by Tom Quinn
Unconstitutional
‘I consider,’ said Mr Weller, ‘that the rail is unconstitutional and an inwasion o’ privileges…’
Charles Dickens, Master Humphrey’s Clock, 1840
Positions on the Coal Sheet
It should be explained that all the drivers doing the same class of work, working for instance the broad gauge expresses between London and Swindon are formed into one corps technically known as a link. Every pound of coal and every pint of oil that goes into each man’s engine is debited to him, and at the end of the week the total is made up and divided by the number of miles his engine has run. The men are then arranged in order of merit, that is, of economy of fuel and oil consumption, on a sheet hung up on the notice board of the running shed.
Of course for a single week, extra load or stress of wind, greasy rails or what not, may affect a man’s position, but in the long run (assuming every man’s engine to be in equally good condition) the man who comes out top is the best driver, in other words, is the man who can do his work to time – for punctuality, of course, comes before coal saving – with the most scientific economy of force. In fact, a driver feels the loss of a good position on the coal sheet much as a boy feels on being sent to the bottom of his form at school.
George P. Neele, Railway Reminiscences,1904
A COUNTRY
STATIONMASTER
CLIFF CARR
STATIONMASTER ON THE LONDON MIDLAND & SCOTTISH RAILWAY
Like many bright young men in the 1940s, Cliff Carr won a place at the local grammar school, only to have to give it up to help support his family. Cliff was born in Llangattock near Crickhowell in 1926. His father was a coal miner who did not relish the prospect of his son going into the same industry. However, it was the death of Cliff’s mother in 1940 that propelled him out of school and into the railways where he was to spend the rest of his working life. His first job, for which he was accepted only after passing a thorough exam, was as a junior clerk in Brynmawr where he stayed for two years, from 1942 until 1944.
‘It was quite a journey to Brynmawr from my home: I had to cycle four miles to Gilwern and then push my bike half a mile up a steep hill before catching the 8.10 train which consisted of four vestibule-type coaches dating back to the early 1930s, and a Webb 0-6-2 coal tank engine. The ticket inspector here was terribly strict – he once reported me for not having a pass for my bicycle, even though he knew I was entitled to one!’
The line to Brynmawr climbs to more than one thousand feet, and Cliff remembered the glorious views in summer: ‘They almost made up for the freezing temperatures in winter!’ The booking office at Brynmawr was unusual. Known as a Passimeter, it was wooden and glass, measured 12ft by 8ft and had a built-in foot-operated pedal that unlocked the gates controlling passengers’ entry to the platforms. All booking had to be entered in a traffic book which was added up and checked daily, weekly and monthly, as Cliff recalled:
‘Passenger trains were absolutely packed when they came through, especially on a Tuesday since this was market day in nearby Abergavenny. In fact when it was this busy the Webb 0-6-2 engines were replaced by LNWR 0-8-0 engines in order to haul an additional two coaches, making a six-coach train instead of the usual four.’
After six months at Brynmawr, Cliff moved on to Ebbw Vale where Dai Morris, the senior clerk, was such a suspicious character that his fingers had worn deep grooves in the underside of the wooden drawer where he kept his personal things. ‘He was always tugging at it to make sure it was locked,’ remembered Cliff.
In February 1944, Cliff was called up for war service. Clerical grades, unlike signalmen and drivers, were not reserved occupations. He was sent to the Warwickshire Regiment for six weeks’ intensive training. ‘It was a bit of a shock,’ he recalled, ‘but I didn’t regret it in the long run. After six weeks they looked at my employment record, such as it was, and decided that, as a railwayman, I should be sent to the Royal Engineers, to what was called the Movement Control Section.’
His first posting, in June 1944, was to the London Docks, and from there he went to Willesden in North London where he helped supervise the loading of tanks and other military equipment on to trains. Then, in September 1944, after the D-Day landings, he was sent to France: ‘I was astonished while working on the European railways at how they used horseboxes for the troops; each van had a sign saying “Sixteen Horses or Thirty Men”, and they were truly relics of World War I!’
Next stop for Cliff was Belgium with the Second Army; here he worked at one of their main depots from which ammunition trains were sent to Holland for the troops on the front line. ‘My railway experience proved useful because I knew how to keep good records and was able to liaise with the Belgian Railway people – I was even able to use my grammar school French. The Army weren’t daft when they made these decisions.’
By May 1945 he was on the Rhine organising movements of coal. Then, suddenly, he was sent back to Britain for a few weeks before being ordered to the Far East via Tobruk and Bombay: ‘I ended up in Java, in what was then still known as the Dutch East Indies, helping organise tank and troop movements because the Japanese war was still on. I reckon 90 per cent of the people I worked with were railwaymen, and I wonder to this day if the role of the railwayman at home and overseas in wartime has ever really been given the attention it deserves in books about the war. After all, nothing could move without us, and the more efficiently we did our job the better for the war effort.’
By the end of 1947 Cliff had completed his four years, and he was sent back to England and discharged. ‘I had two months’ leave and then reported back to Swansea Victoria, the headquarters of the LMS in South Wales. I think they were a bit surprised when I just turned up and asked what post they had for me. They knew that, under wartime regulations, they had to keep a job open for me, so they sent me to Eardisley on the Hereford and Brecon Line. I was made a class five clerk, which might sound very grand until you remember the complexity of the railway hierarchy and that a class five clerk was the bottom grade!’
Eardisley was a small country station, and Cliff arrived in November 1947, knowing no one in the area. He remembers a foggy, freezing day and a long walk into the village, for the station was well outside Eardisley itself. But if the place seemed remote and the weather unpropitious, the staff were very different:
‘You would have to go a long way to meet a man as pleasant as dear Ernie Brooks who was to be my stationmaster. He was about sixty when I first met him at Eardisley. He was a real old-style railwayman, friendly and helpful and really one of the most endearing chaps I’ve ever worked with. It shows you how different things were in the old days, because when I arrived at Eardisley in my early twenties I was on the same grade as Ernie had been until very recently, and he’d worked for the railway for decades. They were hard times, and promotion was hard to get.’
Ernie had just been promoted to stationmaster and Cliff took over his old job. The two men were the only clerical staff at Eardisley, but there were also signalmen and porters and goods staff. Ernie and Cliff were also responsible for keeping an eye on Kinnersley Station and Whitney-on-Wye, both local stations.
‘I had to deal with passenger, goods and parcel traffic,’ says Cliff, ‘and I remember thinking at the time that clerical work at small country stations gave you a real insight into how the railways really worked; it was as if you could see the structure on which everything else was based. We used to book tickets for passengers and organise the work in the goods office, dealing mostly with farm produce – grain, hay, sugar beet and so on. There were animal food stores from which local agents sold to farmers. The food arrived in bulk and was delivered by railway lorry, or the agents used their own transport. Some farmers collected their own feedstuffs.’
The system of which Cliff had become an integral part had been built up over decades and it was designed to ensure that nothing went astray: ‘It’s difficult to visualise,’ remembered Cliff, ‘but road transport accounted
for a much smaller percentage of the movement of goods in those early days. A huge amount of small stuff, even supplies for the local greengrocer, would come in by train, together with farm implements, animals, milk, fruit and every other kind of local produce you can think of. The most perishable produce, for obvious reasons, came on the passenger trains, not on the goods trains.’
Together with his stationmaster, Cliff was responsible for paying twenty men in the area; these included platelayers, maintenance men, station repairers, signalmen and shunters. They also paid themselves. ‘We certainly did, but like everything else it was all checked by the district office.’ As a class five clerk Cliff was paid less than a porter. He received just £5 a week, and it took six years to reach the maximum pay for the grade which was £8. Half his wage went to pay for his lodgings so things were difficult, but as he began to take part in the social life of the village, things took a turn for the better: ‘I hated Eardisley at first, but came to love it. I met my wife there, went dancing regularly in the village hall and even played football for Hay-on-Wye and cricket for Hereford.’
Cliff quickly realised that to get promoted he would have to move, and he was ambitious. He began studying the rules and regulations for signalling and for railway accountancy. He was given a promotion, but found that the district office in the Eardisley region wouldn’t release him for the post as they were unable to replace him. Under the railway agreements that existed at the time, if he couldn’t be moved to his promotional post, he had to be put on to the top salary for his existing job. Then in October 1951 he moved to Hay-on-Wye as chief clerk. He stayed here until 1954 – ‘my new stationmaster boss was far stricter and less friendly than Mr Brooks!’ – and then decided that he should try to become a stationmaster himself:
‘That was much more difficult than it sounds because I was only about twenty-six and the era of younger stationmasters hadn’t arrived. I just applied for every post that came with a stationmaster’s house –this was important as I’d married in 1952 and we had a baby son.’
But Cliff was determined, and in 1954 he was appointed to his first job as stationmaster. ‘I knew I would have to accept a post for which there was less competition. Vacancies were advertised weekly on a list and I finally got a job at Nantybwch. I hated it there. Nothing to do with the work, but I’d grown to love the Herefordshire countryside and I found my new environment difficult to get used to. My wife didn’t like it much either.’
At Nantybwch it was all passenger traffic, and Cliff had to look after his own station as well as the station at Rhymney Bridge; both had signalboxes controlling single line junctions with double lines. One of Cliff’s biggest responsibilities was to make sure the colliers’ trains ran punctually. There were two on each shift (early afternoons and night), and it was vital that these trains were not delayed as the Coal Board imposed fines for lateness.
‘Once or twice I was glad that I knew enough about signalling to get us out of a difficulty,’ remembered Cliff. ‘When the signalman didn’t turn up on one occasion I was able to open the box and get the colliers’ train going on time.’
Nantybwch was famous for its dreadful winter weather, so much so that the permanent-way staff were sometimes on snow and frost duty for weeks on end, and on one never-to-be forgotten day a pile of huge stones fell from a bridge a few miles from the station and almost derailed a train. For six weeks after that buses were used while the bridge was demolished and then rebuilt.
Other difficulties encountered by Cliff included miners, who always seemed to be in a tearing hurry, running across the lines after leaving the train instead of using the bridge, an offence under railway bylaws. ‘The railway police tried cautioning them, but it never worked for long.’
Farmers were another problem for Cliff, who remembered that their sheep strayed on to the line suspiciously often. ‘We felt sure that farmers were putting dead sheep on the line to be run over so they could claim compensation from the railway for a sheep that was virtually worthless!’
The passenger line at Nantybwch closed in 1958. Cliff always believed that the loss of passenger traffic that caused the closure stemmed from a two-week strike in 1955 that forced people to find other means of travel: ‘They found they could do without us when they had to, and never really came back.’
Cliff had kept in touch with his friend Ernie Brooks at Eardisley station, and it must have pleased the old man to know that Cliff was going to apply to take over as stationmaster when he, Ernie, retired in 1958. ‘It was funny going back after ten years,’ recalled Cliff, ‘but my main reason for applying was that my father-in-law had died and my wife, who was from Eardisley, wanted to be closer to her mother. It was also a way for me to return to dear old Herefordshire. That was the great thing about the railways – they would allow you to move on compassionate grounds, as they did in this case.’
Little had changed at Eardisley in the years since Cliff had been away, other than a slight reduction in the volume of traffic, and an increase in the level of responsibility: cutbacks meant that the Eardisley stationmaster now had to look after five stations in the area: ‘I had to go to one or other of these stations every day, and to all five on pay day,’ remembered Cliff. Over the coming months he had to cope with a case of serious subsidence under the rails: ‘They found the track had been placed on marshy land and tree trunks had been used to support it.’ This caused a bad derailment which led to the closure of the line for three days. There was also a tragic incident when one of Cliff’s porters had a few too many one night, climbed a stile, slipped, got stuck upside down and died.
Disasters only rarely disturbed the steady routine of the country stationmaster’s life, however. The busy days were Wednesday, which was market day at Hereford, the main centre served by Eardisley; and Thursday, which was market day in nearby Hay-on-Wye. Even in the late 1950s country people would crowd onto the trains to take things they’d made or grown to sell in the market: ‘One man used to take a six-foot-square crate of china as passenger luggage every week – he wouldn’t get away with that now! I think Ernie had turned a blind eye to it for so many years that no one minded – well, until a relief stationmaster turned up and charged a large sum for the crate. After that we never saw the china man again!’
Other unusual cargo included bulls and horses, which had to be accommodated in a special wagon attached to the back of a passenger train because they were defined as ‘urgent’. The daily takings were also given special treatment, and were carried in a leather bag and placed in a special travelling safe in the guard’s van. The cash then went to Hereford where it was banked by the Hereford stationmaster.
At the end of 1961, following the death of his wife’s mother and again keen for promotion, Cliff started to look around. Eardisley was a class three stationmaster’s job, so when a vacancy arose at Walcot, near Wellington for a class two stationmaster, he applied. He was successful, and found himself in a sugar factory! ‘The sugar-beet industry was so important in the area around Walcot that the stationmaster had an office in the British Sugar Corporation factory at nearby Allscott. I’m pretty sure that was unique in British Railways, although it made sense as we had sidings there and so much of our business depended on the factory, and on close liaison with the factory manager.’
Though Walcot was a country station it was busy because it was on the main London-Birkenhead line. Cliff was at Walcot from 1962 until 1967 and throughout that period, as the steam engines gradually disappeared, he noticed the decline in freight and passenger traffic, a decline that the railway industry seemed powerless to halt. In 1967, taking account of the new realities, some stationmasters became station managers – and, many would say, promptly lost the reputation for reliability built up over more than a century. The local stationmaster had been an important figure in the community, and it must have been hard to believe that the new station manager label, which sounded rather remote and inaccessible, would instil the same confidence.
By this time Cliff had
taken a relief stationmaster’s job, but it was on a temporary basis only, pending the introduction of the station manager scheme. Then from 1967 until 1970 he was a relief marshalling yard supervisor at Shrewsbury. There followed a further promotion to movement supervisor responsible for locomotive staff, guards and traffic for the whole of West Wales. By 1979 Cliff was passenger station manager at Cardiff, and here he remained until taking early retirement in 1983.
‘Change is, I suppose, the thing I remember most about my forty-one years on the railway, but I’m glad I did it. Railwaymen are a great bunch to work with.’
Railway Matrimony
Among other great advantages afforded by railways has been that of opening out the great matrimonial market, whereby people can pick and choose wives all over the world, instead of having to pursue the old system of always marrying a neighbour’s child. So we now have an amalgamation of countries and counties, and a consequent improvement in society – improvement in wit, improvement in wine, improvement in ‘wittles’, improvement in everything.
R. S. Surtees, Mr Facey Romford’s Hounds, 1864
Sabbath Trains
And if we are entitled to employ our servants for railway work on the Sabbath why am not I and others entitled to reap our crops, or plough our fields on that day, or why may not a manufacturer also employ his workpeople or any other work whatever be carried on? Is there any exemption for railway work or have they any privilege above any other system of labour? If once Sabbath work on the railway commences, the system will rapidly spread to every other occupation. It has been found that in our Scotch lines Sabbath trains yield no profit to the company anyway …
Debate on the running of Sabbath Trains, 1849
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