Tuesday Treasures - December 2023

TUESDAY 19 DECEMBER

The Great Western Railway’s Centenary Banquet

The GWR was incorporated by an Act of Parliament passed on 31 August 1835, and one hundred years later the occasion was marked by an extravagant banquet given by the directors personally at the Grosvenor House, London on 30 October 1935.

The corporate gift of Lord of the Isles, produced to hold a cigar and a cigarette for guests at the centenary banquet. Behind it is the cover of the menu and the invitation card

It was a grand affair attended by more than eleven hundred people. The guest list included MPs for constituencies through which the GWR ran, directors and officers of other British railway companies, mayors and municipal officials of cities and towns in Great Western territory and High Commissioners for the Dominions. The principal guest was His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, soon to become Edward VIII as his father, King George V, was a sick man at the time and died three months later. Also present were representatives of manufacturing, commercial and shipping companies, the press, officials of railway employees’ trade unions and other members of the Company’s staff who were elected by colleagues as their representatives. It is interesting to note that the MPs were referred to as ‘Members of the late Parliament’ as Parliament had been dissolved in readiness for the General Election which took place on 14 November.

The corporate gift of Lord of the Isles, produced to hold a cigar and a cigarette for guests at the centenary banquet. Behind it is the invitation card and the cover of the menu

The Trust holds a number of items from the occasion and shown here are a formal invitation, a menu and a cigar/cigarette holder in the shape of the GWR broad gauge loco Lord of the Isles. This amazing survivor of the event is in mint condition and is made of wood shaped to the outline of the locomotive, with a coloured drawing of Lord of the Isles on paper pasted each side. The chimney is drilled with a hole to take the cigarette, while a larger hole at the rear allowed the cigar to be inserted in the ‘firebox’.

This photograph shows the hole drilled in the rear of the Lord of the Isles, allowing the cigar to be inserted in the 'firebox'. You will also see a slot between the wood and paper above the boiler barrel. This is for a book of matches in case any guests have not brought their own means of ignition for the tobacco

The driving wheel splasher on the fireman’s side is printed: ‘33 years service. Ran 789,000 miles’. On the driver’s side the message is: ‘Great Western Railway Centenary 1835-1935’. The sandwich construction of the souvenir (paper-wood-paper) in some way mirrors the sandwich frames of broad gauge locomotives which were metal-wood-metal.

This photograph of guests seated in the packed room at the banquet is, in fact, two photographs taken to include every table, and mounted side by side on a folder

A large photograph of the event finishes this week’s item and indeed for 2023. Despite its size, the room appears very crowded. One can only imagine the effect of all those cigars and cigarettes being lit simultaneously at the end of the meal. It must have created an atmosphere similar to Old Oak Common engine shed on a Monday morning when all the locomotives were lit up after their Sunday rest!

We will take a break until January and hope that you have enjoyed reading about the Trust’s collection over the past year.

A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all.

TUESDAY 12 DECEMBER

Holidays by Train – Part 12

Our Blog last week from the Great Western Trust Collection on the illustrated leaflet the GWR issued on ‘How to Advertise in Holiday Haunts – The Official Guide to the GWR’ published in June 1935 for the following year, prompted questions about the special express trains also illustrated from the GWR staff magazine.

The GWR’s final edition of Holiday Haunts had 688 pages and was printed by Butler & Tanner at Frome – the company which had printed the book for many years. Butler & Tanner’s print works finally closed down in 2014

Our archive collection may be extensive, but it remains in many parts, a jigsaw with missing pieces. Given the long life and massive operation that the GWR and BRWR provided, we shouldn’t be too demanding of saving every last paper, document or other object they created for no archive could physically cope with it! However, a bonus of those ‘missing pieces’ as it were is that they leave questions yet to be answered, but who knows, ‘out there’ may just be a remnant yet to be discovered? That is what makes the Trust’s work so inspiring.

What we can do however is try to answer questions from what we do hold. We have two public leaflets that date from 1933 advertising Holiday Haunts Expresses from the Birmingham stations, and another from Bristol, Bath & Weston-super-Mare, stating under the title ‘Make Sure of Your Holiday!’ that trains will run to multiple seaside destinations on Sundays from April 16th to June 25th with the ‘Cheapest Fares ever known’.

Being wordy documents however, we thought you would prefer the rather racy for its times, cover of the very last GWR edition of Holiday Haunts of 1947! It was also produced as a double royal pictorial poster, which happily the Trust Collection also possesses! Perhaps sexist by today’s standards, but of its time, considered appropriately distracting to make passing passengers think holiday!?

An enthusiastic description of the West Country as a holiday destination is contained in the GWR advert published in The Times on 17 May 1933, with the obligatory mention of Holiday Haunts

TUESDAY 5 DECEMBER

Holidays by Train – Part 11

Over a long period of our Blogs, we have been able to delve into the vast archive of Holiday related material in the Great Western Trust collection, reaching no less than ten Blogs to date. With winter at last coming later than it used to, we need to cheer up and plan ahead for our 2024 holiday, just as our forebears used to.

Today’s Blog illustrates how the GWR wanted to help in that activity, and they did so by prompting the folk who ran seaside accommodation to advertise in the then well established ‘Holiday Haunts’ publication.

We illustrate the leaflet they issued to such parties ‘How to Advertise in Holiday Haunts – The Official Guide of the GWR’ which was published in June 1935 for the following 1936 season issue. Its format was centred upon an open letter from H L Wilkinson then Superintendent of the Line, pointing out that the 1936 Edition of Holiday Haunts would amount to no less than 170,000 copies, demonstrating how amazingly popular and clearly valued it was to the public!

It provided detail on the costs for varied types and physical sizes of adverts, and warned that the closing date for submission of potential adverts was 30 September 1935. Rather cleverly it included a section ‘The Pulling Power of Holiday Haunts’ with quotes from pleased users etc, much in the way websites today publish customer recommendations!

Having noticed the large scale of the print run of Holiday Haunts, it is hardly surprising to find that this advance publication leaflet was itself printed in 30,000 copies!

Of course it being the GWR’s publication, they were wise to warn those seeking to advertise that the each one was subject to GWR approval, and that those accepted were only on the basis that the accommodation offered was ‘in all respects reasonably satisfactory to the requirements of visitors’.

After all, by association, the GWR’s much respected reputation, was on the line, if users had valid reasons to complain!

From 1933 the GWR introduced Holiday Haunts Expresses, day excursions so people who had read Holiday Haunts could visit the resort they had chosen and view the accommodation before booking. This photograph, showing locomotives being prepared for Holiday Haunts Expresses was published in the Great Western Railway Magazine

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