Tuesday Treasures - November 2024

TUESDAY 26 NOVEMBER

Furniture Removals by Rail

The interesting small brochure forming our Blog adds further example to both the wide ranging services the railways once offered, well beyond passenger travel, and that in the between-wars period, the so-called Big Four companies collaborated in joint publicity campaigns.

Our Great Western Trust collection holds many similar publicity items, and naturally many centred on the Great Western Railway’s own services but the joint issued publications also have a vital part to play in allowing us to fully grasp the extent of that collaboration and through it, how customers could benefit from it being offered across company boundaries as it were.

Hardly to be missed however, is the banner of the Big Four publicity initiative as ‘British Railways’ years ahead of that becoming the adopted title for the nationalised railways! Rather ironic given the strident efforts of each company to fight such an eventuality.

Back to this brochure, we simply provide illustrations from both sides of it once it has been fully opened. The ‘What the People Think of It’ section is that period’s equivalent of the customer review internet posts on product adverts of today.

This photograph of a GWR Furniture Removals container was published in the Great Western Railway Magazine, January 1936 edition

TUESDAY 19 NOVEMBER

Spotlight on Bewdley

This Blog gives us a stark contrast from today’s heritage line reality back to when this station was still, very much in BRWR service in 1961. Our first illustration is of the back cover article in the BRWR staff magazine of January 1962, which was part of a series on many BRWR stations and their staff.

Being 1961 content of course, this edition was significant in reflecting upon what it deemed major events during that year, not least the handover to the Science Museum in June of loco 4073 Caerphilly Castle, but reflecting further dieselisation – the formal handover at Paddington in May of Hymek class loco No D7000 and the Blue Pullmans arriving to create the South Wales Pullman set in September. The second illustration is the cover of the January 1962 edition of the magazine, showing a Blue Pullman in Sonning Cutting and the third illustration is the centre spread of the magazine with photographs of 1961 events.

Back to that Bewdley Station article and it is striking how familiar it looks to those who enjoy the Severn Valley line of today, even if we doubt it is now ever as bereft of trains or rolling stock as the image here! What is of course striking is that in 1961 it had a fully connected passenger and freight service to its many regional stations. The brief traffic statistics given prove this. Vector forward to today and does Bewdley now have annual passenger bookings of 56,000 or rather more we wonder?

Times have certainly changed, but at least for this station, its sad demise was reversed and much more besides, to bring so much pleasure to railway enthusiasts and general recreational visitors, and a rewarding pastime for so many SVR volunteers.

This edition is from the complete run of those magazines in the Great Western Trust collection until it ceased publication in spring 1963 to become a newspaper format. The Trust holds them not only as they are an extension of our collection of the long running GWR staff equivalent monthly journals but also because their content provides us with a perfect contemporary record of how BRWR saw itself and its staff.

TUESDAY 12 NOVEMBER

Oxford

To the city of dreaming spires this week and an interesting poster from 1949 in the Great Western Trust collection. It is a very ‘busy’ poster designed for a location where the viewer would have time to pause and study rather than an image that fleetingly catches the eye. The large size (40 inches high x 50 inches wide) means it is easy to read while waiting for a train – and will lighten your mood if it is delayed!

The poster as it appears after being electronically cleaned and repaired

Meticulously drawn by John Pearson Sayer (1901-1984), a master of his craft, it draws the viewer into the streets, colleges and individual buildings of post-war Oxford. Through small vignettes, the colleges are shown with their coats of arms and year of establishment with snippets of history attached to them and many other notable locations throughout the city centre. Many famous persons are depicted including Samuel Johnson, Cardinal Wolsey and Percy Bysshe Shelley who was expelled from University College for publishing his views on atheism. Not forgotten are the four women’s colleges, outside the area of the map. At the right hand edge we are reminded of the plan to build a city bypass across Christ Church meadow which resulted in the man from the planning department being pitched into the River Thames! (or Isis as it is known in Oxford). The poster is a joy to behold and is a wonderful example of a picture telling a thousand words.

The poster straight from the scanner, with frayed edges and creases

The Great Western Trust is fortunate to have such a poster and although it is in a rather ‘tired’ condition our drawing archivist Kevin Dare has scanned and then electronically cleaned and repaired the poster so we can see how it would have looked when first printed, seventy five years ago. Both images are shown here for comparison.

The Great Western Trust owns other map posters by J P Sayer for different areas of the country using the same style of vignettes with light-hearted comments.

TUESDAY 5 NOVEMBER

Delivering the Goods – 7

Our previous blogs on this broad but vital subject explored much detail of traffics and even claims for losses in transit. In the blog today from the Great Western Trust archive we illustrate a very interesting publication by the British Council as No 5 in a series of eight set on ‘They Carry the Goods – The British People How they Live and Work’. Undated but circa 1950 it covers all transport, railways, roads and canals.

The photos are striking in that they capture the work and the conditions each form of transport entailed and being of their time, workers smoking on duty as it were, was then a commonplace. We illustrate just two, the dramatically-lit cover of a night-time goods yard shunter with hand lamp and shunting pole, and that showing a representative, large goods exchange yard ‘somewhere in England’.

Quite who the target audience was for these publications, with a one shilling (now 5p) purchase price, is a question, although No 6 in the series entitled ‘Ordinary People’ makes that question even more intriguing! The British Council was created in 1934 and is still very much alive and thriving as a charity and exists to create educational and cultural relationships with worldwide nations and bodies. So, perhaps that goes some way to explain why even a booklet on ‘Ordinary people’ had justification. Giving an honest insight to our culture and our working folk was viewed as a means to step away from a heavy governmental or foreign policy perspective?

Whatever the reasoning, such publications are valuable to us today, in capturing how our railways were then viewed as a crucial part of the goods transport infrastructure and that picture alone, of the massive well stocked goods yard demonstrates this completely. It also admits that of 1¼ million wagons only 5.5% could carry more than 20 tons. The great majority would have been unfitted with vacuum brakes, limiting the speed at which freight could travel. The yard itself, though unidentified, is now most probably under a housing or industrial estate!

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