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JAEKEL HOUSE

THE RAILWAY MUSEUM PROJECT

In May 1998, this building together with two other houses and a Running Shed, were handed , to a Joint Operational Committee with the objective ofstarting a Railway Museum by the then Sole Administrator of the Nigerian Railway Corporation, Chief Greg Ilukwe. This memorable event took place

when the Railway was almost exactly 100 years old.

All the properties are in need of restoration and we decided to tackle the larger of the two houses to give us a meeting place for Legacy and in order toat least start a small museum.

The Management Committee unanimously agreed to call this house Jaekel Houseafter a former superintendent of railways who had retired in the

seventies after almost thirty years of service and later had written a history of the Nigerian Railways in three volumes which was published in 1998. But

although we were able to do some minor repairs we never had sufficient funds to properly restore the whole building.

Original Design

Firstly, the plan was derived from the early colonial houses built in equatorial latitudes in the 19th century namely, a design which made use of the

natural cooling breezes to alleviate the heat. There was nothing like artificial air-conditioning only natural conditioning. Thus the standard designs wereplanned for the working and living spaces to be at first floor level with large overhangs to shade the occupants from the sun. The core of the structure

was built in brick or, in this case pre-cast concrete blocks, a technology then in its infancy. The floors and roofs above ground are in timber, with

windows and doors in a similar material.

Secondly, parts of the building were prefabricated in England from standard elements manufactured in pitch pine which is a strong resinous termiteresistant wood. Much of the timber came from the US and being a popular export, eventually denuded the vast forests in central America and created

the well known dust bowl which had such a disastrous effect on the environment there in the 20s and 30s.

It is not surprising then, that we see in this building text-book examples of contemporary 19th design and construction of houses in Europe modified

to tropical conditions. Thus the floors and roof profiles are what you would expect to see in best practice in England.

Thirdly, one of the main problems was finding the right materials for roofing. At the time that the first storey house (ile onipako) was built in

Badagry in 1845 by the Church Missionary Society, they imported wooden shingles from Sierra Leone to use as a more permanent weathering thanpalm fronds or grass then used. The nail holes can still be seen in the roof planks. However it was not long before corrugated galvanised iron, I believe

first manufactured in France in the 1850s, became the popular covering.

But what was used in the Railway Compound was unique here, namely Welsh slates which could be cheaply imported from Britain along with the coal,which until 1923 was imported to fuel the steam engines. They are still seen on many buildings in this compound and we have retrieved some of the old

copper nails used to fix the original slates and one can confidently say that a combination of real slates and copper nails have contributed to 100 years

of reliable use and they are still going strong!

That was what covered Jaekel House originally before the advent of corrugated asbestoscement sheets in the 30s which were in a bad state and we

have now removed. We felt it was important to simulate the original slates and have used fibre-cement slates with a durable paint finish.

Doors and windows

Many of the doors and windows have been reconstructed and new ones substituted. All these have hinges and accessories which we are presentlycleaning and repairing so that we can re-use them. Some of the joinery has been subjected to termite attack and it is interesting to note that much of it is

still active and therefore has to be cut out and replaced with treated timber to avoid recurrence of the trouble. Affected timber has to be removed fromsite and burnt.

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There is still a lot to do and we dont expect to be able to re-commission the building until March 2010.

Prof. John Godwin Project Manager for LEGACY 17 Nov 2009 (for the 2009 AGM)