by Tom Quinn
In those days railway workers were represented by two powerful unions and they both tried to recruit youngsters as soon as they could. ‘I remember on our first pay-day we got snapped up by ASLEF,’ said Reg. ‘They were on to us like a shot, but it could just as easily have been the NUR; it was just that on that particular Friday the ASLEF man happened to be quicker off the mark. I remember the ASLEF rep was a driver called Alf Murray who, as it happens, lived well into his nineties. But we were in touch almost till the end, which just shows how railwaymen stick together.’
Cleaners at Stewart’s Lane, as elsewhere, had their own lobby – a sort of common room – and in those days it was completely separate from the drivers’ and firemen’s’ lobby. Job demarcation was rigid, as Reg explained: ‘Once you were a fireman or driver you never went in the cleaners’ room and they never came in ours. I remember all the lobby windows were covered with tar because of the blackout, and there was always a huge open fire; and it had a long table with a two-inch thick top and a wooden form – a bit like a school bench – which was bolted to the floor just in case you tried to walk out with it under your arm!’
Thrown into the deep end at virtually no notice and in a way that was all but unprecedented in the railway industry, Reg and his four mates were given no training before taking up their duties as firemen. For weeks on end they were put on one of the most arduous shifts, 8pm to 4am, and with a number of different drivers. None of this would have happened but for the war. When the lads weren’t firing they did shed work, cleaning smokeboxes and fireboxes, loading the trains with coal and water and turning the engines round.
‘It was bloody hard work,’ remembered Reg. ‘On the King Arthur class the clinker shovel was some fifteen feet long – you imagine lifting that with a great heavy lump of clinker on the end! Clinker is different from coal; it’s the dirt from the coal really, I suppose. Cleaning out the fire (as opposed to the clinker) means you’re moving coal that’s still burning. Under all the fire and the clinker there were the ash pans, the dampers and the smokebox to clean.
‘On the old goods engines you’d sometimes open the fire door and find another door, of solid ash! Moving that was a filthy job and all the dirt used to get into your clothes – it was so bad that all the cleaners wore bicycle clips: at least that stopped it going up your trouser legs! I always wore a big red spotted handkerchief round my neck, too. Without these precautions you’d have so much dirt on you it would take a week to get it off!’
Reg was officially designated a fireman cleaner, but after a while his main work centred on firing engines – getting them ready from cold – in the yard. He worked on what the Stewart’s Lane men called pilot or shunting engines. These were used to break up and make up trains: six carriages here, ten there, whatever was needed.
‘We worked on ammunition trains – and there were a lot of those, I can tell you – as well as troop trains and tank trains. The tank trains were interesting; they’d be made up as follows: you’d get two locomotives one behind the other at the front (you’d need that sort of power because of the weight of the tanks) followed by a coach for the officers, then a coach for the men, then flatbeds for the tanks, then another coach. When we used two engines we called it a double header.
‘We also used to move trains around a lot to keep the Germans guessing. I can recall a couple of these trains made up with each flatbed loaded with giant papier-mâché guns – the idea was that from the air, the Germans would think we were incredibly well equipped, although the opposite was true.
‘The railway helped with some great tricks in the war. For instance, down at Dover we had one massive gun, a real one this time, mounted on the railway, and this was used to lob shells regularly over the Channel. When it fired it would quickly reverse through a long tunnel, pop out the other side and fire again, so old Gerry thought we had two big guns there, not just one!’
During this period Reg was on what was known as a ‘P and D’ gang: its work was the Preparation and Disposal of trains at the start and end of their working days. The drivers in the shed were called red carders, meaning they could drive, but only in the shed; they were never allowed to drive outside. Cleaner firemen such as Reg on the P and D gangs were passed cleaners, that is, cleaners who fired at least some of the time. The drivers in the shed, on the other hand, were passed firemen.
‘It was as if, when you moved up the promotion ladder, the description of what you did was there to remind you of what you had done – so a passed cleaner was really a fireman in all but name. I was firing on the shunting engines for some years. I was a member of the Norwood Harriers, so called – unofficially, of course – because we were always racing between Battersea and Norwood. During this period I met one of the funniest men I’ve ever met; he was known as Monty, and he could do the most brilliant impersonations of film stars. He used to keep us entertained for hours, and during the war years that was just what we needed.’
Among the worst jobs a young fireman had to cope with was firing the W-class engines: ‘They were horrible,’ said Reg with a grimace, ‘because they effectively had three engines – one on either side and one underneath, so they had to be oiled up from underneath, which was hot and filthy.’
As in most occupations where a group of people have to work together closely and who rely heavily on each other, railway workers always had nicknames. In fact it was almost universal, unless – as in Reg’s own case – your name was already considered to be something of a nickname:
‘Well, being called Coote I didn’t have a chance, did I? Most of my mates thought Coote was my nickname and that I had another real name, but such was the liking for nicknames I was also known as skipper.
‘Sometimes people had nicknames for odd reasons – one bloke was called Charlie because he hated his real name, which was Monty, and we had lots of Smiths so I suppose they had to have nicknames to distinguish them one from another: there was Big Bill Smith who was about seven feet tall, Two Gun Smith because he was always playing with an air pistol, Dab Toes Smith who walked in an odd way, and Holy Joe who was a lay preacher. When Holy Joe was on the footplate he used to make me laugh: if the train seemed to be going too fast to stop easily he’d put his hands up in the air and shout, “Don’t worry! The Lord will provide!” After he retired he went to live in Bath and got a job as a lollipop man, and he was famous for leaping out in front of oncoming vehicles regardless of the risk and shouting, “The Lord will provide!”
‘Yes, there were hundreds of characters and only a few miserable unfriendly so-and-sos,’ remembered Reg.
Becoming a passed cleaner or passed fireman was really a question of being allowed – usually temporarily at first – to cover holidays and sickness, in the job above the one you normally did. But to reach this stage you had to do enough ‘turns’ to qualify.
‘After we’d had thirteen turns firing we were entitled to an overcoat, or “P”-jacket as we called it. That was a sort of dufflecoat, but it was a sign that you were a passed fireman. After 313 turns – that’s a whole year, not including Sundays – you got a serge jacket and a brass cap badge. Then you’d really arrived, but if I remember correctly you could get round the system by paying the storeman ten bob and he’d flog you a brass cap badge. I couldn’t afford to buy my badge, and this was awkward because sometimes you’d get an old stickler of a driver who wouldn’t let you on the footplate without it.’
The fireman had a great deal of responsibility on the footplate. He had to make sure everything was ready when the driver arrived. The routine would be as follows: at the start of a shift the fireman would climb up onto the footplate and immediately make sure he had everything he needed: shovel, brush, coal-pick, bucket, spanners, flare lamps, four headlights each with a red shade, and three disc boards or targets. He would put these disc boards on the front of the train so the signalmen could see the train’s code. Then the driver would arrive. At this stage it became something of a team effort, as Reg explained:
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��If he was keen the driver would get the oil; if not, you did it. We always had a big oil bottle and a small one. The big oil bottle had thin engine oil which had to be applied to various points. The driver did the actual oiling. The small oil bottle had a thicker, black oil.
‘Before you set off you’d prepare the fire and check the sandbox – if the train slipped on the rails you could allow the sand to trickle onto the rail to help the wheels grip. Lots of engines were what we called “tippy-toey” which meant they would slip at the least provocation, so sand was essential – and woe betide if you went off without it! Oh, and I should also mention that some regions had what were called fire droppers. These were the men who got the fire going in the engine from cold, but we firemen did this at Battersea. Anyway, having checked the sand, we’d also check that we were OK for water, and would then toot four for Victoria (if that was where we were going), two for Herne Hill and five for Victoria Central. This was to let the signalman know what was what.’
To some extent drivers and firemen were the elite during the steam era. Yet despite what many people might now judge to be slightly unorthodox practices, accidents were extremely rare.
‘We never had any major accidents – at least none I knew about – although there were one or two slip-ups: men used to hitch a ride on the footplate, for example. This wasn’t allowed in later years, and it was strictly speaking illegal to do it even then, but people turned a blind eye. You might get half a dozen of your mates going to Victoria like this. Once we had a pack of them on the footplate and as luck would have it the train they were on went over a set of points that were all wrong – wrecked the points and caused a fuss, but no serious damage. And I remember once on the 3am paper train a bunch of men were going home on the footplate and they were chatting away so merrily that they didn’t notice the fireman had gone to make a cup of tea before they set off. They’d set off without him! He had to catch the next paper train and I hate to think what he said when he caught up with the others!’
Like many railwaymen, Reg was in a reserved occupation, although he did try to join up when war started. He told the recruiting sergeant he was a shed sweeper (not a reserved occupation), received his initial army pay and was told to report for duty in four weeks.
‘We were supposed to go in the Royal Armoured Corps,’ he recalled. ‘When I told my mum she fainted because my dad had only recently died and my brother was away fighting. Anyway, she secretly contacted the army and told them what my real job was. When I got to Beverley in Yorkshire where I’d been told to report I was immediately called out and sent home with a day’s ration money. I’ve still got my service card which says one day’s service, twenty-eight days’ leave, and reason for discharge, “Services no longer required”. I was damn lucky, too, ‘cos I got 3s 6d a day for my twenty-eight days’ leave.’
Reg’s memories of the war years were especially vivid. Partly, of course – and as he was the first to admit – this had a lot to do with the camaraderie instilled by the sense of shared danger, for the railways were a prime target for German bombers. But if train driving was a dangerous job in those days it had huge compensations, not least the wide range of characters and individualists who made up the workforce.
‘During the last months of the war I was firing for a driver called Sammy Jingle. He was a real character, and a terror for the throttle – it used to be said of him that he’d set every cornfield alight as he went along; that’s how much the sparks used to fly when he was in charge! But Sammy knew all the roads (the routes were known as roads), and we used to work the army leave trains down at Dover on the south coast. I remember all the soldiers were absolutely loaded down with booty – German swords, helmets and souvenirs of every description, till the customs people stopped it. We were working a King Arthur class engine at this time with thirteen coaches: twelve, plus one for the NAAFI.’
Other wartime journeys took Reg to Gravesend where German prisoners were landed in their tens of thousands. ‘They were locked into the coaches and hadn’t washed for months; the smell was indescribable. I remember, too, that early in the war these prisoners were great big strapping Bavarian types, very proud even though they were prisoners, but towards the end we were collecting boys and old men. You’d see kids in uniform. They were twelve and thirteen and usually in tears. There were old men, too. Hitler didn’t care who he called up in the end. All along the road as we took the train across from Gravesend to Kempton there were British soldiers on the bridges overhead carrying machine guns. We drove two and three trainloads a day for weeks on end.
‘On the ambulance trains they would often carry out major operations, amputations and so on. I remember we used to be handed boxes by the medical staff to throw in the firebox and we were convinced they contained legs and arms. An SS man I spotted being carried along on a stretcher had a leg and an arm removed and he was still sitting bolt upright on the stretcher giving the Nazi salute with his one remaining arm. All this helped with the shortages, however. I remember saying I needed a pair of boots, and next minute a tea-chest full of boots arrived!’
At a time when Britain’s population was suffering from severe shortages of everything from clothing to food, the railwayman’s lot could occasionally be a happy one, and never more so than when well-fed American troops began to arrive.
‘When the Yanks first came over we had to move them around the country and as soon as we’d dropped a load of them off, we used to go straight into the carriages to collect up the ration boxes they always left all over the place. The boxes each contained one meal for a man, together with chewing gum, chocolate and even condoms! The chocolate was horrible, but to us poor half-starved devils the fact that most of the boxes were left untouched was a wonderful bonus.’
Many railwaymen were killed during German air-raids which is why important railway offices sometimes had their headquarters inside tunnels; the shedmaster at Orpington in Kent, for example, worked in an office in an old, disused tunnel. The tunnels were useful in other ways, too. For instance, if a train was buzzed by enemy aircraft the driver and fireman would race for the nearest tunnel, as Reg did on a number of occasions.
‘I worked with a driver called Bill Murray during the war years – another great character – and once when we were heading for Brighton we were buzzed by a German plane. We were in the second engine of a double header and you’ve never seen anything like the spurt we put on – despite the weight of a hell of a lot of carriages – to get to the nearest tunnel.
We suddenly found we had the strength of ten men – that’s what fear does to you! Anyway, we waited hours in the tunnel till we thought it was safe to come out, and finally arrived in Brighton at 4am. We were taking a load of Scottish troops to the coast, and when they marched out of the station at 4am I’ve always wondered what the locals made of the fact that they insisted on a full pipe band playing full blast at the head of the column!’
But with the end of the war came other occasional distractions, such as more visitors from abroad, more holidaymakers and sometimes VIPs. Reg was once even ejected from the footplate by a young VIP, as he recalls:
‘I was firing on a Golden Arrow – can’t remember when, but it was probably in 1947 – when an inspector came onto the footplate and said, “You’ve got a VIP aboard, so watch it!” When we arrived at Victoria we were told the VIP wanted to come onto the footplate. As the fireman I had to make myself scarce, and then up popped a twelve-year-old boy! I couldn’t believe it when they told me he was the King of Iraq! Still, I got ten bob for my pains.’
Despite the fears and excitements of the wartime years, railway work was never very well paid and, like many men, Reg looked about after the end of hostilities for better-paid alternatives.
‘Yes, I nearly packed it all in, the money was so poor. The pay was about £6 a week. That sounds quite good when you think I’d started in 1941 on £1 6s 2d, most of which I had to give to my mum. But that £6 was very low after the war and I thought that lots of other job
s would probably pay a lot more. I suppose it really was love of the work that kept me at it, and the fact that all my mates were railwaymen. Mind you, having complained about the pay I ought to admit that we all wasted a lot of money gambling. The Battersea men were terrible gamblers. I didn’t get too involved, except once when I lost my whole wage packet, only to win it back at the last minute. But the stress involved in that put me off for a long time! During the war years a lot of the gambling came about as a result of troop moving, because we were kept hanging around for ages and gambling was one way to fill the time.’
Reg was an excellent storyteller with a keen memory for detail and, with his jolly, animated face and gravelly voice, he was skilled at bringing the past to life. He fired on the Golden Arrow boat service for many years after the war, and in 1948 passed for driving. In terms of everyday work this meant little change for Reg as, like all firemen with years of experience, he’d done hundreds of turns as a driver already. The only real change was an increase in wages. Driving, like firing, was a question of knowing exactly what you had to do, and when.
‘After a while you got into a routine and everything would go like clockwork. One driver I worked with is a good example. He never wore a watch, yet every time we took a train to Ashford – an hour from Victoria – the minute hand on the station platform clock would move from 59 to 60 minutes just as we pulled into the platform.
‘After I passed for driving I never went firing again, except perhaps at Christmas when you stayed in your grade – in other words, when you dropped back a grade. After the war there was very little work in winter so we spent a lot of time in the pub; and then in summer it was non-stop because all the soldiers were back, they had money and they wanted to go on holiday. There was a train out of Victoria every ten minutes for holidaying soldiers. Some were day excursions, too; it was as if, the war being over, everyone was absolutely determined to celebrate. Firms organised outings for their workers, too; they’d always have a bar and send up beer to us men on the footplate.’
