Jack Simmons

Book Review: Welsh SteamBriwnant-JonesGwyn, Welsh Steam, University of Wales Press, Cardiff (1991), 90 pp., £9·95.

drawn by a single horse. The writer praises the efficiency of the railroad and wonders at the massive earthworks, bridges and inclined planes of the Baltimore and Ohio. However, his journey took 8 hours for 61 miles (he would have gone a good deal quicker on an English turnpike road of the period), partly because, he records, having met a train of cars, loaded principally with flour, and having but one track, we were obliged to retrograde for some distance until we arrived at a turnout. The remaining extracts vary in novelty; those from Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson are reasonably familiar and might well have been omitted. This reviewer would have preferred more and shorter extracts, with more information about railroads and fewer lengthy descriptions of scenery. There are a few nuggets for the historian. One is an account of liveand-let-live relationships between tramps and the crews of freight trains used for free travel by no means the constant fisticuffs of railway folklore. Another is about a rather under-documented phase of US transport history, the short era in which the inter-urban trolley lines flourished. It is a record of a New York to Chicago trip which in theory could have been entirely performed by trolley. Actually the traveller used steam trains to close one or two gaps in the inter-urban network with reasonable speed and comfort; his final reckoning was 956 miles by inter-urbans and 187 miles by steam, taking altogether 3 days 21 hours. The concluding extracts deal with a trip on the Twentieth Century Limited and the modern decline of the passenger railroad, a note of sadness offset by a ride on a Metroliner of the North-East Corridor. This is not a picture book, but there are some relevant illustrations. The weight of the acidfree paper used makes this quite a substantial volume to handle, but the pictures are not as sharp as they should be. There is an index.

Review: The Lancashire & Yorkshire RailwayTHE LANCASHIRE & YORKSHIRE RAILWAY. By MarshallJohn. Volume III. (David & Charles, 1972. 294 pp. Illustrated. £3.50.)

This volume completes Mr Marshalls history of the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway. It is devoted entirely to the companys locomotives and rolling-stock. Like its predecessorsit is a careful piece of work, businesslike, straightforward, plainly written. Mr Marshall has firm notions of what should and should not be included in a book ofthis sort. He will not print the logs oftrain runs, dismissingthem with somejustice as padding for which there is no space in a railway history. But he goes very far in the opposite direction. giving us for example no information about the locomotives consumption of fuel. The result is a narrative of the production of locomotive types, with some useful discussion of their technical success and failure, but very little about their economy in working. The account of the rolling-stock here is most welcome-though sincethe North Union Railway is included, why is there no mention of the model of one of its early carriages in the Museum of British Transport, one of the finest of all its kind? Mr Marshall tells us what we want to know, not only about the carriages themselves but about their suspensionand brakes, heating and lighting. The eager student of the railway in its central role of carrier will have cause only to wish for more. We can now look at Mr Marshalls work as a whole and appreciate it fairly. Its grave defect is that it tells us so little about the company itself. There is a good index; but you will search it in vain for rates, for instance, or trade unions. On the other hand the book has important merits. It gives us the first coherent account ofone of the most interesting, and most important, of the English railway companies. It is a pre-eminently sensible book, free from nearly all the absurd partisanship that has disfigured so much of what passes for railway history. Perhaps this denies it a little light and shade. Here is a company that was conspicuously transformed from a very bad railway company indeed into a good one. In 1864 it was characterized to a Parliamentary committee as a most wealthy, most respectable, and most conservative company. Its wealth the source, no doubt, of its respectability and conservatism arose not only from the value of its traffic but also from the cheap and nasty facilities it offered. This can be discerned in Mr Marshalls second volume, particularly at pp. 249-50, but he does not say enough ofthe fascinating processof change, which can be paralleled in Britain perhaps on the Great North of Scotland Railway alone. For what he does tell us, however some of it new, and all of it arranged in an orderly fashion for the first time we ought to be grateful.

Review: A History of British Railways down to the Year 1830A HISTORY OF BRITISH RAILWAYS DOWN TO THE YEAR 1830. By MarshallC. F. Dendy. (Oxford University Press, second impression, corrected, 1971. xviii246 pp. Illustrations. Maps. £6.00.)

is particularly good on the way in which pressure groups have exerted influence on parliamentary legislation (incidentally the motor car lobby turns out to have been not quite as influential as one might have expected), it falls short of the ideal. The somewhat erratic treatment ofissues makes it difficult to discern just how ideasand policieshave changed over a period oftime, while the frequent reference to, but insufficient treatment of, the major problems leaves one with a sense of frustration. Moreover, one senses that the author is-resigned to the fact that there is or will be no proper and lasting solution to the traffic problem, partly because governments will shrink from taking bold measures to deal with the car. He may well be right since Mishan type solutions are ruled out because they are politically unacceptable and many of the alternative solutions only provide temporary palliatives. The difficulty liesnot in the lack ofsolutions but in the fact that many ofthem are unacceptable to the vast majority of families who now own carsand feel they have a right to use them as they wish. Thus until opinion swings round to the view that there may be a case on socialand economic grounds for restricting the use of cars we shall be faced with the ever increasing problems which the inexorable growth ofmotor traffic presents.

Review: Transportation in Modern EnglandTRANSPORTATION IN MODERN ENGLAND. By JackmanW. T.. (Cass, 1962. xxxiv, 820 pp. Maps. £7.)

Weapons Policy because he rightly regards it as a typical case-history of a primarily military procurement policy which extended over much of the first four decades of the twentieth century. He claims, quite clearly with justification, that the story holds lessons for more recent military development programmes because,although the technical problems are, of course, now quite different, the workings of Government administrationsand the effectofhuman nature and of political pressures have not really changed. Certainly everybody concerned with the initiation and administration of current aircraft, space, and other defence programmes could benefit from a study of this book. History, often in only slightly altered guise, seemsto have a remarkable way of repeating itself quite faithfully in this as in other fields. Apart from its interest as a case study of procurement policy, this book covers a lot of historical ground not previously investigated. In his final chapter, Dr. Higham seeksto put the whole British rigid programme into perspective and, in particular, points out that rather more than £10 million was spent by Britain on rigid airship development between 1908 and 1931equivalent to perhaps £27 million in todays money values. For thisexpenditure we completed 17 rigids and flew them a total of about 3000 hours. Most of these aircraft were belated copies of German designs and did not, therefore, contribute much to progress in rigid airship design. The last two British rigids, R.l00 and R.I0l, were perhaps exceptions in that technically they broke some new ground, but as they contributed nothing to the design of the last two Zeppelins, the HinJenburg and the Gra!Zeppelin II, they were historically dead ends as much as were those last two rigids themselves. Dr. D. H. Robinsons The Zeppelin in Combat, publishedby FoulissinceDr. Highams book, has shown that the Germans, and Count Zeppelin himself, had firmly concluded by 1918 that the rigid airshiphad been eclipsedboth as a strategic bomber and as a naval scout; yet influential western opinion continued to argue the types importance and effectiveness for reconnaissance. Indeed,Dr. Higham ishimselfclearlyofthe view that the rigid airship could still have been an effective weapon up to as late as 1935. He shows that those responsible for United Kingdom defence policy between the wars gave no sign of recognising that militarily the rigid airship was already a dead letter. In other words, either the lessons ofGerman experiencewere not known in Britain after 1918,or they were not accepted; as a result, Britain and the United States spent large sumsofmoney and lost many livesbetween 1918 and the middle 1930sattempting to develop a weapon which had already been proved ineffective. The last British rigid airship programme launchedin 1924,like the whole ofthe Germans effort-quite genuinely-between the wars, was nominally aimed solely at the development of the large airship for long-haul transport. However, Dr. Higham shows that military usesparticularly maritime reconnaissance-were also in the minds of the British planners and policymakers. The American rigid airship programme was, of course, frankly directed at the maritime reconnaissance requirement alone. Disinterested historians at a further remove in time from the lighter-than-air era will probably conclude that the whole rigid airship episode was a ghastly mistake-albeit a fascinating and historicallysignificantone. Dr. Higham does not go as far as this. He seems indeed to be quite under the spell of the surviving participants in the events he describes, and he fails even to acknowledge properly that the whole rigid airship exercise was completely abortive.

Review: The Grand Trunk Railway of CanadaTHE GRAND TRUNK RAILWAY OF CANADA. By CurrieA. W.. (Toronto University Press, 1958; London: Oxford University Press, x, 556 pp. Map. 68s.)

This is a large-scale history of what, by any standards,must be reckoned amajor railway company: one that began in 1852,asa scheme to meet the needs of the St Lawrence Lowlands, and expanded half a century later into a transcontinental system,acquired after the firstWorld War by the Canadian government and operated today as part of the Canadian National Railways. Professor Currie has a remarkable story to tell, and he tells it clearlyand coolly, unravelling its complications and trying to do justice between the conflicting personalitiesofthe men who successively moulded the company. The book has a special interest for an English reader: for the Grand Trunk Railway was built mainly on capital raised over here, and for much of its life it was managed by Englishmen. This helps to give the book its piquant quality. It is a study of a great business corporation in a new country, owned and managed from the start by foreigners. Partly for this reason, the corporation was always unpopular; and its position was still more gravely weakened when it becameinvolved in Canadian party politics, incurring the hostility ofthe great Conservative politician SirJohn Macdonald, without gaining the real friendship of his Liberal opponents, who wished to avoid the odium of supporting a foreign organization. In the end, it was a Conservative government that brought it under state control, with a financial settlement that had the effect of depriving the shareholders of their property without compensation. In the circumstances, this step was justifiable, though it made the shareholders deeply and naturally indignant; but the interesting point is that, ultimately, both Canadian parties concurred in it. The characters in Professor Curries story include a number who will be familiar to students ofrailwaysin this country. Peto and Brasseywere the contractors. George Carr Glyn, Chairman of the London & Birmingham Company, was one of the Grand Trunks first directors. Sir Edward Watkin was its President from 1862 to 1868. (Readers of this JOURNAL may recall Professor Curries interesting assessment of Watkin in its issue for May 1957.) Watkin was succeeded by Richard Potter (the father of Beatrice Webb), who was also on the boards ofa number ofEnglish railway companies. Most curious ofall, Captain Henry Tyler combined for some time the posts of Chief Inspector of Railways under the British Board of Trade and of Vice-President of the Grand Trunk. In 1876 he succeededPotter as President, only then resigning his office as a civil servant in London. Candour obliges one to add that under British direction the railway does not seem to have been well managed, and that its most remarkable officer was Charles Melville Hays, who came from the United States and dominated the Grand Trunks affairs from 1896 until he was drowned in the Titanic in 1912. The story of the Grand Trunk Railway is a very different kind ofstory from that ofa British railway company. Professor Curries handling of it, too, is in marked contrast to the methods used by railway historians in this country. It illustrates very well what may be called, generically, the American approach to the subject. It is in essence the approach of an economic historianwhereas no economic historian, properly so called, has ever thought it worth while to write the history of a British railway company. That has been left here to amateurs: to antiquaries like Mr Dendy Marshall, to historians moving in from other fields of work like Mr MacDermot, to engineers like Mr Ahrens. The history of a great railway company in North America is a larger subject than that ofeven the biggest company in Britain. Railways there were involved far more directly in politics-they were indeed part of the very stuff out of which the new countries were made; and the historian must take a proportionately broad view oftheir operations. Such a study asthis callsfor an author with high qualifications: on the one hand, a firm grasp of the history of Canada over the past century and ofher relations with Britain and the United States; on the other,

Review: LA FORMATION DU VOCABULAIRE DES CHEMINS DE FER EN FRANCE (1778–1842)LA FORMATION DU VOCABULAIRE DES CHEMINS DE FER EN FRANCE (1778–1842). By WexlerPeter J. (Geneva: E. Droz, 1955. 160 pp. Price not stated.)

by his contemporaries. The actor is there but the scenery is missing. Part III deals with the development of the Morris organization from the years immediately following the war until 1929. It was during this period that he found it necessary to purchase many of the businesses which had hitherto been his specialist suppliers; only thus was he able to expand their output and to secure supplies which he needed. It was during the recession ofthe early twenties that he adopted the policy of reducing his prices and expanding his market-a policy which had already been introduced by Ford in America. Morris saw what other British manufacturers failed to see, that even in this COWltry a reduction in price would expand the market sufficiently to enable an even greater reduction in cost to be secured. Perhaps this was the greatest single decision that he made. The description of super-tax cases in which he fought a battle with the Inland Revenue on undistributed profits are interesting in retrospect. Part IV takes us from the year 1929 through the thirties and the 1939-45 war to the present day, and comprises a dull but accurate description of the development of Morris Motors during this time and the part which they played in the 193945 war. The last part of the book, dealing with his benefactions, pays, perhaps, the greatest tribute to the man, and in a manner which, in contrast to the rest of the book, is convincing and which the reader can accept without reserve. B. c. OTrAWAY

Railway History in English Local Records

In the last number of this JOURNAL the Archivist of the British Transport Commission described the records in his charge and the facilities he can offer to students who wish to consult them.1 The Commissions archives represent an amalgamation of the surviving official records of practically all the British railway and canal companies. Necessarily, therefore, they form the most important single source of material to the transport historian in this country, rivalled only by the records of the Board of Trade, now in the Public Record Office. But these are not the only sources; and it will be the object of this paper, and some of its successors in this series, to describe other groups of documents that can usefully supplement the two great metropolitan collections.