Tuesday Treasures - January 2025

TUESDAY 28 JANUARY

Train Spotting – 3

Our previous blogs were based on the Meccano Magazine. Today we turn to a contemporary publication for admittedly young train – or more accurately ‘Loco Spotters’ – which is part of our Great Western Trust collection.

Yes, because the four young men who formed what later became the Great Western Society (GWS), were train spotters at Southall, we also hold a wide ranging archive of publications, games and other ephemera devoted to contemporary railway enthusiasts of all persuasions, not least of course those produced by the GWR and BRWR.

However, our item today has the distinctive cover of a drawing of a green liveried ex London Midland & Scottish Railway Coronation class Pacific (4-6-2) No 46229 Duchess of Hamilton with a smartly dressed male train spotter keen to record it at a station. What is significant is the small sub title ‘Presented with The Rover’ exposing the then contemporary fact that many popular boy’s comics, catered for their wide ranging hobbies, of which train or loco spotting ranked highly, alongside stamp collecting, Meccano construction kits, Dinky Toys etc!

What is more interesting, is that the booklet contained no less than 30 drawings of various steam and diesel class locomotives, each with a space for the youngster to record where and when he hopefully saw an example, and our copy has in pencil that some were seen at Bristol Temple Meads station. Naturally we are rather biased and therefore happy to note that that was the only ‘spotting’ location and even No 6000 King George V was duly recorded, though not its year!

At a modest 4” x 3” size it was meant to be a pocket reference for the spotter to take on his outings.

Alas, today’s young railway enthusiasts are not so blessed with such publications, but recording the past era in contemporary social publications for youngsters is an important element of the wider picture of railway enthusiasm. And without having nurtured such a hobby, maybe the four young men who spotted at Southall would not have sown the acorn that became the GWS?

Loco Spotter’s notes:

The loco in the picture has a long and varied history. She was built in September 1938 at Crewe, No 6229, as a red streamliner, complete with gold speed stripes. In 1939 6229 swapped identities with the first of the class 6220 Coronation and was sent to North America with a specially-constructed Coronation Scot train to appear at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. The locomotive was shipped back from the States in 1942/3, and the identities of the locomotives were swapped back in 1943.

No 6229 Duchess of Hamilton in streamlined form at the National Railway Museum. Photograph by cooldudeandy by Creative Commons

In 1943 she was fitted with a double chimney. The streamlined casing was removed in December 1947 and in 1948 she was given the British Railways number 46229. She was painted in the short-lived BR blue livery in April 1950, but was soon repainted on 26 April 1952 into Brunswick green. The semi-streamlined smokebox was replaced with a round-topped smokebox in February 1957, and in September 1958 the locomotive was painted maroon.

46229 was withdrawn from service in February 1964 and became a children’s playground exhibit at Butlin’s holiday camp in Minehead, until March 1975 when she became part of the National Railway Museum collection. She was then restored to main line running standard until 1996, after which she became a static exhibit in the National Railway Museum. In September 2005 the Museum announced that the streamlining would be re-instated, returning the locomotive to her original appearance. This work was undertaken at Tyseley Locomotive Works and in May 2009 she was returned to the National Railway Museum in her streamlined form.

TUESDAY 21 JANUARY

Wartime Miscellany

A recent generous donation by a long-standing member contained a large collection of Notices and Circulars issued by the GWR. They were only intended for use by the company’s servants and were thus rarely seen by the public. Most of them come from the Office of the Superintendent of the Line and the Chief Goods Manager’s Office and were produced on a weekly basis and sometimes more often as circumstances required.

We have selected two at random for this week’s offering.

First from the Superintendent of the Line on Thursday 1^st April 1943 we are informed that Double Summer Time will commence on Sunday 4^th April. During World War Two, Britain created British Double Summer Time when, during spring clocks moved two hours ahead of GMT as opposed to one. This began in 1941 and ended in 1945, although it did make a brief reappearance in the summer of 1947 due to severe fuel shortages.

Also of note here is the item regarding Aer Lingus and West Coast Air Services Ltd. The £7 4s 0d return fare from Liverpool to Dublin today equates to around £278 showing just how very cheap air fares have become in the age of budget airlines. A similar flight today can be had for about £60 although the standard of comfort may have been higher eighty years ago.

An Aer Lingus DC-3 at Manchester Airport in 1949

Roath Dock, Cardiff, in 1943. Note the barrage balloon in the distance

Next, from the Chief Goods Manager’s Office a circular dating from December 1943 regarding Ministry of Food traffic. It would be tedious to reproduce all seven pages of the document but what is remarkable is extent to which Britain relied upon imported food during the Second World War. Supplies were being shipped from, amongst others, Australia, China, South Africa, Portugal and New Zealand. By this time, merchant shipping losses in the Atlantic had begun to decrease because of the Allies ability to destroy German U-Boats. Trans-Atlantic traffic from Canada and the USA would have seen vast tonnages of food being unloaded at the GWR’s docks and extraordinary efforts were made by all the railway companies to ensure that the food was distributed across the entire country.

Such is the wealth of social history to be found in two rather mundane, ephemeral items which form a tiny part of the Great Western Trust collection.

Cargo being discharged from SS Empire Waimana at Swansea in August 1945

TUESDAY 14 JANUARY

Enticing the Americans – Part 6

We continue to find items from our rich seam of material on this subject within our Great Western Trust collection.

Our folded brochure illustrated, was published in 1913 under the then General Manager, Frank Potter. Its striking cover image of a then unnamed Churchward Saint class loco on a crack express comprising a rake of Dreadnought carriages is accompanied by more juvenile repeated sketches in wallpaper style of the head-on image of a steam loco! Appealing to all tastes?

Anyway, its rear cover is rather different having a photo of GWR solid tyred road-motors with the title ‘GWR Rail & Automobile & River Tours’.

Naturally, the contents are multiple pages detailing all those tours and we also illustrate perhaps the most striking one of London to Liverpool via Windsor, Bath, Bristol, Abergavenny, Hereford, Ludlow, Shrewsbury and Chester! And just look at that diagrammatic route map emblazoned ‘The Ideal Tourist Route from London to Liverpool’. Liverpool reached of course via the GWR ferry from the Birkenhead Landing Stage.

Quite how many American tourists invested in these tours is not easily discovered as yet but it’s a fact that the GWR thought it worthwhile (at the exchange rate at the time of $4.88 to the £1!) to produce a continuous stream of similar publicity over many years specifically aimed at wealthy Americans who were (and maybe still are) enthralled by our historic sites and particularly Royal Windsor and Shakespeare!

A GWR road motor at Beaconsfield in the pre-first world war era

TUESDAY 7 JANUARY

Winter Holidays in Sunshine

With our current 2025 New Year beginning with a very cold snap including snow and freezing rain, we thought that our first Blog this year based upon the Great Western Trust collection, should give an alternative seasonal outlook from the Great Western Railway.

We illustrate the cover from a free booklet entitled ‘Winter Holidays in Sunshine - No Line like the Holiday Line’ published by the GWR in December 1909. At 40 pages however, this was no minor publication and demonstrated the bold assertions the GWR made in that era for its pre-eminent physical and service attributes, which we can see immediately from that cover title alone ‘No Line like the Holiday Line’. Yes, had the public not realised by then, the GWR adopted this strap line for much of its travel publicity but seemingly even that wasn’t sufficient for them, as we can also quote from this booklet

‘Glorious Winter Resorts on the Great Western Railway’ [Note the Initials !!]

And the gushing foreword text went much further:-

‘There are no better places in England for your Winter Holiday than those served by the Holiday Line – the ‘GWR’. In no part of the Kingdom are there to be found such perfect Winter Resorts, such charming scenery, lovely coastline, rivers large and small, and rugged moorlands, combined with mild and equable climate; indeed the westernmost counties Devon and Cornwall constitute a real Riviera of which England has reason to be proud.’

Phew! If that alone wasn’t bold enough and maybe stretching the facts, the text also reflected upon the growing tendency among all classes in this country to relax the time honoured custom of spending the Christmas holidays in the home, and to seek ‘fresh fields and pastures new’ to engage in the Yuletide festivities. Even bolder… they suggest that Christmas at home is very liable to prove somewhat dull and the time hang heavily …

Beyond that text with its assertions that may deserve our further pondering, the booklet is structured to mirror a range of specific booklets the GWR concurrently published for sale, based upon particular districts such as ‘The Cornish Riviera’; ‘Devon the Shire of the Sea Kings’; ‘Wonderful Wessex’; ‘Inland Resorts’ and ‘The Cardigan Bay Coast’. All such publications promoted under the enlightened leadership of the then GWR General Manager, James Inglis (later knighted) which ran to many editions, and they became the bedrock for the extensive publications the GWR then continued to produce throughout its existence.

The GWR’s enthusiastic promotion of its holiday destinations did provoke some negative reaction. It is recorded that the meeting of Penzance Chamber of Commerce on 21 May 1906, included lively discussion of a request from one of the members that a letter of protest should be sent to the GWR to ask them to remove the word ‘Riviera’ from their advertisements about services to Cornwall. The member, a Mr Cornish, felt that it did the county more harm than good, it was killing the goose that laid the golden egg and that he had seen several people who were disgusted with the place after they had visited. He felt that the word ‘Riviera’ implied incessant sunshine, but that wasn’t the case at Penzance as there had been 44 inches of rain in the last year. Another member of the Chamber agreed that it was misrepresentation and that the GWR should not be defrauding the public! A vote was taken and the request was defeated.

The Great Western Trust collection holds a vast array of these publications which represent social history just as much as transport history. Overblown claims by private companies are nothing new, especially in our current era. So perhaps we shouldn’t be too critical of the GWR’s enthusiasm for this style, but studying their publications of over a century ago may help us tolerate today’s commercial publicity as yet another example of there being ‘nothing new under the sun’.

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