Rail to the Rescue - Part 3
amongst themselves and with the harbour police, to be stitched up by the surgeon and cared for by the nurses. Luckily five days of bad weather followed which kept them in their bunks and few voices of protest were raised when it was announced there was a total ban on shore leave at Constantinople. But once in the Black Sea the Dorset Gang had reignited their old feud with the Nova Scotia boys and the supervisors were hugely relieved to arrive at Balaklava.
Clearly it was essential to set the navvies to work immediately. Luckily the weather held fair, although the nights were bitterly cold. The top priority was their accommodation; they had the banking and revetting done in no time and the huts up in a trice. Their chief gripe was that there was no beer to be had; they were allocated quadruple rum rations to compensate, but this made them truculent and disobedient in the confined holds aboard ship, so it was doubly important to get them segregated into their huts.
Suddenly help was available from outside again. Captain Lushington produced 150 sailors from the Naval Brigade who were able to carry on with developing the Stores area from where the men of the 39th had left off. And Stratford de Redcliffe's Croats had had a change of heart and suddenly turned up on a transport from Constantinople - Beatty was allocated 200 of them and set them to work as stevedores unloading the ships. Russell of the Times was impressed. 'The Croat labourers impressed all who saw them by the enormous loads they carried, and by their great physical strength and endurance Broad-chested, flat-backed men, round-shouldered with long arms, lean flanks, thick muscular thighs and their calfless legs...the Croats performed daily an amount of work in conveying heavy articles on their backs who had not seen a Constantinople 'hamal'.
This influx of effective labour freed up the Navvies to start work on the railroad. On 8th February all foreigners were ordered out, and the trail of rickety arribas and their sutler owners wound up towards Kadikoi where they were to establish 'Vanity Fair'. The majority of Turks decided to move out as well. With navvy gangs armed with sledgehammers positioned on each side of the main street, the systematic work of demolishing the hovels sped on apace. The rubble served to fill in the potholes and filthy pools in the roadway,
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