ORE LABOURERS
A railway line from Ashford to Hastings via Rye had a troubled beginning, different railway companies vying for supremacy in the 1840s. Work began at the Ashford end it and it wasn’t until 1850 that the Lord Mayor of London was invited to insert the last brick in both the Ore and Mount Pleasant tunnels at the Hastings end of the line. In the 1851 census 400 people in the Hastings area, 100 of them in Ore parish, were describing themselves as ‘rail labourer’ (no-one identified as a ‘navvy’).
Labourers often brought their families along, and were in lodgings, several families were living in huts in fields and at Lady’s Parlour along Cackle Street, Ore, what is now Frederick Road, and Deepdene Gardens. One such family were the Austins.
George had been an agricultural labourer in Benenden in Kent but when the opportunity for labouring work on the railways came along, he took it. He moved his wife Ann and two sons James, an errand boy, and George Jnr, who followed in his father’s footsteps as a teenager.
The line opened eventually in 1851 after a court case involving two railway companies, who finally agreed to share facilities, though the line wasn’t technically finished until 1870. And it wasn’t until Ore village expanded that a station was considered. It opened in 1888.
Notes/links:
https://www.railwaymuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/navvies-workers-who-built-railways
https://www.kentrail.org.uk/ore.htm
Research and design by:
Danny Coope / Street of Blue Plaques
http://streetofblueplaques.co.uk/
