Lemont Road

I’m writing this in the attic of our terraced house on Lemont Road. Some of these small terraced houses – two down, two or three up, and an attic – were built on fields in the late 1870s (and were still surrounded by fields until the 1930s). These were for rent by workers, around the time that the middle class started occupying new posh houses, out of the smoke. In the 1881 census quite a few of the houses were unoccupied, perhaps because they were only recently built, but a shifting population of renters will have lived here in those early years. Some 10 years later, however, the railway navvies who built the Totley tunnel had moved in. 

I look at the 1891 census. I never tire of looking at census records when researching – so much and yet so little can be gleaned from them. Out of twenty Lemont Road households in eighteen houses, fifteen households contain railway navvies and out of forty two working men (though three are only fourteen years old) thirty four of them are working on the construction of the tunnel. Jumping out at you is their class, their origins, the overcrowding. Those navvies, contrary to popular thought, were not Irish, but peripatetic workers nonetheless, moving from railway to railway. The census reveals their birthplaces as Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Somerset, Devon, Scotland... Here are people probably forced to move from the fields by a great agricultural depression, to the places of progress and industry, except that for them that progress meant overcrowding and a shifting, travelling lifestyle. Elsewhere, from first-hand accounts, I discovered that there were so many dialects spoken that local people couldn’t understand them. I expect they couldn’t understand each other either!

Their work often meant working in the dark, knee deep in the many streams that come off the moors. Even this year, on our road, the water board has had to come out several times to deal with an underground stream that won’t stay there. Monnybrook near the site of the tunnel isn’t called Monnybrook – meaning many brooks – for nothing. I picture those tired, damp navvies, after a hard day’s work, looking out at our garden hawthorn - probably part of the old field boundary. They will perhaps be thinking of home, before they crawl into a mucky bed. 

Hawthorn
Even the tunnel navvies, migrants who

shifted in this house, turn by turn

perhaps ten to a room, would have clocked it –

our quickthorn’s flickering spuggies,

its hemisphere of tired bones framed

by our back window and fronting

grey wall, green park, blue hill.

Early now, the March sky is thin milk,

our tree’s unleaved, though one dunnock

marks it in its drunken scat of song.

I drink to sleep again, to blur the years

and think I hear you, my tired travellers,

waking from a boozy night of dreaming

and dragging on your trews and boots

as with the drabby bird you sing along. 

I look more forensically at the 1891 census, at one small house – there are eleven people living there. That’s just the ones they admitted to. The real number of occupants may have been even greater, as the navvies, according to another, possibly exaggerated, contemporary report, ‘boxed and coxed’, occupying beds in shifts. But those we know for certain lived here, listed on the census, are Samuel Martin who is a tunnel miner and his wife Jane, both thirty seven years old and both born in Devon. They have seven children – Samuel, fourteen, already a tool carrier for the tunnel work; William, eleven; Alice, nine; Elizabeth, eight; James, six; Caroline, three; Nellie, one. They have two navvy lodgers as well: Charles Trott, thirty six, and James Turner, twenty three, their birthplaces marked as N.K. for Not Known. Perhaps they were at work when the census enumerator arrived and Samuel and Jane had no idea how to answer the questions about the backgrounds of their boarders. 

Samuel and Jane’s seven children are all born in different parts of the country – presumably those where their father was working, following the railway boom around Great Britain. I decided to research those places and their connections with tunnel and railway construction at the time that the various children were born. Sure enough, I found matches for dates of construction and the dates of birth of Samuel and Jane’s children and that Samuel must have been experienced in tunnel excavation – or “mining” as it is often named on the census. 

The oldest, Samuel was born in “Grimpstone,” a misspelling for Grimstone, in Leicestershire. Grimstone Tunnel opened in 1878 around the time Samuel junior was a small baby. Evidently the winter of 1878/9 was a hard one and never forgotten by those who endured it, with many of the men unable to work. Soup kitchens were set up in some towns. Samuel and Jane will have endured this too, and with a young baby to feed. 

William, aged eleven in 1891, was born in West Hoathley Sussex. The station here is just north of the long Sharpstone tunnel, part of the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway. Sharpthorne Tunnel was constructed in 1881 – when William was a baby. 

Alice aged nine was born in Oxted Surrey. Either end of the station here are tunnels - Limpsfield Tunnel at the country end and Oxted Tunnel at the London end. Work was ongoing on the tunnel in the early 1880s and the line was completed in 1884. Alice was born on August 11th 1881 according to Totley All Saints school register. Again, a good match with Samuel’s work at the time. 

Elizabeth aged eight was born in Whitchurch, Hampshire. This is on the Didcot, Newbury and Southampton railway which was finished in 1885 when she was small – from the Totley School register she was born on January 30th 1883. The railway had to negotiate the Berkshire and Hampshire Downs and meant that there were, as at Totley, huge engineering challenges. The cutting at Upton and Tothill involved the excavation of around 1 million tons of chalk and soil. 

James aged six was born in Caldecott, Monmouthshire. I think here Samuel may have been involved in building the Severn Tunnel for Great Western Railway, finished in 1885 around the time James was born. This was the longest railway tunnel in Britain for more than a century. It was a terrific struggle to construct it under the Severn Estuary – a battle of engineering skill against groundwater and tides. It is still part of the national rail network and continual pumping is needed to keep it dry. 

Caroline aged three was born in Glamorgan, St Nicholas, near where the Barry Railway was built in 1889 to carry coal from the Rhonda. Nellie, aged one year was born in Totley - where Samuel was working under the moors on our tunnel, now the second longest tunnel in England, completed in 1893. I think not only about Samuel and his backbreaking and presumably skilled work on the tunnels and cuttings, but also about Jane, hoiking children to a continual stream ofnew lodging houses around the country, giving birth in each place of work, and taking in lodgers in a tiny house to make ends meet. 

“Where the efforts of the local authorities have been directed to isolation the results have usually proved satisfactory but where infected persons have been allowed to herd together under unhealthy conditions as at Totley near Sheffield the results have been disastrous.”

Not a SAGE announcement, but a piece from Manchester Evening News in April 1893. And the infectious disease causing chaos was not Covid-19, but smallpox. The people who weren’t vaccinated and who succumbed to the illness and the people who died, were mostly the navvies or their families. Seventeen of them are buried in communal graves in Dore Church Yard. The graves have tiny headstones on which carved letters say bluntly: “S.P. 1893. Full Up.” 

         One of seven similar grave markers in Dore Churchyard

Some of those places where people were ‘allowed to herd together’ were not only in Lemont Road but also in the temporary navvy village built out on the moor near Moss Road and other lodging houses. But here in ‘Greenoak’, as Lemont Road was called then, smallpox, according to contemporary reports, was rife. There had been an earlier outbreak too in the late 1880s and for a while there was a smallpox hospital where the Laverdene Estate is now. In the later epidemic in 1893, there was a makeshift hospital out on the moor, near the navvy village of wooden huts. 

I like to think that perhaps they tried to help each other on Lemont Road, rather like this past eighteen months, when we set up a Whatsapp Covid Support group with people sharing information, daft videos, requests for help and offers to collect food and medication, even a regular food bank collection point. I know that one hundred and thirty years earlier, George Pearson, the socialist market gardener from Ruskin’s St George’s Farm, would deliver fruit and vegetables to the navvies when others would not, even though he wasn’t vaccinated himself. 

Like Covid-19, smallpox is thought to have jumped from animals to humans. And also like Covid-19, small pox was mild for some but deadly for others. Unlike Covid, where deaths mainly affect older people, smallpox deaths were mainly among children. Out of the seventeen buried in Dore, eleven were babies and children. In the same month as the newspaper report, April 1893, two little girls died in a house on Lemont Road and were buried in the communal graves in Dore churchyard. They were the children of our family in the census - Elizabeth Martin died, aged ten, on April 24th and Alice, her sister, aged eleven, two days later on April 26th.

We can only guess at the grief in that small house.

Sally Goldsmith

December 2021

Victims of the 1893 Smallpox Outbreak

Official statistics (see article below) say that 204 cases of smallpox at Totley were notified to the authorities and that there were no deaths from among the local population or from those who had been vaccinated against the disease. In all there were 19 deaths but this figure is inclusive of Norton. 

Dore Christ Church burial records indicate that 17 people died of the disease but their demographics do not tie up with contemporary newspaper reports. A report on 26 April states that 13 people had died including 3 adult men and 2 adult women. A report on 16 May states that 16 people had died including 6 adults. 

Dore Church records mark, with "SP", the burials of 5 adults - all men - and 12 infants or children. Two of these burials (one adult male and one child) took place well after the newspaper report of 16 May. Hence it would appear that there were two adult women who died of smallpox whose burial records were not marked as such - there are no obvious candidates - or who were buried elsewhere. 

We are trying to find out more about who the victims were.

New paragraph