Trans. Bristol & Gloucestershire Archaeological Society 134 (2016), 231–250

The Avonmouth Light Railway

By RICHARD COATES

The Avonmouth Light Railway (ALR) Company was a nominally independent railway company operating a short standard-gauge branch line from a point on the Great Western and Midland Railways Joint Committee line near Avonmouth Docks station in Bristol to a Bristol Corporation electricity installation east of the new main entrance to Avonmouth docks in King Road Avenue, and perhaps beyond (Fig. 1). This paper contains the first extensive account of its history, an exploration of a problematic detail in that history, and a reflection on the methodological interest that recollection of its history presents for historians.

Ownership of the project as conceived The King’s Weston estate of Dr Philip Napier Miles (1865–1935) had owned much of the land in Shirehampton and what is now Avonmouth since Dr Miles’s grandfather, Philip John Miles (1773–1845), a wealthy Bristol banker and briefly MP for Bristol, purchased it from the estate of Lord de Clifford on the latter’s death without issue in 1832. Philip John’s son Philip William Skynner Miles (1818–81), also MP for Bristol, had been responsible for promoting Avonmouth Docks, opened in 1877 on a large tract of the estate’s marshland, and Philip the grandson was keen to exploit the area’s commercial potential still further, extending the docks complex with the Royal Edward Dock, opened in 1908.1 The ALR was a further project of the King’s Weston estate intended as part of the infrastructure of a prospective new industrial and commercial zone to be developed east of St Andrew’s Road, which marks the effective eastern boundary of the dockland area (Fig. 2). One commentator has regarded this road, which the Docks Committee were obliged to build as a condition of the purchase of land for new docks from King’s Weston, as a ‘disastrous’ restriction on the potential of the docks to expand, and as a road built to favour the interests of the King’s Weston estate now that the docks themselves had been sold off to Bristol Corporation; though what King’s Weston could have gained from restricting the docks is far from obvious, and the port’s official historian may be somewhat partisan in this matter.2 The ALR was projected almost entirely on land owned and largely occupied by Dr Miles (all bar where some public roads and paths were crossed),3 and was intended to shadow St Andrew’s Road closely. Its headquarters were in the King’s Weston estate office in High Street, Shirehampton. In the 1903 order allowing

1. On the involvement of the King’s Weston estate in the development of Avonmouth, see the King’s Weston Action Group website, www.kwag.org.uk/history/the-victorian-era/. 2. W.G. Neale, At the Port of Bristol: the turn of the tide 1900–1914 (Bristol, 1970), 92. For other implicitly critical remarks on the restrictions placed on the port by King’s Weston, see W.G. Neale, The Tides of War and the Port of Bristol, 1914–1918 (Bristol, 1976), 15 and esp. 152. 3. Gloucestershire Archives [GA], Q/RUm/567, book of reference of ALR. 232 THE AVONMOUTH LIGHT RAILWAY

Fig. 1. The ALR (shown as a dark line), produced by the Railway Clearing House (1914). The junction labelled ‘Holesmouth Jn.’ is in fact Hallen Marsh Junction. Holesmouth is the ‘junc. with dock lines’; cf. Fig. 5. RICHARD COATES 233

Fig. 2. Grayscale copy of plan of the proposed development of the King’s Weston estate at Avonmouth, 1905. The entire proposed course of the ALR can be seen departing from south of the ‘Industrial Dwellings Area’, looping in an inverted S to the west of the ‘Cricket Ground’, and proceeding along the eastern margin of St Andrew’s Road, enticing development in the ‘Factory Sites’ area, as far as a double junction (north and south) with the GWR to the west of the word ‘Owner’. Reproduced by courtesy of King’s Weston Action Group. 234 THE AVONMOUTH LIGHT RAILWAY the construction of the line, Dr Miles is named as proprietor of the line, responsible for appointing two other directors.4

The railway context Philip William Skynner Miles had been a promoter of a railway from Hotwells, below the Clifton suspension bridge, to a pier, hotel and intended pleasure resort in the marshland, which was at first called ‘River’s Mouth’ and then Avonmouth. This, the Bristol Port Railway and Pier Company enterprise (BPR),5 was opened on 6 March 1865, and was a freestanding line, i.e. it did not connect with any other line of the burgeoning national rail infrastructure. When the docks at Avonmouth were planned, the need for such a connection became pressing. The BPR tried to promote a connection, but failed to attract sufficient investment. In 1871 the interest of the Great Western Railway (GWR) and the Midland Railway was engaged, and they formed a Joint Committee to take over and build the BPR’s planned line from Sneyd Park Junction on the isolated line to two junctions: (1) Narroways Hill Junction on the GWR line from Bristol Temple Meads to New Passage (as it was at the time, before the Severn Tunnel was opened in 1886), and (2) Kingswood Junction on the Midland Railway line from Mangotsfield and beyond to the Midland’s Bristol terminus at St Philip’s and to Temple Meads. This new line, opened for goods in 1877 to coincide with the opening of the new dock on 24 February, and for passengers on 1 September 1885, was known as the Clifton Extension Railway. The junctions referred to allowed through running to Avonmouth from all parts of the by then extensive GWR and Midland systems. The GWR and Midland Joint Committee formally took over the BPR entirely in 1890.6 The GWR had built two further lines of its own to Avonmouth: a minor local one opened on 2 February 1900 from Pilning Junction on the Bristol–Cardiff line through the Severn Tunnel, and one opened on 9 May 1910 from Filton Junction, allowing direct access by mainline traffic from the ‘Badminton’ line (Swindon to Cardiff via Stoke Gifford). The detailed railway history of Avonmouth is complex,7 but the raft of minor changes of alignment, new docks and dockland lines, and repositioning of stations does not need to be embarked on here. The three lines mentioned provide the essential context for the ALR.

Light railways The ALR was promoted under the provisions of the Light Railways Act 1896, which permitted railways to be built after obtaining an Order from the Light Railway Commissioners answering to the Board of Trade, without the expense and lengthy procedures of a private Act of Parliament, which would be the normal requirement. Such lines could be built to less exacting constructional

4. The National Archives [TNA], MT 58/208; GA, Q/RUm/583; Bristol University Library [BUL], DM1228/1/2. 5. On the BPR, see especially C.G. Maggs, The Bristol Port Railway and Pier and the Clifton Extension Railway (Oakwood Libr. of Railway Hist. 37, 1975); E. Thomas, Down the ’Mouth: a history of Avonmouth (1981), 45–54. 6. Strictly speaking, the BPR, with all its staff, was transferred jointly on 1 September 1890 to the GWR and Midland, under the Great Western and Midland Railway Companies (Clifton and Bristol) Act of 25 May 1871 and the Midland Railway (Additional Powers) Act of 25 July 1890. When built, the line was actually administered by the Clifton Extension Railway Joint Committee until 31 October 1894, and from then onwards by the Great Western and Midland Railways Joint Committee: Maggs, Bristol Port Railway, 11, 19. 7. M. Vincent, Lines to Avonmouth: a story of railways in the Bristol area (Oxford, 1979). RICHARD COATES 235 standards than conventional railways, which entailed in particular the setting of limits to the maximum axle weight of locomotives. Many short railways of this kind were proposed for the carrying of goods in rural areas, and the genesis of the ALR, though by no means a typical rural line, fell into this category.

Orders obtained The ALR scheme was incorporated on 12 December 1893 as a ‘light railway’ before such a concept actually existed in law,8 but the plan of reincorporation was not deposited until November 1902.9 An order for its construction was eventually obtained in 190310 under the Light Railways Act of 1896; but with the full original plan threatening not to be implemented before the period specified in the Act expired, extensions were sought and acquired in 1908, 1909 and 1910, with four-year renewal finally obtained in 1912 through the Avonmouth Light Railway (Revival and Extension of Time) Order,11 again under the Light Railways Act 1896. Nevertheless, the line was not then completed to the full original specification (as in Figure 2), despite periodic renewals of powers until their final expiry on 26 May 1927.12 In effect, it remained a siding dignified with the name of a railway. However, certain provisional assertions made below on the basis of the bulk of the evidence about the eventual extent of the ALR will be re-examined towards the end of the article.

Planned relation to other railways The book of reference of the ALR,13 and the contractors’ plan of November 1902,14 specifies that it was to run from Shirehampton parish (of which Avonmouth was a part at the time) to Henbury parish, a distance of 2 miles 1 furlong and 1½ chains (3,447 m). This course was entirely outside the boundary of the City of Bristol as it existed at the date of the order, although it fell entirely inside as a consequence of the boundary extension of 1904. It was duly built from the planned southern extremity, i.e. from its junction at a coalyard of the Great Western and Midland Joint Committee’s line from Narroways Hill Junction to Avonmouth. As mapped by the Ordnance Survey, it never actually crossed the historic parish boundary into Henbury. It was planned to meet the GWR’s Pilning to Avonmouth line just north-east of a bridge (west of Mitchell’s or Rockingham Farm) over the GWR south of Hallen Marsh Junction, where the Pilning line is met by the GWR’s line from Filton Junction, so that in principle it could be accessed from either of the GWR’s lines from the north and east. The junction would have allowed access both from north and south (awkwardly in the latter case), as can be seen in Figure 2. It was intended to serve sidings of the new industrial enterprises that were expected to develop on the King’s Weston

8. M. Smith, Britain’s Light Railways (Shepperton, 1944), 21; Vincent, Lines to Avonmouth, 46–8. These two succinct sources, a total of four pages, represent the only previous accounts of the ALR known to the writer. 9. TNA, MT 54/384; Bristol Record Office [BRO], 07790/76. The official depositing of the plans for parliamentary scrutiny is noticed in The London Gazette, 30 June 1903, p. 4095. The draft plan of 1902 and the plan as approved by the Board of Trade and passed into legislation can be found as GA, Q/ RUm/567 and 583 respectively. 10. TNA, MT 58/208. 11. Ibid. MT 58/375. 12. Vincent, Lines to Avonmouth, 47. 13. Two copies of the plans and sections and one copy of the book of reference (detailing ownership of the lands to be built on) can be found in GA, Q/RUm/567. 14. BRO, 07790/76; GA, Q/RUm/567. 236 THE AVONMOUTH LIGHT RAILWAY estate’s marshland. This was the site of the later zinc smelting works15 and other related chemicals factories.16 But the intended extension beyond its eventual terminus at an electricity station near the southern end of St Andrew’s Road (the present A403) may never have taken place. As we shall see, the internal standard-gauge railway systems of these important factories, as eventually built in the 1920s, never connected with the ALR. Instead they linked northwards with the GWR’s line north of Holesmouth Junction, which served the GWR’s interest in the docks estate, via a spinal line mainly parallel to but east of (and presumably avoiding for legal reasons) the intended ALR alignment for which powers were already in existence and vested in the King’s Weston estate.

Objections Minor objections to the scheme from various interested parties and some routine legal correspondence have survived.17 The GWR placed the only substantive objection, arguing that the ALR was in effect a competitor line parallel with a section of its own line from Pilning to Avonmouth, and was therefore likely to bleed it of custom. The promoter’s revealing riposte was that the ALR would probably never have been proposed if reasonable terms for siding arrangements at the intended new factories could have been agreed with the GWR.18 Gloucestershire County Council, as the authority responsible for roads in 1903 before the extension of Bristol’s boundaries, wanted to cap the speed of traffic at 4 rather than 10 miles per hour near level crossings, and was worried about the unprotected crossing of the main Avonmouth Road (the former A4, now unclassified), making the preposterously expensive suggestion of a bridge to take the line over the road. Other objectors wanted to install gates where the line crossed the road, modifying their request in due course to make it contingent on a Board of Trade requirement to that effect. Barton Regis Rural District Council was generally supportive.19

Capitalization The estimated original capital of the ALR was £21,000,20 and an extra £7,000 was permitted to be raised in loans. By 1910, £12,510 had been issued as ordinary shares,21 and by 1915, £14,800, with no loans.22 Shareholders’ meetings were held routinely, even in wartime, at the King’s Weston estate office.23

15. The National Smelting Company, later the Commonwealth Smelting Company, Imperial Smelting Corporation, Consolidated Zinc, Britannia Zinc, and so on. The site was generally known as ‘The Smelter’, and this is the neutral term used below. 16. Originally a spinoff factory from the zinc smelting operation, Fisons Ltd, established to exploit the sulphuric acid which was a by-product of the smelting process. 17. BRO, SMV/7/1/4/25; GA, C/CLP/4/15. These refer mainly to preparations by Glos. County Council and others for a local inquiry held at the Guildhall, Bristol, on 24 Feb. 1903 (reported in the Bristol Daily Mercury the following day), and for a Board of Trade hearing in London on 7 Aug. 1903. Guildhall inquiry papers are also in BUL, DM1228/1/1. 18. GA, C/CLR/4/15. Bristol City Council, broadly supportive of ALR, also chipped in that the GWR’s rates were too high. 19. BRO, 22936/61. 20. GA, Q/RUm/567, draft order 1902. 21. Stock Exchange Yearbook (1910), 211. 22. Bradshaw’s Shareholders’ Guide (1915), quoted by Smith, Britain’s Light Railways, 21. 23. For example on 1 June 1917 and 6 November 1918 (notices in Western Daily Press, 26 May 1917 and 18 October 1918). RICHARD COATES 237

Engineering of the line ALR’s consulting engineers were Kirkland and Capper of Westminster,24 and the contractors were Sir John Aird and Company.25 The cost was estimated at £17,251. It was not one of their most demanding commissions, since the terrain was practically dead flat (the maximum inclines, one close to each junction, were 1 in 330, i.e. 0.3%) and no structures more significant than culverts over rhynes (drainage ditches) were required. A redundant post-medieval seabank, stranded by land reclamation, was breached near the southern end of the line. Curves of a minimum radius of 6 chains (121 m) were required in the line as built, avoiding the buildings and orchard of Dr Miles’s Avonmouth Farm. Had the full planned line been built, most of the northern section would have been dead straight, hugging the eastern flank of St Andrew’s Road. The deposited plan appears to suggest a single track all the way, but there is more to say about this below. Some difficulty may have been caused at the outset of building by the need for the line to criss-cross the temporary tramway laid down by the constructors of the new Avonmouth Road.26

Dates of operation The line eventually opened in November 1908, but as far as what point is unknown.27 It seems rather unlikely that it had any destination short of the electricity generating station, and it certainly reached its ‘classical’ form on arriving there before or in 1913. It was requisitioned by the government in 1915,28 but was effectively out of use in 1931, a commercial failure, and seems to have been largely dismantled and removed by 1934.29

Arrangements for the operation of traffic The line was planned to be operated from the start by the Great Western and Midland Joint Railway Committee.30 Detailed provision for the possibility of electric traction was made in the order of 1903, but steam appears to have been used exclusively, unless there was some unrecorded horse traction. One tank engine of unknown type(s) and ownership was stabled at a shed in the Joint Committee’s coalyard as required. The line was transferred in 1927 to the ownership of the Joint Committee’s successor companies, the London, Midland and Scottish Railway and the (post-Grouping) Great Western Railway.31 The possibility of such a transfer was presumably the stimulus for the final revival of powers to complete the line referred to above. The Committee’s representatives inspected the line in 1931, though we cannot tell for sure whether they saw any activity, and judging by the neglect that followed they gave it up as a lost cause.32 From their point of view, the trackbed may have seemed a potentially useful piece of real estate, and that was that. The actual date on which operations finally ceased is unknown, but it cannot have been long after this inspection, and may even have preceded it.

24. BRO, 22936/61; obit. of Prof. David Sing Capper (1864–1926), in Grace’s Guide, online at www. gracesguide.co.uk/David_Sing_Capper (accessed 30 Dec. 2014). 25. TNA, MT 58/208. 26. BRO, 07790/76; GA, Q/RUm/567, draft order 1902; Vincent, Lines to Avonmouth, 46. 27. Stock Exchange Yearbook (1910), 211. 28. E.A. Pratt, British Railways and the Great War (London, 1921), 55. 29. Vincent, Lines to Avonmouth, 48; V. Mitchell and K. Smith, Branch Lines around Avonmouth (Midhurst, 2004). Mitchell and Smith give different tentative dates in notes to their map XII. 30. TNA, RAIL 252/1544, memo. of arrangements 1908–18. 31. Ibid. MT 58/481; RAIL 420/136. 32. Vincent, Lines to Avonmouth, 48. 238 THE AVONMOUTH LIGHT RAILWAY

As far as conventional history is concerned, the powers of completion had lapsed as noted in 1927; but there is another angle on this to be explored below. It was widely believed to have been completed, in some sense, even if not to the original specification.

Staff The names of two secretaries of the company are known, both of whom probably had functions within the King’s Weston estate enterprise which may have embraced the railway project as well as bestowing upon them their formal title. Alex. B. Carter is described as ‘agent’, evidently with responsibilities including the railway, to judge by Figure 2, which shows the railway as part of the grand development plan and bears Mr Carter’s professional gummed label. Alfred Seymour signs a letter as company secretary in 1920 (Fig. 3). W.H. Pretty, on his retirement in 1935, was said to have been on the office staff, and then secretary to the ALR, before becoming the estate’s agent.33 The names of those who maintained the track and rolling stock, drove, loaded, marshalled and attended to safety have not been discovered, with the exception of Mr Kennett (see below).

Fig. 3. Letter from company secretary Alfred Seymour, 1920. Reproduced by courtesy of Ian Dinmore.

33. Western Daily Press, 23 March 1935. RICHARD COATES 239

Function The ALR never carried paying passengers, and was intended to carry only goods even from the first attempt to implement the powers sought in 1902. The overall purpose of the line was never realized, as will be noted in more detailed fashion below, but its function as built must have been to transport coal from the Joint Committee’s sidings from which it emerged to the Bristol Corporation electricity generating station in St Andrew’s Road, near the new eastern entrance to the docks at King Road Avenue, which the line reached at last by 1913. The generating station was conceived in unusual three-storey grandeur with a central turret like a bellcote, as the plans deposited in 1907 reveal.34 It had more than a hint of the then King’s Weston estate architect Frederick Bligh Bond about it, though it is not his name that appears on the plans. The surviving single-decker reality, whether modified from the outset or, as I believe, cut down to size since, is altogether more modest (Fig. 4). Beyond this point, there was ‘only a contractor’s road with lines laid upon it’.35 Later revisions of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps36 label the installation as a sub-station or a transformer station. If that means it was no longer generating electricity, and therefore no longer needing coal, that must account in part for the poor revenue and eventual demise of the line. It may have been used to transport parts as required (switchgear, transformers, capacitors, circuit breakers), and there may have been backup generation capacity still requiring occasional deliveries of coal – but this is speculative. It is hard to imagine what else might have kept the ALR’s commercial life hanging on by a thread. Whilst the connection with the GWR was acknowledged, those responsible for the issue of passes to the docks ‘questioned if it was really necessary for

Fig. 4. The derelict electricity (sub-)station which was the destination of the ALR. (Author’s photo, January 2015).

34. BRO, Building Plan 54/6a. 35. Vincent, Lines to Avonmouth, 47. 36. OS Maps 1:10,560, Glos. LXXI.NW; Somerset II.NE. 240 THE AVONMOUTH LIGHT RAILWAY

[Alex. B.] Carter [ALR’s agent] to be on the dock for business connected with the light railway’, suggesting that the dock company saw no wider role for the ALR than what it had achieved in 1915 (and indeed the author cannot imagine why Mr Carter would have needed such a pass).37

Trading Returns have come to hand for 1908, when expenditure is recorded as £79 and receipts as £4.38 This, the first calendar year of operation, is only two months of a full year, but the prognosis is not one of undreamt-of riches. The subsequent history of the line bears this out, despite what appears to be a trading surplus in 1915.39 Returns for 1914 are also in existence (see note 52), and other partial annual returns also suggest an irredeemable operating loss, in the continuation of which the events of 1914–18 played a significant role.

Thwarted development: a casualty of war The outbreak of World War I effectively halted any plans for industrial development on the King’s Weston estate, and, as noted above, the ALR was requisitioned in 1915. During the war, matters took a relevant but unexpected turn. In 1917 a plant for the manufacture of ββ´-dichlorodiethyl sulphide (i.e. the internationally illegal military poison, mustard gas), was established by the Ministry of War at the northern end of the King’s Weston land designated for development, as far away as possible from the houses of Avonmouth.40 The gas was transported by rail from there to the already extant Filling Station no. 23 at Chittening, a short distance away, but also adjacent to the GWR’s Pilning–Avonmouth line, where it was put into artillery shell cases. For this purpose, a standard-gauge siding was laid from the factory to a junction with the GWR’s line south of Hallen Marsh Junction, and from a junction a little north of Hallen Marsh Junction there was a line giving access to the internal railway system at Chittening Filling Station,41 meaning that direct transportation between the two sites was possible, subject only to some modestly complex signalling requirements. Conspicuously, as noted above, the siding from the factory was not laid on the authorized route of the ALR, but just east of and parallel to it, and its junction with the GWR was at or just north of the location of the ALR’s own authorized junction (Fig. 5). Whether this happened for legal, financial or operational reasons, or for some combination, is unknown. After the war, the site of the gas plant was converted to civilian use and became the National

37. Western Daily Press, 10 Apr. 1915. 38. Pratt, Brit. Railways and Great War, 55; TNA, BT 285/842. 39. Bradshaw’s Shareholders’ Guide: see note 22. 40. For the war effort, see I.F.W. Beckett, The Home Front 1914–1918: how Britain survived the Great War (Kew, 2006), esp. ch. 2–3. The exigencies of war and the force of the precedent of chemicals production must have trumped the condition that the King’s Weston estate had attempted to lay on subsequent purchasers of land in this zone, namely that ‘no noxious works’ should take place (see Neale, At the Port of Bristol, 93), because the factory site produced or stored useful but harmful chemicals for the next 80 years. 41. A direct line between the two Ministry of War installations could not conveniently be laid because its route was blocked by the GWR’s Filton Junction–Hallen Marsh Junction line (opened in 1910), whose junction with the Pilning–Avonmouth line intervened between the two junctions mentioned in the main text (Figs 2 and 5). The last traces of this Smelters’ siding could be seen until recently embedded in the tarmac where it crosses the southern extremity of Smoke Lane, no longer guarded by the abandoned flashing warning signals which still drooped from poles there, and where it crosses King’s Weston Lane. These traces were finally removed in May 2016. RICHARD COATES 241

Smelting Company, whose long history of zinc production and stockholding at Avonmouth lasted until the closure of the site of the plant in 2003 (after the several changes of ownership and business name already mentioned).42 Its wartime railway system was maintained43 and duly expanded within the plant during the late 1920s and 30s, which, on the face of it, made the planned northward extension of the ALR redundant. It is nevertheless a moot point whether this extension ever happened: see below. The Smelter’s railway, even when extended southwards to what became the Fisons fertilizer factory,44 was never mapped by the Ordnance Survey as connected to the ALR. The land authorized for the ALR’s use was eventually absorbed into the breadth of the now very wide highway St Andrew’s Road (A403) and its footways.

GWR, to Pilning (Low Level) station and Pilning Junction --- Junction for Chittening Filling Station no. 23 --- Hallen Marsh Junction (GWR, to Filton Junction) --- Junction for the mustard gas plant (later Imperial Smelting Co.) = which is at or very close to = --- Projected junction with the ALR --- Holesmouth Junction (GWR, northern access to Avonmouth Docks) GWR, to Avonmouth Docks station (not part of the Docks complex)

Fig. 5. Schematic representation of the railways near Hallen Marsh Junction.

Course and traces of the line as built The line started from a Bristol-facing junction with sidings on the Great Western and Midland Joint Railway, which ran from Narroways Hill Junction and Kingswood Junction in north Bristol to the port of Avonmouth. This junction was located 31 chains (624 m) east of Avonmouth Docks joint station, and was controlled from a signal box named Avonmouth Dock Junction box (not the one which later bore that name at West Town, a little further east). The stub of the line at its southern end appears as a siding truncated at Portview Road on the Ordnance Survey 1:2,500 revision of 1949. When it was operational, the ALR crossed three streets on the level in the expanding suburb before setting out on an S-shaped course across the fields of Avonmouth farm. It apparently had sidings trailing back towards Avonmouth Dock Junction, though their exact location in relation to the street layout is unclear.45 Towards the end of the line, the trackbed is now built over by the houseplots of 76–94 St Andrew’s Road. It crossed what is now Crowley Way, the major approach road to Avonmouth Docks from the east, on the level just east of its junction with St Andrew’s Road, when this potential artery was still an underdeveloped dual carriageway which led nowhere. The railway then followed the wide St Andrew’s Road for a short distance

42. For a brief history of the commercial plant, see C.E. Harvey and J. Press (eds), Studies in the Business History of Bristol (Bristol, 1988), 25–6; R. Bingham, ‘The rise and fall of ISC Chemicals at Avonmouth: the impact of the Montreal Protocol on CFCs’, Regional Historian 25 (2012), 32–7. 43. There was also a plant-internal 2'-gauge system. 44. See above, note 16. 45. Enlargement of Avonmouth on a Midland Railway distance diagram dated 1910 in the author’s possession, source unknown but labelled Book no. 69 and Sheet 53A (3rd edn). The sidings are not known to me from any other source, though a siding parallel to the Joint line, and parallel with and adjacent to Portview Road, is confirmed (Fig. 6). 242 THE AVONMOUTH LIGHT RAILWAY

Fig. 6. Midland Railway distance diagram (1910) enlargement of Avonmouth, showing the ALR with otherwise unknown sidings near the southern end of its course, partially covered by the words ‘Avonmouth’ and ‘Dock’. (Document in author’s possession). until it terminated on the western side of the electricity generating station, or rather the later sub- station. This building is still in existence but fenced off and derelict in 2016 (Fig. 4). The line as described was about 60 chains (c.1,207 m) long. No visible trace remains in 2016, and it is hardly possible even to perceive its ghost. Aligned gaps between buildings in the three streets, Portview Road,46 Davis Street and Avonmouth Road, could once have been discerned and interpreted as the course of the line, but building has taken place in some of these, and the only gaps remaining are opposite the Miles Arms pub in Avonmouth Road,47 and on the two sides of Davis Street, where the house-numbers due at the gaps in the terraces, 26 and 29, were not used, as if anticipating that the line would eventually come to naught and be infilled (Fig. 7).48 The fields north of the village across which it went have all been built over with warehousing and other commercial development as Avonmouth has expanded, and traces of the line have been completely obliterated. But the disturbed ground marking its sinuous course, showing adventitious

46. Later infilled by Avonmouth Motor Services, a body repair shop, numbered 68 Portview Road. The location of the streets mentioned may be seen in Figure 8. Avonmouth Road is the wide road crossing the north-east corner of the map. 47. The gap beside the pub is now occupied by an extension to the pub itself. 48. The deliberate interruption of the terraces of Davis Street by a light railway is distinctly odd, but Neale, At the Port of Bristol, 94, is harsh in condemning the superior working-class housing as representing the ‘unworthy terraced style of Bristol East’. RICHARD COATES 243

Fig. 7. The historic gap at 29 Davis Street, looking north. The Miles Arms pub and its extension can be seen in the background. (Author’s photo). tree growth, can clearly be followed in post-Second World War aerial photography cutting across fields still marked by the ridge-and-furrow pattern of pre-modern arable farming.49 It is curious that no building of the ALR’s own is known. One might think the operation would have required a modest tally clerk’s office, an occasional shelter for a shunter or signal attendant/ pointsman, a tool shed, perhaps a stable and hayloft if horses supplemented steam traction, a place to make a cup of tea, a toilet: in short, an operational headquarters for the two male staff, as opposed to the formal business headquarters at the King’s Weston estate office 1½ miles away in Shirehampton, where dirty hands would have been unknown. The author’s suspicions fell on a run-down two-storey brick building at the rear of 1 Farr Street, and within its plot, but adjacent to the ‘26 Davis Street gap’. This building, however, is recorded as stables in 1905, and as Mr Elliot’s workshop in 1921, and nothing connects it with the ALR except proximity.50 The ALR’s staff must therefore have shared facilities with the Joint Committee’s or the Port of Bristol Authority’s personnel, or suffered some inconvenience and discomfort.

49. Bristol Know Your Place website (maps.bristol.gov.uk/knowyourplace/), aerial photography of 1946. 50. BRO, Building Plan 48/5c. 244 THE AVONMOUTH LIGHT RAILWAY

Operational life Nothing is known for sure about the locomotives used on the ALR,51 and little about its rolling stock, operational practices, finances52 or personnel, justifying Mike Vincent’s observation that the ALR is ‘not a particularly well documented railway’.53 It does not figure in standard accounts of the major railway companies, despite its absorption jointly by the LMS and GWR. It does not merit a mention in the Avon County Planning Department’s survey of 1983, which is titled in a way which invites its inclusion.54 Colin Maggs omits it from his Panorama.55 No photos illustrating it specifically are known.56 There are occasional mentions of it in oral history accounts, but nothing that illuminates its business with precision – or rather the illumination which it brings is problematic (see below).57 The issue of gates protecting traffic on Avonmouth Road mentioned above appears to have been resolved by the employment of a man with a red flag stationed at the Miles Arms, at one time ‘a Mr Kennet from Shirehampton, who was lame’, to give warning of the approach of a train.58 It appears that the GWR kept an engine in a shed by Portview Road to share the duties of servicing a coal yard and hauling trucks along the line.59

51. The existence on the Middleton Railway (WR Yorks.) of a preserved Manning Wardle L class 0-6-0 saddle tank dating from 1903, said to be ‘ex John Aird & Co., Avonmouth’, may have given rise to the idea (Vincent, Lines to Avonmouth, 48) that the ALR operated a Manning Wardle locomotive, on the basis that the Aird company built the railway. I do not think the information available can sustain that interpretation. Manning Wardle mainly specialized in locomotives for contractors’ temporary railways; so if its connection with the ALR is genuine, it is most likely that Aird’s used it during construction work, and that it did not remain on the ALR operationally when the line opened: see www.leedsengine. info/leeds/histmw.asp, accessed 12 Feb. 2015. Moreover, Aird’s also built Avonmouth’s Royal Edward Dock for the Port of Bristol, opened in 1908 – a far more significant undertaking – and the surviving locomotive may have been used on that contract. It is much more likely that the ALR was operated by whatever small tank engine the GWR (or the Midland) was willing to spare from other duties. 52. Financial returns have been identified for 1908 (see above) and 1914: TNA, BT 285/842, and some other bald statistics are recoverable from Bradshaw’s Shareholders’ Guide and the Ministry of Transport’s annual Railway Returns. It had an overdraft on its current account of some hundreds of pounds in 1921, according to Railway Returns. 53. Vincent, Lines to Avonmouth, 48. 54. M. Oakley, Railways in Avon: a short history of their development and decline (Bristol, 1983). 55. C. Maggs, Bristol Railway Panorama (Bath, 1990). 56. An obstruction of Davis Street, visible in an aerial photograph of 1927 (Photo EPW019267), accessed online via the ‘Britain From Above’ website (www.britainfromabove.org.uk), is in fact a pair of walls embracing the ALR’s tracks. They are referred to by Ethel Thomas: D. Archer (ed.), The Avonmouth Story (1977), 102. These would have prevented road traffic between the two halves of Davis Street. The walls must have disappeared in about 1931 when the ALR had finally expired. 57. e.g. contributions in J. Helme and S. Davies (eds), A Mouthful of Memories. An oral history of Avonmouth (1999); and J. Helme and S. Davies (eds) Another Mouthful of Memories (2001). 58. Vincent, Lines to Avonmouth, 47. The quotation is from the memoir of Jack Cooke in Helme and Davies, Mouthful, 4. ‘Mr Kennet’ was probably George Kennett who lived in Shirehampton with his mother and three siblings in 1891. He was 15 years old then, and, according to family knowledge, worked as a wharfinger and ‘railway points boy’; see http://sumnertree.sumgen.com/fam692.html#Src4-2, accessed 11 March 2016. The 1891 census, as transcribed online, incorrectly says ‘railway porter boy’. According to later censuses (1901, 1911), he also became a fireman and engine driver. The cause and date of his ‘lameness’ is not known. 59. R.W. Smith, memoir in Helme and Davies, Another Mouthful, 32. The Midland Railway might, perhaps should, also have contributed motive power. RICHARD COATES 245

The ALR was distinguished by the fact that all of its staff were called up in the First World War – that is, both of them.60 In 1918, the company advertised for two men, ‘for working on Permanent Way’, suggesting that it was still considered at this moment that the line had prospects.61 Around the time of the first major post-war development of the Smelter in 1923, the line was inspected by representatives of the Joint Committee along with officials from the Smelter, who noted that the line ran close to the Smelter’s premises, ‘but has never yet been utilised’.62 It is far from clear what is disguised by the word ‘close’ and how large the gap, if any, was. But this suggests that even at this date a possible fulfilment of greater aspirations for the line was under consideration. By the end of the line’s life, inspectors for the Joint Committee’s successor in 1931 found only a small coal depot and an under-utilized engine shed (which was not taken down till after 1950),63 with a coaling stage and a water-tank for locomotives. The rest of the line was derelict, and had been fully removed by 1934 if Port of Bristol Authority maps of the area can be taken at face value.64 The copy of the large-scale Ordnance Survey map of 1949 on the Bristol ‘Know Your Place’ website shows it carefully erased by human hand, though just detectable.65 One operational detail can be gleaned from maps, and from them only, it seems. The gaps in the terraced housing in Portview Road and Davis Street (Fig. 7) might be thought generous for a single line of 4' 8½" gauge. Close inspection of the 1916 Ordnance Survey 25-inch map reveals two parallel tracks passing through these spaces, a matter for which there had been no explicit provision in the plan (Fig. 8). This means that, at least for a time, the line cannot have been operated formally as a single block with access controlled by a single token allowing entry to a train. To be safe and legal, some sort of arrangement involving intermediate signalling would have been necessary at both ends of the doubled section, whether this was used for trains passing or crossing (which cannot have been often) or for shunting. We do know from oral evidence that there was a signal by the Miles Arms to hold back trains at the level crossing, i.e. it was the railside equivalent of Mr Kennett on the roadside.66 The points required to permit trains to pass each other or to be shunted would have needed to be manned, and Mr Kennett with his flag may well also have returned to his 1891 duties as an experienced ‘points boy’. In its dereliction, the line served as a playground. Stuart Pullin, who moved to Avonmouth in 1926, aged four, could not remember the line ever being used, but recalled an abandoned pair of wagon wheels on an axle which the children played with by pushing them up and down the rails.67 The only (undated) event in the ALR’s history that seems to have excited notice is when a long train of wagons was strategically placed to block both Portview Road and the main through road

60. A.J. Mullay, Blighty’s Railways: Britain’s railways in the First World War (Stroud, 2014). 61. Western Daily Press, 4 and 6 May 1918. 62. Ibid. 7 Dec. 1923. 63. ‘[A] huge galvanised shed, massive, rusty and falling to pieces’: Bill Powell, memoir in Helme and Davies, Mouthful, 13. 64. Referred to by Vincent, Lines to Avonmouth, 48. On a fold-out map in the 1936 Port of Bristol Authority Handbook, the only one of the period that the author has personally seen, the line has been manually erased since the previous state of the map. 65. It survives, misleadingly, on some post-war maps based on the inter-war state of the Ordnance Survey: e.g. Geographia A1 Atlas of Bristol and Outer Suburbs, map 6, otherwise datable on internal evidence to the early 1950s, by which time the ALR had been closed for as long as it had existed. 66. Jack Williams and Myfanwy Clark, memoir in Helme and Davies, Mouthful, 61. 67. Stuart Pullin, memoir in ibid. 25. 246 THE AVONMOUTH LIGHT RAILWAY

Fig. 8. The double track in the gap between the houses in Davis Street (OS Map 1:2500, Glos. LXXI.1, 1916 edn, reproduced under Bristol City Council licence via Bristol Know Your Place website). RICHARD COATES 247

Avonmouth Road, so as to prevent a new bride and groom from leaving Avonmouth to get to their reception.68

The ‘Jones’ map of 1928 The account of the ALR set out above and supported by the evidence of the Ordnance Survey has been laced with occasional hints that aspects of it might be called into question. It is challengeable on the basis of one single piece of evidence discovered towards the end of the author’s research, namely a neat and detailed map dated January 1928 among the papers of local historian Frederick C. Jones (1892–1964). A section of it is shown in Figure 9.69 This shows the line in a state of magnificence not recorded anywhere else. It proceeds beyond the electricity sub-station and into the Smelter’s estate, branching out into a substantial thicket of sidings and with a shunting neck parallel to St Andrew’s Road. There is a passing loop just north of the sub-station. This document is perplexing, and I have not traced its source. No other documents suggest that the ALR achieved such a degree of completeness in relation to its original aims, and the map subverts the impression of continuity given by the Ordnance Survey’s sequence of revisions. We clearly have two options. The first is to take it at face value and conclude that the ALR was completed as per plan at least as far as the Smelter, if not to its intended full extent, perhaps in the mid 1920s (after 1923; see above and footnote 62), for however brief a period and in defiance of what the rest of the evidence suggests (see above and footnote 67); and that the extension was promptly removed (after the 1931 management review?) before the change came to the notice of the Ordnance Survey. They presented the ALR in the ‘original’ short form previously seen on their 1912 six-inch survey (published 1920–1) when they published a revision c.1935. The extended line does not feature on a one-inch revision datable on internal evidence to c.1922–4, nor on a Port of Bristol Authority plan of 1916.70 It is confirmed by no other documentary source or map known to me; The second option is to take it as an expression of unfulfilled intentions. Against this option is the fact that the plan in the Jones collection signals some other intended development clearly, under the wording ‘site(s) for works’, and there is no hint of provisionality alongside the ALR. In favour of the first option are certain aerial photographs dated 1921, 1927, and 1931,71 which, although admittedly difficult and rather distant, could be interpreted as showing sidings at the place and on the alignments indicated by the map, although potentially the best photo, that taken in 1921, does not show the southward connection if it exists; it would be just beyond the edge of the shot. The Smelter’s own sidings are visible in aerial photography of 1946, and are more or less, though not precisely, as on the ‘Jones’ map. However, in this photo they do not connect southwards to the ALR trackbed, and it is hard to be sure whether or not the disturbed ground visible to their south is, or disguises, evidence of a lost connection.72 There is actually a third possibility. The ‘Jones’ map may represent a state of affairs described by Mike Vincent.73 He states clearly, but does not specify his evidence, that ‘[by] July 1926 the constructed line was opposite the Electricity Generating Station. Beyond that point, there was only a contractor’s road [i.e. St Andrew’s Road] with lines laid upon it. These lines ran into the

68. Howard Westlake, memoir in Helme and Davies, Another Mouthful, 18. This incident recalls one of Glos. County Council’s initial worries about the disruptive potential of the line back in 1903: GA, C/ CLP/4/15. 69. BRO, 21744/7. 70. Ibid. 11168/67. 71. Britain from Above website, photos EPW005480 (1921), EPW019264 (1927), EPW037152 (1931). 72. Bristol Know Your Place website, aerial photography of 1946. 73. Vincent, Lines to Avonmouth, 47. 248 THE AVONMOUTH LIGHT RAILWAY

Fig. 9. Top left, the ALR on the ‘Jones’ plan of 1928 (BRO, 21744/7), extended into the estate of The Smelter (shown by the dot-and-dash line) with sidings. RICHARD COATES 249

National Smelting Co.’s works’. It is not fully clear what this means (especially since Vincent says in the same paragraph that the generating station had been reached by 1913), but it appears to suggest either that the constructed line made an end-on junction with a contractor’s line, or, more plausibly, that the line beyond the generating station was laid to lighter than light standards, but nevertheless reached the Smelter. Vincent’s own map of the state of the line ‘c.1920’ shows a completed line reaching the Smelter, bifurcating at the end, but not connecting with the Smelter’s internal system.74 If any sense can be made of all this, perhaps it is that the ALR was completed as far as the Smelter to skimpy standards in the mid 1920s, with a view to testing its commercial viability before being cut back after the review of 1931 to the constructed line as shown on the mid 1930s Ordnance Survey map. There are matters here which remain to be clarified.

Documentary versus oral history: towards resolving the uncertainty Avonmouth has been well served by oral historians collecting and publishing the memories of local people for the Millennium History Project of the Avonmouth Genealogy Group (see note 57). A curiosity in relation to the ALR is in the (apparent) divergence of documentary and unofficial perceptions of the line’s purpose and nature. Local resident Howard Westlake seems to have believed the line was operated by the Port of Bristol Authority,75 which can be put down to a simple and understandable misperception, as his view has not been corroborated elsewhere. But Jack Cooke recalled in 1999 that the line ‘ran to the National Smelting Company which was being built just before WW I’.76 Bill Powell recalls that it ‘ran across the road [probably meaning Portview Road, perhaps Avonmouth Road, RC] from the marshalling yards ... out to the Smelting Works with ore’.77 Jack Williams and Myfanwy Clark also state that the line ran to the Smelting Company, but ‘... also ran up to the clay pit at King’s Weston Lane to collect clay for making pots in which to smelt the metal’.78 Jim Lindsay’s recollection is that it went even further, ‘round the back of the Smelting Works to the Chittening Munitions factory used in the Great War’.79 As we have seen, the early documentary evidence shows that it was indeed conceived to run as far as the area eventually occupied by the Smelter and out the other end, but apparently, on the basis of the bulk of the evidence, never reached it.80 But the five local people whose memories were collected for publication in 1999 and 2001 are unanimous in their perception that the ALR reached at

74. Ibid. 98. 75. Memoir in Helme and Davies, Another Mouthful, 18. 76. Jack Cooke, memoir in Helme and Davies, Mouthful, 4. The date is inaccurate: the plant was constructed between 1917 and 1923, according to Bingham, ‘Rise and fall’, 32. 77. Bill Powell, memoir in Helme and Davies, Mouthful, 13. 78. Jack Williams and Myfanwy Clark, memoir in ibid. 61. 79. Jim Lindsay, memoir in ibid. 69. For a brief account of Chittening, see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chittening; the present author was responsible for much of the version current on 8 Apr. 2016. 80. Bingham, ‘Rise and fall’, 32, notes that from 1917 ‘Avonmouth provided the necessary deep water port for offloading the imported ores’. No evidence has been discovered that these were transported to the Smelter via the ALR, nor is it clear how this could have been done, considering the evidence for physical structures set out in the first part of this paper. The major extension to the Royal Edward Dock, which opened in 1928 just before the Australian takeover of the Smelter in 1929, and which can be seen about to be constructed in Fig. 1, permitted imported ore to be ‘transported by means of an aerial ropeway at the rate of about 200 tons per hour’ from the dockside to the factory: Grace’s Guide (1952), accessed online 11 March 2016. It might be concluded that some such arrangement had existed from the start of importation on a large scale, but the actual method of ore transport before 1929 remains obscure. This period is one of post-war reconstruction and stagnation, so perhaps the issue did not rise to the status of a problem before the economic recovery. 250 THE AVONMOUTH LIGHT RAILWAY least as far as the works. None of them mentions the electricity generating station. One of them believes that ‘ore’ was carried rather than coal, which is actually inconsistent with a belief that it served the generating station. On the face of it, oral history vindicates the 1928 map, possibly but by no means certainly supported by at least two of the three aerial photos mentioned. It appears that local opinion is correct in its belief about the destination of the line in its brief heyday, whilst some of the claimed details conflict not only with the broad thrust of the documentation, but also with the 1928 map, as regards the final destination of the railway. Depending on our attitude to the relative status of documentary and oral evidence, we may believe either that these local people who express themselves (or are reported by their editors as expressing themselves) so definitely on the subject were unaware of a gap between the ALR and the internal railways of the big chemical works and ignorant of the material carried on the railway, or that they supply us consumers of history with valuable information about a physical connection that is close to being undocumented. What we might say is that there was a widespread belief that the ALR served the purposes of the large and highly visible enterprise and major employer ‘up the road’ from the village rather than the inconspicuous and dull and possibly unstaffed Corporation electricity (sub-)station which must truly have been the ALR’s terminus for a significant part of its history (Fig. 4), and that we can record here a simple local example of an emergent alternative truth or mythopoeia: local people’s creation and collective acceptance of a history which is plausible in the light of the visual prominence of the factories and of the existence within their perimeter of separate private railways and sidings, and in the light of the community-wide importance of the economic conditions created by the factories. The alternative is, of course, that the locals (and the 1928 map) were right, and that, by means of shunting arrangements involving at least one reversal in the yard or sidings adjacent to Portview Road (Fig. 6), ore could have been transported via the Dock lines and onto the ALR for a few brief years.