by Tom Quinn
‘Another driver I remember well was Bob Foster with whom I rode on the famous 4472 Flying Scotsman. With its low pressure boiler it wasn’t one of the best, but it was an education to see Bob making small, delicate alterations to the valve travel to suit the road, according to whether it was level, uphill or down. Another fine driver was Alf Cartwright – he was a big man, slow-moving and with a great sense of humour. He once stopped by mistake at a station and was given an absolute roasting by the stationmaster. Calm as you like he replied: “We’d better go, then. It’s a long time since we saw you so we stopped to see how you were going on.” Like many drivers in the West Riding who worked with firemen in their forties, Alf did his share of firing while his mate took hold.
‘I once fired a Valour for Alf, from Wakefield to Grantham, and I remember the quiet, unhurried way he went about his business, making life easy for me. On another journey, this time from Wakefield to Bradford with a chap called George Styles, I was given a literary lecture – George knew everything there was to know about the Brontë sisters, and as we roared along he lectured me on Wuthering Heights!
‘Perhaps my greatest mentor was Ted Hailstone, who my mother thought had the look and presence of a bishop. The first time we met, he told me that he would make a fireman of me and then a driver. Looking back, I am amazed at the opportunities he gave me. He also told me what he expected of a shedmaster, or a superintendent. He was always interested in my career, and each time I gained promotion in later years he expected me to let him know, whereupon I would receive a reply finishing, “Yours ever forward”.
‘He was a very hard taskmaster who inspired either immense admiration or loathing in those who worked with him. He came from a railway family in Manchester and was a stickler for self-discipline and tidiness. When you saw him in action, either driving or firing, you knew that here was a man who had mastered the engineman’s profession. My firing had to be precise, he expected full steam pressure where it was needed, and the minimum of smoke and waste of steam. If I failed to sweep up after every firing, he would stand and shuffle his clogs until I did so; many West Riding men wore clogs in those days. In later years he moved from Bradford to King’s Cross and I fired for him, for old time’s sake, to Leeds and back on his own A4 Pacific Silver Link just before he retired in 1956. He was a good friend.
‘I learned with Ted the utter importance of concentration: never to let the mind wander, and never, never to talk when running into a station, or when the signals were at caution or at danger, or up to a speed restriction. To pass a signal at danger was a crime – and still is, I am sure. I was to experience that, too, so I know the awful feeling.
‘On one occasion I was firing for a marvellous old character, Harold Binder, on an N5 5901, from Bradford to Halifax. A few minutes before going I got the camera out and took a photograph of Harold and his mate on the front gangway. But when we returned, I realised that I had left the injector at work and had overfilled the boiler. We started away, but when we got on the 1 in 45 and Harold opened the regulator wide, 5901 ‘caught the water’ and we roared up the grade to St Dunstans, water pouring from the chimney and cylinder cocks, at not much more than walking pace. I had to struggle all the way to Queensbury but we kept time and Harold’s greatly embellished rebuke always makes me laugh. But it was yet another lesson learned.’
As well as stories of firemen and drivers Richard remembered incidents from all areas of steam-working, including a fascinating meeting early in his career with chief mechanical engineer Edward Thompson.
‘I had been interviewed by Mr Thompson when I left school and he had taken an interest in my progress. Early in 1942, in the dark at Wakefield, he spotted me getting off an engine and asked me what I was doing so late on a Saturday evening. The fact that I was learning to fire pleased him greatly, even though it was highly unofficial! When the train for Doncaster ran in, he beckoned me to follow, sat me down in a compartment and then told me about his plans for building new locomotives: the Bl, the Ll, his Pacifics, rebuilt Kls, B17s and, of course, the splendid 04 rebuild, to become the even better 01. Not all his engines were to be perfect, but most were splendid jobs. He aimed to reduce the number of classes, to ease the lot of the running sheds by simplification and standardisation and, given the appalling wartime shortages of material, his short reign of five-and-a-half years was memorable.
‘That night at Doncaster when he bade me goodnight he lifted his hat to me, a scruffy eighteen-year-old. Whereas some will always denigrate Thompson and his work, I shall never forget him: he sent me to Leslie Parker, and he knew he was sending me to the most outstanding manager of young men on the LNER. And for that I shall always be grateful.’
Not Amused
In 1872 the Queen left Windsor on 14th May, accompanied by Prince Leopold and Princess Beatrice; the suite being the Marchioness of Ely, Viscount Bridport, Colonel Ponsonby, Mr. Collins, Dr. Marshall, and Mr. Sahl. A special saloon was on the train for His Royal Highness Prince Leopold, fitted up with an invalid bed. The Prince was brought into the station on a surgical couch, which was lifted from the wagonette and carried to the saloon; he was suffering from a sprain of the knee. Both at Windsor and Oxford, contrary to the usual custom, the public were admitted. The journey was not so successful as usual. Passing along the platform in the dead of night at Wigan, where usually nothing is heard or seen of the Royal travellers, I was surprised to find John Brown (the Queen’s gillie and servant); and, on enquiring whether all was right, heard to my surprise ‘No! The Queen says’ – but this, certainly, was only John Brown’s way of putting it – ‘the carriage is shaking like the devil!’ a startling communication, for we, closely behind, were travelling with the utmost steadiness.
John Brown’s coarse phonograph had transmuted Her Majesty’s gentle complaint!
George P. Neele Railway Reminiscences, 1904
What’s in a Name?
It is worth while setting down, because almost forgotten since the amalgamations which preceded the coming into existence of British Railways, the now unfamiliar names of some of the railways by which I travelled at one time or another in my childhood, youth and young manhood.
When I came into the world in 1870 there were a hundred and thirty different railways!
J. W. Robertson Scott, The Day Before Yesterday, the autobiography of the founding editor of The Countryman 1951
BRITAIN’S OLDEST
RAILWAYMAN
VINSUN GULLIVER
DRIVER ON THE LONDON MIDLAND & SCOTTISH AND THE LONDON & NORTH EASTERN RAILWAYS
Vinsun Gulliver lived to be 109. When he started work in 1907, he worked on what was still a Victorian railway system. He caught the end of the greatest days of steam; the days, long before the motorcar, when the railway was undisputed king.
Born in Upton, Warwickshire, in 1889 Vinsun started work at the station there cleaning engines on 3 September 1907. His memory of those far-off days never faded: ‘I can remember the smell of the engines, the smell of the oil and the long hours – well, they were long by today’s standards, anyway.’
But in those days when you started at the bottom, as Vinsun did, your job might include all sorts of tasks; in fact, as he explained, you did whatever you were asked to do, from making tea for the stationmaster to running errands: ‘Yes, I carried out all sorts of tasks, and I supplemented my income by shovelling coal – as you can probably imagine, there was a lot of that to be done.’
Vinsun made light of many of the more irritating afflictions of great age. ‘I am really rather deaf,’ he confessed, ‘so you must bellow into my good ear!’
Vinsun retired in the early 1950s more than ten years before the steam trains began to disappear – and that was at the end of a career lasting just under half a century. But inevitably what fascinated Vinsun most towards the end of his life were the changes he has seen during his long life.
‘I can’t remember the first motor car coming through our village,’ he says, ‘because I like to be precis
e about these things and I was busy playing somewhere, I think, when the shout went up that it was coming. I think I saw the back of it as it disappeared through the dust, but I got a full view of the second car which seemed to be going at a hell of pace, though I shouldn’t think it was more than five miles an hour. This would have been during the last decade of Victoria’s reign.’
Vinsun’s father was the village handyman – ‘he did just about anything and everything’ remembered Vinsun – and when he left school, Vinsun’s decision to join the railway had more to do with simply taking the job that was available than with any love for steam. But that quickly changed as he began work on the great locomotives: ‘I remember I cleaned the Queen Alexandra – the name of one of the best engines we had – and it was a magnificent thing; most of our local engines didn’t have names, they were just engines used for the local passenger and goods trains.’
It was to be some years before Vinsun graduated from cleaning and odd jobs to the footplate: ‘When I started as a fireman I saw it as my chance to watch the driver and see how he did the job. At first of course it looked very complicated. You had to get the pressure just right to get the train to move at all. You had to learn to fire the engine properly, and of course certain types of coal were much better for this. On the LNER, which is where I moved later on in my career, I think it would be fair to say that our methods of locomotive practice were not as consistent as, say, those of the Great Western, but then they had better coal which could make a great difference. Theirs was relatively smokeless coal, which was good.
‘One of the biggest changes I remember very early on was that Cunard, the shipping line, moved from Liverpool to Southampton and went from using coal to using oil. That reduced the price of coal considerably, but of course, although that was good for people who bought coal, it knocked Liverpool for six; in fact I don’t think the city ever recovered.
‘I was passed fit for driving on Shrove Tuesday – I can’t actually remember which year, but I remember it was Shrove Tuesday, and well before 1930. I’d certainly already been working for many years. The most exciting thing about it all, of course, was that it meant I earned a bit more money. I drove the trains from Gorton, and I drove them all over the place, to Glossop, Stalybridge, Macclesfield, Liverpool, all local stuff. Many of the lines I worked disappeared with the Beeching cuts in the 1960s. In those days, of course, we weren’t romantic about steam; it was hard work, much harder than diesel or electric, and they were made – the engines, I mean – simply to do a job.’
During the Great War, Vinsun registered as a conscientious objector, which was an immensely unpopular thing to do at the time. ‘I was examined several times before Judge Mellor, who seemed fairly sympathetic. I simply stated my case and hoped for the best. And this was at a time when many conscientious objectors were imprisoned.’
Once he’d become a driver Vinsun found the work enjoyable, but he recalled that, in those far off days, it was still only a job. The romance of the thing only came much later: ‘Yes, I did enjoy it, because you had status; it was important work and looked exciting to others with different jobs – which is why so many children always wanted to be train drivers. Of course it really was exciting, too, despite the fact that it also had a lot of routine about it. And that’s how I saw it.
‘It’s certainly fair to say that I was a rather good driver. No accidents and always very reliable – which is more than you can say for the brakes on those early trains! They often caused us problems compared with modern train brakes.
‘After I retired I collected snuffboxes, which were still being used when I began my hobby! I collected dozens, and some were valuable. My daughter has them now.
‘The thing I remember most about the steam trains was working at night, and how busy it could be then with goods trains moving everywhere. And in the wars – that is, the Great War and the Second World War – there was a shortage of uniforms so we always had to wear an official hat; as long as you had your hat, it didn’t matter too much that you didn’t have the rest of your uniform. Trains were very reliable then – apart from those brakes of course!’
Out of the Ark
It was only yesterday, but what a gulf between now and then. Then was the old world. Stage coaches, more or less swift riding-horses, pack-horses, highwaymen, Druids, Ancient Britons. All these belong to the old period. I will concede a halt in the midst of it and allow that gunpowder and printing tended to modernise the world. But your railroad starts a new era. We who lived before railways and survive out of the ancient world, are like Father Noah and his family out of the ark.
William Makepeace Thackeray, 1860
Trains on the Road
We have almost forgotten the fact now-a-days, but railways in their early years had to compete for passenger traffic with something besides stage coaches. ‘Railroads, except in very peculiar circumstances, are behind the age,’ says, in 1831, the author of a pamphlet written to prove the absurdity of building one between Edinburgh and Glasgow. He adds that the future is not on the side of cumbrous locomotives with their long, lumbering trains, but of steam road-carriages – ‘of which a great many are already required by coach proprietors, carriers of merchandise and others for their use on the public roads.’
Mr Scott Russell – afterwards the builder of the Great Eastern – established in 1834 ‘a line of steam coaches between Glasgow and Paisley as the regular mode of conveyance. These ran for months with the greatest regularity and success and the trip, a distance of seven and a half miles, was run in forty-five minutes.’
These steam coaches escaped the payment of tolls which were by act of parliament authorised to be levied upon all vehicles ‘drawn by one or more horses or mules etc.’ They were consequently the object of the fiercest hostility of the road trustees.
W. M. Acworth, Scottish Railways, 1890
THE BRAKE
VAN MAN
JOHN KERLEY
GUARD ON THE LONDON & NORTH EASTERN RAILWAY
John Kerley always said that the driver drove the train but the guard was in charge of it. John worked for more than forty years on the railway, and in retirement he was only saddened that the guard’s role had almost vanished with the coming of diesel and electric engines. At the same time he was delighted that he had known the railway industry when the train was still king of the transport system. He was born in the street where he still lives, and his first job on leaving school at the age of fourteen was as an electrician’s mate. He was immediately thrown into one of the busiest periods of his life, as most of London’s houses were in the process of being converted from gas lighting to electricity, a process that continued throughout the 1930s.
Tiring of the electrician’s life, John worked in a dairy, making pats of butter. Then war started and he joined the Navy. It wasn’t until he was twenty-five that he finally found the career that suited him – and this is perhaps rather surprising, given that several members of his family were already employed on the railways: his wife’s uncle, her father and his aunt, to name just a few: ‘My father-in-law was a loco inspector,’ he remembered, ‘and he was sure I’d enjoy working on the railways. He was pretty convincing, too. They were also crying out for staff at the time so it wasn’t too difficult to get a job. I was interviewed at King’s Cross and my first job was awful – I had to do shifts that started at lam or 2am or 3am: that was all they gave me because the night trains had to be covered, and the last man to be taken on always started at the bottom in every respect.’
John spent the first three weeks of his career as a porter at Hatfield. He sorted parcels, swept the platforms and helped people with their luggage: ‘I did all the basic things. Despite what most people think, carrying people’s luggage was not really part of the porter’s work; we called it weaselling because you were really trying to ingratiate yourself to get a tip.’
After just three weeks at Hatfield, John left portering behind and was sent to King’s Cross as a trainee guard. He spent four weeks w
orking with an experienced guard to get used to the various duties and routines: ‘I’d start at 8am by reporting to the guard superintendent who’d tell me which guard to report to. Then I’d be shown the sidings, because guards guarded the train as well as the passengers. We were responsible for backing trains into sidings – they were never driven in, always backed in, with the guard directing operations and signalling to the driver who, of course, couldn’t really see where he was going. It could be tricky, too, reversing into the sidings, because you had to know all the signals and setbacks.
‘There were no phones either, in those days, which meant that you had to use hand signals and lamps to get the driver to do what you wanted him to do. After four weeks I was put in front of the signals inspector who quizzed me on all the rules and regulations and working practices. I found it all a bit of an ordeal; inspectors in those days always seemed solemn and very important, but I think I passed all right simply because I’d had a really good teacher. The guards in those days really knew their stuff. The other curious thing about this time was that you decided yourself when you were ready to go in front of the inspector. Might sound a funny way to do it, but it actually worked very well because it put the onus on you to learn fast.’
From King’s Cross, John went to Barnet and Enfield where he spent much of his time shunting in the sidings. These were the days before roads and container lorries had begun to eat into the railways’ almost total domination of transport. Thus at Barnet and Enfield there were sidings covering several acres, and so many coaches that they were kept off the road for as long as six months at a time.
