'The Toss of a Coin', Chapter 6 / 1

Stationmaster, Aberbeeg

After completing the BR management training scheme in April 1964, my colleague, Stan Judd, and I appeared before the Cardiff Divisional Manager, Bob Hilton, who informed us that he intended to appoint us to two stations in the Western Valley pending the replacement of the Yard Managers, Shedmasters and Stationmasters by a Western Valley Area Manager some ten months hence. The two vacancies, for some months covered by Relief Stationmasters, were at Ebbw Vale and Aberbeeg. Bob Hilton drew a half crown from his pocket, tossed it, Stan called correctly and chose Ebbw Vale because he’d heard of it. I became Stationmaster Aberbeeg, the Operating job, by default. This choice coloured the rest of my BR career, leading ultimately to four years as Chief Operating Manager of the London Midland Region in the mid 80s and my last years before retirement as Head of Safety Policy for BR and Railtrack.

We were sent, the two of us, to have a look round Aberbeeg and Ebbw Vale and search for lodgings. We found a public house right opposite Aberbeeg station, the Hanbury Arms, abutting the Webb Brewery in the V junction of the valley overlooking the small yard, junction signalbox and station and enquired within, thinking that we could stay temporarily and we might get some advice about something more permanent later. Of course, we stuck out like a sore thumb – two strangers, not one. ‘Londoners from their accents. They said they work on the railways. They asked for lodgings so they’re staying in the valley. Ask Islwyn, he’ll know.’

Islwyn, the 60 year old relief stationmaster, who’d been covering the vacancy at Aberbeeg for eighteen months or so, didn’t know. The office hadn’t told him, so our arrival was a shock, an incomprehensible shock. He thought he’d be there until he retired. He didn’t believe us. Stan went to Ebbw Vale to break the news there before the valley drums beat out the message but in vain. The relief stationmaster there found it incredible too. They reacted in disbelief. The two clerks at Aberbeeg station swore that no-one had advised them and opined that it must be a mistake, we’d come to the wrong place. I sat and listened, while they rang the Personnel Office in Cardiff and asked where these two young men should be. ‘It’s madness!’ they said. ‘What can you know about running a station in a place like this. You’re just a boy.’ They went on and on about the stupidity of the office and told me how difficult the job was, how could I be expected to cope. ‘Oh, it’s not your fault, how were you to know the set-up here.’

Stan came back and we decided to go back to Cardiff and get our things from our lodgings there and we called in the Personnel Office to explain our predicament. The Chief Clerk was horrified. ‘You went and introduced yourselves? We told you just to go and familiarise yourselves with the area. We hadn’t advised the staff there yet.’ What had they expected us to do? Surely they should have guessed that two young men ‘familiarising‘ themselves with the railway infrastructure there would raise questions? We’d not been told to lie low or keep our presence and purpose a secret. We both assumed that local staff would have at least been made aware that new stationmasters were arriving even if they only knew which of us was to go to which station that morning.

The damage was done now and there was no further reason to stay away so we returned with our belongings the following morning and took the only unoccupied room which was in the front of the hotel overlooking the railway, having ascertained that there was little likelihood of other accommodation in the village. Although the stationmasters and clerical staff now accepted that we were there to stay, it did not stop them passing comments about our unsuitability and the grave injustice to the present incumbents until their depression spread to us and made us feel guilty. Then the next day, the relief man at Ebbw Vale whom Stan was replacing, had a heart attack and died. They didn’t say we killed him, of course, but the implicit accusation hung in the air: ‘It was the shock to the poor man, how could the Cardiff Office be so insensitive.’ They never blamed us directly; it was always ‘they’ and ‘them’. At the end of the week they had worn me down and I called into the Divisional Office and asked to see the Personnel Manager. I told him I could not take the job, the morale at the station was rock bottom because of my arrival and I didn’t want to be part of it. I wanted to see Bob Hilton to explain. The guy took me aside and told me not to be so foolish. ‘Go home for the weekend. Relax, travel back on Monday, don’t rush back. You’ll see it in a different light then.’

Thankfully I took his advice and rescued my career. Had I gone through with my intentions and confessed my reluctance to Bob Hilton, that would have been the end. I would never have worked in South Wales again and I’d have started my career with a huge ‘black mark’ that I’d have found very difficult to shake off. On Monday, after a rested weekend away from this stress, I returned to Aberbeeg and it did look different. I met some of the other staff in the yard and signalbox. They didn’t immediately dismiss my appointment as crazy or catastrophic. In fact one of the signalmen confided to me in a whisper – when Islwyn was out of earshot – that I was most welcome and that perhaps I’d stir things up a bit, because it was needed. Islwyn, after his initial apparent distress and patronising comments, decided that he had better help me and changed from one extreme to the other, so that whatever I tried to do, he was always at my elbow explaining to me, as if I were a child, how it should be done. He promised he’d remain to help me as long as I wished, but during the second week the staff office rang and asked me how much longer I needed his assistance and with my huge sigh of relief, he was reassigned to another post the following week. Islwyn lived in the neighbourhood – which was why he’d been so put out by my appointment – but once he’d accepted me, we became friends, although he took early retirement shortly afterwards.

Stan and I shared a huge room at the hotel. I asked Stan if he wanted to find somewhere in Ebbw Vale, but I think at that stage we both needed the companionship and support of the other, so we stayed put. In fact, there was so little to do of an evening – one of us was always ‘on call’ anyway, so we couldn’t go far in the days of no mobiles or bleepers – that we spent hours after the evening meal in the hotel playing canasta or discussing the experiences of the day. We each had a half day off during the week, and covered one another for ‘on call’ purposes, so the one who was free would climb the local mountains and look over towards Abergavenny and the Sugar Loaf or down the valley to Crumlin Viaduct or Newport. Later, as it was already the beginning of summer, we found a local tennis court and joined the cricket club at Llanhilleth whose ground ran alongside the railway line, within loud hailing distance of Llanhilleth Middle signalbox. Sometimes we would walk the line together. I would take the ‘Jones’ bus to Ebbw Vale and we would walk the five miles back to Aberbeeg along the sleepers, calling off at various locations where Stan had staff at the steel company’s sidings and colliery outlets. We were both good walkers but Stan outshone me and would often arrive back in Aberbeeg a hundred yards or so ahead of me as his rhythm seemed to match the distance between the wooden sleepers better than mine!

We got gradually used to the eccentric routine of the hotel. It was a barn of a place, the bar spit and sawdust and much to be avoided. There was only one other permanent occupant of the hotel, an elderly and clearly sick gentleman with whom it was difficult to converse. The hotel was owned by an 80 year old but the power was his 50 year old wife who ran the hotel with her rod of iron, countered only by one other soul, a woman on whom she depended, but the two of them always seemed to be in perpetual strife and each breakfast or dinner we would become the confidants of one or other woman regaling us in a fierce whisper about the iniquities of the other. Each night we entertained ourselves until late, listening to the night noises emanating from the railway opposite. Any attempt at sleep was abandoned until after midnight when the last raft of coal empties for the early morning trip to Marine Colliery was safely berthed in two portions in the little yard, until the clanging of buffers ceased and we were convinced they were not ‘off the road’ again!

The passenger service had been withdrawn a year or so previously and the track layout around Aberbeeg rationalised and the stations left to rot. My office was in the middle of the V shaped station between the branches to Ebbw Vale to the West and Abertillery and Brynmawr to the East. The office was dingy, lit by gas mantles, with two buckets strategically placed on the floor to catch the drips from the incessant rain through the leaky roof. The telephone was archaic, hung on the wall (until one evening a spectacular lightning strike surged through the power lines and it exploded into myriad fragments). Filing appeared to be by carbon copied memos speared onto a forbidding looking spike on the desk.

My pessimistic encounter with the office environment and systems was countered by the way I was welcomed by the 70 operating staff outside. Charlie Sargeant, Secretary of our LDC was a signalman in the Junction (Middle) Box, Jack Shepherd his burly mate and Relief Signalman Terry Parsons, the Trade Union organiser, were superb and shared their problems and ideas in a constructive and enthusiastic way. I was encouraged to instigate a number of changes to improve the working and their lot, a win/win situation, which bolstered my credibility with both the staff and the Divisional Office and I started to spend long periods tramping around my territory, getting lifts from our local pannier tanks and occasional new 1750 hp English Electric diesels (later class 37) which were infiltrating from their Newport Ebbw Junction home.

A number of factors helped me to get accepted, little things, but they impressed the locals and I was grateful for any help that chance gave me. All the local trips to collieries berthing empty wagons and clearing the loaded coal had ‘target numbers’ by which the trains were known by signalling, train crews and shunting staff. It was a silly thing, but about a week before we had arrived the Train Planning Office, for some reason best known to themselves, had changed all the target numbers from K + numeral to J, with the numbers changing without any link to the old number to make it easier for the staff to remember. I, of course, coming afresh, only learned the new target codes and thus was able to refer correctly to our trains before any of my staff had mastered them. This soon got me an undeserved reputation of understanding the workings better than they did.

A second and more significant event, which I in all ignorance drew great kudos from, occurred quite early. A few weeks before our arrival there had been some rationalisation of the layout at Aberbeeg Junction and the four tracks from Llanhilleth to the Junction Box had been reduced to two, even past the outlet from the small engine shed. This meant that no train could take the line to Ebbw Vale, the more heavily used line, until a train on the Abertillery and Brynmawr side had cleared well beyond Six Bells Colliery. We observed very quickly the trains now waiting at Aberbeeg Junction to get line clear and Jack Shepherd mentioned to me that if he had authority to change the clearing point on that side to a spot a couple of hundred yards or so clear of the junction, much delay to trains bound for Marine Colliery at Cwm, Waunllwyd Sidings and Ebbw Vale steel works would be avoided. I talked to him for a few minutes about the safety implications on which this very experienced signalman reassured me, went back to my office, handwrote (we had no type-writer) a ‘special instruction’ authorising a revised clearing point and took it to the signalbox and pinned it to the notice board there. Jack looked at me with eyebrows raised and said, ‘You mean that, boss?’ and I replied, ‘Well, you assured me it was safe. It is, isn’t it?’ ‘Well, yes, of course…’ he said, so I left it there and word ran round the depot like wildfire that they had a boss not afraid to take decisions.

A few weeks later I got the only visit from any officer from the Divisional Office in my ten months there – Jack Brennan came. I received a call from Charlie Sargeant saying he’d had a visitor, hadn’t a clue who he was, he looked like a farmer. He’d stared at the track diagram displayed in the box, read the notices, signed the Train Register with an indecipherable scrawl and was now coming my way. It was a dreadful evening, the clouds were low and the rain was pouring. Jack Brennan pushed the door of my office open, tripped over one bucket and dropped his matches with which he’d been lighting a cigarette into the other bucket that was catching the steady drips from the ceiling, swore, and settled himself opposite me to say he’d come to see how I was getting on. He never let on that he’d seen my special instruction – I can’t believe that he didn’t notice it. It was only in later years that I realised the authorisation of special instructions was the prerogative alone of the Regional Operating Manager – a task I had in later years when a sheaf of such instructions would be placed before me for signature by the Rules & Regulations Officer in Rail House at Crewe.