in order to cut it into sleepers. When felling a tree you must first look at the landscape and decide which way you want the tree to fall. You need to consider other trees and whether the branches will catch them as the felled tree falls down. The wind will always be a factor, and when we felled our oak, the wind speed was high. However, due to the size of the tree, we could fell it directly into the wind.
Once you have decided on the direction in which you want the tree to fall, you need to cut a notch known as a ‘gob’. I have always been taught, when felling with a two-man saw, to cut the horizontal bottom cut first. This is a very important cut and worth taking the time to get right, as this will determine the way in which the tree falls. It is essential to keep the saw level and have the perpendicular line formed by the cut to be in the direction you wish the tree to fall. Then, using a felling axe, the gob can be cut out by chopping down onto the cut you have made in the tree.
Once the gob has been created, a cut from the other side of the tree is made in order to fell it. It is important to establish lines of safety. Anywhere in front of the tree is a no-go area and directly behind the tree is also