The story about tzar's finger is for Moscow - St Petersburg railway (not Trans-Siberian Railway). It is only urban legend, the whole line was originally built almost straight but a slope near Verebye proved to be too steep for trains of that time and a climbing curve was built to overcome this problem. So it was not there in the original project in the first place.
I thought the story was going to be that he drew a straight line on a map, not taking into account the curvature of the earth, ending up with a long curved railroad line and complaining about it upon showing...
For what it's worth, I have heard the story about the finger curves in the ruler line on many different occasions, most often French people talking about Belgians.
We still use the word "Navvy" in the UK, specifically in the coal mining trade when referring to excavator drivers. I never understood why we actually call them Navvy's until I watched this video! You learn something every day!
I love to see Stephen's passion for the Navis. They - amongst many other feats of Irish muscle - make me proud to be Irish and I always feel connected to them when I pick up a shovel.
Navvies in Britain were 70% English and only 30% Irish. The idea that navvies were exclusively Irish is untrue. Surprising that QI didn't point this out, as it's kind of the point of the show!
@@1815matt nobody said they were exclusively Irish but the Irish stood out for their hardiness and ability to work under great stress and long hours. They were simply better suited for the job and that's why they're remembered. Hundreds of years of being shat on will do that, I suppose.
There's always the song (I know The Pogues' version but I don't know the writer(s)) that goes "Navigator, navigator, rise up and be strong. It's four in the morning and there's work to be done." Or was it five?
Unfortunately, a census in the 19th century showed that the majority (70%) were English. That being said, there were still plenty Irish navvy's doing fantastic jobs.
@@L.C.Sweeney I think its wrong to suggest the Irish were better suited for the job. Probably they were appreciated for being cheaper, but one Navvi was as much alike as any other, no matter where they came from. As you say, hundreds of years of being shat on; but this results in myths springing up, in an attempt to claim some pride back. There is no need for such myths, as the Irish have much to be proud of, but there's a whole subsection of 'The Irish were better at X' that doesn't really sit well with the truth.
One of the funniest yet overlooked parts of this is when Jimmy makes a little horsey with his fingers about to rob the train of Rob's candy and then says "curses!" when he's foiled. Maybe I'm weird but that was brilliant to me on several levels =)
My great great grandfather was one. Though he built railway lines in Pakistan not Britain. I've been trying to find his diary, as I'm sure he has tons of interesting stories written down.
Lol, the only psych class I did was in my game design degree. This I learnt about from my dog trainer friend. Good dog training works the same way as people training. ;)
70-80% of the actual railway navvies were in fact English and it always saddens me that their own people consistently fail to appreciate that. I say this as the author of The Men Who Built Britain: A History of the Irish Navvy (Dublin, 2001), which is the definitive history of Irish male migrant labour in Britain. The occupational term 'navvy' was dropped from official usage in 1960 - at which time Irish labour was concentrated in , and coming to dominate, the groundworks aspects of construction. BTW: The first British commercial canal of the Inland Navigation System was the Newry Canal, in Co. Down,opened in 17 45.
Your figures are off www.irishcentral.com/roots/the-navvies-how-the-irish-built-the-modern-british-railways Lets face it you English couldn't wipe your own arses without foreign help let alone build a railway. And God forbid you should give other people credit.
Navvies weren't 'mostly Irish' in the books I've read. This from The Railway Archive: Interestingly, it is often thought that the majority of navvies were Irish, but this is not the case. Large numbers of Irish men did travel to Britain and become navvies, as work was more plentiful and the jobs were invariably better paid, but these represent a minority of the hundreds of thousands of men required for the construction of the railways.
The Irish made up around 30% of the Navvy workforce, similar to the percentage of Irish soldiers that defeated Napoleon at Waterloo. Who would think that a bunch of 19th white n***ers were capable of such tasks? I’m sure the Empire treated them with the upmost respect and ensured that the majority Catholic Irish were treated as equal citizens in the United Kingdom (the minor Cromwellian genocide and indentured labourer deportations to the West Indies being a thing of the past).
Irish made up about 40% and English made up roughly 30-40, followed by Scots and Welsh, and then other migrants like Germans and Italians who made up less than 5% combined
Most Irish would not include themselves on census,for many reasons,pride of Irish not wanting to importalise on paper forever, anominity, also did not fit cencjs requirements as many went home at weekends to their family,are doingnfew months at a time , homeowners did not want to declare lodger in their home as would have to declare money @@TT_1221
We already have a slow speed railway (with fast and slow trains trying to share it). If we wanted to build another one, it would take 5 years, sure. But slow and fast trains shouldn’t mix.
Kishore Shenoy The weird thing about ‘they say of the Acropolis’ is it’s not actually in the episode. It was only shown in an outtakes special. Possibly unique in television history for a programme’s most famous moment to be a ‘deleted scene’.
It was tough as hell micks that built the railroads here in the US also. I'd imagine it was even tougher considering they dealt with more extreme weather, wild life, indians, isolation, etc ....
Meat and beer? According to the Pogues: "The canals and the bridges, the embankments and cuts They blasted and dug with their sweat and their guts They never drank water, but whiskey by pints And the shanty towns rang with their songs and their fights"
That explains something to me. I'm Irish and as youngsters if we couldn't finish our dinner we were told to, "just eat your meat." No! It's not an euphemism.
I stole a train when i was 4 ... no ... really ... driver was nice enough to let the little boy into the cab and stupid enough to leave the cab for 30 seconds after showing the little boy how to drive a train ... i got about 50 feet but it still counts! ... him running etc ... i dont actually remember it but i`m told about it constantly ... someone else in my family needs to do a bank
..and thus, the name Evil Sean was birthed. "But...he's lovely !" "He stole a train when he was FOUR!" "What?!....The lil evil bastid !" His wife, though, calls him Choo Choo and LOVES it when he "Arrives" in the "Station".
I did the same thing with one of the old 3 wheeled electric milkfloats back in the 80s! The milkman running up the road hearing 100s of bottles clinking and a 8 year old me handling it like a professional 😂
Let’s not forget all the Victorian infrastructure from London to Sydney …. Across the globe the men of Ireland gave sooooo much and not a mention or memorial for such hard work 🥲
A study of 19th-century British railway contracts by David Brooke, coinciding with census returns, showed that the great majority of navvies in Britain were English. (70%). The researchers of this program must have been part time! 😁😉😊😜
Unfortunately he would be taken into a dark room in BBC HQ, never to be seen again, if he broke impartiality guidelines. So let's just say he meant the former...
I.K.Brunel GWR... Stephenson his Rocket won the Rainham trials! Not to forget Richard Trevithick pioneering Cornish man who was using steam engines in tin mines decided to put wheels on an engine!
So Navies built the first railway from London to Birmingham by hand in 5 Years. But they now recon it will take 30 years to build a High Speed Link from Manchester to London for a Link to the Chunnel. Don't you just love the Progress made in Engineering.
The difference back then is you don’t have to deal with issues like existing structures and right of way. Today you’ll have to buy out the land where the tracks would run into private properties. Owners who refuses to sell their land would file lawsuits against it. Then it often takes years for the courts to decide on imminent domain cases.
The actual construction phase is maybe 10% of that. In fact I think engineering projects are built too quickly. The other 27 years are lawyers and bureaucrats fighting about how best they can siphon off funds or get the project named after them.
Actually Irish workers were thought to have made up to 40% of the ethnicity of the Navvies workforce followed by English workers who made up roughly 30-40%. This was then followed by Scottish Workers Approximately 10-20%, however Scottish Navvies were more common in Scotland and northern parts of England, but they were present across various railway projects. Next were the Welsh workers who made up around 5-10%, and finally other migrant workers (e.g., Germans, Italians, and others), who likely made up less than 5% combined.
Neither the Show nor any of the comments bellow mention probably the most important and interesting fact about the "Railway Mania" that saw lines being built everywhere across the country. A large proportion of the British population were in a uniquely "Cash rich" position and looking for a place to invest their money. When Slavey was fully abolished in Britain the government compensated all Slave owners the market value for each slave EG young strong boy v past the age of being able to work; each category had its price and it was this cash that funded the Railway Era with all its eventual implications for the modern world we live in.
Well, at least the word "smile" has a slang meaning of "2. bare flesh appearing between the top of a skirt or pair of trousers and the shirt, blouse etc." in addition to a similar "1. the gap of bare flesh between a stocking and a suspender belt." (related to zettai ryōiki, which came to Japanese from otaku slang).
@@andrybakthey are saying Dagenham smile. Dagenham is an area of London that used to have lots of factory workers and all sorts of manual labourers, and was generally poorer than the rest of the city. The saying comes from their ill fitting trousers showing too much when they bent over.
they were trained in laying train tracks, trained to make trains go, trained to train, train train train, get what i'm getting at? teach aka train, train aka locomotive
Mostly learn to follow instructions. Building rail lines requires quite precise grading of the ground, then laying the railbed (which needs to be done properly, so it can support the weight of a laden train), then laying the ties properly, and finally the tracks. For manual labour, it's very skilled work, and doing it badly made all your effort worthless, as someone would have to go back and do it again
I think everyone has had that moment for one question or two on QI. It indicates you actually know something in a specific area better than the general public.
In the 19th century Irish poor were noticeably larger than their English compatriots, British army records and studies from the time, showed the english population actually got shorter over the course of the 18th & 19th centuries, with the exception of the upper classes.
So did the Russians. The railways in the Baltic states have been regauged several times - under Russian occupation they were broad gauge, under German occupation they were standard gauge, and they're now in the process of being regauged again now they're in the EU....
When you take a train from Poland to Ukraine (and Belarus I believe), they lift the train up and exchange the bogies so the train can fit Learnt that recently, quite surprising. I would've thought they'd just have people go onto a different train, but clearly this way is cheaper (1 train instead of 2)
I remember learning about navvies in junior school, plus reading books about them as a kid. They had a terrible rep for drinking, fighting, immoral living and generally causing trouble. A lot of the stereotypes and prejudices against the Irish come from this time and of course the Irish being Catholics didn't help. Another thing about the Irish Navvies is quite a few were bigamists. They go to England to get work promising to send money home and perhaps bring the family over once they'd found work and got settled. However all to often the tough work meant they'd spend much of their wages on drink, gambling and whores, etc. And so there was never the money for the family to come over or perhaps he simply enjoyed his freedom too much and didn't want them too. And then after a while they'd find a new girl and when she got pregnant end up marrying them too and starting a second family. The same is true of later Irish immigrants who again left Ireland to find work and many British and Irish emigrants who went abroad leaving one family behind and then starting a second one in their new country. One of my distant relatives did this after emigrating to Canada for work. Occasionally there'd be a letter and less often some money with it. And once in a while he'd return for a bit before heading back. It wasn't until he died that the two families learnt about each other.
I've just noticed that toy train is a repainted Thomas model. It's not just an E2 model, Hornby never made E2 models that small, the proportions are all wrong for that. That is a "Thomas" proportioned model based on the television show rather than the actual E2s with extended side tanks. The key giveaway is how much shorter it is. Though I suppose it could have been a bachmann model, or custom made.
"They lived on beer and meat, and they could outperform any other manual labour that farmworkers would be exhausted after a quarter of the day with that Navies could do". Hear that Vegans?
When billy says "The Railway Mouse" and Stephen says "correct", the look on Bill's face is a picture! "REALLY?!?!?!" Lol.
I KNOW RIGHT !
The story about tzar's finger is for Moscow - St Petersburg railway (not Trans-Siberian Railway). It is only urban legend, the whole line was originally built almost straight but a slope near Verebye proved to be too steep for trains of that time and a climbing curve was built to overcome this problem. So it was not there in the original project in the first place.
I thought the story was going to be that he drew a straight line on a map, not taking into account the curvature of the earth, ending up with a long curved railroad line and complaining about it upon showing...
For what it's worth, I have heard the story about the finger curves in the ruler line on many different occasions, most often French people talking about Belgians.
The first digital modification.
GIVE THIS MAN SOME SWEETS!
I've heard the same story about Stalin planning a road.
Stephen Fry would be an excellent Dungeon Master.
Oh wow YESSS !!!!
I think he might actually be one.
My dirty mind is going elsewhere :P
@@eleSDSU where can I find this, it sounds legendary
i read this and definitely didn’t think of d&d
Pity the sweet train didn't become a steady QI fixture.
Yeah I reckon that it's so entertaining
My uncle has a train just like that in his basement. And to think some people have dead prostitutes.
@@muesli_snipes just died laughing, thank you sir or madam
We still use the word "Navvy" in the UK, specifically in the coal mining trade when referring to excavator drivers. I never understood why we actually call them Navvy's until I watched this video! You learn something every day!
It's also part of the well known saying, " he swears like a navvy "
I love to see Stephen's passion for the Navis. They - amongst many other feats of Irish muscle - make me proud to be Irish and I always feel connected to them when I pick up a shovel.
Navvies in Britain were 70% English and only 30% Irish. The idea that navvies were exclusively Irish is untrue. Surprising that QI didn't point this out, as it's kind of the point of the show!
@@1815matt nobody said they were exclusively Irish but the Irish stood out for their hardiness and ability to work under great stress and long hours. They were simply better suited for the job and that's why they're remembered. Hundreds of years of being shat on will do that, I suppose.
There's always the song (I know The Pogues' version but I don't know the writer(s)) that goes "Navigator, navigator, rise up and be strong. It's four in the morning and there's work to be done." Or was it five?
Unfortunately, a census in the 19th century showed that the majority (70%) were English. That being said, there were still plenty Irish navvy's doing fantastic jobs.
@@L.C.Sweeney I think its wrong to suggest the Irish were better suited for the job. Probably they were appreciated for being cheaper, but one Navvi was as much alike as any other, no matter where they came from. As you say, hundreds of years of being shat on; but this results in myths springing up, in an attempt to claim some pride back. There is no need for such myths, as the Irish have much to be proud of, but there's a whole subsection of 'The Irish were better at X' that doesn't really sit well with the truth.
One of the funniest yet overlooked parts of this is when Jimmy makes a little horsey with his fingers about to rob the train of Rob's candy and then says "curses!" when he's foiled.
Maybe I'm weird but that was brilliant to me on several levels =)
I don't see the horsey
Hey! This is from the same episode as "They say about the Acropolis, where the Parthenon is"!
The bottom bit of a pyramid is called a frustum
FYI, a Dagenham smile is what we know as a plumber's crack.
Julia Lilienstein ‘Builder’s bum’ is the usual English expression. But Stephen Fry is just a bit more English than most.
@@kisbie That's odd. I've always known of that as "builder's cleavage".
Thank you Julia. Being Australian I wondered what it was & plumber's crack is the term we use.
I gathered that, but why Dagenham?
@@miikop ...only guessing, it could come from the car workers at the Ford factory at Dagenham
5 years to build London to Birmingham with pure man muscle, now we have machines we can barely get the plans done in under 10 😫
Machines don't respond well to meat and beer being poured into them. (Bender excepted.)
And gunpowder
and pure private enterprise with minimal government involvement.. There is a lesson there somewhere..!
My great great grandfather was one. Though he built railway lines in Pakistan not Britain. I've been trying to find his diary, as I'm sure he has tons of interesting stories written down.
I hope you managed to find it.
No Where Man if he was a navie I doubt he wrote one
Gg Ff or could write!
I imagine mostly stories about building railway lines
Need an update on this!
Positive reinforcement at its best.
Lol, the only psych class I did was in my game design degree. This I learnt about from my dog trainer friend. Good dog training works the same way as people training. ;)
Positive reinforcement isn't always a good thing. For dogs I'm sure it's pretty good, but for human beings not so much.
Surely by it's very nature positive reinforcement MUST be a good thing.
Not how words work
70-80% of the actual railway navvies were in fact English and it always saddens me that their own people consistently fail to appreciate that. I say this as the author of The Men Who Built Britain: A History of the Irish Navvy (Dublin, 2001), which is the definitive history of Irish male migrant labour in Britain. The occupational term 'navvy' was dropped from official usage in 1960 - at which time Irish labour was concentrated in , and coming to dominate, the groundworks aspects of construction. BTW: The first British commercial canal of the Inland Navigation System was the Newry Canal, in Co. Down,opened in 17 45.
Your figures are off www.irishcentral.com/roots/the-navvies-how-the-irish-built-the-modern-british-railways Lets face it you English couldn't wipe your own arses without foreign help let alone build a railway. And God forbid you should give other people credit.
It seems to me there are more historical revisionists with some sort of agenda than actual historians.
Never let us forget that paper never refused ink.
@@rapier1954
Cries in Irish.😭😂
@@54356776 Why would I cry over English ingratitude, it is merely a fact of life.
'Curses'? I think that's the politest expletive Jimmy's ever said on the show!
3:25 I don’t think that joke was heard properly because that’s a classic. Kudos Bill Bailey!!
Navvies weren't 'mostly Irish' in the books I've read. This from The Railway Archive:
Interestingly, it is often thought that the majority of navvies were Irish, but this is not the case. Large numbers of Irish men did travel to Britain and become navvies, as work was more plentiful and the jobs were invariably better paid, but these represent a minority of the hundreds of thousands of men required for the construction of the railways.
Lots of English navies would of have Irish parents?
The Irish made up around 30% of the Navvy workforce, similar to the percentage of Irish soldiers that defeated Napoleon at Waterloo.
Who would think that a bunch of 19th white n***ers were capable of such tasks? I’m sure the Empire treated them with the upmost respect and ensured that the majority Catholic Irish were treated as equal citizens in the United Kingdom (the minor Cromwellian genocide and indentured labourer deportations to the West Indies being a thing of the past).
Irish made up about 40% and English made up roughly 30-40, followed by Scots and Welsh, and then other migrants like Germans and Italians who made up less than 5% combined
@@A-Flano Navvies were 70% English according to census studies from the time
Most Irish would not include themselves on census,for many reasons,pride of Irish not wanting to importalise on paper forever, anominity, also did not fit cencjs requirements as many went home at weekends to their family,are doingnfew months at a time , homeowners did not want to declare lodger in their home as would have to declare money @@TT_1221
The wisdom of the Rural Buddha definitely deserves a sweet.
Dalai Farmer
@@janpeternelj2309 It's the bald man with the long hair.
He’s ingested the Little Book of Calm
He's an excuse with a beard hanging off of it.
The Birmingham to London railway was built in 5 years. How long have we been working on HS2?
We already have a slow speed railway (with fast and slow trains trying to share it). If we wanted to build another one, it would take 5 years, sure. But slow and fast trains shouldn’t mix.
When you find the official channel of QI... live is nigh complete
Days have changed in Britain, a round about in Basingstoke is taking whole year to make improvements, an extra lane. 😕
"very good, very good" *gives Alan a treat*
Didn't they say something about the acropolis where the Parthenon is in this episode? :p
all i could think was "this is the episode where stephen lost it"
They say of the acropolis where the Parthenon is...
whaaat do they saaaaay!
You have been out voted aino.
Kishore Shenoy The weird thing about ‘they say of the Acropolis’ is it’s not actually in the episode. It was only shown in an outtakes special. Possibly unique in television history for a programme’s most famous moment to be a ‘deleted scene’.
@@kisbie That's true and quite interesting in itself, so I'll give you six points for that.
Such children. I love it.
This really was the end of the best for this country
2:57 S W E E T
It was tough as hell micks that built the railroads here in the US also. I'd imagine it was even tougher considering they dealt with more extreme weather, wild life, indians, isolation, etc ....
And the Chinese...
@@dogsnads5634 true ... from the west coast ...
So Egyptians hired Irish workers! Now it all makes sense!
Meat and beer?
According to the Pogues:
"The canals and the bridges, the embankments and cuts
They blasted and dug with their sweat and their guts
They never drank water, but whiskey by pints
And the shanty towns rang with their songs and their fights"
That explains something to me.
I'm Irish and as youngsters if we couldn't finish our dinner we were told to, "just eat your meat."
No!
It's not an euphemism.
0:47 Either there is a breeze in the studio, or Bill's hair is sentient and has the ability to move on its own.
Air conditioning. Otherwise the lights would cook them.
The latter, definitely the latter.
…train breeze
We miss you Steven!
"Oh, it stopped in the right place, it can't be a virgin train then, can it?"
The answer is, the Irish.
Stephenson was responsible for the line from Birmingham to London. He walked the full length several times during its construction.
ohhhh this is the episode w/ parthenon🤩
I stole a train when i was 4 ... no ... really ... driver was nice enough to let the little boy into the cab and stupid enough to leave the cab for 30 seconds after showing the little boy how to drive a train ... i got about 50 feet but it still counts! ... him running etc ... i dont actually remember it but i`m told about it constantly ... someone else in my family needs to do a bank
dammit let me fix the spelling
I thought you were fixing the spelling! =(
ta daaa
..and thus, the name Evil Sean was birthed.
"But...he's lovely !"
"He stole a train when he was FOUR!"
"What?!....The lil evil bastid !"
His wife, though, calls him Choo Choo and LOVES it when he "Arrives" in the "Station".
I did the same thing with one of the old 3 wheeled electric milkfloats back in the 80s! The milkman running up the road hearing 100s of bottles clinking and a 8 year old me handling it like a professional 😂
Any one else reminded of Pob (or MAC from "Mac and me" if you're a Paul Rudd fan) when Jimmy purses his lips like that?
Let’s not forget all the Victorian infrastructure from London to Sydney …. Across the globe the men of Ireland gave sooooo much and not a mention or memorial for such hard work 🥲
A study of 19th-century British railway contracts by David Brooke, coinciding with census returns, showed that the great majority of navvies in Britain were English. (70%). The researchers of this program must have been part time! 😁😉😊😜
The panel that made the greatest work!
"Oh it stopped in the right place... it can't be a virgin train then" HAHAHA!!!
It's possible he meant Virgin? as in Branson, not sex.
+Bryan8329 yea but it works for both. it's a joke that keeps on giving
Unfortunately he would be taken into a dark room in BBC HQ, never to be seen again, if he broke impartiality guidelines. So let's just say he meant the former...
I was thinking Branson aswell... How would it work as sex?
@@justaguy6544 I don't know either
I.K.Brunel GWR... Stephenson his Rocket won the Rainham trials! Not to forget Richard Trevithick pioneering Cornish man who was using steam engines in tin mines decided to put wheels on an engine!
Brunel indeed. Is that a conicidence: 2:00 ?
Is it just me or is the volume of these clips really low compared to other UA-cam videos?
So Navies built the first railway from London to Birmingham by hand in 5 Years. But they now recon it will take 30 years to build a High Speed Link from Manchester to London for a Link to the Chunnel. Don't you just love the Progress made in Engineering.
bigniper just laziness, lack of imagination and money is how it seems to go these days.
You can thank all of the modern Health & Safety, Employment Equity, and other make-work government-regulations for the difference.
The difference back then is you don’t have to deal with issues like existing structures and right of way. Today you’ll have to buy out the land where the tracks would run into private properties. Owners who refuses to sell their land would file lawsuits against it. Then it often takes years for the courts to decide on imminent domain cases.
The actual construction phase is maybe 10% of that. In fact I think engineering projects are built too quickly. The other 27 years are lawyers and bureaucrats fighting about how best they can siphon off funds or get the project named after them.
Yes but Back Then There Were head-on collisions and derailments a lot. Now trains are the safest way to travel.
0:13 ha ha hey its James
0:18 Oh my _God_ what did Stephen do to James's _face?!?_
FYI
this is the 'Acropolis' episode
The Irish were 30% of Navvies. 70% were British.
But the 70% British had Irish parents.
Actually Irish workers were thought to have made up to 40% of the ethnicity of the Navvies workforce followed by English workers who made up roughly 30-40%. This was then followed by
Scottish Workers Approximately 10-20%, however Scottish Navvies were more common in Scotland and northern parts of England, but they were present across various railway projects. Next were the Welsh workers who made up around 5-10%, and finally other migrant workers (e.g., Germans, Italians, and others), who likely made up less than 5% combined.
So how do you train a navie?
The "half" pyramid would be halved vertically not horizontally.
The "Tsar's Finger" bypass wasn't made until 25 years after the Tsar's death.
Neither the Show nor any of the comments bellow mention probably the most important and interesting fact about the "Railway Mania" that saw lines being built everywhere across the country.
A large proportion of the British population were in a uniquely "Cash rich" position and looking for a place to invest their money. When Slavey was fully abolished in Britain the government compensated all Slave owners the market value for each slave EG young strong boy v past the age of being able to work; each category had its price and it was this cash that funded the Railway Era with all its eventual implications for the modern world we live in.
I thought the navvies worked on potatoes 🥔 & donuts 🍩 ! I was wrong on that one
I wonder what job would count as the closest equivalent of something like this today?
Irish have always been hard workers where ever the went great testimony to them
“Come ride the little train that is rolling down the tracks to the junction. ...”
Please explain to a non-native speaker: what's a "duggenem smile"? or whatever they are saying at around 01:46 about trousers?
Dagenham Smile
Buttock cleavage exhibited by large people when wearing ill-fitting or inadequate trousers.
Well, at least the word "smile" has a slang meaning of "2. bare flesh appearing between the top of a skirt or pair of trousers and the shirt, blouse etc." in addition to a similar "1. the gap of bare flesh between a stocking and a suspender belt." (related to zettai ryōiki, which came to Japanese from otaku slang).
@@andrybakthey are saying Dagenham smile. Dagenham is an area of London that used to have lots of factory workers and all sorts of manual labourers, and was generally poorer than the rest of the city. The saying comes from their ill fitting trousers showing too much when they bent over.
What did they do in their year of training?
Stephen Troyer dug a lot of shit...
We're talking 20 tonnes a day per person.
they were trained in laying train tracks, trained to make trains go, trained to train, train train train, get what i'm getting at? teach aka train, train aka locomotive
Mostly learn to follow instructions. Building rail lines requires quite precise grading of the ground, then laying the railbed (which needs to be done properly, so it can support the weight of a laden train), then laying the ties properly, and finally the tracks. For manual labour, it's very skilled work, and doing it badly made all your effort worthless, as someone would have to go back and do it again
I thought 'Irish navvies' was going to be the 'obvious but wrong' answer to this question.
I think everyone has had that moment for one question or two on QI. It indicates you actually know something in a specific area better than the general public.
In the 19th century Irish poor were noticeably larger than their English compatriots, British army records and studies from the time, showed the english population actually got shorter over the course of the 18th & 19th centuries, with the exception of the upper classes.
I thought the Czar was the ruler
Was it Trevithick's or Stevensons Fusiliers? After all it was McAlpines Fusiliers who built UK's roads. ;-)
Did you know Spain intentionally built their railways on a wider gauge so France couldn't invade them by train.
So did the Russians. The railways in the Baltic states have been regauged several times - under Russian occupation they were broad gauge, under German occupation they were standard gauge, and they're now in the process of being regauged again now they're in the EU....
When you take a train from Poland to Ukraine (and Belarus I believe), they lift the train up and exchange the bogies so the train can fit
Learnt that recently, quite surprising. I would've thought they'd just have people go onto a different train, but clearly this way is cheaper (1 train instead of 2)
Dream team.
Again the obvious answer is correct. No klaxon 😯 !
Mein canals !
I heard Navis and brain made me hear 'Hey Listen'
the navi , are from the planet pandora , and they are blue and tall.
Oh, you should have given Jimmy one. You could tell he wanted it.
SWEET!!
Apparently there were a lot of Yorkshiremen
SWEET!!!!!!
In Canada "navvies" refers to "coolies."
I remember seeing Irish road workers into the early 80's still wearing a suit whilst digging up roads.
That was the IRA planting mines.
The train is so cute
Can’t wait until he asks a lad to show him his Chelsea smile
“Curses.” 😂
I remember learning about navvies in junior school, plus reading books about them as a kid. They had a terrible rep for drinking, fighting, immoral living and generally causing trouble. A lot of the stereotypes and prejudices against the Irish come from this time and of course the Irish being Catholics didn't help.
Another thing about the Irish Navvies is quite a few were bigamists. They go to England to get work promising to send money home and perhaps bring the family over once they'd found work and got settled.
However all to often the tough work meant they'd spend much of their wages on drink, gambling and whores, etc. And so there was never the money for the family to come over or perhaps he simply enjoyed his freedom too much and didn't want them too. And then after a while they'd find a new girl and when she got pregnant end up marrying them too and starting a second family.
The same is true of later Irish immigrants who again left Ireland to find work and many British and Irish emigrants who went abroad leaving one family behind and then starting a second one in their new country.
One of my distant relatives did this after emigrating to Canada for work. Occasionally there'd be a letter and less often some money with it. And once in a while he'd return for a bit before heading back. It wasn't until he died that the two families learnt about each other.
The earliest Navvies were not 'mostly Irish'
the majority of Navvies were Englishmen, with approximately 30% being Irish immigrants.
Same people that built the canals?
As explained in the clip itself.
Stephen Fry is the fanciest cat. And it's adorable.
Black people. They also built our roads, our buildings and churches. They all came on the SS Windrush in the year 1138.
??????
Sweet!
I wonder what the Canadian Pacific Railway was the equivalent of building then?
Prairielander Or the First Transcontinental Railroad in the U.S.?
Dont forget your shovel if you want to go to work.
We want to go to heaven, but we're always digging holes.
3:50 Jimmy think bout how he really like one of those sweets
…hitching a plan 😂
Beer and meat is a great incentive to do many things.
@ No Where Mañ
I suspect it wasn't called Pakistan though!
Irish construction worker diet has changed very little since the 1800s
As usual they don't mention that the it was a Private enterprise, there was no state involvement or funding
If London-Birmingham is equivalent to 1.5 great pyramids, then what is the Trans Siberian railway equivalent to? 😮
A ladder to the moon
Crossrail?
"dagenham smile" lol
The Birmingham to London track which took 5 years to build was an astonishing feat; what was the U.S. transcontinental, or the trans Siberian railway?
Well it's always harder to be the first isn't it
I've just noticed that toy train is a repainted Thomas model. It's not just an E2 model, Hornby never made E2 models that small, the proportions are all wrong for that. That is a "Thomas" proportioned model based on the television show rather than the actual E2s with extended side tanks. The key giveaway is how much shorter it is.
Though I suppose it could have been a bachmann model, or custom made.
Jimmy's face at 3:21
did jimmy get his sweet at the end? :O
Navvy is Gaelic for digging
No it isn't
They drank beer because water wasn't safe, but I'm sure it also numbed the aches and pains of hard graft all day. Can you imagine?
"They lived on beer and meat, and they could outperform any other manual labour that farmworkers would be exhausted after a quarter of the day with that Navies could do".
Hear that Vegans?