Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland. Joseph Tatlow
and circulated through the office, little scraps of paper containing quips and puns and jokes in prose or verse, or acrostics from his prolific pen. One clever acrostic upon the office boy, which has always remained in my memory, I should like for its delicate irony (worthy of Swift himself) to reproduce; but as that promising youth may still be in the service I feel I had better not, as irony sometimes wounds. For some time we had in the office an Apollo—a very Belvidere. He was a glory introduced into railway life by I know not what influence and disappeared after a time I know not where or why. A marvel of manly strength and grace and beauty, thirty years of age or so, and faultlessly dressed. Said to be aristocratically connected, he was the admiration of all and the darling of the young ladies of Derby. He lodged in fashionable apartments, smoked expensive cigars, attended all public amusements, was affable and charming, but reticent about himself. Why he ever came amongst us none ever knew; it was a mystery we never fathomed. He left as he came, a mystery still.
There was an oldish clerk whom we nicknamed Gumpots. This bore some resemblance to his surname, but there were other reasons which led to the playful designation and which I think justified it.
There was another scribe of quite an elegant sort: a perambulating tailor’s dummy; a young man, well under thirty. He was good-looking, as far as regularity of features and a well-formed figure went, but mentally not much to boast of. He lounged about the station platform and the town displaying his faultlessly fitting fashionable clothes. They always looked new, and as his salary was not more than £70 a year, and his parents, with whom he lived, were poor, the story that he was provided gratis by an enterprising tailor in town with these suits, on condition that he exhibited himself constantly in public, and told whenever he could who was his outfitter, received general credence, and I believe was true. He was never known to hurry, mingled little with men and less with women, but moved along in a stiff tailor-dummy fashion with a sort of self-conscious air which seemed to say, “Look at my figure and my clothes, how stylish they are!”
I remember a senior clerk in the office where I first worked to whom there was a general aversion. He was the only clerk who was really disliked, for all the others, old or young, serious or gay, steady or rackety, had each some pleasant quality. This unfortunate fellow had none. He was small, mean, cunning, a sneak and a mischief maker. He carried tales, told lies, and tried to make trouble, for no reason but to gratify his inclinations. He was a dark impish looking fellow, as lean as Cassius and as crafty and envious as Iago. The chief clerk, to his credit be it said, gave a deaf ear to his tales, and his craft and cunning obtained him little beyond our detestation.
In our own office about half our number were youths and single men and about half were married. Our youngest benedict was not more than eighteen years of age, and his salary only £45 a year. On this modest income for a time the young couple lived. It was a runaway match; on the girl’s part an elopement from school. They lived in apartments, kept by an old lady, a widow who, being a woman, loved a bit of romance, and was very kind to them. He was a manly young fellow, a sportsman and renowned at cricket, and she was amiable and pretty, a little blonde beauty. The parents were well to do, and in due time forgave the imprudent match. At this we all rejoiced for he was a general favourite.
Looking back now it seems to me the office staff was in some ways a curious collection and very different to the clerks of to-day. Many of them had not entered railway life until nearly middle-age and they had not assimilated as an office staff does now, when all join as youths and are brought up together. They were original, individual, not to say eccentric. Whilst our office included certain steady married clerks, who worked hard and lived ordinary middle-class respectable lives, and some few bachelors of quiet habit, the rest were a lively set indeed, by no means free from inclinations to coarse conviviality and many of them spendthrift, reckless and devil-may-care. At pay-day, which occurred monthly, most of these merry wights, after receiving their pay, betook themselves to the Midland Tap or other licensed house and there indulged, for the remainder of the afternoon, in abundant beer, pouring down glass after glass; in Charles Lamb’s inimitable words: “the second to see where the first has gone, the third to see no harm happens to the second, a fourth to say there is another coming, and a fifth to say he is not sure he is the last.” Some of the merriest of them would not return to the office that day but extend their carouse far into the night; to sadly realise next day that it was “the morning after the night before.”
I do not think our ladylike chief clerk ever indulged in these orgies, but I never knew more than the mildest remonstrance being made by him or by anyone in authority.
Pay-day was also the time for squaring accounts. “The human species,” Charles Lamb says, “is composed of two distinct races, the men who borrow and the men who lend.” This was true of our office, but no equal division prevailed as the borrowers predominated and the lenders, the prudent, were a small minority. A general settlement took place monthly, after which a new period began—by the borrowers with joyous unconcern. “Take no thought for the morrow” was a maxim dear to the heart of these knights of the pen.
Swearing, as I have said, was not considered low or vulgar or unbecoming a gentleman. There was a senior clerk of some standing and position, a married man of thirty-five or forty years of age, who gloried in it. His expletives were varied, vivid and inexhaustible, and the turbid stream was easily set flowing. Had he lived a century earlier he might have been put in the stocks for his profanity, a punishment which magistrates were then, by Act of Parliament, empowered to inflict. He was a strange individual. Long Jack he was called. He is not in this world now so I may write of him with freedom.
No one’s enemy but his own, he was kindly, good-natured, generous to a fault, but devil-may-care and reckless; and, at any one’s expense, or at any cost to himself, would have his fling and his joke.
It was from his lankiness and length of limb that he was called “Long Jack.” He stood about six feet six in his boots. He must have had means of his own, as he lived in a way far beyond the reach of even a senior clerk of the first degree. How he came to be in a railway office, or, being in, retained his place, was a matter of wonder. Sad to tell, he had a little daughter, five or six years of age; his only child, a sweet, blue-eyed golden-haired little fairy, who, never corrected, imitated her father’s profanity, and apparently to his great delight. He treated it as a joke, as he treated everything. Long Jack loved to scandalise the town by his eccentricities. He would compound with the butcher, to drive his fast trotting horse and trap and deliver their joints, their steaks and kidneys to astonished customers, or arrange with the milkman to dispense the early morning milk, donning a milkman’s smock, and carrying two milk-pails on foot. I remember one Good Friday morning when he perambulated the town with a donkey cart and sold, at an early hour, hot cross buns at the houses of his friends, afterwards gleefully boasting of having made a good profit on the morning’s business. In the sixties and early seventies throughout the clerical staff of the Midland Railway were many who had not been brought up as clerks, who, somehow or other had drifted into the service, whose early avocations had been of various kinds, and whose appearance, habits and manners imparted a picturesqueness to office life which does not exist to-day, and among these. Long Jack was a prominent, but despite his joviality, it seems to me a pathetic figure.
CHAPTER VI.
FRIENDSHIP
Delicate health, as I have said, was my lot from childhood. After about eighteen months of office work I had a long and serious illness and was away from duty for nearly half a year. The latter part of the time I spent in the Erewash Valley, at the house of an uncle who lived near Pye Bridge. I was then under eighteen, growing fast, and when convalescing the country life and country air did me lasting good. Though a colliery district the valley is not devoid of rural beauty; to me it was pleasant and attractive and I wandered about at will.
One day I had a curious experience. In my walk I came across the Cromford Canal where it enters a tunnel that burrows beneath coal mines. At the entrance to the tunnel a canal barge lay. The bargees asked would I like to go through with them? “How long is it?” said