A Settle and Carlisle railway Navvy Hut

Mark Rand
 JOURNAL 
 2014 
 North Craven 
 Heritage Trust 

This article appeared in the Midland Railway Society Journal, ‘A Settle and Carlisle Navvy Hut’, pp. 20-24, Issue no. 53, Autumn 2013 and is reproduced by very kind permission of the editor, Ian Howard. The full set of 12 images is available in that Journal and on this NCHT website version of this article, whereas, the printed NHT Journal only prints 3 pictures.

Everybody knows that the Settle-Carlisle Railway was built by so-called navvies. It was one of the last major jobs done that way. Many of the thousands of navvies who built the line lived in temporary wooden sheds, navvy huts built either by the Midland Railway or their contractors. Some of the few photographs that exist of the line under construction show large huts, most of simple design and similar size, usually in a hazy background to the main subject. (Fig. 1). Dr Bill Mitchell’s books paint a vivid picture of the grim lives of many navvies. There are contemporary accounts too, notably the diary of William Fletcher, for five years a Baptist missionary on Contract 2 between Dent and Smardale. He chronicles the dangerous daily lives, and deaths. Little is known of the huts themselves; they were after all temporary and basic. The biggest concentration of them was at Ribblehead and Blea Moor (Fig. 2) where clusters of huts had evocative names like Inkerman and Sebastopol. The posher huts of the bosses were on higher ground at Belgravia. It is known that some, if not all, of the huts were sold off once they were no longer needed, perhaps to other contractors or local farmers. Some navvy huts survive in Leicestershire from the Great Central Line. Perhaps they were from the S&C. This suggests they were capable of being constructed, dismantled and re-used. Given the hostile environments on the S&C two things seem certain:- they would be prefabricated and they had to be well-enough built to withstand harsh conditions for several years.

There is now barely a trace of the medium-sized town, with a population about the same as that of Settle today, that was once there at Ribblehead. There are no large huts there or anywhere else along the S&C, but some of the surviving line-side cabins are made of distinctive navvy hut profile wood, 9”×3” planks with two rain grooves (Fig. 3). A possible navvy hut candidate was a large wooden building at the north end of Blea Moor Tunnel, demolished some years ago. Network Rail offered it to the Friends of the Settle-Carlisle Line (FoSCL) or the S&C Trust but there was at that time nowhere to put it. The work presently being done by FoSCL to record all structures could yet turn up some surprises. But back to ‘our’ hut. When my wife and I were planning how best to restore the water tower in Settle the planning and conservation officers rightly insisted that such a prominent site should not lose its railway feel and look. Any outbuildings would have to be in keeping and follow the advice in the S&C Design Guide. Early photographs and plans of the Settle site showed two sets of buffers, coal merchants’ huts and a weigh office alongside or near to the tower, which gave us a steer. The obvious starting point was Network Rail to see if any S&C structures might be redundant and available. Even if they were, there would be legal, logistical and planning problems to be overcome at both ends. The S&C is not a Conservation Area for nothing.

The S&C’s Permanent Way Engineer, Gordon Allen, came up trumps, not for the first time. The up-line head-shunt buffers at Settle needed removing from alongside the main line and were soon in place alongside the tower, giving it an obvious and prominent railway feel. Two water cranes had been in store at Appleby for years, at the initiative of FoSCL, in the hope that they might resume their intended functions one day. Removal of all but one (Settle) of the former water towers put paid to that. The Settle tower (Fig. 4) could still have supplied water but not without huge investment. Even then, modern operational considerations ruled out their being located at the platform ends at Settle. As a result, one of them has been re-located (at our expense) by the water tower for interpretation of its function (Fig. 5), and the other is sited by Settle signal box, preserved by FoSCL. Network Rail generously transported them for us. This still left the problem of outbuildings that would satisfy both the planners and our needs.

Planning

We thought we wanted a double garage and workshop for the main outbuilding. I put it to Gordon Allen who agreed to look out for anything suitable, without much hope of success, he warned. Network Rail take great care with the structures on the S&C, mindful of the line’s heritage and its Conservation Area status. He drew a blank, except for one huge wooden building (Fig. 6) right outside his then office window in the Network Rail yard at Appleby. A one-time store, it had been derelict for years and had been declared too dangerous to enter, so was locked up and out-of-bounds. It was held up by internal braces made of scaffolding and railway sleepers. A section of its roof had caved in and windows were broken. Not only that, it was low, squat and ugly. There it sat, useless, dangerous and forlorn, yet incapable of demolition without planning permission. If we could take it off their hands it would do Network Rail a favour, if the planners agreed. When I went to photograph it and measure it up, it shouted ‘Navvy Hut’ straight away. Also, it felt that a polite ‘thanks but no thanks’ would be my response given the enormity of the tasks of demolition and reconstruction; even if rebuilding was possible given the scale of the rot and deterioration. The side walls were partly made of sliced up railway sleepers and the whole building rested on a crudely-formed concrete plinth with a floor made of hundreds of entire but rotten sleepers, roughly laid on earth. The gable end walls and the ‘A’ frames or trusses supporting the roof were far better made. It seemed to me that it was a re-building of some earlier building, perhaps from elsewhere. A plan of 1911 showed it in situ then, alongside the Warcop branch line. I donned a hard hat, defied the out-of-bounds edict and started measuring and photographing construction details. Here was an undoubted railway building that would surely satisfy our planners, Network Rail would have got rid of an eyesore and another bit of S&C heritage would be saved.

We needed to see what useful wood could survive demolition and transport to Settle, so we agreed to a rescue attempt. Network Rail have strict rules about giving away public property to individuals, even if it is unwanted. That was the next stage and we are very grateful to their staff Jerry Swift, Patrick Cawley and their Planning Officer, Tony Rivero, who had been so helpful with previous projects, notably Garsdale, the Ruswarp statue and Carlisle station. Network Rail submitted a very detailed local planning application for demolition, stating the intended re-use at Settle, which helped to justify it. Meanwhile we submitted planning and listed building applications for Settle. We certainly did not want to rebuild the building as it was. Since its being a navvy hut was only a possibility, we decided to apply for a re-designed building but with three bays, because it was known that navvy huts were three-roomed affairs with a family bedroom, living room-kitchen and a third room for lodgers. Stephen Craven Building Design examined the components and came up with the new design which involved shortening the building, making it narrower and with generous roof overhangs. This improved its proportions and allowed for rotten wood to be cut away without need of replacement.

Demolition and Transport

Network Rail used contractors to demolish the building and for its components to be wrapped in plastic and stacked on site at Appleby, where it then sat for many months awaiting planning approvals at our end and for space to become available. The firm of Settle Coal is a local institution, nowadays builders merchants, hauliers and heavy engineers. Their biggest articulated low loader and Hiab crane could not accommodate the entire load of hut components. Again, Network Rail came to the rescue with their large rigid HGV and crane from Carlisle. The huge ‘A’ frames alone filled that. In a combined operation we unwrapped the stacks of timber and two things were immediately obvious. The demolition people had done a good job in separating the various components but the rot was far greater than expected. There was a moment when we all wondered if the move was futile and whether a box of matches would be a neater solution. It was Settle Coal’s Brian Thornton who decided the issue. “I’ve shifted worse”, he said, “but not much”. The sun was shining that day. Had it been otherwise the decision could have gone the other way. The load was by its nature fragile and springy so our journey via the M6 had frequent check stops. Both cranes unloaded what appeared to be a mountain of firewood into the water tower yard at Settle (Fig. 5), stacking it around and over the buffers. The date was 28 May 2012, just days before the Queen’s Jubilee. Several people asked if the wood was for a Jubilee beacon. I was tempted to say yes.

Rebuilding at Settle

By now our TV programme about the water tower had been shown. Our local authority planner, ominously named Jack Sykes, confessed that he watched it with trepidation and had not told his colleagues about it just in case. He thought that the work on the tower itself was plainly good and we had followed all the rules. He saw that we were not up to any sort of mischief and we had achieved a remarkable result. Earlier difficulties with the planning system (as distinct from the planner himself) had been resolved and a good relationship established. Planner Jack Sykes and I surveyed the woodpile and compared it with the recently approved plans. There might have been problems if the salvageable timber did not match up to the approved plans. We agreed that, so long as the outer dimensions did not exceed the approval, we would do our best to comply, but adapt and adopt as the re-build progressed. Our Blog4, besides recording everything, has been a useful tool for all manner of purposes, informing Jack of what was happening, and, especially, enabling new contractors to catch up with the build-so-far and to hit the ground running. We had the great good fortune to have had Dave Richardson as our joiner for the tower. Ideally, we would have preferred Dave to re-build the shed, but the cost would have been unaffordable, even if he had had the time. It turned out that I would have to re-build it myself, with occasional help from friends and from the crane from Settle Coal when needed. The gang working at Settle signal box were keen to help on any Saturday. Most critically, joiner Dave, enthused by the project, kindly agreed to visit daily if needed and to advise.

Because the water tower is in such a prominent location and because of its TV fame, I developed an effective technique of enlisting the help of onlookers when I got stuck or needed a lift with the heavy timbers. I would assess the passers-by until an able bodied male seemed a likely victim, usually accompanied by a wife. I would ask the wife, tongue in cheek, “You’re not a joiner by any chance are you?” On one such occasion the wife answered “No - but he is.” She was to have been a judge at the Great Yorkshire Show, cancelled in 2012, so they had time to explore the Dales. Her husband stayed with me for the entire day, doing some very clever joinery indeed. I began to think that God was on my side. The build was slow but steady (Fig. 7) and, in time, a very handsome building began to emerge, pretty much as per plans. It was three feet narrower than the original and twelve feet shorter, the difference having been taken up by rot. The areas that were not rotten proved to be remarkably sound. Much of the wood was pitch pine, all but unobtainable nowadays and very expensive when it does crop up. I learnt that pitch pine was quite common and widely used in Victorian times. It grows slowly, very straight and tall and is highly resinous. The pine smell when it is sawn is glorious and the resin makes it rot-resistant. But the resin is also a serious weakness; pitch pine trees catch fire easily. Forest fires do not kill the trees, which regrow from the base but those shoots do not produce the prized straight growth. Hence the world’s supply of useful pitch pine has become seriously depleted.

The Discovery and Detective Work

As each new piece of wood came into use, I examined it closely for any clues that might advance the suspicion that the origin of the structure was navvy hut. But all I found were old bolt holes and stencilled letters and numbers in places (Fig. 8), indicating that it had been constructed as a kit of prefabricated parts. This was hardly surprising considering the building was being rebuilt for the third time at least after more than a century of hard use in a railway yard and two demolitions. For any evidence other than a deep carving into the wood to have survived such hazards would be unlikely. The inside walls of the building had been lime-washed, with many coats of it in places. Lime-wash was known to have been applied in the navvy camps in an attempt to stop the spread of disease, which claimed so many lives there. Here and there, the remains of plain paper had been applied, perhaps as a way of draught-proofing the gaps between the boards. None of the papers bore any printing, writing or scribble. On the very last day of building the west gable, I was being helped by former police colleague, Peter Bennett. As we lifted the longest and heaviest (ground to roof apex) board onto trestles for preparation we saw, faintly visible through the lime-wash, what appeared to be news-print. The only thing easily readable was the word ‘penny’. The font appeared old. Elsewhere, illustrations were just visible, etchings, not photographs. This called for a break to consider matters. We set the wood aside carefully, recognising the possible significance. If it were newspaper, it should be datable. A date during, or soon after, the construction of the line might tell us something helpful. A date after 1911 would simply mean that the paper had been stuck on the wall when the building was known to have been at Appleby. Careful removal of a wooden lath that ran along one edge of the board showed that the printed paper continued underneath the lath, giving us some encouragement. If we were fortunate, we might find that the paper had already been on the plank when the hut was rebuilt at Appleby.

Two police careers-worth of experience did not make us forensic experts nor paper conservators, but we did know how to record and preserve evidence. Good fortune again appeared in the person of Stephen Allen who, now working freelance from his home in Wensleydale, had been North Yorkshire County Council’s paper conservator, and, by another fortunate coincidence, was a Wensleydale Railway member too. As soon as he heard the story he jumped at the opportunity to help, refusing any fee. I delivered the board to him and he set to work on it. Normally, a paper conservator would start work from the back of the paper, but ours was extremely fragile, covered in layers of lime-wash and glued in place (Fig. 9). Stephen’s only recourse was to dissolve the layers of lime-wash, a slow and painstaking business. If our paper were newsprint, we would expect to find the title and publication date at the top. Stephen found a frustratingly incomplete set of apparent newspaper title letters of the form THE WE[ ]LY [ ]U[ ]G[ ]T. Some internet research showed that the only publication that fitted the mystery letters was The Weekly Budget, a paper aimed at a family readership, published in Manchester and later in London, selling for one penny. It was one of the ‘penny dreadful’s of its time. Encouraged with this hopeful connection, Stephen continued working down the title page. On 4 October 2012, Stephen e-mailed me with the news that he had found a date. The paper was the Christmas 1878 double issue of The Weekly Budget (Fig. 10). He had also done a phloroglucinol test on the paper itself which revealed that it did not contain unrefined wood pulp. This tallied with the 1878 date and also meant that the paper would not go yellow in daylight as does later wood pulp paper. Further down the three pages were etchings with captions in comic strip style but the story was unclear and would, in any event, take us no further if revealed. Besides the date, the contents might also prove helpful. If they were something comforting or homely, that could be quite persuasive.

The Verdict and Reflections

So, what should we conclude from all this? Although we still cannot say with certainty that we have discovered a former navvy hut, the evidence is almost overwhelming. The building has the look and size of a navvy hut (Figs. 11 and 12). It had been on S&C railway land for at least 100 years. Its survival more or less intact was a result of enforced neglect, much as the S&C itself. It was the right sort of building and was from absolutely the right date. Records show that navvy huts were still in use by families in 1881. A Christmas issue of a ‘penny dreadful’ pasted onto a lime-washed wall strongly suggests a domestic rather than an industrial setting. We might never discover where the hut had been before Appleby or who lived in it, or why someone wanted to display these pages on their hut wall. We know that Christmas 1878 was cold, very cold indeed. Manchester was the nearest location for weather reporting and its monthly summary of the weather in December 1878 was just one word, ‘terrible’. That is graphic enough, but that winter got worse. Perhaps the paper provided some comfort, merriment or distraction to the souls on those moors that year. This turned out to be quite a find, and a special finale to the water tower project. For my part, I have derived as much satisfaction and a greater sense of achievement from re-building this humble wooden structure than from the tower itself. The Victorians who built both have my utmost admiration. What a tragedy it would have been if the Settle & Carlisle Line had been closed and all this heritage lost. I am so glad that Michael Portillo could be with us to see the conclusion of our project, to celebrate the bright future of the line and to see for himself this amazing relic of those who built it.

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