October 2019 Reviews

By Grace MacFarquhar

edited by Laurence Marsh and Colin Wight (Herne Hill Society 2018 79pp ISBN 9780954932333) £8 from Herne Hill Society, PO Box 27845, London SE24 9XA

Published exactly one hundred years after the end of the First World War, Grace’s Story is an important and moving addition to The Herne Hill Society’s ‘Remembering Herne Hill 1914-18’ project. Grace did not record her experiences at the time but, according to the book’s editors, ‘wrote down her memories towards the end of her life, seven decades after the events she describes’. This, of course, raises the question of the accuracy of memory after such a time lapse. However, the editors are fully aware of this question and throughout the narrative they supply excellent notes which either provide further details of Grace’s memories or, on occasion, suggest that they may not be entirely accurate.

Grace, born in 1906, was the eldest of the five children of Fred and Charlotte Lucas—the family moved frequently before settling in number 45 Kemerton Road, Herne Hill, about a year before the outbreak of war. Grace describes a happy and supportive home life at this time, reminiscing that ‘My father was very good with us children’. The outbreak of war shattered normal family life as her father, an engineer, joined the Army Ordnance Corps in the early stages of the war. Sadly Fred Lucas died of gas poisoning in July 1916, and the inevitable telegram arrived on ‘the fateful day that changed our lives’. Grace’s mother now had to feed, clothe and house five small children and to try to provide them with as normal a childhood as possible. From this point, Grace’s memories focus on the continual struggle her family, along with many others, faced in ‘making ends meet’. This necessitated Charlotte taking a job, first of all at Brixton Sorting Office and then as an outworker for a clothing factory, and Grace took on more responsibility for looking after her four brothers and sisters. As Grace was now at ‘big school’ some distance away and as air-raids were becoming more threatening, one can well imagine the daily strains faced by this ten-year old schoolgirl. But she faced them with fortitude and acceptance.

The family also experienced one or two happier times and the sections recording Grace’s memories of family holidays spent in Paulerspury near Towcester (1917) and Thaxted in Essex (1918) take the reader away from wartime Herne Hill into the countryside where the family met with much kindness. Remembering the Paulerspury holiday Grace was able to record that ‘We had forgotten about Germans as the war seemed so far away’. Grace found further means to escape from the war in reading and indeed referred to Andrew Carnegie and his support for local libraries as ‘my salvation’. Within a short time of returning from the Thaxted holiday, the war ended and it was necessary for the Lucas family to look to the future. Grace was clearly an intelligent and motivated young girl and in 1920, at the age of 14, she won a scholarship to Southampton Row Art College in London. However, opposition from her mother prevented Grace from pursuing this option and instead she enrolled at St George’s College where she was successful in the Civil Service junior entrance exams in 1922. Grace was allocated to the Post Office which she hated.

Although Grace’s memories end at this point, her story continued and some details of her marriage to Colin MacFarquhar (only very briefly mentioned), her three children, her work during the Second World War, her various moves before settling in the New Forest and her involvement with her local community are provided by her daughter Elizabeth. Grace died in 2001. The wartime memories she left behind provide an intimate, moving and first-hand record of how ordinary family life was greatly disrupted by the war but also of how resilient families were in reacting to such disruption. Grace’s text is enhanced by a number of contextual and personal illustrations (unfortunately only one of Grace when young and one on her wedding day) adding to the overall high quality of the publication. It is an excellent example of the work undertaken by local history societies to commemorate the centenary of the First World War.Christopher French is emeritus reader in history and honorary research fellow at Kingston University. His most recent book, published by the Borough of Twickenham Local History Society, is titled The Hidden Area of Teddington’: the growth of Fulwell, 1870-1939 (2019).

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By Peter Perkins

(Northamptonshire Industrial Archaeology Group 2019 48pp, ISBN: 978-0-9576647-3-9) £9+p&p

Attractively presented, with copious illustrations, this book describes the successive partnerships which operated Northampton's Eagle Foundry and its various products. In the absence of any business records, the products form the basis of the book, and a gazetteer at the end lists all the surviving objects that can be attributed to the firm. What made the Eagle Foundry out of the ordinary is that a high proportion of its products consisted of architectural castings, some rather over-ornate but others being of the highest artistic quality. In particular, the firm appears to have produced much of the ironwork at Wrest Park, the best of it being somewhat French in style. There was a close relationship between E.H. Barwell and the architect/clerk of the works, James Clephan (or Cléphane) although the surviving letters do not allow one to apportion the share each had in the design. Nevertheless, the stylistic continuity of the firm's work suggests either that its own designer had a considerable input, or that there was at least a convergence of ideas between the two men. Ironwork of this sort constitutes a strand in nineteenth-century architectural history which has been little explored, and the book should be welcomed for this reason alone.

Barwell was active in municipal politics in the Whig interest and served as mayor of Northampton from 1842-4. There was another side to his life: he was a railway promoter as early as 1836, and from the 1840s was chairman of a company engaged in lead-mining and smelting in the Mendips. By 1854 he had handed over management of the foundry to a son and had moved to a country house in Somerset. The house was leased from Earl Waldegrave along with another set of mineral rights which he worked as a partnership; one should perhaps see the country house as a convenient residence from which to superintend mining operations, rather than as an attempt to move into county society.

This entire side of Barwell's life is something the author seems to wish to avoid: he characterises the railway promotions as unsuccessful and describes some of Barwell’s other business dealings as ‘questionable’. It is worth observing that men promoting railways through their own town were usually more interested in improving facilities for trade than in the profitability of the line; one of Barwell’s projects, the Northampton & Banbury Junction Railway, did ultimately provide a cross-country link; another, the South Midland Railway, was never built but was at least bought out by the Midland Railway on terms which met all its expenses. All in all, that might be characterised as a modest success.

The book is to be commended as a detailed account of the Eagle Foundry and its products; it also deserves the attention of those interested in High Victorian architecture. As a biography it is less satisfying.R.C. Wheeler has written on the rise of the Lincoln ironfounders Clayton & Shuttleworth; he is currently working on the Ellison family of Lincoln and their business interests.

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By Graham Evans

(Palatine Books 2018 217pp ISBN 13: 978-1-910837-19-1) £14.99

‘All that was needed was a sheltered haven, usually the mouth of a river, where a vessel could take to the ground to discharge, or load to and from vehicles drawn up on the beach’. The 11,073 miles of the British coastline include numerous inlets, some penetrating deep inland, others no more than shallow creeks. In 1768 it was reckoned that there were 580 places where goods could be conveyed via the coasting trade. One of these was the small Lancashire town of Poulton-le-Fylde, the ‘pool’ in its name being at Skippool on the estuary of the River Wyre.

This informative book is a valuable contribution to the picture of the small ships, their crews, masters and owners, which navigated the dangerous coastal waters of Britain, and of the ports from which they sailed. On these ships, bringing raw materials in and carrying away the finished products, largely depended the growth of Britain’s industrial economy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Apart from details of the cargoes carried in and out of Poulton, the types and sizes of the ships involved, the local industries supplied by them, and the geography of the Wyre Water, out of and into which they plied, here are all sorts of snippets of information, such as the significance of the word ‘quay’ (or ‘key’), meaning stone markers, designating the point at which cargoes could be legally discharged, in particular those liable to duty.

Outstanding are the lavish illustrations. Rarely can an area have been so comprehensively depicted in maps, drawings, prints, paintings and latterly photographs. Not all shipping in and out of Poulton operated in coastal waters. Some ventured on the high seas, to the Baltic, the Iberian Peninsula, Africa, and the Caribbean. Included among the latter were slavers. Admittedly Poulton’s participation in this heinous business was limited both in the number of ships involved and the period during which it occurred. It ceased not out of conscience but because, due to the Seven Years War, the trade became unprofitable. The ships returned with rum, sugar, and mahogany for Gillow’s developing furniture industry at Lancaster.

However, although the book is a mine of information, Mr Evans’ readers have to do much of the mining for themselves. His chapters would have benefitted from subheadings, under which each topic could then have been organised. As it is, the text is often confused: in chapter 2, Coasting Trade, for example, the salt trade is discussed, followed by wine and coal, but then the text reverts to the salt trade as if for the first time. Furthermore, the services of an editor would have eliminated the frequently awkward syntax, numerous repetitions, occasional howlers (e.g. ‘Lord MacAulay’ sic), and contradictions, such as when, having observed of Poulton and Skippool, that English towns often go in pairs, a few pages later the author makes the same point, but about Poulton and Kirkham. Having been told on p.31 that the first records of customs collection at Poulton as a member port under the port of Chester begin in 1633, according to the following page the first documentation of Poulton as a member port of Chester was in 1671. Nevertheless, coupled with an extensive bibliography (although there are more recent overviews of British economic history than Clapham’s of 1926), the author has assembled a mass of valuable information concerning the trade in and out of the port of Poulton-le-Fylde and Skippool, until, after 262 years, Poulton was overtaken by the development of Fleetwood.

Ian Beckwith taught local history at Bishop Grosseteste College, Lincoln until he retired. He is the author of books about the river port of Gainsborough and Lincoln, and has contributed to The Local Historian, The Mariners Mirror, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, The East Midlands Geographer, History Today and Records of Huntingdonshire.

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By David Hallam

(Brewin Books 2018 112pp ISBN 978-1-85858-592-5) £9.95

In the centenary year of British women over the age of 30 being given the right to vote in general elections, David Hallam’s book offers an illuminating take on three women who stood as West Midlands parliamentary candidates in the so-called ‘khaki election’, held almost immediately after the end of the Great War, in December 1918. The women differed remarkably in their political leanings, personality and attitude: Christabel Pankhurst (Coalition candidate for Smethwick), Mary Macarthur (Labour candidate for Stourbridge) and Margery Corbett Ashby (Liberal candidate for Birmingham Ladywood).

The possibility of women running as MPs had only been granted in November 1918, after the passing of an Act of Parliament, and within days of this a general election was called. The ease with which women found themselves eligible to stand for parliament is somewhat ironic given how long the campaign for the right to vote had taken—this Act followed a matter of months after the passing of the Representation of the People Act in February 1918 but the suffrage campaign in Birmingham had been active for over fifty years, since the establishment of the Birmingham Women’s Suffrage Society in 1868. In total seventeen women across the UK declared that they would stand but entrenched attitudes and lack of planning time made their attempts mostly doomed from the start. However, all three West Midlands candidates were well-versed in suffrage politics: Pankhurst as notorious leader, along with her mother Emmeline, of the Women’s Social & Political Union; Macarthur as a committed advocate of universal suffrage; and Ashby as a suffragist.

Hallam gives a comprehensive overview of the circumstances that led Christabel Pankhurst to run for the Smethwick constituency against well-established Labour and Unionist candidates. The seat initially chosen for her, Westbury in Wiltshire, was rejected in favour of the new constituency of Smethwick. Unsurprisingly, this attracted much press attention with many newspapers believing that she stood a good chance of winning, although in the end she was defeated, albeit narrowly, by the Labour candidate, John E. Davison. Hallam dismisses the suggestion that Pankhurst might have won had women under the age of 30 been allowed to vote but his argument is not entirely convincing—indeed, the reasons he gives for her failure to win the seat actually demonstrate how well she did to come so close, losing by only 775 votes.

Stourbridge was another new constituency and one of the largest, with over 16,000 women voters, although this did not include Cradley Heath where Mary Macarthur had come to prominence in 1910 during the chainmakers’ strike. Macarthur, general secretary of the National Federation of Women Workers and a universal suffragist, had a notoriously poor relationship with Pankhurst, played out in newspapers during the election campaign as Pankhurst’s Women’s Party accused the NFWW of inciting women war workers to strike. In contrast to Pankhurst’s experience of campaigning, Macarthur faced a much higher level of hostility from her rival candidate. Although she lost by over 1300 votes she also came second, behind the Liberal candidate John William Wilson.

Margery Corbett Ashby had arguably the most difficult job, taking on Neville Chamberlain in the Ladywood constituency of Birmingham, an idea that seemed absurd even to Ashby. A Poor Law guardian in London, her candidacy for the Liberal party was supported by colleagues from the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. She was treated with disdain by Chamberlain but interestingly, as with Pankhurst and Macarthur, was treated fairly evenly by the press, apart from the Evening Mail which decried her as a stranger to the city. Her result was one of the most disappointing, with only an 11.5 per cent share of the vote, third after Chamberlain and J. W. Kneeshaw, the Labour candidate.

As Hallam asserts, what happened during the 1918 election campaign would set the tone for the selection of future women candidates and highlighted the painfully slow attainment of seats in parliament: during the interwar years there were only four women MPs in the West Midlands region. Statistics demonstrate that in 1918, an election with one of the lowest turnouts and one that focused on war and patriotism, women voters did not vote for women candidates. Over a century since years since that election progress is still slow: as Hallam reminds us, in 2015 only 148 women were elected to parliament. However, looking back at the suffrage campaign and the 1918 election reminds us that although patience is required for those hungry for change, progress is inevitable.Nicola Gauld is author of Words and Deeds: Birmingham Suffragists and Suffragettes 1832-1918 (History West Midlands, 2018)

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By Edwin Garman

(Hobnob Press 2017

xv+314pp ISBN 978-1-906978-43-3) £14.95

The bulk of this book is an inventory of the 270 premises which are, or once were, places to consume alcoholic beverages in Salisbury. The author states that the starting point for his research was the discovery in Salisbury Reference Library of an unpublished manuscript entitled The Inns of Salisbury by Roland Gordon. He progressed from this beginning by drawing on several main sources including licensing records, letters which appeared in the Salisbury Journal in the late nineteenth century from W.A. Wheeler covering the ‘Old Inns of Salisbury’, and the Salisbury Journal archives.

Before entering the inventory the introduction provides some useful information covering definitions of inns, taverns, alehouses and other terms; examples of licensing and licensed hours; and a list of the breweries of Salisbury. Further background is contained in the appendices including details of street name changes over the years, and an explanation of the measurements used (including definitions of imperial units for younger readers). The text is enhanced by a series of charcoal drawings by local artist Fred Fieber. These include some of the lost pubs.

Obviously, the amount of detail available varies considerably from house to house. Several have but a single mention and even their location is unknown. Often the specific information comes from licensing applications or court cases so there is a flavour of many of the people mentioned being miscreants. Almost unavoidably these references and extracts become rather repetitive in style but remain fascinating nevertheless. The scale of some of the establishments is interesting. In the times when many houses brewed their own beer they often had very large storage facilities, apparently because brewing only took place in spring and autumn—it was too cold in winter and too hot in summer. Some had stabling sufficient for eighty horses or more, perhaps to cater for illustrious travellers: in 1805 ‘Ten of the cream-coloured state horses, and five other of his Majesty’s favourite horses, rested here on Wednesday night in the excellent stables of the Bull Inn, Fisherton’.

For many years public houses were the main location of large rooms or spaces for public gatherings. The inventory contains numerous examples of the ways in which these were used, of which the following gives a flavour: they range from the horticultural (Carnation Shows, Pink Feasts, Cucumber Shows) through the ‘sporting’ (wrestling matches, badger baiting, bull baiting, pigeon shoots with live pigeons of course…) and on to the curiosities, such as a Gigantic Yorkshire Youth, a Devonshire boy celebrated for mental calculation, and the Hottentot Venus. Demonstrations of amazing machines, travelling shows and theatre, New Zealand cookery, phrenology and of course medical people with wonderful cures, added to the variety of entertainment on offer.

There are several examples of pubs being reviewed under the 1910 Licensing Act which allowed authorities to close a pub if it was considered that it did not provide for the needs of the public. The Renewal Authority was generally given with three types of evidence: a description of the state of the buildings and their sanitation; a list of the other licensed houses in the vicinity and their proximity; and counts of the number of customers over a week or in some cases a fortnight. This last set of data was collected by ‘police observation’. It is remarkable that the local constabulary had sufficient manpower to spend days counting the number of customers entering a particular premises. For instance, in 1924 the Ox Inn in Ox Row was deemed to be in an urgent state of disrepair and the sanitary arrangements for customers ‘insufficient and offensive’. There were five other pubs within fifty yards and the only days its customers ran into double figures were on market days. Its licence was not renewed and the owner and landlord were compensated to the tune of £270. On another occasion in 1926, when reviewing the licensing application for the Lamb Inn which had ten other premises within 235 yards, figures were produced stating that the city had a population of 22,867 and contained 86 licensed premises (one to about 265 people).

This history is particularly interesting against the backdrop of the current era when many pubs are closing. Indeed, each week in the Britain 21 coffee shops open while 25 pubs close. However, and ironically, the number of breweries is on the increase. The book gives an understanding that the situation has always been fairly fluid and that over the years many establishments have come and gone, some in a surprisingly short space of time. Perhaps there is no need to panic just yet. There should be time to visit all the extant houses.

As the author states in his introduction, pubs have always been there, forming a backdrop to other historical events in a community, but often overlooked. This book adds colour and detail to the scenery. Also, it is pleasurable to dip into before visiting any of those pubs still in existence or to be used as a guide to finding signs or remnants of those that no longer exist. The general information on the trade, and the wide variety of sources used, make it valuable for anyone thinking of doing a similar exercise for another town or village.Jon Barlow is retired but at an earlier stage in life he worked in the Managed Houses Department of Gibbs Mew Brewery, and has always been an avid supporter of pubs.

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By Margery Elliot

(Brewin Books 2019 133pp ISBN 978-85858-541-3) £12.95

Margery Elliott uses family and local history to capture the development of Rotton Park, a Birmingham suburb which lies north of Edgbaston ward and encompasses the southern edge of Soho ward, situated between the trade of the Jewellery Quarter and the affluence of Edgbaston. Two features dominate this area of Birmingham: Edgbaston Reservoir, created in 1824-1829 by Thomas Telford to supply water for the local canal system; and Perrott’s Folly, built by John Perrott in the 1730s in the grounds of Monument House, now a listed building of architectural interest. Within the long life of Margery Elliott, Rotton Park, its farmland and large houses with tennis lawns, grew into a busy suburb, with canalside apartments and ‘Edgbaston Gate’ completed in 2014, one of the latest housing developments. The author refers to the Lodge Farm throughout the book, this assuming an almost iconic presence in the time of James Turner, her grandfather. The frontispiece and the photograph on p.4 show the lord mayor’s landau outside the Lodge in 1906 or 1907. Life at the Lodge was shared with servants, nannies and gardeners even in the interwar years, but it ended with the death of James Turner in 1933 and the demolition of the property in 1934.

Elliot investigates areas outside the immediate boundaries with chapters about Edgbaston Reservoir, Monument House and Perrot’s Folly. There are additional chapters on Park Station, the tennis and squash clubs and ‘Some distinguished inhabitants of Rotton Park’. Chapter 8 gives a series of maps of the farm and adjoining land, Birmingham and environs, Edgbaston Reservoir and the 1845 tithe map. Building began with Joseph Gillott who, having made his fortune through the manufacture of pen nibs, purchased the land for £100,000 in 1851. Cutting new roads, and demolishing anything which did not conform to his vision of housing in a location suited to the growing middle class, he planned spacious detached and semi-detached properties with large gardens and stipulated that there should be no licensed commercial properties in Rotton Park.

John Chesshire, land agent to Gillott, purchased a prime plot on Rotton Park, where he built a large Victorian Gothic house called Rotton Park. Thereafter, he was ‘John Chesshire of Rotton Park Lodge’. In 1895 this was sold to Frank Dudley Docker, whose son Frank chose the entrepreneurial path, eventually owning a paint business. His donation of £10,000 to the Shackleton Antarctic expedition resulted in the survival of the crew in the ‘Dudley Docker’ lifeboat. The Dockers left the Lodge in 1902, when it sold for £4000. Margery Elliott’s grandfather and family moved into the Lodge in 1905. James Turner, an autodidact, went on to acquire land and the freehold of large parts of Monument Road, Waterworks Road and Retreat. Some 28 houses were built in this area, but he also built more houses, in Edgbaston, Balsall Heath and Smethwick. His children were the lucky recipients of rows of houses when they married.

Margery Elliot, the author, a science graduate, worked as an analyst in Leeds and served on the board of directors of E. Elliott Ltd, before retraining at the Royal College of Music, eventually becoming music mistress at Dudley High School. She pursued her musical interests; joined the Birmingham Bach choir; performed as soloist with a variety of orchestras and ensembles; and was made an Honorary Fellow of Birmingham Conservatoire in 2004. In 1989 she entered a BBC/Barclays Bank competition to celebrate Birmingham’s centenary as a city. Her ‘Rotton Park Lodge and the Turner Family’ developed into a 6000 word essay ‘Rotton Park Lodge and the Farm’ for a Birmingham University course and this now forms the substance of the present book.

The book describes the dynamism of Birmingham’s self-made men and their subsequent move to the suburbs which demonstrated their newly acquired wealth and gentility. It is the contention of the author that enjoying a privileged life imposed an obligation to do one’s civic duty. The tennis and dinner parties and the musical evenings, pre- and post-First World War, were a backdrop to the work for charities and for local government. Margery Elliot was 100 in July 2019.Pat Franklin has a history and English degree from Birmingham University, and a degree in Community Education, also from Birmingham University. She has for some years been a guide at Birmingham Back to Backs and at Brandwood Cemetery, and was a contributor to Carl Chinn’s ‘Brummagem’.

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By H. Thornton

(Landor Local History Society 2019 22pp) £2.50

Local history societies such as The Landor at Rugeley in Staffordshire deserve commendation for supporting publications enriching understanding of the history of a place and its people. Harry Thornton’s most recent work has as its focus two houses of interest to Rugeley inhabitants, and two pairs of Sneyd sisters. Ralph Sneyd of Keele Hall (1793-1870) was among Staffordshire’s leading landowning gentry with substantial holdings in the industrialised northern area. He had two aunts, Elizabeth and Harriet Sneyd, who lived at Brereton Hall, and they had a nephew, Henry Ralph Sneyd, whose two daughters lived at Eaton Lodge. Henry Ralph and the four women had certain benevolent actions to their credit, principally financing almshouses. Thornton’s main contribution to an understanding of Rugeley’s history is an outline narrative of the way in which charities set up by individuals in the Victorian age have become public assets in an era defined by austerity.

The Sneyd name resonates wealth and privilege in the county’s history and even minor members of the family attract attention for marks they made in places well away from Keele. Thornton compiles information about family relationships, periods of residence in the Rugeley area and charitable gifts, including a school and church memorial windows. Ralph Sneyd, the family head, may have been born at Ravenhill in Rugeley, but moved as an infant in about 1794 to Keele. Ravenhill had been leased to his father who occupied it for seven years. It was also the case that neither Brereton Hall nor Eaton Lodge were ever part of the Keele estate. Ralph’s aunts leased the Lodge from Earl Talbot in 1816 and Harriet the younger sister died there in 1852, having survived her sister by fourteen years. The other sisters, Harriet Anne and Fanny Louise, moved to the Rugeley area and Eaton Lodge in 1852 when their father bought the small estate. By 1881 the sisters had a house in Rhyl and thereafter spent as much time there as they did in Rugeley. When Harriet Anne died in 1913 the Rugeley connection with the Sneyd family ceased.

Thornton studied the probate records for the five principal figures and reveals the scale of their not inconsiderable wealth. Harriet Anne ordered some £26,000 to be distributed among 24 recipients quite apart from several sums of £3000 set aside for her charitable bequests. In this context the gifts towards the building of St Michael’s church at Brereton adding up to £109 9s in 1837 appear somewhat modest. Thornton, in a rare speculation, suggests that at that time the sisters were in a benevolence competition with their neighbour, Miss Birch, an ardent Methodist convert.This collection of information strips history to its bare essentials and will serve a useful purpose for all in Rugeley who wonder why, for example, 35 homes for the elderly opened in 1984 are known as ‘Sneydlands’.

Paul Anderton was formerly senior lecturer in history at North Staffordshire Polytechnic and assistant lecturer at Keele University. He is the author of books on Whitchurch in Shropshire and Leek, and articles on a variety of Cheshire and Staffordshire subjects, more particularly on Nantwich, Holmes Chapel and the Potteries.

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By John Dixon

(Tewkesbury Historical Society Publication no.15 2019 128pp ISSN 1742-6030) £15

With generous use of personal testimony, old photographs, records and maps, John Dixon has assiduously pieced together the hitherto undocumented story of Tewkesbury’s two railways—the first in 1840 from Ashchurch to Tewkesbury Quay, connecting the River Severn with the new Bristol to Birmingham railway, and the second running from Ashchurch through Upton on Severn to Malvern from 1864. The author recovers the location and appearance of Tewkesbury’s distinguished neo-Gothic first station on the High Street, and well describes the inconvenience of a railway line which for decades crossed a busy High Street on the way to the Quay. The engineering challenges of the Mythe tunnel, railway company rivalries and local business optimism which spurred the establishment of the line to Malvern, illuminate familiar tropes of the Railway Age: indigenous enthusiasm for quicker passenger and freight connections to Birmingham and the South opposed by strong local resistance from vested interests, especially coaching inns and the occasional landowner.

After an initial boost to local industry—the maltings, Healing’s steam-powered flour mill, Ashchurch’s forage stores—resulting from the railway, Tewkesbury failed to expand as its railway-backers had anticipated. It was only absorption into the giant Midland Railway that brought the line some profitability. Road haulage after the First World War then began to attract freight away. Yet Tewkesbury’s railways had their moment in the sun during both World Wars, as the lines did sterling work carrying wounded soldiers to convalesce in Malvern; indeed, after D Day over 50,000 American casualties were borne from Southampton to the huge hospital on what is now the Three Counties Showground.

Nationalisation in 1948 saw the start of rationalisation of the country’s rail network, shutting down loss-making lines; the Upton to Malvern section closed as early as 1952. In a useful piece of revisionism, Dixon addresses the question of the responsibility of much-demonised Dr Beeching for the closure of the two Ashchurch lines. He concludes that the fate of the Ashchurch to Upton line (which closed in August 1961) was sealed before ever Beeching’s Commission set to work on its root and branch report of March 1963. In 1960 a passenger survey of the Ashchurch to Upton line illustrated just how few locals were supporting the line: often a mere handful travelled on the train.

Tewkesbury’s railways have found a scrupulous and enthusiastic historian, and his tale is capaciously illustrated. These two railways were never more than branch lines, though their history will be of interest to railway enthusiasts in the West Midlands for all that. Still, the text demands clear, legible maps—many are too small, and some are out of focus and as a result the lucidity of the story itself is occasionally compromised.

Andrew Reekes is author of a number of books about Joseph Chamberlain and his family, and has just finished Worcester Moments, twenty episodes in Worcester’s history when the city was nationally significant. It is due for publication in November 2019. Since schooling in Worcester, he has known Tewkesbury well for over fifty years.

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