'The Toss of a Coin', Chapter 3 / 1

Management training – Western Region’s London Division

In September 1961 I was appointed as one of six Western Region Traffic Apprentices (known in later years as Management Trainees). I had an unfair advantage in the selection process. Normally around 20 young men (there was little encouragement for potential women managers in those days) would be selected throughout BR by examination and interview - but after negotiation with the clerical Trade Union, TSSA, it had been agreed that 50% should come from the ranks of railway staff and not be recruited directly from university. Because of my year’s service, I counted as a staff entrant and therefore the railways got the bonus of an additional graduate entrant! At that time, the scheme consisted of 3 years’ training, the first year being basic training in railway operating activities at ground level. Managers in those days had a belief that it would be useful for managers of the future to have an understanding of what their staff were meant to do (and did do!).

I commenced the Western Region Traffic Apprenticeship scheme after a final interview with Assistant General Manager, George Bowles, was sent to the Headquarters Staff Officer in charge of trainees to be allocated to a Division for year 1 training and to receive my initial programme. The London Division was my first year’s location, and the immediate programme was six weeks at Maidenhead passenger station, six weeks at Slough Goods, four weeks at South Lambeth, a larger Goods Depot, four weeks at a medium sized station, Oxford, four weeks at a large station, Reading and six weeks at a locomotive depot, Old Oak Common. After that I was to go to Margam Yard in South Wales as the London Division was not considered to have a large enough yard for training purposes - Acton apparently did not count.

As Reading seemed to be the focal point of the programme and daily commuting from Woking seemed impracticable (my own transport was still the 1936 built cycle), I took lodgings with an elderly widow in a terraced house five minutes’ walk from Reading station. So I was sent for my first six weeks’ basic training to Maidenhead station to learn the roles of booking clerk, parcels clerk, how to wield a shunting pole in the small goods yard and to watch activity in the signalbox. My first dose of real responsibility came during such a spell when the signalman, closeted in the loo, shouted instructions to me to clear signals for the Down Cornish Riviera (again - this train was becoming my nemesis). I accepted the train, pulled off the semaphores, watched the ‘Warship’ roar past with some trepidation and remembered to give train out of section and replace the pegs before my mentor emerged from his cubby hole.

My six week stint at Slough Goods started on 13th November and lasted until the Christmas holiday. I would spend a somewhat tedious day looking at freight charge calculations, cartage returns and wagon demurrage. I can remember little else which shows how ineffective that part of the training was. What I did learn was that a large part of my training might consist of what we nicknamed ‘sitting next to Nellie’ - ie obeying an instruction to go and sit next to a clerk and watch what he or she did. This was one rung higher than the other frequent training technique which management trainees were subjected to - reading files.

After a Christmas spent in North Germany (in temperatures of -20 degrees C) as best man to a college friend who was getting married to a girl who’d escaped from East Germany, I came back to a month’s training at South Lambeth Goods Depot where I learned a lot (mainly how not to conduct industrial relations) but commuted from my home at Woking as that was easier, spending such free time as I had on evening railway jaunts with my ‘priv’ tickets to Banbury, Peterborough, Swindon and Rugby. At that time South Lambeth was a hotbed of militant trade unionism and I witnessed an incident which thankfully I never saw again in my railway career. In the middle of the meeting during a particularly angry exchange, the Chief Clerk, a hefty man with a walking impediment requiring him to carry a stick, and the LDC Secretary got up and began a fight, the Chief Clerk wielding his walking stick to some effect. All this time the Goods Agent, theoretically in charge, just laid his head on the table and buried it in his arms and made no attempt to intervene. No-one walked out - I got the impression that this was not the first such occurrence. I spent another instructive few days with the only two clerks in the cartage section. Both men were far too intelligent for the job they had - one had been a Polish RAF pilot, the other the manager of a Steelworks in Dhurgapur in India. Both men finished their tasks by 11 am, and then spent their time regaling me with the sins of management and staff at the depot and running rings round everyone else fabricating elaborate and fictitious cartage returns and other paperwork, making the entire job farcical. Neither had any respect for the job but unfortunately due to racial prejudice prevalent at the time, neither could get jobs that were appropriate for their skills and experience.

I resumed my Reading lodgings on 26th February as a base from which to perform my training at Oxford - with unwary strangers I can impress by referring to my Oxford days! It was really a repeat of my Maidenhead days although on a slightly larger scale - I really don’t think I learned an awful lot more except by meeting different people and seeing their personalities in action. At the time my main interest was catching the 5.30pm Oxford back to my Reading digs each night via Paddington. This train was the ‘Oxford Flyer’ requiring ‘Cheltenham Flyer’ or ‘Bristolian’ style running from Didcot to Paddington if it was to keep time and I enjoyed practising my train timing skills and egging on the drivers to beat the previous efforts. One trip made the 63 miles in just over 53 minutes, a start to stop average of 71 mph with a Castle and six coaches and one Old Oak driver was rumoured to have done it in 51 minutes (74 mph) but unfortunately I was on the wrong shift that day. I worked out that I could get home to Reading nearly as quickly by catching this train and the 7.5pm Paddington - Cheltenham as if I’d waited for the 4.5pm Hereford, it was much more fun and no cost as I had a Divisional free pass throughout my London Division training! At both Oxford and Reading, where I moved next to observe a large passenger station operation, I had to mix day shifts with some evening and night shifts, mainly to observe the parcels working at both the platform and cartage bays - parcels and GPO traffic was still important in the early sixties.

In the spring of 1962 I was allocated to Old Oak Common for my depot and footplate training - the highlight of most Traffic Apprentices’ three year stint. The intention was to ensure management trainees had an understanding of operations from a driver’s perspective and the normal arrangement was the provision of a Divisional footplate pass for three weeks of the depot training. As I had been at Old Oak during my college years and Ray Sims, the Shedmaster, knew of my interest in locomotive matters, he handed me a Driver’s all stations route learning footplate pass (covering Paddington - Penzance, Fishguard, Chester and all stations between) on my first day, only to be returned on my last. My official pass had got ‘lost’ somewhere between the Superintendent’s Office in Paddington and Old Oak Common in the railway internal postal system!

I had been surprised to be sent to Old Oak for this part of my training for two reasons. Normally one avoided locations where one had previously worked and also Old Oak had been known to ask Head Office not to send trainees there as there was a certain amount of hostility towards future bosses in that somewhat militant location. Traffic Apprentices had to be sensitive to the feelings of many ordinary railwaymen and women who sometimes resented the ‘fast track’ promotion that would follow our training and not all Traffic Apprentices were the most tactful of individuals. In this case, apparently, because I had worked at Old Oak previously and had got on well with most staff (apart from the guy whose overtime I had usurped in 1958!), I was warmly accepted as ‘one of them’ and received full co-operation.

While my early training at Old Oak involved experience of rostering, trade union negotiations, maintenance planning, driver route learning and training practices etc., I sought opportunities to use my privileged footplate pass facility. On the first Saturday lunchtime (one worked to noon on Saturdays then) I made my way to Paddington and showed my pass to the crew of 7031 ‘Cromwell’s Castle’, newly transferred from Laira to Worcester and working the 1.15pm Paddington - Hereford. We had a very comfortable and punctual trip to Oxford where I alighted, the gleaming locomotive and Worcester crew well on top of the job. After a quick sandwich, a Worcester double chimney Castle, 7013 ‘Bristol Castle’ (which had exchanged number and name with the royal engine 4082 ‘Windsor Castle’ in 1952 as the latter was in no fit state to work King George VI’s funeral train) rolled into Oxford on time and I joined the crew. We had a very straightforward run, economical on coal and water, with sustained running in the mid 70s and an early arrival. 7013 was not quite as smooth running as 7031, but it was 26 years older!

During those first few weeks while my training was constrained to the depot environment, I increasingly utilised my pass for evening trips to Paddington, Swindon or Oxford. By mid May 1962, it was my turn for the three rostered weeks of formal footplate training in which I was required to sample both steam and diesel, freight and passenger, local and mainline work. One of my first days was to be spent on shunting and empty carriage working (the Old Oak - Paddington ‘in and outs’) with condenser pannier 9709.

Because of my supposed firing prowess (had my successful showing with ‘Castles’ on the road got onto the Old Oak grapevine?) I was entrusted with looking after the fire of 9709 while the fireman was despatched to the office to collect the wages of driver and fireman, taking the little brass discs that acted as proof of identity. We were marshalled ahead of a long train of parcels vehicles to form the 2.34pm Paddington - Plymouth Parcels from platform 1A, awaiting the road to leave Old Oak carriage sidings. The fireman had been gone for some time and the driver had engrossed me in a long discourse on a number of topics, including, I believe, the correct way to prune raspberries, when we got the road to leave. The fireman was still nowhere to be seen, so the driver said ‘you’ll do’ and went to open the regulator. I decided it was time to put coal on the fire and opened the firehole door and to my horror, found that the fire had gone out! To my surprise the driver was not unduly fazed and helped me find some timber and firelighters to relight the fire. Meanwhile we went, using what steam remained, at least as far as the bottom of the flyover at North Pole. 80lbs of steam frankly was not adequate to lift 14 large parcel vehicles up the gradient of the flyover, so we gesticulated to the driver of a ‘Castle’ waiting to follow us light engine and he gave us an almighty shove up to the top, whereafter I just raised enough steam to keep the brakes off until our arrival in platform 1A. I never heard anything more about it, and the driver did not even tell the fireman when he returned with their wages on our eventual arrival back at the depot.

I had worked pretty long hours to make full use of my pass while undergoing depot training, but once my scheduled footplate programme came round, I could not squeeze enough hours into the day to do all I wanted. No-one sought to challenge my 14-15 hour turns of duty and only once did I appear to suffer when I nearly fell asleep while trying to fire a ‘King’ (‘Richard III’ again) on the first Up Wolverhampton, after an all night shift on a Paddington – Oxley fast freight. In order to maximise my day, and avoid the anxious entreaties of my uncomprehending landlady, I lodged for three weeks with the jovial stationmaster of Twyford, Bob Poynter, a former Traffic Apprentice in his first substantive post which covered the Henley branch as well as the mainline. Many of the commuter trains were formed with former GWR rolling stock with the T-shaped door handles that had to be turned and Bob was much exercised by station overtime while doors were shut and handles operated - he learned from bitter experience that you don’t blow whistles to hurry commuters off the Henley branch! Most mornings I would travel up to Paddington in the cab of a ‘Castle’ or ‘Hall’ on a commuter service, and go back to Old Oak shed on the light engine.