by Tom Quinn
W. M. Acworth, Scottish Railways, 1890
THE PEOPLE’S
PORTER
TOM JALES
PORTER ON THE LONDON & NORTH EASTERN RAILWAY
Born in 1913 in The Perseverance pub in Islington, north London, Tom Jales started work in 1927. His first job was as a railway messenger boy in the heart of the old City of London, and he went straight into it from school at the age of fourteen. He was sent to Bread Street for an interview that had been arranged by a neighbour who worked on the London and North Eastern Railway, as it was then known: ‘A Mr Syder – I’ll never forget his name – interviewed me. He was what was called the City manager. We met in a dark old room that by today’s standards wouldn’t look like an office at all – you have to remember this was before London was bombed, when it was still a City of tiny lanes and old houses. Far more people lived right in the heart of the City, too, in those days, because there were none of these enormous office blocks.
‘Anyway, after my interview, Mr Syder said there might be a chance they’d have me; he was completely non-committal, but it all sounded pretty optimistic to a lad of fourteen.’ A month to the day after his interview Tom received a letter telling him to report to Farringdon Street station, and so a railway career that was to last more than fifty years began.
‘The instant I arrived I was put to work,’ he remembered; ‘there was no messing about in those days – no induction courses and little chats. I was put straight on to the switchboard, an old mechanical thing with wires coming out like spaghetti. This was relatively early days for the telephone, and for long-distance calls a whole string of operators across the country had to be co-ordinated. I had a national board for these calls, and a board for internal calls – that is, calls within the office.
‘I didn’t enjoy that job much, but I stuck it for six years until I was twenty. It was just that good jobs were hard to come by in those days, and I didn’t dare leave. It wasn’t the nature of the work I objected to, it was the shifts. At fourteen I was doing 6am to 2pm, or 2pm to 10pm, or 10pm to 6am, and this meant that, outside work, I had no life at all.
‘As well as dealing with calls I had to file all the invoices from the goods yard – there were thousands of them, and sorting out one batch might take from 10pm until 3am. There were few calls at night, however, so you had time for all this.’
Horses were only beginning to disappear from London’s streets at this time. Trams were still to be seen on major roads across the capital, and working people hardly dreamt of owning their own houses. When Tom married in 1938, he and his wife, like most young couples, moved into a small set of rented rooms. Then a month after his twentieth birthday he was transferred from the switchboard to Finsbury Park station, still in London, as a grade two porter.
‘I stayed there for three happy years,’ he remembered, ‘and in those days portering was a real job. You had to be diplomatic and deal with people’s luggage and with their problems. Effectively you were waiting on the passengers, because that was the tradition; now, most people carry their own cases. In those days they didn’t, they expected a porter to be there to do it for them.
‘I wouldn’t say that most of those I dealt with were toffs, but they were well-to-do, and of course, the porter was just a servant – we were sort of invisible, I suppose. My other jobs were sweeping the platform every day, and unloading the milk – you quickly got the knack of rolling two great churns along the platform to the carts waiting outside. At first it seemed impossible. Rolling one along was difficult enough, and it would sometimes end up falling off the platform onto the line, but after a while you got the hang of it. Normally, in one delivery we’d have about a hundred churns to roll – a hell of a back-breaking job, but there were several porters, and we quite enjoyed doing it together.’
At Finsbury Park, as at most stations in those days, there were several porters and an indicator boy who operated the lights on the sign saying where each train was due to stop. If a train stopped at one particular platform a porter was needed on each side of the train because it was a single track and so passengers could get on and off on both sides: ‘Once the train was due to depart, the leading or senior porter would shout over the top of the train, “Are you all right there!” If you shouted “Yes!” in reply he’d wave his flag, you’d wave yours and they’d be off.’
Tom always felt that working on the railways gave you a sense that you were doing something important: ‘People on trains had somewhere they had to go, and you had to help them get there.’ As each train moved off, he and the other porters would check that all the doors were closed; but once one train had gone there was little time to relax before the next arrived. As Tom explained, porters in the 1930s were kept very busy indeed: ‘A lot of people think that there were long gaps between trains and we’d sit around playing cards and drinking tea – well, nothing could be further from the truth. There were trains every few minutes, and we never stopped for a moment, apart from official breaks of course.’
After three years at Finsbury Park, Tom went to King’s Cross; he wanted this move largely because he knew it would give him more work helping passengers with their luggage, and that in turn meant more money because it meant the chance to earn tips. He had been applying for a transfer from Finsbury Park for months, and began to be suspicious about his lack of success:
‘I knew I’d get more money if I was moved, but however often I applied for my transfer nothing happened, so I began to worry that someone was blocking me. Then, quite by chance, I found out what was going on, although I only found out because one of my duties was to empty the waste-paper basket in the stationmaster’s office! One morning I picked up the bin and found my latest application for transfer sitting there on the top! I was furious. Everyone was terrified of the stationmaster, but I seemed to have lost all fear that day, I was so angry. I went to see him, and I put the letter I had retrieved from the waste-paper bin in front of him. I told him that if he continued to ignore my applications I’d take the matter up with my union – and by 3pm I’d been told that I was starting at King’s Cross the following Monday. That was a good example of how a powerful union could protect the ordinary individual, because without a union I’d have been prevented from transferring, perhaps indefinitely.’
Tom arrived at King’s Cross in 1936 and found that rather than dealing with large numbers of people, he was suddenly swamped by parcels. ‘It was a shock for me – there were tons of them, and they arrived in a never-ending stream; it took up almost all the porters’ time. When I started there I did the 5.15pm–1.15am turn, which was a bit of a nuisance as it meant I had to walk home to the City. It’s hard to believe today how many ordinary people lived right in the heart of the City of London then. I lived in Haberdasher Street near Old Street where it’s mostly offices now – although funnily enough, one of my relatives still lives in that house today.
‘Even in the 1930s I would be passed by quite a bit of horse-drawn traffic, although lorries and cars were very quickly taking over. Opposite my house was a road haulier who had only horses; I remember they had one massive white one that I used to see regularly, and one of their wagons once went over my foot!’
Towards the end of the 1930s, Tom decided to move north a couple of miles from the City back to his home borough, Islington; his first memory of this period in his life is of a landlady who wouldn’t let him have his papers delivered! ‘Can’t remember why now, but landladies could be dragons in those days!’ he recalled.
Into the swing of things at King’s Cross, he discovered the main requirement was for speed, because no sooner had one train been sorted than another was in need of attention. Mailbags were unloaded, not onto the platform side of the train, but down onto the next set of rails: ‘Doing it that way meant that we could sort the mail out while the passengers were boarding,’ remembers Tom.
When he started work at King’s Cross, more than two hundred full-time porters were still employed at the station. Many of his fellow p
orters were elderly men who’d started work at the turn of the century. ‘They were always very nice, if a bit old-fashioned,’ remembered Tom, ‘but they showed you the ropes and tried to be helpful.’
All the porters wore what Tom thought were terrible uniforms. They were navy, with a cap, but made out of extremely rough, coarse material, and even on the hottest day of the year a porter wouldn’t dare be seen without a tie and a hat. The other problem was that they very rarely seemed to fit properly, and any new man would have to go off to The Lotteries in Petticoat Lane where all railway uniforms were made, and where ‘They’d sort out a new coat or trousers for you,’ remembered Tom.
‘In fact, the real difficulties weren’t with uniforms, they were with one or two of the staff. We had an inspector, for example, who was famous for walking along shouting, “You know your duty!” – usually when we were sweeping the long platforms. Then he’d shout, “I don’t want to make you do it again,” but of course he often did make us do it again.’
Tom remembered that in his early days trains always seemed to be full: ‘There were passengers everywhere, and in summer they often had half a ton of luggage, if they were going to Scotland for a few weeks for example, or grouse shooting.’
Streams of porters were always unloading taxis, but if they found themselves with a spare minute they queued with the other porters at the ticket office to help passengers with heavy luggage. Aristocrats were definitely the best tippers, and particularly in August when they were off to the grouse moors. ‘That always seemed to put them in a good mood,’ recalled Tom.
‘I particularly remember the old Duke of Windsor – King Edward who abdicated in 1938. He took the royal train often, but he’d always arrive by cab, and at night. He’d get out of the cab, call a porter and walk straight past the booking office. He always seemed to have had a few drinks, and that’d be putting it mildly! I used to take him to a sleeper so no one saw him – he always seemed concerned about that, understandably I suppose. As I helped him out of the cab he’d always say, “You know where I want to go” – and of course I knew exactly, straight into his carriage. I think I helped him across the station four or five times, but he was never accompanied by Mrs Simpson who, I suppose, preferred to stay in France. He always travelled under an assumed name, too, but we knew who he was.’
In Tom’s day the royal train was always kept ready in sidings at Old Oak Common in West London, and when a member of the royal family was expected, it would be brought to King’s Cross at night. ‘Royal trains were definitely used a great deal more when I first arrived at King’s Cross than during my last years; by then I suppose they’d started using the car more often. I can remember George V using the train, we watched him pass in the distance; then of course there was the Duke of Windsor, as I’ve said, then came George VI. All the sofas in the royal train and the other soft furnishings were a rich green colour, and it was very plush and luxurious, I can tell you.’
Tom’s first stint as a porter at King’s Cross lasted from 1936 until 1939. After that he worked with the shunters, which meant he helped with coupling the trains, and it was during this period that he nearly lost his life, as he remembered: ‘I was working at Hornsey in North London at the time and the inspector told me to leave four coaches and release the engine. The carriages each had what was called a buck-eye coupling which weighed about one hundredweight: you’d pull a chain and that would make the knuckle open, and the two carriages would then move together and lock; that was the procedure. Anyway, I was under this train setting the buck-eye when the driver was told by the inspector that it was OK to reverse the train. I only just got out in time. It would have crushed my head like an eggshell.’
When war came, most of Tom’s friends disappeared into the Army, but Tom – in a reserved occupation – had to stay put. He continued with his shunting work through the first years of the war, and remembered endless numbers of troop trains: ‘We always seemed to be getting them ready to take the men to the troop ships. Normally we’d put eighteen coaches behind the engine for a troop train and on one occasion we’d just formed up two trains when I heard a particular noise, one we all knew and dreaded. I looked in the direction from which it was coming, and sure enough saw a doodle bug hurtling towards me straight down the line; I heard its engine cut out, too, and that was the signal that it was about to drop. Luckily, this one just went over our heads and exploded harmlessly on the Alexandra Palace racecourse nearby. It broke every window in the train – you’ve never seen so much flying glass. My mate Arthur Cove, who had a terrible stutter, was thrown into an awful state by the explosion; I can recall him saying in a very agitated voice, “They’ve broken every fffff…” and he never got further than that!’
At the end of the war Tom went back to senior portering, but this meant an unfortunate dent in his pay packet: ‘A shunter’s money in those days was 55s a week, which is why from a financial point of view I wasn’t that pleased to be back portering when the war ended – a senior porter was on only 50s a week.’
One of Tom’s favourite jobs was winding up the indicator board, which involved cranking a big handle until the right destination appeared; however, his duties changed again in 1946 when he became a summer seat reservation inspector. ‘It was a promotion, but only for the summer; a lot of jobs on the railway were done like this. You got a sort of holiday fill-in promotion which gave you a chance to move up temporarily to a job that you might or might not like. Likewise the management could see if you were going to be any good at it; if not, then you went back to your normal job at the end of the summer and no hard feelings. Basically a seat inspector puts the reservation tickets on the seats in the train – not the most fascinating work, but it did mean a pay increase.’
By 1955 Tom was a supervisor foreman in the luggage office. He thinks he was appointed because senior management wanted to avoid a repeat of an earlier incident: ‘It used to cost nine old pence, roughly, to leave your suitcase, and you were issued with a ticket. Well, two of the men had apparently been re-using old tickets and pocketing the money. They got caught because the authorities suspected something was going on and set a trap using a policewoman in civilian clothes. The two who were caught were told that they’d be let off if they said who else was involved – it was thought that it had to be more than just two. Anyway, eleven staff went to prison as a result of that little caper. After all the fuss had died down they decided to put in a supervisor, and that was me. I stayed for ten years and started on a wage of £10 8s 2d a week.
‘Working in the left luggage at King’s Cross was a real education, I can tell you – you wouldn’t believe the things people used to leave with us. On two occasions we were left a package that contained a dead baby. I can remember the first time this happened – we’d had this suitcase for a while when my mate noticed the terrible smell coming from it. I went over and it really was appalling, a sort of sweet, decaying smell. We called the police, and by the time they arrived there were flies everywhere, but we hadn’t dared touch the case. Two detectives came and took it away to the Caledonian Road police station. They phoned to tell us they’d found a baby’s body inside, but then they came back with the case empty to set a trap for whoever had left it. Eventually a young woman arrived and we kept her waiting while the police were called; she was duly arrested, but later released as the baby had been stillborn.
‘Apart from that there used to be thousands of umbrellas, briefcases, wallets, bags, parcels, bits of furniture: it never ceased to amaze me that so many items were never collected. Why on earth would a chap who left his briefcase one evening not bother to collect it when it was full of his personal effects and papers? Anyway, if the stuff wasn’t collected it was eventually sold and the money went to the railway benevolent fund.’
In 1965 – and by this time the old steam trains had vanished – Tom was appointed to a carriage cleaning inspector’s job. He was responsible for all the ‘turn-around’ trains – that is, those that were arriving but had to b
e got ready to go out again quickly. ‘You had to clean them while they were on the platform, just dashing through with a hand broom!’
Tom was also responsible for the red carpet which was ceremoniously retrieved from a cupboard when a member of the royal family was expected: ‘It was kept in a special storeroom at No 11 platform,’ says Tom, ‘but it wasn’t carpet at all, it’s a sort of felt material. The point of it is really just to prevent any member of the royal family slipping on the platform, a genuine danger if it happened to be wet. A letter would arrive in the first instance saying that the royal train would be arriving at the station on such and such a date, so myself and two storemen would immediately traipse off to No 11 platform. We’d grab the carpet – and it weighed a fair bit, I can tell you! – load it into an old four-wheeled barrow and wheel it across the station. They used to measure precisely where the door would be when the train stopped; the royal drivers could stop within an inch of the right place, although the inspector at King’s Cross would stand there right on the mark to indicate to the driver precisely when he should come to a full halt, and the carpet would always be carefully positioned so it came right opposite the door we knew they’d use.’
Tom’s last job, as a divisional inspector, lasted until he retired in 1975. Like so many retired railwaymen he always enjoyed regaling his friends with tales of the old days. He particularly enjoyed re-telling tales of the Duchess of Kent and certain other aristocrats: ‘The duchess was a very friendly woman. Lord Lascelles, however, wasn’t quite so friendly – he was always late arriving and he’d be in a tearing rush not to miss the train. He always seemed to be carrying half a ton of 78rpm records, too. Once he shouted at me because he was in such a panic, and before I realised what I was doing, I shouted back! He used to swear at us too!’
