Tuesday night in North London. The pub is already shut despite 24-hour drinking. We head to a Tescos Extra store, bright lights and bustle whatever the hour. Late evening shopping has peaked but the place is still busy. It’s workers rather than shoppers that predominate now. In the first isle, music is blaring, helping to maintain the rhythm of the work required to replenish the shelves. As we head towards the far side of the store, we see men and women, mostly middle-aged, putting cans, boxes and packets in their places. The ‘Beer and Wine’ aisle is almost fully occupied by trolleys packed with tomorrow’s drinks. We squeeze by to make our selections then move towards the checkouts. But they are almost completely obscured by more trolleys piled high with stock (as in the image). The night-time shift in the character of the space from one geared to consumption to one geared to work is clear. It’s mostly self checkout at this hour.

The guard’s function was mainly to open and close the doors at stations and give the signal to the driver (known as a Motorman) to proceed. I worked on the Northern line between 1977 and 1981, starting as a guard and qualifying as a Guard Motorman in 1980 (a Guard Motorman being the in-between stage on one’s way to becoming a full-time driver).

At that time the Northern line was known as the ‘misery line’, quite rightly so, as the service was plagued by staff absenteeism and frequent equipment failure. Problems were often compounded by the complicated nature of the line’s layout, especially at Camden Town where the two branches from Edgeware and High Barnet converge and then diverge to either the Charing Cross or City Branches. No modern tube line would be designed like this — have a look at the Victoria Line (opened in 1968) which has no branches or junctions and was One Man Operated (known as O.M.O in the trade) from its inception. The absence of passenger toilets on the system meant that late night boozers coming home from the pubs often used the platform ends or cross passages to relieve themselves so this added to the general fug which was counteracted (and compounded) by an evil-looking green powder which was sprinkled liberally in problem areas. Train crews also urinated in the tunnels or underground sidings and there were even a few instances of persons unknown defecating in the Tooting Broadway siding. As if that wasn’t bad enough there was found to be a section of tunnel between Golders Green and Hampstead which was lined with blue asbestos.

Camden Town was also one of the locations on the line where train crews would break for meals (or a P.N.R. — Physical Needs Relief) and once the service started to get out of sync the situation often arose where a crew due to come off for a meal break would find no relief crew waiting for them (either because they hadn‘t finished their meal break or because they were delayed on another train). Most of the staff had a pretty bloody-minded attitude to the job and we worked to rule all the time secure in the knowledge that the unions would protect us if the need arose. Given the above, the word ‘misery’ seems a fair adjective to use.

New recruits to London Transport (as it was known then) had to undergo a period of training at the White City School. There we sat in classrooms, kitted out in brand new uniforms that felt like they were manufactured from cardboard for East German border guards and learned about train equipment, signalling and emergency procedures (smoking was allowed in class!). First though, we had to watch an old black and white film called Rail Crash, presumably to give us the idea of what shouldn’t happen on a railway. In fact London Transport had one of the best safety records of any railway in the world up until the Moorgate crash in 1975. In the twenty-five years prior to that there had been one serious collision in Stratford (1953) where a train had run into the back of another in a tunnel resulting in the deaths of twelve people.

Once through the classroom stage, I (and my fellow newbies) were itching to get out and participate in what we had been lead to believe was a glorious undertaking with strict adherence to all aspects of rules, regs and time-keeping. (In fact, just about the only place on the whole LT network that had strict time-keeping enforced was the School). So with a head full of ominous and highly technical sounding jargon like Dead Man’s Handle, Tripcock Isolating Cock (TIC) and Drivers Brake Valve Isolating Cock (DBVIC) I reported for duty at some ungodly hour of the morning at a depot on the Central line where I was to finally get my hands on a train.

A guard’s job included taking over the controls of a train in an emergency and believe it or not the practice at the time was to learn to drive on a train in passenger service, despite the existence of simulators (you can try one in the London Transport Museum). On entering the cab of my appointed train the driver stepped away from the controls and told me to take over, he then gave me verbal instructions as to what to do. The chief skill involved in driving a train is in judging the braking and given that there is a trip system that prevents trains passing red signals this system of learning to drive is not as dodgy as it sounds. The passengers did get a rough ride though as a common mistake made by learners is ‘dropping the dead-man’ i.e. letting go of the Dead Man’s Handle which results in instant emergency braking and a loud noise of compressed air escaping. Some Dead Man’s Handles (I never heard the expression in the plural using Men’s) had a particularly fierce spring so were quite hard to hold down.

At the other end of the train the guard’s position was inside the last carriage (on some lines in the cab) and consisted of two panels, one either side of the car. Learning the guard’s job was also done on a train in passenger service and consisted of opening and closing the passenger doors, giving the signal to the driver to proceed and watching the train out of the station. Once the guard’s key had been inserted in the panel the controls would become live and enable the guard’s door to be operated independently of the rest of the train doors. The guard would open his or her door first when the last car entered the station and after checking that the train was fully in the station would then open the passenger doors by depressing two buttons simultaneously. After passengers had detrained and entrained the doors would be closed and the signal given to the driver to proceed (one ring on a bell operated by a button on the panel). As the train left the station the guard would keep an eye out for any untoward activity on the platform and close the guard’s door making sure that his or head was in the carriage before the train reached the end of the platform.

Tea can

Eventually a guard would be teamed up with a regular driver in one of the depots serving the line that he or she was working on. It was advisable to live near one’s depot as the first shift started at 05:19, the latest morning start time being 07:43. There were also shifts that started throughout the afternoon, a few night shifts and some ‘split’ shifts. Split shifts involved coming to work twice in one day to work in peak hours. Night shift crews ran the last trains at night, late staff trains, early staff trains and the first trains in the mornings. We also had ‘spare’ crews whose function was to be there in case of staff absenteeism. Night spare was a good shift — come to work, book on, if everybody shows up for work either bed down for the night in the mess-room or go home and come back in the morning to book off. I was lucky enough to end up crewed with a driver with whom I shared some interests and we spent many hours at night listening to jazz, reading and drinking Darjeeling tea. We were probably the only crew who had string on our tea-bags and as far as I know there was only one bloke on the whole of the Northern Line who drank coffee made in a cafetiere. Every mess-room had a hot water urn and most guards and drivers owned a white enamel tea can, the lid of which served as a cup. Other mess-room activities included playing cards, snooker at a couple of the depots, and I once saw a driver making a clock-surround from clothes-pegs.

There was also a lot of time to kill whilst running the service given that most of the guard’s time was spent not opening and closing doors. I read newspapers and did crosswords, eventually graduating to the Times via the Sun, Evening News or Standard, Telegraph and Guardian. I also played chess with one driver and games would start at the beginning of the shift with moves being made when we saw each other — either at the end of the line, in which case one had plenty of time for deliberation during the journey there — or at meal breaks. I am convinced that I learned more in four years of reading newspapers and doing crosswords than I had in the whole of my school career. Other times I just sat and stared at and re-read endlessly the adverts above me and even perfected the art of dozing off between stations to catch up on missed sleep. To this day I cannot sleep on a tube train without waking up every time it stops.

Guard’s panel

There were quite a few ‘characters’ at my depot (East Finchley), including a guard whose nickname was ‘Killer’, so-called because he had been involved in a passenger fatality in the Kennington Loop. The Kennington Loop was a section of track south of Kennington on the Charing Cross branch where trains would run empty southbound into the loop after detraining and emerge on the northbound platform. Killer was a diminutive Asian man who spoke unintelligible English and apparently a lack of communication between him and the driver over the train intercom had had something to do with the accident. This wasn’t surprising as the intercoms on the 1938 trains were almost useless. The guard’s panel had a small speaker and microphone with button next to it, the technique for using the apparatus being to press the button and shout into the microphone. At the other end of the train the driver would hear a strangled squawk from his speaker if he was lucky and using the same procedure as the guard, would shout back. The guard meanwhile in anticipation of a reply would have his ear pressed hard against the speaker grill — the whole procedure being akin to communicating with deaf relatives at Christmas. Killer was crewed with a huge taciturn West-Indian driver, who was mainly interested in playing cards, or sometimes with a very overweight moustachioed racist who drove like a maniac and arrived at junctions minutes early. This meant that the train would be held to time by the signalman. Passengers on his trains had all the fun of the demented fairground followed by seemingly interminable tedium.

Only two of the train staff at my depot wore full uniform, i.e. including hat, tie and matching jacket and trousers and most didn’t bother to carry all the equipment that was required i.e. timetables, traffic circular, note-book, lost property labels etc. Nearly everyone carried a hand-lamp though, although I don’t remember ever using mine or being aware of anyone else using theirs. Drivers carried a phone which could be connected to wires in the tunnel to speak to the line controller in an emergency. On finding lost property the guard was required to attach a label to it with details of where and when found, and hand it in at a terminal station at the next convenient opportunity. I never found anything of interest except an empty suitcase (quite a big deal at the time because of the IRA activity in London), and of course umbrellas. Quite a few of the train crews had snazzy umbrellas which they had found and kept. The rest ended up at the Lost Property Office in Baker Street which was run by a man rejoicing in the nickname of ‘Mr Brolly’. When he retired he walked out of the building under an umbrella guard of honour.

Then there were the suicides, sometimes referred to as ‘a person under a train’ in official passenger announcements or ‘one under’ by the staff. Deep tunnel stations have a trench in the centre of the track known as the ‘Suicide Pit’ and if you fall into the pit you will survive a train passing over you (these were installed during the depression in the 1930s). Apart from the risk of being mangled by a train there is a hefty current of 640 Volts D.C running through the positive rail which in stations is always furthest from the platform. I once saw a woman who had crossed the track at East Finchley, lie down across the running rail and positive rail and electrocute herself. My chief memory of that incident is of the smell of burnt hair. We often stepped on the rails whilst walking to the depot to prepare a train for service, not that we were supposed to of course. Some drivers at my depot had had as many as three suicides and I was lucky to avoid a suicide myself when driving, as the train behind me was chosen instead. This was at Waterloo going north, where trains enter the platform at about 30 mph. It doesn’t sound fast but even with full braking it would take more than half a platform length to stop. Jumping in front of a tube train is not a guaranteed way of killing yourself, surprisingly it is only about 50% effective and often results in horrific injuries instead. There are up to 100 such incidents every year on the network — many drivers have been severely traumatised by them and unable to drive again.

So how does a guard on a train in service happen to have a hot cup of tea? At East Finchley going south, the driver’s cab is right next to the stairs to the mess room so after stopping and securing the train, the driver runs up the stairs with a tea can, fills it and runs back down. This takes less than a minute. The driver pours a cup of tea and stops short at the next station (Highgate), leaving the tea can at the guard’s end of the platform before pulling fully into the station. After opening the doors the guard alights and picks up the can from the platform. A cup of tea and a newspaper help to pass the time, the only other entertainment being trying to trap double-bassists and their instruments in the doors.

Follow this link for an account of the last 1959 Tube Stock Train to run on the Northern Line: http://www.squarewheels.org.uk/rly/1959final/. District Dave’s website is very good too: http://www.trainweb.org/districtdave/index.html.

I’d been told on a previous visit (at the wrong time to see any fish) that there are different rhythms to the fishing: the smallest boats come in at around 6.30pm and the larger ones which fish at night arrive back before dawn. ‘Are you arriving or leaving?’ I ask a man on a boat with a light on and the engine chugging. ‘Stiamo per partire. We’re just off,’ he replies. But there’s time for a chat.

I’m getting used to the topics and tone of these exchanges. There’s a tension in the air as the boat is readied for departure in the dark, and the weather, which is mild and calm for now, is an ever-present and unpredictable companion. They take the small boat. It’s just one of so many different judgements to be made, even before they set off. The boat is exposed and has just enough room for the two fishermen and a decent haul. ‘We don’t have higher-level qualifications,’ the skipper says, ‘but there’s a lot of skill in all this.’ He talks about the nets and how to manage them, the boat’s instruments and how to interpret them, and of course how to read the weather and decide when it’s time to return to shore, and how to manage the crew in times of danger and ensure everyone gets back safely. Then there’s the difficulty of getting a good price for what you’ve caught, even to get people to appreciate the difference between fish caught like this and those that are farmed or imported. It’s a hard way to make a living, and a dying tradition, he says.

‘What time will you be back in the morning?’ I ask
‘At 4.30 or 5am,’ he replies.
‘I’ll try and come.’
‘Do you struggle to get up early then?’ He’s casually making a distinction between us.
‘In somma…’

Another fisherman who’s not going out that night but who’s hanging around the docks says: ‘I’ll probably be around too. I can’t sleep on land.’

I resolve to make an effort. With an early night, I can manage an early start, I think. I set the alarm for just after 4…

Thursday, 2 December
It takes until nearly half past 4 to drag myself from the bed but I’m back at the docks by 10 to 5. The boats are already in.

‘We came back at 4’, the skipper I was talking to last night explains, ‘I didn’t like what the weather was doing.’ They’re washing octopus, squid, sole, prawns, and the odd scorfano (scorpion fish) on board, then packing them into open polystyrene boxes and lifting them ashore. The sale has already been arranged, and there’s a man waiting. He produces a set of scales from his van, and there’s some mumbled negotiation.

‘So what now?’ I ask the skipper. ‘Is your working day done?’
‘For now’, he replies. His mate will clean the boat. ‘Do you want some sole?’
‘Sure!’ I get given what feels like 2 or 3 kilos. ‘Thank you!’
‘When there’s enough, we can give some away.’
‘So when do you next go out?’
‘Friday,’ he says.
‘Maybe see you Saturday morning then, but a bit earlier I think!’

I go home and back to bed, starting the day again a couple of hours later – a day in which I know I’ll have a good dinner!

Saturday, 4 December
It was pretty windy last night and I wonder if there will have been much fishing. But I decide to get up and go and see anyway. This turns out to be the coldest – and earliest – morning I’ve known since I’ve been here. 5 degrees, a street sign tells me, at 4.30am. I don’t see the boat from earlier in the week but there’s another, larger one just in.

‘How was the night?’ I ask.
‘Fredda. Cold.’
‘How much colder is it at sea?’
‘Un bel po. Quite a bit.’
‘Where did you go?’
‘Vicino. Tempo brutto. Close by. Bad weather.’

The man I am talking to looks and sounds exhausted. It was a rough night after at the end of a long week. And the catch was small. It takes less than 5 minutes to load it into the waiting van for it to be taken to the wholesale market.

I’m about to head home when I notice there’s a caffè open on the Via Roma opposite the docks. I go in and order a caffè latte.

‘Do you always open a 5am?’ I ask.
‘No, at 4.30,’ replies a very professional-looking barrista.
‘My goodness, that is an early start every day,’ I remark.
‘You get used to it,’ he smiles.

I drink a perfect coffee then go home, gratefully, and back to bed.

There was a fire opposite my mother’s house, behind the bungalow on the other side of the green. I’ve been looking at that bungalow a lot lately as builders have been carrying out what seems to be a major refurbishment. I’ve seen so much stuff go into the skip on the front drive that I’ve wondered what could be left inside. It was hard to see where the fire was coming from to start with. A tall fir tree was like a single flame but not much else seemed to be burning around it. The builders were replacing the windows on the day the fire started. PVC. My first thought was whether or not they would melt.

This all happened shortly before midnight and the scene it produced highlighted things we know but don’t often get to see about the different rhythms and temporalities of work that coexist. The bungalow in front of the burning tree was dark and quiet, locked up after the builders’ day was done. In neighbouring houses, it was mostly the bedroom lights that were on. Of the stream of people that formed in the street, many were wearing dressing-gowns and slippers. The hour and the emergency permitted that. Then the fire engines arrived and men on a night shift, their job to be ready for an incident like this, worked in protective clothing in front of an audience in nightwear (unfortunately I don’t have a photo of that).

The next day it was possible to see what might have happened. A car, a shed, a fence and a tree were destroyed. The tree will probably find new growth from its roots whether or not anyone does anything. The car was removed, no life left in that. The remains of the fence and the shed point in two directions: to the labour that put them there in the first place, now undone; and to the processes of work that will come next, from demolition (most likely) to reconstruction. The windows, I was glad to see, survived intact, and building work on the bungalow continues.

In the early seventies, before the advent of Human Resources, Health and Safety and union-bashing Tory governments, there was work aplenty in Essex for anyone who could present themselves at the Colchester Odeon at 7am. At that time, a bona fide existence for us hippies, school drop-outs and squatters revolved mainly around smoking dope and doing as little work as possible. The words work and ethic never appeared in the same sentence. There was a lot of labouring work around for those who could be bothered, some of it ‘casual’ or ‘off the cards’, i.e. cash and tax free. In fact if you were a bloke with long hair just about the only work you could get was labouring. (It was difficult to rent a flat too and I was also turned down by the Technical College for refusing to get a hair-cut.) The railway job was relatively well paid — £40 a week take home as long as you did a weekend shift. To put this in perspective: the car I bought as a result of this employment cost £15, and the insurance, £40. Driving lessons were £3.50 at the BSM and my total outlay to get a driving licence was £73.

So one morning, I found myself waiting at the cinema with a few others. This was recruitment at its most informal. No-one spoke to me and I didn’t know where I was going or what I was going there to do. A ropey-looking bus full of grim-faced old men smoking roll-ups pulled up and I got on, sat down and rolled a cigarette too. I was feeling slightly out of place as a seventeen-year-old, bespectacled, middle-class ex-public schoolboy.

We were a track-relaying gang working for Balfour Beatty sub-contracted to British Rail, consisting of Poles (by far the best workers), Irish and locals from Suffolk and Essex. I have never since met such tough men. The work consisted of wielding implements such as pickaxes, shovels, sledge-hammers, six-foot crowbars, scythes and large forks. Track that has been in situ for ten years or so cannot just be lifted out since the stones that the track is laid on (known to us affectionately as slag) set solid after a while so it all has to be dug out. Most people find digging the garden quite hard work. Multiply that by ten.

To begin the process of relaying track the gang would spread out over a section, three beds  to a man. A ‘bed’ was the area between the sleepers. If we wanted to be more precise we used the terms four foot and six foot, - the four foot being the area between the running rails and the six foot the area between pairs of tracks. (The term four foot comes from the standard railway gauge of four feet, eight and a half inches). To dig out your beds you had to stand on a sleeper, then raise your fork high above the slag and smash it down just next to the sleeper. It would take a few goes to get to any depth at all; if and when you did, you could lever the fork against the sleeper to remove (hopefully) a decent amount of slag which you’d then chuck to one side. If you missed the slag and hit the sleeper a huge, jarring shock would be transmitted up your arm. We sometimes used pickaxes to loosen the slag but most just relied on brute force and a fork. Once you had removed some slag you could then use a foot on your fork and your entire body weight to attack the slag from less of an angle. Once you had finished excavating your beds you could have a smoke for five minutes or so before moving on to the next section.

Every now and then, the arrival of a train would be heralded by a blast on a kind of tin bugle by a one-armed man who then shouted either ‘up road’ or ‘down road’ depending on the train’s direction of travel (up being towards London and down away from London). We would stand by the side of the track until the train had passed. Once a fast train took the lid of our oversize tea-can with it which could well have resulted in an Odd-Job-style decapitation. Train toilets emptied straight onto the track at that time and we often admired the results or in some cases were sprayed. Other diversions included executing myxomatosis-infected rabbits with shovels and merciless piss-taking. Generally the Poles were the quietest, the Irish the most philosophical and the locals the most garrulous — most of their opening conversational gambits consisted of the words: ‘I tell you what…’

During the six months or so that I worked there, I saw new blokes start almost every day; some lasted an hour or so and most just one day. Absenteeism was commonplace and generally tolerated. Inactivity was not. I once made the mistake of sitting down for a breather. Luckily an old bloke called Fred advised me: ‘you can have a smoke but don’t sit down otherwise he’ll be on to you’. He being the foreman or ganger. All I remember about him is that he was Welsh and used to hold his dick with an unusual reverse grip when pissing by the side of the track. Funnily enough the sunken area to the side of the track was known as the cess.

In addition to digging stuff out, we would also pack slag under sleepers to bring the track up to the right level – a process known as tamping. This involved jacking up the track and ramming the stones home with a shovel. When we were done, or if a train was coming, the jacks would be released, the only warning being a shout. You had to learn not to have your feet under a sleeper when this happened unless you wanted a couple of tons of steel and concrete dropping on your toes. Another process was lining. Twenty men with six-foot crowbars, ten to each rail, would dig the bars in and lever against the track to push it in whatever direction was required according to a man sighting down the rail from a distance. To synchronise the pulls there would be a rhythmic shout: hey — hup hup hup, the hups being when you pulled.

The clacketty clack rhythm of train wheels hitting the joints between sections of rail bolted together with plates has largely disappeared with the advent of long-welded rails. As in all engineering of this type, expansion is a factor that needs to be catered for and in this case we used a process known as de-stressing. It was pronounced distressing which gave the activity a certain poignancy. To de-stress a section of track (usually about a quarter of a mile long), we would unclip the rails from the sleepers, cut out a small piece (about nine inches long) and stretch the remaining rail with a hand-operated hydraulic gizmo before re-clipping. The clips were sprung S–shaped steel affairs which could be removed quite easily with a well-aimed blow from a sledge hammer. I say well-aimed because you needed to have your foot on top of the clip when hitting it to keep it from shooting off. Replacing them however was much more difficult. Being sprung they had to be hit very hard and in exactly the right place, otherwise a kilo of steel would go flying off usually into your shins or worse, into someone else’s. This job was always done at night of course which didn’t help. We had a variety of lights though including Tilley lamps (run on pressurised paraffin) and lengths of cable with bulbs every few feet — as seen in miniature on your Christmas tree.

Although there were machines to do all these tasks, they were generally only available for weekend engineering works when there was a deadline to meet. That often meant very long shifts starting at midnight on Saturday and going right through until the following afternoon. The weekday work was a picnic compared to the weekend as we could stop for rain and smokes and cups of tea were brought to the track in the huge white enamel can. Weekends we worked in all weathers and snatched breaks only if the work was going well.

Night-work was conducted with a sense of urgency in an eerie half-light. Mostly there was no conversation, just gangers shouting orders. Weird-looking machines with sirens that sounded like air-raid warnings would appear for tamping and lining and there were others that ran on the adjacent track with cranes that brought lengths of rail. If there was no adjacent track we would erect temporary rails supported by devices known as pots to allow a machine to deliver rails. In the absence of machinery, we did everything by hand. It took four men to carry a sleeper with devices known as dogs and many more were required to move rails — either with dogs or crowbars. One night we moved eighteen pairs of long rails from one side of a track to the other using crowbars. It took all night with much hey-hupping. There was another huge machine which had a kind of conveyor belt that excavated under the track and dumped the resulting mixture of earth and slag on the embankment. We would spend days moving this stuff with shovels to clear up the mess.

New slag was delivered in hoppers and we had to turn a kind of steering wheel to let the stuff out (hopefully in the right place to save too much shovelling later on) then jump off and run round to the next un-manned hopper. I once jumped off onto the adjacent track right in front of an oncoming train. A slow one, luckily. No sympathy to be had though — just a bollocking.

There were no toilets or washing facilities of any kind and the only safety equipment I had was a dirty orange vest. I enjoyed my sandwiches though — and the fags, and even the disgusting tea made with Carnation tinned milk.

Further reading

Coleman, T. (1965) The Railway Navvies: A History of the Men Who Built the Railways. Hutchinson.

It was at night though that I was most struck by where I was. The murmur of chat, the sounds of tea-making, the distant presence of a radio – something was going on in the ticket office below the bedroom! It’s the kind of thing I knew went on, I suppose, but had never fully realised before. The rhythms of the Tube at night are easy to forget when the trains are in their sidings, the barriers are closed and there’s no reason to be there anyway. And what I could hear wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, it was just part of the routines of maintaining station life.

My night close to the rails brought to mind Rogan Macdonald’s photographs of ‘London’s fourth emergency service’ which show what most of us don’t get to see of the Tube — the hidden work that keeps it going. His photo-story, Emergency Response — at: http://www.roganmacdonald.co.uk/site/pop_small.html - is based on just a few images that nevertheless convey a sense of work as being complex and puzzling and difficult and exciting. The impression of it as a collective activity is really powerful across the photographs too. It’s the single image of the locked entrance at Archway and a man with a job to do striding towards the gates as if he could walk right through them that reminds me that the end of my day is the start of his.