My Ancestors

The Birmingham Daily Mail for 17 April 1888 includes a report on an inquest into the death of 22-year-old William ROBERTS.

Richard David ALLEN, fireman in the employ of the London and North Western Railway Company at Monument Lane Station, said that on Sunday morning he was engaged, together with the deceased, in shunting railway wagons. The deceased, standing against the points, gave the signal to witness to set the train going backwards. This direction was obeyed, and immediately afterwards witness heard the deceased groaning, and found him lying across the rails with one of his feet fast in a ‘check rail’ and his leg quite crushed. It was apparent to witness that the man in getting out of the way of the train had caught his foot in the ‘check rail’ and been unable to get away, so that several wagons had passed over his leg. Similar evidence was given by the driver of the train, and also evidence of the death of the deceased in the General Hospital a short time afterwards. A verdict of ‘Accidental death’ was recorded.

Richard David ALLEN (1860-1935) was the eldest brother of my great grandfather Philip ALLEN (1870-1936).

Railways in the 1880s

Today most stations are almost exclusively passenger terminals, but in the 1880s almost every station had its own goods yard. Dealing with freight was complex. Many independent customers would use their own private wagons or bring goods to be loaded with others onto rail company wagons. But each train would then have to be made up in the right order so that wagons could be left at sidings along the route in the right order. Tens of thousands of men would have been employed in shunting yards across the railway network. In 1880 the London and North Western Railway Company (LNWR) alone employed 55,000 people, almost exclusively men. Not only that, but (according to sources cited on its Wikipedia page – which I haven’t independently checked) in the late nineteenth century LNWR was one of, or perhaps the, largest global company by market capitalisation: the Apple or Microsoft of its day.

The work was dangerous and discipline was strict. My great grandfather Philip ALLEN also worked for LNWR in the 1890s. Within a period of three years, he was fined 1/- for causing three wagons to come off the rails; suspended for 2 days for making two violent shunts; cautioned for causing two wagons to leave the rails; and finally dismissed for absenting himself from duty without leave.

Behind the headlines

The very shocking fact that’s omitted from the newspaper report is that William ROBERTS was Richard David ALLEN’s brother-in-law. William had married Richard’s sister Mary Ann ALLEN less than 4 months earlier, on Christmas Day 1887. The two witnesses were Mary’s father (my 2 x great grandfather) Philip Matthews ALLEN (1835-1910) and her sister Clara ALLEN, suggesting perhaps that William ROBERTS was close to the whole Allen family.

What happened next?

This family tragedy only came to my attention through research. No account of it came down through my branch of the family. But it must surely have had a significant impact on the whole family. I haven’t yet managed to locate any rail company records relating to either William or Richard, or any other accounts of the accident, although either or both of these may well exist. These might perhaps shed more light on the incident and its immediate aftermath.

Richard David ALLEN

The incident doesn’t seem to have been detrimental to Richard’s railway career. In the 1891 census he was still recorded as a railway locomotive fireman, but by 1901 he had been promoted to railway engine driver. Burton (2016) says that:

Training to become a driver was a long, slow process. Men started out in the engine sheds cleaning the locomotives and polishing the brasses, later moving up to become firemen. They worked with their driver as a team and learned as they went along. If they were considered good enough, they were promoted to driver. An idea of just how complex the work was can be gauged by looking at a manual for drivers, published in 1877 – it is 250 pages long.

Reynolds (1888) provides a contemporary self-help manual for railway drivers covering all the practical aspects of being a driver, and advocates:

Before a fireman is placed with a driver on passenger work, he should have served some time on shunting engines, and been employed for a few years on the goods traffic; and before being placed second man in charge of an express engine, he should have done at least 100,000 miles on slower trains, and have been passed by the superintendent for a driver, so as to be fully capable of taking charge of the engine in case of accident to the driver.

Richard was recorded as a railway engine driver with LNWR in both the 1911 and 1921 census returns.

Mary Ann ALLEN

Richard’s sister Mary Ann remarried less than a year after the accident. Her new husband, William Henry MINSHULL (c1864-?), was also 25-years-old, and himself a widower. He was a ‘railway policeman’ – a term often used to describe signalmen at the time. Mary’s father Philip and Ada, one of Mary’s other sisters, were witnesses. Mary Ann and William’s first daughter was born less than 5 months after their marriage.

Mary Ann and William went on to have at least five children (some of whom seem to have found there way to Canada), but the story does not have a happy ending, at least as far as Mary Ann is concerned. In 1897 she was admitted to Lichfield County Lunatic Asylum (also known as Burntwood Asylum) suffering from ‘mania’ and died there in January 1898 at the age of just 33.

Postscript

My great grandmother (Mary Ann’s sister-in-law) spent almost a year in this same asylum in 1900-1901, a story I wrote about in an earlier post https://myancestors.blog/2023/09/07/advice-for-a-happy-marriage/.

Bibliography

1. Birmingham Daily Mail, 17 April, 2f
2. Burton, Anthony. 2016. Focus on Railway Workers. Who Do You Think You Are? January, pp 52-56.
3. Drummond, Di. 2010. Focus on Railway Workers. Who Do You Think You Are? April, pp 48-53.
4. Reynolds, Michael. 1888. Locomotive engine driving: a practical manual for engineers in charge of locomotive engines. London: Crosby Lockwood. p92. Available at https://archive.org/details/locomotiveengine00reyn