The Romantic on the Railway
By CANON ROGER LLOYD LTHOUGH we have probably not heard the last. of it, the grievance of the railway footplate men over lodging turns is not very important in itself. Its importance lies in the fact that it is the symptom of a change of spirit and of temperament which is creeping over many of the younger drivers and firemen, but which is being resisted by as many more. This hidden conflict has nothing to do with nationalisation. It would have happened in just the same way had the old companies been allowed to continue. Railway drivers and firemen used to be called "the aristocrats 9f the labour force." What makes that title not extravagant is partly the very high degree of craftsmanship their work involves, partly the steady dependability with which they bear their heavy responsi- bility and partly the independence of their position, for the driver is the absolute king of his own footplate.
But more than these, the particular spiritual qualities of the good footplate man won him the esteem of all travellers and the envy of that large section of them who happen also to be railway enthusiasts. It is difficult to define these qualities, but they amount first to tht desire for a responsible job which offers a constant change of pro- gramme, and, second, to what can only be called a romanticism of spirit which finds something of a thrill in working periodically at night, in coming on duty at 2.30 a.m., and in rushing through the darkness on the engine whfle all the sober citizens are tied to their pyjamas and their beds. The really good railwayman always has
something of the romantic in his nature, though he will seldom admit it ; and he sees the railway he serves as a living, sensitive thing, and not as a staid matter-of-fact piece of industrial equipment or machinery.
The many people who like to have a chat with the engine driver before their train pulls out on its journey will certainly have sensed this conflict of spirit. The recent Sunday strike against lodging turns began at the Heaton engine shed, which serves Newcastle. Not very long before it began I got into conversation with a Heaton driver who had recently been promoted from fireman. He freely acknowledged that there was a thrill abdut his job which he had never lost and never would lose. But this thrill was, for him, purely the thrill of speed ; and as on that particular day his duty was to take a stopping train on a short journey he was not pleased with life. He volunteered the significant information that, though he came of a railway family, his father and his grandfather both having been North Eastern drivers, he had seen to it that his son had broken the family tradition.
The thrill of speed did not compensate for the two great dis- advantages which he found in his job. The first was the dirt of the footplate; and indeed there is very little to be said for being dirty, though his own footplate was much dirtier with unswept coaldust than it had any need to be. The second disadvantage he found in the irregular hours of work. What his soul longed for, and what he had thankfully got for his son, was "a regular job with regular hours," by which he meant nine to five in the same office day after day for the rest of his life. If the boy accepted that sort of security and regularity as greatly to be prized, then no doubt it was better for everybody that he should not go on the railway, and for footplate work he would be temperamentally unfitted.
There are two pointers to the fact that this sense of values is creeping into the railway service. The first is the fact that lodging turns do obviously constitute a point of grievance about which not 3 few drivers and firemen feel strongly. Resentment at sleeping occasionally away from home, even though it be in railway hostels which are now generally clean, comfortable and well run, may be partly inspired by the fact that it is an interruption of the routine of family life, but the resentment is more against irregularity of risutine as such. An unchanging routine has come to be regarded as a sign of security. It is interesting to note that the lodgirt-turn trouble occurred only on thc old L.N.E.R., which is the line where, except for the Southern, there was always least of it. The L.M.S., whose men lodged away far more frequently than the drivers of any other railway, was almost completely free from resentment over the system.
The second pointer is the very great difficulty now found in recruiting cleaners for the engine-sheds. It is true that the job of an engine-cleaner is a particularly dirty one, and true again that a great deal of the work has to be done at night. But in times past there was no difficulty in finding cleaners, because the job led to the footplate, and there was no other way for a boy to become a fireman and eventually a driver. He might well have to be a cleaner for five years or more, but he thought it well worth while. Today the shortage of cleaners is such that a boy probably takes not five years but five months, or less than that, to become a fireman and to put the grime of cleaning behind him. But it is still intensely difficult to find young cleaners, which means • that more and more boys are valuing clean collars and regular hours more than the great variety of the footplate and the sense of adventure in being made free of it.
If all, or even most, young cleaners and firemen had that sense of values the outlook for British Railways would be ominous. But 01 course there are just as many, and probably there are more, who scorn it. I met the other day a young fireman from the Nine Elms shed of the Southern Railway. He had risen as high as he could go as a fireman, and he was what is called a "passed driver" who Was waiting for a vacancy. Till it occurred he was working in the lop link, firing for a driver he clearly venerated, and on the newest and heaviest engines. His beat was between Waterloo and Bourne- mouth and Waterloo and Salisbury, and he worked on none but the fastest trains. When his vacancy came, he would have to spend a couple of years or more on an elderly and decrepit tank engin4 slowly pulling empty trains from Clapham Junction to Waterloo to pick up their passengers, and taking other empty trains back td Clapham when they had shed their loads. It was promotion, but he did not relish the prospect. "Too blooming tame," he called it.
Now to that young man, and to his driver too, half the attractian of his job was that it was not regular. They had two specially awkward turns—the 2.40 a.m. to Bournemouth and back with the 7.20 from there, and the 5.40 a.m. also to Bournemouth. The young man lived near Bromley in Kent. To be on duty in time for dui 5.40 meant getting out of bed at three o'clock and making a very complicated journey to Nine Elms by train an& bus and bicycle. Yet that was really his favourite turn, and what made it so was pre- cisely the oddity of being about and at work in the small hours of the morning when the streets were empty, and, later, the start from Waterloo in the darkness, and then the coming of the daylight as they swept onwards into the west. Significantly, that engine was graced by one of the cleanest footplates I have ever seen. The old driver, now retired, was still of the same mind as his fireman ; and for him too, after all his years of experiencing it, the "thrill of the footplate" was still a real thing, experienced afresh every morning.
Of such minds and characters is the railway service made. The very conditions of it demand them, and it can only be a good and a happy service when it gets them. But this condition of excel- lence on the railway is also one of the conditions of the spiritual health of ft nation. Security both financial and domestic there must naturally be, and until every citizen has it no nation can be healthy. But security is not the same thing as an iron regularity of time and movement. Among all who work, and however they work, the desire for independence, for variety at work and for craftsmanship is the sign of health. But the desire to shelter within the strait-jacket of habit and regularity, so that all unusual duty is thought of as art imposition or a penance, is a sign of that disease which makes free men the sort of slaves who consent to their own slavery and call it freedom. The romantic spirit has always much to commend it, and of all forms of transport, especially the railway service, it is the essential prerequisite.
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