Category: Events

Railway Life Part Four

A spring time step in his walk to work,
On past the gas works, the pub and the chip shop,
A wriggle of his hips as he walks past the football pitch,
With egg and bacon for a fry-up on the shovel;

But back in the house, she sits fretting.

Her anxiety worsened, her nerves on edge,
After a twenty-year marriage
Of sleepless fatigue and shifting shifts;
Twenty years of keeping the kids quiet,
And the door knocker muffled:
The Railway Widow;

Sleepless, cold, and alone, in the double bed,
While he tip-toes across the lino,
Gently closes the front door,
And trudges off for the 2.15 link,
Shunting in the sidings,
Feeling the aches in his bones,

Hearing the rustle of the bills in his pocket,

Clutching his pools coupon.

 

 

 

Railway Life Part Three

It’s full steam ahead –

Until, freezing in the cab, paper in his boots,
He gets stuck in a wind-whistling loop,
Out here in some unsheltered, open landscape;

Or, shovelling six tons of coal
Choking in some seeming endless tunnel,
On a two-hundred-mile journey
Of relentless, endless standing,
Shovelling, shovelling, back-breaking labour,
Watching and checking and checking and watching,
Until the journey ends, lodging away.

(He had left home early in the morning,
A stranger to the children;
A weekly pay packet to the wife;
Waiting for the proud longed-for day,
When he takes control of the regulator:
A right proud member of ASLEF);

But now he’s on another interminable shift,
Freight train working in the dead slow of night,
Catching a moment to dream his future:
Mainline passenger link,
And the top pay packet each week –
When name, engine and coal consumption
Will be systematically monitored –
Renting a house close to the lodge,
And close to the marshalling yard,
With double-homers to boost his wage;

 

A spring time step in his walk to work,
On past the gas works, the pub and the chip shop,
A wriggle of his hips as he walks past the football pitch,
With egg and bacon for a fry-up on the shovel;

But back in the house, she sits fretting.

Is this the time he crashes?

 

 

 

 

 

Railway Life Part Two

But down at the running shed: All is different!
Hustle, bustle and red-hot tumult:
Fill the tender! Water the tank! Empty the firebox!
(Cough on the dust, choke on the fumes, burn your hands.)
Smash the clinker! Draw the firebar! Sweep the pit!
(Hot sweat pours down night-cold skin.)
Rake it out! Open the damper! Push it through!
(And rush outside for a lungful of frost-fresh air.)
Clear the smokebox! Four whole wheel-barrows filled!
Race against time! Steam-pressure’s falling! Something’s awry!
Repair the brick arch! Firebar setter! Boiler tube cleaner!
Where’s the fire kindler?

Dreaming he was a fitter
In the quiet order of the fitting shop,
Or a roster-clerk, dozing after tea
But there’s no escape, even in dreamland
From the foreman’s peremptory demands:
Cover the inkwells! Use both sides of blotting paper!
Save on lighting! It’s a full moon!

Or perhaps he was dreaming of the footplate?
That long, long, lifetime ladder
From cleaner to fireman to driver,

Starting out with rag and oil and grease,
And soot and paraffin and tallow fat,
And sulphur and ash and blistered hands,
Unpaid overtime, and a seventy-two-hour week.

But now he sits, chatting and listening,
Drinking tea with the tired eye drivers,
Who now sweep the floors and clean the lavs;
And they sit, tired eye, and declining,
Remembering their footplate days,
Slipping and sliding from mainline shifts,
To shunting and siding;

And as they doze, they recall their footplate youth,
Walking in the driver’s shadow and footsteps
(Behind his black box, overcoat and rule book),
Proud of a brand-new billy can and new blue serge jacket
(No cleaner’s overalls now),
Arriving early to prepare the engine,
The boiler pressure, the water level, the firebox, the fire,

And, of course, the driver’s seat.

A Victorian Railway Maxim

Zealously try to excel. Industry is commendable.

Perseverance deserves success.

Quietude of mind is a treasure.’

This was a GWR 19^th century maxim for its workforce:

A world of gaslight, back to backs, the workhouse;

The engine shed, the ash pit; the night black platform,
The coal fire waiting room, the leather strap carriage window;

Signalmen clanking levers; tip-tapping the telegraph,
Filling in the forms in triplicate, polishing the brass,
Trimming the wicks, cleaning the grates,
And all for sixteen bob a week, on a sixteen-hour turn;

Pointsmen and fogmen, choking on the fumes,
Kindling the coke in the brazier in a pea-soup fog
Banging up the wagons to pilfer some coal,
While winter’s frost and a cold, clear moon
Light up the permanent way.

Then at five minutes past midnight,
The goods guard’s tail van leaves the marshalling yard –
(Hectic with wagon examiners,
Repairers and axle box greasers)

Its red tail lamp slowly disappears
Into the reverberating distance,
While he sits alone in his van,
In dark isolation,
Buffeted by shunting, points and engine brake,
Watching the night slowly tick away
In silent loop or siding,
Counting the pennies of overtime,
Hoping for passenger-promotion,
Lighting another Woodbine,
Staring at the moon.

Shopping in the Railway Works Retail Outlet

Shops had a double meaning in my childhood:

The obvious, which was the domain of women,

Open every weekday except Wednesday afternoon,

And the ‘Inside’, which was the domain of men,

And accessible to children on Wednesday afternoons only –

When we clutched our precious Permits

(Applied for all those long weeks before),

To process down through the tunnel,

To spot train numbers beyond anyone’s dreams,

As we wandered through the Railway Works,

And its alchemy-alphabet of shops:

A Shop, A Erecting Shop, A Shop Engine Testing Plant, A Shop Extension; B Shop, Boiler AV Shop, Boiler House, Brass Turning & Fitting Shop; C Shop, Concentration Yard, Carpenter’s Shop, Carriage Finishers (No.7) Shop, Carriage Repair (No.19) Shop, Carriage & Wagon Construction (No.24) Shop, Carriage & Wagon (No. 16) Shop, Coppersmiths’ Shop; Cylinder Shop; Diesel Engine Repair Shop, DMU Lifting Shop, Erecting Shop; Forge & Smiths’ Shop; Grinding Shop; Iron Foundry; Lifting Shop, Locomotive Paint Shop, Locomotive Wheel (AV) Shop; New Points & Crossing Shop, Points & Crossing (X) Shop; Road Motor (No.17) Shop, Rolling Mill; Steam Hammer Shop, Stamping Shop; Tender Shop, Trimming Shop, Truck Shop, Turning Shops; Wagon Frame (No.13) Shop, Wheel Shop, Wheel-smiths’ Shop.

I took my mother back there in 1997, when the designer outlet opened, on the site of all those closed down railway shops, and we went shopping where ghosts of five generations of my family marched through that tunnel. I sniffed the air: Smoke, steam, gas, coal, coke, oil, soot; I heard the factory hooter again; Mum picked up a keepsake magic touchstone: For she knew it could open a closed-down factory.

GWR Holiday Haunts, 1939,

I bought you at Didcot in 1978:

GWR Holiday Haunts, 1939,

All sepia tinged arts and crafts, and art deco modernism,

And Olde Englande Mockobethan,

For this is a book to get you through the winter months of 1938-9,

A book full of promise and practical tips

As you plan your summer holiday haunts

In the dark nights of winter.

No fear of war here, no barbed wire beaches,

No pill boxes and tank traps along the Thames;

Instead, punts and tweeds and flannels:

‘Make a holiday based in Reading

An idea worth serious consideration’;

Or, you might make it to Wiltshire:

‘Camping Coaches and Fashionable Walking Holidays

In Marlborough and Savernake Forest’;

Photographs of passengers with tea and scones smilingly served,

Steaming west to the Cornish Riviera –

And I’m pleased to say that everything

Is just tickety boo, Cheerful Charlie and Even Steven,

Especially in the buffet car from Bath to Newquay,

Thirty-four shillings and fivepence return –

No wonder they look so happy.

But doesn’t hindsight give an air of tragedy to it all?

The unspoken foreshadowing of war.

For even though there’s no shots of barbed wired beaches,

Gas masks, sand bags, bomb shelters and pill boxes,

Just the carefree innocence of buckets and spades,

The cheerful innocence of the high tides’ tables,

An almost limitless list of west country

Hotels, guest houses and bed and breakfasts,

At ports and seaside resorts served by the GWR,

All the way from the promise of spring

(When Hitler will break his Munich pledge),

Until the late summer of September

(‘I am speaking to you from the Cabinet Room, 10 Downing Street’);

In truth, what fearful thoughts were in the minds

Of those model passengers, posing for the camera

Captured in those holiday haunts buffet car snaps?

What haunting anxieties?

How many women were to wait anxiously at railway stations,

As children were evacuated

Or as GWR troop trains left for the coast,

Or arrived back with the wounded?

How many of those men would stand in queues

On the beaches at Dunkirk,

Or in the cold waters of the English Channel,

Taking their turn to embark for home,

And arrive back at their old holiday haunts?

And all that, just one year later.

Where the Railway Lies

It was hardly Dombey and Son in Stroud

When Brunel brought the railway into town:

No earthquakes, or bridges that went nowhere;

Instead: Dickensian Cheapside.

I walked beneath the beech tree, by the Black History notice boards,

Pondering on the elusive meanings of that ambiguous word ‘Heritage’,

Remembering the GWR coat of arms:

‘Domine Dirige Nos: Virtute et Industria’

‘Lord Guide Us: ‘Virtue and Industry’;

Remembering these Bristolians

Who benefitted from the abolition of slavery:

Thomas Daniel: major shareholder in the GWR;

Richard Bright: GWR deputy chairman;

George Gibbs, director of the Great Western Railway;

Christopher Claxton: zealous defender of the West Indian plantocracy,

Close confiding colleague of Isambard Kingdom Brunel,

Claxton, the future managing director

Of the Great Western Steamship Company …

Remember this when you journey on our branch line

Wandering through the Golden Valley,

Half in love with the picturesque perspective –

But lines of steel stretch to revelation point,

As you see how the railway lies.

Blackbeard the Pirate and Stonehouse?

(Edward Thache aka Blackbeard)

When you next visit Stonehouse on the train,

Take a walk down to beautiful St Cyr’s Church:

Take a seat there by the Stroudwater Canal,

And ponder on these intriguing questions:

Could the Revd Thomas Thache, rector at St Cyr’s,

Possibly be Blackbeard’s grandfather?

And could the Edward Thache, born in Stonehouse

On June 14, 1659,

Baptized two weeks later at St Cyr’s Church,

Possibly be Blackbeard’s father?

Did that Edward Thache (senior)

Move to Bristol, marry an Elizabeth,

 And have two children: Elizabeth

And the Edward who would become known as Blackbeard?

Did the family of that notorious pirate,

The legendary swashbuckler Blackbeard,

Really hail from Stonehouse?

Is St Cyr’s Church down by the canal,

Linked with the fearsome skull and crossbones,

That ploughed the waters of the Atlantic Ocean

And the Caribbean Seas?

The Blackbeard, killed near Ocracoke Island,

North Carolina, November, 1718?

The Blackbeard, pursued by Alexander Spotswood,

The Governor of Virginia?

Spotswood had authorized the expedition

That claimed Blackbeard’s head as a trophy –

So, when you visit St Cyr’s Church,

Nestling so peacefully down by the Ocean

(As that part of the canal is called),

Gaze into the azure skyscape,

And track a windblown cumulus cloud,

For you might just glimpse the head of Blackbeard –

But beware of any inexplicable light

Flashing on the limpid flowing waters:

‘Teach’s Light’, the mariners call it:

Guiding Blackbeard in the ceaseless search for his head,

Desperate that the Devil will know him still.

Think about this strange tale on your train-ride back home.

 

 

 

 

Sir Topham Hatt

(aka The Fat Controller)

And Swindon

 

2025 sees the 80^th anniversary of the first of the Rev Awdry’s stories that have become linked with Thomas the Tank Engine. The first story was entitled The Three Railway Engines: the tale of ‘Edward, Gordon and Henry who lived in the same shed and who were always boasting and quarrelling among themselves until, after a series of adventures, they found it best to be good friends and to help each other.’

 

The early stories feature a fat director. This character who we later learn is Sir Topham becomes The Fat Controller after the real-world nationalisation of the railways in 1948. But what isn’t so well-known is that the fictive Master T. Hatt started his railway career in 1894 at the GWR Works in Swindon as an apprentice. I imagine he was quite slim then. I also imagine that his father probably worked ‘inside’ in the factory and that Topham might well have been born a Swindonian. There’s food for thought as you ruminate upon social mobility.

 

According to the Rev Awdry’s narrative, Topham became close friends with Swindon-born William Stanier, who went on to an illustrious career with both the GWR and the LMS and received a knighthood (There’s food for thought as you read this, thinking about a career on the railways). But the future Fat Controller never forgot his love of all things GWR: ‘All ship-shape and Swindon fashion.’

 

Now as regards my family, I have five generations who have worked in the railway works at Swindon, starting in 1851 with Wiltshire agricultural labourers on my mum’s side who tramped in from the villages. But my great grand-father, Charles Butler, moved to Swindon from Clerkenwell in 1886 as a carpenter in the carriage & wagon works. His son, my grand-father, also became a carpenter in ‘the Works’ and my dad an electrician there.

I have the planes of my carpenter forebears, stamped with their names and the GWR insignia. I also have my gramp’s clocking-in token. These act almost as talismans, opening up the tantalising possibility that my great grand-father knew this fictive young cove, Master Topham Hatt. And, of course, correspondingly, Master Topham Hatt knew my great grand-father.

 

More food for thought as I hear the ghost of the Swindon railway works hooter on the wind…

19^th Century Railway Investment

You can see the deceptive bounty

Derived from West Indies plantations

In classical, elegant Clifton,

And the Regency spa splendour

In the streets of Bath and Cheltenham:

The honey-stone Age of Enlightenment,

Sweet reason, proportion and symmetry –

But not even these straight lines so true

Can utterly obscure the triangles

Of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade –

But it’s easier for British railway lines

To separate themselves from the West Indies:

It seems counter-intuitive to find a link,

A signal, a junction and a connection

To something so far away in space and time.

Because

Railways after the 1825 Stockton and Darlington,

And after the 1830 Liverpool and Manchester,

Seemed to herald a steam powered modernity:

Coal and iron and steel and speed and farewell

To the Regency age of the coach and the ostler,

And farewell to the barge, towpath and canal.

The Age of the Railway Mania, however,

With all those speculative investments,

Needed money from somewhere –

It might not grow on trees … but it did on sugar cane …

And an examination of the records

Of the great and the good who gained so much

From the abolition of slavery in the British Empire,

Reveals hundreds of great investments

Made in railways in the United Kingdom

By those who gained so much from abolition:

There is the signal, junction and connection.

The £20 million paid by the British Government after abolition was a colossal amount: some 40% of the annual income of the Treasury. More than 40,000 enslavers benefitted. Over 800,000 enslaved people received nothing.