Tuesday Treasures - October 2025

TUESDAY 28 OCTOBER

GWR Canal Operation

Our Blog last week entitled ‘An Unexpected GWR Form” brought to light both an unexpected subject for a form, and maybe an unexpected aspect of the GWR’s assets and consequent operations in regard to canals.

The Great Western Trust collection has quite a range of canal related materials, both paper based and metalware, and we believe its time to open a new theme in future blogs based on that treasure trove.

Today we illustrate one of two examples we hold of enamel narrowboat or barge registration plates, and the one we choose directly connects with our blog last week as it is for a boat on the Brecon and Monmouth Canal.

It is oval and modestly sized at only 3 inches by 4.25 inches. Given that it is numbered 112 demonstrates the extent of the craft on that canal that the GWR had to inspect for their worthiness and of course in doing so, charge a fee for their continued use on the canal!

The canal at Llangattock

The canal itself had naturally a very long history. Beginning with the Monmouthshire Canal authorised in 1792 and the Brecknock and Abergavenny Canal authorised in 1793. Over later years tramways were included in canal empowerment as vital feeders of traffics. Eventually, the Monmouthshire Company became the Monmouthshire Railway and Canal Company in 1848 and bought out the Brecknock and Abergavenny, but the Monmouth canal itself gradually closed although the Brecon section was retained as a water feeder. Only in 1880 did the GWR assume control until nationalisation in 1948.
With such a long history from 1880, its hardly surprising that GWR canal operation created an extensive source of historical material of which many interesting elements will become subjects in our future Tuesday Treasure Blogs.

TUESDAY 21 OCTOBER

An Unexpected GWR Form

To operate an efficient business on the scale of the Great Western Railway, and one which like all legally empowered railway companies established by Parliament as ‘Common Carriers’, the GWR had to create a multitude of standard forms. The Great Western Trust collection holds many hundreds of these, covering all manner of services, and naturally, each unique design had to have a unique identity number, usually printed on it in brackets (nnnn).

Our Blog today highlights just one example, which we feel might surprise our readers given the specific ‘service’ it addresses and of course, the charge imposed upon the customer for providing it!

Yes we illustrate GWR Form 4462, designed for and used by the Toll Clerk at Cwmbran on the Monmouth & Brecon Canal on 21 June 1937, to charge a Mr Whitney of Tycrew (or maybe Ty Cooke?) Farm the sum of one shilling to wash 20 sheep in the canal near Mamhilad.

The form, clearly as a series, is also numbered 330 as a confirmation by the toll collector, a Mr Benram (?) to the canal engineer that this sheep washing had indeed occurred.

It is perhaps a further surprise to today’s generation that the GWR and other railway companies owned canals, for the GWR the most famous perhaps was the Kennet & Avon Canal that runs in large part alongside their Reading to Westbury ‘cut-off’ line and is now a celebrated fully operable canal beloved of narrow boat users. Thankfully so is part of the Monmouth & Brecon Canal, which the GWR acquired in 1880, of course!

So a modest form, created for a service to farmers to wash their sheep, probably one inherited with the obligations of the original canal company and clearly still utilised by this local farmer. Hardly a significant income stream for the GWR, but one that required a special form, and for us, it provides a further insight into the breadth of GWR business operations, intimately connected to the local community even far from the main centres of customers and their transport needs.

Our query (?) on the identity of the farm, stems from the hurried longhand used by the form filler, and that we discovered that a Ty Cooke farmhouse still exists and is near that very canal!

TUESDAY 14 OCTOBER

Newbury or Nürnberg?

The GWT Library and Archive gained its initial funding via a bequest from the late Charles R Gordon Stuart whose massive railway ticket collection the Trust holds. This collection alone holds a wealth of social history and often reveals items which, whilst raising eyebrows today would not have caused so much as a ripple when they were first issued.

The two tickets shown here were issued in 1921 the year after Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party was formed and appropriated the swastika for the party flag. At that point in history the swastika (the word comes from Sanskrit) had not acquired the sinister symbolism which, in Europe at least, it retains to this day. In reality it has been in use for millennia and is a symbol of good luck and prosperity. For this reason it would seem that the GWR overprinted these tickets from Paddington to Newbury Racecourse in the hope that the holder would have a profitable day at the races.

Newbury Racecourse station was opened in 1905, the same year as the racecourse itself. It saw intensive use on race days, but only as recently as 1990 was it provided with regular stopping services to cater for nearby development. In its heyday, the station had three footbridges connecting the four platforms of which the southern two were devoted to race day traffic. There were carriage sidings nearby and a turntable to save locos having to run light engine to Reading in order to turn. Only 53 miles from Paddington, Newbury Racecourse specials always had great kudos and as late as October 1962 BR Western Region were using the remaining ‘Kings’ on these workings. By then these locos had lost their traditional West of England and Birmingham duties to the new diesel hydraulics.

Newbury Racecourse station looking west, c.1910

The station is well used today being served by GWR Class 387 EMUs from Reading to Newbury.

Newbury Racecourse station looking east, c.1960

All images from the Great Western Trust collection.

TUESDAY 7 OCTOBER

GWR Customer Services

Our blog today from the Great Western Trust archive focuses on the illustrated decorative retail supplier label and its associated and modest GWR ‘Label for Package’.

Very much of its time, this striking and detailed retailer label of H J and E A Boolds Ltd of Devonport came to the Trust having been removed from the package itself, because of the interesting detail it provides of an age far lost to us now when GWR services even at stations had to address the widest of customer requirements, including temporary storage!

Boolds of Devonport were in fact a very substantial business, in that in size alone they occupied the entire street there between Market Square and Cross Street, and even on the opposite corner, Nos 31-33 Market Street too! A newspaper cutting from the Western Evening Herald of 24 December 1907 extolled their claim of having ‘the most enterprising Fancy Fair and Xmas Attraction in the Country’.

Boolds of Devonport’s china and glass shop is on the right of the picture, which includes a policeman in cape directing traffic at the crossroads. A Francis Frith photograph dating from 1924

The Boolds label itself tells us that whatever it contained, it was then the property of a Mrs Striplin, of East Burraton, and seemingly to either go on or be collected by her for the 4 o’clock train to Stoke Station C Room (cloak room we presume).

The mystery now deepens, as the Kelly’s Directory for Devon and Cornwall of 1914 notes a Nicolas Striplin was a fruit grower of East Burraton, and that East Burraton is closest to the Stoke Climsland station, opened on 2 March 1908, on the Callington branch of the Plymouth, Devonport and South Western Junction Railway, and not as we might assume the GWR’s Stoke Canon on the line north of Exeter. To avoid consequent confusion of misdirecting deliveries to that station, Stoke Climsland was quickly renamed Luckett on 1 October 1909. We might then deduce that the package dates from the 1908 to 1909 period.

Stoke Climsland station in the brief period between its opening on 2 March 1908 and being renamed Luckett on 1 October 1909. The train is heading towards Callington

The GWR ‘Label for Package’ adds yet further confusion, in that it charges the princely sum of one old penny per day for storing the package at either of its Plymouth, Millbay, North Road, Mutley or Devonport Stations and is undated! That said, because it’s a GWR label, we believe it was actually delivered to their North Road Station, as both the GWR and the rival Plymouth, Devonport and South Western Junction Railway had separate Devonport Stations!

This simple, modest item certainly offers plenty of mystery. It seems to us that Boolds being such an important Plymouth retailer and Mrs Striplin an equally important customer, perhaps they arranged at her direction to send a young lad on a bicycle with the parcel to the GWR station, from where she or a servant maybe would retrieve it, and then send it on the 4 o’clock train on the Plymouth, Devonport and South Western Junction Railway to Stoke Climsland?

Whatever the true facts, however, at one old penny per day, GWR stations offered such a parcel storage facility, even despite not then being the train service provider! But then this of course was an established part of their wider and more obvious passenger and goods train services. Try seeking that service today at every railway station?

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