A bit sniffy

My daughter gave me a book for Christmas. Simon Garfield was already known to both of us as the author of On the Map, a splendid and well written explanation of the importance of maps over the centuries, which had formed a previous present from her, in the belief that, as an erstwhile geographer, I would find it of interest, which I duly did.

The Last Journey of William Huskisson [Faber and Faber Limited, 2003] is also informative and very readable, no section more so than the description of the meeting between twenty-one-year old Fanny Kemble, an actress with good connections and George Stephenson, himself, who accompanied her on her first ride behind the Rocket as part of a demonstration run prior to the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830. It is a delightful story and well told.

Later in the book, Simon Garfield gets quite hooked on L&MR memorabilia, especially original paperwork, and so, quite logically, he finds himself attending railwayana fairs and auctions for the first time. This is how he describes what he discovered there.

“Whenever I went to these things I found I had to battle my way past an eager crowd of pensionable men with uncommon hair partings and the whiff of heartbreak about them, as if they had been spending too long in airless rooms with their timetable collections and had begun to question whether they had been wasting their weekends. Their aim was completion, but their task was impossible: there was just too much railway stuff out there. They were a knowledgeable bunch and the thing they knew most about was each other.” [p.206]

By this last point he meant that many stall holders and customers knew each other well as providers and consumers, respectively, of some very specific items in which they shared a mutual interest. I take his point about the volume of stuff out there and perhaps it is that fact particularly, second only to the availability of disposable income, which drives specialisation and personal choices within the field.

I nevertheless bristled a bit when I read about myself in these terms and then I had a bit of a think about it. I remember once being seated at Stoneleigh in winter and suddenly thinking that there was not much air in the room. In summer, those big side entrances are sometimes opened for a welcome breeze. I have luckily not suffered much from respiratory problems, to date, but I was definitely conscious that there was perhaps not quite enough fresh air to go around everyone. I surmised that by mid-afternoon a sharp intake of breath might already be second or third hand. I went to stretch my legs.

I don’t feel desperately inclined to re-visit for long the old chestnut of whether we are wasting our time or not. I’m inclined to give us the benefit of any doubt on the basis of valuing heritage and a sense of history, which Simon Garfield himself also obviously shares. The whole collecting business is very widespread and certainly not confined to railway stuff anyway. I would have to hold up my hands in agreement about the pensionable age thing. To my knowledge, there will be no more palatable escape for any of us from that one.

My wife and I took a train from Kidderminster - it must be a few years ago now and during one of the Severn Valley Railway’s brilliant gala weekends. I chose an elderly ex-LMS mixed first and third-class compartment coach because it was close to the engine, the chunky ex-GWR 2-8-0 tank No. 4270, that was visiting from the Gloucestershire Warwickshire Railway.

“This compartment stinks,” my wife observed as we entered the third-class option. She turned tail straight away and headed for the adjacent first-class alternative, which she would have been happy with had we been eligible. Before you could say “aerosol air freshener,” she was on her mobile phone to our friend, John, who works as a volunteer in the carriage department at the SVR. “Haven’t you got any shampoo for your upholstery?” was her opening gambit, holding him personally responsible for our short-lived discomfort.

It seems that John is never happier these days than when fully equipped with paint brushes and varnish, and he has recently been rewarded for having a steady hand by promotion to lining out duties on the immaculately refurbished stock. Back in third class, though a little further down the train, Chris opened the window for some ventilation. I opened it a bit further so I could hear the beat of the locomotive. Then I settled down and kept my fingers crossed for a relaxing journey to Bridgnorth. Momentarily, I caught sight of my reflection in the carriage window and remembered the days when I had sufficient hair for an uncommon parting.

 

Along the route, I pondered over whether I, too, had a whiff of heartbreak about me. We are still together after all this time, of course, and who else would be so protective of the sensitivity of my olfactory organ in such situations? That reminded me that I needed to remove the rotting leaves from the drain next to the kitchen door when I got home.

[This article appears in the current edition of the Railway Antiques Gazette, for which I am grateful to the editor, Tim Petchey.]