'The Toss of a Coin', Chapter 1 / 2

Chapter 1 / 2
Why did I become a railwayman?

As a 14 year old, I had inherited the Chair of the Charterhouse Railway Society, after a period of disinterest from older pupils. I had the help of a few 13 year olds - Martin Probyn as Secretary, Jim Evans, later like myself a BR senior officer also, as Treasurer and the new boys, Philip Balkwill (who later became a master at the school and died of cancer tragically young a few years ago) and his friend, Conrad Natzio.

We were highly energetic, boosted the membership to over 300 (!) by putting on regular film shows using the marvellous British Transport films you can now see at the National Rail Museum (remember ‘Train Time’ and that obese Western Region Operating Manager ensconced behind a desk festooned with the largest number of telephones I have ever seen?). We charged 3d a show or gave free admission to the four shows a year if you joined the Railway Club (annual subscription 6d) and as entertainment in those pre TV days was at a premium, we had a lot of takers. I vaguely remember that ‘London to Brighton in 4 Minutes’ had a regular showing by popular demand and a brief sighting of a train on an adjoining track and the possibility of a race (which failed miserably to materialise) was enough to get hordes of schoolboys jumping up and down in their seats yelling on the driver! We also achieved a great coup in our early years by getting our little exhibition on ‘Societies Day’ opened by the Chairman of the British Transport Commission, Sir Brian Robertson. He happened to be an Old Carthusian and a colleague of Jim Evans’ parents’ friend, Sir John Elliot, then at London Transport.

By 1955 I’d become a bit more ambitious with my primitive Kodak camera and started cycling to various locations nearby. In 1956 we had fixed a visit to Rugby Locomotive Testing Plant for our Society’s Day outing, caught the ‘Royal Scot’ from Euston and were abandoned by our chaperone, our school geography master, at Rugby station where he announced he was off to see his aunt who lived in the town. The group of motley schoolboys duly went round the shed and then were met by an angry boss of the Testing Plant we were to visit later, who’d been watching us wandering unsupervised all over the shed and wanted to know who was in charge. When I admitted to this, we got a safety lecture and the master who was supposedly in charge of us must have got a rocket, as he was replaced thereafter by the musical William Llewellyn (founder and conductor of the ‘Linden Singers’), a true enthusiast who really took an interest and inspired us.

Another fond memory of Railway Society activities related to the model railway layout of a retired surgeon named Romanis, another ‘Old Carthusian’ who lived just half a mile from the school in Hurtmore. In the summer term, half a dozen of us would be invited every Sunday afternoon to operate his magnificent gauge 1 layout - a system with 25 locos modelled on the late pre-grouping period, with three signalling block posts and a 60 or 90 minute timetable we had to operate with precise punctuality. At the end of the session, if we had operated the layout to his satisfaction, we would round off the visit with a glass of cider in his beautiful mansion.

However, I’d always assumed you had to be an engineer to progress in railway management and as my skills were more in the humanities, my greatest potential relevant exposure was a four week Easter holiday course at the Sorbonne in Paris where I and a like-minded colleague learned most of our French on the Gare du Nord and the Gare de l’Est. I drifted into the Modern Languages Sixth Form because at that stage of my life I was best at German, mainly because of the influence of an excellent German teacher – Dr Gerstenberg, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany where he’d been a distinguished headmaster. A career as a school teacher myself was looking increasingly likely as I could think of nothing else and I began to sit for the various Oxford college scholarship examinations anticipating that my hobby would remain just that. I spent hours watching the trains on freezing Oxford station instead of revising for the imminent exams and interviews.

I left school in December 1956 and spent a few months in a holiday job at Old Oak Common locomotive depot in North West London, whilst awaiting the university term to start at the end of September 1957. I’d not succeeded in my efforts to become an Oxford scholar - the competition was very tough, and whilst I’d chosen to pursue Modern Languages as these were my best school subjects, I was stronger on the literature aspects than the basic language. I eventually obtained a place at University College London in the small German Language Department, and quickly established that I’d need to live at home as hostel places at UCL were limited to 171 beds for over 3,000 students and most were having to find lodgings in bedsits all over the capital, many with daily travelling longer than I had from my parents’ home in Woking. In fact I welcomed this for two reasons - I’d been at boarding school for over five years and it was good to re-establish close relationships with my own family again. Secondly, I was obliged to purchase an annual season ticket, funded by Surrey County Council in lieu of a grant for London accommodation, which my memory suggests was just £33. This meant that I could both study and enjoy my hobby as I chose to travel by steam train to and from London each day, one of the few occasions when I have excelled at multi-tasking!

One might question my choice of faculty as languages and European literature do not seem an obvious route for a railway management career which was already featuring in my mind, following some further research on opportunities on the railway which had established that there were possibilities for arts graduates. In my second year I had to select a specialist subject for research and deeper study, occupying some expected 4-6 hours per week for the final two years, and one might well doubt my sanity when I finished up as one of only two students in the whole of London University selecting ‘stylistic analysis of mediaeval German epic poetry’. In fact the choice happened - like so much in my life - by apparent chance. I had started on nineteenth century German drama - not that much more relevant I suppose - but the course was crowded and the professor less than charismatic. A friend pleaded with me to join him as he, the lone student selecting such an esoteric course, found himself facing a professor and a senior tutor for a couple of long afternoons every week, which he found too much of a strain, even though it was held in the professor’s flat and accompanied by the occasional glass of wine or sherry! So I made the switch and for about three weeks floundered in near panic as I found the subject initially incomprehensible, even though we started learning the techniques with more modern literature. Suddenly something clicked, I received back an analysis of a Goethe poem with a row of double-ticks in the margin (the professor’s highest accolade) and the fog in my brain seemed to lift.

At that time managers undertaking the railway industry ‘milk-round’ of universities seemed to be looking for evidence of the ability to assimilate learning quickly, apply logic and exhibit some creativity. They did not appear to give much weight to the relevance of the course to the knowledge required in the industry. That could be learned during three years’ training. Of course, the types of people required by the UK railway industry in 1960 were very varied - for as well as engineers BR was looking for managers in train operations, marketing and selling, publicity, communications, architecture, finance, law, hotels, shipping… Anyway, I discovered with hindsight that my course was not quite as irrelevant as I thought. It taught me to see patterns in thought, to read quickly and identify the important bits, to apply logic and find evidence. All fairly useful skills in BR’s bureaucracy.

And we had a lot of fun in the process. Most of the mediaeval texts were from the Arthurian romances, but the French epics of Chrétien de Troyes, translated and further developed by several German poets such as Hartmann von Aue, Wolfram von Eschenbach and Walther von der Vogelweide, were bawdy and irreverent and were themed round something that was highly relevant to BR in the 1960s - the role of the outsider in bringing about change to a closed society. All the Arthurian heroes were outsiders or challenged the system. Sir Launcelot of course conspired with the King’s wife, Guinevere. Sir Erec (in mediaeval English and Norman French, Harry son of King Lake - Harry le fils Lac) married and took his young bride to bed for six months until tongues wagged, then strode off into the dangerous forest in a blind rage using his wife to direct and tend him until he was severely wounded; was nursed back to health by his long-suffering wife, when his eyes were ‘opened’, a significant symbol. Or the story I love of brave Sir Ivan (Uweine) whose pet lion used to join in jousts if they went on too long and all the knights would cry ‘foul’ as it broke all the courtly rules. But when they made a sortie to rescue a damsel in distress at some giant’s castle outside the court, all said to Ivan, ‘You will bring your lion with you, won’t you!’ Of course, Arthur’s famous table was round, symbol of the church or school or whatever closed society took your fancy (BR?) and yet all the adventures took place outside it, never in Arthur’s castle itself. I hear you identifying the errant BR knights now…

In the meantime, however, exposure to a British Rail ‘Short Works’ course, as recounted in the next chapter, had opened my eyes to other opportunities. And so it seemed possible that I could turn my hobby into a career and get paid for what I liked doing. Now I look back on a 36 year career for British Rail, a further period of consultancy work on railway safety that took me all over the globe, fifteen years of leading the industry’s niche charity, ‘Railway Children’ and an assessed two million miles of travelling by train. And I reflect just how lucky I have been to have had the opportunity to do something fulfilling in an industry, which has fascinated me from my pushchair outings to the latest opportunities coming my way to ride the GW 175 anniversary vintage trains conducting raffles for the street children supported by the Railway Children charity.