Generations of nineteenth-century schoolboys wanted to become engine drivers or, as they grew up, locomotive engineers. A new generation of professional men – and a very few women, too – was quick to realize that railways were good for business. Ideas as well as people could hurry between towns and cities at speeds that no one could have imagined before George Stephenson first opened out the regulator of Rocket at Rainhill in 1829. Finally, it was possible to travel faster than by horse.
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‘I am such a locomotive being always flying about,’ wrote the prolific architect Augustus Welby Pugin, as he sped around the country whenever, it seemed, a new railway opened, in his mission to build Gothic Revival churches the length and breadth of Britain. Architectural styles had begun to travel too, and one wonders whether the railways were to blame for the sheer eclecticism of High Victorian design as architects raced about the country, rather than working locally, and with local materials, as in the days before steam.
Railways, though, and the steam locomotive in particular, had a character and an aesthetic of their own. The ways they looked, moved, and sounded were new and special. From early on, artists attempted to capture the spirit of the steam locomotive in oil on canvas. J. M. W. Turner’s Rain, Steam, and Speed, showing one of Daniel Gooch’s broad-gauge 2-2-2s blazing across Maidenhead viaduct between Paddington and Reading at the head of a GWR express, was painted in 1842. It is a brilliant, awe-inspiring evocation of a steam train in full flight, part fairy-tale dragon, part factory furnace, a fiery and fleet herald of the industrial world that had shaped it, at once frightening and compelling.
If artists and, later, photographers became enchanted with the steam locomotive, so did musicians. Steam locomotives sing a universally popular song, a song with an insistent regular beat which has been the direct inspiration for many forms of music: orchestral, jazz, blues, boogie-woogie, folk, country and western, pop, and rock. In an interview in 1923, Arthur Honegger, the Swiss-born French composer, said: ‘I have always had a passionate liking for locomotives; for me, they are living things and I love them as others love women or horses.’ Honegger’s Pacific 231 (1923) is a piece of music that captures, in its own modern way, the excitement and musical intensity of a train journey spun through the landscape by a relentless French État railway Pacific locomotive. And even before Honegger’s overt orchestral paean to the steam locomotive, Jean Sibelius had worked the sounds of a steam train into his Night Ride with Sunrise, as had Anton Bruckner in his Fourth Symphony, Dvořák in the scherzo of his D minor Symphony, and Igor Stravinsky in The Rite of Spring.
Black plantation workers from Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana rode a mix of passenger and freight trains north to Chicago to find work and a new life after the American Civil War. This internal emigration continued for many decades. The sound of all those steam engines, the clickety-clack of the rail joints, lonesome whistles, and a sense of hope, yearning, and nostalgia, all railroaded into one new sensibility, helped give rise to the blues. To jazz and boogie-woogie, too, through the rocking pianos of Jimmy Yancey, Albert Ammons, and Meade ‘Lux’ Lewis. Just listen to ‘Lux’ Lewis’s ‘Honky Tonk Train Blues’ (1926).
From an earlier time, here is a wonderful poem, ‘From a Railway Carriage’, by Robert Louis Stevenson, published in A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885):
Faster than fairies, faster than witches,
Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches;
And charging along like troops in a battle
All through the meadows the horses and cattle:
All of the sights of the hill and the plain
Fly as thick as driving rain;
And ever again, in the wink of an eye,
Painted stations whistle by.
Here is a child who clambers and scrambles,
All by himself and gathering brambles;
Here is a tramp who stands and gazes;
And there is the green for stringing the daisies!
Here is a cart run away in the road
Lumping along with man and load;
And here is a mill, and there is a river:
Each a glimpse and gone for ever!
How cleverly, and in so few lines, Stevenson, born seven years before G. J. Churchward and just twenty years after the opening of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, catches the sound of the locomotive and of the carriages tearing after it – and how, too, his soundscape gives us the train now racing along the level, now climbing a hill, and, finally, streaking off into the unheeding distance.
W. H. Auden managed much the same with his memorable script for the GPO Film Unit’s Night Mail (1936). As we watch 6108 Seaforth Highlander, a three-cylinder Royal Scot class 4-6-0, climb the long gradient to the summit at Beattock, Auden recites:
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 and the girl next door.
Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient’s against her, but she’s on time.
Stately. Dignified. But with the punch and pull of pistons pounding in hard-pressed cylinders. And, then, as the LMS locomotive streaks down the fells towards Glasgow, the poet accelerates too:
Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from the girl and the boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or visit relations,
And applications for situations
And timid lovers’ declarations
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled in the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Notes from overseas to Hebrides
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, adoring,
The cold and official and the heart’s outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.
Here you can hear the rhythm of the rail joints as well as the insistent chatter of valves, letting steam in, letting steam out.
As for films, perhaps it is significant that the very first moving picture shown to the public was of a train. This was the Lumière brothers’ fifty-second short, L’arrivée d’un train en gare à La Ciotat, filmed on a family holiday in July 1895. The sequence shows a tall-chimneyed Paris–Lyon–Mediterranean 2-4-2 pulling into a seaside station between Marseilles and Toulon and passengers getting on and off. The sight of the locomotive heading towards the screen when the film was projected in the basement of the Grand Café on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris on 28 December 1895 caused several members of the audience to duck their heads behind the seats in front.
The steam locomotive created a rich world of art, culture, and enthusiasm around itself. For the men whose work is celebrated here, it was a world in the round. Brought up in an era in which the steam locomotive was all around them, it was no wonder that the future mechanical engineers who shaped the last generation of great mainline steam locomotives were so smitten with them. For some, as we will see, it was steam to its limits, even though most were well aware of the competing demands of new forms of traction. There was, though, always going to be a difference between a machine that seemed to be alive, abounding in character and imbued with a soul, and smooth anonymous boxes on wheels which moved trains along tracks with little apparent effort. This attitude was summed up well by British Railways design engineer E. S. Cox when he wrote in 1965:
Professionally, the diesel and the mechanical parts of electric locomotives have given me just as absor
bing an interest and challenge as ever did their steam predecessors, and I shall watch their future progress with the closest interest when I have no longer any contribution to make. Privately, steam has been a lifelong love, from the lineside, in the erecting shop, on the footplate and above all in the countless aspects of design and development with which it has been my good fortune to be concerned. When the time comes, not far distant now, when the steam locomotive in this country is only to be seen in museums or on small enthusiast-sponsored light railways, the magnificent sound of crashing exhausts, and the distant wail of the chime whistle will remain in memory’s ear as unforgettable recollections of an age which has gone.
Quite simply, steam had a magic quality, a spirit that was difficult for those brought up with steam railways in their Victorian and Edwardian heyday, when all was spick and span and colourful, even to want to consider giving up. There came, though, a later generation of politicians and professional men and women who believed in modernization at all costs, whether promoting high-rise council estates, motorways, and supermarkets, with the concomitant destruction of so many historic buildings and town centres, or conducting an attack on the steam locomotive which, even at the time, seemed the stuff of a zealous and blinkered iconoclasm.
As it was, I was born at the very end of steam in regular main-line service. And yet, like so many generations of boys – and a number of girls – before me, I was captivated the moment I first saw and listened to a steam engine. There were Britannia class Pacifics named after British heroes and all-purpose Stanier class 5 4-6-0s at Marylebone, the delightfully quiet and quintessentially Edwardian terminus hidden behind the roaring traffic of the Marylebone Road, where steam-hauled semi-fasts raced the electric trains of London Transport’s Metropolitan Line through Kilburn and Neasden, then up the steep Chiltern banks to Amersham and on across the Vale of Aylesbury, along the magnificently aligned route that Sir Edward Watkin had built to more generous continental dimensions in the late 1890s, dreaming of a direct service from Manchester through Sheffield, Nottingham, Leicester, Aylesbury, and Neasden, and on through central London to Paris, via the South Eastern & Chatham Railway and a Channel Tunnel.
There were the ex-GWR red 0-6-0 pannier tanks, based at Neasden depot, which could be heard chuffing around the Circle Line at night with their maintenance trains. There was an unforgettable day at the Dagenham works of the Ford Motor Company where I got to drive a steam locomotive for the first time. I had to stand on a wooden box to see out of the circular cab window of Ford’s No. 8, a Peckett 0-6-0 saddle tank which was used, together with a small fleet of identical engines, to pull goods inwards from Dagenham Docks on the Thames and goods outwards, in the form of cars, to the boats that would take them to the continent. I can still remember the sheer thrill of opening a regulator for the first time. That slight delay between moving the lever and the steam pushing the two pistons in and out. The clouds of steam shooting out from the cylinder cocks as the fireman exhausted condensation from the cylinders after the locomotive had been standing idle. The sudden chuff from the chimney as the industrial engine rumbled down from behind the massive factory towards the docks.
I remember the driver, from the nearby Becontree Estate, built by the London County Council in the 1920s, covering my hand and guiding it through the various positions of the brake valve. There were instructions on how to use the ‘blower’, a valve that opens to shoot steam up through the blast-pipe whenever the regulator is shut, to ensure a draught through the fire-box and boiler tubes; without this, a sudden downdraught or the compression of air when passing through a tunnel could blow back down the chimney and force flames and hot gas out on to the footplate, threatening the crew with the very real danger of severe, or even fatal, burns. No. 8 was painted green, with the distinctive Ford signature logo on the bulbous saddle tank. She was no beauty, yet locomotives like this were very much a behind-the-scenes part of the working life of industrial Britain. I wonder what became of her? Perhaps she went the way of 99 per cent of Ford Cortinas. Hopefully, though, she is delighting a new generation of children on a preserved railway somewhere, a generation for whom steam, despite the allure of digital Twittery, retains its elemental sorcery. In her vastly popular Harry Potter books, the first of which was published in 1997, J. K. Rowling instinctively knew that her fictional Hogwarts Express had to be a steam train. In the equally successful Harry Potter films, the locomotive used to pull the Hogwarts Express is an ex-GWR, Hall class two-cylinder 4-6-0, Olton Hall (renamed Hogwarts Castle) designed under the direction of Charles Collett and built at Swindon in 1937. Both author and directors gauged the mood of children at the turn of the twentieth century exactly. It is still possible to be intrigued by steam, and even to love the steam locomotive, while living in an age of global digital communications and computer design and technology.
I rode the footplate of another Peckett 0-6-0 saddle tank some years later, at the Betteshanger colliery in Kent. Today, in the era of Facebook and air-conditioned edge-of-town shopping malls, the idea of a coal mine in the plush Home Counties, complete with cage lifts and the skeletal wheeled towers that lowered miners into Hadean depths, must seem highly improbable. But the Kent mines were real enough, and very old-fashioned indeed by the time I got to see them in action. Somewhere, my old school friend Paul Kutarski, a former army medic and today a consultant surgeon, has an 8 mm film of the occasion. He says he cannot find it. I wish he could. It would be the stuff of museum archives now. Betteshanger was the last colliery in Kent. It closed in 1989.
I remember a thrilling ride on the 08.30 express from Waterloo, for the first time, to greet the RMS Queen Elizabeth, the Cunard liner, at Southampton Docks. Our locomotive was a filthy West Country Pacific – 34001, shorn of its nameplate, Exeter – originally built to the radical designs of Oliver Bulleid for the Southern Railway in 1945 and modified by Ron Jarvis for the Southern Region of British Railways in 1957. We sat in the first coach, an elegantly curved, malachite-green Bulleid Open Brake Second, ventilators wide open, as I listened with the intensity of a young child to the compulsive three-cylinder jazz beat of Exeter as she raced south-west, her performance belying her appearance. At the end of steam, British Railways management seemed determined, unlike railway managements in France, Germany, or South Africa, to prove to the public that steam was inherently unclean – although perhaps a shortage of workers willing to toil in sooty engine sheds in the 1960s was equally responsible.
By refusing to clean engines, stripping them of names and number plates, and maintaining them to minimal standards, and simultaneously declining to retain a suitably skilled workforce, British Railways’ intention appears to have been to turn passengers against these beautiful machines in preparation for the impending launch of gleaming, if characterless, electric multiple units. Yet even in their very last days, these charismatic and modern steam locomotives – some, like 34098 Templecombe, had been rebuilt just six years before withdrawal – would run happily at 100 mph and more when given their head between Basingstoke and Woking, a blur of whirling, grimy motion, a triumph of design and engineering over a management blinkered by the notion of modernization at any cost.
Was the public fooled? Perhaps. One thing I was to learn, though, many years later when firing and driving regular steam trains in Poland was that many – most? – passengers simply want to get from A to B, to commute from home to work and back, as quickly and reliably as possible. The question of whether their train is powered by steam, diesel, or electricity is largely irrelevant. On my first solo spell driving the 04.16 fast commuter train from Wolsztyn to Poznań on a savagely cold day in 2003, when the landscape was shrouded in snow and even Captain Oates might have allowed himself a grumble of complaint, I drew to a halt under the electric wires at a graffiti-sprayed Poznań station, aligning the doors of the first of the olive-green, double-deck coaches behind me with the stairs leading to the exit, exactly on time. Andrzej Macur, the moustachioed regular PKP (Polish State Railways) driver w
ho had allowed me to drive as I saw fit for the two hours from Wolzstyn, clapped me gently on the shoulders, exclaiming: ‘Bravo! Pivo! Wodka!’ – which meant he would be buying the drinks back in the engineman’s bar in Wolsztyn that night. I leaned out of the cab of the well-groomed, if hard-pressed, fifty-year-old, black and green PKP two-cylinder 2-6-2, 0149-69, and watched passengers stream from the train, some behind newspapers, others blowing their noses, several staring crossly at their watches. Not one, not a single one, looked up at me or spared the most cursory glance for the brutally handsome machine that had brought them safely and on time through the snow, stopping at and starting from fifteen stations along the way. Perhaps some had been hoping the train would be cancelled so they could stay at home in front of the fire – and who could blame them in such extreme weather?
I can remember, too, those Nottingham semi-fasts from Marylebone. ‘Brackley? That’s the steamer, son.’ This was the stuff of Stephensonian wizardry to me, yet just a train, or so it seemed, to the bored-looking grown-ups in the compartment with me. I used to stand in the corridor, lower the window, and look out as the 14.38 Marylebone to Nottingham Victoria barked through the tunnels under Lord’s Cricket Ground and St John’s Wood on a Wednesday afternoon, red and orange sparks rising from the chimney of a Britannia Pacific or, more usually, a Stanier class 5 4-6-0, the glow from the cab flickering against blackened brick walls. As a teenager, I remember the shock of recognition when I first saw Joseph Wright of Derby’s painting An Iron Forge (1772) in the Tate Gallery, and again, at much the same time, when I looked properly at Wright’s An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768) in the National Gallery. Wright had painted, in spirit if not in fact, what I had seen when looking out of the window of a maroon ex-LMS coach in the tunnels leading north-west from Marylebone.
Giants of Steam Page 4
