Engine driver (General)

by Jefff , West London, Middlesex, Wednesday, June 19, 2013, 21:11 (4180 days ago) @ slowhands

Hi S,
yes I see where you're coming from, and yes there were many more steam engine applications beyond "just" the railways by then, so thanks for raising a fair and valid point. However for what it's worth personally in this case I err on the railway side, given the Parsons' address very near the Station and the fact it's a husband and son pairing of "driver" & "fireman", but yes this is one of those tricky areas which is not helped as the words & their meaning vary around the country.

Apart from on the railways, stationary steam engines were already the country's major power source, supplying rotational power for machinery in factories & mills, dynamos in power stations, water pumping stations for drinking & sewerage, cranes & saws at stone quarries, winding & fan engines in the collieries, furnace blowers in ironworks, and so on. Also as you say relatively "portable" engines were developed which were towed (not self-propelled yet) around the farms to belt-drive separate machinery for threshing, cider-making, etc, or powering circular saw-benches in woodfelling areas such as ours. Eventually these were developed into self-propelled tractors (aka traction engines), still with flywheel pulleys for driving belts. In more agricultural areas such as East Anglia these were also developed into longer more powerfull engines with huge underslung winches to tow wide ploughs across fields, far faster than horses could ever manage. Altho these were unlikely in the Forest, steam tractors were used locally for heavy road haulage to & from the railway depots, such as by Mitcheldean cement works and quarries, or for lumber, replacing huge horse teams.

Back to the users, I've seen the terms mechanic, engineer, engineman, engine tender, fireman and more applied to the operators of (most probably) stationary engines on census forms.

Strictly speaking a fireman is the coal shoveller, aka stoker in ship-speak; in many stationary-engine applications the power and speed demand on the steam engine was more-or-less constant, so the vast majority of work associated with it was "just" feeding it with fuel and lubricating oil. This was essentially "only" a fireman's tasks, so part-negating the need for a separate and more highly skilled (& paid!) driver; hence the term fireman seems to appear more commonly in these environments. Also the term bankman was used in the colliery winding houses, he controlled the cage movement in the shaft hence was "over" the engineman/fireman.

However the term driver, I think, more often indicates the most highly skilled engine operators, that is of moving locomotives, either on rails or road. In these cases the driver clearly has a more complex & difficult job, hence the term "driver" to emphasise this. Of course as in other professions exaggerated claims were often made, but I do feel the dual role of "driver" and "fireman" is relevant in this case. Such a family pairing was always preferred and encouraged by the railway companies as teamwork was key, all drivers only became such after years moving up the ladder from cleaner to greaser to fireman etc, often within a family.
Similarly a road traction haulage business was a huge investment so the operators would be kept within the family if possible.

So again thanks Slowhands for raising a valid point, and of course I could well be wrong in this uncertain "science", but in this case I prefer the romance of rail.