IT was murder, of sorts. At least that’s how it was described. The identity of the victim, who died in a horrific manner at the Swindon Railway Works, was not revealed other than he was “Smarmer’s brother”.

He was killed “with a blow on the head” shortly after starting work on a piece of machinery called the drop-stamp. The account goes on: “A jagged piece of steel, ten or twelve pounds in weight, flew from the die and struck him between the eye and ear knocking out half his brains.

“As things go, no one was to blame. The men were all hurrying together to get the work forward.

“But he was murdered, all the same – done to death by the system that is responsible for the rash haste and frenzy such as is common on the night shift.”

The book in which this tragic snippet of news appeared has been hailed as “undoubtedly the single most important commentary in the history of Swindon,” and “a landmark documentary of industrial life in Britain”.

The author himself felt he had achieved “the only good book on factory life that we have in England written by a working man”.

Yet Alfred Williams’ tome on his 23 years’ experience at Swindon’s Great Western Railway factory – which he hoped “will be of interest to a great many” – was a resounding commercial flop in the town where it was based.

Life In A Railway Factory – published by Duckworth of Covent Garden a century ago this year – only sold a dozen or so copies in Swindon during its first six years in print.

Yet its savage condemnation of harsh conditions, appalling accidents, “cruel hearts,” and weasley foremen in the foundries, blast furnaces, blacksmiths’ shops and engine sheds of one of the world’s great railway engineering complexes should have rung true with many of the 12,000 men who worked there.

Life In A Railway Factory – which can now be read either on-line or in a more traditional physical form – today takes its place among the great literary works outlining late 19th/early 20th Century industrial conditions in Britain.

Williams’ biographer Leonard Clark described it as: “The most daring and comprehensive condemnation of factory life that had appeared in Europe for 30 years.”

Upon its 1915 publication, The Daily Chronical extolled it as a “book of revelation,” while a lengthy review in The Times Literary Supplement proclaimed it “admirable”.

But the People of Swindon virtually ignored it. Why?

Alfred Williams (1877-1930) was no ordinary GWR worker. He was no ordinary man at all.

The son of a carpenter, Williams grew up in poverty but had an all-consuming passion for literature.

Despite long working hours – not to mention a daily nine-mile trudge to and from The Works and his South Marston home – he managed to teach himself Latin, Greek and French.

Having published poetry books and tracts on the wonders of the Swindon countryside, he decided to write a book drawing on 23 years at The Works.

From 14, Williams had toiled in the hot, grimy, physically testing environs of the stamping shop where pieces of red hot metal, required for the construction of locos, were stamped out.

He mostly operated a steam-hammer, thus earning the moniker The Hammerman Poet.

By 1911 Williams was busily compiling “a record of my experience in the workshop – strong, faithful pictures of the industrial life, rough and vigorous”.

Resigning from his job through ill health in 1914, he finished “my factory book” the following year, when it was published.

The result was a brutally honest account of just about every aspect of life “inside” the GWR at Swindon, as Williams saw it.

Had he still been employed there he would have swiftly been given the boot – not to mention a very hard time by some colleagues, while perhaps a slap on the back or a handshake from others.

Williams certainly didn’t flinch in describing the severe working environment – or the unsympathetic nature of some workers… even when colleagues were killed at work.

He writes: “One has to die before his mates in the shed think there is anything the matter with him.

“Then, in nine cases out ten – especially if he happens to be one of the poorest and most unfortunate – he is mercilessly sneered over.

“They even blame him for dying. In three days he is almost totally forgotten.

“Cruel hearts and feelings are bred in the atmosphere of the factory.”

Williams revealed the roles of a vast army of GWR workers… coalies, shunters, smiths, fitters, forgemen, boilermakers, carriage finishers, painters, washers down, cushion beaters, ash wheelers, wagon builders, clerks, draughtsmen, stampers, checkers, storekeepers and overseers who all “pass like zombies”.

Such were the conditions that “every hour spent outside the factory walls is a precious addition to life,” he insisted.

His biographer, the aforementioned Clark wrote: “Dante’s imaginative representation of hell is no more horrible than Williams’ description of the Swindon Railway Works.”

Readers of the book, he said, felt “the whole awful place, shaking and trembling, echoing and re-echoing with the ceaseless noise and heat of the stamping, rolling, coaling, shunting, forging, shingling and smithing.

“Noise upon noise, continual thunder, crash and reverberation, shatter our senses and stifle our protestations.”

It was, wrote Swindon historian Joe Silto several decades later “pretty strong stuff”.

Understandably, he felt, Williams’ book was “not completely accepted by those who read it”.

Swindon railway workers did not consider themselves “gesticulating automatons” or “zombies”, as they had been described.

Silto added: “Many of them were proud of the magnificent locomotives and gleaming carriages that The Works turned out, and of the part their skills and labour played in their construction.”

While praising its “high literary value,” the GWR Magazine at the time tore into Williams’ version of The Works with a vengeance.

“The author has been entirely out of his element in the factory since his thoughts were more often far away in the countryside or with his beloved books in the library,” it wrote.

“He detested the factory simply because it was a factory.”

No wonder it didn’t become a best seller in Swindon.

Time, though, has been kind to the hammerman’s bold, provocative, candid account of life in the famous Swindon Works 100 years ago.

In his introduction of a 1984 edition, Michael Justin Davis wrote: “It is a deeply human, richly detailed book, appreciative of man’s generosity, strength, skill, devotion and sense of fair play; but intensely scornful of man’s inhumanity, selfishness, arrogance and ruthlessness.”

  • IN the book Williams tells of a grey-headed furnace-man, no more than 50, who slipped into a “boshful of boiling water” after being accidentally pushed, severely scalding his head and shoulders.

    “He was absent on the sick list for two months. When he came in again he was not allowed to resume work at the furnace but was put wheeling out ashes from the smiths’ fires.”

    Despite Williams explaining to a passing manager what had happened and what the man was doing now, the manager responded that he “ought to be shifted”.

    Williams wrote: “A short while afterwards the furnace-man was discharged.”

  • “ACCIDENTS are frequent at the rolling mills. Burns are of common occurrence and they are sometimes very serious and occasionally fatal.

    “Great care is requisite in moving about amid so much fire and heated material.

    “Not long ago, as a youth was drawing a large, white-hot pile from the furnace to the steam-hammer, he slipped on the iron floor and fell at full length on his back.

    “As he fell the huge pile shed down and lodged on his stomach, inflicting frightful injuries.

    “He was quickly rescued from his tortuous position but there was no hope of recovery and he died a day or two afterwards.”

  • “THE natural fool or the systematic skulker is pitied and respected. Once his general conduct is understood he is taken for what he is worth and no more is expected of him.

    “In time he is rewarded. He may come to be a checker, a clerk or an inspector while the sterling fellow, the hard worker, may work himself to death like a slave.

    “Thus, deserving men, because they have proved themselves adept at the work, have been kept on the ash-barrows for ten or 12 years, sweating their lives away for 18 shillings a week.

    “Several, however, disgusted with the business, have left the shed and gone back to work on the farms, in the pure surroundings of the fields and villages.”

  •  Life In A Railway Factory can be read online at: www.alfredwilliams.org.uk/railwayfactory.html In 2007 an illustrated edition was published by Sutton Publishing and can be acquired online.