LAST TRAIN FROM EVERCREECH JUNCTION
Memories of the S&D
with John Alves #1
Earliest Days
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My senior aunt, Frances Alves, had once said to me: “My grandfather used to be employed in painting the crests on the Somerset & Dorset Railway engines.” Why did I not question him further?
I knew that she was talking about her maternal grandfather, who used to describe himself on documents as ‘artist’ (and later as ‘photographer’). He was born in 1827 and he cannot have been offered this employment by the railway before 1863. The Somerset & Dorset (S&D) company name came into existence in that year through an amalgamation of the Somerset Central Railway and the Dorset Central Railway.
For the Somerset company the alliance represented a declaration of independence from the Bristol & Exeter Railway. This latter main-line company had helped to promote the Somerset Central as a broad gauge (7’¼”) railway and had for the first nine years of the Somerset Central’s life provided the locomotives and carriages that were needed to operate the train services of its protege. The rolling stock presumably remained in the livery of the Bristol & Exeter Railway.
As soon as it was independent the new company elected to convert its tracks to the national standard gauge of 4’8½” (as already existed on the former Dorset Central), although for some years afterwards the retention of a third rail (mixed-gauge track) allowed access for Bristol & Exeter trains. The S&D soon obtained its own locomotives and carriages, all of which needed to be painted, lettered, numbered and adorned with the company crest. The railway company’s headquarters were still at Glastonbury, and the services of a local artist would have been welcomed. On his side, Francis Percival would have been glad of extra commissions. His family had grown to comprise five daughters, and his wife seems to have been failing in health.
I have always appreciated local railway systems and was delighted to discover that my own family had been connected with the S&D from its earliest days.
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The School Train
My father, Donald Alves, was a regular on the S&D from an early age. Living in Glastonbury he used the railway to get to the Wells Blue School and back each day.
By now the S&D had moved into a very difficult phase in its history. Back in the 1860’s the Wells line was regarded as an extension of the original Somerset Central main line from Highbridge to Glastonbury. From Wells it had been hoped to continue the railway northward to approach Bristol through Cheddar and Yatton, rejoining the Bristol & Exeter main line. However, the connection with the Dorset Central Railway and thus with the London and South Western Railway (L&SWR) gave the S&D new ambition to create a main line from the south coast to join the Midland Railway’s Queen Square station (later known as Green Park).
The cost of the new railway line exhausted the finances of the S&D, and a rescue package was put together by the L&SWR and the Midland Railway companies. From 1876 it became the ‘Somerset and Dorset Joint Railway Company, under the joint control and virtual ownership of the two large railway companies. The S&D proved to have been worth rescuing as it began to earn good profits from the north-south passenger business and from coal traffic. The extension to Bath ran through the North Somerset coalfield, and colliery branches proliferated around Radstock, bringing added prosperity to the railway and to coal owners.
What had once been the main line between Evercreech Junction and Highbridge (and Burnham-on-Sea) was now a branch. The company offices were moved from Glastonbury from Bath. Furthermore, the line from Wells was now a branch off a branch, and the Cheddar Valley railway route had been left for the Bristol & Exeter company to build and operate as a separate broad-gauge branch line.
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Behaving Badly
As the S&D’s Wells branch had become such a backwater by the time my father started his journeys to school by train (from about 1905), the schoolboy travellers found that wild behaviour on the train would go almost unchecked. Polsham was the only intermediate station on the Wells branch, and it was unimportant on any reckoning. The porter in charge, however took himself very seriously, and this made him vulnerable to irreverent schoolboys.
To begin with, they did not address him as ‘Mr’, but called him ‘Old Jacko’. As the train passed at Polsham the boys were merciless, yeling ‘Jacko’ at him in derision. He looked forward to any and every day that might be a school holiday. The boys knew this and devised plans of climbing out on the far side of the train as it approached Polsham and crouching down outside on the footboards.
Jacko saw an almost empty train, assumed there was a school holiday, and began to enjoy the blessed peace thereof. But as the train started to leave Polsham the boys surged back into the compartments and yelled ‘Jacko’ out of the window at the unhappy wretch. Poor Jacko sometimes went to the headmaster of the Blue School in Wells and complained. Next day the boys would be told in morning assembly to behave on the trains. This was ineffective. Eventually Jacko was transferred to another station in order to preserve his sanity.
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Another Staff Problems
A transfer to another station was not always the solution to staff problems on the railway, rather it caused them. Around the same time, the same porter at Ashcott was transferred to Pylle. Over the years it had, of course, become automatic for him to shout “Ashcott! Ashcott!” Whenever a train arrived. The habit was hard to break at Pylle. After some confusing weeks with the porter shouting “Ashcott, Ashcott; no - Pylle, Pylle,” the management admitted defeat and returned the poor man to Ashcott.
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Return to the S&D
Although the S&D lost its independence at the very early date of 1876, it did not lose its separate identity. The L&SWR took responsibility for maintenance of the track. The Midland oversaw the locomotive departments and, when necessary, built new engines for the S&D at the Midland works in Derby. But those engines were lettered S&DJR and had their own livery and a seperate number series. The Joint Committee operated the line as an entity quite distinct from either parent company. The railway grouping of 1922-3 did not alter this situation. The Joint Committee from that time was drawn from both the London Midland Scottish Railway (LMSR), which engulfed the Midland, and from the Southern Railway which had likewise engulfed the L&SWR.
In 1930 there was a more noticeable change. The LMSR integrated the locomotive fleet of the S&D into its own vast collection and gave them LMS numbers. The initials LMS began to appear on the rolling stock, and the trains were no longer given the distinctive blue livery. By the time I got to know the S&D at all well the change over had been completed, but many other local traditions continued - such as non standard head codes on the engines denoting the type of trains they were hauling.
You never felt you were on an LMS train or a Southern train when you were travelling on the S&D. Even after nationalisation, which did away with the Joint status of the line, that special feeling of separateness did not entirely disappear.
Let us briefly return to earlier times to explain the odd situation of the competing railway lines that were used to serve Wells. The Bristol & Exeter Railway, just before it amalgamated with the Great Western Railway (GWR) in 1876, had converted the track of its broad-gauge Cheddar Valley branch to standard gauge. It could now link up at Wells with the S&D branch from Glastonbury. The GWR needed to run through the S&D station at Wells to reach its other branch line, the East Somerset. But would it stop there to pick up passengers from Glastonbury? No indeed! Passengers who wanted to continue by GWR had to walk across Wells to the GWR station. It was not until 1934 that the benefits of co-operation were admitted, and GWR trains began calling at both railway stations.
In the war-time period of petrol rationing, my father found himself again a traveller on the S&D. One dark night, in 1943, at the S&D station in Wells he saw his train for Glastonbury arrive at the platform but with so a effective black-out he could not locate a carriage door. At last he saw an open one and started to climb aboard. “Can’t get in here, mister; this is the engine!” The driver guided him to a passenger compartment.
The same place and the same period saw the sad downfall of one of my father’s colleagues who was on a train bound for the S&D station in Wells. Hearing the station names called as the train stopped, he peered through the blackness until he was just able to distinguish the interior wall of the station’s overall roof. Reassured he opened the door, took a suitcase in either hand and stepped out - not onto the platform but into thin air on the offside of the train. He crashed down beside the train but was miraculously unhurt.
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To Boarding School by S&D
My mother and her brothers were regular travellers on the S&D in the school days. Living in Crewkerne, on the South Western main line, they all went to boarding school at Bruton (change at Templecombe; alight at Cole). The S&D station at Cole was the 1862 meeting point of the Somerset Central Railway with the Dorset Central and near the site of the planned, but never completed, junction with the GWR’s east-west route through Bruton.
Cole was near Hugh Sexey’s Grammar School (for the boys) and equally near Sunny Hill School for Girls. The two schools, as was the station, ‘Cole, for Bruton’, were just beyond the southern edge of the town. My mother was one of a large family. Her oldest brother began travelling to Cole each term in about 1907, and her youngest brother last made the journey in about 1927.
The only family legend that has survived from all those years of S&D journeyings via Templecombe concerns the wise judgement of a ticket collector levying extra charges on an elderly lady travelling with all her household pets. He told her: “Dogs of course is dogs, and this cat is a dog, and your parrot is a dog, but that there tortoise is a hinseck (insect), and he do travel for nothing!”
Towards the end of the First World War my mother returned to Sunny Hill School as a young teacher. She was already engaged to be married to my father, a young officer then staying in the army convalescent in Bath. That young officer now began to enjoy S&D main line travel. Bookings to Cole were up! At this time one of my uncles, still a Sexeys schoolboy, was wondering why his older sister and her fiance began taking him out to tea in Bruton so often. He later realised why his presence was needed. Young lady teachers were not encouraged to wander around with Army officers unchaperoned.
That young schoolboy, Gerald Marsh, must have taken a deeper interest in his railway journeys to and from Cole than did his brothers. After an engineering apprenticeship, he achieved eminence in his career as a designer of railway braking systems. Late in his life, appearing at an Institution of Mechanical Engineers meeting in Swindon, he was greeted as: “Gerry Marsh, the man who held up the modernisation of British Railways for ten years,” - by designing improvements in their vacuum brakes when otherwise all trains would have been converted to air braking.
Misapprehension Norton
Immediately before her teaching appointment at Bruton, my mother had to do a few months practical teacher training in a primary school. The one chosen for her was in Midsomer Norton, and she lodged with a Mr and Mrs Smith at a home just beyond the edge of the town.
On her first evening there my mother was puzzled by the conversation. Mr Smith came home from his job as a S&D engine driver at Radstock. “What were you doing today?” Asked Mrs Smith.
“Most of the time we were helping passengers up the bank”. My mother jumped to the conclusion that there had been an accident to a passenger train and expressed concern. Mr Smith, of course, had merely been using his locomotive to give rear-end assistance to all the trains that had to climb ‘the bank’ up to Masbury summit, where the S&D crossed the Mendip Hills.