If you register, you can do a lot more. And become an active part of our growing community. You'll have access to hidden forums, and enjoy the ability of replying and starting conversations.

Edward Thompson: Wartime C.M.E. Discussion

Discussion in 'Steam Traction' started by S.A.C. Martin, May 2, 2012.

  1. Spamcan81

    Spamcan81 Nat Pres stalwart

    Joined:
    Aug 25, 2007
    Messages:
    35,121
    Likes Received:
    20,772
    Occupation:
    Training moles
    Location:
    The back of beyond
    Heritage Railway Volunteer:
    Yes I am an active volunteer
    IIRC the likes of Nock were sometimes invited to time runs for which a dynamometer car was not available so as you say, the co-operation offered by the railways would indicate their work was appreciated.
     
  2. 35B

    35B Nat Pres stalwart

    Joined:
    Jun 18, 2011
    Messages:
    25,490
    Likes Received:
    23,720
    Gender:
    Male
    Location:
    Grantham
    Heritage Railway Volunteer:
    No I do not currently volunteer
    For insight, or publicity?
     
    MellishR, ragl and jnc like this.
  3. 60017

    60017 Resident of Nat Pres Friend

    Joined:
    Jul 6, 2008
    Messages:
    9,002
    Likes Received:
    7,891
    Gender:
    Male
    Occupation:
    Retired from corporate slavery :o)
    Location:
    Fylde Coast
    Heritage Railway Volunteer:
    No I do not currently volunteer
    IIRC 'CJ' was present on the 114mph run of the 'Coronation' and was badly shaken by the high speed entry to Crewe! He turned down a seat on the 'Mallard' run, citing he was 'not available.'
     
    Johnb likes this.
  4. S.A.C. Martin

    S.A.C. Martin Part of the furniture

    Joined:
    Aug 31, 2010
    Messages:
    5,591
    Likes Received:
    9,325
    Gender:
    Male
    Occupation:
    Asset Engineer (Signalling), MNLPS Treasurer
    Location:
    London
    Heritage Railway Volunteer:
    Yes I am an active volunteer
    It is "brave" - but the comment is also still ridiculous.

    People are allowed to hold views - we are human after all - but the level of discord within the LNER looks, with the safe benefit of time and hindsight, and documented evidence, to be manufactured.

    If Thompson had been quite so poor, that the board was so dissatisfied, that his staff were so unhappy with his work at the time, would he have stayed in role? Retired? Had a locomotive named after him?

    The contemporary sources that we have and the records that we have show direct contradictions to what has been said. Any CME is going to upset a few people - Gresley is also reported, by Bulleid, of all people, as having been capable of doing that - where Thompson is concerned, we get a disproportionate amount of criticism and diatribe in relation to his supposed crimes.

    The sum total of voices that have reported on Thompson's "tragic desire to obliterate all things Gresley" is a very small number, in reality - but those voices have got disproportionately louder over the decades since Thompson's death. That's the reality of the situation.

    To give one prime example: Tim Hiller-Graves book has one thing on my book that is significant. Bert Spencer's letters. In the past, we have heard from a number of different authors that Spencer and Thompson supposedly were at odds, arguing, that Thompson treated him badly. Hillier-Graves book directly quotes from Bert Spencer's letters and records - and the story is completely different.

    So much so, I have done a partial re-write of my own Spencer chapter and acknowledged Hillier-Graves work in this area too.

    This is where much of the unpicking of the myths from the facts is still to be done.
     
    Kje7812, MellishR and jnc like this.
  5. Monkey Magic

    Monkey Magic Part of the furniture

    Joined:
    Jan 6, 2018
    Messages:
    3,498
    Likes Received:
    6,845
    Location:
    Here, there, everywhere
    Heritage Railway Volunteer:
    No I do not currently volunteer
    I think Nock and Allen are products of their time. They were essentially journalists who had to produce interesting copy once a month (more considering how much they wrote) and to produce regular books. As with anything there are going to be shifts and turns - take for example the post-war move towards grassroots history - and if you'll forgive the pun, the work of the other Edward Thompson (E.P), and revisionism, new orthodoxies etc etc. And that isn't a bad thing. One of the things I would always be cautious about is throwing the baby out with the bathwater and saying that because something was written 70 years ago it has no value. It is up to the contemporary author to extract the value from those source (I gave the example of McKillop's book which is pitched to schoolboys - read it more deeply and for all the discussion about speed (ie fitting into the Nock/Allen traditional emphasis) there is a huge amount about efficiency/maintenance.

    When it comes to LNER Edward Thompson, the arguments that E.P.Thompson made about the purpose of history being to restore 'the casualties of history' to history is very true.

    Rogers is also a product of his time and a different publication environment (likewise with Nock and Allen) - I suspect did not go through peer review.

    I know someone who travelled abroad to look at some material that had been referenced as being in a specific place, when they got there they were told that the reference was completely fictitious and the original material was probably in the author's attic.

    As you say it happens a lot. There are a lot of people out there who are less than rigorous when it comes to handling materials.
     
    Last edited: May 8, 2021
  6. Big Al

    Big Al Nat Pres stalwart Staff Member Moderator

    Joined:
    May 30, 2009
    Messages:
    21,064
    Likes Received:
    20,773
    Location:
    1016
    Heritage Railway Volunteer:
    No I do not currently volunteer
    At last we are getting at the heart of what has caused this thread to run and run. The comment about OS Nock sums it up.

    Prolific writer. Not like Barbara Cartland but given the focus, pretty active. You have to assume therefore that he researched what he needed to for what he was writing about but probably no more than that. I liken it to my day job where for a while I wrote either a full report or a short report. What you did to prepare for the short report couldn't be 'expanded' into a full report as you just didn't have the data.

    It appears that @S.A.C. Martin has gone for the 'full report' model. And in the case of Thompson that is about time and the least that anyone can do for him.
     
    Kje7812, oddiesjack, MellishR and 6 others like this.
  7. Monkey Magic

    Monkey Magic Part of the furniture

    Joined:
    Jan 6, 2018
    Messages:
    3,498
    Likes Received:
    6,845
    Location:
    Here, there, everywhere
    Heritage Railway Volunteer:
    No I do not currently volunteer
    Nock, Allen et al, are akin to a Dan Snow or Niall Ferguson, people who write a large volume of popular books based on a fairly superficial understanding of the topic and drawing primarily on what they and others already know. But fundamentally not works of serious scholarship. Not to gild the lilly, but what Simon is doing is nearer to the heavy lifting that someone like Christopher Clark does where you go and spend a long time doing primary research and come back with a different perspective based on new (or revisited evidence) and a different analysis. In the end, a coffee table book of Gresley pacifics will probably sell more copies, but will be usurped by xmas by the next coffee table book, while Simon's work will hopefully have a longer lasting impact on not only the consensus on Thompson but also how railway historiography evaluates the worth of locos and the work of designers (a far more important paradigmatic shift).
     
  8. Jamessquared

    Jamessquared Nat Pres stalwart

    Joined:
    Mar 8, 2008
    Messages:
    26,101
    Likes Received:
    57,418
    Location:
    LBSC 215
    Heritage Railway Volunteer:
    Yes I am an active volunteer
    It's certainly true that Nock was afforded considerable assistance by the mainline companies in terms of wide-ranging footplate passes, so they must have seen some benefit in his writings. Of course, that leads to the thought of just how much Nock would wish to bite the hand that fed him - perhaps not too surprising that much of his writing on locomotive performance is relatively upbeat. You don't get too many descriptions along the lines of "the old clonker had the most dreadful knock from its trailing axle; a glance into the firebox showed a steady stream of water running down the tube plate from a leaky tube; there was steam all round the front end from worn valves and pressure rarely got above 120psi while the water bobbed worryingly around the bottom nut for mile after mile - in the circumstances losing twenty minutes on the 30 mile trip represented a fighting effort from the loco crew given a locomotive that was probably 30,000 miles past when it should have been shopped and only remained in service due to a backlog of repairs on other locos meaning it was the only loco available to the shed master for the duty that day".

    I suspect as well Nock knew his readers, and knew what they wished to read - and what they couldn't care about.

    It is also clear that Nock's primary purpose in writing was financial. Towards the end of his life, he wrote, autobiographically:

    In the early 1930s the great slump prevailed. There was little work for Westinghouse—so little indeed that many of us lived in fear of being discharged. To try and augment my small salary I began writing articles about railways. The great majority of those early efforts earned nothing more than the editor's rejection slip; but one day I took a long shot, and it came off-and in due course I arrived at Euston with an engine pass in my pocket, to collect data for a commissioned article. My first efforts were directed towards the Railway Magazine, of which I had been a reader almost from my cradle; but, tempted by an advertisement which, if I remember rightly, was headed 'More Profit from Writing', I took a correspondence course in journalism, and gathered some pretty caustic comments upon my first efforts at writing popular articles. That course eventually taught me two important things: the need for a compelling, arresting opening paragraph and, when I was writing round technical things, to have a plentiful leavening of human interest.

    (Quoted here: https://www.steamindex.com/library/nock.htm#outquote)

    In other words, he was essentially a journalist writing to supplement his income; reliant on the railway companies for access to source material, and on his income dependent on meeting the needs of his readers. No shame in that, but he wasn't primarily an academic historian; and his work needs to be appreciated in that light.

    Tom
     
  9. Hermod

    Hermod Member

    Joined:
    May 6, 2017
    Messages:
    985
    Likes Received:
    283
    Gender:
    Male
    Location:
    Klitmoeller,Denmark
    Heritage Railway Volunteer:
    No I do not currently volunteer
    It was more proftable to write about fast steam locomotive runs than running railways afterWW2 UK
     
  10. 35B

    35B Nat Pres stalwart

    Joined:
    Jun 18, 2011
    Messages:
    25,490
    Likes Received:
    23,720
    Gender:
    Male
    Location:
    Grantham
    Heritage Railway Volunteer:
    No I do not currently volunteer
    The parallel is reasonable, but I think you pick a poor example in Ferguson who is, amongst other things, a prominent academic.
     
  11. Spamcan81

    Spamcan81 Nat Pres stalwart

    Joined:
    Aug 25, 2007
    Messages:
    35,121
    Likes Received:
    20,772
    Occupation:
    Training moles
    Location:
    The back of beyond
    Heritage Railway Volunteer:
    Yes I am an active volunteer
    Does it matter which?
     
  12. 35B

    35B Nat Pres stalwart

    Joined:
    Jun 18, 2011
    Messages:
    25,490
    Likes Received:
    23,720
    Gender:
    Male
    Location:
    Grantham
    Heritage Railway Volunteer:
    No I do not currently volunteer
    In this context, absolutely.
     
    jnc likes this.
  13. Spamcan81

    Spamcan81 Nat Pres stalwart

    Joined:
    Aug 25, 2007
    Messages:
    35,121
    Likes Received:
    20,772
    Occupation:
    Training moles
    Location:
    The back of beyond
    Heritage Railway Volunteer:
    Yes I am an active volunteer
    If you say so.
    The people involved are all long gone anyway.
     
  14. Monkey Magic

    Monkey Magic Part of the furniture

    Joined:
    Jan 6, 2018
    Messages:
    3,498
    Likes Received:
    6,845
    Location:
    Here, there, everywhere
    Heritage Railway Volunteer:
    No I do not currently volunteer
    But, in my opinion not a very good one. I don't want to get into it, but I don't think his work stands up to scrutiny.
     
    Last edited: May 8, 2021
  15. 30567

    30567 Part of the furniture Friend

    Joined:
    Aug 7, 2012
    Messages:
    5,608
    Likes Received:
    3,510
    Beevor or Hastings possibly? Very good at what they do.
     
  16. 35B

    35B Nat Pres stalwart

    Joined:
    Jun 18, 2011
    Messages:
    25,490
    Likes Received:
    23,720
    Gender:
    Male
    Location:
    Grantham
    Heritage Railway Volunteer:
    No I do not currently volunteer
    Indeed. But in the context of this piece of history, understanding the limitations and strengths of previous authors is highly relevant.
     
    ragl, jnc and flying scotsman123 like this.
  17. 35B

    35B Nat Pres stalwart

    Joined:
    Jun 18, 2011
    Messages:
    25,490
    Likes Received:
    23,720
    Gender:
    Male
    Location:
    Grantham
    Heritage Railway Volunteer:
    No I do not currently volunteer
    Both of whom spend serious time in the archives. I’m not sure which popularisers I’d list there.


    Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
     
    ragl likes this.
  18. Johnb

    Johnb Nat Pres stalwart

    Joined:
    Dec 3, 2014
    Messages:
    14,315
    Likes Received:
    16,391
    Gender:
    Male
    Occupation:
    Retired, best job I've ever had
    Location:
    Buckinghamshire
    Heritage Railway Volunteer:
    Yes I am an active volunteer
    Are you seriously suggesting that two of the acknowledged most respected train timers were just boys with cheap watches?
    I quote from Locomotive Panorama by E S Cox; ‘observers such as C J Allen and O S Nock from whose writings we gleaned the contemporary feel and measure of steam in action. I for one, would like to pay tribute to all the faithful and accurate recording and comment in their monthly articles, which, designed primarily for the lay enthusiast, have always interested and often helped the professional engineer.’
    Obviously a high ranking locomotive engineer has a somewhat different opinion.
     
    RalphW, Spamcan81 and Bluenosejohn like this.
  19. Big Al

    Big Al Nat Pres stalwart Staff Member Moderator

    Joined:
    May 30, 2009
    Messages:
    21,064
    Likes Received:
    20,773
    Location:
    1016
    Heritage Railway Volunteer:
    No I do not currently volunteer
    Indeed but what lives on through this thread are views of people still alive that draw on what they have read in books that we have to recognise may be no more valid than the armchair comments on here.

    I have no people or comments in my mind as I type but I think that I'm not far off the mark of the way it really is. So that's why I have come off the fence over the Thompson book and concluded that it is a) good and b) about time.
     
    MellishR and S.A.C. Martin like this.
  20. Big Al

    Big Al Nat Pres stalwart Staff Member Moderator

    Joined:
    May 30, 2009
    Messages:
    21,064
    Likes Received:
    20,773
    Location:
    1016
    Heritage Railway Volunteer:
    No I do not currently volunteer
    But 'all' they were often doing and saying was something that was based on what many contemporary people can now do with far more accuracy in the 21st Century and in far greater detail.

    Wonderful data of the time - more advanced than Rous-Marten (don't let's go there!) - but far more suspect when they strayed off into wider locomotive design, performance, reliability and maintenance which is precisely what this Thompson book is trying to cover.
     
    Kje7812, MellishR, ragl and 3 others like this.

Share This Page