The Boy Who Was Afraid of Butterflies - Final Chapter and Postscript

Chapter 26 The Railwayman

I’d always assumed you’d need an engineering degree to become a manager on the railways. However, in 1956 my attention was drawn to a ‘short work experience course’ run by British Rail for Sixth Formers interested in a railway career. It was a splendid opportunity for me to indulge my passion for trains in any case – a week at railway expense at a hotel in Bath with conducted tours daily to railway institutions in Bristol, South Wales and Swindon and my eyes were opened to the possibility of careers in Operations and Marketing. A contact I’d made there maintained my interest, facilitated my employment during college vacations at Old Oak and helped me decide to turn my hobby into my career.

After graduation I’d expected to be required to undergo National Service training which had been deferred whilst I’d been at college. However, a month before I was due to register, I received a letter from the Ministry of Defence announcing the end of this two year obligation for all. I stuck the letter on my bedroom wall and applied to the railway at Paddington for a job. I’d just missed ‘the milk round’ – the selection of graduates for management training – so I was recruited as a clerk, with the intention of applying for a place on the ‘Traffic Apprenticeship’ scheme as a staff entrant a year later.

I duly went through an examination and interview process in 1961 and was appointed as one of six management (as opposed to engineering graduate) trainees in the Autumn and commenced three years’ comprehensive training, starting in the Reading Division of BR (Western Region). The first year was spent learning the rudiments of the business at the grass-roots – station booking and parcels office work, shunting, signaling, freight depot operation and the management of train crews and resources at a large engine shed. A year in South Wales followed at the next management levels at District level in Swansea and the Cardiff Divisional offices.

The final year of training was spent on project work and in relief or temporary posts where I could be given some responsibility to test me. This period was undertaken mainly in the Plymouth Division as Assistant Station Manager at Plymouth North Road, Assistant Goods Agent at Exeter and finally, Stationmaster at Gillingham in Dorset together with the adjacent country stations of Semley, Tisbury and Dinton. It was a glorious spring and I visited my stations and signalboxes daily as I was required to, utilising the sparse local passenger service from Exeter or Salisbury or hiking alongside the track admiring the outsize primroses growing on the cuttings and embankments.

This stretch of line had been transferred from the jurisdiction of the Southern Region to the Western only three months earlier and it soon became apparent that this part of the Region had been low on the priorities of the management at Waterloo, their attention being on the vast suburban empires out of Waterloo, Charing Cross and Victoria. Typical of my duties was the supervision of the evening school train from Gillingham to Salisbury, probably the slowest scheduled train on BR at the time, its timetable allowing 79 minutes for the 15 miles at an average of around 11 mph.

The train was formed of four coaches, into which we shepherded pupils from the local mixed Grammar school – boys in the front two coaches and girls in the rear two, locking the connecting corridor between them. We were spoilsports – at the instigation of the Headteacher, I gather. The steam locomotive then set off on its unhurried way, stopping at each station for ten minutes or more while we hurled punnets of locally grown watercress into the brakevan. In addition, we gravitated a loaded milk tank from the United Dairies siding at Semley onto the rear of the train to connect at Salisbury with the milk train from North Devon. Heaven knows what the Health & Safety Executive would make of that movement these days, although no-one ever remembered any undue incident.

At the end of my training and before appointment to my first permanent post, I was required to attend for a completion interview with the then Western Region General Manager - Gerald Twistleton-Wykeham Fiennes, a remarkable individual much respected, despite (or because of) his illustrious name. A colleague and I were summoned to Paddington on a sunny June day in 1964 - my interview was at 12noon with my colleague to follow at 12.30pm. On being ushered in, the first words spoken were:
“Do you like cricket?”
After my somewhat surprised answer in the affirmative, Gerry Fiennes said, “Oh good!” and opened a drawer in his desk, drew out a transistor radio and switched it on. It was just before lunch at the Lords Test Match. We listened to the commentary for about twenty minutes, then he thought he’d better ask me a couple of incisive questions about my training and future career, after which we were interrupted by the entry of a formidable looking woman in her sixties who was introduced to me as his sister-in-law. They discussed her shopping expedition at Harrods for a few minutes, then she departed, whereupon Gerry Fiennes admitted that women like that, with non executive directorships left, right and centre, school governorships and half a dozen charity trusteeships petrified him.

I didn’t believe him for a minute, but I had to remain alert for another couple of show-stopping questions, before he announced it was time to check the progress of the Test Match before the lunch break. We listened until the umpires removed the bails and then I was ushered on my way with appropriate congratulations on a job whose identity was still a mystery to me. Only then did Gerry Fiennes realise that he had another trainee to interview before partaking of his own lunch break!

Having managed to avoid blotting my copybook at either Gillingham or in the subsequent interview, I was despatched to Cardiff along with my fellow trainee and later best friend, Stan Judd, to be interviewed by Bob Hilton, the Divisional Manager and be told of our first permanent appointments. Bob Hilton advised us that he had two stationmasters' jobs for us in the Western Valley above Newport and tossed a half-crown inviting Stan to call. He called ‘heads’ correctly and was offered a choice of Ebbw Vale or Aberbeeg. He chose Ebbw Vale because he’d heard of it! That toss shaped our entire railway careers because his was basically a marketing job with close involvement with the Steel Company of Wales, whilst I got operating responsibility for station staff, train guards, shunters and signalmen serving the collieries in the area.

My childhood and youth was now complete. Formal learning was now over, it was now learning on the job. It is probably true to say that I learnt more about human nature in those first few months at Aberbeeg than in most of the rest of my railway career or earlier. But that is another story which I’ve described in another book about my railway interests and career.

Just one last memory – a year ago I noticed in the railway press that Gillingham was celebrating 150 years since the first sod was dug to build the railway to Yeovil. A celebration was planned in the town and I got in touch and found myself invited to join other retired railwaymen on a march through the town behind the local band. As the senior railwayman present I got to unveil the plaque on the station building jointly with the mayor. My most pleasurable memory, however, was being introduced to a 49 year old woman and her husband. After much local detective work, it had been established that this lady was the four year old granddaughter of my landlord during my stay there, and apparently she, although a very shy child, had taken a shine to me and had me playing hide and seek and reading bedtime stories.

Postscript: I think I’m normal

Despite this autobiography and all its weird fears and obsessions, I think I’m fairly normal. I left Charterhouse at 18, graduated from University College London with a second class Honours BA in German language and literature. Well, perhaps just a little eccentric as I specialised in ‘Stylistic Analysis of Twelfth Century German Poetry’ which - of course - fitted me admirably for 36 years in railway management, culminating in a final few years as British Rail’s Head of Safety Policy.

In 1969 I married Pat and we had three ‘normal’ children, none of whom, as far as I’m aware, are afraid of butterflies although I have heard piercing screams when an extra large spider has been discovered unexpectedly in the bath. But people accept that girls are frightened of spiders. Apparently that is normal. And now I have grandchildren - Emma and Sophie, four and two respectively, living in far off Kenya where their father is Head of an international school and my daughter after working with street children in Nairobi’s slum, Kibera, is now a full time mother. The younger girl, Sophie, is scared of ants - or ‘dudus’, the Swahili word for insects - but she has good reason. She was bitten once by one of the nastier species found in Kenya.

My work has led me overseas as well. Returning from railway safety consultancy work in Australia in 1989, I had a traumatic encounter with a young desperate begging street girl on a Bombay railway station that was catalyst for my subsequent interest in Amnesty International and the Consortium for Street Children, culminating in the founding of the Railway Children charity in 1995. My railway career and a history of the charity are both the subjects of other part autobiographical books.

But, despite the so-called normality, I’m still a little wary. I still avoid buddleia bushes if I can - one grew wild in my garden and I had it rooted out. Some twenty years ago I opened a door to a railway office just as someone inside opened a cupboard and a Tortoiseshell butterfly flew right into my face. I turned instinctively and fled, crashing into the half open door, and causing a gash in my forehead. I suffered the embarrassment of the entry in the office ‘injury book’ stating the cause of the accident as ‘lepidopteraphobia’. Hopefully to most readers, this will be assumed to be some rare tropical disease!

And once, walking through the streets of London, I thought I’d seen a ghost - I could have sworn it was Topsy. Then she turned and the likeness faded. But Topsy is a grandmother now, so I believe. My sister, Jill, said she married a doctor and lives somewhere down on the South Coast. Have I asked for contact details? No, as I said, I’m a little wary. I’m still frightened of butterflies if they catch me by surprise.