THIS PAGE IS STRICTLY FOR THE OVER SIXTIES...

                                A DECADE OF 'MAKE DO AND MEND'                   

 

I was born in the late Forties - a post-war 'baby-boomer', no less, so I wasn't around to witness the Second World War, or listen to Winston Churchill’s rousing oratories on steam radio. His 'Never in the field of conflict was so much owed by so many to so few' makes my pulse race in much the same way as the sight of a streamlined Gresley A4 'streak' thundering along the flat racing ground north of York, or a Collet 'King' doing battle on the South Devon banks, a Stanier 'Duchess' storming Shap, or a gleaming 'Spam Can' dashing through the Kent countryside with a Continental boat train.

I remember taking a trip to the 'Flicks' and watching the British Movietime News. It was usually narrated by a grandiloquent-spoken gentleman - all frightfully, frightfully - which imbued me with the belief that I was somehow inferior because of the way we spoke 'up north'. The plain-spoken folk I grew up with punctuated their sentences with 'Eeeeh, bah gum' or 'Ecky thump, like!’ -  I never heard anyone embellishing their voices with any snooty flourishes like those plummy-voiced oiks did down south. Still the old newsreel footage gave me a chance of seeing something of the LNER's Apple Green livery, the LMS's Maroon and the Southern Railway's Malachite Green, albeit in black and white, so it’s refreshing to see engines on preserved lines decked out in original liveries.

(Above) There must have been lots of ruddy cheeks as NER Class J72 0-6-0T No 69027 makes a spirited climb to Oxenhope in snowy weather on the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway. (Below) Sixty Adams Class 02 0-4-4Ts were widely used all over the London & South Western Railway on shunting duties and on branch lines. The SR shipped twenty three examples from the mainland to the Isle of Wight, numbered W14-W36 in the fleet, and given names associated with the island, included the sole

 
surviving Class 02 No 24 Calbourne, which is still operating on today's Isle of Wight Steam Railway.

It's a crying shame that my generation missed the 'Big Four' railway companies which were amalgamated to form the new British Railways. Quite simply, we were born too late, or perhaps we should think ourselves lucky to have been born at all, depending on one's point of view of the outcome of the war? The baby boom was due, in large measure, to the need for financial stringencies and an abstinence from family planning, but as soon as the war with Germany was over, the nation's bedsprings were soon twanging away to a celebratory orgy of passion as the menfolk returned from service overseas. This bulldog spirit continued well into the late Fifties, but the erstwhile class system had changed little from the old colonial days of the British Empire. The stuck-up socialites still subscribed to their assumption about the right order of things which meant that a person was ranked by their role in the workplace and expected to snap to attention and address everyone else as their betters. Still no matter where they came in the social pecking order, the working class was proud to be British and proud to be themselves.

 
1955 was a landmark year for steam fans...construction of the new BR Standard Class 9F was well advanced - by the end of the year 38 had entered traffic, followed in 1956 by 45, 56 in 1957, 62 in 1958, 15 in 1959, and the final 3 in 1960. The 9F was by far the most numerous of the Standard classes, with 85 going to the ER, ten to the NER, 56 to the WR and 100 to the MR - total built 251. Two hundred and fifty one? It does beg the question why such large numbers were built when their usefulness was limited to so few years? But the BTC’s decision to develop existing steam power had been made as long ago as 1948; a decision greatly influenced by the parlous state of Britain’s economy and the low capital cost it would take to build a series of new steam locomotives, in preference to the huge expenditure required to get large-scale dieselisation off the ground. Within eight years, however, the plan was radically changed. No sooner had the first batch of 32 BR Class 9Fs been completed at Crewe Works in December 1954, and the BTC announced
 
the Modernisation Plan, the emphasis of which was the total replacement of BR steam. (Above Right) BR Standard class 7MT No 70006 Robert Burns powers a northbound freight through Dent in January 1964. (Above Left) Keeping apace with the current scene, Ian Allan Publishers was standardizing its abc Locospotter Book covers too. AN Wolstenholme's evocative line drawing of BR Standard 7MT No 70000 Britannia, was reproduced on the cover of all four BR Regions - in this case the Western Region, with the appropriate WR chocolate livery in two bands top and bottom.

However, there was no concession for patriotism when post-war financial hardship meant that most families had to struggle to make ends meet. The 1950s was a 'make do and mend' era, and essential food such as bacon, meat, butter, cheese, eggs, tea and sugar were still in short supply. By the end of

 
rationing, however, the stoicism of the 'points' system had levelled the playing field, and the class divide - once as clear-cut as the finest crystal – began to wane in the Sixties.

But I'm getting ahead of myself - returning to the immediate post-war years, in spite of Churchill’s rousing oratories, the Tories were surprisingly defeated in the 1945 General Election and the nation now pinned its hopes on the Labour Party's manifesto which promised the end of poverty, better housing and free treatment in health care. At the same time, acrimonious debate began echoing around the corridors of Whitehall over the Government’s plan for nationalising Britain’s key industries, including the former 'Big Four' railway companies - the LMSR, LNER, GWR and SR.


 

Childhood memories...saved by the 7 o'clocker!  

On the ‘Lost Railways West Yorkshire’ website, I mention 'copping' my first  'streak' No 60001 Sir Ronald Mathews at Horsforth station between Leeds and Harrogate. It was the defining moment which kick-started my spotting days The A4s were spectacularly streamlined, with a wedge-shaped front - and fast. But above all else, their Crosby tri-tone whistles gave out a distinctive, melodious chime, which was music to the ears of this five year-old, who lived in a house overlooking the railway line in Woodside, Horsforth. I couldn't wait to see the two Sunday night expresses (one in each direction) both headed by the strikingly handsome streaks. The booked time for the 'down' train was around 7pm which coined its nickname the 7 o'clocker and the 'up' train was called the '8 o'clocker' for the same reason.

 
Mention of the 7 o'clocker takes me back to post-war days when national pride was at its height. Everyone felt good about themselves,  yet there was a growing sense that Britain was no longer the mighty Commonwealth leader of old. Instead the country had become a second-rate power status, struggling with a succession of balance of payment deficits, sterling crises, currency restrictions, cuts in social spending and a reduction in our overseas obligations. Quite simply, we had won the war, but somehow become the poor relation of Europe. But then, a lot of changes took place in the post-war Fifties, including Britain’s policy on the use of nuclear arms. The West had armed itself with a deadly arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles, so Britain the capability of 'nuking' the whole of Russia - or any other country it didn’t like, for that matter - and for those people still nursing bad memories of World War 2, a third was a disaster just waiting to happen.

The 'bomb' wasn’t a new phenomenon, of course. Back in 1945, Emperor Hirohito of Japan surrendered to the allies when the United States vaporized the city of Hiroshima with an atomic bomb called Little

 
Boy, followed by a second atomic bomb Fat Man - who in hell's name dreamed up these names? - which wiped out the city of Nagasaki on August 9th. Flushed by its success, the Atomic Energy Commission in the Nevada desert started work on an even bigger, better bomb - an atomic bomb that could hold the temperature long enough to fuse the nuclei of hydrogen atoms to trigger a 'super bomb', 1,000 times more destructive than all the bombs dropped on Japan. On May 21st 1952, the Americans exploded their first hydrogen bomb over the Bikini atoll in the Pacific. The test shot, code-named Cherokee was detonated at precisely 5.51 am local time – 6.51 p.m. Sunday BST.  How do I know? I was hiding under the kitchen table at the time. It was my mother’s idea. On the BBC Light Programme, she had been listening to a group of anti-nuclear protesters lambasting the Americans for meddling with forces they didn’t understand - "Did you hear that?" she gasped, "The only way they can detonate a hydrogen bomb is by tapping into the same source of thermonuclear energy as our sun."

 
"They’ll need long extension lead," quipped my dad...subtlety was so not his style! Mum was mortified. In her awful imagination, she feared the bomb could split the Earth’s crust, boil the Earth’s oceans, blow away the Earth’s atmosphere - it could create a chain reaction of such cataclysmic proportions and destroy the whole of mankind - "This could be the end of the world," she said mournfully, and hit the home-made rhubarb wine from the pantry…          

When Sunday evening came, we crawled under the kitchen table and peered dolefully at the clock ticking away the last seconds of our lives – "Look! - the big hand is nearly at ten!" she warned. I didn’t want to look...I badly wanted to go to the toilet. Then, with only seconds to go, I heard the melodious chimed-whistle of a streak on the Sunday-night seven o’ clocker

 
across Woodside valley. It couldn’t have happened at a better time. It was as if the driver had given the 'all clear' signal, which, for this terrified youngster - 'babbing' his pants - came as a huge relief. S’funny what you remember from childhood...

However, the reports sent by observers from the Pacific test site were far from funny! They described the hydrogen bomb's luminosity as being brighter than 500 suns. It was followed by a colossal pillar of fire that soared into the sky at incredible speed, then an iridescent mushroom cloud spewed upwards and outwards until, more than an hour later, it appeared to envelop the entire Earth. For any youngster to be burdened with such an image of mass destruction was, to put it mildly, scary – and hiding under the kitchen table seemed a puny way to defend oneself. indeed, the Government’s official guideline for protection against a nuclear strike was equally appalling. Experts believed that people in the blast area 'could

 
become ill' (the quotation marks are mine) for as much as three months if exposed to radiation, so the public was advised to stay indoors to avoid radioactive fall-out.

As it turned out, the Government’s duplicity was about as two-faced as you can get, for we now have access to 50 year-old Government documents which reveal how Whitehall ministers contemplated Armageddon with an almost sinister coolness. One file estimates the likely number of deaths during an atomic war in each British city - from 2,000 in Plymouth through 127,000 in Birmingham, to 422,000 in London. Today, such figures inspire an odd mixture of relief and anxiety - relief because nuclear war was avoided; anxiety because if ever it happens in the future, then given the size of bombs we now have the estimated death toll will be infinitely greater. Even so, the arms race will never go away. It all started in the Fifties, when world leaders believed that being in possession of nuclear arms would be the biggest deterrent in the event of a crises should one ever occur. Surely it would stop an aggressor like the Ruskies threatening an offensive? Wrong! The tempo of the arms race seldom let up. The cold war turned into a dirty game of espionage, propaganda, bluff and counter-bluff - and, as it turned out, stalemate too, thank God.

Nevertheless, the British Movietime newsreels of the Soviet Union parading its military might in Moscow’s Red Square was a nerve-jangling sight - it was almost like watching the trailer of a nasty-toned Hitchcock thriller. The kids at school were warned to heed the ‘four-minute warning’ siren and take cover in the nearest underground shelter. My dad said we'd all turn into Godzilla-style monsters and glow green in the dark!... 

 

By the mid-Fifties, however, a renewed sense of optimism began to sweep the country as British

 
industry emerged from the post-war doldrums, and many firms were offering more congenial working conditions than at any time since before the war. At long last, prosperity seemed just around the corner, yet money was still tight and improvements to the home were painfully slow. To think that we lived in a house without electricity until 1956 is an indictment of those times. In fact, the standard of living was bleak on so many levels that it's hard to imagine a modern-day family - pampered by all the creature comforts that we now take for granted - being asked to live in a house without electricity. A Fifties housewife had to be Olympian fit to get through the daily grind of domestic chores. Many homes still had gas lighting that 'popped' when the 1d slot meter ran out; the outside toilet froze during the winter and families had to share the hot water in a tin bath, which, for the last one in, was marginally cleaner than a sheep dip. Less than half of British households possessed a bathroom, yet in 1959, Harold Macmillan, then Tory Prime Minister, elected to office for the third time, uttered the immortal words - "You’ve never had it so good."

 
Cloth caps, mill chimneys, cobbled streets and rows of back-to-back terraced housing are the traditional images that people associate with the north. In this scene of Kirkstall (Horsforth St Margarets Church spire can be seen in the distance), the acrid smoke hanging ponderously over back-to-back rooftops evokes memories of the ‘peasouper’ fogs of the Fifties when road traffic was brought to a halt and street lighting was swallowed up in the gloom. The first campaign to clean up the atmosphere began in Manchester in 1954 when compensation was paid to domestic consumers and industrial users who switched from coal to smokeless fuel, electric or gas