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There is a blackened colliery to the south
of Kathmandu….*
In the process of researching the history of industrial railways, there are many odd avenues that you end up going
down - places where you end up finding information that you would never have dreamt of looking. One of the pluses
of the internet is that many things are starting to appear on it that once would have required many hours, days
even weeks of searching through libraries and other associated collections to come across.
One day I was idly putting the names of Indian collieries and coal fields into Google when I was presented with
a link to an Australian university and its collection of books that had passed out of copyright. The texts of a
few hundred books have been put online - they mainly consist of the classics of literature: Edgar Allen Poe, H
G Wells, Rider Haggard, Samuel Coleridge Taylor and the like.
One of the texts available is From Sea to Sea by Rudyard Kipling. It is a collection of Kipling's articles written
when he was working as a journalist in India that were published in the Civil and Military Gazette and the Pioneer
newspapers between 1887 and 1889. The articles concern life in India at the time and are essentially what would
now be known as travelogues.
The particular article that interested me was entitled "The Giridih Coal-Fields". In it Kipling describes
his visit to the East India Railway (EIR) colliery in Bengal, the people he meets, the working practices and, most
importantly for the industrial railway historian, gives some details of the railways used at the colliery. Unfortunately
the article is not dated but can be roughly placed by when the original articles were published. It has to be said
that to the 21st century reader, Kipling's language can be colourful and a little florid at time but I think you
will agree that as a description of late 19th century industry, it is both valuable and highly evocative.
He starts by setting the scene:
"As to Giridih itself, the last few miles of train bring up the reek of the 'Black Country.' Memory depends
on smell.…. That first breath of the coal should be the breath of the murky, clouded tract between Yeadon and Dale-or
Barnsley, rough and hospitable Barnsley-or Dewsbury and Batley and the Derby Canal on a Sunday afternoon when the
wheels are still and the young men and maidens walk stolidly in pairs. Unfortunately, it is nothing more than Giridih-seven
thousand miles away from Home and blessed with a warm and genial sunshine, soon to turn into something very much
worse. The insanity of the place is visible at the station door."
I think that that Kipling has a point - there is nothing like the smell of a colliery to let you know where you
are and even more so if that colliery has a coke works attached to it (as the next paragraph confirms when he writes
"They drive mad horses in Giridih-animals that become hysterical as soon as the dusk falls and the country-side
blazes with the fires of the great coke ovens.").
He next gives us some historical background to mining in the area:
The E.I.R. estate, bought or leased in perpetuity from the Serampore Raja, may be about four miles long and between
one and two miles across. It is in two pieces, the Serampore field being separated from the Karharbari (or Kurhurballi
or Kabarbari) field by the property of the Bengal Coal Company. The Raneegunge Coal Association lies to the east
of all other workings. So we have three companies at work on about eleven square miles of land.
And so to the colliery itself:
There is no such thing as getting a full view of the whole place. A short walk over a grassy down gives on to an
outcrop of very dirty sandstone, which in the excessive innocence of his heart the visitor naturally takes to be
the coal lying neatly on the surface. Up to this sandstone the path seems to be made of crushed sugar, so white
and shiny is the quartz. Over the brow of the down comes in sight the old familiar pit-head wheel, spinning for
the dear life, and the eye loses itself in a maze of pumping sheds, red-tiled, mud-walled miners' huts, dotted
all over the landscape, and railway lines that run on every kind of gradient. There are lines that dip into valleys
and disappear round the shoulders of slopes, and lines that career on the tops of rises and disappear over the
brow of the slopes.
Now comes the important section, the locomotives:
Along these lines whistle and pant metre-gauge engines, some with trucks at their tail, and others rattling back
to the pit-bank with the absurd air of a boy late for school that an unemployed engine always assumes. There are
six engines in all, and as it is easiest to walk along the lines one sees a good deal of them. They bear not altogether
unfamiliar names. Here, for instance, passes the 'Cockburn' whistling down a grade with thirty tons of coal at
her heels; while the 'Whitly' and the 'Olpherts' are waiting for their complement of trucks.
He then discusses the origin of the locomotive names:
Now a Mr. T.F. Cockburn was superintendent of these mines nearly thirty years ago, in the days before the chord-lines
from Kanu to Luckeeserai were built, and all the coal was carted to the latter place and surely Mr. Olpherts was
an engineer who helped to think out a new sleeper. What may these things mean?
'Apotheosis of the Manager,' is the reply. 'Christen the engines after the managers. You'll find Cockburn, Dunn,
Whitly, Abbot, Olpherts, and Saise knocking about the place. Sounds funny, doesn't it?.
Kipling goes on to tell us something of the permanent way:
Doesn't sound so funny when one of these idiots does his best to derail Saise, though, by putting a line down anyhow.
Look at that line! Laid out in knots-by Jove!' To the unprofessional eye the rail seems all correct; but there
must be something wrong, because 'one of those idiots' is asked why in the name of all he considers sacred he does
not ram the ballast properly.
'What would happen if you threw an engine off the line! Can't say that I know exactly. You see, our business is
to keep them on, and we do that. Here's rather a curiosity. You see that pointsman! They say he's an old mutineer,
and when he relaxes he boasts of the Sahibs he has killed. He's glad enough to eat the Company's salt now.' Such
a withered old face was the face of the pointsman at No. 11 point!
He then goes into details of how the mine is staffed and worked and is told that the only way that he can truly
understand the working of the colliery is to go underground (or as it is described to him "be pitted").
This he does the next day.
A stationary engine was hauling a procession of coal-laden trucks-'tubs' is the technical word-out of its depths.
The tubs were neither pretty nor clean. 'We are going down in those when they are emptied. Put on your helmet and
keep it on, and keep your head down.'
There is nothing mirth-provoking in going down a coal-mine-even though it be only a shallow incline running to
one hundred and forty feet vertical below the earth 'Get into the tub and lie down. Hang it, no! This is not a
railway carriage: you can't see the country out of the windows. Lie down in the dust and don't lift your head.
Let her go!'
A hand with a reeking flare-lamp hangs over the edge of the tub, and there is a glimpse of a blackened hat near
it, for those accustomed to the pits have a merry trick of going down sitting or crouching on the coupling of the
rear tub. The noise is deafening, and the roof is very close indeed. The tubs bump, and the occupant crouches lovingly
in the coal dust. What would happen if the train went off the line? The desire for the 'consolations of religion'
grows keener and keener as the air grows closer and closer. The tubs stop in darkness spangled by the light of
the flare-lamps which many black devils carry. Underneath and on both sides is the greasy blackness of the coal,
and, above, a roof of grey sandstone, smooth as the flow of a river at evening. 'Now, remember that if you don't
keep your hat on, you'll get your head broken, because you will forget to stoop. If you hear any tubs coming up
behind you step off to one side. There's a tramway under your feet: be careful not to trip over it.'
The road turns and winds and the roof becomes lower, but those accursed tubs still rattle by on the tramways. The
roof throws back their noises, and when all the place is full of a grumbling and a growling, how under earth is
one to know whence danger will turn up next? The air brings to the unacclimatised a singing in the ears, a hotness
of the eyeballs, and a jumping of the heart. 'That's because the pressure here is different from the pressure up
above. It'll wear off in a minute. We don't notice it. Wait till you get down a four-hundred-foot pit. Then your
ears will begin to sing, if you like.'
The rest of the article carries on to tell of the life of the miners, their working practices, the way the pits
are sunk, the perils of the clay diggers and all manner of related topics.
It can be seen that the articles gives much detail of the railway workings of the colliery, both on the surface
and underground. The main question that it raised for me was "What were the locos?" Looking at my records
for the EIR colliery it turns out that Kipling is indeed spot on (or should that be that my records are correct?),
at the time of writing his article the EIR colliery did have six metre gauge locos.
Four of them were supplied new to the colliery. They were two 0-4-2WTs built by Naysmith, Wilson of Patricroft,
works numbers 178 and 182, both built in 1875. The other two new locos were two 0-4-0Ts built by Dubs of Glasgow,
works numbers 1198 and 99, built in 1879.
The final two of the sextet were acquired second hand from the Rajputana Malwa State Railway in 1885. They were
2-4-0Ts, again built by Dubs. It is now not possible to say exactly which two locos that they were but they were
from the works number ranges 508 to 519 of 1872 and 602 to 614 of 1873. Incidentally, two more locos from these
batches were sold by RMR to a company in Bombay named Kirby at around the same time. Sadly we can not of course
put the names to the locos, so it not possible to narrow down the locos described by Kipling.
It would be interesting to hear if anybody else has examples of industrial railways that are described in literature
or other 19th century travel writing.
* - With apologies to John
Milton Hayes
http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/K/KiplingRudyard/index.html |
