Giants of Steam

by Jonathan Glancey

  The railway’s first chief mechanical engineer had been George Hughes. An affable and much-liked Fenland farmer’s son, he had held the same position from 1907 with the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway at Horwich, and from 1922 with the LNWR. Hughes did his best to break the stranglehold of the dominant, Derby-based, ex-Midland Railway faction within the LMS, which believed in locomotives of moderate size to run relatively light express trains. Such engines were certainly economical, but Midland Railway locomotive development appeared to have frozen by the time of the First World War. Nevertheless, J. E. Anderson, the Midland Railway’s chief locomotive draughtsman, had been appointed motive power running superintendent at Derby in 1923, and he believed that a locomotive should have the least number of wheels possible to do the work it was asked to do. He strongly advocated the small-engine school of thinking that dogged the early days of the LMS, even on the former LNWR main lines from London to Liverpool, Manchester, and Glasgow, where trains had long been much heavier than those running on the Midland Railway.

  This policy resulted in the need for double-heading – two locomotives coupled together – to work the heaviest express passenger and goods trains. This was clearly a waste of resources. To meet demand, Hughes had proposed a four-cylinder Pacific in 1924, with a 2-8-2 heavy goods version of the same machine. These projects had come to nothing because Anderson put a spoke in Hughes’s wheel when he refused to spend the money necessary for new and longer turntables for the putative Pacifics. As it was, one of the young men working on the design of the Hughes Pacific and 2-8-2 was Ernest Stewart Cox, who went on to become one of Stanier’s key men and, after the nationalization of the railways in 1948, was appointed head of design for British Railways steam locomotives.

  When Hughes retired in 1925, his successor, Henry Fowler, the son of a cabinet-maker from Evesham, was another nice fellow who proved unable to break Anderson’s obstruction of larger LMS locomotive designs. One promising design, however, was for an enlarged Midland compound. These highly successful 4-4-0s had been Derby’s crowning achievement, and Fowler now suggested a more modern and powerful 4-6-0 version. With a tractive effort of 32,270 lb, it would have been comparable to the later Royal Scots and might well have been a very useful machine. Again, though, Anderson’s influence ensured that it was rejected.

  In October 1925, Fowler organized and led a trip to France with other LMS engineers, along with the LNER’s Bulleid, who acted as translator, to study the latest in French compound locomotive design. Enthused by the 12–15 per cent fuel savings that French engineers claimed – accurately – for their compounds, Fowler, a compound enthusiast, came back eager to resurrect the Hughes Pacific in compound form. The result was the design of an impressive-looking, four-cylinder compound Pacific with 6 ft 9 in driving wheels, twinned with a 2-8-2 goods engine with 5 ft 3 in driving wheels, and boasting a tractive effort of 44,400 lb. Fowler himself was no expert in detailed design, but his team did a terrific job and it looked as if the LMS finally had the super power it needed.

  It seems that casting work on the cylinders had already begun when Anderson, determined that a four-cylinder Pacific was too big for the LMS, played a surprising trump card. In September 1926, he invited the GWR to send a Castle class 4-6-0 for trials between Euston and Carlisle. Anderson knew that greater power would soon be needed for the fifteen-car Royal Scot train which would run non-stop over the 299 mile route the following year, but he was not prepared to sanction Pacifics.

  The Collett-designed Castle was set against a four-cylinder LNWR Claughton class 4-6-0, an older and less dynamic machine, and no one was really surprised when 5000 Launceston Castle demonstrated her clear superiority over her rival, a design by Charles Bowen Cooke dating from 1913. What Launceston Castle proved to Anderson and the operating department was that nothing bigger than a 4-6-0 was needed for even the most demanding west coast work. They convinced the LMS board, and Swindon was asked if it could supply fifty new Castles. The answer was a very firm no. The upshot of this was the Royal Scot class three-cylinder 4-6-0s of 1927, largely designed and wholly built by the North British Locomotive Company of Glasgow. The Pacific was abandoned and Fowler’s name, a touch ironically, was from then on attached to the very locomotives that had scuppered his finest moment. Anderson’s tactics had worked. The Royal Scots were far from perfect in their original form, but they were nevertheless fast and powerful engines which did away, for the most part, with doubleheading on the principal west coast expresses. But while the Royal Scots solved one problem, much of the LMS locomotive fleet remained as diverse and old-fashioned as it had been at the time the railway was formed in 1923.

  When, by 1930, even the Royal Scots were performing at near their limits and more power was deemed necessary, Anderson – independently and over the head of the chief mechanical engineer – approached Beyer Peacock in Manchester, manufacturers of the superb, if unconventional, articulated Garratt locomotives, and suggested an express passenger compound Garratt with 6 ft 9 in wheels. Beyer Peacock’s design team were quick to understand that what Anderson really wanted was a kind of twin Midland compound 4-4-0. They dutifully drew up an arrangement for a 4-4-2 + 2-4-4 compound, but – in a lovely touch – added drawings of what they thought should be built instead. This was a 4-6-2 + 2-6-4 compound with 6 ft 9 in driving wheels, long-lap, long-travel valves, a massive 220 psi boiler, and a tractive effort of close to 50,000 lb – and there was every indication that it would have been a truly special machine which would have romped up Shap and Beattock with small towns in tow. Anderson was presumably not amused, but the idea of the express passenger Garratt lingered until the arrival of Stanier and his decidedly big Pacifics.

  Fowler was promoted sideways into a top-level research role in 1930 and Ernest Lemon took the reins while a chief mechanical engineer who could deliver Sir Josiah Stamp’s vision of a fully integrated railway could be found. GWR practice, meanwhile, had certainly impressed LMS management. Sir Harold Hartley used the GWR as a matter of course on his way up and down from London to Oxford; a rational man, he was impressed by the high level of standardization and efficiency found on Stanier’s railway. As for Stamp himself, he wanted rationalization at any cost. After the Treaty of Versailles, he had been on the Dawes committee in Germany which helped to establish the Deutsche Reichsbahn in 1922, a newly integrated state railway set up on commercial lines and one step removed from full state control. His continuing, eager interest in the ways of the German economy were to lead him, along with many other British businessmen sympathetic to Nazi Germany, into serious errors of political judgement. In 1936, he wrote to The Times calling for British academics to attend the 550th anniversary of Heidelberg University even though, under Nazi control, it had unceremoniously sacked forty Jewish lecturers. He wrote for Hermann Göring’s lavishly produced Die Vierjahresplan (Four-Year Plan) magazine and, as a guest of Hitler, attended the Nuremberg Rally in 1938. That same year he was raised to the peerage, but on the night of 16 April 1941, Stamp, his wife, and his eldest son, Wilfred, were killed in a Luftwaffe bombing raid. His house, Shortlands, in Kent, had received a direct hit.

  At the time of his death, Stamp was serving as the government’s adviser on economic coordination. He was one of the ‘Guilty Men’ accused in the book of that title published by Victor Gollancz in 1942. Written by ‘Cato’, the pen name of a trio of writers representing the three major British political parties – Michael Foot, Frank Owen, and Peter Howard – Guilty Men pointed an angry finger at the architects of appeasement. Stamp, however, was accused not for his fondness for Nazi Germany’s apparent administrative efficiency (a not uncommon trait among the British ruling and senior administrative class at that time), but for spending too much money on the LMS. ‘The soldiers of Britain had insufficient tanks and airplanes to protect them,’ Cato railed, ‘for the simple reason that insufficient money had been spent to buy them. It was not really Lord Stamp’s fault. He was only half guilty. The nation’s railways must be carried on.
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  Stamp’s pro-German views did not, however, prevent the LMS from commissioning a brilliant poster by the Viennese artist Lili Réthi, titled Crewe Works: Building ‘Coronation’ Class Engines, which was issued in 1937 in the run-up to the launch of the Coronation Scot express from Euston to Glasgow. When ‘invited’ to produce art glorifying the Third Reich, Réthi chose to emigrate to London, and eventually to New York.

  Stanier, meanwhile, a big man with a Wiltshire accent which never left him, was as apolitical as most steam locomotive engineers. Coming from a Churchward background, however, he did believe in standardization, simplicity, and ease of maintenance. His biggest single problem on joining the LMS on 1 January 1932 lay with the infighting going on around him. Once in his stride, he shaped an impressive team of designers and production engineers, allowing him to produce, starting with the two-cylinder class 5 mixed-traffic 4-6-0s, a family of locomotives that would be among the very last steam locomotives in regular service with British Railways. Stanier’s class 5 4-6-0 of 1934, and its heavy goods sibling, the class 8F 2-8-0 of the following year, were manufactured by LMS and other works in vast numbers. A total of 842 ‘Black 5s’ was built between 1934 and 1951, along with 852 of the 2-8-0s between 1935 and 1946.

  The Black 5s were, without doubt, one of the best all-round steam locomotives to run in Britain. A development of the GWR Hall class two-cylinder 4-6-0s built between 1927 and 1950, the Stanier class 5 could run on most routes of the LMS and, from 1948, many lines of all British Railways regions. They were simple, free-steaming machines which were timed at up to 96 mph. They could exert peak outputs of up to 1,800 ihp and were equally at ease at the head of goods, parcels, stopping passenger, and express trains. True maids-of-all-work, they were known as ‘engineman’s friends’ and, especially when clean (a rare condition in late British Railways service), they were particularly handsome machines. They also set the tone for the look of all standard Stanier locomotives.

  Where did this enduring aesthetic come from? From the drawing board of Tom Coleman at Horwich works, who, in 1935, became Stanier’s chief draughtsman. All Stanier’s greatest engines were effectively designs by Coleman: the class 5 4-6-0s, the class 8F 2-8-0s, the rebuilt three-cylinder Royal Scot and Patriot 4-6-0s, and, most famously, the Princess Coronation Pacifics. Coleman himself was the most self-effacing of men. Born in Endon, Staffordshire, in 1885, he served an apprenticeship with locomotive builders Kerr, Stuart & Co. at Stoke-on-Trent at much the same time as Reginald Mitchell, who went on to become chief designer for Supermarine and gave us the Spitfire. Coleman himself moved on to the North Staffordshire Railway, also based in Stoke-on-Trent, in 1905, rising to the rank of chief draughtsman. The chief mechanical engineer there was George Hookham, whose daughter was Margot Fonteyn, the famous ballet dancer. Coleman was transferred to Horwich in 1926.

  Once he had discovered this quiet, unassuming giant of a man – Coleman had played centre forward for Port Vale FC in the 1908–9 season, scoring fifteen goals in twenty-two games – Stanier was dependent on him. Coleman, the very best of backroom boys, had no interest in self-promotion. He wrote few technical papers and left no memoirs. But no matter how bluff and crag-like he must have seemed, Coleman did have a sense of humour. When Stanier had his arm twisted by management at Euston into producing a series of streamlined Pacifics, he said: ‘Let them have their bloody streamliners if they want them, but we will build five proper ones as well.’ The nameplate on the non-streamlined Pacific that Coleman drew up for Stanier bears (or bares) the legend Lady Godiva. In retirement, Stanier told Coleman’s son-in-law, G. A. Lemon, that without Coleman he would not have succeeded on the LMS and might well have left. Coleman was an artist of sorts: he knew instinctively how to draw handsome and fully resolved locomotives which, visually, were just so and all of a piece. It is a real gift to be able to make a highly functional machine into a thing of true elegance and even beauty, and in Coleman’s case the gift was innate. Indeed, industrial stylists have never been able to better the design work of the finest locomotive engineers.

  Coleman’s genius, like that of Stanier, Gresley, and Churchward, was to gather a team of like-minded engineering disciples around him, not just from within his own department but from wherever he could find the talent he needed. Among his first-division players were two men brought in from outside the LMS – L. Barraclough from the North British Railway and G. R. Nicholson from the Yorkshire Engine Co. – along with D. Willcocks from Horwich, his own home base, and J. Francis from Crewe. E. S. Cox and E. A. Langridge were already at Derby when Coleman took over there in 1936 and they too became part of Coleman’s impressive design team for Stanier.

  In his first two or three years with the LMS, Stanier’s star was at mid-point. His three-cylinder Jubilee class express passenger 4-6-0s were unreliable steamers. His class 3P two-cylinder 2-6-2 tank engines were ineffectual. His first two Pacifics, 6200 Princess Royal and 6201 Princess Elizabeth, were neither as powerful nor as economical as their size and specification suggested. And even the first Black 5s were not as effective as they should have been. The problem was simple enough. Coming from Swindon, where only that amount of superheating that would dry steam was considered necessary, Stanier had continued with a superheating practice which he thought was readily transferable, until he realized that servicing conditions on the LMS were very different from those on the GWR. With a higher degree of superheating, and other modifications, the Jubilees and Princess Royals were transformed. Tests on low- and high-superheat Black 5s showed that the upgraded engines used 12 per cent less coal and 14 per cent less water for the same work.

  But while Stanier’s main concern was with building up a consistently modern fleet of locomotives – and carriages, too – the age of streamlining and high-speed railways soon caught up with him. A good friend of Gresley’s, he was well aware of developments on the LNER. He was never a convert to the streamlining of locomotives, believing that the savings in horsepower requirements that could be achieved as a result of the reduced air resistance, as demonstrated in wind tunnels, were relatively insignificant at speeds up to 100 mph, and, more importantly, that streamlining meant that machinery was hard or even impossible to access, which was something he normally opposed. The siren voices of speed and streamlining were, however, impossible to ignore.

  On Monday, 16 November 1936, when Stanier was in India as a member of Sir Allan Mount’s committee of inquiry into serious derailments of Pacific locomotives on the Indian railways, a high-speed run was made from London to Glasgow and back. The journey was planned in typically meticulous detail by one of Stanier’s up and coming team, R. A. ‘Robin’ Riddles, then principal assistant to the chief mechanical engineer. The schedule was six hours for the arduous 401.4 miles, including the challenging ascents of Shap, 915 feet above sea level, in Westmorland, with its 1-in-75 northbound gradient, and Beattock, 1,016 feet above sea level, in the southern Scottish lowlands.

  On Sunday, 15 November, 6201 Princess Elizabeth, fitted with an enlarged superheater, was at Willesden shed being prepared for the following day’s exertions. A fitter discovered a leak in one of the joints of the main internal steam-pipe. This would have seriously reduced the performance of the engine. Riddles called Roland Bond, another key member of the Stanier team, who was then assistant works superintendent at Crewe. Bond was entertaining guests for tea. Riddles explained that the spare part needed could only be had at Crewe – could he find it and send it by the 18.40 up express? Yes, of course, came the answer. The one problem was that, this being Sunday afternoon, the works (as opposed to the engine shed) was closed and in the dark. It was also a filthy day, gloomy and tipping down with rain. Bond got one of his guests, a local farmer, to drive him to the works, stopping only to pick up a retired storekeeper named Froggatt who knew the stores backwards. With the help of a box of matches, Froggatt laid his hand on the small part – one of countless thousands in row and after row of racks in the giant works stores. There followed a rush
to the station. Bond handed the vital component to the driver of the 18.40 with instructions to hand it to Riddles, who would be waiting at Euston.

  Riddles worked through the night fixing 6201. He then rode with the crew on the non-stop run to Glasgow the following morning. Quite what this must have been like is hard to imagine today. There was no corridor tender and so no relief, of any sort, for those on the footplate. Just flasks of cold tea – remarkably few enginemen owned expensive Thermos flasks in the 1930s – and some sandwiches washed down with soot and steam. With a train of seven coaches, including the LMS dynamometer car, weighing 225 tons, Princess Elizabeth completed the run, with driver Clarke at the controls, in 353 minutes and 42 seconds, at an average speed of 68.2 mph. Shap had been crested at 57 mph and Beattock at 56 mph. Given that express trains of the day could be down to below 30 mph on these gradients, this was exceptionally good going, although the test train was much lighter than a scheduled west coast express.

  Ernest Lemon, now a vice president of the LMS, took Riddles aside at Glasgow and suggested they run faster back to London the following day. Riddles, erring on the side of caution, suggested instead an increase in weight to eight coaches. His instinct seemed to be right when, during the celebratory dinner held in Glasgow on the Monday evening, he was slipped a note informing him that another important component – the left-hand outside crosshead slipper – had run hot and needed re-metalling. Leaving the dinner at 10 o’clock, Riddles took a taxi to the St Rollox works and worked on the locomotive for most of the night. He managed an hour’s sleep in the works before Princess Elizabeth steamed out from under the great glass roof of Glasgow Central. With Beattock cleared at 67 mph and Shap at 63 mph, and in squally, unpleasant weather, Princess Elizabeth span up to London, cruising wherever possible at 80–95 mph. She pulled into Euston – the terminus then still fronted by Philip Hardwick’s monumental Euston Arch, wilfully demolished by the arch-modernizers in 1961 – in 344 minutes and 20 seconds, at an average speed of 70.15 mph. Legally, this time would be impossible by car on the motorways of Britain in 2012 – imagine just how fast it was in 1936.