Tuesday Treasures

We are very fortunate indeed here at Didcot Railway Centre with our vast collection of historic locomotives, artefacts and memorabilia that forms our world-famous museum telling the story of the Great Western Railway and its employees. For our volunteers and staff there are objects of great interest everywhere around the centre, each item unique to keeping the greatest railway company on the rails.

Our Tuesday Treasures blog is designed to share this vast and historically important collection so enjoy our deep dive into the rich history in our Museum and Archives.

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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’.

TUESDAY 17 DECEMBER

Christmas for the Railway Staff – 2

In the spirit of Christmas and the New Year coming, our Blog today from the Great Western Trust collection relates to an official card produced by the GWR London Division Locomotive and Carriage Department for the 1903/04 holiday festival. Whilst sadly unissued to an individual or maybe another Company, our illustrated example still has lots of historical interest.

First we have the message addressed from John Armstrong, from the Department’s Offices based at Westbourne Park near Paddington. That location was the prime London locomotive shed until replaced by the magnificent, but now utterly lost, Old Oak Common facility, a few mile to the west.

Second we can perhaps smile that the message includes Armstrong’s ‘hearty’ Christmas greetings, which coming from a senior officer of the GWR, is a step beyond the more common and less expressive phrasing we see today on official Christmas cards.

Finally, the best topic of all, is the splendid official photo centrepiece of 4-4-0 No 3297 Earl Cawdor then sporting that massive boiler of pure Churchward experimental design, installed in July 1903, and the large almost North Eastern Railway style double windowed cab. The idea was that even pressure could be maintained on the undulating road in the west with a high reservoir capacity in the boiler. However, no advantage could be found and the net result was that a great deal of extra hot water, and therefore weight, was carried round the system.

The large cab was replaced by a standard GWR pattern one in November 1904, and the boiler with a standard one in October 1906.

Clearly that image alone was being used to promote the very forward looking activities of the GWR Locomotive and Carriage Department to a wider audience. Indeed, Churchward was concurrently overseeing similar evolution in GWR carriage stock too.

John Armstrong retired in 1916 and his valedictory review published in the Great Western Railway Magazine explains his relationship in the Armstrong dynasty that was so prominent in GWR history:

“Mr. John Armstrong, the London Divisional Locomotive and Carriage Superintendent, retired on September 30th, at the age of 65 years, and on the completion of half-a-century's service. A second son of the late Mr. Joseph Armstrong, who succeeded Sir Daniel Gooch as Locomotive Superintendent, and nephew of the late Mr. George Armstrong, late superintendent of the Northern division of the Locomotive department, he entered Swindon works in 1864 and after acquiring a thoroughly practical acquaintance of locomotive engineering was appointed, in 1878, district superintendent at Swindon, subsequently obtaining further experience in the South Wales and South Devon districts.

“In 1883 he became superintendent of the London division with charge of the Carriage department in the section between West Drayton and Aylesbury, and in 1889 the remainder of the division was placed under his control. Since that time the growth of the London division has been almost phenomenal, and today – although it is not actually the largest – it is perhaps the most important locomotive centre on the system. During the time Mr. Armstrong has been at Paddington he has had charge of the Royal train, and it stands to his credit that in all the Royal journeys, which include the Jubilee celebration trips from and to Windsor, the funerals of Queen Victoria and King Edward, and the welcome home of Lords Roberts and Kitchener, there was no hitch throughout that period.

“What perhaps was Mr Armstrong's biggest task during his term of office was associated with the transfer, in 1906, in connection with the scheme known as Paddington Improvements, of the London locomotive depot from Westbourne Park to Old Oak Common, where the engine shed alone contains four 65-ft. turntables, each equipped with 28 radiating roads, representing a total of 112 engine pits. Mr. Armstrong's interest in the employees of the Locomotive department did not end with his business hours, as his long and devoted interest in the G.W.R. Temperance Union, as Chairman of its Council, testifies. He was the founder and President of the Old Oak Common Railwaymen's Temperance Institute, the quarters of a variety of interesting social movements over which, when business admitted it, he has presided. A large circle of friends regret Mr. Armstrong's severance from official life, and he carries with him their wishes for many years of health and happiness.”

After a long year of Tuesday Treasure Blogs, this is our last of 2024, so that our Trustees and volunteers can take a well-earned rest and focus for once on relaxing with family away from things railway, that is if we can ever put aside our consuming fascination for this amazing and extensive subject!

From all the Trustees and volunteers of the Great Western Trust we wish our Blog readers a Happy Christmas.

TUESDAY 10 DECEMBER

Enticing the Americans – Part 5

With four previous blogs covering this wide topic, we thought that with winter on its way, and for some of us, already arrived, that to lift our spirits on cold dark nights we should return to it with the Great Western Railway’s publicity for the summer holidays in 1931.

From the Great Western Trust collection we illustrate the eye catching cover of the fold-out brochure for American tourists of a certain wealth, for a variety of Land Cruises by Motor Coach and Train. That phrase alone is strikingly catching as most wealthy American tourists were very much aware of, and enjoyed, sea cruises on luxury liners, so the GWR boldly used that same cruise description with luxury of course, to bring an alternative and intriguing special transport tourist offer to those same potential customers.

Issued from the GW Offices on 505 Fifth Avenue, New York City by G E Orton the GWR’s General Agent in the USA, the brochure is beautifully constructed and overflowing with attractive tour offers. No less than five such different cruises were on offer, four being 5 day duration, but one of 13 days. They all began and ended with train travel, but also used (we quote) ‘magnificently appointed motor coaches purchased by the company expressly for these Cruises’ plus first class hotel accommodation and a GWR representative accompanying each cruise to ensure all arrangements are in place. The whole scheme was (again we quote) to ‘provide the maximum of sight-seeing without fatigue, which could not be run under more comfortable conditions or at cheaper cost.’

What cost? Well the 5-day cruises were close to 62 Dollars (£12:12 shillings) and the 13 day cruise was a hefty 128 Dollars 88 cents (then equivalent to £26). That longer cruise was in today’s rough exchange, a cool £1,500…hence only the wealthy could afford it!

The brochure helpfully includes a set of coinage equivalents, including that One Pound was then equal to Five Dollars!! A long way from the exchange rate today!

The Great Western Railway Magazine published testimonials from American Land Cruise participants in its March 1931 edition:

This page showing locations visited by the Land Cruises was published in Great Western Railway Magazine, March 1931 edition

From Mrs B Jackson, 837, Sherman, Denver, USA. “It gives me great pleasure to be able to tell you that my trip with Land Cruise No. 3 has been a great success. It more than came up to my expectations, and I have never had a more enjoyable week in all my extensive travels.”

From Miss H M Hume, Waldorf Hotel, Aldwych, WC2. “We have just finished Land Cruise No 1 (a party of four Americans), and wish to recommend it heartily to anyone wanting a delightful motor tour. The hotels were most comfortable, the programme of sight-seeing was varied, the coach very satisfactory, and the personnel very attentive and thoughtful.”

It is interesting that the cover of this brochure uses art deco typefaces, plus the GWR initials in a roundel. The roundel was officially launched as the standard monogram ‘for all practicable purposes’ in the Great Western Railway Magazine’s September 1934 edition, more than three years after this brochure was published. The Great Western Trust collection includes examples of experimental GWR monograms used in the early 1930s, until the familiar GWR roundel was adopted.

Maybe the Americans, being more forward-looking than the British, were tested with the art-deco design of this brochure.

TUESDAY 3 DECEMBER

Up in the Air

Scheduled passenger helicopter services between London Airport and Waterloo began on 25 July 1955. Even if all eight trips on a day were sold out, British European Airways (which originated in the 1930s as Railway Air Services) still made a loss of over £300 and the flights were terminated on 31 May 1956. Photo from: Nationaal Archief (Netherlands)

‘We used to have a service into London, running the Westland Sikorsky 55 Whirlwind. For safety reasons the Ministry decided that, as the last three miles of its course would be over the River Thames, that it should carry floats. Floats were duly fitted and it started flying. Then, because the august gentlemen of the House of Lords protested about the noise of the helicopter it was decided to fit silencers – another weight penalty.

Then the Port of London Authority came along – “I see your helicopter has floats on it. What are they for?” And it was explained that they had been fitted in case it had to come down in the River Thames. Back came the reply: “Jolly good show, in that case it becomes a vessel in navigable waters and it must carry an anchor and chain.” And it did!’

What, I hear you ask has this got to do with the Great Western Trust? Well the above is a short extract from a talk given on 23 January 1958, to the British Railways (Western Region) London Lecture and Debating Society.

The cover of the transcript of the meeting

The speaker was Mr M G Housego, the Press & Public Relations Officer, Ministry of Transport & Civil Aviation, who was himself from a railway family and was a senior civil servant having entered the service in 1935. He was relating an episode from the time when helicopters were used to ferry important passengers from the airport to central London and the bureaucracy that the transport industry faced then. Nothing, it seems, changes. Mr Housego provided a wealth of information about London Airport which was officially renamed London Heathrow in September 1966.

A photograph taken inside the control tower at Heathrow, published in the transcript of the meeting

The Great West Aerodrome was established in the early 1930s by the Fairey Aviation Company and would have developed sooner had not the Second World War intervened. As a result civil operations began on 1 June 1946 and growth thereafter was rapid. The technology seen here in Aerodrome Control may look archaic but it was highly advanced seventy years ago.

The Great Western Trust holds a comprehensive collection of lecture papers dating from 1906 – beginning with what was entitled the GWR London Debating Society. Its successor, the British Railways (Western Region) London Lecture and Debating Society lasted well into the 1970s having presented over five hundred papers with such diverse topics as ‘Notes on American Railroad practice’ (1928) to ‘A visit to the USSR’ (1959).

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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