A Loo with a View

The lounge area of our holiday home in St Ives had a panoramic view of the harbour and the Island [as is it known - even though it is not actually detached from the mainland]. Another floor up, our open-plan bedroom meant that one could enjoy a similar vista, either sitting in the bath or on the loo.

A short walk down Primrose Valley leads straight to Porthminster beach. The GWR shuttle service to St Erth, made up of a couple of two-car units, is seen leaving St Ives station and immediately trundling over St Ives viaduct. 

Call me Mr Fussy, but…

It was going to be a hot day, so I thought I’d go for the early train for a change. Always a chance of some wildlife while I wait. On Monday, a weasel had poked its low-slung sausage body out into the road just ahead of my front wheel. It saw me at the last minute and scurried back into the grass.

A couple carrying binoculars approached the gated crossing over the railway. “I can hear a willow warbler”, I offered. “Yes, I saw that. Once they’ve stopped calling you can only tell them from chiff-chaffs by the colour of their legs”. This was news to me, but its funny how that registered straight away as, “I am someone who always has to have the last word”.

They crossed the line but stopped at the trackside. “I should go through the gate, actually”, I said, “They are quite hot on that these days. I think they phone through and someone might come along”, thinking about some more recent railway police responses to trespassing incidents that I’d heard about. Instead of heeding my advice, the man just stood there and the lady went on a trackside walkabout between the down line and the metal farm gate. They really did not like being told, I thought.

The train was due. The barriers at Rolleston station came down and the signal changed to amber. “Its coming now”, I added in the hope that they would take the hint. “You can hear them before they arrive”, he exclaimed, “and they hoot for the crossings”. His wife finally went through the gate. I breathed a sigh of relief. I did not know if another train was coming from the Nottingham direction, while all our attention was directed towards the freight coming the other way. If so, she could have been taken unawares and put herself in real danger. At the last moment, he too withdrew to the right side of the gate.

“Arse”, I thought.

“Cheers, then”, I said.    

      

Ferret and Dartboard

A recent railway-themed letter to the Telegraph was drawn to my attention by a friend. The writer recounted how in the 1950s the Garter King of Arms had “an apoplectic fit” on discovering that the lion emblem on a locomotive’s tender had been turned round to face the right so that it faced the front of the locomotive. Unsurprisingly, he knew better than anyone that according to convention heraldic lions always faced left. The revelation presumably left those responsible at British Railways red-faced until they were able to phase out the offending articles and replace them with the correct version. As the contributor to the letters page reminded us, “these things need to be right”.

Blissfully unaware of the issue, myself, I thought the least I could do was get up to speed on BR’s lion emblems, even if I was over 60 years too late for it to have ever spoilt an otherwise enjoyable day out on the trains for me, personally.

The first “lion on wheel” emblem adopted for use on BR locomotives is attributed to the celebrated poster designer, Abram Games [though that is open to conjecture, apparently, as explained on the website thebeautyoftransport.com]

As it was an emblem/seal/totem/logo/crest and not officially heraldic, BR were free to have the lion facing the front of the loco on each side without infringing etiquette [or endangering the health of an unsuspecting Garter of Arms]. A replacement design was eventually introduced, also incorporating a lion and wheel, that was based on the British Transport Commission’s own coat of arms, which had been registered with the College of Arms in 1956.  However, BR continued its previous practice of having the lion facing the front on the right-hand side of the tender, and in doing so they infringed the terms of the registered design. After this faux pas had been pointed out to them, they phased out the offending version and after 1959 they followed the accepted practice. The new design was irreverently described as “the ferret and dartboard”, though what the Garter of Arms thought about that is not recorded.     

The replacement design became an instantly recognisable part of our formative years, even though I can hardly have claimed to have studied it closely at any stage. It is important to get it right, not because all convention must always be followed rigidly to satisfy the obsessions of people in high places, but because every artistic design is someone’s creation, even where it represents a large corporate body, and they deserve to have the integrity of their work upheld.

Pates

Pates, as we called the Patriot Class, came in two sizes. Un-rebuilt and rebuilt were very different engines to look at, yet the class as a whole was made up of a good mixture of both. Un-rebuilt locos seemed very old and chunky and some had already been withdrawn from service by the time of my 1962 combined volume. Rebuilt versions, with their tapered boilers and curved windshields, looked more like the Royal Scots.

John Dyer photographed both types - No. 45541 Duke of Sutherland was on Birkenhead sheds in April 1961 and No. 45531 Sir Frederick Harrison was seen at Stockport Edgeley sheds in August of the following year.