Edward Thompson: Wartime C.M.E. Discussion

But what's the betting that had 4472 been rebuilt and scrapped and 4470 survived then exactly the same people would be bewailing the loss of the iconic 4472 and the survival of the less distinguished in service 4470?

 

Perhaps when SACM has finished the history of Edward Thompson, he might write volume 2 on the historiography of Edward Thompson! I think it is an interesting question why he has apparently been poorly served by historians to date.

Tom

 

The most bizarre thing about the Thompson vitriol is that it appears to come from the LNER fans. That's what seems to make it quite unique to me. If one considers Collett, for instance, the biggest knockers will be those who would tend to be critical of the GWR anyway, whilst the GW enthusiasts will be rather more restrained, and point out his virtues, leaving the man with a reasonable amount of support. Whereas with Thompson those of us who are not such great enthusiasts for light green (or even dark blue) round top boilers are not likely to express much support, but those who are in the LNER fan club cascade this quite startling (to this outsider) torrent of vitriol on the poor bloke's memory. At the risk of receiving another torrent of vitriol, its a mystery to me why Thompson is so hated by LNER folk, and yet Bulleid, who was arguably no more successful and much more expensive to the Southern, receives adulation. Is it just a hangover from historical emnity? Cook, for example, seems quite clear that the Thompson versus Gresley thing was a live issue in his day and with the staff, not just the enthusiasts.

 

I should point out that Gresley did much the same thing when he was put in charge of the LNER, and after the grouping, giving his locomotive designs priority in the sequencing - for example, the classification to his Pacifics "A1" and Raven's "A2" and a fair few others besides. It is interesting that his Pacifics did follow a numerical order in development, however, A1-A3 and then A4.

So to be fair Thompson continued on a logical theme - older locomotive designs took the higher numbers and newer locomotive designs took the lower numbers.

Peppercorn followed Thompson and did exactly the same thing: Thompson's A2 becoming A2/3, A1 becoming A1/1 and K1 becoming K1/1 in favour of Peppercorn A1, A2 and K1. Not vanity, I would suggest, but tidy minds putting newest locomotive classes at the top of the classifications.

I don't see Peppercorn or Gresley being accused of vanity, so why should Thompson?

 

That is somewhat of an exaggeration if I may be so bold!

Absolutely: and I hope in my book that I am able to do this to the best of my ability.

Are you being serious? I'm at a loss to respond if you are. Of course putting Thompson's decisions into context is relevant. To castigate him for the results and not understand the pressures he (and others like him) were under is to be entirely unfair.

Absolutely, but the report seems to suggest that this was not an option. Neither would it have been at the time. The nature of the war meant specific traffic had to get through and reliability was of the greatest concern.

 

Just to say that I have edited my typed up copy to include that suggestion above. Thank you for the timely reminder.

 

Tom - I think that's a whole new ball game! I think there are questions to be answered by LNER writers. Why this report required some effort to find a decent copy of - why, I am told, it is in Stanier's biography and not in Thompson's - why, in every engineering or pseudo engineering book on Gresley, it's never been mentioned either for balance, and why we are in 2015 and I am still finding new material I've never read before on the LNER…!

It's not something I wish to pursue at this time, however. That's for other readers and interested parties to consider themselves, I would suggest.

 

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I've not really been bothered about all this pro/anti Thompson, pro/anti Gresley discussion but I'm a bit perplexed by this latest posting on class numbering. Gresley's A1 entered service a few days before the Raven loco so it would be logical to give the GNR loco the 'A1' designation with the NER being the 'A2'. The next logical developments were obviously classified as A3 an A4 in date order. I can't see the logic of re-classifying the Gresley A1's as A10 as being a logical theme that the newer designs took the lower numbers. To follow this would mean a wholesale re-classifying each time a new design was put into operation. Even though the last K1 Ragtimer had been withdrawn in 1936, Gresley did not re-use this for his latest 2-6-0 design, introduced in 1937 as a K4. Why didn't Thompson simply use the A2 classification as that was available to him if he wanted a low number? That's seemingly what Peppercorn did.

 

Yes, almost exclusively.

Thompson was known to have been difficult with superiors, and certainly clashed with Gresley on occasion. Peter Grafton's book relates a few specific encounters, however one thing which always seems to be overlooked is that they were still colleagues and friends. When Gresley's wife died, his daughter Violet took up looking after her father and supporting him as best he could. Thompson and his wife were known to have Gresley round for dinner, and there is evidence (if you so choose to look for it) that they socialised outside of work.

I feel that Thompson is criticised and somewhat vilified, because he disagreed intrinsically with the use of the conjugated valve gear and this one component in particular, as we can see in the report, is that which is potentially Gresley's hubris. To criticise Gresley is to, in the eyes of his supporters, undermine his reputation. So how better to preserve his memory than to undermine the man who stopped the development of locomotives which used the Gresley patent valve gear?

It is interesting that many people fall silent at the fact that Peppercorn did not return the LNER to conjugated valve gear use for new build locomotives after the war. If the three sets of independent motion had shown no improvement on the conjugated valve gear across the board (including performance and maintenance and not just manufacturing) then he would have been free to return to it. He did not and his A1 Pacific is perhaps the best of Gresley and Thompson, in a very compact design with his own trademarks too.

Thompson DID use the A2 classification - Peppercorn changed the Thompson A2/3 - which had been Class A2 (this classification which had also been applied to A2/2 - and then A2/1 - both of these classes receiving their /2 and /1 on the building of the first A2/3 - which emerged as Class A2!) when he took office, to A2/3 when his Peppercorn A2 emerged.

Confusing, I know, given the fact that four different classes within a ten year period were all classified as A2 in some way - A2/2 was originally just "Class A" for instance.

 

Yes

The war was not confined to the LNER region. Nor could "war" be used an excuse or reason for all his decisions.

 

The war is not being used as an excuse. It is contextualising his decisions. It is important to put his decisions into context to better understand why he made them. In addition, it is entirely fair and reasonable - and provable no less - that certain decisions were taken because the war was having a detrimental effect on the railway and its employees (unsurprisingly).

I wonder what other CME spent nights on fire watch duty and slept in their own office as a result of bombing raids! The pressures he was under - and remember he was 61, and not a young man, at the time - must have been enormous. So these should rightly factor in our overall analysis of his decisions and his ability to make them in an informed and reasonable manner.

Otherwise you are basing an opinion of the man purely on results and results which are, at best, not easily definable in a number of ways (particularly as many critics remain entirely loco centric).

I would not base my view of Gresley on just his locomotive successes or failures, and I would contextualise his decisions too. If we are being consistent in our analysis of locomotive engineers we should do it for all of them.

 

I think Steve in post 689 has covered my intended reply.

However, for all this controversy about 2 : 1 gears, the plain fact is that in former Kings Cross Shedmaster Peter N. Townend's writings this gear is seemingly so trouble-free that there is very little written about it. If anyone had cause for complaint surely it would have been he.

 

In context we should remember the report was written in the middle of WW2 and Peter Townend writes on his experiences of the valve gear specifically in post war 1950s and 60s Britain, when perhaps the A4s were better understood and better maintained then they had been in the austerity and desperate times of WW2.

As I have said a few times, there's no doubting the conjugated valve gear worked, and worked well when maintained properly. That wasn't the case when Thompson became CME for various reasons, and the report validates his point of view at the time of writing.

It is entirely possible - and my personal view - that both Thompson and Townend are right in their views. These views are formed in different circumstances and as such are different. That in itself is unsurprising.

 

Have just been reading a piece about the A4s in wartime. It says of the Haymarket based ones, that in spite of labour and material shortages, their performance remained at a satisfactory level and failures were very rare indeed. From all that I've read, I still contend that the Achilles heel was the centre big end, not the derived motion, and once the big end had been redesigned properly, that particular weakness was removed.

 

That's fair enough - can you cite which book that was please? Would be interesting for the purposes of balance to compare reports. I've a lot of material on the A4s in wartime and their performances are varied. The A3s seemed to suffer less failures - more down to the lubricant choices once suspects, given the A4s had a specially formulated one pre-war and this wasn't available during it.

Cox's statistics, incidentally, about the number of failures is not specific to class - it's across the board of conjugated valve gear locomotives.

 

RCTS LNER Part 2A. Can't find similar reference to the A1/A3 class though.

 

I'm reading The book of the A3s and there are some comments to that effect. Good book if you can pick it up. I have the A4 volume to get through as well. Thank you for the pointer I will go through my copy of RCTS 2A carefully on the morrow.

 

I'm not sure how you get anything else out of the report. To me it says two things (reversing the order)

Firstly and most importantly the big ends were, shall we say substandard, and that was the cause of the unreliability. Its not a good reflection on anyone that the big end problem didn't really get resolved until the 50s.

Secondly the conjugated gear, in practice, caused uneven valve events, [something that would reduce power and efficiency] and was a bit under engineered, but was *NOT* responsible for the bulk of the reliability problems.

So the motivation given for not continuing with the conjugated gear was not reliability, but poor valve events and consequent lost efficiency. Its nicely put in A E Durrants book, where he writes "It was an education to stand on Finsbury Park platform and watch a procession of northbound expresses... Gresley engines roared up under a vertical column of smoke, the hop, skip-and-a-jump exhaust betraying the fact that only two and a half cylinders were working... the Peppercorns purred up, faster, with all three cylinders fully operative..." That was the motivation for dropping the conjugated gear according to the paper, not reliability.

 

Thank you for highlighting this using such an elegant quote. As someone who thought I wasn't particularly interested in engineering detail, I find I am, and as someone too young to have stood in that spot watching those trains pass, I most definitely wish I could