Overlooked Britain
As fancy a tunnel as any admirer of 19th-century railway architecture could desire, the Bramhope Tunnel of 1846, for the Leeds to Thirsk railway at Otley in West Yorkshire, was also a particular triumph of laborious endeavour.
Building it was dark and dangerous work, with men being lowered in buckets with candles – their only light by which to work below ground – as deep as 290 feet, hewing hard sandstone, shale and clay for a full two miles and 243 yards.
Some 2,300 navvies – many of them Irish refugees from the Famine – were employed, including 188 quarrymen, 102 stone masons, 732 ‘tunnel men’, and eighteen carpenters; all of them living in the 300 wooden bothies that had been built, shanty-town-like, for the job. With seventeen men to each little hut, with every bed being shared in shifts, they slept in fetid air, with the asphyxiating smell of gunpowder fumes. It was also dangerously wet, with the consequent subsidence and collapsing of the roofs.
They were grim times. There were seven major faults in the rock, and metal sheeting had to be used to divert the flooding waters. Between 1845 and 1849,
it was reckoned that 1,563,480,000 gallons had to be pumped out for the worker’s safety. They were paid £1.50 per week to shovel 20 tons of rock and earth per twelve-hour shift, seven days a week.
Drunkenness and fighting were such that Jos Midgeley, a railway police inspector, was hired for £1.25 a week to keep order. Five men died in the first year, six in the second and, by the time the tunnel was finished, 23 had perished.
There were so many accidents that Leeds Infirmary arranged for a specially sprung cart to ferry the injured the seven miles to the hospital. Such though, was the pride in the finished work, that it was decided to commemorate the victims with a replica of the tunnel’s northern portal.
There the memorial stands to this day, in nearby Otley, having been extensively repaired in 1913. It is known as the Navvies Monument, by All Saints’ Parish Church.
Complete with crenellations, towers and turrets, pierced with cruciform arrow loops, as well as gothic detailing and horseshoe arches, handsomely framed by bolection molding, the monument celebrates the brave workforce who built the tunnel – listed Grade 2 – and gives them their full due. All their names have been recorded to be cheered to this day, together with this inscription:
‘ In memory of the unfortunate men who lost their lives while engaged in the construction of the Bramhope Tunnel of the Leeds and Thirsk Railway from 1845 to 1849.
This tomb is erected as a memorial at the expense of James Bray Esq., the contractor and of the agents, sub-contractors and workers employed thereon.’
Two tall sighting towers were created, from which the engineers could see that the railway line was true, as well as twenty squat towers for the circular air shafts. All built of stone, they must have pleasingly added to the architectural landscape.
William Rhodes was the landowner, whose likeness, with a kiss curl and mutton-chop whiskers, is carved on the keystone to the tunnel itself, surveying his contribution to Britain’s railway architecture. Sadly, he has not been replicated on the memorial.
Originally estimated to cost £800,000, the final bill for the tunnel was £2,150,313 – £182,000,000 today.
A delightful detail that has nothing whatsoever to do with the memorial is that John Wesley, founder of Methodism, buried his horse in this graveyard.