Finding Hopetown’s worker accidents

Earlier this month, Darlington’s railway museum opened in its revamped and reimagined format: Hopetown. Previously known as Head of Steam, it occupies the site of Darlington North Road station and Hopetown goods, just south of the site of the Darlington railway works. It’s not every railway museum which shares the site and indeed station with an active mainline railway line, either.

Having visited Head of Steam, and done some research in the archives there, I’ll be really interested to see how Hopetown compares. What I’ve seen and heard so far is promising. The site itself is much expanded and improved, with more buildings publicly accessible, revamped interpretation, and more on display. Railway staff who worked at Hopetown and lived in the area are featured in the interpretation, too.

This is important, as how working people are portrayed in museums is a challenging topic. Do they even feature at all? If so, how? How can visitors truly get a sense of workers, their lives and the nature of their work? Can they? As with so much else around railway and indeed all forms of transport and mobility history, there’s a challenge in museum environments: how do you display, in a static format, moving things and breathing people?

We’ve collaborated with Hopetown in its past guise – around their excellent ‘On Track for Change’ installation in 2021, looking at railway disability. The team put together two guest blog posts for us, on the installation and on the experiences of railway workers who received artificial limbs. (Louise Bell, another guest author, also put together this blog post, about the installation.) We delivered a talk as part of the programme associated with ‘On Track for Change’, and have worked with Hopetown on some North Eastern Railway (NER) accident records they hold – something we’ll return to in the future.

Darlington & Hopetown

For now, we wanted to see where Hopetown features in the existing Railway Work, Life & Death project database. In due course we’d like to feed this in to Hopetown’s interpretation – it’s a really important way to find out more about Hopetown’s workers and about what was actually happening on site.

Perhaps predictably given the size and importance of the railway industry to the town, Darlington as a whole features strongly. In our union record release, Darlington features 175 times – though further cases will be added to the database in due course. However, these records are largely of workers who belonged to the various Darlington branches of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants (ASRS)/ National Union of Railwaymen. They certain lived and worked in the area, but for those who had accidents, they might have occurred outside Darlington.

The records of the Railway Inspectorate accident investigations are easier to explore. They looked at accidents, so if Darlington features, it’s because there was an accident. And Darlington does feature – 86 times. This will only have been a small percentage of the total number of accidents in Darlington, not least because it excludes the railway works (for why, see this blog post).

Of those 86 cases, 10 were clearly identified as having taken place in and around Hopetown. Again, there will have been many more accidents at Hopetown – these are only the ones for which documentation has survived. Just one of the 10 Hopetown cases will be the focus for the remainder of the blog today: William Turner.

William Turner (1871-1929)

William Turner was born in Malton, Yorkshire, in 1871. By 1897 he was working for the NER – he joined the ASRS in Darlington in that year, as a shunter. Living at three different addresses in Darlington over the course of the censuses 1901-1921, he married at some point between 1911 and 1921. In this final census he had moved out of the family home and was living with his wife, Florence. No children were listed, so it’s possible that they couple did not have children.

On 3 August 1907 Turner had been on duty, as a goods shunter, for about half of his shift. He was working inside Hopetown goods warehouse. He ‘whistled a prescribed signal’ to a shunter colleague, ‘thereby indicating that he wished an engine to draw some twenty wagons out of No. 7 siding.’ Here we start to get more of an insight into a lost world at Hopetown. The goods shed is gone, but will exist in the photographic record. Will the ‘prescribed signals’ have been recorded? Unlikely. They may not have been heard by anyone still living, and – as with ephemeral things like sound – may well never have been known but for this passing reference in the documentary record.

Turner’s colleague walked forward to communicate with the driver, but ‘Turner got impatient and being unable to restrain himself he came down off the platform intending to cross the line and find out what was causing the delay.’ Needless to say, just was he was passing under the wagons, they were moved. He stepped back, but couldn’t get to a position of safety and was caught between a wagon and the wall of the goods office. Inspector Charles Campbell investigated and found Turner at fault (1907 Quarter 3, Appendix C).

So far this is the only occasion for which we have documentary evidence of an accident to Turner in the project database. As we add more records, particularly from the trade union dataset, he may reappear. There is also a sad coda to the tale. Passing references in local newspapers in May 1929 show that Turner was killed at Hopetown goods yard. He was found with a serious head injury, believed to have been caused by a wagon.

Difficult histories in museums & at heritage sites

It would be excellent if we were able to find out more about Turner – ideally including locating any descendants, and a photograph of him. We’d like to see him remembered at Hopetown in the future. Doing this for all of the Hopetown cases would be in incredibly powerful tool. It could re-connecting current and former uses of the site, and help visitors (particularly locals) make sense of their railway pasts.

There’s huge potential for this kind of collaboration with museums and heritage railways. It would enhance the visitor experience and understanding of railway work, and place the workers in their immediate workplace environment. Of course, it’s not easy – by their nature difficult pasts like accidents aren’t necessarily crowd-pleasers. This is something we’ve considered in the past, in this blog post. Nevertheless, handled with care, they bring important insights and allow us to approach the past in more nuanced ways.