Tuesday Treasures - July 2024

TUESDAY 30 JULY

World Scout Jamboree

Ninety five years ago this week on 31 July 1929 the formal opening took place of the third World Scout Jamboree at Arrowe Park near Birkenhead on the Wirral Peninsula. The Great Western Railway provided fourteen special trains for the event carrying 6,200 Boy Scouts. Other Scouts from Britain and abroad travelled by regular services and in all over 10,000 were carried. The event lasted for two weeks, and on the second day the Prince of Wales attended to confer a Barony on Lieutenant-General Sir Robert Baden-Powell GCMG, GCVO, KCB. Baden-Powell, now 72, was also presented with a gift of a Rolls Royce car and a caravan bought with donations from Scouts all over the world who each donated a penny.

The poster shown here is a joy to behold. Packed with detail and visual puns it is both a history and geography lesson combined. Flags from over forty countries form the border and many of these have changed or even disappeared over ensuing years. Of note are Newfoundland, which did not become part of Canada until 1949, Palestine whose flag bears the Star of David (discuss), and the Irish Free State which did not become a fully independent Ireland until 1937.

The poster was printed by George Falkner & Sons of Manchester but sadly the name of the artist is not recorded.

The Rolls-Royce being presented to Sir Robert Baden-Powell at the Jamboree. The car is know as Jam Roll (presented at the Jamboree and being a Roller). Photo by Gil Fuqua

Each town on the map has a small vignette portraying in a beautifully drawn illustration, what it might be famous for. Thus Crewe has a scene where a steam locomotive is being built from Meccano, Leeds famous for its cloth has a ‘light suiting’ and a coal miner in Wigan appears to have discovered the Koh-i-noor diamond! Most curious is the reference in Buxton to ‘Dr Voronoff’s rival’. Readers of a certain age may recall the expression “he must be taking monkey glands!” when describing someone of senior years having boundless energy. Further research reveals that Dr Serge Voronoff was a Russian-born surgeon who was a pioneer of transplant surgery. His specialism was to transplant thin slices of monkey testicles into humans claiming to reverse the ageing process. As a result he became a very wealthy man with a fleet of cars, chauffeurs and mistresses but without scientific proof the treatment fell out of favour and so did the good doctor. Thus Buxton’s claim on the poster that its famous spa water was more efficacious than ‘monkey glands’.

The Rolls-Royce carries on the radiator the Scout’s fleur de Lys emblem with the motto ‘Be Prepared’ in place of the Spirit of Ecstasy. Photo by Rod Kirkpatrick

Many are the snippets of social history contained in just this one poster from the Great Western Trust collection.

TUESDAY 23 JULY

To Devon this week and two images which demonstrate early 20th century high definition photography at its best.

Plymouth is our venue and at Millbay Docks we see Churchward 0-6-0 saddle tank No 1363, now being overhauled at Didcot, involved in shunting operations prior to an express passenger engine attaching to the train for a fast run to Paddington. And fast runs there were, one of the most notable being on 12 June 1935 when Castle class No 4094 Dynevor Castle took a seven coach train, conveying passengers from the French liner Normandie from Millbay to Paddington in three hours thirty eight minutes. When considering the steep gradients and tortuous curves of the South Devon main line, a start to stop average of 62.4 mph was a superb achievement.

The photo is full of detail, having been printed from a 12 x 10 inch glass negative. The carriage design and style of the passengers’ dress points towards the years just before the Great War, indeed the loco was built at Swindon in 1910. Porters are loading luggage into the leading vehicle which has a carriage destination board bearing the legend OCEAN BOAT EXPRESS PLYMOUTH AND PADDINGTON. Millbay Docks did not have the capacity to accommodate large ocean liners so they would anchor in Cawsand Bay. In the shadows behind the porters, passengers recently landed by tender after a fifteen minute journey from the ship, can be seen ready to board the train for the final leg of their journey to London. In the absence of platforms, passengers had to board the train from ground level so portable steps were provided. Elaborate gas lamps hanging from under the canopy light their way during hours of darkness.

The second photo is clearly dated 1939 and was taken during the early stages of North Road station’s reconstruction which began the year before. Building work ceased abruptly upon the outbreak of the Second World War and the new station was not completed until 1962, incorporating a very modern ten-storey office block to house the staff of British Railways (Western Region) Plymouth Division.

Again, there is great detail to be seen in this print from a whole plate (8½ x 6½  inch) glass negative. On the ‘up’ (distant) side of the station it is possible to see where demolition work has already begun behind the two running-in boards which are interestingly worded ‘North Road Plymouth’. BR Western Region reversed the sequence of wording and in modern times the station became just ‘Plymouth’.

The Western National, Bristol L-type in the foreground is bound for Dartmoor although it advertises Simonds’ beer – a long way from their brewery in Reading, but the company had acquired a brewery in Devonport in 1919. The wagons parked against the partly demolished island platform are delivering building materials. The bracket signal on the ‘down’ platform has only two arms in use and the telegraph pole in the foreground seems almost entirely redundant. Both scenes are now quite unrecognisable. The GWR docks at Millbay have been obliterated and the rather ramshackle North Road station seen here is now very different.

Both images are from the Alexander Jeffery collection, now in the care of the Great Western Trust.

TUESDAY 16 JULY

The Bath Pageant of 1909

In last week’s Blog we used a pamphlet from our Great Western Trust collection to show the bold claims the GWR used in their free-to-customer publicity brochures. This week we have a booklet they published in the very same month and year, namely July 1909, some 115 years ago but this one is making perhaps extravagant claims as to the status of the City of Bath. However, the good folk of Bath, clearly had a very high opinion of their City as the booklet is centred upon their own remarkable event ‘The Great Historical Bath Pageant’ which took place daily from Monday 19 July to Saturday 24 July inclusive starting at 2:45pm.

We illustrate the cover and key introductory pages of the booklet and we may be startled to find that the GWR not only proposed that Bath was ‘The English Athens’ but in the text, it was apparently, already ‘The City of Fashion’.

Stepping away from a debate on the justification for such accolades, the very reason for the GWR producing this booklet was to publicise their extensive special train services to Bath for potential passengers. That of course could so simply have been achieved by handbills and station posters, so the GWR, then led by its gifted General Manager, James C Inglis, clearly considered producing this 48 page, glossy booklet, demonstrated their full belief in the Pageant and its view of Bath’s eminent status as a City of history, culture and of course fashion. As all those attributes would be the expected domain of the ‘upper strata of society’, the GWR had no doubts that this investment of theirs would be duly rewarded!

From the pages illustrated, the Pageant itself was to involve 3,000 performers, and provide a ‘Beautiful and Lavish Spectacle’ and ‘Stately Dances’! That seats varied from a guinea (21 shillings, or £105 at today’s value) to 3/6d or 2 shillings standing, demonstrated that most of the audiences were expected to have sufficient wealth.

The format and style of the booklet became a standard during Inglis’s reign as General Manager, and numerous other locational and regional subjects were covered. It is not a surprise, therefore, to note that one of the authors of the Pageant was A M Broadley, who also wrote many of the GWR’s travel books in the Edwardian era, such as Cornish Riviera and Devon: the Shire of Sea Kings.

Visitors arriving at Bath station for the Pageant in 1909 would have been greeted with a scene similar to this. The locomotive is Bulldog class 4-4-0 No 3355 Camelot. The signal box on left of the picture, high above the station canopy, gave the signalmen a view of the railway line in both directions. The signal box is the subject of an article in Great Western Echo, Spring 2024 edition, which was sent to Great Western Society members at the end of April, and copies can be bought from the shop at Didcot Railway Centre

Bath clearly remained significant to the GWR, and the Trust collection also holds a further GWR publication, Bath The English Athens … Its Past, Present and Future published in March 1913, using much of the text content of the 1909 edition. So, it is evident that the ‘Pageant’ had had the desired effect on GWR custom warranting a further stimulus, and the same bold assertion about that city’s status.

TUESDAY 9 JULY

The Artwork of Railway Service Information - No 2

In our first Blog on this subject we set out our aim to put to the test, the notion of our current age as innovators of railway service information and alternatively show that the early railways were both innovators and key commissioners of publicity design evolution for which they properly deserve credit.

Our illustrated example from the Great Western Trust collection comes from the early 20th Century period of the GWR, of July 1909, some 115 years ago. That long ago is we believe a strong reason to focus upon this one rather modest in size publicity pamphlet given the design motifs used by the GWR, the slogans boldly adopted by them and their claim for being pioneers of such tours. Quite a combination of features that would in most part be the ‘sound bites’ that our internet world is dominated by in an era where grabbing and holding the attention of anyone on the web, is the ultimate challenge for a publicist.

We illustrate the front and back pages of the pamphlet which surprisingly given its size, in fact opens to 20 pages, all simply crammed with detail of a multitude of tours to various destinations, and for a range of passenger fares. That said, the cover title of ‘Day and Half-Day Tours’ was rather stretched when one Tour included a trip on August Bank Holiday Monday to Killarney; departing Paddington at 8.30 pm on Sunday, arriving Killarney (Via GWR boat crossing from Fishguard) at 9.40 am (Irish Time) and leaving to return at 6.15 pm (Irish Time) to arrive at Paddington at 8.30 am on Tuesday morning! Eight and a half hours in Killarney was the prize for an epic undertaking! Irish Time was 25 minutes behind Greenwich Mean Time at that period, and was not synchronised with GMT until 1916.

Returning to our theme however, we have a cover design with a pointing hand to ‘The Holiday Line’ slogan, which the GWR had boldly assumed for itself, plus the fact that they offered ‘Unique Tours’, not just any old common sort. The artistic border design was very much of that period, appealing to Edwardian Era sensibilities of aesthetic awareness and culture. The cover wording is further emboldened on the rear cover where we find the GWR claim that they were in fact no less than ‘The Pioneers of Unique Day and Half-Day Tours’. Quite what their contemporary railway companies thought of such claims, we are left to imagine!

Finally, the printers of this pamphlet were Pretty & Sons Ltd of Reading. This reflects that the sheer volume of general publications produced monthly by the GWR, provided valued custom, for numerous printing companies and, over time, the GWR chose specific printers for their ‘quality’ publications, one example being Kelly & Kelly Co.

So we believe that this Edwardian publication, itself a remarkable 115 year old survivor, has demonstrated the case for our opinion that modern publicists cannot claim to be first in the field of bold, perhaps overstated design material, which is hardly surprising since the same key objective underpins all successful publicity …’capturing the fleeting attention of a potential customer’.

Further examples of this material will be used in future Blogs.

TUESDAY 2 JULY

Tregenna Castle Hotel

Last week we featured the opportunities for a weekend of golf at the Tregenna Castle Hotel situated above the town of St Ives, in the far west of Cornwall. After an early morning round, what better way to relax than over breakfast in the hotel restaurant?

The pair of silver grapefruit spoons shown here have an interesting history. A newlywed couple spent their honeymoon at the hotel in the 1940s and such was their happiness that they ‘borrowed’ these spoons as souvenirs. After many years of married bliss they decided to assuage their guilt by donating them to the Great Western Trust. We are very grateful that they did. Grapefruit spoons are similar to teaspoons, but they taper to a point to make it easier to separate the flesh of the fruit from the rind.

The silver tea strainer originates from the same hotel and was recently given to the Trust by a very generous, long standing Great Western Society member. In the days before tea bags such items were de rigueur in the best restaurants. It is exquisitely made, by Elkington, the strainer itself being made from a flat disc and after having been drilled with hundreds of tiny holes was then pressed into a bowl shape and silver soldered to the carrier. The drip bowl is similarly beautifully produced.

It is a steep climb from St Ives Station to the Hotel and for many years the GWR ran a dedicated bus, complete with roof-mounted luggage rack, between the two points. The photographs here date from the 1930s and must have been taken around 5pm just after the arrival of the St Ives portion of the Cornish Riviera Limited. The St Ives branch was one of the few that had sufficient clearance to accommodate the GWR’s 1935 built ‘Centenary Stock’, seen here at the platform.

The poster, dating from 1947 is far more modern in style and exhorts the wealthy clientele to indulge in a wide range of activities in addition to the game that ‘is a good walk spoiled’.

• Tuesday Treasures - Latest Blogs

« Back To Tuesday Treasures Index