Not motoring
Nostalgic journey
Gavin Stamp
Northampton Borough Council has very wisely decided to cash in on the Mack- intosh Industry and has now acquired No. 78 Demgate, the Georgian terraced house whose tight interior Charles Rennie Mack- intosh transformed during the dark days of the first world war. It was the Glasgow architect's last important job, and in it his earlier sinuous spooky Jugendstil was replaced by an interest in hard geometry, in lines and triangles as decorative motifs. But, when restored, the Demgate house will be not just another museum dedicated to Toshie worship; it will also be a memori- al to his extraordinary client. W.J. Bassett- Lowke was certainly independent-minded, for he first employed the Glaswegian when out of fashion and down on his luck, and then, a decade later, was brave enough to approach the great Peter Behrens of Berlin to design a complete new house — 'New Ways', the first Modern Movement house in Britain.
To architecture buffs, the name Bassett- Lowke means Mackintosh and Behrens, but to almost anyone else it means trains — model trains. As (I recall) I described in an earlier column, Bassett-Lowke's interest in precision engineering led him to estab- lish a company to manufacture model rail- ways. And this did not just mean the sort of miniature trains that run around tables but also the larger models that haul real pas- sengers around pleasure grounds. And Bas- sett-Lowke's ambitions went even further: in 1915 his Narrow Gauge Railways relaid the Ravenglass & Eskdale Railway, a derelict mining line, with 15-inch gauge track. Motive power was supplied by a model 4-6-2 Pacific locomotive which Bas- sett-Lowke had built for Captain Jack Howie to run on a miniature railway on his Staughton Manor estate and which he bought back when Howie was detained abroad as a prisoner of war.
After the war, Howie, a millionaire rac- ing driver, went on to become the creator and owner of the Romney Hythe & Dym- church Railway in Kent, the World's Smallest Public Railway'. Opened in 1927 and later extended to Dungeness,. it operat- ed a regular public passenger service both for holiday-makers and local residents, while during the second world war a minia- ture armoured train ran its 13-mile length along the fortified Channel coast. In 1946 civilian service returned and the RH&DR happily ran its one-third scale trains again, and, having survived the crisis resulting from Howie's death in 1963, still does so. Today, two diesel and 11 steam engines pull the miniature carriages at up to 25 m.p.h. between Hythe and Dungeness. For some reason, none of the steam engines is of Bassett-Lowke manufacture: most were made in the 1920s by Davey Paxman of Colchester.
A few weeks ago I took a trip on the Romney, Hythe & Dymchurch — a nostal- gic journey as the railway ran at the end of the tiny garden of the bungalow in Great- stone-on-Sea that my parents rented for a couple of summer holidays in the distant 1950s. And I am happy to report that very little has changed. Yes, there are more cars, more caravans and a few new houses, but the character of that remote part of Kent remains resolutely pre- and post-war, enhanced by the weathered concrete of second world war defences (including an extraordinary aeroplane listening dish at Greatstone). As for the trains, they run through a surprisingly varied landscape, alongside rivers and over fields on the coastal plain between the sea and the sud- den hills to the west, on which — hidden by trees — stand Lympne Castle and Port Lympne. In the other direction there are distant views of Martello towers by the sea, for Bonaparte was surely bound to try to land here.
But the best bit of the line is south of New Romney, where the railway narrows to a single track and the tiny rails, a mere lft 3ins a art, run behind the seaside hous- es and oss the great swathes of shingle that fo the Dungeness peninsular. As the little am n rattles south, the landscape becomes stranger, bleaker; fishermen's boats catibe seen pulled up on the shore and the rows of masonry bungalows give way to isolated wooden cottages. One of these belonged to the late Derek Jarman, who created a remarkable dry garden of stones and objets trouves around it. Finally the track divides to make a turning loop, and the train comes to a halt just near the old lighthouse. It is journey's end, and a chance to savour one of the strangest and most haunting landscapes in England: wild and seemingly so remote, yet dominated by techndiogy, for in one direction stands the bold ck and white new 1960s lighthouse and he other looms the sinister, cubic shado of the Dungeness nuclear power station. Time is allowed for tea and cakes, or a quick visit to the (old) lighthouse, before the whistle blows and the oddest of Britain's public railway services heads off north again, back to distant, ordinary rail- way-less Hythe.
Wenman Bassett Lowke has his memori- al in avant-garde architecture in Northampton; Jack Howie's useful legacy is the network of tiny rails that continue to take those not seduced by package foreign holidays along the real English seaside down to the rare delights of Dungeness.
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