The Designation and Display of British Railway Heritage in the Post-War Decades
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The designation and display of British railway heritage in the post-war decades Mark Lambert BA MA Thesis submitted to the University of Nottingham for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy October 2016 2 Abstract This PhD thesis details the ways in which objects which were deemed to represent Britain’s railway heritage were designated as important and subsequently displayed or stored by the state-owned British Railways, and its’ Parent organisation (until 1962) the British Transport Commission, in the post-war decades. I focus particularly on the period between nationalisation in 1948 and the opening of the National Railway Museum in 1975, when responsibility for the preservation of historic railway objects passed to the Department of Education and Science (with the exception of paper records, which became the responsibility of the Public Records Office from 1972). In this period, the British Transport Historical Records Office was established in West London (with branches and York and Edinburgh), whilst a series of temporary exhibitions of railway history at the Shareholder’s Meeting Room in Euston in the 1950s were followed by the establishment of new transport museums at Clapham, South London in 1961 and at Swindon in 1962. Attempts by the British Transport Commission to preserve and display aspects of Britain’s railway history - and particularly, from 1951, those of its Curator of Historic Relics John Scholes and its Archivist Leonard Johnson- intersected with the increasing enthusiasm for railways amongst the general population, exemplified by the advent of new societies catering for this interest in addition to those established prior to the war, and also for the growing popularity of transport history as a subject of scholarly interest. This in turn took place in the context of increasing technological change on the network, notably the closure of thousands of miles of railway lines (often rural branch lines) and the abolition of steam locomotives in favour of diesel or electric power. This thesis shows that railway enthusiasts, through the Consultative Panel for the Preservation of British Transport Relics from 1958 onwards, played an active role in advising the Transport Commission on the preservation of railway heritage, notably the selection of historic locomotives to be saved for posterity. This thesis considers in detail the work of the Joint Locomotive Preservation Committee in 1948-1949 and of the Consultative Panel for the Preservation of British Transport Relics between 1958 and 1968, and also the 3 interrelated activities and museum displays of the Curator and Archivist of Historic Relics at the British Transport Commission (later the British Railways Board) between 1951 and 1974 (1972 in the case of the Archivist), including the museum displays at the Railway Museum in York, the Great Western Railway Museum at Swindon and the Museum of British Transport at Clapham. Figure 1. The interior of the Museum of British Transport at Clapham, 1966. © National Railway Museum and SSPL http://www.nrm.org.uk/ourcollection/photo?group=British%20Transport%20Commission &objid=1996-7038_BTF_9617 “The train at Pershore station was waiting that Sunday night Gas light on the platform, in my carriage electric light, Gas light on frosty evergreens, electric on Empire wood, The Victorian world and the present in a moment’s neighbourhood.” From Pershore Station, or a Liverish Journey First Class by John Betjeman 4 Acknowledgements “You’d have quite a crowd of people parading around the Luxembourg Garden if you really wanted to honor all of the new bus progenitor’s” Latour, B. (1996:2) As with buses, so with railways- or at least, with theses about them. There are many people who have kindly assisted me in completing this thesis- including some, beavering away in the bowels of the earth beneath archives up and down the land, whom I have never met, let alone know the names of. I will endeavour to thank as many people as I can in this section, though I feel that I must apologise in advance for any omissions. Firstly, I would like to thank my supervisors, Professors David Matless and Mike Heffernan, and my Internal Examiner Professor Charles Watkins, for their helpful advice and comments, not just in person as part of the supervisory process but also in responding to my emails over the years, however banal and ill-founded some of them- often sent in panic- turned out to be. I must also thank Professor Georgina Endfield for her role in securing the funding for this PhD. Without her work in this regard, this PhD may simply have never happened. I would also like to thank my interviewees, who enlightened me about the time period I am studying and opened the door to whole new avenues of research. In alphabetical order by surname, they are: Bob Ballard, Neil Butters, Sir Neil Cossons, Dieter Hopkin, Andy King and Rob Shorland-Ball. I am also grateful for the assistance I received at the archives where I accessed my primary material (not all of which was ultimately included in the finished thesis), notably Sarah Norville at the National Railway Museum, Jon Joliffe at the Transport Trust, Lis Chard at Thinktank: Birmingham Science Museum and Kathleen Dickson at the BFI National Archive. I would also like to thank Tim Petchey for gifting me several back issues of the Railway Antiques Gazette, and Bill King from the Great Eastern Railway Society and Gerry Nichols from the Stephenson Locomotive Society for sourcing photographs of some of this thesis’ key protagonists. Last but not least, I would like to thank my academic colleagues, particularly my office colleagues or in one case my housemate who have provided help and advice and also put up with my occasional moments of madness: Resh, Alex, Liam, Felix and Julia. Beyond this a special mention should also go to Lee and Matt from Kings College London and Newcastle University respectively, who have fulfilled a similar role at conferences- and the pubs beyond- along the way. I would also like to thank my parents, who have always been there to support me, in so many different ways, en route. 5 Contents List of Abbreviations 10 Chapter 1: Introduction 11 Chapter 2: Literature Review 23 2.1 The cultural impact of railways 23 2.2 Museums of transport 35 2.3 Histories and Practices of collecting 42 2.4 Technological Enthusiasm 48 2.5 Object subjectivities: conceptualisations of the object within the social sciences 55 2.6 Conclusion 63 Chapter 3: Methodology 65 3.1 Piecing the fragments together 72 3.2 Actor-Network Queries: Finding the fragments in 2013-2016 84 Chapter 4: “There is an intense and perfectly articulate interest in locomotive matters”: Nationalised beginnings, 1947-1951 91 4.1. The nature of British railway preservation in December 1947 94 4.2. “No one is ashamed to have worked for the Southern Railway”: corporate pride in the dying days of the Big Four 97 4.3. Plans for a British Railway Centre 101 4.4 Geographical tensions in the BTC’s early railway preservation policy 109 4.5 “He has not succeeded in completing his full terms of reference”: G.R. Smith’s Relics and Records reports of 1949 114 4.6 “We had our backs against the wall at this time”: W.O. Skeat and enthusiastic interventions in locomotive preservation, 1948-9 126 4.7 Conclusion 148 6 Chapter 5: “Difficulties should be overcome in the national interest”: forming the Departments of Historic Relics and Records, 1951-1958 150 5.1 The Preservation of Relics and Records 150 5.2. After the report: establishment of the Relics and Records organisations 160 5.3 The British Transport Historical Records Offices and those who used them 163 5.4 Exhibiting Britain’s railway history at the Festival of Britain, 1951 174 5.5 The exhibitions staged by the Department of Historic Relics during the 1950s 182 5.6. How railway preservation unfolded ‘on the ground’: The Scottish Region and the preservation of Gordon Highlander 190 5.7 “The ball is put right back in the Region’s court but they have to improvise as before for a racquet”: continuing problems of storage, display and decision making for the BTC’s historic relics 203 5.8 Conclusion 210 Chapter 6: “We would be very lucky to get some locomotives preserved in any shape or form”: establishing and running the Consultative Panel for the Preservation of British Transport Relics, 1958-1962 212 6.1 Growing public Concern over BTC policy, 1957-1958 215 6.2 Forming the Consultative Panel 223 6.3. Organising and running the Consultative Panel 228 6.4 The locomotive listing process, 1958-1960 233 7 6.5 Amendments to the list 1960-1961 253 6.6 ‘Railway preservation is not within our terms of reference’: Relationships between the Consultative Panel, the BTC and other railway enthusiast groups 263 6.7 Conclusion 279 Chapter 7 “The sight hits you hard in the solar plexus”: Britain’s Transport Museums in the 1960s 281 7.1 Establishing a regional network of museums 287 7.2 Thinking regionally about the railway, within and beyond the railway literature 294 7.3 “A noble zoo”: The Museum of British Transport, Clapham 299 7.4 “An interim statement”: Transport Preserved by Bryan Morgan 313 7.5 Displaying the Railway Age at Clapham and beyond 320 7.6 Organised chaos or “rearguard action”? Running the Museum of British Transport 325 7.7 Sparrows but no strippers: Quotidian and carnivalesque life at Clapham 337 7.8 “You are never likely to forget it”: the Great Western Railway Museum, Swindon 343 7.9 Progress? The Great Western Railway Museum as a site of post- industrial protest and melancholia 351 7.10 “There is no tourist attraction”: Swindon’s financial and spatial struggles 357 7.11 “Modesty clings to it still”: The Railway Museum, York 362 7.12 The 1960s: Uncertain times for Britain’s Railway Museums 373 7.13 Transport Museums and enthusiasts 380 7.14 Conclusion 384 Chapter 8: Conclusion 386 Bibliography 403 8 List of figures 1.