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The Dirtiest of Jobs: Maintaining Sydney's Sewers 1890–1910
Peter Sheldon*
Public health crises followed as provision of water supply and sewage disposal failed to keep pace with Sydney's rapid, mid-nineteenth century growth. Construction of necessary infrastructure and the creation of the Water Board, in 1888, to administer it proved to be the solution. This article tells of those who laboured to maintain Sydney's sewers and thereby helped guarantee the public health of that metropolis. It is a story of grindingly heavy, dangerous and nauseatingly foul work but also of the workers who willingly took that work on. This willingness drew from life experiences and working histories in an era marked by a major depression and persistent employment insecurity for the formally unskilled. Under a paternalist Board, they found employment security, generous employment conditions and wide autonomy in carrying out their work. This convinced them to choose the protected backwater of house unionism rather than more militant union tendencies evident among labourers outside the Board.
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| Public debates about the provision of a sufficient water supply for Sydney and more effective forms of sewage removal have periodically erupted since the city's early days. Efforts to meet these challenges to service a fast-growing and spreading population in a difficult environment often only came to fruition once the existing situation appeared irremediably desperate. Political impediments of different types blocked earlier resolution particularly as these solutions involved very large expenditures. Such was the case from the 1850s when severe droughts and then environmentally-generated epidemics highlighted the inadequacies in quality and quantity of Sydney's existing water supplies, poor plumbing practices and the heavy reliance on outdoor cesspits that substituted for the lack of urban sewerage works. After decades of controversy, debate, sanitary reform campaigns and delaying tactics from opponents of systematic change, the New South Wales (NSW) government introduced Premier Henry Parkes' own long-sought, far-reaching public administration and engineering responses.1 |
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In 1879, the government had work start on the Upper Nepean water supply scheme and, in November 1886, Nepean water finally began to provide the long-term answer to the city's growing water needs. In the meantime, legislation – first in 1880 and then, more importantly in 1888 – established what soon became the Metropolitan Board of Water Supply and Sewerage (the Board). The Board was an authority whose membership came jointly from the ranks of Sydney's municipal councils and from appointees of the NSW government. Upon its establishment, the Board took over the ownership, control and operation of completed water supply and sewerage infrastructure.2 |
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The other part of the water supply and sewerage industry, construction of main works, remained with the government through the Public Works Department (PWD). This division between the two public sector agencies split the water and sewerage workforce. PWD manual employees worked on large construction jobs; the Board largely concentrated its manual workforce on maintenance although it also had responsibility for minor construction works. This industry was to become a major force in public sector activity, employment and urban development over successive decades. |
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From this author's published work, we know something of the people who worked in that industry, both employers and employees. The construction of water supply and sewerage works and their maintenance relied heavily on the work of large numbers of labourers. Labourers, with their lack of formal craft skills, did a wide variety of jobs in different industries. Many had in common experience in building, construction and quarrying. Irrespective of the skills peculiar to the different jobs (and many of these were interchangeable), the work required great strength and endurance and appears to have been an area of entirely male employment.3 |
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Within this large, general category, there were identifiable core groups who remained in relatively stable employment. This stability, like the instability experienced by the majority of workers, was the product of general economic conditions, the pattern of economic development and the peculiarities of each section of the labour market. The most important of these groups were specialised rather than general labourers; they were builders' labourers, rock miners and those labourers permanently employed by government instrumentalities. These became the areas of most persistent unionisation. Navvies, the largest and most typical group of construction labourers, inhabited the most open and least stable section of the market for labourers. They were general construction labourers building roads, railways, dams and canals, typically with pick and shovel. Much of their work was casual and itinerant and they also did a range of other unskilled and semi-skilled work.4 |
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There are published studies, again largely by this author, of the labourers who built the water, supply and sewerage works – whether for the PWD, the Board or contractors – and on the working lives and union involvement of the Board's clerical and supervisory staff at that time, mainly through the Public Service Association of New South Wales (PSA). In particular, we know more about a particular construction group, rockchoppers and sewer miners, and the broad patterns of labourers' union membership and union activity in the years before and after World War I.5 There is little or no published work, however, on those who worked on maintaining the Board's water supply and sewerage infrastructure during those years. |
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We do know though, that, under Judge Heydon's administration of the NSW Industrial Disputes Act, 1908, Board maintenance employees – in combination with the Board itself – contributed to the fragmentation of union representation among labourers, and particularly those working on building, civil construction works and public utilities. The new Act encouraged a large group of disgruntled sewer maintenance labourers to leave the PSA and establish the Metropolitan Board of Water Supply and Sewerage Employees Association in February 1909. This was, at inception, a house union of and for the Board's permanent manual employees although, with Heydon's support, it soon also took in Board casuals and thus monopolised union recognition for most of the Board's manual workforce.6 |
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Although disgruntled over declining real and relative wages, the house union's founders still identified closely with the Board and shunned the types of industrial disharmony or confrontation common in 'outside' unions of labourers. By the end of 1909, they (and the Board) had won Heydon's agreement that they constituted a separate 'industry' jurisdiction. It also meant that this union and the Board were to be counterparts in the making of awards – those judicial-like declarations that, for more than a century, determined the terms and conditions of employment for specified groups of employees and employers under Australia's arbitration systems. Within that system, for many decades after 1909, the Board's house union was to remain an inward-looking and industrially compliant body that encouraged a continuing identification with the Board as industry and employer.7 |
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Somewhat idiosyncratically then, the published literature tells us much about patterns of unionisation and almost nothing about the patterns of work and employment of those workers that formed and joined that union or about the workers themselves. This article seeks to remedy this oversight. Its focus is therefore the permanent sewer maintenance workforce. |
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The workings of the 1908 Act also generated an outstanding body of evidence regarding sewer maintenance work, the workers involved and their working lives. The Act gave award-making responsibility to new tripartite wages boards that operated under the purview of the Industrial Court. The Act itself defined each of the 'industries' that were to get a wages board. The Water Board was such an industry. Until then, the determination of wages, working hours and related conditions was the province of the Board's managerial prerogatives. The first wages board hearings therefore had the purpose, in retrospect, of establishing the historical base-line award for Board employees' substantive terms and conditions. Hearings took place during 1910 and provided a platform for Board employees and managers to explain to the wages board their views and experiences of the work and employment under the Board over the previous two decades. The exhaustive process of hearings to establish the knowledge necessary for this regulatory base-line generated voluminous evidence, in the form of wages board transcripts and, in particular, regarding sewer maintenance employees, the core of the new union. |
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This article works from an exhaustive array of sources, both primary and secondary, many from the Board's own archives. However, the evidentiary core of this article depends overwhelmingly on the large segments of these one thousand or so foolscap pages of wages board transcripts. The information obtainable from these pages brings a number of great advantages. First, the hearings gave voice – often at length – to 23 of the least visible of Sydney's working class, those who had toiled underground and often at night in Sydney's sewers. Those voices come through clearly and with great power. They are the voices of individuals who had led different lives but, at that moment, shared a common employer, a common set of tasks and common employment conditions. Their evidence includes – as was necessary for the purposes of making a first award – testimony concerning work in the sewers as well as the continuities and changes in employment under the Board. This evidence therefore provided the wages board (and us) with a clear picture of the Board as an employer and the sewers as workplaces. |
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Another advantage of this evidentiary source is that a number of these workers, in reflecting on their own work histories, located Board employment within a broader context of outside labouring and other jobs. This comparative lens provides us with compelling insights into the perceptions and realities of broader life chances among the formally unskilled in the decade or so on either side of 1900. Third, the hearings provided an opportunity to confront the views of masters and men in a situation where testimony was provided under oath and open to both cross examination from the advocates of union and employer and questioning from the five wages board members.8 |
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The following sections explain the development of Sydney's water and sewerage industry between the foundation of the Board in 1888 and the 1910 wages board hearings that were to culminate in the first award for Board employees. This is necessary to understand the Board's strategies, policies and practices and their impact on employment and work for sewer maintenance employees. Subsequent sections sequentially address the Board as an employer, the work of sewer maintenance, the characteristics of the men who worked on maintenance and the reasons why they chose these jobs. The conclusion draws the article's findings together to address a final question: why did these workers choose to form their own conservative and compliant house union rather than joining the broader currents of labourers' unionism? |
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Sewering Sydney: Public Health and Public Works, 1888–1910 | |
| Heavy public spending on Sydney water and sewerage works from the 1870s was a response to earlier urban growth. There were long time lags before these necessary, large and indivisible 'lumps' of investment moved from the arena of public debate to the schedules of public works expenditure. Only the threat of imminent public health catastrophe encouraged necessary spending.9 |
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The steady extension of sewerage in the 1890s was perhaps the most important contributor to improving Sydney's public health. In the meantime, urban overcrowding and poor domestic sanitation continued to generate filth, disease and premature death. About 70 per cent of Sydney's 5,961 deaths during 1896 were children under five and one third were less than one year old. Low-lying areas that still relied upon cesspits suffered most. Typhoid was one of the major killers in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Australia. Like tuberculosis, diphtheria and diarrhoea, it was a result of inadequate sanitation, public hygiene and housing. In 1894, Marrickville had 41 cases of typhoid or 31 cases per 10,000 population (of 13,200). Erskineville had 31 or 60 cases per 10,000 population (of 5,200) and Leichhardt had 23, or 13.5 per 10,000 population (of 17,000). For the same reasons, the 1897 diphtheria epidemic hit hardest in Botany and Camperdown. These problems improved in direct relation to the provision of adequate sewerage, sanitary connections and fittings.10 |
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In the decade to 1903, a series of typhoid epidemics claimed 914 lives. The Board's Medical Officer, Dr T.M. Kendall, denounced official neglect and urged immediate action to provide improved working-class housing and sanitation. Typhoid was avoidable; it was only a question of getting rid of filth and sewerage provided the best answer. Bubonic plague in January 1900 forced public health authorities to launch the urgent laying of an extensive system of low-level sewers. The incidence of plague subsequently declined markedly; with the extension of sewerage and introduction of better fittings, so did death rates from other contagious diseases.11 |
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Once committed, the momentum of this spending depended on factors apart from public health concerns. The costs of large-scale water supply and sewerage construction gradually diminished towards the end of each project. Expensive headworks (dams or sewerage outlets and their major conduits) gave way to the laying of ever-smaller branch and reticulation mains. At the same time, financial returns rapidly increased during this process. Headworks and branchworks were not income generating. The rates and charges from reticulation gradually recouped the costs of the whole system. There was therefore a financial imperative to complete the entire system expeditiously. Senior PWD officers stressed this combination of public health and economics. In early 1893, amid dramatic falls in PWD spending, Robert Hickson, PWD Commissioner and Engineer-in-Chief, championed further heavy spending for the sewering of Sydney's western suburbs. He concluded,
I would submit, that the drainage of Sydney and suburbs rests on a different footing from almost any other public work. Not only is the health of a large and growing community, equaling about one third of the population of the Colony, dependent upon its rapid completion, but its financial success is assured.12
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Public health concerns meant that water and sewerage construction gained to the extent that its proponents could differentiate these works from other areas of public works spending. As a result, Sydney sewerage construction activity recovered remarkably from the 1890s depression and, in 1897/98, accounted for just under one tenth of all PWD spending. This was not much below the expenditure on railways and tramways for all of New South Wales.13 |
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From its inception, however, the Board suffered a lack of financial autonomy, a position common to other statutory authorities at that time. When the PWD transferred completed works to the Board, the government added their cost to the Board's capital debt with the NSW Treasury. Although the Board had powers to levy rates and charges for water and sewerage, the money flowed directly into Treasury's Consolidated Revenue Account to repay that debt. The Board also needed ministerial approval for all expenditure. It raised loan funds for reticulation work through the government's borrowings – the Board's Loan Account. Expenses for maintenance and general operations came through its Revenue Account, after submitting annual estimates for parliamentary votes.14 |
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Unlike the PWD, the Board had problems getting sufficient loan finance for new sewerage works during the 1890s. As before, concessions only followed crises. In 1888, the Board had declared its intention to run the organisation: 'on as near a commercial basis as possible'.15 A decade later it had to revise this credo to take account of the costs of providing sanitation to a growing metropolis:
the Board is not a dividend paying institution, but a body engaged upon a work of a national character, viz., the reduction of the death-rate of the community and the improvement of the health of the Metropolis generally, which work ... is an advantage also to residents of the Colony as a whole.16
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At the start of the 1890s, there was the completion of two major sewage disposal schemes. These diverted effluent to ocean outfalls and replaced the City's brick sewers that had flowed into the harbour as well as a host of suburban household privies and cesspits. A further major branch system completed in 1900, connected a great many other areas.17 |
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An important element in the Board's expansion of sewerage was its programme of ventilation. Sydney's sewers had become damp and airless, often stagnant, slimy and foul. The presence of hydrogen sulphide gas made them: 'decidedly dangerous' for both public and maintenance workers. A ventilation system using raised inflow and outflow shafts gradually overcame these problems. John M. Smail, the Board's first Engineer for Sewerage (and later Engineer-in-Chief), was not one to exaggerate, but wrote of the first section of sewer ventilated:
During the erection of the shafts, the men employed were often compelled to stop work, being attacked by vomiting and modified forms of tonsillitis, or sewer-air throat, the Inspector also being a sufferer. On one occasion one of the men had to be removed in a semi-unconscious state.18
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Employment in the Board's Service | |
| The 1880 Act gave the Board complete independence in the hiring, firing and promotion of its 'officers and servants'. The former were the Board's salaried officers. The latter, the wages employees, were permanent manual workers largely involved in maintenance and ancillary work. The Act made no mention of casual labour. Both wages and salaried employees were to retain their permanency 'during the pleasure of the Board' and received their pay from the annual parliamentary (Revenue) appropriations. |
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Compared to other public sector employers, the Board had a great deal more autonomy over employment and used it to the full. It could and did draw on the experience of the departmental public service and the NSW Railways but developed its own managerial culture and practice, partly reflecting its connection to local government. This allowed it to adjust pay rates to take account of internal factors or market rates for categories in short supply. The President had the greatest single influence but could not prevail alone. The opinions of the Engineer-in-Chief carried considerable weight and, of these, Smail, was especially influential.19 |
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Minutes of the Board's meetings show that industrial relations questions often caused prolonged disagreements. Some members consistently favoured austerity for employees on behalf of ratepayers, a convenient excuse for the anti-labour majority on the Board. Compared to other public employers, the Board's majority was tough, mean and often arrogant. The anti-concession alliance mostly comprised whomever was Board President, the two NSW government-appointed Official Members – often both businessmen – and the conservative Alderman Thomas Henley. This alliance also favoured larger rewards for the Board's highest echelons. In 1903, Henley even led an unsuccessful effort to wrest the industrial relations initiative from the Board's President, Engineer-in-Chief and Secretary. Those most sympathetic to employees, with Alderman Richard Meagher the most vocal, gained most concessions during the short time when Board President Thomas Keele was an ally, partly due to his deep and mutual hostility to Henley. Keele's successor, W.J. Milner also sometimes joined them. Smail also, at times, supported claims of those permanent wages employees whom he felt suffered through hard toil and unhealthy conditions. Otherwise, these municipal representatives, more sympathetic to the plight of the low paid, were mostly in the minority.20 |
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The Board had a reputation for 'sweating' manual workers and the labour press periodically criticised the Board as a collection of wealthy and autocratic individuals.21 At the 1910 wages board hearings, one outspoken casual labourer gave a clear picture of the Board's reputation:
we have the impression that because the men in the Railways, the Harbour Trust, the Municipal Council are paid for holidays that it is only natural we should look forward to it, seeing we are all under the one head and are all taxpayers. It is perhaps selfishness on our part to look for the good and easy times our superior officers enjoy.22
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Its funding arrangements were crucial to the Board's approaches to organisational and employment questions. The Board divided its workforce to reflect its funding structure: dividing employees between those employed under Loan or under Revenue accounts. The necessity for continuous operations and the Board's capacity to generate income through rates meant its revenue funding was much more consistent. This allowed the Board to appoint a small core of permanent workers for the more sensitive and highly specialised maintenance work. There was no such technical need to keep a permanent workforce for construction and, from the Board's perspective, permanency would have only added financial rigidities to an unpredictable loan schedule. The Board therefore divided its manual workforce between permanent workers doing maintenance and casuals on construction.23 |
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The Board's revenue income was more stable than that of the Railways and its maintenance costs were lower. Water supply and sewerage were largely services of passive flows requiring only a small number of highly specialised workers to run a large and expensive system of capital works. As its maintenance budget actually rose during the depressed 1890s, the Board's maintenance workforce suffered much less insecurity than did their counterparts on the Railways.24 Yet, there was still no certainty that the Board would receive the revenue funds requested or required. |
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The stringencies inherent in its lack of budget autonomy encouraged the Board to squeeze the maximum out of its permanent manual employees. Thus, the Board tended to understaff its permanent manual workforce and concentrated it in areas connected to revenue raising or that required constant attention. Within the wages workforce, the (relative) beneficiaries were those working on maintenance or on areas connected to rate collection.25 Nonetheless, sewer maintenance employees faced repeated and prolonged bouts of work intensification. |
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The Board initially divided the sewerage system between a City Division and its growing Suburban Division. In March 1897, together these employed 80 maintenance labourers, the largest single body of the Board's permanent workforce. Subsequently, despite the continuing expansion of the system, restricted maintenance funds meant that the Board did not allow for the necessary increases to its permanent manual workforce – in this case in sewer maintenance. Supervisors merely increased the workloads of existing employees at a time when greater flows of water from an expanding system also made the work more difficult and sometimes dangerous. There were now more lines and manholes to clean and repair. Relative cutbacks in staffing levels did not leave enough time to complete all jobs and workers sometimes insisted on finishing the work properly against management directives. At other times, they took shortcuts that increased the unpleasantness or risks of their work.26 |
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The Board's appointment during 1900 and 1901 of many additional permanent maintenance labourers from its temporary workforce brought the sewer maintenance workforce in 1902 to 129, almost all of whom labourers. They now accounted for nearly one quarter of all Board officers and employees but this did not overcome the shortage. Renewed economic downturn from 1902 provoked the Board to reduce this number in 1903, which meant that the permanent workforce was unable to cope with the expanding workload. This prompted the Board to hire casual labour to clear specific sewer sections on a one-off basis, an ill-starred decision.27 |
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Despite its use of ongoing labour intensification, in employing and managing its maintenance workforce, the Board also introduced aspects of paternalism, welfarism and a managerial (control) strategy that Andrew Friedman, in 1977, termed 'responsible autonomy'.28 The relative lack of pressure for short-term profit or surplus facilitated its experimentation with less exploitative management strategies and a more benign or generous organisational culture through which it could display greater 'liberality'. |
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Maintenance could not stop without heavy costs to plant and without directly endangering people's comfort and health. The government, constituent municipal councils, the press and the public exerted more pressure on the Board. Yet, here, where the effects of disruption were large and soon noticeable, the Board, as an employer, was most technically and industrially vulnerable. Maintenance workers potentially had great industrial power. Building and construction labourers had already developed a reputation for job-level industrial action and close links to the wider labour movement. It was therefore in the Board's interest to have its maintenance labourers choose to identify closely with the Board's 'service' and to see their life chances and those of their families bound to the Board as industry and employer. This was true even in the sense of individual protest: the Board could not afford a high turnover of workers with rare knowledge of its systems and the specific skills necessary to maintain them. |
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The Board therefore needed to develop a loyal, long-serving and thoroughly knowledgeable sewer maintenance workforce. For this reason, it 'appointed' these labourers to permanent positions and granted them 'privileges', such as six days' paid annual leave plus paid public holidays. There was also sick and accident pay on a declining scale for up to three months. These were handsome concessions largely unknown to workers outside the Board and at a time when dread of the income effects of physical infirmity dogged the lives of manual workers. No wonder then, given the enormous insecurity of most unskilled jobs, that labourers prized these permanent positions.29 |
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There were other better-placed Board labourers too: experienced men who had learnt the skills of pipe laying and rough plumbing and whom the Board moved between maintenance and construction. Yet, these long-term casuals for many years suffered the worst aspects of the Board's casual and permanent employment. One was the broken time due to the stop-go nature of the Board's activities and wet weather. Another was the lack of clear definition as to maximum daily hours of work. In 1904, when the Board introduced the category of 'temporary permanent', these employees finally received the basic conditions for permanent employees: paid public holidays and one week's annual leave.30 |
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There were also substantial improvements in hours of work. At first all worked a 48-hour week, the same as or better than most workers in NSW at the time. Night workers, in particular, desired reduced hours in recognition of their highly unpleasant work. In 1905, the men, on the initiative of sewer maintenance veteran, Henry Rigg, and with the help of Inspector C. Rhodes, drew up a personal petition to Smail. He responded by agreeing to a 36-hour week for night work underground. While Smail subsequently extended the reduced hours to some of the smellier daytime jobs, most sewer maintenance workers continued working 48 hours.31 |
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The Board was a very sagacious employer in these ways. It had good reasons for this special recognition apart from the vulnerability of maintenance work to industrial conflict, collective or individual. There were other financial and technical matters. The Board's management had organised sewer maintenance into a very flat hierarchy with almost all on the lowest rung. Given the geographic spread of the work and its hidden nature, this meant little constant supervision for many of the gangs. In the early years, there had been no leading hands on night shifts and the oldest worker usually took responsibility. Even in 1910, there were no permanent leading men on the City sections. The Inspector often appointed the most skilled in the gang as a temporary leading man. The Board did finally appoint a few permanent leading men in suburban sub-districts to overcome the difficulties of overseeing the rapid growth of that system. Nevertheless, these leading men had to oversee a number of gangs on different runs or sections and this often meant walking two or three hours each day.32 |
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This high-trust, light-control pattern closely resembles Friedman's arguments about managements choosing a strategy of 'responsible autonomy' rather than 'direct control'. For sewer maintenance workers, the important elements included employment security, much lighter supervisory controls over their work and greater responsibility – but not increased status. According to Friedman, management is most likely to choose such a strategy where, as in this case, employee know-how and goodwill are more important to management's needs and where management has less to fear from its product market (or, in this case, revenue stream).33 There was no doubt about the skill and experience of the Board's permanent sewer maintenance labourers, and leading men attested warmly to their autonomy and reliability, especially in comparison to gangs of casual labourers who had an interest in making jobs 'last'. The wages board transcripts also make evident these sewer workers' own commitment to their often-odious work.34 |
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The Board's paternalism also flowed from similar conditions and reinforced its use of responsible autonomy. One feature was its preference for hiring relatives of ailing or deceased employees. There was also an informal working preference for family members of existing employees. These came in at the lower levels — by applying to district engineers, inspectors and overseers. Given the labour market for the unskilled, this linked families into the Board for generations. Their lives became increasingly enmeshed with the Board's history and their families became storehouses of lore as to the Board and its workings. Whatever they felt about the Board as an employer, they inevitably identified with the 'service'.35 |
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The Board's grievance procedures maximised low-placed employees' recognition of the Board's hierarchy and the debts owed for their 'privileges'. The approved methods were signed complaints, petitions and finally deputations. Unsigned complaints received no recognition. This, of course, limited the nature and extent of complaints. Acceptable requests went to heads of branches but real change only occurred if Smail or the President took them up. Although most were not successful, and many were simply discarded within the bureaucracy, there was no alternative. The Board expressed hurt and aggression at grievances taken outside this hierarchy. Until the formation of their house union in 1909, few permanent manual employees took the risk.36 |
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The annual picnic symbolised the coexistence of apparent paternalistic harmony within the Board's service and its class and hierarchical structure. It was important that all, from the highest to the lowest, should be present to indicate their belonging to the service. In fact, the Board made the day a paid holiday. To receive payment, all those not having to do essential work attended. By all accounts, the large number of employees and their families had a very enjoyable day's outing. There were games, races and competitions of all types with prizes and lollies for the children. Workers' families had a picnic lunch on the grassy area by the harbour where they listened to speeches from 'distinguished guests'. The latter did not lunch on the grass, instead partaking of a most sumptuous but free feast inside a pavilion. Here they raised their glasses and responded to a series of toasts: to royalty, to the NSW ministry and parliament, the press, members of the Board, the visitors, the ladies and, finally, to the chairman. There was no mention of the employees, whether blue or white-collared, who designed, built, maintained and administered the Board's works and organisation and who lunched much more modestly at their own expense outside.37 |
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The Work of Sewer Maintenance | |
| As the City Council sewerage system that the Board took over combined sewerage and stormwater drainage, every storm brought down into the sewers large quantities of silt and blue metal from the roads above. The silt clogged the pipes and built up in the tunnels; the blue metal wore away the brickwork. As a result, some of the old brick mains sewers in the City were collapsing and there were blockages in subsidiary sewers. The system needed extensive repairs and cleaning so that, during the early 1890s, half of the sewer maintenance workforce worked full-time just removing silt from the old mains sewers. Others worked at cleaning and scraping the filthy tunnels walls or on the embryonic suburban systems. By 1894, the rapid extension of sewer reticulation had reduced the silt problem. An expanded system sent down a greater flow of water that flushed the sewers more effectively. In response, the Sewerage Inspector moved maintenance workers onto other maintenance work and further out into the expanding system.38 |
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Sewer maintenance continued day and night. Some worked permanently on the day shift, others on the night and still others moved between the two. Where they worked in groups of three, there was considerable informal swapping of surface and underground work and of tasks inside the tunnels.39 There were a variety of tasks: cleaning out the tunnels; cleaning the tidal flaps, intercepts and sandpits on the low levels; removing 'chokages'; putting in junctions; renovating, lifting and lowering manhole covers, and a host of general repairs. Some required knowledge of rockchopping, pipelaying or concreting, but the skills learnt from working daily and from seasoned workmates were even more important. These men were very proud of their practical ability and experience. According to them, it was difficult for ordinary surface labourers or even the mighty rockchoppers to get, 'into the system ... for working a sewer'.40 This, they felt, differentiated them from other labourers inside and outside of the Board's workforce. |
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Underground sewer work also held dangers unknown to those working above. Not for nothing did foremen insist on new workers spending time on surface jobs before climbing down manholes. After 20 years working on the sewers, Henry Rigg could testify that, 'If a man were a new chum ... he would drown himself if he did not burn himself'.41 First, there was the danger of flooding from sudden rainstorms as overflow from street gutters fed directly into the sewers. In the early days, flash floods coursing through sewer tunnels had swept unwary maintenance labourers to their deaths. As a result, Smail ordered workers not to enter sewers if there were a chance of rain and no worker was to enter a sewer unless another worker remained above to keep a look out. Nevertheless, some of those working below continued to have narrow escapes when circumstances hindered a rapid exit.42 |
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Breathing was the second major occupational danger. Contrary to Dr Kendall's optimistic reports, it was some years before ventilation made a significant impact on the quality of the air below. In many sewers, the air was still bad in the early years of the new century. Beyond the terrible stench, there were also the dangers of sewer gas. Maintenance workers complained of headaches and dizziness, nausea, collapsing below and of having to be helped or carried out. Sometimes the illness lasted for a couple of days, at other times it was a question of weeks. The atmosphere below was particularly suffocating when the surface air was still and close and in the very deep Western District sewers. |
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The sewer maintenance workers found Dr Kendall unsympathetic, even when they told him of their work slowly debilitating them, sapping their strength and causing continuous and often long bouts of illness. Rather, Kendall always seeking to ingratiate himself with the Board, commented approvingly on the success of their ventilation scheme; for Kendall 'sewer disease' was a thing of the past. He subsequently assured the Board that outbreaks of typhoid among sewer maintenance workers were unrelated to their work. Kendall's successor, Dr E.S. Stokes, cut an even worse figure in terms of professional ethics. He used bogus sampling methods to argue that sewer maintenance work was the healthiest in the Board's service and that the sewers were more conducive to good health than the atmosphere on the surface. It was only a short step from advertising Sydney's sewers as health clinics! As a result, rather than consult Kendall or Stokes, the men preferred to go to their local or Lodge (friendly society) doctors although this frequently caused problems in convincing the Board to provide sick pay.43 |
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Some workers took preventive care. On Kendall's suggestion, John Potter took up smoking a pipe, the shortest and as close to the nose as possible, to kill airborne germs. His other precaution against 'sewer fever' was to keep 'well physiced'. Jeremiah Patrick Ring, otherwise a light drinker, took a touch of medicinal brandy to calm his queasy stomach. It was not surprising that the work affected the men so badly. Even the Board's senior officers admitted that, in 1910, two decades of ventilation works had not resolved the problem of foul smells. Still, someone had to do this important work and Smail passed off employee complaints before the wages board, reminding a complaining sewer maintenance worker that, 'When you joined the service you knew you were not going on a rose farm'.44 |
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Other risks were common to all who worked in the sewers. With no change sheds, workers had to change out of their wet and filthy clothes on the surface with no protection from the winter chill. There was also the risk that the sewer gases could catch fire. Some workers were lucky to escape with their lives when gases in manholes or sewers ignited or even exploded off the miners' lamps, candles or matches they used for light.45 |
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Aside from the general dangers, most tasks were extremely unpleasant and some very arduous. Putting in junctions off main sewers and pipe laying were tricky jobs and only for those experienced at rockchopping and pipe jointing. Whoever did this work ran a high risk of infected cuts and scratches and even blood poisoning.46 |
50
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Then there was 'dredging', where a team of three moved along the line of the larger sewers, removing residues. One pulled a rope dragging a heavy cup through the silt on the tunnel floor between manholes. The cup, held about three gallons and when full, they emptied it, often into a special barrow. The second worker below then pulled the cup back to the point where the silt had accumulated. The third, who remained on the surface, used a windlass or shearlegs to pull the bucket or barrow up when full. Even working on the downgrade to take advantage of the flow of water, it was often killing work and extremely unpleasant. Where manholes were further apart, the toil increased. |
51
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One worker complained of pulling a two inch rope hand over head for more than 275 yards at a time and Leading Man William Dwyer, who no longer had to dredge, recalled that, 'You are pulling yourself to pieces when dredging. It would take a horse sometimes to shift the bucket'.47 Working in the narrower sewers, some only three and a half feet by two and a half feet, was even more difficult. The men were always stooping or crawling when dredging heavy loads. Said Rigg, 'I suppose ... we had about 15 inches from our nose to the water, and make no mistake we had to work hard'. The cup shifted solid matter along the sewer floor giving off putrid smells that rushed along the tunnel to assault the dredger. As Potter complained, 'The man has his head down on to the rope and he gets the full blast of it'.48 |
52
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Another vital but obnoxious task was removing 'chokages', blockages in the smaller pipes, by 'rodding'. Maintenance workers followed the blocked sewer until they found a manhole not filled with water. Upon entering the manhole and locating the choke, they would stick in up to 30 short rods in an effort to shift it. Sometimes the pipes were very tightly blocked and Potter had seen, 'chokages coming out of a pipe like meat coming out of a sausage filler'.49 The more packed chokes often held back large quantities and maintenance men had to exit quickly to avoid being swept along the pipe. This work always meant getting covered in filthy water and Thomas Linkenbagh remembered one big choke where, '[I] sank to my waist or just enough to keep my face out of it; I found it was two blocks ... I worked for about 3 hours at it in the water'.50 Decaying, putrid matter such as dead animals were often the cause of the choke or were banked up behind. When shifted, they gave off a nauseating stench. The low level sewers presented special problems. As the pipes were narrow (six or nine inches), maintenance workers had to clear chokages and do other cleaning work while cramped in the intercept pits or manholes.51 |
53
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Most construction labouring in that era was extremely heavy, grinding work. Sewer maintenance work could be too, if less consistently. More importantly, there were the disadvantages of the wet, the stench, the lack of space and of fresh air. Henry Rigg did not suffer from the odours because of his poor sense of smell, but noted that others did:
It is a weekly occurrence pulling them up and finding them reaching their heart up. I have been down the sewer with mates who could not live in it, and have had to go out.52
It was different when supervisory staff went below. Then, six or more labourers worked to removed a string of manhole covers to increase the ventilation and reduce the discomfort below.53 |
54
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The cramped, wet conditions also took their toll on clothes and boots. The continued stooping and crawling wore out the knees and backs of even the most solid clothes and poor wages made it difficult to constantly replace them. This was a source of anguish to men such as Thomas Campbell who took their role as representatives of the Board seriously. Nevertheless, a tightfisted Board refused Smail's proposal to supply waterproof jackets to workers cleaning manholes. Adequate boots were extremely important to these workers' health and comfort. Even Dr Kendall overcame his usual optimism and indicated better footwear as a remedy for persistent health problems due to working in water. Dredging, in particular, put constant stress on the uppers of boots. Working in silted water wore them away. The Board at times supplied boots or paid a weekly allowance in lieu. Maintenance workers preferred the former as the money did not cover the cost of replacement.54 |
55
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The Men who Maintained the Sewers | |
| Who were these workers whose very difficult, unpleasant and unhealthy work contributed so much to the health of the rest of Sydney's population? In 1902, most of the City Division workforce were the labourers the Board had hired as young men in 1890 and 1891. This workforce gradually aged prior to Smail's new appointments a decade later. As much of the suburban system was newer and also less labour intensive, more than half its workforce had had much shorter periods of service. Here again, although 1900 and 1901 had been years of heavy recruitment this was not a decisively younger workforce because recent appointments had come from the ranks of seasoned temporary labourers. By 1909, both sections had aged further notwithstanding additional appointments in 1901.55 |
56
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The evidence of 23 sewer maintenance labourers and leading men before the 1910 wages board hearings affords a closer view of this workforce. In service and age they were quite representative of the overall sewer maintenance workforce. Six had joined the Board prior to 1892, three over the following five years, ten between 1897 and 1901 and finally four after 1901. Most had started with the Board in their twenties or early thirties. In common with much of Sydney's labouring population at the time, they almost all lived in the first and second rings of working class housing around the City: in Balmain, Alexandria, Surry Hills, Darlinghurst, Newtown, Marrickville, Glebe and Pyrmont. |
57
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Despite these similarities, they had more varied work histories. Nine had previously worked predominantly as construction or quarrying labourers in town and country, mainly for the PWD or its contractors. They had done a range of tasks including pipelaying, rockchopping, wheeling and timbering. Others had also spent time rockchopping or on pick and shovel. These included three ex-miners, an ex-shearer and an ex-seafarer/fisherman. |
58
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Their experiences of the 1890s depression and of recession between 1902 and 1905 help explain these men's working life stories and their perceptions of how employment could and did shape their life chances. For example, George Davis had lived the life of many of the formally unskilled. He had travelled New South Wales and Victoria — bridge building, shearing, gold mining, sewer mining, dredging and cleaning. By 1910, he was 58, married with five children and had buried seven others. He had brought his family to Sydney for his wife's health, never intending to stay. There had been work as a contract rockchopper and rock miner, a ganger on City Council pipe laying and on fumigating sewers. More children and much broken time had made it financially impossible to return to the country.56 |
59
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Charles Young had left coal mining in Newcastle because of the irregularity of the work. Jeremiah Patrick Ring had done some quarrying but had mainly worked as a 'gun' shearer in Australia and New Zealand. Finding married life and itinerant work incompatible, he had given up the latter. William Dwyer had been a railway carter. Unable to afford to replace his dead horse, he had then worked as a labourer on the railways until they dismissed him, 'as they usually do when you get in a certain time and are entitled to a rise; they then knock you off and start you again next week'. John Duff had been a supervisor on the construction of the Glebe Island Bridge until PWD retrenchments in 1904. William Brown, a pastry cook disgruntled about low wages, had talked his way into a Board job during the illness of his father, who had been a former City Council labourer. Both father and son were working for the Board in 1910. Martin O'Mara, an apprentice carpenter, had given up his indenture to take his deceased father's position in the Board's service. Of the two ex-coal lumpers, Henry Rigg had been victimised for taking an active part in the Maritime Strike. There were also two ex-carters, a coachbuilder made redundant by the new fashion for buggies and sulkies and a plumber's improver. Drought had wiped out Ernest Wigzell's poultry farm.57 |
60
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These experiences explain the readiness of these men to do such unpleasant work for lower hourly wages than many of them could have received outside the Board during prosperous times. It was permanent employment that appealed to these men, many of whom had large families to support.58 There was none of the impoverishing broken time common elsewhere when times got harder as it had only a few years before the 1910 hearings. |
61
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Sewer maintenance was vital to the health of the metropolis and sewerage rates provide the NSW Government with ready and continuing revenues. The Board could put a strong case for its maintenance funding and wages expenditure for sewer maintenance continued to rise gradually during the depression years of the 1890s. Thus, while thousands of other labourers tramped and begged their way into temporary or casual work at greatly reduced pay, not only had these men kept their full-time jobs, they had suffered no cut in wages. |
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Permanent labourers received other advantages too from employment in the Board's service. There were the paid annual holidays and sick and accident pay that helped alleviate fears of broken earnings from dangerous and dirty jobs. Then there were the greatly reduced hours of work for some of the most unappealing work. These were concessions almost unknown to labourers outside and very rare in manual private sector employment. As well, if the work below was oppressive and unwholesome, it had improved in the ten years since the turn of the century.59 |
63
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Nor was work discipline as harsh as on construction. The leading men came from and remained close to the permanent labourers. Nevertheless, fear of surprise visits from an inspector or foreman drove them to vigilantly oversee the jobs they visited. It even moved them to take their coats off and lend a hand when the work was slow, something unthinkable for gangers, their peers on construction. The labourers regarded the higher echelons such as Smail, Inspectors Rhodes and Mackenzie and Foreman Berrie as 'hard but fair'. There was little latitude but if the maintenance men worked consistently, these officers treated them fairly, given the prevailing standards and might support claims for improvements in working conditions.60 However, they had a terrible time with Ben Nettleton. |
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Nettleton joined the Board in 1898 and, by 1909, he had replaced the late, well-regarded Berrie as foreman. His Orangeman's hatred for the many of Irish Catholic origin among the Board's labourers fuelled his tyrannical hostility towards those below him. His hatred showed in a series of totally false accusations that embarrassed other Board officers at the 1910 wages board hearings. He drove the labourers, tormented them, refused their most reasonable requests and spied on them from behind bushes. He even eavesdropped on them in the sewer tunnels.61 If so, he may have heard the words the normally mild-mannered Ring, ex-shearer and bush balladeer, had penned in his honour:
Poor old Berrie is dead, 'tis true,
No better boss a sewer man knew,
He was often stern, but always fair,
And his soul may rest in peace,
By the sewer man's prayer.
But now our boss his name is Ben,
He's neither good for God nor men,
Your proper place it is in Hell,
Where all such tyrants like you should dwell.
You Yorkshire pig, we'd like to dig
Your grave tomorrow Ben,
We'll dig it deep and ram it well,
With the tools the Board would have to lend.62
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65
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This vignette is important for this argument as the type of continual, petty tyranny that Nettleton employed (and enjoyed) was extremely common on construction jobs. There gangers ruled, literally, with their iron fists and were prone to sacking men at will and at an hour's notice. It clearly was not common on sewer maintenance. Nettleton may have survived and even prospered modestly in the Board's service, but he was unable to cancel these men's employment and the conditions and the benefits that went with it.63 |
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Conclusion | |
| This then is the story of formally unskilled workers whose organisationally-specific knowledge and informal work skills brought them a relatively secure and well-treated island of employment in the sea of insecurity and instability facing most labourers. The work they did and the employment and working conditions they received reflected technical demands of the sewerage system but, most of all, they were the result of the Board's own employment and management strategies, policies and practices. The Board had to meet a range of budgetary pressures but these were less demanding than those of many other employers, public or private. Moreover, it had to meet rising societal expectations regarding its role in improving Sydney's public health. The provision of an effective sewerage system was fundamental to this role as was that system's proper maintenance. In this, the Board relied a great deal on the skills and knowledge of its permanent maintenance labourers, on their ability to work autonomously, their sense of responsibility, commitment and goodwill. |
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Given these organisational and employment conditions, their demographic characteristics and life experiences clearly explain the choices these workers made regarding their options for 'exit' and 'voice'. Largely middle aged and with large dependent families, these mainly formally unskilled workers had plentiful direct experience of the vagaries of their segments of the external labour market, particularly during depression years. The Board's treatment of its 'permanent casuals' also provided an ever-present reminder of the implications of falling out of their employer's core workforce. Given the range of advantages of their employment, there was little to tempt them to leave the Board's employment, despite the foulness and heaviness of their daily toil. Nor too, were they willing to risk the Board's ire by collective expressions of dissent that threatened the Board's own paternalistic sensibilities. |
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Given the times and their diverse employment histories, these permanent maintenance workers found the Board a reasonable, even fair employer. The contrast with the position of construction labourers could not have been starker. These sewer maintenance workers had permanent jobs, a range of favourable employment conditions and access to their supervisors over grievances. Further there was, Nettleton aside, a lack of conflict over work discipline and a great degree of autonomy and control over how they carried out their work. These advantages tied them to the Board as industry and employer. It also encouraged them, in 1909, to choose a collective voice approach that distanced themselves from the unionism of 'outside' labourers unbeholden to the Board and to found and subsequently dominate the Board's compliant and inward-looking house union. If they had grievances, they preferred to deal with these internally, unaffected by militant currents outside. Given the alternative scenarios for union representation, the Board quickly determined to support them in this choice. |
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Peter Sheldon has published extensively on labour history, particularly on unions and the early years of arbitration in New South Wales. He also researches contemporary employers, employer associations and employment relations policy in Australia and abroad. He is Associate Professor, School of Organisation and Management at UNSW,
<p.sheldon@unsw.edu.au>
Endnotes
*This article has been peer-reviewed for Labour History by two anonymous referees.
1. A.J.C. Mayne, Fever, Squalor and Vice, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1982, pp. 17–30; Peter Sheldon, 'Professor Smith and the Water Question', in Roy MacLeod (ed.), University and Community in Nineteenth Century Sydney: Professor John Smith 1821–1885, University of Sydney, Sydney, 1988, pp. 70–84. See also an official Water Board history, F.J.J. Henry, The Water Supply and Sewerage of Sydney, Metropolitan Water, Sewerage and Drainage Board (MWSDB), Sydney, 1939, pp. 156 and passim; Margo Beasley, The Sweat of their Brows: 100 Years of the Sydney Water Board 1888–1988, Sydney Water Board, Sydney, 1988, pp. 23–4; 42–5, 54, 104–5, 120–2.
2. W.V.Aird, The Water Supply, Sewerage and Drainage of Sydney, MWSDB, Sydney, 1961, p. 21. This organisation, after a number of changes of name, authority, composition and mission is now called 'Sydney Water'.
3. See the work of Peter Sheldon: 'Public vs Private Employers on New South Wales Public Works, 1890–1910', Australian Economic History Review, vol. 36 , no. 1, March 1993, pp. 49–72; 'The Dimming of Illusions: Changing Attitudes of Labourers to Direct Government Employment on NSW Public Works, 1899–1916', Australian Journal of Public Administration, vol. 48, no. 2, June 1989, pp. 139–45; 'In Division is Strength: Unionism among Sydney Labourers, 1890–1910', Labour History, no. 56, May 1989, pp. 43–59; 'System and Strategy: The Changing Shape of Unionism among NSW Construction Labourers, 1910–19', Labour History, no. 64, November 1993, pp. 115–35.
4. Sheldon, 'In Division', pp. 44–5. Denis Rowe, 'The Robust Navvy: The Railway Construction Worker in Northern New South Wales, 1854–1894', Labour History, no. 39, November 1980, pp. 32 and 34. Itinerant labourers also worked in mines or as shearers, cutting cane, labouring in the pastoral industry or in agriculture or doing casual labouring around the ports.
5. Peter Sheldon, 'A Middle Class Union: The Early Years of the Public Service Association of NSW', Labour & Industry, vol. 2, no. 1, March 1989, pp. 97–118; 'Job Control for Workers' Health: The 1908 Sydney Rockchoppers' Strike', Labour History, no. 55, November 1988, pp. 39–54; Sheldon, 'In Division'; Sheldon, 'System and Strategy'.
6. Sheldon, 'In Division'; pp. 54–57.
7. Awards, in fact, are legislative declarations rather than judicial. For discussion of Heydon's deliberations, see Sheldon, 'In Division'. For the history of the house union, see Peter Sheldon, Maintaining Control: A History of Unionism among Employees of the Sydney Water Board, PhD thesis, Department of History and Politics, University of Wollongong, 1989.
8. These were the Metropolitan Water and Sewerage (General Labourers) [Wages] Board, Transcript of Hearings (hereafter MBWSSEA Wages Board) 1910. Consulted in the archives of the (then) Water and Sewerage Employees Union, 1984–86. The union, as the Australian Services Union (NSW Division), deposited these archives in the Mitchell Library in 2000.
9. See for example, NSW Parliamentary Debates, Session of 1889, p. 5341.
10. MWSDB, Annual Reports, Sydney, 1894, p. 33; 1896/97, p. 32; 1897/98, p. 50; 1898/99, p. 48. See also W.A. Sinclair, 'Economic Growth and Well-Being: Melbourne 1870–1914', Economic Record, vol. 51, no. 134, June 1975, pp. 154–5.
11. MWSDB, Annual Reports, 1894, p. 32; 1898/99, pp. 52, 54, 56; 1899/1900, p. 54, 1902/03, p. 37; 'Report of the Government's Chief Medical Officer, J. Ashburton Thompson', in M. Kelly, Plague Sydney 1900, Doak Press, Sydney, 1981, no page numbers; F. Crowley (ed.), Colonial Australia, Volume 3, Nelson, West Melbourne, 1980, pp. 584–6; A. Birch and D.S. Macmillan, The Sydney Scene 1788–1960, Hale and Iremonger, Sydney, 1982, pp. 251–4; Public Works Department (PWD), Annual Reports, 1899/1900, p. 12; 1900/01, p. 12.
12. PWD, Annual Report, 1892, p. 6. The Board defended deficit financing on similar grounds. MWSDB, Annual Reports, 1891, p. 63; 1899/1900, pp. 5, 10; 1903/04, p. 5.
13. PWD, Annual Report, 1897/98, p. 10.
14. F.A. Larcombe, The Stabilisation of Local Government in New South Wales, 1858–1906, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 1976, p. 102; MWSDB, Annual Report, 1903/04, p. 24; MWSDB, Dual Control of Water Supply and Sewerage Works, 1907, pp 1–3, 6, 9–11, 13–4, MWSDB Archives. These MWSDB records are now available in the State Archives of New South Wales (at Kingswood).
15. MWSDB, Annual Report, 1888, p.3.
16. MWSDB, Annual Report, 1897/98, p. 11.
17. Aird, Water Supply, pp. 132–3, 139–40, 142, 144–5; 'Report to the Public Works Department Roads Branch by Geo. H. Stayton on a System of Sewerage for the Western Suburbs of the City of Sydney', 30 January 1891, pp. 2–3, 11, 24. MWSDB Archives.
18. MWSDB, Annual Reports, 1890, pp. 48 and p. 49; and 1893, pp. 40, 44.
19. Public Service Board of NSW, 'Report of Enquiry into the Department of Metropolitan Board of Water Supply and Sewerage, in connection with the Grading of Officers', 1907 (PSB-MWSDB), p. 1, MWSDB Archives.
20. MWSDB Minutes, 3 August 1904; 15 May 1907; 1 June 1910. For Henley's campaign, ibid., 18 February 1903, 27 May 1903. Keele was Board President, 1904 to 1908. For Keele, Henley and industrial relations, ibid., 8 January 1907, 22 February 1907, 13 March 1907, 25 March 1907, 18–19 May 1907. For Milner's support of employees, ibid., 27 March 1908. For Ald. Meagher, ibid., 6 and 12 May 1908, 18–19 May 1909, 29 June 1909. All MWSDB Minutes referred to in this article are available in the State Archives of NSW (at Kingswood).
21.Public Service Journal (journal of the Public Service Association), 10 November 1904, p. 10. Worker, 28 January 1909, p. 26; J. Rydon and R.N. Spann, New South Wales Politics, 1901–1910, F.W. Cheshire, Melbourne, 1962, pp. 23, 96.
22. MBWSSEA Wages Board, 1910, p. 677.
23. Larcombe, Stabilisation, p. 101; F.A. Bland, Budget Control, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1938, pp. 36, 105; Aird, Water Supply, p. 216; MWSDB, Minutes of the Meeting of the Board, 24 April 1907, MWSDB Archives.
24. MWSDB, Annual Reports. The same spending pattern was true for NSW local and semi-government spending on water and sewerage within which the Board was the dominant element. N.G. Butlin, Australian Domestic Product, Investment and Foreign Borrowing 1861–1938/39, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1962, pp, 371, 372. For railway maintenance workers and the 1890s, Gregory E. Patmore, A History of Industry Relations in the N.S.W. Government Railways: 1855–1929, PhD thesis, Department of Industrial Relations, University of Sydney, 1985, pp. 106–7.
25. MWSDB Annual Reports.
26. Smaller numbers of maintenance labourers worked outside the two large systems on sewage farms, suburban outfalls, and pumping stations. The Board classed them separately as does this article. MWSDB, Annual Report, 1898/99, p. 82; MBWSSEA Wages Board 1910, pp. 173, 199, 238.
27. MWSDB Minutes, 21 March 1900, 25 July 1901, 26 October 1904 and generally during 1905; MWSDB, Annual Report, 1901/02, p. 64.
28. Andrew L. Friedman, Industry and Labour: Class Struggle at Work and Monopoly Capitalism, Macmillan, London, 1977.
29. MBWSSEA Wages Board, 1910, pp. 154, 158, 171, 178, 209.
30. Temporary permanents were initially those with more than 12 months' continuous employment. Some benefited but others, kept uninformed of their new rights, did not. In 1907, the Board reinterpreted 'continuous service' as an aggregate 11 months during the previous year. This was still a very restrictive definition compared to the six months needed for temporary status on the NSW Railways. MBWSSEA Wages Board, 1910, pp. 523, 597, 611, 632, 632A, 634–5, 636, 646, 648, 649, 651, 652–3; MWSDB Minutes, 8 June 1904; 1 May 1907; Transcripts of the Industrial Court (ICT), 11 April 1910, p. 7, vol. 2/145, State Archives of NSW.
31. C.P. Mills, 'Hours of Labour in New South Wales', NSW Industrial Gazette, vol. 109, no. 3, 30 June 1953, pp. 802–3; MBWSSEA Wages Board, 1910, pp. 21–2, 36, 69–71, 105, 131, 169.
32. MBWSSEA Wages Board, 1910, pp. 55–6, 286.
33. Friedman, Industry and Labour.
34. MBWSSEA Wages Board, 1910, pp. 100–1,165–8, 171, 175.
35. MWSDB Minutes, 19 April 1900, 30 May 1905, 13 March 1907.
36.Ibid., 31 December 1900, 9 January 1901 13 December 1905; 22 February 1907; Public Service Journal, 10 May 1902, p. 1; 10 April, 1903, p. 18.
37.Ibid., 10 October 1903, p. 3; MWSDB Minutes, 21 October 1908.
38. MWSDB Annual Reports, 1890, p. 44; 1891, p.64; 1892, pp. 4, 52–4, 61; 1893, pp. 3, 70; 1894, p. 101.
39. MBWSSEA Wages Board 1910, pp. 20, 119.
40. Evidence of Rigg, p. 31. Also pp. 100–1, 134, MBWSSEA Wages Board 1910.
41.Ibid., p. 33. See also p. 135
42.Ibid., pp. 21, 33, 38, 65, 127, 133, 135, 139, 146–7.
43.Ibid., pp. 19, 32, 36, 67, 97, 98,124,164, 189, 179, 227., 288–9, 837–8, 840; MWSDB Annual Reports, 1893, p. 8, 1897–98, p. 32, 1902, p. 38.
44. MBWSSEA Wages Board 1910, pp. 50, 98, 133–4
45.Ibid., pp. 23, 33, 64, 116–7.
46.Ibid., pp. 28, 125., 135, 189.
47.Ibid., pp. 171. See also pp. 24, 29–30, 815.
48. For Rigg, ibid., p. 33. See also pp. 16, 135, 163. For Potter, ibid, p. 141. Also see p. 33.
49.Ibid., p. 132.
50.Ibid., p. 178. See also pp. 32, 58, 132, 163, 191.
51.Ibid., pp. 62, 194, 206.
52.Ibid., p. 33. See also p. 100.
53.Ibid., pp. 23, 133.
54.Ibid., pp. 35, 48, 134, 268. MWSDB Minutes, 13 October 1909; MWSDB, Annual Report, 1895/96, p. 41.
55. From the Board's 'Annual Returns of Officers and Servants' etc. MWSDB Archives.
56. MBWSSEA Wages Board, 1910, p. 47–8.
57.Ibid., pp. 85, 87, 101, 151, 166, 174, 191–2, 204–5, 218, 244, 247.
58.Ibid., pp. 101, 130.
59.Ibid., pp. 154, 158, 171, 178, 209.
60.Ibid., pp. 152–3.
61. MWSDB Minutes 11 and 18 March 1903; MBWSSEA Wages Board, 1910, pp. 750, 760–2, 771–2, 778–9. The poem came from an interview the author conducted with W.H. Ring, Parramatta Nursing Home, 28 January 1986. The then very elderly Ring junior still carried the stories of the hated Nettleton he had heard from his own father.
62. W.H. Ring interview.
63. Sheldon, 'In Division'; Sheldon, 'System and Strategy'.
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