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 Made in Yorkshire


Doncaster, today, isn’t a name which readily brings to mind the finest of British workmanship. Doncaster’s town jail, a privately run affair, is known to the locals as Doncatraz, the loss of railway, mining and engineering work has taken a toll. When you look at the engine in this photograph, which as most of you know, was built in Doncaster, do you think, what a handsome and stylish machine it is, or do you think about all those men, forging and hammering, filing and milling, measuring and checking, riveting and bolting, and much, much, more before she finally rolled out of the Plant and into history, probably not the later and, most likely, the former.

Entire families and often several generations of those families laboured much of, if not all, their working lives creating the parts and assembling them into a thousand steam locomotives both large and small, the speedy and the less so. When Joe Duddington, a Doncaster engine driver, the man who drove No.4468 Mallard at 126mph, died, the obituary in the local Doncaster paper was just a couple of paragraphs and they said more about Mallard, than Joe Duddington.

Today, people from some sections of the railway fraternity get more het up about whether a statue of Sir Nigel Gresley should or should not have a Mallard, (the feathered variety), on the base, than ever questioned why there was no tribute of any kind to Joe Duddington, or the man who really made it happen, his fireman Tommy Bray; whose skill with a shovel and the sweat of his brow, produced the steam which became the draw bar horse power and a world record speed.

The photograph shows No.60007 Sir Nigel Gresley approaching Esk valley and getting into her stride for the 1:49 climb to Goathland.

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