Victoria Line Pony Boy

Navvying in the Victoria Line tunnel. I was once a ‘Pony Boy’ on, or more accurately in, the Victoria Line tunnel, London.

In the late sixties the construction of this new tube line was the great Civil Engineering project in London. London’s and the world’s first underground transport system began in the late eighteen sixties and no new tunnel had been ‘cut’ under Central London since the early nineteen hundreds. The London underground is one of the great city transport networks of the world. Its distinctive classic-design map and station symbols are iconic features of that great city. The workers on the Victoria Line project were the crème de la crème of the Irish construction army in England at that time. Their ruggedness and courage combined with a swaggering attitude combined with the wages they received, achieved the status of folklore among a wide range of commentators at the time. They were used as subjects for media features and television advertisements. I, however, was but a youthful minnow in this pastiche.

Pit Boss and Pony Boy
The tunnel workers were mostly drawn from two Irish counties, Mayo and Donegal. Tunnels and ‘headings’ were their speciality. I, a teenager, had the temerity to join this group, albeit on the bottom rung of the pecking order, following in the footsteps of my older brother.
There was a definite hierarchy to the work-force in the actual tunnel. The overall co-ordinator was the ‘Pit Boss’. Next came the ‘Leading Miner’. He led ‘a gang’ of around half a dozen workers. The numbers depended on the dimensions of the tunnel. These specialist gangs travelled the country. They were marvellous workers who pursued their craft with, what appeared to be, reckless abandon in a most dangerous environment. Next to the ‘leading miner’ were the ‘miners’. They worked ‘at the face’. Their tool was the pneumatic drill or ‘air spade’ as it was called. The miners ripped the tunnel face with these spades and great lumps of London daub were levered onto a wooden gantry or stage. The next group in the hierarchy were the ‘miners’ labourers’ who shovelled this spoil into ‘skips’. Since our location was, technically, ‘a heading’ for a station area, there was no locomotive to pull these skips to the point of exit. This was done manually by the next group, the ‘pony boys’. I was a ‘pony boy’. This was for the subterranean session of my two sojourns on the line.

‘Banksman’
While these were the main bodies consigned to the depths there was a formidable backup on the surface, one of whom, ‘The Banksman’, was the link between the underworld and the surface. It was he who guided the ‘crane driver’ who otherwise worked in the blind.
The surface of the site had its varied group of construction huts for engineers, surveyors, agents, administration and a ‘rough and ready’ hut used for ‘tea breaks’ and ‘togging out’ to go down. The ‘Gov’nor’ was the General Site Foreman. One of the main Civil Engineering companies involved in the overall project was John Mowlem. The Warren Street heading, where I served my time, was being developed by a company called Mitchell.

Since I did two ‘tours of duty’ at Warren Street I covered a number of portfolios. I imagine the ‘Pit Boss’ was somewhat surprised when he first saw this whipper- snapper of a new recruit, there on my brother’s recommendation. The boss was an old time ‘Cockney’, hard as nails, with a face like well-worn leather. He did not suffer fools lightly and though he had this tough exterior I could not fault him in his dealings with me. I think his name, not unusually for a Cockney, was ‘Fred’ and I can still remember that weathered, older than his age, face.
My introduction to The Victoria Line was on the surface as the ‘Banksman’. Today this necessitates one of those ‘Health and Safety’ courses and a certificate but around the construction sites of The Victoria Line, ‘Health and Safety’, as a specific concept, had no more than a token hold. A number of basic hand-signals such as, ‘take the weight’, ‘raise’ and ‘lower’ were necessary for communicating with the crane driver high in his cab where the yardarm jib met the tower. There was no course required for these basic instructions.


Danger:

Building site management often played loose with safety and sites were often dangerous. The tunnels always had the whiff of danger about them.
Warren Street was close to the heart of London .The service shaft was about one hundred feet deep. The skips, with the mined earth, were pushed along the rail lines to the base of the shaft. They were then attached to the crane and the skip was raised from the shaft and raised over a gantry and tipped. On one occasion the tipping of the skip was nearly my undoing as it came off its tenuous clips tumbled down the face of the mound taking me with it. Apart from a few scars and wounded pride I survived. My other near serious encounter resulted from a misunderstanding with the mechanics of a large cement mixer and its mechanical shovel. There was a fatality once in our section, on an opposite shift, when a young labourer slipped off a tunnel gantry and was killed after his head hit the base ironwork, though the fall was not more than ten feet or so. While there was an investigation it was a short, sharp affair with little obvious reform resulting. On another occasion as the gang were hoisting one of the heavy cast iron plates into position in the ring the assisting air compressor ‘cut out’ resulting in the weighty iron crashing onto the platform close to the working gang. Two labouring colleagues, of just a few hours, looked at each other and without further adieu beat a hasty exit up the maze of ladders into the London haze feeling that the risks were not worth the reward. Their retreat was accompanied by a chorus of boisterous derision from the hardened gang for whom danger was but a harlequin. These rings were bolted together and a sealing grout, which contributed to the distinctive smell, was pressurised into the gaps.

Streets of London

The Banksman sometimes doubled as the humble tea-boy. This necessitated getting provisions from a nearby store. With muddy wellington-boots and a donkey jacket, showing the scars of wrestling with spoil skips, these daily trips presented moments of amusement as the bowler hats and office ladies steered a delicate evasive course on the sidewalk. Once, being short of some necessary provisions, on the night shift, I attempted to secure them in a very fashionable adjacent West End restaurant. My appearance in the doorway was met with a flurry of defensive activity as if an angel of recrimination had appeared. Bearing the label of a Victoria Line worker allowed for a tolerance of these diversions.

Enamel tea bucket

The tea-breaks were something of a rough ritual similar to the experiences of miners of much earlier times. A boiler, maybe a Burco if it was around at the time, heated the water. An enamel bucket was the improvised tea-pot with a similarly organised spout. Indeed improvisation was a key asset around the Line. The ingredient measurements were pretty clear cut. It was usually a straight quarter pound of tea. It was one pint or two of milk with the sugar measurement of even dimensions also. While it now sounds incredible these ingredients might be stirred with a new pick-axe handle. The food the workers brought to this party was similarly roughly apportioned including generous portions of cooked chicken. During these tea-breaks the gang would visit a nearby pub where they ‘skulled’ pints of bitter with speed, determination and appreciation. The pub landlord had to balance income from these muddied Celts with a possible reaction from the more theatrical clientele of The West End. Having slaked their thirst they returned to the hut for the tea and sustenance before descending to their underworld.

Diversion

Most of the workers lived in the Irish enclaves of Kilburn, Cricklewood, Camden Town or The Holloway Road. Here they got suited and booted for the week-end diversion which began in the pubs which became central to he lives of so many Irish labourers at that time. In Camden Town it might have been The Mother Redcap. On the Holloway Road there was a necklace of Irish bars from The Nags Head to The Archway Tavern including The Half Moon. Cricklewood had the famous tavern called The Crown. Then it was on to the dance halls, The Galtymore or The Gresham. Occasionally a very well dressed miner would arrive at the Warren Street hut much too early for his shift after such diversions.

Not Invited

The Victoria Line was officially opened in sixty nine by the Queen. The joke in The Archway Tavern was that our invitation cards to the opening must have gotten mislaid ! By then many of the gangs had progressed to other ‘big jobs’ as rumours began to circulate about an even bigger project which involved restricting the tidal flow of the Thames with a barrier. The piece de resistance in terms of this work, the Channel tunnel, lay in the future. I have not seen any account of its construction but I am confident that the miners of Donegal and Mayo were well represented.
Though it is nearly forty years ago I still retain a clear picture of those labyrinthine tunnels and particularly their odours, a much too polite a word for that experience. Occasionally in tube stations they return.

Most of all I, the pony boy, remember those cavalier miners adorned with the four-cornered knotted handkerchief as headgear and they swapping stories of Glenties, Ardara and Gweedore amid the din and the danger of the Victoria Line.