The Life of LTC Rolt

Where Engineering Met Literature

Victoria Owens

• Publisher: Pen and Sword History
• Year: 2024
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781399056632
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Explores the life of a young engineer turned prolific writer, chronicling Britain's industrial heritage through adversity and literary success. In 1926, Tom Rolt who was then sixteen years old, abandoned his public school education. Having taken a job with a small firm of agricultural engineers, he realized that he had found his life's calling. But the way ahead was neither smooth nor easy. Having secured a premium apprenticeship, the firm which took him on foundered and although he eventually qualified as a mechanical engineer, the 1930s depression made it almost impossible to find regular employment. Nothing daunted, with the encouragement of his mysterious companion 'Cara', he turned to writing. His literary career flourished alongside his association with the Vintage Sports Car Club, the Inland Waterways Association and the Talyllyn Railway. Between his Inland Waterways Association and Talyllyn phases, Angela, his first wife, left him to join Billy Smart's Circus, and Sonia –an actress-turned-boatwoman – would become his second wife. Over the course of his life, he produced over thirty books, their subject matters ranging from canals and railways to engineering biography; company histories; a collection of accomplished ghost stories and a topographical survey of Worcestershire. He also wrote polemics about the plight of the craftsman in a world which relied increasingly upon mass production. In this book, the first full-length biography of Tom Rolt and a complement to his auto-biographical Landscape trilogy, Victoria Owens draws upon his surviving letters and unpublished manuscripts to tell the story of the engineer-turned-writer who made Britain's industrial past the stuff of enduring literature.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Chapter One Beginnings
• Chapter Two ‘the dirty devices of this world’
• Chapter Three The Apprentice in the Country
• Chapter Four The Apprentice in the Town
• Chapter Five Marking Time
• Chapter Six Love and War
• Chapter Seven Pacifism and the Path to Fame
• Chapter Eight Robert Aickman
• Chapter Nine After Lifford Bridge
• Chapter Ten The End of the Cressy Years
• Chapter Eleven The Talyllyn Railway
• Chapter Twelve Towards a Settled Life
• Chapter Thirteen Second Breakthrough
• Chapter Fourteen Chronicler of Companies
• Chapter Fifteen The Realm of Ghosts
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Plates