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They helped build the C&O Canal and worked as navvies, or laborers, in its port.

He leaves for a better life with his mother’s brother in Leeds, where he becomes a navvy.

Prof Rotherham said it may have originally arrived with Welsh "navvies digging out the cuttings for the canal systems".

By 1917, when navvies poured in and construction started on an inland railway to the north, widespread food shortages had led to violent workers’ demonstrations and a near mutiny among the army units.

The scale of the work can be judged by the group of navvies gathered in the bottom right of the picture.