The Other Railway Children - Chapter 6 (more extracts) "Fun and Fire"

An effective fundraising initiative around the same time was an approach I made to the Britt Allcroft company who had taken on the ‘Thomas the Tank Engine’ franchise from the Rev Awdry’s family. I was invited to a lunch at their Southampton headquarters with their Marketing Director who explained their reluctance to partner any charity specifically but liked the possible link with the Railway Children and promised to see what they could do. Over lunch we had chatted about some of my railway experiences when I was a ‘Fat Controller’ in my own right (as a stationmaster and later as Chief Operating Manager of the BR London Midland Region where I was also Officer in Charge of the Royal Train) and the following day I received a request to outline the plots of a few of my experiences which the Britt Allcroft scriptwriter could use in a new series of stories for the next video ‘Thomas and Friends’.

A couple of days after I’d submitted my morning’s scribbling on the typewriter, I received a call offering me a £10,000 donation for the charity and a two year contract to review the scripts of the videos to help them avoid complaints from adult ‘children’ who would write in to say that the stories had the signals back to front or the engines had the wrong number of wheels or rivets! I even got to attend a filming at the Shepperton studios of ‘Gordon’ ploughing through the station bufferstops and falling into the road outside – a scenario based on a famous poster of a French Crampton engine plunging through a station wall into the street with a appropriate epithet stemming from the lips of the unfortunate engine driver!

And I often wonder if the Queen ever sat down to watch a ’Thomas’ video with any of her grandchildren and if so, recognised that one story when the Fat Controller’s mother on a VIP special complained of her bath water hitting the ceiling, was actually based on a real incident on the Royal Train! When the video was in the shops I noticed that I was named as the Associate Railway Consultant and I’ve even signed autographs on the video cover for 2 year olds as a result.

A further visit to India in the company of Stan Judd, now the charity’s official Treasurer, took place the next year, April 1999, and with a rapid increase in income, compounded by the lottery grant, we looked hard at possible further partners there. The number of children around India’s railway stations was staggering and Edith Wilkins took us to visit a number of small NGOs working in the Calcutta slum suburbs. Edith herself had been moved on from CINI Asha by GOAL, the Irish NGO that had sent her to India in the first place, asking her to use her experience to develop a number of smaller NGOs working with street and working children.

As a result of her recommendations we started to partner a number of local NGOs working beside the lines out of both Sealdah and Howrah stations. OFFER was an NGO working at Dum Dum Junction north of Calcutta and we funded the purchase of a residence to act as an emergency shelter of children arriving at the station. Sabuj Sangha wanted to build a home for street girls in a suburb where there was a Hindu shrine which was the focus of red light activities putting the girls at great risk. Cosmos and VSS were two further NGOs that set up informal schools in the illegal settlements on railway land adjacent to the running railway lines.

One of these visits was to one of seven informal schools on the line from Sealdah to Budge Budge, run by Cosmos. The school was a bamboo structure beside the line opposite Lakeside station (a misnomer if it referred to the stinking stagnant pool that one could sense if not see from the station) in an area of Calcutta known as Tollygunge. It served a community of some 300 men, women and children, with somewhere between 75 and 100 children aged between 5 and 12 crammed into its tiny confines to be taught by one teacher. After the usual welcome (garlands, concert of party pieces) we looked at the children’s work and mingled, before being invited to join one of the parents for a cup of chai under the one long platform that serve the 12 coach electric trains. 106 homes were literally hollowed out under the platform, the only access being from the railway line which hosted a train approximately every ten minutes on this busy commuter line. I crawled in with some trepidation and found a spotless earth home and a brightly ‘sari-ed’ lady serving the brew from burnished implements.

Early the following morning I was awakened with the news from Edith that the whole slum had burned down during the night as a result of an upturned open stove. Stan and I quickly agreed that I should return to the site to give what help I could, while he would fulfil our commitment to meet the Railway Divisional Manager that morning. I hurried out to find a smouldering acre of land with no remaining building of any sort except for the bamboo school. Apparently the local population valued this so much that they’d given it priority for saving over their own homes. Many people from the community had been badly burned and one child – one who had been in the welcoming party the day before – had died. No fire engines or ambulances had attended the slum and we found a pitiful group of people standing helplessly around surveying the wreckage.

Edith took charge. Two of her own charity’s trustees were present, one of whom, like her, was a nurse. A local doctor who attended the community occasionally to offer free treatment to the children came. We all pooled whatever cash we had immediately available and the doctor and I walked a mile to the nearest chemist and bought up his stocks of medical supplies that we thought would be most useful, while Edith and her trustees gathered the injured into some sort of priority queue. It was over an hour before we returned and found the long silent queue with only the sound of an occasional whimper from one of the injured children. We cleaned up an area on the floor of the school as best we could and set up an emergency treatment centre, the doctor diagnosing the treatment required while Edith and her colleague applied burns ointment, cleansed and bandaged, and I acted as medical orderly, cutting bandages, finding the right painkilling pills, bottles of disinfectant etc., trying to interpret correctly the cacophony of Hindi, Bengali, Irish and English voices.

After over five hours in the debilitating heat and we’d just reached the last patient in the diminishing queue, a politician turned up with a TV camera crew and tried to take credit for what Edith and her helpers had achieved. He received short shrift from the adults present who forced him off their land and two of the children took Edith gently by the arms and guided her between the burnt out tarpaulins to the safety of the main road, while we all followed her, embarrassed at the profuse expressions of thanks that were coming from many members of that impoverished community.

When we were back at Edith’s office, we began to think of the next things the community would need and made contact with our organisations and donors back in the UK to seek funds for bamboo poles and tarpaulins to give shelter to the community. The problem was the temporary nature of these slums and the ever present threat of eviction by the city or railway authorities. In fact, several years later this slum was demolished by bulldozers sent in by the authorities and the people were scattered, most without compensating alternative housing. Apart from the distress caused to each of the families, it disrupted the education of the children in the informal schools and wasted some of the investment made.

This was not the only reason why Railway Children began to question the effectiveness of such informal slum schools. We found a reluctance of many parents to allow their children to attend such schools as they needed their children to earn money to augment family income – sometimes the children were the only breadwinners! Frankly, these communities needed government or large agency investment in adequate housing, sanitation, health care and income generation as well as education and Railway Children did not have the resources needed for such a holistic approach.

I had also assumed that the children in these slums were genuine ‘railway children’ at risk of drifting from their communities beside the track to the main city stations. However, I began to discover that this was not often the case. Certainly some of the older children would travel into the city centres to earn money, but most would return at night to their families. The children with little or no family contact tended to be from distant rural villages and over the next few years Railway Children gradually withdrew from such projects, leaving them to be partnered by agencies such as UNICEF and Save the Children, while we concentrated on the newly arrived lone children who had abandoned their families or had been abandoned by them.