Edward Thompson: Wartime C.M.E. Discussion

You had appeared to be casting doubt on the reliability of Harvey's recollections as well as on their relevance to the whole class of L1s. Is it possible, from your documentary sources, to establish which manufacturer(s) the reportedly troublesome L1s at Neasden came from?

And could the statistics fail to reflect issues that were causing a lot of hassle at the shed without a proportionate impact on availability?

 

I think a number of people on this thread are getting a bit overly wound up over my views on the recollections of Bill Harvey, who is a normally reliable witness on many topics where we have other source material to cross reference with. The whole point of this - or any - research is to establish facts and separate it from fiction, and, where there is a contradiction, to weight it up and see which is more likely.

Bill Harvey's recollections only ring true to a certain extent - and the majority of the class were high mileage machines with high availability throughout their working lives. That's at odds with his - emphasis here - limited experience of the class in 1950. That's why taking his viewpoint as representative of the class throughout its working life isn't fair and why we must tread carefully. Same for E.S. Beavor I am afraid.

It's a bit like taking one driver's viewpoint of a Gresley A3 Pacific and taking that as the only summation of the class.

The statistics together with a couple of internal reports are very clear on the causes - which were maintenance related, at the sheds - and the fixes (axlebox shims and better welded tanks) which worked someway towards removing that responsibility of maintenance from the sheds back to the workshops in order to ensure higher availability and lower failure rates.

 

This is where it all gets complicated though.
I think its completely valid and desirable to take the availability and mileage records and say "This class was clearly problematic" or "that class actually had a good record". Even then its probably also desirable to know how expensive the periodic repairs are. If class A runs the same mileage and availability as class B, but the general overhaul costs are double then that's also not good.

But I think if you try and drill deeper then maybe it can get dangerous. If shed maintenance for a given class was problematic then is that down to the sheds, or down to the design being difficult to maintain, or even down to management failing to change ingrained working practices? Some of those are things that the CME should spot and resolve, others may be outside his control. Cook tells us that when they introduced felt pad lubrication for connecting rods they were sufficiently concerned by the possibility of someone inserting the old style worsted trimmings that they put in a special perforated plug in the oil box so it was physically impossible to do so. In that case I think its good design to accept an extra component and machining cost in order to prevent an error at the sheds which ought not be made, but probably would have been.

 

It seems to be overlooked that these shortcomings with the L1s, particularly in respect of the axle boxes, were not just in the year or so from new, but were still persisting five years later at Neasden. Much the same shortcomings can be gleaned from Bill Harvey's book on pages 144 -147 , this as late as 1957 regarding the B1 4-6-0s, when an out of course heavy axle box renovation had to be done at the 45 - 50,000 mark in order to keep them fit for main line use.

What I find truly amazing is that although 'higher authority' must have been aware of the situation for years, yet they chose to do little or nothing about it. Perhaps one can understand that with such an ongoing situation Messrs Harvey and Beavor must have been a tad peeved, to say the least.

 

Taking what you say entirely at face value, without benefit of archive information or suchlike, I'd like to question the "higher authority chose to do little or nothing about it" position. What the narrative and experience from the front line doesn't necessarily give us is what the choices were for dealing with those issues. In particular, did 'higher authority' ignore the issue, or did they make a conscious decision to tolerate it, perhaps because the cost of fixing it was disproportionate to the cost it imposed?

 

There is also the view that - with the advent of Nationalisation in the post war years - the LNER Board opted to tolerate the faults thus leaving the problem(s) to be resolved by the new British Railways organisation.

 

There seems to be a general human failing to accept a bad-but-not-too-bad situation rather than try and improve. I was about to ascribe this terrible complacency to the steam era when I recalled the number of times I had failed to persuade my management that we should do a regular analysis of our IT help desk calls with a view to identifying what was causing most calls and kicking off little projects to try and improve things...

 

There is also the question, rarely asked of "if you fix X, what don't you fix because your resources are absorbed fixing X"? Management's job is to make those resourcing choices. If you've got a loco that consistently runs 80k miles between overhauls but sounds like a box of spanners by half way through that, do you prioritise fixing that problem relative to, say, sorting out a class of loco that typically only manages lower mileages but always sounds good while running?

Just about the most frequent complaint levelled against a Bulleid Q1 was that the brakes were pretty ropey. For a goods loco on unfitted freights that's a reasonably serious matter, and things got as far as Bulleid taking cab rides during brake trials to experience the problem first hand. But after that, nothing happened to sort out the problem. The drawing office was stretched, and clearly the problem wasn't so serious it had to be fixed. On the other hand, they did do a series of incremental improvements on the steam reversers of the pacific. Clearly they had limited resources, and the pacific reverser problem was seen as more serious than the Q1 brake problem, and you can only fix one at a time ...

Tom

 

There were other complaints too, which were never addressed, Super D's used to prime easily, and had poor brakes, the famous undersized Derby 4 axleboxes which ran hot, see also Austin 7s, and WD 2-8-0s, where the tender used to bump against the loco at speeds of over 25mph and could have been cured by a spring loaded drawbar and so on.

 

A similar situation to one I found in the Civil Service. Whilst monitoring run listings I noted a particular tape deck was constantly giving rise to failures leading to computer processes having to be restarted at great cost in time and resources. I highlighted this to the software team concerned who poo-pooed it as being a normal situation that could be suffered by any of the 5 tape decks in use. After 6 months the head analyst came and apologised because I had been proved right. During a lull in work he had checked the reported tape deck and identified an error in the micro-code hence its constant failure. That correction saved much time and cost for future processing.

 

I'm afraid this is part of the problem. That's actually a perception of two separate testimonies five years apart, which doesn't actually reflect the full work done over those five years.

But (checks notes) 45-50,000 miles was still one of the better average mileages for repairs of this type, which (checks notes again) led these 4-6-0s to have an intermediate rather than a heavy general and therefore allow them another 45,000-50,000 miles until a heavy general.

In any event, 45,000-50,000 miles - per year, not between overhauls - still made the Thompson B1s one of the highest mileage locomotive types on the LNER, then BR (E). So is this really a flaw as such?

There's a lot of supposition here without much facts tbh!

 

Hello Simon,

I don't know much about the L1s at Neasden, but I would imagine the ASLEF, and then NUR (now RMT) local branch minutes as appropriate at the time would be enlightening.

Knowing people who I knew who knew Bill Harvey (and incidentally Bill Hoole), I think you underestimate Bill Harvey.

There might be at Kew a whole host of files on all this from Bill. His family might have duplicate stuff, or can tell you where it is.

Just a thought.

Cheers,
Julian

 

(Unlike on some threads) we're not really banging on about conflicting views of our own but rather about apparently conflicting evidence of what was happening 70 years ago. If one kind of evidence conflicts with another kind, it seems to me that we should not dismiss any of it but rather try to work out what real situation lies behind all the evidence.

 

I think we also need to be really careful about how we treat different evidence - something written or recorded at the time vs not at the time. As a rule of thumb (as someone who's spent far too much of their life in archives doing academic history) something is less useful the longer after an event it is written - the classic case is the autobiography of Harry Patch, one of the last survivors of the First World War. It's a great book, and Richard van Emden did a wonderful job of collaborating on it and steering the reminiscence. However, it needs to be contextualised as the memories of a man writing about his youth nearly one hundred years after the event.

From that it slides upwards in reliability to a diary entry written on the day, for example.

Within that, there's a hierarchy of reliability based on triangulation - how many people were saying what, and what were they basing it on?

FWIW I'd be tempted to put union minutes as suggested by Julian (and viewed within the context of what the union was trying to achieve) above individual reminiscences (whether Harvey or anyone else). Quite apart from anything else, minutes get signed, so at least you can rely on them being a true picture of what the organisation wanted recording even if nothing else. One person writing their memories down doesn't have that.

None of that is to suggest at all that individual accounts don't matter, or should be discounted (all we know about Isandlwana comes from about 50 people, many of whom were trying to cover their backs when asked difficult questions about how they survived when no one else did, but it's the only narrative we've got).

The issue then becomes how you go about recording e.g. 'all things point to this, but two shed masters say that'? Which is where the historian will have to contextualise the two shedmasters, and why they might have been right or wrong, or had the perspective that they had.

What a historian won't do, unless there's evidence, is just say 'well it's because they're a liar' - there are far more elegant ways of making a point. But if I was faced with the situation that appears to face the author of this book, I'd be looking for ways to explain the discrepancy, and it will come down to 'when he said this, he couldn't have known x,y, and z because they weren't relevant to what he was trying to do; nor did he have access to a,b,c and d archives.

 

Who is dismissing it? I'm highlighting a discrepancy between two accounts and the written records. And isn't that what we are doing? How do we "work out the real situation" behind all of the evidence without discussing it and potentially questioning the evidence provided?

That is an excellent suggestion, and worth following up. Thank you Julian.

Incidentally, the locomotive committee minutes (available in Kew Garden) are very enlightening too on the introduction of new rolling stock. Much of the written record there, you may be interested to know, welcomes the changes made by Thompson and Peppercorn to the LNER.

It is disappointing to read so many people take what I say so personally where Bill Harvey is concerned.

I am not criticising him. I am only stating the facts. His account, and the records were have, do not match up. The question is why, and that's what we are trying to ascertain.

If we take everyone's viewpoints simply on the basis of their job role, then that's a dangerous path to follow because you might as well say none of the recorded evidence matters.

This seems a uniquely LNER trait where railway history is concerned. We treat the individuals as sacrosanct (where it suits us) and question everything else if it contradicts the man.

The biggest thing about the Edward Thompson story is just how much of the individual accounts and evidence is contradicted by the records and archive material. Almost all of it, I am afraid.

Unlike Colonel Rogers - who had a huge axe to grind where Thompson is concerned - Bill Harvey is only interested in the locomotives and what they did. We can't discount his memory of events, absolutely not - but where it doesn't match up to the records, we should question why. And for me, it's pretty simple cross referencing.

One batch of L1s, at Neasden, doing somewhat worse than others, due to leaking tanks (poor welding at works) which leads inadvertently to more hot boxes by way of detritus in the axleboxes. Five years later it's a slightly different affair with another batch of L1s at the same depot developing similar, but not identical issues (for which some changes to the cylinders were made, with no discernible improvements).

The Thompson L1s are condemned out of hand on the basis of the noise they made (!) when run down, and a few accounts which portray them as totally useless, or inadequate for the work they were put to. Yet the written records including mileages and availability tell a very, very different story.

 

I guess two points about that (@gwralatea piece) are :

1. Individual observations may not be representative especially if they are small numbers. Ideally we would like the record from the one hundred shedmasters at KX, Hitchin, Stratford, Ipswich, Neasden, Colwich, Middlesbrough, Botanic Gardens etc in whose care the L1s rested at different points in their life. And we would like the collected views of the footplate staff, the shed maintenance staff, the workshops etc.

2. Some events, completely true in themselves, make better stories than ' Average day, not much happened.'

 

Nonsense!

Its a universal human trait you see everywhere.

 

Very valid point, which I confess I'd totally overlooked as with them having being rebuilt in SR days, their BR power classification didn't cross my mind. You have to wonder why on earth did the SR classify them N15x? Add to that their top-link duties on south coast expresses in LBSC days and your comment made me realise I'd never actually bracketed them with, say, the decidedly antiquated looking Furness Railway, or G&SW (5P) 'baltic' machines, which were in any event doomed to early extinction under Stanier's standardisation drive. It throws both the finances and priorities of the SR and LMS into pretty sharp relief.

Put that way, you'd have to think of similar criticisms of the 6MT Clans, where it transpired they were being flogged on 7MT Britannia loads and timings. So why am I thinking of gieselised 34092 being described as 'two carriages stronger' during it's mainline running stint 30-odd years ago?

 

Point taken Jim. A generalization too far?