Navvy
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Navvy is a shorter form of the word 'navigator' and is particularly applied to describe the manual labourers working on major civil engineering projects. The term was coined in the late 18th century in Britain when numerous canals were being built, which were also sometimes known as "navigations". Canal navvies typically worked with shovels, pick axes and barrows.
Many navvies were immigrants, as manual labourers of low social standing and training requirements often are in relatively affluent societies (compare the Chinese coolies on the US railroad construction), and were mainly Irish. By 1818, higher wages in North America attracted many of these immigrants to move again. They became a major part of the workforce in the construction of the Erie Canal and similar projects.1
The construction of canals in Britain was superseded by contracts to construct railway projects from 1830 onwards, which developed into the railway manias, and the same term was applied to the workmen employed on building rail tracks, their tunnels, cuttings and embankments.
Navvies working on railway projects typically continued to work using hand tools, supplemented with explosives (particularly when tunnelling, and to clear obdurate difficulties). Steam-powered mechanical diggers or excavators (initially called 'steam navvies') were available in the 1840s, but were not considered cost effective until much later in the 19th century, especially in Britain and Europe where experienced labourers were easily obtained and comparatively cheap. Elsewhere, for example in the
- "United States and Canada, where labour was more scarce and expensive, mechanical diggers were used. In the States the machine tradition became so strong that [...] the word navvy is understood to mean not a man but a steam shovel."2
- More recently, in Britain "navvy" sometimes means a workman digging a hole in a public road to get access to buried services such as gas mains or water mains.
- The name "navvies" is sometimes given to members of the Inland Waterways Protection Society and other canal restoration societies.
[edit] See also
[edit] Bibliography
- Way, Peter (1997). Common Labor: Workers and the Digging of North American Canals, 1780-1860. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0-8018-5522-5. p. 94
- Coleman, Terry (1968). The Railway Navvies: a history of the men who made the railways. London: Penguin Books Ltd. p. 54
- Dónall Mac Amhlaigh, Dialann Deoraí (Dublin: Clóchomhar, 1968), translated into English as An Irish Navvy: The Diary of an Exile, London: Routledge, 1964. ISBN 1-903464-36-6
