Tuesday Treasures - June 2024

TUESDAY 25 JUNE

Weekend Golf

In our previous Blogs we have variously illustrated from our Great Western Trust collection the recreational activities that the railways offered to customers – for example conducted rambles and walking tours. Today we turn to a very popular professional and amateur sport, golf.

The Great Western Railway once owned and operated four first class hotels, the Great Western Royal at Paddington, the Fishguard Bay in furthest West Wales, the Manor House Hotel at Moretonhampstead, Devon and finally the Tregenna Castle Hotel at St Ives, Cornwall. Of those four, the Manor House Hotel and the Tregenna Castle Hotel, had extensive golf courses or “Greens” which were very popular with its clientele. After Nationalisation, that popularity had hardly reduced, and so our Blog today illustrates two BRWR brochures of 1962 and 1964 advertising those facilities under the title of ‘Weekend Golf’.

Our 1962 brochure rather refreshingly has on its front and back covers, an artist’s impression of a lady golfer, with the pipe smoking, flat-capped male partner, observing her style! This is in our opinion refreshing, as golf was then very much a male dominated sport, be it professional or amateur, and ladies partook as second string rather to the male ‘first rank’ players. Even now, do professional lady golfers get the same massive financial prizes as men? Anyway, we also include the centre spread, showing the all-inclusive costs, for transport, hotel board and lodge and green fees all in ‘gns’ – that is guineas (£1.1 shilling, or £1.05 in today’s currency). This now rather archaic sum, was then a strong traditional format in various applications.

Our 1964 brochure is very similar in format and content, but we are pleased to include it as this time, the cover design is a photograph rather than an artist’s sketch and whether male golfers would have condoned the image, it shows a poor chap, with a bunker shot!!

This publicity photo of one of the ‘sunshine’ coaches of the mid 1930s, with deep windows to let in the maximum of light, includes the obligatory man carrying his golf clubs

Sadly, the railway companies of today, are constrained to provide travel services, as the hotels once owned and run by the pre-nationalisation companies and then in early BR days, we sold off in the 1980s, including the most famous golfing hotel of all, the Gleneagles Hotel!!

TUESDAY 18 JUNE

Pride in the Job - 3

The BRWR era continued much of the long established monthly GWR Staff focused journalism and perhaps surprisingly, expanded its range from the GWR concentration on its ‘whole system Staff Magazine’ to journals devoted solely to its Traffic Divisional and even Swindon Works staff and their activities.

Today’s Blog is a very informative article from the January 1961 BRWR Swindon Railway News edition, about Pattern Maker, Viv Rogers and his highly skilled and important work. The Great Western Trust collection holds all editions of this journal, issued from April 1960 to autumn 1963, and it appears they were issued free to relevant staff. The editorial approach was relatively light hearted but necessarily serious when senior management provided formal contributions!

The Viv Rogers article is a fine example of the detailed but lighter touch of its informative contents. When much material exists today in our collection of the eventual consequence of his work, namely cast iron, brass or aluminium items, it is simply too easy to overlook the fact that without the pattern maker, none could have been created. Beyond the skill of producing an accurate wooden pattern, the article explains the complex design considerations that had to precede it, specifically the nature of the eventual metal item to be cast, that all had unique casting expansion characteristics which had to be accommodated. The article includes a display of many pattern examples of which the distinctive BRWR era named passenger train headboards will be the most familiar to us. However, the one wooden pattern illustrated, that actually dominated by far, the casting production was the rail chair! That item alone, was in fact constructed from removable sections, as it could not be made from a single block of timber.

This display of pattern shop work was one of the exhibits in Swindon Works during the naming ceremony on 18 March 1960 for No 92220 Evening Star, the last steam locomotive built for British Railways. The photograph is one print in a comprehensive album commemorating the event, now in the Great Western Trust collection

From his accompanying photo, it is clear that Viv Rogers was both a ‘nice chap’ and truly ‘Proud of his Job’. Long may we admire such backroom skilled individuals, who were far from the limelight, but were vital to create the working railway.

The train headboard for The Bristolian, described in the text of the article, is carried on the Castle class locomotive about to haul the train from Bristol Temple Meads. This photograph is in the Great Western Trust’s R King Bird collection

TUESDAY 11 JUNE

Pride in the Job – 2

When the then Princess Elizabeth visited Swindon Town itself and then the Swindon Railway Works on 15 November 1950, at the latter she officially named the last Castle class locomotive to be built, No 7037 Swindon.

The Great Western Trust collection holds a very great deal of material broadly described as ‘Royals’ that cover the Royal Train workings themselves including funeral trains, the security arrangements, and extracts of internal communications exposing the massive, behind the scenes efforts involved in making them run smoothly.

Today’s blog casts light upon one overlooked example of just that ‘behind the scenes’ staff and organisational commitment. It is an official BRWR Drawing Office Swindon photo which merely states it was ‘issued’ on 5 December 1950, that is not necessarily taken on that date. As the naming event took place on the 15 November that year, we have seen another version of this photograph captioned as a record of the men who built the locomotive, taken after the Princess and the great and the good had all left for the post-naming celebrations and drinks?

Princess Elizabeth naming the locomotive on 15 November 1950. Photograph in the Great Western Trust collection

Whatever the case, the saddest omission is that the print we hold, lacks any identification of the numerous individuals posed, but it does however give us a glimpse of the shared ‘top to bottom’ hierarchy celebration of the effort that they had all contributed to achieve this important historical moment, and that their part in making it so, was officially recorded. Even more telling is the working overalls stained individual at the front alongside the senior ranking suited men. Yes all men of course, but that is a fact of history, post WW2, women were only employed in office duties within the Works.

No 7037 hauling a westbound express though Southall in the early 1960s. Photograph by Mike Peart

‘Pride in the Job’ is the very best caption we can offer to this picture in hindsight.

TUESDAY 4 JUNE

Advertising Standards

In the early years of the twentieth century the Great Western Railway began to invest heavily in the main line to West Wales and Fishguard Harbour. The latter, in particular, involved huge levels of civil engineering, the result of which the company hoped would bring lucrative transatlantic traffic to the new port. The anticipated business never really materialised but the Great Western heavily promoted the route to and from Ireland via Rosslare and holiday traffic grew as a result.

The first image, very Edwardian, shows a poster dating from around 1907 soon after the new harbour had opened. The vignettes depict the Bay of Tramore, the River Suir flowing through Waterford and ruined castles nearby. The artist is Alec Fraser and typically uses a ‘lumpy’ style of writing, all very eye-catching and yet demure.

Sixty years later, British Railways adopted a leprechaun to launch the Western Region’s summer holiday campaign luring motorists to the uncongested roads of Southern Ireland. Not content with their new poster, (designed by Irishman Mike O’Brien, graphic designer in the publicity office at Paddington) Rail News adopted a rather more racy way of advertising the Fishguard-Rosslare route to ‘motourists’ by using scantily clad 19-year old Sandra Evans, a shorthand typist at Paddington. It is doubtful whether James Inglis, the GWR General Manager in 1907 would have approved.

Six decades later, one can only imagine the response today should a young female employee be asked to drape herself across a desk in a bikini in order to advertise her company’s products. It is an interesting thought that what was deemed acceptable in the ‘swinging sixties’ would have been quite unacceptable sixty years before and indeed sixty years later.

What goes around comes around.

Both images are from the Great Western Trust collection at Didcot Railway Centre.

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