The Impact of the Railway on Society in Britain

Essays in Honour of Jack Simmons

A. K. B. Evans, J.V. Gough

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780754609490
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351887830
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Jack Simmons, perhaps more than any other single scholar, is responsible for the advancement of the academic study of transport history. As well as being a co-founder of the Journal of Transport History, he wrote extensively on a variety of transport-related topics and was instrumental in developing the London Transport and the National Railway museums. Whilst his death in September 2000 at the age of 85 was a sad loss to the world of transport history, the achievements of his life, celebrated in this festschrift, remain a lasting legacy to succeeding generations of scholars in many fields. Concentrating on the theme of the railways, and how they dramatically affected the development of Britain and her society, this collection touches on numerous issues first highlighted by Professor Simmons which are now central to academic study. These include the men who built the railways, those who financed the enterprise, how the railways affected such everyday issues as tourism, the arts, and politics, as well as the lasting legacy of the railways in a country now dominated by the private car. This volume written by former friends, students and colleagues of Professor Simmons reflects these interests, and provides a fitting tribute to one of the truly great British historians of the twentieth century.

Chapter 1
Jack Simmons: the Making of an Historian

Michael Robbins

The first time I met Jack Simmons was one evening in September 1929 when we both walked in as new boys - King's Scholars - at Westminster School. There were 40 King's Scholars altogether. The eight of us elected that year were thrown together in a common room, and we tried to find out about the others. Jack and I had never met before. He was a south Londoner from Carshalton in Surrey; I was a north Londoner from the Hampstead Garden Suburb. We soon discovered that we were both interested, in a boyish kind of way, in looking at railways; but we came from two different worlds of railways. The Southern was very much a developing entity of its own kind at that time. That first evening, he said, 'I bet you can't tell me the headcode of the South London line from Victoria to London Bridge.' I said, 'Well,Ican. It's 2.' It was actually easy to remember - all the others were letters. After that we found we had a good deal in common. Neither of us cared for sport. Jack already had a problem with his twisted spine (scoliosis), though that did not prevent him from doing a lot of things. We were expected to participate in sports - cricket or football, or rowing. If there was a football match against Charterhouse or another school, we were all turned out to watch and shout for our side. Jack and I became adept at dodging the column, and on our way to and from the playing field we sat together at the back of the bus and talked about many things, including politics.

Jack had already been in the school for a year in one of the boarding houses (Grant's). He counted as a year older than I was, even though in fact he was only ten days older, because my birthday on 7 September and his at the end of August fell on either side of the crucial 1 September date line. As he had been in the school for a year before becoming a King's Scholar, he moved up a year after two years in College, which meant that we lost touch a little. Both of us started in the Classical Fifth form, but at the end of the first year (after what was then called School Certificate) we had to make a choice between classical and modern (science), or joining a small bunch of historians. Jack went for history. They had not even got a form room - the group met in a corner of the library. There were about eight of them at a time. There were two masters. Lawrence Tanner, who was closely associated with the Abbey establishment, was one of them and a good historian.¹ The other was John Bowie, who was later a professor and wrote a history of the British Empire.² I stayed on the classical side.

Jack went on to get a Westminster scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford, in 1933, and he went up that year. I was a year behind and got one in 1934. I found Jack and some other friends there when I arrived. He was doing straightforward Modem History. I ought to have followed a four-year course, but I managed to persuade the Christ Church tutors to let me follow the most unusual course of doing Greats without Mods³ - something they regarded as very irregular if not immoral. So both of us were on three-year courses, with Jack a year ahead. However, he then fell sick and had to spend a good deal of time in the Acland Nursing Home, so he got leave to drop back a year, and he took his degree in 1937, as I did.

We had already done a certain amount of scribbling about railways together. The Oxford University Railway Society had begun in John Betjeman's day as a sort of on-train dining club on the Great Western Railway, but behaviour had become so uproarious that the proctors closed it down. It therefore had to be refounded in a quite different form, and when I came along it had been running for several years with a programme of lectures, visits, and so on. J.G. Griffith⁴ was secretary before me, and I was followed by John Machines,⁵ who died rather early. In 1936 I got Jack to give a lecture about the proposed railway station for Oxford which was not built in 1863. In preparation for this talk he went into the city archives and examined the drawings and records. I hope that a copy survives somewhere.

I had taken to running a little quarterly periodical called Locomotion. Jack was on the committee of foundation members. We were rather schoolboy number-grubbers. Various other friends were involved, including Roger Kidner. He and I founded the Oakwood Press together, and Roger went on with a long string of publications.⁶ At the time in the middle 1930s when Jack and I were at Oxford the Oakwood Library short histories of individual railways - was begun. I did the North London as the first of the series; D.S.M. Barrie wrote on the Taff Vale as the second; and Jack was on the point of doing the Maryport & Carlisle. But the war stopped all that.

In 1937 Jack had gone to Pans for the winter to brash up his French and I went to Vienna to learn German. I was fairly busy in the two years 1938 and 1939, and I did not see much of him then. We all knew there was going to be a war, but of course we could not know exactly when it would be. It must have been at that time that Jack became very much interested in imperial history, with Reginald Coupland. He became a sort of personal assistant to Coupland, though not called that. He moved his home to Boar's Hill outside Oxford to be near Coupland. It was obvious that he could not be called up - he was not fit enough for that. So he spent the war years reading and ghosting for Coupland, who had all sorts of interests. He also met Margery Perham and did a joint work with her.⁷ He did a lot of reading in the British Museum for one of Coupland's books, Livingstone's Last Journey (1945) and he involved himself very much with the whole of the 1880s and 1890s imperial period. He also, of course, kept his private interest in railways going, and he finished the Maryport & Carlisle book (Oakwood Library no. 4) in 1947.

Leicester came into the picture in the summer of 1946, when the University College set out to look for a professor of history. Jack must have been in a particularly favourable position - there were very few people at that time who were ready for such a post. They were mainly recovering from the war. Jack was the perfectly right person; but he was also lucky to be in the corridor at the moment the door opened. He was offered the post. He liked the principal, F.L. Attenborough, and his sons, and got to know them quite well. W.G. Hoskins was already on the staff (as lecturer-in-charge of the Department of Economics and Commerce), but he did not apply for the chair.

The first time I visited him at Leicester, Jack was living in a hotel in the New Walk and his mother was still back at Boar's Hill - this was before they had a house at Leicester in Stoneygate off the London Road. I met Hoskins and I got the impression that there were no hard feelings between them at all about the chair. Hoskins did not want it - he wanted to get on with writing about Midland peasantry and Wigston and so on, and he also resented every minute of the time he was away from Devon. These two were strong characters, but they hit it off quite well. This was in a way surprising, and it led to Jack starting to think about the range of history that he wanted to master. His inaugural lecture, which contains the clues to much of all this, was called Local, National, and Imperial History.⁸ That was given in 1948, and in it he mapped out his programme, though not in detail. He showed that he had a concept of the three areas having a relation with one another. This is a key document in understanding Jack; at that time he was looking pretty broadly at history (though not outside the empire). He was never especially interested in European or United States or world history.

Soon after his arrival at Leicester, Jack was impressed with the need for a countrywide series of books on England, county by county, with a few separately on cities, providing both a history and a gazetteer. He persuaded the firm of Collins to take the project on, somewhat on the lines of their successful New Naturalist series. I did one on Middlesex (1953) - not my line at all, really - and W.G. Hoskins (who had become Reader and Head of Leicester's new Department of English Local History from 1948 until 1951 when he was appointed Reader at Oxford) did a very good one on Devon (1954, since reprinted). But the intended authors were slow to deliver, and Collins lost patience and threw up the series. Jack was a firm editor who provided clear guidance about what he wanted. He himself was to have written Berkshire, but that never came off. It was a great loss that no more volumes appeared.

Things began to change a good deal for Jack in the early 1950s, because he thought that transport history - not railway history - was neglected by his academic colleagues. It had no journal of its own and there were few contributions on the subject in the economic history journals. So Jack proposed to the University College of Leicester that it should publish a journal devoted to the history of transport in the broadest sense, and he asked me to join him as joint editor. The first issue came out in 1953. We did a sort of balancing act. I tried to bring in people from the world of operating transport who had broad interests, like Peter Masefield (air) and John Elliot (rail). At the same time we took a more strictly academic path, with contributed articles seriously referenced, book reviews, current publications, and accessions to documentary collections. The Journal of Transport History came out twice a year. We got along like that until about 1963/4.I managed to find just enough time to play my part when I was Secretary of the London Transport Executive. But in 1965 I got a job there which made me sure that I must pull out because of professional pressures: there was not enough time to do my part of the Journal job properly. I told him that I must stand down, which he understood, and I notified Leicester University, which took absolutely no notice. I did not even receive a letter of acknowledgement, let alone thanks. Soon the Journal stopped appearing, and for a time there was a gap.⁹ In 1975 there was a commemorative number, with a list of Jack's published writings down to that date, when Jack retired.¹⁰

It had become evident that Jack had extraordinary strength in the writing of the railway history of Britain (not Ireland, and sometimes also leaving Scotland to other hands). He knew a great deal about the subject; he knew what railways were, how they operated, and so on. On the whole he liked them - mainly, but not exclusively, the old steam railways. He was willing to put in a great deal of time to his research and writing. For example, the little Maryport & Carlisle book was a work of real craftsmanship, with nothing skimped at all. Perhaps most importantly, he had an enormous depth of reading. The list of references at the back of his books shows what a staggering variety of sources he could call upon. There are the expected ones, of course - the official materials that became available only slowly in this period with the opening up of the railway archive in the Scottish Record Office and the historical records of the British Transport commission, transferred later to the Public Record Office. But there are also literary sources, like Henry James, R.L. Stevenson, and plenty of others. All this was worked together very skilfully into a narrative.

His year as Acting Vice-Chancellor of the university¹¹ in 1961-2 had made it difficult for him to do the research and writing that he wanted to do, but after his retirement he came back to them again. He had in mind a four-volume series on the railway in England and Wales. The first volume of this (The Railway in England and Wales 1830-1914) appeared with Leicester University Press in 1978, and the further volumes were to be Town and Country, Mind and Eye, and a volume treating the community at large and the part played by the railway in its social, economic, and political life. However, that arrangement collapsed, and Jack had to find different publishers for the remaining volumes as free-standing projects. The second volume, The Railway in Town and Country 1830-1914, came out with David & Charles in 1986. The third volume, Mind and Eye, appeared from Thames & Hudson in 1991 as The Victorian Railway.

The series is marked by a particular personality and feeling and approach - a civilized approach to the place of the railway in British society that had not been demonstrated before. There had been technical histories, mostly of locomotives and rolling-stock (the 'hardware' approach), and there had been the gossipy history as written by Hamilton Ellis. But there had been nothing similar to the comprehensive railway history that Jack produced. He turned to all kinds of sources that had not previously been used. His achievement was to make it clear that railway history was an area of the social history of England and Wales that deserved looking at much more closely, and he showed how to do that. Then in 1997 there appeared the indispensable Oxford Companion to British Railway History, of which Jack was co-editor with Gordon Biddle and to which he made by far the most contributions (more than 300; about one-third of the volume). It was a triumph.

Most boys who get interested in railways probably begin with a love of locomotives. Jack began to write in Locomotion in the 1930s with an article about the Ivatt locomotives of the Great Northern Railway; in 1936-7 he wrote about the naming of locomotives, and he went on to biographical notes about Dionysius Lardner and George Bradshaw. Signs of interest in museums followed, with pieces on the Great Western collection at Paddington (he always had a special feeling for the GWR) and the Rastrick collection in the University of London (this one unsigned).¹²

Jack Simmons also showed a very strong interest in the museum side of things, in collections. There is a reading room named after him at the National Railway Museum at York. He was also involved with transport museums in western Europe. Throughout, his strength was to be broad, liberal, and civilized in his approach to what could easily become a humdrum, inward-looking subject. He was no great technician, and he did not want to be. But he spotted and lamented that there was no decent histoiy of British railway signalling (though the Friends of the National Railway Museum are now doing something about that). Jack was always looking over the fence at the impact of the railway on the country through which it passed, and he was concerned too with the indirect effects the railway had on people's lives. For example, he and I argued about how far the spread of fish and chips could be put down to the railway. There was fish and chips in Oldham in the 1860s; where did the fish come from, and how?

These occupations did not prevent him from doing things that he thought were part of the duty of a good citizen within Leicester itself. He wrote a guidebook to the city, which went into several editions, and a history (Leicester Past and Present, 2 volumes, 1974), and he served on the committee of the Leicestershire Archaeological Society - he edited its Transactions from 1948 to 1961 and was its president from 1966 to 1977. He was chairman of the Leicester Local Broadcasting Council from 1967 to 1970.

So Jack was not solely a railway historian; but the subject was never very far from his mind. The aspects of the railway in history were aspects that had on the whole been ignored by other people. Railway historians tend to grind out information from statutory and other sources about the preliminaries, the birth, and perhaps the early years of a railway, and then they pay no attention to developments until closure many years later. This is the kind of thing you get from official records. But there is the tedious reading of the daily and weekly press to get more and fill in the middle. Jack always paid attention to the official record; but after the Maryport & Carlisle book (which was inclusive enough to mention Wilkie Collins and The Woman in White) he went on making more of the subject. He saw the railway as a part of the wider society rather than as an entity in itself. The impact of the railway on the landscape and townscape was coupled with that. He drew attention to those aspects more sharply than anyone had done before. Mind and Eye as a proposed title is ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Foreword Derek H. Aldcroft
• Editors' Preface
• Abbreviations
• Three Tributes Alan Everitt, J. Mordaunt Crook, Dame Margaret Weston
• 1 Jack Simmons: the Making of an Historian Michael Robbins
• Section I The Railway: Origins and Working
• Section II Spirit, Mind and Eye
• Section III The Opening Up of Britain
• Section IV Heritage and History
• Appendix Jack Simmons: a Bibliography of his Published Writings Diana Dixon and Robert Peberdy
• List of Sponsors
• Index