The Thorpe disaster at 150 – The power & problem of centenaries and anniversaries

10 September 2024 is the 150^th anniversary of the Thorpe railway disaster. Two trains met head-on, two miles east of Norwich. Twenty-five died and 75 were injured. It was big news at the time, and over the coming days will be remembered again in the village of Thorpe St Andrew. Various events will be held and a memorial plaque dedicated at the local church. It’s brilliant that this initiative has come about.

 

The Railway Work, Life & Death project is always keen to see accidents and disasters remembered publicly. The more attention paid to those events and the people affected, the better. However, as our project co-lead Mike Esbester notes in an article for ‘The Conversation’, big anniversaries and centenaries can pose challenges about who is remembered and who is forgotten.

 

Who was seen at the time?

For most of the 19th and 20^th centuries, if there was public discussion of railway safety, it was focused on passenger train crashes. These events were big news – as they are to this day. Railway travel was and remains incredibly safe. When something goes wrong, it’s exceptional and therefore newsworthy. Passenger crashes were often large-scale, involving lots of people and dramatic wreckage. They were seen by lots of people, as they were frequently in locations that it was possible to access.

Worker accidents were the opposite. They generally happened in locations that weren’t seen by the public, and were inaccessible. They were commonplace and therefore not newsworthy. They happened in ones and twos, so it was difficult for people to get a true sense of the cumulative scale of the problem. For example, in 1874, the year of the Thorpe collision, 211 passengers died on Britain’s railways and 1841 injured. On the other hand, 788 workers died and 2785 were injured. The numbers were far greater – and this remained true until late in the 20^th century.

Passenger crashes also affected people of all classes, exposing the middle and upper classes to industrial dangers usually only experienced by the working classes. Those middle and upper classes were politically articulate and able to raise concerns in places that mattered – like Parliament. In contrast, until deep in the 19^th century, the working classes were largely politically invisible. Even with the rise of railwaymen MPs and the railway trades unions, who advocated for worker and passenger safety, railway staff safety was rarely seen as a concern by the majority of the public.

We can see why it was possible to overlook the sheer numbers of employees killed or injured at work on the railways. It was also convenient for British and Irish society to do so. The system evolved, via active decisions, to function in a way the prioritised moving people and goods at the expense of staff lives and wellbeing. If the human costs of running the railway system were clearly seen and publicly discussed, then the railway companies might have been forced to make costly changes. It suited everyone – except those who were being hurt – for the system to operate without safety improvements. Unfortunately, some lives were cheap.

 

Who is remembered now?

The big crashes were undoubtedly tragic, and should absolutely be remembered. Exceptional cases always attract attention, and train crashes were exceptional. For example, we see it in relation to the worst railway disaster in Britain, the 1915 Quintinshill collision, which involved five trains and saw 226 killed and 246 injured.

Very often the prompt for remembrance is an anniversary, sometimes a centenary. This fits the news cycle. So, in 2021 a plaque was erected to remember the 1921 Abermule disaster. And this isn’t confined to the UK, either. André Brett has explored some of the issues about who is remembered in his blog post looking at the Tangiwai disaster in New Zealand.

To reiterate, remembering those unusual train crashes is important in its own right. In addition, the crashes generally affected workers, as well as passengers, so this isn’t a zero-sum game – something explored in this blog post, about the Quintinshill disaster. Regardless, train crashes focus our attention in particular directions, replicating some of the original inequalities. They obscure the far more numerous worker casualties. There needs to be space for both.

 

Can we remember worker-only accidents?

Is it possible to publicly remember workers killed or injured in incidents which didn’t involve passenger train crashes? It should be – but it isn’t easy. There’s one immediate example which comes to mind – but it is once again exceptional. It’s the case of driver John Axon, and guard John Creamer, killed at Chapel-en-le-Frith in Derbyshire in 1957.

 

Axon stayed on the footplate of his engine as it ran out of control down an incline. He tried to bring the train to a halt and to ensure the signal boxes he passed were aware the train was running away. Sadly it hit a goods train standing at Chapel-en-le-Frith station, killing guard Creamer as well as Axon. For his bravery, Axon was awarded the George Cross, and was the subject of a popular folk song. A memorial was also erected at the site of the accident, along with some interpretation. However, this was still a very unusual case.

The Railway Work, Life & Death project has also been able to remember some worker-only accidents. We do this in part through the project itself, and making details of railway staff accidents more easily available, as well as in our talks and other forms of public engagement. However, we’ve also worked with a range of groups to publicly remember specific cases – in Manton, Wilmcote and Stapleton Road. These – along with cases at Speyside and Holywell Junction – were all achieved by using their centenaries as a ‘newsworthy’ hook.

 

However, they too were exceptional cases. They all involved multiple casualties, very often fatalities – for railway staff, they counted as ‘large-scale’ incidents. But this means they’re not typical. Focusing on them may get ‘buy-in’, but it risks obscuring the far more common other types of accident, far more common outcomes (injuries rather than fatalities), and the other grades of worker involved in the vast majority of accidents. All of the cases noted, for example, involved track workers, maintaining lines. As these men worked in gangs, if something went wrong, it was likely to affect relatively large numbers of employees in a single incident. This wasn’t the common experience of railway workforce accidents.

So even though we have achieved press and public interest and support from within the rail industry for these centenaries of large-scale worker incidents, are we skewing the focus? Increasingly as we work on this type of remembrance, we recognise the ambivalence and problems of doing so. They’re useful for garnering interest, via a dramatic story and a discrete location that serves as a focal point. They also offer really important possibilities to locate multiple descendants and involve them in the remembrance.

But how do we do justice to the many others who can’t be remembered in this way? On each of the dates of the ‘big’ centenaries, there would have been far more workers affected in individual cases. For example, in the Railway Work, Life & Death project database alone, on the date of the Manton tunnel accident – 24 May – there are 58 records; only five of those are for the men involved in the Manton tunnel accident. How do we ensure the others are publicly known and remembered? There aren’t any easy answers.

 

Dealing with difficult pasts

As we’ve noted in this blog post, difficult pasts on the railways – involving worker accidents should and can be remembered in public environments. It’s a topic that’s never likely to be a crowd-pleaser – but that makes it all the more important that it’s addressed. We should be aware of the challenging bits of our past, and not see things through rose-tinted spectacles.

Heritage railways and museums do actively engage with historic safety issues, provided handled sensitively. This can be seen, for example, in this online exhibit from Railway Work, Life & Death project collaborator the National Railway Museum (NRM). We’d like to see more of this – and there will be more to come. So, one of the new areas in the NRM’s Station Hall redisplay will address worker safety.

Going beyond this and out into more public arenas, where people will find details or a memorial without actively seeking them out is more of a challenge. There isn’t a straightforward means to mark the sacrifices of railway workers. There’s no single location that forms a focal point, and no one organisation or group who would be involved. Given each case usually only affected one or two people, sadly remembering them doesn’t seem to evoke the same sense of urgency or interest as the large-scale incidents.

 

The Railway Work, Life & Death project & remembrance

The Railway Work, Life & Death project will of course support efforts to see all railway accidents remembered, such as the Thorpe crash. Reflecting what’s at the heart of our project, we’ll continue to raise awareness of the everyday staff accidents and railway workers affected. We’ll advocate for remembering them, in public contexts, as individuals. We’re pragmatic, however. Given the way remembrance in British society is still focused on larger-scale, exceptional incidents, it’s likely to remain difficult to get people to engage with individual railway staff cases.

Alongside trying to think about the individuals, then, we’re likely to have more success in the public environment by finding the cases which involved multiple railway workers. Despite the ambivalence we may feel about focusing on these exceptional worker cases, if they offer a means to remember some railway workers affected by accidents then that’s valuable. They offer us an opportunity to expose the unexceptional dangers that far more employees faced in the course of their work.