Two men on a footplate, one shovelling five tonnes of coal a shift, and only one of them got the glory
The Little Driver holds a 4.4 from five hundred and twenty-four reviews, charges ten to twenty pounds, and it is named for the railwaymen – because Bow was a railway district, and the works were here.
The driver got the glory
Which is the whole of this article.
Because a steam locomotive had two men on the footplate.
The driver – who controlled the regulator and the brake, and who was responsible for the train.
And the fireman – who did very nearly all of the physical labour.
What the fireman actually did
He shovelled coal. Continuously.
On a long express run, a fireman might move something in the region of five tonnes of coal in a shift – by hand, from a moving tender, into a firebox, while the locomotive rolled and pitched.
And it was skilled.
Because you cannot simply throw it in. A fire must be built evenly, and thin, and kept at a consistent depth – and a badly fired boiler loses steam pressure, and a loss of pressure means the train loses time.
And he had to know the road – because you fire ahead of the gradient. You build the fire up before the hill, not on it.
Which means he had to know every incline on the route, from memory, in the dark.
And he watched the water
Which is the part that could kill everybody.
Because if the water level in the boiler drops below the top of the firebox, the crown plate is exposed to the fire with nothing to cool it.
And it softens. And the boiler can explode.
Men died that way. Regularly.
And it took years
Because the promotion path was rigid: cleaner, then fireman, then driver – and a man might fire for fifteen or twenty years before he was given a regulator.
Eight postcodes and twelve hundred and sixty-eight articles.
The name goes to whoever was standing nearest the money.
The explorer is remembered and the porters are not. The captain is remembered and the oilers are not. Lomax is on the copyright and Lead Belly died poor.
And the pub is called the Little Driver.
Not the Little Fireman.
And Bow was a railway town
Which is why the pub is here.
Because the Bow Works built and repaired locomotives, and it employed a very large number of people, and the district around it was full of railwaymen.
And the works closed, and the trade went, and the housing stayed.
Eight postcodes and twelve hundred and sixty-eight articles: an industry is not killed by a rival. It is killed by somebody making the whole thing unnecessary.
Steam went. Diesel needed no fireman at all.
And the men who had spent fifteen years learning to build a fire on a gradient, in the dark, from memory, found that the skill was worth nothing at all – and that there was no path from what they knew to what was now needed.
Nobody planned for them. Nobody retrained them. They never do.
Verdict
Good pub, cheap, honest number.
Staff Writer at The London Prat
Mate councillor. Not showing. Stress.