by Tom Quinn
Throughout his long years of service Reg never lost his enjoyment of the actual process of driving, and like most drivers he enjoyed a challenge, as he explained:
‘I enjoyed driving goods trains more than passenger trains, simply because there was more to it. Goods trains were sometimes so long that at any one time the train might be on three levels: the front going slightly uphill, the middle on the level and the back going downhill. The wagons had no brakes, either, so with that much behind you, you sometimes put the brake down and left it and just hoped for the best! But you can imagine how you had to concentrate on what you were doing, with that much going on behind you!’ And if the work itself could be varied and demanding, so too could the engines the men had to work with.
‘The West Country class Golden Arrow trains we used had some interesting peculiarities, as did every engine. In fact they were all individuals. You always had to remember to watch the water because if there was too much, the brake would come on automatically.
‘Most of all I enjoyed driving the boat trains on the Ostend route. During the war a fireman was earning about 9s 6d a day, and that would go up by a tanner a year until he got to the top rate which was 11s 6d. A driver got 15s a day, but if he’d only recently passed as a driver he had to work terrible shifts.
‘By 1955 I was working on steam and on the new electric lines – they’d electrified the Ramsgate line in about 1959. At first the electric seemed great – so clean after steam, and you got better shifts; but it changed the whole atmosphere of the thing. By 1961 they’d electrified the Ostend boat train and the Golden Arrow had become an electric engine.’
In addition to his firing and driving work, Reg put a great deal of time into union work throughout his career: ‘I was always keen on the union, and for many years was assistant branch secretary for Battersea. We used to organise dinner dances and a huge kids’ party every Christmas; this was held in a big listed building in Vauxhall in central London, the Brunswick Building, which is still there. I can remember carting hundreds of party hats and jellies around the streets of south London in a mate’s old car, and being terrified we might squash them all!’
One of Reg’s most poignant memories was of the solidarity of railwaymen at difficult times. They stood up for each other and helped the widows and orphans of dead colleagues. Funerals of colleagues were treated with great respect, and woe betide a man who failed to do his bit.
‘When a driver died in the steam days his mates were always the pallbearers. They carried the coffin out of his house to the horse-drawn hearse – everyone insisted on horses in those days – and the whole street came out to see the coffin away. The chapel would be packed out with his mates, too. I remember old Bill Cook died at Stewart’s Lane, and you couldn’t move in the church. But that sort of thing faded out with the coming of the electric, and then diesel.
‘The best way to illustrate the change is probably to compare the way we made collections for a dead man’s widow at the start of my career and the way we had to do it towards the end of my time. In the old days when a man died we’d leave a tin out in the lobby to collect money for the relatives, and no one would have even dreamt of doing anything other than adding to the amount already in the tin; but towards the end we had to stop doing it because all the money got stolen. That would never have happened in the steam days.’
Reg was no starry-eyed nostalgic, however: he enjoyed the steam days, but he was well aware of their limitations. For instance, demarcation was strict and men in different grades often ignored each other: ‘In the drivers’ lobby or common room the Chatham men would sit at one end with the Brighton blokes at the other and they’d never talk to each other. And men in different areas tried to keep themselves apart from everyone else – the drivers at Nine Elms, for example, always wore dickey bows. It was a way of saying who they were, and if they met another man with a dickey bow, of course, they knew instantly they were mates. This is probably why the men at each depot had group nicknames, too, like the Dover Sharks and the Old Kent Roaders!’
But drivers and firemen were sticklers for tradition and for not forgetting their friends. Near Gillingham in Kent, where Reg decided to live in retirement, an old driver he’d once known, called Dizzy Farrow, is buried; and for years after he died every driver coming along the track by the graveyard would toot Dizzy as they went by.
‘Drivers definitely thought they were a class above the rest, and they were very militant as a result,’ remembered Reg. But rivalries between drivers and firemen were as nothing to the rivalries between men and management.
‘Management and unions used to meet for discussions at a hotel in Somerset. The idea was that we could have brain-storming sessions well away from the “us and them” environment where discussions normally took place. To make this even easier you were never told what the other people in your group did back at work. This was so you could say what you really thought without worrying about who you were saying it to. It also meant you could end up sitting next to someone really very senior indeed. I remember being in charge of my group and one bloke – he was a bit snotty – didn’t take part; so I had a go at him, only to discover that he was one of the most important people in the whole railway industry! Still, I never got into trouble over it.’
If Reg’s memories are anything to go by, railway work attracted and bred wonderful characters who got up to all sorts of entertaining mischief. Dizzy Farrow, the driver buried at Gillingham, is a case in point, as Reg recalled:
‘We were in the drivers’ lobby, all sitting around the long table by the fire, when Dizzy Farrow – he’d be over a hundred now if he was still alive – started arguing with his mate about some obscure subject; and then suddenly Dizzy leaps up, grabs a milk bottle and some bits of paper and sets up an impromptu ouija-board. There must have been fifty or sixty blokes round that table watching half a dozen of their mates pushing this old milk bottle round with their fingertips asking: “Is there anyone with us tonight?” Just at the quietest moment, when we were all breathless with anticipation, some joker threw a detonator on the fire. You can imagine the mayhem when that went off – Dizzy jumped so high that he lost his hat and never found it!
‘Another time we were gambling in the lobby when we saw a policeman’s head peep through one of the blackout windows, and this gave us the fright of our lives because gambling in the lobby was illegal – but it was only old Rasher (can’t remember his real name) taking the mickey. He shouted, “Stay where you are!” Thinking this really was a raid, someone else turned the light off and we all made a grab for the pile of money that had built up in the middle of the table. When the lights came on, all the money had gone!
‘Another great character I fired for was Bert Hutton. He was a nice bloke but always in a bit of a mood on the down train – the early morning one – so I never used to say a word to him till we were on the up train later in the day. He was all right by then. Charlie Bird was another marvellous driver I worked with in my early days. He used to tell me that when I became a driver I was bound now and then to over-run a signal or go a bit past the platform, and that I’d need some standard answers for these misdemeanours. He then told me what he used to put on the enquiry forms. For lost time he’d fill in the form with the following, which I always thought very funny:
“The wind was high, the steam was low
The train was heavy and hard to tow
The coal was bad and mixed with slate
And that is why this train ran late.”
‘His second excuse was that – to quote him – “the tractive effort overcame the adhesive effort”.
‘One boastful driver I worked for was Sid Wickens; he was famous for boasting about everything under the sun, although he was a nice bloke all the same. We used to work together in the Haydon’s Lane area where there was a pub we’d go to for our bread and cheese at lunchtime. Old Sid always used to have an onion with his lunch – he absolutely loved onions, and one day one of the pub regulars said t
o him, “I bet I’ve got an onion you can’t eat”. Well, ever boastful, old Sid said he could eat any onion in the world. So the two men bet a pint on it. Next day we were in the pub when this bloke comes in with the biggest onion I’ve ever seen in my life. I’m not joking – it was the size of a dinner plate. Sid wasn’t going to be beaten, so he ate it all. He had his pint, and a pint from the man who’d brought the onion along, and back we went to work.
‘A couple of hours later we came down Tulse Hill and stopped at the arrival signal where we usually had a ten-minute wait. As soon as we stopped Sid said, “Look after her”, jumped out of the cab and disappeared across the tracks. I didn’t see him again for two days and apparently he spent both of them in the loo!’
Reg’s memories went back, in a sense, to the end of the nineteenth century, for the older men he worked with at the beginning of his career still talked about Victorian times and had distinctly Victorian habits: ‘The old drivers used to hand round their snuffboxes,’ he says, ‘and some could barely read and write – I don’t think it was felt to be important for a railwayman when they’d started work.’
By contrast, education and recreation – perhaps with the emphasis on the latter – had become an important element in railway life by the mid-1950s: ‘We had regular educational outings during my time,’ said Reg with a chuckle, ‘though to be honest these tended to turn into a bit of a booze-up. But everyone loved them.
‘We were all Chelsea Football Club supporters, and once I remember we went to Portsmouth for an away game. Afterwards we were all enjoying a drink outside a local pub when a bloke walked past with a small pony in tow. I don’t know why, but we asked if we could buy the pony and its owner a drink. Next minute the pony was in the bar drinking beer out of a bucket! I remember that when we were about to set off home, the pony and his owner could be seen disappearing into the distance, but both swaying and weaving because they’d had a little too much. I remember how much we laughed because the owner had his arm round the pony’s neck and we were convinced they were having a nice little chat.
‘These outings grew in popularity and we even went to Amsterdam once – and when we went by train it was quite normal for the buffet car to have run out of alcohol by the time we were halfway there. A railwayman likes a drop, as they say!’
Working for the union probably made Reg a tougher, less sentimental railwayman than most, but he readily admitted that, after retirement, he had mellowed: ‘I never thought I was sentimental about the old days till I went to the Bluebell Railway, a restored steam line. As soon as I smelled the steam and the coal, I was in tears.’
But among all the happy memories Reg had one of near-disaster: ‘I was only ever involved in one accident; I was seventeen at the time. We were on a 796 King Arthur class with Cecil Dudley driving, and we’d been given the road from Victoria; “Take this train to Chatham,” they said, “and you’ll be relieved there.” We were supposed to leave at 8.40am, but as soon as we left the station we hit the 8.35 for Ramsgate – or rather, he hit us. He’d left for Clapham Road where he was supposed to wait and then come back to Victoria; in fact he’d gone out of the station to the first signal and then come back again – straight into us.
‘I was looking out the window at the time. I saw a terrific flash, sparks and flames everywhere, and as this was wartime I thought we’d been hit by a bomb. What I’d actually seen was flames from the paraffin spilled when the headlamps were smashed. Cecil, my driver, hit the reverser, but in the confusion the brake handle dropped and cut his face badly. I smashed my leg on the water gauge.
‘We couldn’t get out at first because all the coal had come forward onto the blackout sheet and we were trapped under it. One of our buffers was found over by the central signal box a hundred yards away – if anyone had got in the way of that they’d have known about it! They had to cut the two engines apart. The poor old driver of the Ramsgate train had broken his pelvis and a few ribs. I remember, too, the Ramsgate fireman had two lovely black eyes because he’d been looking into the lubricator when the accident happened.
‘There was a huge fuss over this accident. Anyway, they got us out and down to hospital, but I only suffered bad bruising. I was sent home, but my mother, a strict disciplinarian, thought I was trying to pull a fast one and she made me go back to work. I had to get a note from my guvn’r telling her that I had to be allowed to stay at home for a few days.
‘I had five days off in total, and shortly after had to go to my brother’s wedding in Harlow. I was best man and I remember I had to get permission not to kneel because I just couldn’t. Coming up to London on the train long after I retired I looked across at Stewart’s Lane and I thought of all the days I spent there with my mates. They were my best days, and now all those men are retired or dead. It always brings a tear to my eye.’
Coal Savings
Sometimes a bonus is given to the fireman who does his work efficiently upon a supply less than usual. One great railway company has issued a circular pointing out to their firemen what an enormous economy would be effected if each of them saved one pound of coal per mile.
But taking into consideration the many kinds of work a locomotive fireman is called upon to do, the fact that coal only costs an average of ten pence per mile is rather creditable. Water, one half penny, and oil, one farthing, per mile, are other average costs.
S. T. James, The Railwayman, 1928
Railways and Health
Very contrary opinions are held upon the effects of railway travelling upon the health of passengers. Dr. Walter Lewis, the medical officer of the London Post Office, in his Report issued in 1863, states that he has arrived at these conclusions from observations of the health of the travelling officers of the Post Office: that railway travel has little, if any, injurious effect on healthy, strong, well-built persons, if the amount be not excessive, and if they take moderate care of themselves; but that persons who take to habitual railway travelling after the age of 25 or 30 are more easily affected than those who begin earlier, and that the more advanced in age a traveller is, the more easily is he affected by this sort of locomotion. Weak, tall loosely-knit persons, and those suffering under various affections, more especially of the head, heart, and lungs, are very unsuited for habitual railway travelling.
Anon, Good Things for Railway Readers, 1863
HIGH DAYS AT
HOLLOWAY
GEORGE CASE
SIGNALMAN ON THE LONDON & NORTH EASTERN RAILWAY
‘I used to sing to Ribbentrop, Goering and Goebbels,’ remembered former signalman George Case. ‘They came to Potters Bar as foreign dignitaries before the war when I was at school. They came each November for a service at St Mary’s Church, Potters Bar, to pay homage to the Zeppelin crews shot down in the vicinity during the First World War.’
Surrounded by beautiful, large-scale model steam trains, George spent almost all his life in Potters Bar in Hertfordshire. He was born just a few miles away at Finsbury Park on the outskirts of London: ‘But I think we’re an old Potters Bar family. My father was born and lived all his life there.’
And railway work ran deep in the Case family. George’s father was a guard for forty-five years – he started work in 1917 – and his grandfather worked as a platelayer; George always kept his father’s National Union of Railwaymen card for 1918 and he remembered family stories of the perils of Victorian days on the railway:
‘It was a rough old job being on fogging duty in those days; my grandfather had to stand for hours on end in the freezing cold with his flags and lamps so the drivers had some idea what was going on.’ Grandfather Case was killed in Hadley Wood Tunnel while on fogging duty in 1918.
It might seem that, with so long a family connection with the railway, George’s career choice would have been virtually made for him; but it was actually a little more complicated than that, as he recalled:
‘I wanted to go in the Navy, but my dad said no, and my mum said she didn’t want me on the railways. After
that I started to get interested in trains; in fact, I was eventually so interested that I used to sneak off from school up to Holloway North Up signal cabin, one of the biggest cabins in London, to see if I could find out how the whole thing worked. I was mad keen to learn signals, but I wasn’t quite fourteen then and I was supposed to be at school – though I think my dad was quite good about it in the end. When he found out I’d been learning semaphore he got me a semaphore instrument, and he’d sit downstairs while I sat upstairs in my bedroom, and we’d send signals back and forth. We had great fun and I learned a lot.’
By this time the war had started, so George decided he’d join the railway. After the time he had spent learning semaphore at home he was now committed to a career as a signalman:
‘I went down to Holloway yardmaster’s office. In those days you had to replace someone to get a job; in other words, if someone wanted to leave the railway, or if they were joining the Army, you could take their place. If a railwayman couldn’t find someone to take his place he couldn’t leave. A mate of mine wanted to go into the Air Force so I jumped at the chance to replace him as telegraph lad, which is exactly how my dad had started. I got a reference from the vicar at Potters Bar and a school reference. As a matter of interest my mate Leslie, the chap whose job I was to take, distinguished himself by being the first RAF man to shoot down a Messerschmitt 109E, a plane that the British authorities were desperate to get a look at.’
