Tunnel Tigers

by Alexander Cordell

Genres: Classics; Cultural Heritage; Historical Fiction

Synopsis

Brunel, Stephenson, Locke and Vignoles - these were the magic names. And under them 10,000 laboured, blasting, shovelling and digging, changing the contours of Britain for a new age of railways. Among them is Nick Wortley, whose love for the daughter of the local mill owner is cruelly thwarted. Taking flight he is drawn by the irresistable clamour of the great Sheffield to Manchester, a railway which is preparing to drive a path of steel under the Pennines. Stephenson said it was impossible; Nick and his companions will prove him wrong, but at a terrible price...

Release date: August 21, 2014

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 288

Sample

Chapter eight

There were twelve navvies in Shant Five including me: there was Little Bert, Alf Posh, and Ezekiel, the blue-berry man I’d seen dancing in the Miller’s Arms; there was Educated Ifan; Jake O’Hara, who was an ex-sailor – he shared his bait with me, for a navvy would always share his tommy with a mate. There was Tatty, Byron, Tom Ostler and Cat-Eating Scan who pulled kittens to pieces and I knew I’d have trouble with him; and there was Gaffer, the ganger of Shant Five whom I’d met coming in plus Dandy Dick who came later. I awoke next morning lying in the truckle bed beside Gaffer.

‘Lie still,’ said he, and I obeyed.

The shant was alive with activity, mainly from Old Peg who was racing around with the handle of a broom, threatening the sleepers, crying:

‘Yo ho! Yo ho! Come on out, ye lazy set o’ bastards, up!’ And she brought the thing down on anything handy, shrieking: ‘There’s me been skinnin’ me fingers since cock crow and you lot jumping beds wi’ the trollops. Come on, come on!’

I made to move.

‘Don’t go,’ said Gaffer.

‘Out, out, out!’ shrieked Peg. ‘Out with ye and bum the tucker. There’s a quart of ale and half a loaf for the first fella at the table!’ Now she stood at the bottom of the truckle, the broom handle up. ‘Come on, Gaffer, show a leg. Ain’t it Old Peg’s task to get ye up?’

But Gaffer only folded his hands behind his head, saying, ‘Get em all out, woman, I want to talk to Welsh Taff.’ And he shouted down to the bustling men: ‘Scan, come here.’

Here was a man, half-ape: no more than five feet tall, he was as broad as he was long, his movements ponderous, drunk with strength; one eye was a red socket, the other burned in his high-boned hairy face; Asiatic. His moleskin trews were yorked at the knees, his navvy waistcoat, once scarlet velveteen, was caked with mud. Gaffer said:

‘Get ’em going End-on. I’ll be out directly.’

The man did not move; his single eye was fixed upon me.

‘Christ, go on!’ bawled Gaffer. ‘Or Purdon will be about and you’ll be down the road on the ticket!’

‘I’ve got to go, too,’ I said quietly. ‘I need a slash.’

‘Cross your legs,’ said Gaffer.

Lying back on the bed I watched the activity. Nobody washed, and now I knew why I’d been scratching all night. Sullen, half asleep, men lounged on the floor or sat at the long board table served by forms, pushing handfuls of oatmeal bread into their mouths or tearing at the remains of last night’s supper with their strong, white teeth, for most were young. And in their sullen silence the treble voice of Little Bert kept piping up as he ate excitedly, snatching at scraps thrown to him by the rest. Around them, filling their pots with ale or pulling the tops off her cottage loaves which she baked in an outside oven, Old Peg ministered to their needs like a guardian angel, being rewarded in gasps and grunts. She shouted at me:

‘Remember, I want bait off you today or you don’t eat, my son!’

‘Leave him,’ commanded Gaffer, and sat up on his bed. To me he said, ‘There’s a brook outside – you want to wash?’

‘Aye.’

‘Be sharp about it, I haven’t got all day.’

 

Later, at the table, Gaffer said, ‘Welsh Taff they call you, eh?’

I nodded, drinking the weak ale Peg had set me.

‘No other name?’

I shook my head.

‘Where you from?’

‘My business.’

He drank, too, watching me over the mug. ‘You learn fast. Last night I saw Purdon. He tells me you can read and write?’

I nodded again, and he said, tossing a paper on to the table before me, ‘Read that,’ and I read aloud from the paper:

 

‘It is of importance that some daily record be kept of the institution under which all navigators are employed. Sooner or later an affiliation will be made with other apprenticeships. The repeal of the Combination laws of fifteen years back . . .’

 

The man nodded and took it from my hand. ‘All right, all right. And if you can write as good as that ye can be of help to us.’

Rising, he went to his bed-space, pulled out a ledger and set it before me. ‘This is a diary. You know what that is?’

‘Aye.’

‘Any fool can dig and shovel. You’ve seen a sample o’ that this morning with this dirty batch. Jesus Christ!’ Turning away, he ran his fingers through his mop-black hair. ‘No brains, nothin’. Just work, ale, women. Sometimes I think there’s no hope for us, that the Combination was born dead.’ Swinging around I saw the sudden fire in his face. ‘And you’ll be as bad after a few months here. Have ye even heard of a Combination?’

‘Yes.’ I returned his glare.

‘Then explain it. Six foot up don’t mean brains. Most of this lot keep them in the arse.’

I said slowly, ‘Are you talking of the Tolpuddle Martyrs? I know of them. And that’s what they got for trying to form a Combination. My pa marched with the Consolidated Union protest on the day Cubitt locked out workers for not signing the pledge.’

He stared at me. ‘God Almighty!’

‘Aye, God Almighty. Back in cotton and wool we’ve been hammering for a union of workers before you lot here knew where Tolpuddle was, and we’ve been stretchin’ our necks up in York before ye thought of killing off tommy shops. You’re not the only ones under the boot.’

Old Peg was listening at the door.

I said, quietly, ‘We ain’t alone, you know.’

‘She only understands one word in ten. Who are you, for God’s sake?’

‘No odds to that, but I’ll want to know more before I set myself to a diary in this fookin’ place. Are ye done with me now?’

There was a long silence; the big man wandered the room. Then turning, he said from a distance, ‘Christ in concrete, do ye believe in God?’

‘Not much.’

He smiled and wiped his bearded face with the back of his hand. ‘Like all the forsaken bloody radicals! Jesus!’

‘I tell ye one thing, He ain’t up in Bradford.’

‘A revolutionary are ye?’

Now he was weighing me.

‘No.’

‘We can do without those sods.’

‘Listen, Gaffer. I come for work, not politics.’

‘You’ll always have politics while you’ve got these conditions.’

‘Ay ay, but I saw what happened to me feyther, so I’m leaving ’em to somebody else.’

‘How old are you?’

‘Sixteen, I told you,’ I lied again.

‘Where did you learn such talk?’

‘Robert Owen.’

‘A New View of Society?’

‘Could be.’ It surprised me.

He said, earnestly, ‘We need you, son. We need young ‘uns to help straighten out this God-forsaken country.’

I said, ‘It’s not forsaken. One day it will all be swept away. One day it will be different, like my pa said. But I don’t come for talk, Gaffer. I come to be a tunnel man.

He said, grinning widely, ‘You’re on! Meanwhile, watch yourself on tipping lest you break a finger. I got you on ledgers.’

‘Try that, Gaffer, and I’m off!’

His expression changed and he turned up his face. ‘Jesus, gentle, you do drop ’em in the most unexpected places,’ and he held out an arm to me and I stepped within it while Old Peg’s eyes went big in her shattered face. And in this fashion, like father and son, we went through the shant door and down to the railway.

‘Purdon told me you come in with a woman, that right?’

‘Could be.’

‘Ye don’t give a lot away, do you? Are you always so clammed up?’

‘Mainly,’ I said.

Chapter eighteen

The year passed and the winter came again with her freezes and sneezes, howling her gales over Longside Moss, blowing dew-drops in clusters around the huddled shants, and the whole shivering country from Penistone to Glossop lay frozen under her hammering fists.

Icicles as long as Kaffirs’ spears hung from the ceiling of our hut; you could stand your soaked trews on their shins at night and jump straight into them in the mornings.

Never will I forget that bitch of a winter on Pikernaze; even God was blowing on his mittened fingers, and up at Woodhead reservoir, now known to us as Suicide Pond, folks were reluctant to take the plunge, while in spring or summer it was standing room only. A lot of navvies knocked themselves off in hope of a heaven elsewhere than at Woodhead, but the coroners put it down to a tumble while their back teeth were awash. Not so. When St Peter calls the roll, he’ll be looking into the activities of Lord Wharncliffe and his shareholders, and if I’m down there first, Tom Ostler used to say, I’ll shovel on a few more coals.

Byron, our deaf-mute of the club foot, slipped into the reservoir in January and did a breast stroke under the ice, for they found him half a mile from the weir where he’d left his clothes. The valve man saw him through a foot of ice, staring up at the sky; around his neck was a cord and on the cord was tied a note saying, ‘I’m coming, Annie,’ and nobody knew what it meant, poor sod.

Queer, come to think of it. I’d lived with him for years and never knew he could write, and being a deaf-mute he naturally didn’t say a lot. Tatty cried a bit, I remember; he thought a lot of Byron.

 

About this time I was getting into Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which Ruth Brandt had told me to read, but since Abby was inclined to be demanding, I couldn’t make much headway, though I did have more time to myself since Tom Ostler had taken over as gaffer.

Mr Purdon reckoned I was too young for the job, and he was probably right: people don’t respect you if you’re young, he said, and Tom Ostler was very old – about thirty. To be accurate, he was thirty on Christmas Day – and a fortnight later he had passed on to the Upper Palace where only good Catholics like her went, said Abby.

Woodhead, it appeared, had a particular liking for gaffers.

 

Our butty gang was now in full swing towards the Quarry shaft and beating all records; blasting and shovelling eastward on the magnetic needle of a mariner’s compass. Myself, I preferred the two-plumb-bob system, sighting back to the entrance light and then working the line on candles.

Tom Ostler came up with Purdon – trouble always came when that bugger was around – and it was an Irish parliament then, with everybody talking and nobody listening. Then Jake o’Hara told Purdon to sod off and leave the butties alone. And that was the end of Jake O’Hara. He left Woodhead, went to Southampton and fell head first into a caisson of wet concrete they were mixing for a harbour dam: nobody missed him until the night shift ended and the fifty tons of concrete set overnight. Later, when they drilled for anchor bolts, they came across a baby’s hand: it was Jake’s (concrete contracts when setting). So the newspapers had a field day and called it ‘Christ in concrete’.

No point in breaking Jake out, so they left him in the foundations where he could hear the ships going by. He’d like that, would Jake, being a nautical chap.

 

The second one we lost that week was our new gaffer, Tom Ostler.

It was getting bad in the tunnel now that we were well under the hill. The only light you had was from candles, and when you were working under the air shaft, these kept blowing out. Under the shaft, the wind froze you to the bone; once past it, the air became fetid and dank. The rock walls streamed water and you waded in a foot of filthy slush. When you blasted, and this was often through millstone grit, the air choked with gunpowder fumes.

The face was dangerous, too. Everytime you swung a pick, you risked a rock fall, and the rocks in Woodhead descended like knives, as bad as slates, an old quarryman told me; slates can amputate like surgeons when on the slide.

So it was handle low, swing and throw; stripped to the waist despite the cold; working in semi-darkness for hour after hour. Drill the borehole, ram in the powder, blow on the bugle and light the fuse – then walk, not run (if you run, you can trip and fall) to the nearest sheltering niche in the wall: and wait, mouth open, body turned, fingers in your ears.

Crash!

Jesus! The mountain didn’t like it. And, not liking us blowing up her vitals, she tended to hit us back occasionally.

Pikernaze Moor hit back on January 8th, 1844.

 

January 9th, 1844: Yesterday Tom Ostler, our new gaffer, was killed with three men from the McNamara butty gang. It was a bucket accident; a premature shot-firing while the bucket with the lads in it were travelling up the shaft to the top. We picked up the lads in bits and pieces. To prevent such accidents needs serious investigation, for they will continue until a safe system of control is invented.

 

We were tunnelling within fifty feet of the lads coming in from the Greystone Quarry air shaft, and were expecting to join up at any moment.

‘Can you hear them?’ asked Tom Ostler, and everyone in the gang stopped work to listen.

Life can concoct some marvellous excitements: like pulling on your trews of a summer morning or getting into the first daze of the homebrew old and mild; spending money, your first trip on a merry-go-round, or the girl when making love. But nothing can beat the comradeship when a tunnel tiger puts his fist through the hole and waves it about in search of a comrade’s hand.

‘They’re coming,’ whispered Tatty, who had ears that could hear brown grass growing.

‘No it anna, it’s behind us,’ said Zeke.

‘It’s for’ard, I tells ye!’

‘He’s got a hole in his head,’ said Zeke. ‘It’s behind you, mun.’

‘Stop talking and listen,’ commanded Tom Ostler.

‘Will they blast?’ asked Ifan.

‘Dear God,’ sighed Alf Posh.

‘Will they blast, ye bloody idiot, with us five foot t’other side of rock?’

‘Jesus, I’m dry!’

‘Me, too. I could do wi’ a quart of skull attack.’

‘After we get up.’

‘Ye know something? I think they’re coming to the right of us . . .’

‘Don’t be daft!’

I looked around their sweat-blackened faces in the flickering light of the candles. All were stripped to the waist, despite the frost outside; all were with honour when it came to a fall.

I’ve never worked with better butties, though they were heathens; I’ve never trusted men more. It is strange how danger always compounds the latent friendship in men. They’ll fiddle and short-change each other in pub sawdust; they’ll scandalise like women in a four-ale tap; and they’ll fight like savages in the sun for a shilling. But once they go underground they’re at their best in manhood, when the chap next to you will hang on to your boot when the roof is coming down, and die with you when the air is running out.

Women don’t understand the purity of male comradeship, and the dirty old world, always suspicious of something it doesn’t understand, looks upon it as some perverted intimacy. But the dirty old world, as usual, is wrong. For the quickest way out of a navvy hut with a boot behind you is to act the fancy pants or put ashes of roses under the arms.

‘I’ll halve the skull of the first man through,’ said Cat-Eater, lifting his shovel, and he was the nearest thing to an orangutan I’ve seen. ‘This is our bloody tunnel, what’s it to do with them?’

‘Stand clear or I’ll halve yours,’ said Tom Ostler. ‘The lads are coming through.’

And as he said it, the half of a pick came through the wall, first the pick and then a hand, a hand that waved in search of another, and Tom stepped over the muck, reached up and gripped it. And we heard on the other side of the broken rock a mad cheering, and we cheered, too. Next a voice cried:

‘Stand clear, boys, we’re coming through – the Quarry Butty gang!’

‘Ay ay. Stand clear!’

Now a face appeared and it shouted: ‘Are you the Tom Ostler butty?’

‘Aye, mun!’ yelled Tom. ‘You’ll have heard of us, for we were tunnelling while you sat on your arses. Come on through, lads. We’ve tapped the homebrew!’

The hole became bigger, and in the blackness of the tunnel beyond, I saw a sea of dancing candles.

Six-hundred-foot underground we had joined another tunnelling gang under Woodhead. Snap on – the point of a pin to the head of a pin, by an engineer’s calculation, done on a drawing, achieved in the dark, by candles.

‘Praise be to God,’ cried Ezekiel, and down on his knees, he lifted his blue-veined hands up to the roof. ‘Anointed, we are, with the oils of rejoicing!’

‘Get up, ye silly old bugger,’ said Tom. ‘Atonement don’t come in half pints, Zeke. It’s penitence or nothing, and God ain’t nothing’ to do with it – we dug this tunnel.’

‘For someone drinking so close to the Devil, you’re taking a bloody chance,’ and Alf Posh raised his tin mug high to the boys crawling through from the Quarry gang.

 

We sat in the candlelight, us and the Quarry men, and drank a cask we’d brought for this occasion. And Tom glanced at the roof.

‘Best bring this lot down before it falls on us,’ he said and rose.

It was the last words I heard him speak.

Tom and three of the Quarry gang drilled, rammed and tamped the charges, and everybody else left the tunnel. Tom ran the fuse and lit it close to the air shaft. But somebody had left an exploded charge in a borehole and the fuse ignited this as the bucket, with Tom and the three others in it, began to ascend the shaft. The explosion occurred when the bucket was halfway up. It travelled like a bullet out of a gun for 500 feet, then shot out fifty feet into the air, spraying its occupants out like small, red flowers.

Abby cried, but we didn’t talk much about it in the shant.

Gone, weren’t he?

And that’s a bloody end to it.

Chapter eleven

It was morning that Cat-Eating Scan went off the ale and sewed his mouth up for a week, which, according to Gaffer, he did when he ran out of cash. Like women have their ears pierced for earrings and black folks put rings through their noses, so Cats had special holes in his lips for sewing up his mouth. Of course he kept little places at the sides for poking in bits and pieces to keep him alive till he saved more beer money, but the only way he could sup ale was to sniff it up his nose. And that, said he, is no way to treat a brew like Allsops.

Naturally, I was all for this because it stopped him talking. And since old Cats ain’t the soul of discretion, as Ifan mentioned, this was the right time to bring a new woman in.

‘How do you intend to do it?’ I asked Gaffer.

‘Bust into Shant Fifteen over at Dunford and fetch her out.’

I said, ‘Suppose the comrades in Shant Fifteen don’t want to part with her? Good skivs are hard to come by.’

‘Then that’ll be too bad for the poor sods in Shant Fifteen,’ said Tom Ostler.

‘I still say you’re making a mistake,’ said I. ‘Old Peg has her faults, but you catch Abby Nothin, Gaff, and you’ve got a tartar.’

‘We tame lion-tamers in by ’ere,’ said Alf Posh, ’never mind bloody tartars. Go and get her.’

 

There were several ways of getting a good skiv on Pikernaze when you paid the old one off.

You could kidnap a Glossop wife when her old man wasn’t looking, but that always caused a palaver, with special constables poking under truckle beds looking for female underwear and distant relatives laying out navvies with knobkerrie sticks.

Another way was to snatch a skiv already employed in somebody else’s hut: Old Peg, with tremendous pride, reckoned she’d been snatched five times. Or you could do it by direct confrontation: bust headlong into another shant, beat up the occupants, grab their skiv and drag her off in the middle of the night.

Lastly, it could be done by stealth while appealing to her better nature and the chance to improve herself. But for this particular method it needed a Romeo, said Gaffer, to turn Abby Nothin into a shanty Juliet.

So they sat, all of them, and looked in my direction. Nobody said anything; they just looked.

‘Oh, no ye don’t!’ I cried.

Little Bert cried happily, ‘She’s your woman, ain’t she, Welsh Taff? Go on, be a sport!’

‘She isn’t my woman!’

‘You brought her in!’

‘I did not. I was on my way here and stumbled into her . . .’

‘You bet!’

Alf Posh said, his eyes closed, ‘We’ve got to have her lads. I’ve seen her, and she’s a right bit o’ crackling.’

Then Gaffer rose and said with fine authority:

‘While you was out, Welsh Taff, the butties ’ave been discussing the case. You’re about this woman’s age, you’re the best-looking fella here, though that anna saying much. You’ve travelled with the lass already, so she trusts ye; and we’ll only get violent if we can’t get her legal – it’s all in the Union rules, my son. Tonight you goes and fetches her.’

‘God willing,’ said Zeke.

‘It’s up to you,’ added Tom Ostler. ‘We gotta have a skiv now that Old Peg’s left us and gone into the workhouse.’

She had . . . on the end of someone’s boot.

 

Five air shafts were being dug on the hills in the three miles between Woodhead and Dunford, ours, The Hermitage, being the first.

According to intelligence reports, Abby Nothin was the skiv in Shant Fifteen, which had just been built near Grip Hill Slack above Dearden Moss, for the navvies at Shaft Five. And I was lazing on the truckle bed that I shared with Gaffer when people started coming and going with pails of water, towels and carbolic soap.

‘What’s happening?’

‘You’re having a bath,’ said Gaffer.

‘I am not!’

‘Can we send you wooing in that bloody state? You stink to high heaven, mun!’

‘What chance would ye have with a decent woman?’

‘A dash of Macassar oil on your locks and Jennings’ Flea Powder under your arms.’

‘I could fancy you myself,’ said Ifan.

They came at me from all sides, but there was a physical confrontation before they got me in the bath.

They held me down, stripped me naked and put me into the big tin bath, and the wind outside was howling with icicles: they scr. . .