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May 16, 2018 · That task fell to vast gangs of itinerant labourers, also known as navvies. By 1850 a quarter of a million workers—a force bigger than the Army and Navy combined—had laid down 3,000 miles of railway line across Britain, connecting people like never before.
Navvy, a clipping of navigator (UK) or navigational engineer (US), is particularly applied to describe the manual labourers working on major civil engineering projects and occasionally in North America to refer to mechanical shovels and earth moving machinery.
a person, in the past a female servant, who does the dirty and unpleasant jobs in a house, such as cleaning: He treats me like a skivvy. SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases. People who serve other people. anti-slavery. below/above stairs idiom. boot boy. butler. dogsbody. gofer. handmaiden. housemaid. labourer. lackey. lady's maid. retainer
When the canals were being built, there was no established corps of what we now know to be civil engineers, and consequently those labourers tasked with building them became known as navigators, or navvies, as they themselves had a greater role in plotting a route for these waterways.
Navvies as Social Outsiders. I can't emphasise too much that navvies were quite literally outcasts, despised and hated (and feared) by very many people. My father always called them a fraternity. So children born to navvies most often became navvies themselves.
Mar 31, 2015 · Navvies were the men who actually built railways. The building of rail lines was very labour intensive. At one stage during the C19th, one in every 100 persons who worked in this country was a navvy. The word “navvy” came from the word navigator.
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Mar 19, 2021 · Navvies were noted both for their itinerant lifestyle and their detachment from wider society. These characteristics imply a lack of long-term association with any given place or with accepted social and cultural norms.
