From Fields to Railways: The Jenkins Family and the Making of Working-Class Britain
From Fields to Railways: The Jenkins Family and the Making of Working-Class Britain
By Antony David Davies FRSA
From the hop fields of Herefordshire to the steam-filled workshops of Crewe, this is the story of one family's journey through a century of change.
The Jenkins family began as agricultural labourers in the Lugg Valley, living lives marked by poverty, resilience, and the constant struggle for survival. In the mid-nineteenth century they left the fields behind, moving first to North Wales and then to Crewe - a town built entirely around the London & North Western Railway. There, their sons became part of Britain's railway generation, men and women whose work, discipline, and endurance helped shape modern industrial society.
Drawing on parish registers, census records, newspapers, trade union lists, and family photographs, Antony David Davies reconstructs the lives of ordinary people whose stories rarely find a place in history books. Alongside tales of tragedy - accidents on the line, childhood illness, and hardship in the steelworks - are stories of aspiration and mobility, as later generations moved into clerical work, teaching, and even overseas railway service.
At once a family history and a social history, From Fields to Railways captures the dignity of working-class life in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. It is a book about resilience, respectability, and belonging - about how the everyday struggles of ordinary families helped build the foundations of modern Britain.
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