Quorn Swapmeet

The photo shows my “stall” at Quorn Swapmeet on the Great Central Railway yesterday, my third visit there over the last couple of years. I thought originally that I might shift some books [Ha!] but now I’m trying to thin out my print and poster collection as the focal point of my interest has changed.

This is a long-established and popular event in the railwayana catalogue – effectively a car boot [or table top] sale for fans of railway memorabilia. It is held three times a year, in the car park and former goods yard at Quorn and Woodhouse station.

An early start is required to assure a less peripheral spot, as the gates open at 7.30 am and it is an hour’s drive to get there, in my case. As I have discovered, however, the early bird is not automatically assured of any worms.

As I have various pieces of paper on show, I depend on it being a dry day. If its windy, it can also be a bit tricky, in fact I’m all over the place - and so is the paper.

To Hull and back

I’ve been to Hull twice in recent times. On both occasions we have visited the Deep, a splendid aquarium. It was wet outside the Deep, as well. It was also cold and windy on both occasions, though I’m sure Hull has its days. Roads, shops, cafes and pavements all seemed surprisingly quiet for a working weekday in a city centre, and with the 2017 city of culture celebrations now having fizzled out, there was rather a feeling of “What next, then?” about the place.

We found a lovely painting in the Ferens art gallery, however - The First Born by Frederick William Elwell, and this was probably the highlight of the visit, along with the sharks and the manta rays.

The concourse at Hull Paragon station has this very dramatic and effective statue to remember Philip Larkin, a favourite son. The Whitsun Weddings is the best known of his few railway themed poems.

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.]

“I thought all hedgehogs were flat.”

I was just wondering if the Detectorists sitcom was really all that funny, when the council highways employee made his observation. That’s the nature of it. It lulls you into this leisurely stroll through a timeless rural England where it is always summer and then jolts you into the here and now with an amusing one-liner.

Detectorists has a warmth to it. I like the unhurried muddling through of the central characters and their world-weary pragmatism in the face of day-to-day problems. I love the gaps in the dialogue and the opportunities provided for reflection on the important things in life - family, friends, the natural world and a sense of time and place.

As I crawled gingerly out of a weather-bound leisure centre car park recently, I passed a black pick-up drawing up outside the school entrance. The circular sign on the door said “Find a field.” I also caught the word detectorists, but without doing a 180 degrees wheel spin on the ice, those were the only clues I had to go on.

The Detectorist Diggers Club arranges access to sites with land owners, organises metal detecting events and charges a fee to those taking part - thus the offer to find a field. I can see the attraction, and it obviously has some shared characteristics with railway heritage - most obviously by flagging up the intrinsic historical value of artefacts.  

More than just a glitch

A “sudden or temporary malfunction” didn’t really do it justice. It was totally stuffed. Computers [and cars] are great when they are working and a pain when they are not. I can barely believe that I had become so dependent on it.

The last one turned out to be what my mother would have described as “a pig in a poke.” I took it back where it came from in the Victoria shopping centre and they eventually offered me a replacement. This used to be the Great Central Railway’s Victoria station in the centre of Nottingham. Below it, a vast car park fills the space where the trains once ran. At street level, only the clock tower remains. From the depths of the car park, you can see the entrance to the tunnel that took the GCR northwards under Mansfield Road.

The railway was soon diving into a tunnel beneath Thurland Street at the southern end of the station, too. It burst out into daylight at Weekday Cross, a much photographed and frequently painted location [by the admirable Rob Rowland, amongst others] adjacent to the Broad Marsh and High Pavement, where the Contemporary art gallery now stands.

I enjoy gradually piecing together my mental jigsaw of Nottingham’s railway past, picturing in my mind’s eye the scenes that I missed while growing up over a hundred miles away. With my new computer now up and running, I’m comforted that my journeys to the city are rarely wasted in my imaginary world, either.

    

Ten to two feet

When Caerphilly Council gave out advice recently to walk like a penguin, with feet pointing slightly outwards, in order to keep upright when combatting the snow and ice inflicted on us by the Beast from the East, it resonated with me straight away. I’ve been doing that all my life.

Chris reminds me [regularly] that as I turned the corner out of Glen Park Road into Mount Pleasant Road, in Wallasey, in 1967, I was always immediately recognisable from my ten to two feet as she walked up the hill to school from the opposite direction and that was from a couple of hundred yards away, down at Hose Side corner - no mean feat!!

As I waddled into Newark Northgate station recently, I found the grand old Potts clock not knowing what time of day it was, though it was adamant that it wasn’t ten to two or even ten to ten. 

William Potts set up his clock making business in Leeds in 1833. The clocks were sold to cathedrals, town halls, schools and engineering works, as well as to the railways, both at home and abroad.

An iconic part of the platform one landscape at Newark Northgate for many a year, it must have seen every Eastern namer under the sun stream by during the 50s and 60s, so there’s a thought.

Luckily, for the benefit of today’s travellers there is an alternative digital affair nearby, which appears to be more in synch’ with both GMT and the current railway timetable.

Yet more bricks in the wall

In the leisure centre car park, a low wall separates the car parking bays from the surrounding flower beds. You can’t see the wall when you reverse your car into a space. Consequently, the area is frequently littered with piles of bricks where people have had little accidents. There was a new hillock of rubble there the other day.

The wall is then rebuilt, but before long it happens again at another spot. Why not do away with the wall altogether? It is pretty clear where the tarmac ends and the bushes begin. If a solid reminder is needed, then a single paved kerbstone would surely do the trick. Alternatively, why not make the wall high enough to be seen through a rear-view mirror?

One wall that I am only too pleased to see properly maintained is that built by Brunel in the mid-nineteenth century along the south Devon coastline at Dawlish. It remains as the only through rail route to the far south west of England, in spite of the sea’s frequent efforts to remove it. As such, it has to be defended at all costs - which actually turns out to be quite a lot.