The
Last Steam Enginemen
The possibility for a life on the footplate began when, in 1804, Richard Trevithick’s first locomotive was built. However, the first man to be ‘officially’ employed as an engine driver was James Hewitt who, in 1812, was a pitman at Charles Brandling’s Colliery Railway in Leeds. Today, Brandlings Colliery Railway is the heritage Middleton Railway. Driver Hewitt’s railway career was, sadly, cut short when, in 1832, the boiler of his engine exploded – unfortunately he wasn’t the first engine driver to be killed in this gruesome fashion. On the 28th February 1818 George Hutchinson, another of the drivers on Brandlings Colliery Railway, died when the boiler of his engine exploded – though it has to be said he was, in part, responsible for his own demise due to his habit of ‘weighting’ the safety valves – a way to increase boiler pressure and gain more power from the engine.
The original engines
for the ‘Middleton Railway’ were built by Murray, Fenton and Wood at the Round
Foundry, which stood on Water Lane in Leeds. It was Murray, Fenton & Wood’s
‘test driver’ who taught James Hewitt the necessary skills to become the first
man employed as the driver of a steam locomotive. In the early days of steam
propulsion it became quite a common practice for the builders / designers of
the locomotives to select and ‘train’ the men who were to work on them. George
Stephenson not only selected the men who drove the engines on the colliery
railways he was involved in, he also helped in recruiting them for the Stockton
& Darlington, Liverpool & Manchester and the Leicester &
Swannington. And so, as a result, one might reasonably say that the origins of
the enginemen were in the North East, in Leeds and Newcastle.
In his book “The
Decline & Fall of the Engine Driver” Clive Groome describes this process as
creating a ‘caste’ - a caste which began in 1812 and lasted for 156 years until
steam no longer powered the nation’s railway network. At one level the engine driver could be seen as having
a great deal of freedom, the reality of daily life on the engine was very
different. The notion that the footplatemen were a caste or clan needs to be
set beside almost military levels of discipline and as time progressed being,
like military men, dressed in company uniforms. A uniformed body of men bounded
by rules, the timetable and running along rails is, in its own way, only
marginally different to the factory worker whose life was run to a clock and
the pace of a machine. The real differences were in public perceptions and in
the levels of specialist knowledge required to safely operate the locomotive
out on the road.
The footplate created
a novel relationship between the owners of the capital equipment and those
responsible for its safe operation. Unlike the factory were the owner or his
agent could directly oversee the way in which the machinery was used and operated
this was not possible to the same degree with the engine driver. However, one
should not imagine that the engine driver had ‘free rein’. To quote Norman McKillop ‘ ...it was no uncommon thing
for the foreman at a depot to treat the men under him with a measure of
severity verging at times on brutality.’ (Norman McKillop aka Toram Beg wrote,
in the late 1940s and early 1950s, several books on footplate life as well as a
regular column in the Locomotive Journal; the in house magazine of ASLEF the footplateman’s
trade union. McKillop was a driver at Edinburgh’s Haymarket depot and, for many
years, a member of the Scottish TUC.)
It wasn’t just the
novelty of the technology which set the engine driver apart from the common
labourer – to quote Groome again; ‘ In manufactures, the ceaseless beat of the
engines made possible mass production of goods by Marx’s de-skilled and
alienated workforce. While, in total contrast, the steam locomotive was drawing
onto its footplate a body of men that were to derive status and satisfaction
from the exercise of their craft for the next century and more.’
Knowledge of the route, the locomotive and a growing
body of rules and regulations were all prerequisites for becoming / being an
engine driver. And what was lacking in direct oversight was more than made up
for by the other demands of the role; a strict adherence to the timetable and
an even stricter one to signals and signalling.
This brings us to another aspect of the enginemen’s
lives: when we board a train we are to some degree handing over our safety and
security to the engine driver – it could be his error, misjudgment or plain
recklessness which cost us our own lives. The railway companies, therefore, had
a vested interest in promoting the driver as ‘a safe pair of hands’ a
disciplined and conscientious worker who considers the safety and security of
the passenger above all else. The fostering
of a public duty / public service spirit within the footplatemen and to
a degree throughout the whole railway workforce also manifested itself in some
of the institutions the footplatemen created for themselves, the Mutual
Improvement Class, the Enginemen’s Mutual Assurance Fund and, of course, their
own craft union ASLEF. (It should, perhaps, be noted that one of the original
aims of ASLEF was to prevent strikes.)
In an industry which offered little or no formal
training or instruction the Mutual Improvement Class was the main, if not only,
way to acquire the knowledge and skills that ultimately led from engine cleaner
to engine driver – it was still doing so when I began as an engine cleaner in
1962. The classes were created by, run by and taught by the footplatemen
themselves. From my own experience of attending them they were very open minded
and inclusive affairs, anyone with knowledge or questions could be and was encouraged
to participate. To help in their teaching the men built their own models of
everything from the different types of motion to the vacuum brake, the live
steam injector to signaling systems. In a word they were mutualism in action.
The Mutual Assurance Fund was the enginemen’s response to the lack of sick pay
or injury benefits in a job which could be, and was, physically and mentally
demanding as well as dangerous.
Just as military men were loyal to country and
regiment the footplatemen were loyal to the company which employed them;
inter-company competition for traffic was their inter-company rivalry too.
Being a GN man or a Wessie man mattered, it was part of ‘who you were’. Even
when the railway became nationalised, as it was when I joined the footplate
clan, these rivalries still existed East coast or West, Southern or Great
Western still mattered. Even as the steam age drew to a close there were men in
the top links who had started working on the railway before the creation of the
‘Big Four’ – I know because I fired for them; men who, during the Great War,
had been engine cleaners and after that firemen in the junior links. One of the
driver’s I worked with was Bert Hooker who, as a fireman in 1948, had been
involved in the Locomotive Exchange Trials – working as far away from the
Southern Region as the Highland main line between Perth & Inverness.
These men, in turn, had worked with footplatemen who
began their footplate lives in the Victorian era, men who had worked on the
Great Western ‘broad gauge’ men who took part in the ‘Railway Races to the
North’ or the ‘Atlantic’ mail train rivalries between the London South Western
and the GWR; these decades and decades of traditions, of rivalries, and
competition simply do not disappear overnight. Even the Mutual Improvement
Classes had a competitive element as they held inter-regional or inter-company
quizzes and competitions. One of my own footplate pals and peers in the British
Railways era, the late Walter Hobson, was a regular participant in these events.
The old railway companies might have gone but that spirit of rivalry, of
competition, still echoed around the railway family.
Unlike almost any other blue collar occupation there
was a degree of kudos in being an engine driver, small boys wanted to be one
when they grew up; grown men volunteered to driver them in the 1926 General
Strike. And there’s a whole assortment of books written about, or by engine
drivers, there are no similar volumes about being a bin man or coal miner and
no one volunteered to be a sewage worker in the General Strike. 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’. I’ve even written them myself,
about my own time on the footplate and, in another, about the changes to their
work between 1962 and 1996 based on the experiences and work of myself and
Driver Walter Hobson.
Driver Hobson began, in 1962, as an engine cleaner at
Manningham, Bradford, moved to Old Oak Common, London, to become a fireman and
to Neville Hill, Leeds, to become a driver. His railway career ended at
Gateshead where he was involved in the 154mph run with the class 91 electric
locomotive on the ECML and also acted as a ‘driver trainer’ initiating a new generation of railwaymen into the footplate
caste. (The 154mph run was to celebrate 150 years of railways in Peterborough;
the locomotive was No.91031 Sir Henry Royce and Peter Semmens was the
‘official’ speed recorder.) While based at Neville Hill Driver Hobson drove
‘preserved’ steam locomotives such as No. 60007 Sir Nigel Gresley and No.4771
Green Arrow; as a passed cleaner at Manningham he took holiday makers to
Morecambe with a Derby 4 and at Old Oak Common he fired on the GWR Halls and
15xx Class tank engines. He also had days out with me on the Southern and had a
go firing on Bulleid’s Pacifics, unofficially of course.
Another of my railway peers, Pete Roberts, who, in the
1960s, was a fireman in Nine Elms No.3 Link at the same time I was, became a
familiar face to many on the ‘steam specials’ over the former LSWR routes. He
was a very talented engineman, who had learned his footplate skills in the
final years of steam; and from men who themselves had forty and fifty years of
main line experience. His feat of working a rail tour out of Weymouth and up
Bincombe bank with the Bulleid Pacific No.34067 Tangmere, after the diesel
which was meant to assist on the climb caught fire was an exceptional piece of
enginemanship.
Drivers Roberts and Hobson weren’t the only men from
the steam age who worked on steam rail tours after 1968 but, they were from a
small and very select band. If you were a driver with a minimum of 1 years
driving experience in 1968 you would, today in 2021, be at least 77 years old,
a fireman with a minimum of 1 years experience in 1968 would be at least 70
years old. The last generation of footplatemen from the steam age railway,
which spanned 156 years and encompassed the highs of the 1895 Railway Races to
the North and Mallard’s epic 126mph record as well as the lows of disasters
such as the crashes at Quintinshill and Harrow & Wealdstone, are all well
into their retirement many are, sadly, no longer with us.
A link to my footplate memoir: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1688929746
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