The Navvies were traveling labourers who built the Great Lakes Canals, the railroads and the mines in Canada and England. They were exploited by the upper classes in body and spirit even after death. This is an excerpt from an online biography of the Navvies. Those in Canada were Irish labourers, Catholics whose bosses were Orangemen. In England they came from the North, Scotland and Ireland. They were the epitome of the English proletarianized peasantry.
In Canada they are celebrated in song by Gordon Lightfoot with his Great Canadian Railway Triology.
Navvies built canals, railways, dams and then pipe tracks, the big nineteenth century sea-port docks, and the Manchester Ship Canal.
Navvying began suddenly in 1763 in the Bridgewater Canal: it ended around 1943, after a twenty-year fade-out. Along with the rest of Britain there was a kind of kink in the navvy's history in the 1870s when things began changing, generally for the better.
At first they were just skilled earth shifters digging canals at prodigious speed. Later they were skilled in tunnelling, mining, timbering — skilled enough to set up as one-man contractors employing local unskilled labourers to shift their muck. You could set a gang of prime navvies down in an untouched valley, they said of themselves, and they'd build you a dam without aid of an engineer. At times they slotted into the pay scales at twice a common labourer's wages, though they never equalled apprenticed craftsmen like masons.
It is easy for the urbanised and pensionable to romanticise them. They seem free, fearless above the humdrum conventions of shopkeepers, clerks, factory workers, vicars, and the legally wed. Perhaps we glamorise cowboys, blue-water sailors and the hell-bent navvy for the same reasons. In reality, isolation was the biggest thing in a navvy's life. They were perpetual outsiders: a people apart. Sub-working class. Sub-the-bottommost-heap of English working society. Sub-all, almost.
Left: Railway Navvies. Right: Navvies, 1890s
Click on thumbnails for larger images.
The navvy never called a spade a spade, always a bloody shovel. Everything he shovelled he called muck. Earth, blasted rock, clay, all were generically and indiscriminately muck. With the muck he created new landscapes and changed old societies. It was mass transformation by muscle and shovel.
To do so navvies worked in geographical and social isolation; crude, muck-caked men on a helix spiralling down from prejudice [4/5] to more isolation, isolation to more prejudice. Eighty per cent were English, most of their work was in England, yet they lived like aliens in their own country, often outside its laws, usually outside its national sense of community. They were their own country's non-belongers. They belonged to themselves only tenuously. Mostly they lived apart in navvy settlements. New habits of life, thought, dress, speech, and a tightening of the ring against outsiders came out of their isolation. Their own countrymen were terrified of them, and despised them. Heavy drinking was normal, death by alcohol common. Drink was a common cause of riot, along with an unhesitating hatred for their own Irish minority. Their accident and death rates were higher than any other group in Britain, including colliers, including soldiers fighting nineteenth-century wars. Often they were nameless, known to each other only at second-hand by nickname. They were a homeless, wandering itinerant people belonging nowhere except to the island as a whole.
They survived the Great War as a separate community, but not for long. Nawying was killed by a lack of large scale public works (worsened by the Slump), by bureaucracy and by the petrol engine. Probably in that order. By the mid-1950s they were quietly ending as a recognisable separate community. Individuals did live and work on. Their descendants still do (at their height, just before the Great War, there may have been as many as a hundred and seventy thousand of them).
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Having Isaac Asimov at a Star Trek convention might seem odd. After all, Asimov may have been one of the grand old men of SF but he had no connection to the series at all. (He acted as a technical advisor to Space: 1999 around this time, which to True Believers was another strike against him.) On the other hand, he was local, he was willing and he was a hero to those of us who had discovered science fiction (and nonfiction) long before the Enterprise ever left dry dock. Best of all Asimov was one of the nicest people I've ever met, the kind of person who'd sit and sign autographs and trade jokes with the fans for hours on end. He was like that lovable uncle you always wanted but few of us get. (Apologies in advance to my uncles should they ever read this comment. You're wonderful and all but you're no Isaac Asimov!)
Harlan Ellison was once the angry young man of SF, the writer who had the nerve to write a script about drug dealing on the Enterprise called The City On The Edge Of Forever. Ellison had a reputation, probably deserved, of being touchy and unapproachable at conventions. Which is funny, because the few times I've met him I have found him exactly the opposite. He even agreed to pose with a friend of mine for a picture, which sadly didn't turn out. And whatever else you think about him, the man can surely write.
