Life on the Old Railways

by Tom Quinn

  George’s father only realised that his son had left school after George had already been at work for a month – the school board man called at the house and the game was up.

  ‘He was furious when he found out,’ says George. ‘He made me go back to school till I was legally allowed to leave and start work, which was on my fourteenth birthday, 14 November 1940. This meant going back for only a short time, however, and as soon as I could I went back to be a lad messenger. I started each day at 8.30am at Finsbury Park, and I had to go down to all the platelayers’ cabins and signal cabins to pick up the mail for the yardmaster. I was a small boy and I had to carry a huge bag back and forth across the main lines – can you imagine being allowed to do that today!

  ‘There were seven sets of lines and you just had to keep an eye out for the trains. If it was foggy they’d detail someone from the shunters’ yard to see you across the rails. Once I’d collected all the mail I’d take it to the yardmaster’s office, and open it ready for the chief clerk who would arrive at about 9am.’

  The lad messenger was without question at the bottom of the pile, but as he dashed between various people doing different jobs George gained an insight into how all the parts of the railway worked. Apart from sorting out the post he had to look after the stores: ‘I can remember taking massive blocks of soap out and cutting off huge chunks to cart to the various cabins. Then I had to deal with applications for privilege passes – these were reduced-fare tickets for railwaymen to travel. This was the London North Eastern (LNER) region so our forms were white.

  ‘At 10.30am I had to make tea for the entire office staff, then I’d run messages for all and sundry. I even had to measure up the railwaymen for their uniforms – it must have been a funny sight. There I was, a little lad of fourteen or fifteen, pulling the tape measure round these huge men. All the railway uniforms at that date were supplied by Lotteries of Liverpool Street.’

  Inevitably, as the newest and youngest recruit, George had to put up with endless practical jokes. He remembered being asked to get red oil for some lamps and green oil for others, and of course he fell for it and spent long periods looking for things that didn’t exist. But occasionally the jokes backfired:

  ‘I remember in my very early days going across the tracks to the platelayers’ cabin at Holloway to see a Mr Hudson, also known as Soapy. When I got there he said “Casey,” – they all called me Casey – “I want a privilege ticket. I want to go to Delhi”. I said, “Do you mean Delhi in India?” and when he said “Yes”, I believed him. I just said, “Oh, that’ll be the pink form as it’s outside our region”. I asked him what route he wanted to take and everything – I don’t know how he kept a straight face. Anyway, I made out the appropriate form and that afternoon the form went into the yardmaster’s box.

  ‘A short while later I heard the bell ringing violently to tell me that the guvn’r wanted me. He was a Mr Keys and I always remember how he wore a pince-nez on the end of his nose.

  “Case,” he said.

  “Yes sir,” I said.

  “This application form from Mr Hudson.”

  “Yes, sir. His old aunt is sick and he wants to visit her,” I said.

  “Think you’d better get Hudson,” he said.

  ‘So I set off across the rails to the platelayers’ cabin and found Hudson, who was a very big man, busy playing cards.

  ‘I said, “Mr Keys wants to see you.”

  “What the bloody hell does he want,” roared Hudson.

  “It’s about your privilege pass to Delhi.”

  ‘At that Hudson leapt to his feet and shouted.

  “You haven’t filled it out, have you, you silly bugger!”

  ‘I could hear all sorts of bellowing from Mr Keys’ office after Hudson went in, and he came out looking very sheepish. There were no more tricks like that afterwards.’

  When George started work, even a boy of fourteen was expected to do a forty-eight hour week. Each day finished at 5pm weekdays, and at noon on Saturdays, with half an hour for lunch. Occasionally George, like the other workers, would finish at ten past the hour, or ten to. ‘I’m buggered if I can remember why!’ he said.

  George worked as a messenger boy for a total of only six months; during the war years, job changing and even promotion was far easier than it had been before the war, simply because of the shortage of men. ‘I got myself a new job, but in the usual way of the time I had to get a replacement for my old job before I could move on. I was lucky, because I managed to get a friend called Mo Kantor to take my place as messenger boy. His dad was a furrier in Potters Bar and though you might have thought he’d have followed in his father’s footsteps, he joined me on the railways. I taught him everything I knew in the messenger boy line, and then became a telegraph lad at Holloway, South Down Cabin.’

  George’s first wage packet contained just 14s 6d, but 2d of that disappeared immediately into what was then called the ‘Lloyd George’, an early unemployment tax. Despite getting himself a new job with extra responsibilities, George had to accept that he was not going to receive any more money. The rule on the railway was that you didn’t get a pay rise, whatever you were doing, until your next birthday. Thereafter at each birthday you received a further 1s rise.

  ‘They had a terrible initiation ceremony for all new entrants,’ remembered George. ‘They’d grab you when you went in the platelayers’ cabin, sharpen a cut-throat razor right in front of you, and make it really look like they were going to cut your privates off! ‘However, having survived the perils of the platelayers’ cabin intact, George was subsequently amazed to discover how much responsibility a fourteen-year-old was expected to cope with:

  ‘You went straight into a signals cabin where you learned to fill in the train registration book. In a busy box you’d have four pages of booking per shift: each line of entry in the book had ten items that had to be filled in – the time the train was offered, the time it was accepted, time passed on, time passing in the rear and so on. It worked out at ten items per line, 40 lines per page: a total of 400 items per page, and there were four pages each shift!

  ‘That was a hell of a lot of entries for a young lad. At the Holloway signal cabin I did 6am–2pm and 2pm–10pm shifts. You had to be there at 6am, and if you were the least bit late they knew straightaway because the bookings would not be there, and of course you couldn’t add them after the event.’

  Despite the heavy workload of the registration book there were other, equally onerous duties. George had to use the telephone, tap out telegraph messages, and once a week get down on his hands and knees to scrub the signalbox floorboards till they were white. The massive metal frame the levers were held in had to be black-leaded every week, too: ‘Anyone who has ever done that will know what a filthy job it is. The black-leading used to get everywhere – on your clothes, up your nose, all over your face. But they wanted it to look smart and clean and well looked after, which it did. At Holloway there were fifty levers that had to be polished, too. Signalmen were always proud men, who wanted their cabins to be just right.’

  Messages from the signalbox were sent up and down the line via the block bells – basically a brass bell in a mahogany case – and this, too, had to be kept sparklingly clean. ‘Even the screw heads on all the bits of equipment were polished regularly with Brasso,’ recalled George. ‘A good cabin was a gleaming mass of metal, at least as beautifully kept as a cab on a locomotive.’

  It was accepted practice that the telegraph lad would operate the levers while the signalman had his breakfast. This was all a bit unofficial, but it wasn’t difficult, remembered George, ‘because the signalman was always on hand if you got stuck and it didn’t take long, anyway, to become familiar with the way the system worked. Mind you, there was a knack to pulling those levers. They weren’t power-assisted or anything, so you had to put your weight behind them. Distant signals were more difficult simply because they were farther off. Down below the cabin were the rods and linkages that led off u
p or down the track, and for a signal a good distance away you were moving a lot of metal, although counterbalancing weights were fitted to make things a little easier. Some points were particularly difficult: first you had to unlock them, then get clearance – that is, prove that nothing was on that bit of track – then you had to open the bar-point lock, a lock lever that kept the points where you wanted them. Only then could you go ahead.’

  Signalboxes were almost like closed worlds with rules of their own and the signalman and his telegraph lad, if he had one, had to be self-sufficient. There was a stove for heating up tea and even meals, and there were chemical loos…

  ‘The poor old telegraph lad had the job of emptying those too!’ recalled George. ‘What a terrible job that was, although at the Holloway box I was lucky because one of the platelayers used to do it, more often than not. But when I had to do it I had to walk across six or seven sets of tracks terrified I might slip and terrified I might have to move quick if a train came along, and of course moving sharpish was very likely to make you drop the loo. I remember when Chitty Mason, a cattle-truck cleaner at Holloway sidings, was emptying this loo, and he tripped while crossing the tracks; of course the contents of the loo went everywhere – Dusty Day, the signalman I worked for at the time, could hardly operate the levers he was laughing so much.’

  Signalboxes were held strictly to account in the steam era. If an accident occurred, however minor, the telegraph lad’s entries were checked in the registration book, so everything had to be spot on. The big clock in the cabin was checked every day at 10am, and if it had to be corrected even by half a minute, a note to that effect had to be entered in the book. When a relief signalman came on he would rely heavily on the telegraph boy who usually knew a great deal more about the business of that particular box than the temporary signalman:

  ‘I remember at Holloway South the relief signalman was George Gunn – he was known as Gun Gun for some reason – an enormous fellow who didn’t like any of the drivers. The drivers all knew this, and to tease him they used to slow down as they passed the box and pretend to shoot him, a sort of reminder of his nickname. It used to infuriate George who would then report the drivers. Once, for no particular reason, he told me I’d been cheeky: “Get on your stool and stay on it for the rest of the shift,” he said. So I sat there for a while, and then he went to the back of the box where the big old range provided heat and a place to cook his breakfast. All the signalmen cooked their breakfasts in the cabin in those days. He used to have half-a-dozen eggs, half-a-dozen pieces of bacon, sausages, fried bread – you wouldn’t believe anyone could eat so much, he absolutely packed it away. Anyway, on this particular day I think he must have spent a bit longer than usual cooking because by the time he’d started eating, we were into a very busy time; in fact we were suddenly so busy that he asked me to move the points – but I told him I wouldn’t because he’d told me to stay on my stool. I had the pleasure of watching him running back and forth between his enormous breakfast and the levers, and all the while he was cursing me. In the end he got so cross that he threw his breakfast, plate and everything, out of the window!’

  By this time the war was in full swing and the main control offices for the railways were evacuated from London. The King’s Cross control room, for example, went up to Knebworth in Hertfordshire. At the Holloway box George and his signalman would frequently receive what was called a London Central Yellow warning if enemy bombers were known to be in the area during the day; a London Central Red meant the bombers were really close.

  ‘Sometimes I wondered why they bothered to warn us,’ recalled George, ‘since there was nothing we could do. We were just sitting targets. All we could do was dim our lights a bit. It was mainly gas lights in those days so they were pretty dim anyway, and all the windows were blacked out with a hole left just big enough for the signalman to look out and peer up and down the line.

  ‘In the back of the cabin at Holloway they fitted a steel shelter inside the cabin. Old Dusty used to get nervy when there were bombers about, so he’d go into the shelter at the back of the box and tell me to get on with it. If bombs fell nearby I was supposed to dash into the steel box with him and sit on his lap – it was so small there was only room for the two of us that way. It always seemed funny to me, sitting there with this great big registration book open on my knees while Dusty held up an oil lamp so I could continue to fill the book in. That metal box shelter was a complete waste of time, too – it was just a heavy steel box, so if the cabin had been hit it would have gone crashing down through the floor and we’d have been killed anyway. I suppose the idea was that it would at least protect us from flying glass.’

  London at this time was definitely a frightening place to be. All over the capital throughout the Blitz the German bombs could be heard exploding, followed by the sound of anti-aircraft guns.

  ‘Bombs often dropped near us,’ remembered George, ‘because the railways were a prime target. One night a massive bomb hit the ground right in front of our box, but by a miracle it just buried itself and failed to explode. If it had gone off we would have been killed, for sure.’ As well as the constant risk of death at work, George had to cope with the very real danger of being killed at home. Like many Londoners, George had a fascinating tale of a narrow escape:

  ‘It was 26 February 1941 – I can remember the exact date – and late that evening our next-door neighbour came round and asked us to spend the evening with her at her house. My dad had told my mum not to leave the house whatever happened because his theory was that if a bomb was going to get you, it would get you wherever you were, so you might as well stay at home. So we said no and we stayed put. A short while later our neighbour came in again; she was upset, and asked us again to go round to her house. I think she just wanted company. Anyway, Mum again refused, and she stuck to her guns until the neighbour became hysterical. Then, at last, we relented and trooped into next door. A short while later our house took a direct hit and there’s no doubt at all that if we’d stayed put we’d have all been killed; as it was they still had to dig us out! There was a lot of bombing in the Potters Bar area because there were three railway tunnels in the area, and the Germans knew they would cause huge disruption if they managed to damage any of them.

  ‘We moved to my grandmother’s after that, and her roof was then blown off in an air raid. My mum was getting a bit paranoid by now. She thought the Germans were really after her, that it was almost personal, so she went to Devon to her parents’ house, and would you believe it, she was bombed out there, too!’

  As the war went on, George was promoted to relief telegraph boy; he also started doing night duties. Despite the difficult hours and long journeys, the job of relief telegraph boy was considered prestigious:

  ‘In 1943, when I was seventeen, two of us were selected to train as signalmen. I knew a lot already from my days as a telegraph lad, but to be a full signalman you had to know a hell of a lot more, as I quickly discovered when I was sent to the signals training school at Hatfield.’

  This school was established in a former royal waiting room on one of the platforms, and the story of how it came to be there provides an interesting glimpse of the relationship between railways and royalty in former times.

  Queen Victoria had often visited Hatfield, because it is the nearest station to Hatfield House, home of the Cecils. In order to accommodate the Queen, the platforms at Hatfield were built staggered – in other words, they were built in such a way that they do not face each other across the tracks in the normal way. This meant that when the royal train stopped at the station, there was no chance that another train could stop alongside the royal train, and so there was no risk of the Queen being ogled by her subjects. The Hatfield royal waiting room was kept in perfect order, but in fact it was never used – until 1943 when the national emergency persuaded officials that they’d better make some use of it. And so it became a signals school for young men like George.

  ‘When my mate and I t
urned up at Hatfield we were joined by two trainee telegraph girls and three women training as guards; they were the first women ever to be trained in those jobs. Our training lasted three weeks. We were given a test to see if we knew the rules and regulations, and then we were off to our own signalboxes. I was sent to Crews Hill on the Hertford Loop. Every frame – that’s the bit in the box that the levers are fixed in – was different, so you had to be trained for the specific box you were going to work in. At Crews Hill it was what was called a porter signalman’s job: in other words, it was a tiny station where you did a bit of everything, signals, booking clerk, stationmaster, porter. In fact there wasn’t much signal work to be done, and you only really opened up the cabin to shorten the block or to perform shunting duties. The more block sections you had, the more trains there were, because there was one train to a block. The idea was that so long as you knew there could only ever be one train in a block section, you knew the trains were being kept safely apart. But you always had to keep your eyes and ears open for things that weren’t quite right – as a train went by you’d always look at the back of it, for example, to make sure its tail lamp was there: if it wasn’t, it meant that half the train had got lost somewhere! That really did happen in the old days when wagons were loose coupled.

  ‘I had a bit of help at Crews Hill in the shape of a lad porter who had better remain nameless, but for the sake of the story let’s call him Monty. All I can say is, he was a real no-gooder; he was always late and he was always up to something. He was supposed to light the station’s oil lamps as well as the oil lamps in the signalbox when he arrived, so if he was late it was a real nuisance. One day I was up in the box when a young lad walked up to me and said: “I’ve come for the oil. Is Monty about?”

  “No,” I replied in complete bafflement.

  “I’ve got the can,” he said and proceeded to wave it under my nose.