The Gricer

 The 6.05 Special and its connections

 

In February 1957 the BBC began to broadcast the “Six-five special” – it was the first ‘rock and roll’ TV show on British Television. The show opened to the tune of the Bob Cort Skiffle Group playing the "The Six-Five Special's comin' down the line, The Six-Five Special's right on time ..." while on the screen the viewer saw a streamlined ‘Coronation’ Class 4-6-2 from the air, a footplateman on the footplate and a Class A2 4-6-2 crossing the Forth Bridge as the Titles scrolled up the screen.

Culture, albeit pop-culture is but one connection in the vast network of ties between the railway and almost every aspect of daily life. Painting, Pigeon Racing, Poetry and Trainspotting, a social past-time only made possible by the railway’s very existence, even the travelling circus has a railway connection.

The coming of the railway made possible the seaside holiday and commuting, it also became a target and a vital cog in the conduct and commission of warfare. In the Crimean war a hastily built narrow gauge line was credited with helping turn the tide of battle and in WW I 100s of miles of narrow gauge lines were built on the Western front to supply munitions and take away the wounded. In WW II the bombing and strafing of the railways was seen as a vital element in reducing the enemy’s ability to actually wage war. From around the 1850s the railway made possible the supply and distribution of a daily newspaper, for the safe and speedy delivery of mail order goods, along with fresh milk and perishable food stuffs; even regional stock exchanges grew up trading in railway company shares. The railways played a pivotal role in the growth and success of all these diverse activities!. And it doesn’t stop there.

There is something unique about the railway in the extent of its entanglement in the web of culture from French Impressionist painters to warfare, from the purveyors of wall paper paste to holidays by the sea and so many points in between.  The railway journey has been used as allegory and metaphor for life in general and, on a slightly more macabre note, there was even a railway funeral service which ran between Waterloo and Brookwood Necropolis; everything for everybody from the cradle to the grave and all stations of life in between.

Many of the words we speak and phrases we use have railway connections, ‘building up a head of steam’, hitting the buffers’, ‘running out of puff’, ‘the wrong side of the tracks’, ‘going off the rails’, ‘Trainspotting’ which became the title of a book and film about Edinburgh drug addicts also became a point of social reference used by radio DJs in the 1990s acid / rave culture and a regular feature sequence in Pete Tong’s BBC Radio 1 show. This latter is based on the cultural stereotyping of the ‘trainspotter’ as a socially inept individual with a tendency to what, in more modern parlance, we call OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder)

When we look at the engine driver and his work, it is so romanticised in books, poems and films that men from more middle class occupations queued up to strike break as engine drivers in the 1926 General Strike – not necessarily because they were scabs, though some undoubtedly were, but to ‘play’ at being engine drivers. There are seldom any volunteers willing to break strikes by playing at being bin men or grave diggers. For many boys, of all classes, from Victorian times right up to the 1950s and even into the 1960s ‘being an engine driver’ was something they wanted to do ‘when they grew up’. A slightly more modern equivalent would be ‘becoming an astronaut’.

With so many aspects of daily and cultural life having connections to the railway it’s hard to know just where to begin. Perhaps, we should start at the very beginning of the railway age with Richard Trevithick’s ‘Catch me who can’ which, in 1809, was a form of entertainment rather than any kind of ‘public’ transport. ‘Catch me who can’ ran on a circle of track not far from what is now Euston Station and people paid a shilling for a ride. When mentioning Euston Station it is difficult not to remember the outcries of cultural and architectural vandalism which ensued when its famous ‘Doric Arch’ was demolished, in 1961, when the station itself was being rebuilt. The poet John Betjeman was a leading critic; he was also a very early member of the Talyllyn Railway Preservation Society.

One of the earliest ‘toy’ locomotives is, reputedly, a wooden model representation of an 1820s locomotive, scratch built from bits of old wood, it dates to the end of the 1820s early 1830s and was, according to reports, built by a father for his son who saw the engines ‘chugging’ past the family home. On a much grander scale, the Czar of Russia who, in 1812 visited Charles Brandling’s Colliery Railway in Leeds and saw Murray & Blenkinsop’s engine, Salamanca, at work on the line, some years later had Timothy Hackworth build a locomotive for him. Shipped to Russia as a ‘kit’ of parts it was assembled by Hackworth’s son who, according to the legends, taught the Czar how to drive it. (Brandling’s Colliery Railway forms the basis of today’s heritage Middleton Railway.)

Turning from toys and Czars to art, during the construction of the London & Birmingham Railway, (1833 – 46), the lithographer John Cooke Bourne began creating drawings of the construction sites, perhaps the most famous of which is his wash drawing of the workings at Kilsby Tunnel. In 1831 Thomas Talbot Bury was producing water colours of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, at Edge Hill and, most famously of all J.M.W Turner painted a Great Western Railway train, crossing the river Thames at Maidenhead, in his work Rain Steam & Speed, which was completed just prior to 1841. It wasn’t just British artists who took to the steam engine, in France, the Dutch painter Van Gogh painted one speeding through the countryside near Arles and the Impressionist painter Monet produced a series of paintings of the Gare Saint-Lazare, eight of which appeared in an exhibition of Impressionist works in Paris in 1877. The surrealist, Rene Magritte, in 1938, painted “Time Transfixed” in which a steam locomotive is depicted coming out of a fireplace and almost equally surreal is “ Gnome Watching a Train” by the German artist Carl Spitzweg, though it is not in a surrealist style. Closer to home and in time, in 1997, the Scottish sculptor David Mach sculpted the “Brick Train” a recreation of the Gresely A4 Pacific No.4468 Mallard, made entirely from house bricks, it was created to celebrate Darlington’s railway heritage and is situated in the town’s Morton Park retail centre.

Again, in more recent times, our homegrown railway artists David Shepherd, Terence Cuneo, Philip Hawkins, Malcolm Root, and many others have painted railway scenes and locomotives from the earliest days to their demise in the 1960s. In fact the railway companies themselves generated huge volumes of art work which they used in advertising their services and products; a feature of railway promotion which continued right through into the period of Nationalisation and beyond. In the present day these railway posters are highly sought after and fetch premium prices at auctions of railwayana. Those posters in the Art Deco style from the late 1920s and early 1930s being particularly desirable and sought after examples.

In the 1950s the portrait artist Robert Norman Hepple, who painted the Royal Family, also produced a series of posters advertising British Railways; they ranged from picturesque scenes of tourist destinations to dock yards and the railways services to industry. And the aforementioned David Shepherd and Terence Cuneo also produced memorable railway advertising works: I particularly like Shepherd’s “Service by Night” and Cuneo’s “Trains at Clapham Junction”. On my own walls I have a full size print of Malcolm Root’s “Windcutter”, (a Dub-Dee pouring clag and hauling a long goods train, a scene so reminiscent of my final year on the footplate at Wakefield.) Such is the popularity of railway art that the modern exponents have formed their own “Guild of Railway Artists”. Probably the most bizarre connection between the railway and advertising was when, in 1968 or possibly 1970, the Ex-LMS Black 5 No.45212 was, quite literally, ‘wall-papered’ during a TV ad-campaign promoting the adhesive qualities of Solvite wall-paper paste.

Moving from art and wall paper to literature; in “Dombey & Son”, the story of a shipping magnate who lacked a son and heir, which was published in parts between 1846 and 1848, the writer Charles Dickens, makes use of the railway as both metaphor and analogy within the narrative. He followed up these metaphoric railway connections with a short railway ghost story, “The Signalman”, published in 1866. In 1976 the BBC adapted this story for television; it starred Denholm Elliot as the eponymous Signalman and scenes were filmed on the Severn Valley Railway; at the Kidderminster end of Bewdley tunnel and in the signal box at Highley. If we remain with railway disasters, the Irish/Scottish word mangler, or poet, depending on your taste, William McGonagall penned a poem about the Tay Bridge disaster:

“Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay! Alas! I am very sorry to say That ninety lives have been taken away On the last Sabbath day of 1879, Which will be remember'd for a very long time.”

I did say he was a word mangler!

Like McGonagall’s poem there are some suggestions that part of Dickens’ Signalman story was based on a real-life railway disaster which happened in Clayton Tunnel, on the London Brighton & South Coast Railway’s main line to Brighton, in 1861 and Dickens himself was amongst the survivors of the Staplehurst derailment, in 1865, which killed ten people and injured forty more.

In Ewan McColl’s “Ballard of John Axon” the link to a true life railway crash is explicit. John Axon was an engine driver at Stockport Edgely and on the 9^th of February 1956 he was on the footplate of Ex-LMS 8F No.48188 when, due to the failure of the steam supply to the brakes, it ‘ran away’ on the 1:58 down from Dove Holes summit to Chapel – en le – Frith. Driver Axon’s heroism in trying to stop the train and warn others of the impending disaster earned him a posthumous George Cross and the whole event is recorded in McColl’s Ballard. On a very different note there is Flanders and Swann’s 1963 song ‘Slow Train’ - a bucolic lament on the Beeching cuts and closures – which, as we know, became the seed bed for the heritage railways.

McColl wasn’t the only British folk musician to record railway songs Dave Goulder a former railway fireman turned singer / songwriter has recorded numerous railway based songs and in his 1978 album “The Man Who Put The Engine in the Chip Shop” he sings about Aisgill, the Settle & Carlisle line, the Races to the North and of course “The Man Who Put The Engine in the Chip Shop”. Another footplate balladeer is Don Bilston aka “The Singing Fireman” and I just love these lines from one of his songs; “The driver sits there like a god, a decent mate but an idle sod. Though I’ll be shoveling on me knees, still he’ll sit there at his ease.”

There have been, navvy’s songs, like “Drill ye tarriers drill”, music hall numbers like “Oh! Mr. Porter” and risqué ditties like the ficticious “Wigan Boat Express” sung by Geogre Formby - did someone mention Crewe! However, British songs and tunes about railways and railway life pale into insignificance when compared to the vast genre of such work in American musical culture. There are songs about “Going to heaven on a streamlined train” or to hell on a “Down Bound Train”, and they also took loved ones away, as they do in the mournful Blues song, “Midnight Special”, there was an “Orange Blossom Special and a “Last Train to San Fernando” one of my personal favourites is Bob Dylan’s "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry" another is by the Jamaican group the Ethiopians – “Train to Skaville”, which was a minor hit here in Britain in 1967, along with their “Engine 54”.

If we switch from the world of grownups music to that of children there’s the wonderful theme tune from the TV series “Chigley” which begins; ‘Time flies by when I'm the driver of a train. And I ride on the footplate there and back again.’ This tune and the accompanying lyrics were parodied by the ‘Indie’ band Half Man Half Biscuit and the parody begins with this: “Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew Cuthbert, Dibble, Grubb. Let it happen bass player…Time flies by when you’re a driver of a train speeding out of Trumpton with a cargo of cocaine.”

Speaking of children and railways we cannot possibly leave out the phenomena of “Thomas the Tank Engine”. What began as a clergyman telling bed time stories to his son, over time, became an industry in its own right. And railway preservation owes a huge debt of thanks to Thomas, who has, over the years, transformed the finances of many a preserved line. Thomas events and Thomas merchandise are still, as I write a major income stream within railway preservation – the first Thomas books were published in 1945 and I still have my slightly dog-eared and minus its dust jacket copy of Four Little Engines, published in 1955.

Thomas even had his own connection with popular music as the former Beatle; Ringo Starr provided the narration on many of the episodes of the TV series based on Thomas the Tank Engine’s adventures. Whilst not quite in Thomas’ league “Ivor the Engine” is another children’s TV series fondly remembered by many. Created by Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin, it follows the adventures of a small green steam locomotive – “who lives in the top left-hand corner of Wales and works for the Merioneth and Llantisilly Railway Traction Company Limited” - Ivor is driven by “Jones the Steam”.

Moving on from Thomas’ and Ivor’s adventures with driver “Jones the Steam” there’s a whole genre of books written about, or by, real life engine drivers, there are no similar volumes about being a bin man or sewage worker. In my own collection I have books written about the engine driver by a doctor, Ransome-Wallis, by O.S.Nock, an engineer and, as early as 1849, Sir Francis Bond Head, a failed diplomat, wrote about them in his book  “Stokers and pokers : or, The London and North-Western Railway, the electric telegraph, and the Railway Clearing-House”.  The Haymarket driver Norman McKillop, the legendary Bill Hoole and the Nine Elms enginemen Bert Hooker and Jim Evans, to name but a few, have written about footplate work and life - I’ve even written a couple myself, about my own time on the footplate and, in another, about the changes to their working lives between 1962 and 1996 based on the experiences and work of myself and Driver Walter Hobson.

Just as the railways feature in songs, art, poetry and books they are also well represented in film too. Some of the earliest moving images are of locomotives at work. In the era of silent movies there’s the film “The General” which starred Buster Keaton though the real star is the locomotive - “The General”, The story is loosely based on real events involving a locomotive ‘chase’ which took place near Chattanooga during the American civil war. Bizarrely this event and film has echoed down the years to influence the locomotive chase scenes in the Belles of St. Trinian’s, the race between train and bus in ‘The Titfield Thunderbolt’, and in the even more unlikely setting of one of the Wallace and Gromit animated movies - ‘The Wrong Trousers’,

At the dawn of cinematography the Lumiere brothers made a short film entitled, ‘L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat’, first shown in 1896 this is the first film of a moving train, it is not however, the first film of moving objects. That honour belongs to another Frenchman, Louis Le Prince, who shot moving images on film, in 1888, on Leeds Bridge – in Leeds.

Just as “The General” has wartime connections so too do several other famous films involving trains, not least of which was the eponymous “The Train” which featured Burt Lancaster as a French, SNCF, engine driver steaming round the environs of Paris in an increasingly desperate attempt to prevent great works of art being looted from France, by the Nazis, during World War II. Another in the ‘war time genre’ was “Von Ryan’s Express” and one simply cannot leave out “Bridge on the River Kwai” and the involvement of British PoWs in the construction of the Burma Railway.

Similarly we cannot leave out British film classics such as “Brief Encounter”, scenes from which were filmed at Carnforth station, Agatha Christie’s “Murder on the Orient Express” which has had dozens of remakes, or indeed another of Christie’s novels which was turned into a movie the “4:50 from Paddington”. In a similar vein is the British film director Alfred Hitchcock’s American classic, “Strangers on a Train”. Remaining in America robbing the mail train and or the gold shipment were staples of the cowboy movies involving trains; there was a even a British version of this particular genre, “The First Great Train Robbery”, which starred Sean Connery and was ‘loosely’ based on real events when gold, en route to pay the troops in the Crimean war, was stolen from a train on the London Chatham & Dover Railway in 1855.

Classics from the cowboy genre include the “3:10 to Yuma”, which enjoyed a recent remake with Christian Bale in the lead role, “Last Train from Gun Hill” which starred Kirk Douglas and Sergio Leone’s sprawling spectacular “Once upon a time in the West” in which the coming of the railway and ‘villainous’ railway magnates play a huge part. This film was considered important enough, in 2009, to be selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

Not all railway films have been Hollywood blockbusters made for a cinema audience; some were documentaries like the classic ‘Night Mail’ and the famous W. H. Auden poem written to accompany it. This work is both celebration and explanation of the role of the travelling post office and the carriage of mail by train was a vital element of communication for more than a hundred years. British Railways had its very own documentary production team, the British Transport Films Unit, which lasted from 1949 until 1982 and produced the legendary “Snowdrift at Bleath Gill”. The story is that of a marooned locomotive and her crew who were stuck in the snow, for 2 days, at Barras, close to Stainmore summit on what was, originally, part of the South Durham & Lancashire Union Railway, later the North Eastern Railway. In one of those little twists of fate, which seem to abound in railway circles, the engine which was buried in the drift survived, BR Class 2MT 2-6-0 No.78018, along with class mate No. 78019, which was the engine sent to the ‘rescue’ of the stranded train, both made it into preservation.

There have been, in this plethora of railway movies, some memorable pieces of railway ‘faux pas’ probably the most famous of which is in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 version of John Buchan’s “39 Steps”. In the film we see the hero, Richard Hannay, played by Robert Donat, en route to the Scottish Highlands and the railway scenes include shots from the Forth Bridge followed by a train emerging from Box tunnel on the Great Western Railway near Bath. Badly chosen pieces of railway footage used in cinema and television productions are a not uncommon topic of amusement and conversation amongst aficionados of railways; adding yet another thread in the fabric of railways and cultural life.

The railway became so embedded in practically every aspect our daily lives, language, music, art commerce and popular culture that it would take volumes to cover and uncover all the connections but, hopefully this article has provided, at the very least, a brief glimpse into how diverse and sometimes quite obscure these connections can be. 

To read about my years as a footplateman with British Railways in the last days of steam click on the link below.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1688929746