by Tom Quinn
LIFE ON THE OLD
RAILWAYS
Tom Quinn
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks are due to all those railwaymen whose lives are recorded here and to Verity Muir at David & Charles. I’d also like to thank Emma, Katy, James, Alex, Charlotte and Joe.
CONTENTS
Introduction
Cards & Characters:
Reg Coote: Driver on the Southern Railway
High Days At Holloway:
George Case: Signalman on the London & North Eastern Railway
Gentlemen At The Top!:
Richard Hardy: Shedmaster on the London & North Eastern Railway
Britain’s Oldest Railwayman:
Vinsun Gulliver: Driver on the London Midland & Scottish and the London & North Eastern Railways
The Brake Van Man:
John Kerley: Guard on the London & North Eastern Railway
Memories Of Grease Corner:
Bill Sidwell: Engineer on the London Midland & Scottish Railway
From Fireman To Foreman:
Ray Beeson: Driver on the Southern Railway
A Country Stationmaster:
Cliff Carr: Stationmaster on the London Midland & Scottish Railway
Steam In The Blood:
Jim McClelland: Driver on the London Midland & Scottish Railway
The People’s Porter:
Tom Jules: Porter on the London & North Eastern Railway
Eighty Years A Railwayman:
Harry Horn: Signalman on the Great Western Railway
Working The Saddlebacks:
Sandy Begg: Driver on the London & North Eastern Railway
A Pillar Of The Community:
Rod Lock: Stationmaster on the London & North Eastern Railway
INTRODUCTION
People tend to become enthusiastic about the industrial past only when it is long gone; old mine workings, mills, pits and factories were far from entrancing when they were part of the everyday scene, and few waxed lyrical about them until long after they had been consigned to history. This is true of almost every industrial artefact one can imagine, with a single exception: the steam train.
Almost from the date of its invention the steam train was seen as a symbol of the liberating achievements of the industrial revolution. Even in its heyday when the steam locomotive was a common sight as it huffed and puffed its way into every corner of the land, it remained a thing of wonder, a thing of legend and romance. Landowners and others may have objected to the new railroads crossing their land, but the steam train’s benefits to the vast bulk of the populace were so great that their objections were usually over-ridden.
Every youngster wanted to be a train driver when he grew up. It meant he would be master of a piece of machinery that seemed almost alive; it meant he would be in charge of a living, breathing thing of colossal power. Those old photographs of drivers standing proudly by their machines really do show the sense of pride the men had in their work. And this sense of pride was based not only on their own belief in what they could do, but on their awareness of the awe in which they were held by train passengers and the general public.
In the public imagination at least, the driver was the most important figure, probably closely followed by the stationmaster (this would certainly be true in smaller country stations); however, to reach the position of driver entailed a long apprenticeship – perhaps as long as fifteen years – first as cleaner and then fireman, before one was finally given the ultimate responsibility. Yet despite the long apprenticeship there was a curious informality about the route to promotion; thus a fireman would be expected to become familiar with driving simply by virtue of being with a driver, so that by the time he got an official ‘turn’ he was well versed in all the necessary procedures.
Certainly train driving was, and is, a highly responsible job: quite apart from the dangers of animals on the line, signals snowed under or trains derailed up ahead, the driver was wholly responsible for operating the locomotive correctly so as to ensure smooth, safe and punctual running, and this at a time when a locomotive boiler could be seriously damaged or even blow up if the driver and firemen made a serious mistake. By contrast, the modern train driver is a man who simply pushes the right buttons to get the engine to work. He doesn’t have to rely on years of skill and experience to drive, though of course his level of responsibility is just as great as it was in the old days.
The pride with which locomotives were built, the intense competition to break speed records, and the competition among drivers to be the best and most punctual, all added to and sustained the sense that working on the railway was something out of the ordinary. Of course, steam involved a great deal more than driving. Signalmen, firemen, guards, shedmasters, stationmasters, platelayers and many others all played a part in a travel system that, until the Beeching cuts of the 1960s, was the finest in the world.
The magic of the steam railway stems in large part, I suspect, from the folk memory of how, within a few decades of its invention, the steam train had transformed the British Isles from a place of remote, isolated villages where only the very rich could afford to travel, to a place where travel for the masses became an affordable reality. A journey that might have taken four days by stagecoach in the 1830s could be completed just twenty years later in under a day. That is the true measure of the railway revolution and the sense of freedom it created; a sense that industry and its products could be truly liberating.
From the very earliest days, the railway also captured the imagination of poets, writers and artists. J. M. W. Turner’s Rain, Steam, and Speed – the Great Western Railway (painted some time before 1844) is perhaps still the greatest artistic expression of the irresistible force of the new invention. Here the locomotive roars out of the mist towards us like a fire-breathing monster, and Nature – in the form of the barely visible hare limping away across the track – can only try to keep out of its way. In this century poets as diverse as Edward Thomas, John Betjeman, Philip Larkin and Stephen Spender have described the railway or used it metaphorically. Edward Thomas’s ‘Adlestrop’ is one of the best-known examples, and it perfectly captures the loneliness of a remote country station:
Yes. I remember Adlestrop-
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.
The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop – only the name.
And willows, willow-herb and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.
And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
By contrast, the inexorable power of the train is beautifully captured in Stephen Spender’s The Express, while W.H. Auden tries to capture the very rhythm of the train in his Night Mail:
This is the night mail crossing the Border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order.
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner, the girl next door.
The nineteenth-century novel is rich in railway imagery and description, too: Mrs Gaskell, Charles Dickens and Thackeray among others are filled with references, and some of the most memorable passages from the works of these writers appear in the ‘Old Railway Ledger’ sections of this book. Because steam lasted until relatively recently – certainly well into the 1960s – we are very lucky in that a la
rge number of individual steam railwaymen’s’ memories were recorded before they died. Few had memories that went back quite as far as those of Vinsun Gulliver, however, whom I interviewed shortly before his 109th birthday. In 1996 he was the oldest man in Britain and I was delighted to discover that he still remembered starting work on the railways in 1907. But thousands of younger men remembered working as part of a transport system that, in essentials, dated back to the 1840s and 1850s, to the earliest days of rail travel.
Before Stephenson’s Locomotion appeared on the Stockton and Darlington Railway in 1825 heralding the dawn of the steam age, railways had existed in some form for centuries; indeed we know that wagons pulled by horses on wooden rails had been in use in industry, particularly mines, since at least the fourteenth century. Flanged wheels were one of the innovations that preceded the introduction of mechanical propulsion: they were introduced in 1789. From then on they were used throughout heavy industry, although the wagons continued to be horse-drawn until the beginning of the nineteenth century.
After the Stockton and Darlington, there was no stopping the railway: by the end of the 1830s some 1,500 miles of track had been laid in Britain; by 1885 that figure had reached nearly 17,000 miles; and by 1921 it was more than 19,000 miles.
By 1921 Britain’s 250 private railway companies were grouped into four regional companies: London Midland and Scottish Railways (LMS), London and North Eastern Railway (LNER), Great Western Railway (GWR) and Southern Railway (SR). In 1947 came nationalisation and the new name, British Railways, which in 1965 became British Rail. Now, of course, the whole thing has come full circle and the railways have been split into a number of privately owned companies once again. This book makes no attempt to deal with the technical or commercial side of the age of steam, except insofar as these matters affected the lives of individual railwaymen. It is not really a book for railway experts, although I hope even the most ardent enthusiast will enjoy it. Instead it is an attempt simply to record the personal memories of a group of railwaymen who worked in different parts of the country and in different jobs. The book is designed to be both a tribute to these men and an attempt to record the details of their experiences in an extraordinary and fascinating world that has gone forever.
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
Each railwayman’s main job is given at the head of the relevant chapter, but as drivers invariably started as cleaners, signalmen as messenger boys, and so on, readers will find that the book covers a far wider range of employment than might otherwise appear.
TOM QUINN – 2011
CARDS &
CHARACTERS
REG COOTE
DRIVER ON THE SOUTHERN RAILWAY
Reg Coote started work on the Southern Railway in 1941. Like most railwaymen from the days of steam he remembered the exact date: 10 February, and like many retired steam railwaymen he remained in touch with large numbers of his ex-colleagues. In the old days, of course, workers were not always on the friendliest terms with management, but retirement changed all that, as Reg recalled:
‘I know you’re going to interview Richard Hardy – well, though we get on well now, we used to have some terrific barneys when we worked together. He was management and I was prominent in the union at local level, but in those days – and we both knew it – I had to be against everything he said!’
Before his railway career began, Reg had a colourful, if short-lived career on a Thames wherry or sailing barge. Indeed, he must be one of the last men to have worked these traditional boats up and down the Thames. He spent the first year of his life in Egypt where he was born in 1924, the son of an airforceman. His father was born in Westminster towards the end of the nineteenth century while his mother came from Lambeth.
‘I’m a real Londoner and so are all my family,’ he said, ‘and I have to admit I was a bit rough, too, in my early days!’ Because his father was in the forces, Reg’s school days were disrupted, and he moved from one school to another, never staying in one place for more than a few terms. By the time he was eleven, however, his father had retired from the Air Force and some semblance of order returned to Reg’s life. He attended Lambeth School for Boys until he was fourteen, and always regretted that he then had to leave.
‘I had to leave as soon as I could because my dad had died six months after retiring from the Air Force – he was only forty-five – and Mum was short of money: everyone was short of money back then, in the 1930s. I sometimes feel a bit sad about my lack of education because in my last year I was top in most subjects.’
Reg’s only connection with the railway at this time was a cousin, a driver, who lodged with the family at their home in Queen’s Road, Battersea. At fourteen, of course, Reg was too young to go straight on to the railways anyway, so he took the first alternative offered to him: third hand on The Thistle, an old sailing barge, known as an ironside among the bargees. She’d been made in Glasgow but mostly plied the Thames.
‘We used to go to Rowhedge near Colchester to collect sand,’ he recalled. ‘It was during the Munich crisis of 1938 that this all started. The sand we were bringing up to London was for sandbags. I reckon old Chamberlain was stalling for time with that bit of paper. We were hopelessly unprepared, and I think Chamberlain knew it. I discovered just how bad things were when I worked on the footplate during the war years. Coal and armaments were always in short supply and I remember my brother telling me that at Territorial Army meetings thirty blokes often had to share one rifle – and that was just months before war broke out!’
Reg spent long periods away from home working on the barge, and although the pay was poor he had little time to think about alternatives: ‘It was a twenty-four-hour-a-day job, and if the wind happened to be blowing in the wrong direction we could be stuck indefinitely, miles from anywhere, or in some distant port because the boat had no engine as a back-up.’
Eventually, fed up with the uncertainties of life on the river, Reg began to listen to the stories of the railway told by his cousin: ‘Well, he was always telling me it was a good job, and as he was my cousin and also our lodger I took my chance when it came up. The war was on by then, and, in my last months on the barge, I can remember watching the fiery glow of a big City seed-cake mill burning after being hit by bombs. We watched in astonishment from the river.’
Reg’s cousin worked at Stewart’s Lane, Battersea, a depot just down the road from the family home. Originally there had been two depots here: Battersea Park, which served the London Brighton and South Coast, and Battersea, which served Chatham and Dover. In the 1920s they were amalgamated into what was called Stewart’s Lane, and that’s where Reg started his railway life, with five others, on 10 February 1941.
‘I’d spent two years on the river,’ he explained, ‘and by this stage London was being heavily bombed. I remember being given a travel pass and a letter telling me to report to London Bridge for my medical; but when I got there, most of the area had been destroyed by bombs. Anyway, I had the medical and an intelligence test – as far as I can remember, to pass this you had to be able to answer just one question: “What is your name?” ‘
Reg had an engagingly irreverent view of his past, which explained why much of his conversation was sprinkled with wonderful stories and anecdotes. In fact, among retired railwaymen Reg was always something of a legend.
Like so many youngsters who started on the railways in those days, his first job was as a cleaner: ‘The three cleaner foremen that our little group of six new lads worked for were all in their forties; they seemed ancient to us, and it was a reminder of just how long it took in the 1930s – when there were few jobs around – to get promoted!’
On that first day the new recruits were given a little safety lecture and a rulebook, and were then taken into the stores. There they were each given two pairs of navy blue overalls and Reg, as the oldest in the group, was made ganger, the man in charge.
‘I remember my chest swelling with pride!’ he recalled with a grin. ‘Being ganger meant I wa
s in charge of the big red board with the white lettering on it! This read “Not to be Moved” and I had to place it on the lamp at the rear of every engine we cleaned while we were cleaning it. The board was supposed to stop us getting killed by some lunatic moving the train while we were underneath cleaning the motionwork. It might sound unlikely that someone could make a mistake like this, but while you were underneath the loco where a lot of the work needed to be done, you couldn’t be seen because some of these engines were massive.’
Engines had to be cleaned thoroughly, and it was up to the new recruits to do the job well enough for the loco to ‘pass muster’ under the eyes of an inspector who would simply make them do it all again if it was not up to scratch. Reg was typically light-hearted about the whole thing:
‘We must have been a pretty sight covered in oil half the time, but even so, marching proudly around. We were all sixteen or seventeen, and as we trooped around the shed I always went first, carrying the board as if it was a military flag and followed by a lad carrying the oil in what we called a bottle (the oil smelled like cat’s pee!); the next lad in the line carried the Vaseline for cleaning and someone else had the cotton waste, the wipes and rags we would use. The cleaner foremen showed us how to clean because it wasn’t that straightforward and it had to be just right. Passenger engines had to be knobbed up a good bit more than goods, but they all had to pass the foreman’s test. He’d come along and check underneath in all those little inaccessible places you might have thought you could get away with not cleaning at all.’
Pumice and brick-dust were used to make the metalwork shine in those pre-detergent days, and the first loco Reg remembered cleaning was the 21C, the first Merchant Navy class: ‘That would have been the end of 1941,’ he recalled, ‘and I remember the paintwork was so rough it shredded our rags – absolutely tore them to bits!’
Under normal circumstances cleaners could look forward to many years in that relatively unelevated role, but the war had caused a severe shortage of manpower with the result that all the old ways disappeared almost overnight, and men were promoted very quickly indeed. ‘Within six weeks of us starting work we were told: “You’re going out as firemen”. Proud as Punch we immediately went round scrounging caps from older firemen,’ remembered Reg.
