The Railways Made Them - The Robinsons

How the Lines Built the Anglo-Indian Community

When the East India Railway ran its first train out of Howrah in 1854, no one could have imagined that this single line, climbing up the Ganges plain toward Delhi, would become the skeleton on which an entire community would be built. Yet within a generation, the railways had become the great employer of the Anglo-Indian community, the thing that held the scattered families together, gave them towns to live in and schools to educate their children, and fixed their narrow but secure place in the order of British India.

Two men—James George Burbidge and William Henry Robinson—took their first steps into this world as it was being built. Their careers trace the rise of the railway community from the first days of the line through the decades when the railways had become an important part of British India. Around them, dozens of other family members found their living on the railway. The railway gave the community shape, gave it a future, and in the end, it was the railways’ decline that forced the community to choose between disappearing into India or leaving it altogether.

The Beginning: Ticket Collectors and Firemen

In October 1863, at the Holy Trinity Church in Allahabad, James George Burbidge married Elizabeth Moore. He was twenty-four, the Northamptonshire boy who had come out to India some years before. The register gave his occupation as ticket collector for the East India Railway. The work was humble—he stood at the barrier checking the tickets of passengers—but the timing was perfect. The railway was still young, still expanding, still hiring. A steady man could rise quickly.

The East India Railway had reached Howrah in 1854, just nine years before. Its rails were climbing the Ganges plain division by division, aimed at Delhi. The last gaps closed in 1866, two years after Burbidge’s marriage, when a train could at last run the whole fifteen hundred kilometres from Howrah to Delhi without stopping or changing lines. Allahabad stood on the new middle section, and the company was hiring faster than it could build.

The records of Burbidge’s children’s baptisms tell the story of his rise. Each one is recorded beside his name with his occupation, and with each child the title climbs. By 1866, when his first son was baptised at Howrah, he was a goods clerk. By the time the youngest were born in the late 1870s, he was superintendent of the goods department—a senior man with a large staff, about as high as a domiciled man (one settled in India rather than imported from home) could rise.

Eight years after Burbidge’s marriage, another railwayman married in Calcutta. On 3 June 1871, at the Union Chapel, William Henry Robinson married Honoria Nester. He was twenty-three and a fireman on a Bengal line. She was about ten years older, an Irishwoman and a midwife. He had come out from Dorset as a labouring man with no trade behind him except the willingness to work, and the railway had taken him in.

The fireman’s place was on the left of the footplate of a locomotive, in front of the firebox door. His work was to feed the fire, breaking the coal and swinging it through the door in a steady rhythm so the fire burned even across the grate. He watched the water in the glass and the needle on the gauge. He did all of this in the heat that came off the firebox, on a plate that pitched and swayed, often through the worst of the Bengal hot weather. No train moved without the fireman, and a man who fired well and kept sober could in time be passed for driver. When William Henry’s first son was baptised at St James’s Church in 1873, the clerk wrote engineer against his name—probably his move from fireman to driver.

The Railway World

What the two men had in common was that they had come to India at a moment when a young, expanding industry needed men, and they had the qualities the industry rewarded: steadiness, literacy, the ability to take orders and carry responsibility. The railway employed hundreds, then thousands, of such men. It built them a world around itself.

The rails themselves carried the family across the country. Burbidge’s postings read like a tour of the trunk route: Allahabad, where he married, Howrah, where he began, Cawnpore, where he rose to station master, back to Howrah in his last years. Robinson’s journey was similar. The family lodged for a season at a station, a child was entered in the local register, and the family moved on. In the case of William Henry, there were births at Krishnagar (William Wentworth) in 1877, Purodha (Elizabeth Edith) in 1879, Barrackpore (Gertrude) in 1886, and Calcutta (Lilian) in 1891.

But the railway gave them more than just work. It built them a community. At Cawnpore, where Burbidge was station master, he joined the Freemasons Lodge of Harmony, and the register shows what kind of place Cawnpore had become. The men in the lodge with him were the men of his working world: guards and engine drivers of the E.I.R., a loco foreman, an auditor, merchants and officers of the garrison. It was a society of the railway line, and it carried a particular character—English-speaking, conscious of rank but not impenetrably divided by it.

The railway built schools for the children. It built churches, where the families were married and their children baptised. It built colonies—the railway colonies—which were little towns of their own, with quarters arranged by rank, with schools and churches and canteens, places where the women and children of railwaymen could live while the men were away working the line. The family’s life was lived inside these structures. The children grew up in the railway colonies. They were educated in the railway schools. They married in the railway churches. Many of them went into the railways themselves.

The Grading System

But the railway also built a hierarchy that the community had to navigate, and it was here that mixed descent began to matter. The railways graded their men as European, Eurasian, or Indian, and the grade decided the pay, the pension, and the prospects. To be graded as European, a man had to prove European parentage on both sides. It was a test that some families could pass only by silence or by luck.

The Barrens, for instance, the line that descended from Sergeant William Barren and the unnamed woman he married at Bangalore. Sergeant Barren’s wife was most likely Indian or mixed-descent. Their daughter Sarah married the Jonathan Chadwick, the soldier from Huddersfield. Their grandchildren included apothecaries, railway clerks, and soldiers. But to move upward in the services required proof of Englishness on both sides, and the further back the ancestry went, the harder that proof became. Families learned to manage the question, or they stayed in the grades that did not ask it too closely.

It was this question of grading that, in the end, would help push the community out of India. As the twentieth century advanced and Indian independence seemed more and more likely, the reserved appointments that had protected Anglo-Indian positions began to look less certain. The railways and the post office, the customs and the police—these were the only places the community had been able to build secure livelihoods. When those doors began to close, the future began to look elsewhere.

The Second Generation

But through most of the twentieth century’s first decades, the railway community seemed secure. The children of the railway men took up the work in their turn, and the family histories filled with second-generation railwaymen. George Alexander Burbidge, born at Howrah in 1866, was a mechanic on the East Indian Railway. Frank Walter Moore Burbidge rose further, becoming superintendent of the railway office at Sealdah, the Calcutta terminus of the Eastern Bengal system. Herbert Harry worked in a related trade—with Bird and Company, the Calcutta managing agency that had grown out of labour contracts for the railways.

The marriages that held the community together were often marriages between railway families. Two of the Burbidge brothers married sisters whose father had been a clerk in the railway’s traffic department. Elizabeth Moore married a ticket collector at Allahabad and had a brother who was a guard on the line. When Lilian May Burbidge, daughter of the superintendent of the goods department, married William Wentworth Robinson, son of the engine driver, in 1901 at Kidderpore, it was a marriage inside the railway world. Their son Denis would go on to the East Indian Railway in his turn.

The Railways’ Gift and the Railways’ Curse

The railways had made the community. They had taken scattered families and given them steady work, respectable standing, and a place in the order of things. They had built them into a community by giving them the same towns to live in, the same schools, the same churches, the same registers of baptism and marriage and burial.

But the railways had also locked them into dependence. When the railways declined, when the traffic fell away and the company looked to reduce costs and to Indianise the services, there was no independent base of wealth or land to fall back on. It became part of the story about Independence for the Anglo-Indian community. The apothecaries had no practices of their own. The clerks had no businesses. The railwaymen had pensions, but how secure the economy and currency would be after Independence was not known. The unknown new India was something that many of them chose to leave.

In Australia, Denis Robinson was able to get job with the Western Australian Government Railway (WAGR). He went for an interview at which he was asked: ‘Do they have railways in India?’ He said later that he was tempted to walk out, but he needed the job so he gave them a polite answer. And he got the job, staying with the WAGR for the rest of his working life. But he never got used to the ‘tin pot’ systems of Australia, the narrow gauges and uncomfortable carriages. Yes, they did have railways in India.

Updated 12 August 2026
Non-commercial use permitted with attribution

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