Edward Thompson: Wartime C.M.E. Discussion

Hardy was a premium apprentice was he not?. Surely the whole point of this apprenticeship was to fit him for management.

As to delving into peoples minds, you cannot tell what Thompson was thinking either, so your attempts to dismiss accusations of spite, bias and hatred of Gresley are no more valid than my own thoughts. Mine, however are based on the writings of a vast majority of those who have written on the subject; yours are based on a self confessed intent to exonerate Edward Thompson.

Further to your comments about the famous report, I pointed out in my first analysis of it (post 712) that if it had recognised the specific situation at the time, it would have been far more comprehensible. No mention was made of confining the assessment to wartime conditions, thus assessing the gear on the wartime maintenance conditions alone was to ignore some 20 years of success for 2 years of problems.

The Remit was:

REMIT: There are 652 3-cylinder locomotives on the L.N.E.R. on which the inside valve is driven by an arrangement of rocking levers known as the 'Gresley' valve gear. Mechanical trouble has been experienced with these engines, and I have been asked to give a considered opinion on the merits or demerits of this gear and its influence on the mechanical trouble in question.

Part of my analysis was

All in all I think the part of the report dealing with the gear is at best misleading and at worst heavily biased. Strangely enough, a much more balanced approach, pointing out that the problems were due to wartime effects, noting how uncertain the future was in terms of a return to peacetime maintenance, and suggesting that whilst the end of restrictions was not in sight abandonment of the conjugated gear in new build would be wise, would have been a far better way to proceed.

And of course Thompson followed the advice, it was his desire all along.

 

Any engineering decision is made according to some combination of hard evidence, suspicions, prejudices and personal preferences. Ideally hard evidence would be dominant and the other factors would have only minimal influence, but that won't always be so, especially in the "up to your arse in alligators" situation, which surely does apply in the middle of a war. It remains unclear whether Thompson's decisions were based at all on a personal desire to do away with Gresley's legacy, but he did less in that direction than he could have done. It is likewise unclear whether he deliberately ignored what was being done at Haymarket, failed to think about it, or was unaware of it; and if unaware why he was unaware.

More evidence from primary sources may provide some clarification, and in particular may continue to reveal where the received wisdom has been mistaken, but I can't see complete certainty emerging ever. Considering the human tendency to stick to one's beliefs even when presented with contrary evidence, many will no doubt continue to see Thompson in totally negative terms whatever emerges, but I applaud S.A.C. Martin's efforts to get as close to the truth as possible.

 

What were those other changes?

 

I think he meant the increase in strength and rigidity of the bearing backstrap and the change to the GWR type continuous whitemetal bearing surface and felt pad oiler.

 

Cook doesn't say, but the improved bearing strap discussed does sound feasible.

As a digression, here's Cook's 1955 paper on accuracy in construction. http://www.gracesguide.co.uk/images/6/6b/Er19550930.pdf#page=8

There's a sly crack at the end about the aesthetics of the BR standards...

 

Yet he was in the drawing office and also went and spent time on the footplate. He went into management at a much later date so I question whether that could truly have been on the cards. It's neither here nor there: here is one of the railwaymen who fit into the bracket that you described Thompson in general as being aloof to stating that "he was a great man, and a great leader of men".

You choose to ignore it and to twist it to suit your own prejudices.

I'm not trying to dismiss them and as I have repeatedly said there are many sides to individuals. However I think there's a point whereby the criticism of Edward Thompson goes beyond how he acted to individuals and delves into the fantasy. You made a general comment about Thompson's treatment of people on lower pay grades: where is your evidence to support this?

There is plenty of evidence for Thompson's presumed spite/malice in writing from individuals such as Harrison and Cox. In almost all circumstances they are from people for whom Gresley could do no wrong and Thompson could do no right. I am perfectly at liberty to question it and examine it for what it is. For instance, 4470 was chosen out of spite by Thompson to be rebuilt.

Maybe I am being totally thick: and correct me if I am wrong! But surely given the report was written in 1942 and there had been three years of the war to deal with, its clear (to me at any rate) remit was to report on the conditions at the time, and it even quoted the number of engines which had failed comparable to the similar 3-cylinder LMS engines of the time.

I have never read it as being anything other than an analysis of the current working conditions at the time and have always confined it to that context on that basis.

But does Edward Thompson not have the right to disagree with Gresley?

Here is the fundamental fallacy right here. Thompson disagrees with Gresley's engineering. This apparently is a crime.

How many other engineers disagreed with Gresley? Did they disagree with his choice of valve gear out of spite? Or did they disagree with him based on their own engineering credentials?

OS Nock describes in pages 77-79 of "From the footplate" a book he published in 1984, for the first time in his writing career, a description of a visit he made to Edward Thompson's home to interview him. This was part of some work he was doing for The Engineer. In it he states the following:

Just a side note - that quotation probably confirms that Thompson was aware of Holcroft's work after all.

The point I am trying to make is that nobody here disagrees that Thompson did not agree with Gresley on the conjugated valve gear. But surely his remit as CME was to be his own man and to make his own decisions - and ultimately he was right to disagree with Gresley on the basis that he perhaps genuinely believed on an engineering level that Gresley was wrong.

That does not make Gresley's legacy any more or any less special, neither does it make Thompson into an ogre. It makes him into a rational human being instead of what has been described previously. I think many people are afraid of that being the truth more than the bitter, twisted old man who somehow had time during a world war to try and destroy a late colleague's legacy. Which seems more likely?

 

S.A.C. Martin said: ↑
"Every other railway company in Britain - every other railway company in Europe, in the Americas, in Australia and in New Zealand, used two cylinders for small and medium sized locomotives."

So you consider the Stanier 2500 tanks not to be medium sized? They were only Class 4 rated. How about the Raven H Class 4-4-4T? Medium sized again I would argue. NER Z Class 4-4-2? Or do you consider an Atlantic to be a large loco in the context of your post? How about 3-cyliner compounds? Plenty of those were built but again do you count those as large?

 

In fairness a rampant generalisation on my part. Yes I concede those classes.

But would you not concede the two cylinder machines by far outstrip the three cylinder ones?

And do not all of those engines have in common...three sets of valve gear. Not conjugated gear.

 

I agree with the number of two versus three cylinder classes but disagreed regarding no other railways adopting three cylinders for other than large locos.
As for the conjugated bit, they weren't designed by Gresley so why would they be so fitted?

 

My apologies if I wasn't being clear: I did initially mean to refer just to three cylinder conjugated machines. Not my clearest posting on this topic but I am under heavy medication for a flu like virus.

 

Rather narrows the field. So are we suggesting the small number of classes to use the derived motion means the motion was no good? One could use the same argument regarding double chimneys. Far more classes lacked them than had them.

 

If ten people say one thing and one person says another, I tend to take more notice of the ten people. That is logical. Yes the single person COULD be the lone voice crying in the wind, but it seems unlikely. As to prejudice - I'm not the one saying that he'll consider he's failed if he doesn't find a way to prove Thompson wasn't as bad as he's painted, who has spend years writing a book to that effect and who insists on pushing his views whenever possible.

That's the impression I've got from reading about his interaction with staff.

I'm not sure about Harrison, but Cox himself tells how he was flattered by Thompson discussing his projects with him - and that report certainly doesn't imply any criticism of Thompson at all, so I'm not sure what you mean by that reference to Cox. Yes, you can examine them as much as you like, but what you take from them seems to differ from the conclusions reached by all the others.

Are you agreeing, disagreeing, or just using that as an example of claims against Thompson.

Sorry, three years of troubles. The remit of the report was to consider the gear - no mention was made of the war. The report condemns the gear in absolute terms - no mention of the wartime situation. How can it be confined to that wartime context if the context is not mentioned. I have pointed this out several times, but you don't seem to understand.

Thompson has the right to disagree - but that isn't the same as being right to disagree. Sure he genuinely believed he was right, but it doesn't actually prove it. If he wanted to use three sets of gear, fine, but he had to trash the conjugated gear's reputation to get permission from the board to do his own thing, and that doesn't seem right! Perhaps if the board had immediately said, sure go ahead, show us what you're made of, this whole discussion would be moot.

Actually a bit of both. Allow him to be really human - a bit vain, a bit scheming, holding a bit of a grudge, but honestly believing his ideas were better. just like the rest of us really.

 

The difference with conjugated motion is everyone else who tried it didn't repeat it!
That doesn't mean it is useless - Chapelon showed that compounds, in the hands of a genius, could be the greatest of all locos. So does that mean everyone else was hopeless and stupid for not building compounds in the inter war years? Does it mean Stanier was a fool for building simples after Fowler's compounds, or that all the engineers who rebuilt compounds were criminal vandals (Whale, Urie) - how about Wordsell who rebuilt his own brother's compounds? What a Judas! Of course not, they all made their best engineering assessment based on the facts available to them.
So why is Thompson the only one pilloried?
The comparison with double chimneys makes no sense - this was a late development.

 

Probably because of
Gresley's prewar popularity and reputation,
Thompson's heavy criticism of the conjugated gear,
The lack of grace of his rebuilds to pacific, and their lack of significant improvement over the Gresley pacifics.
The rebuild of Great Northern - intentional or not.
Various people coming off worst in their dealings with Thompson.

in almost infinite combinations and importance.

Not sure what you mean about the double chimney - All the Thompson pacifics and all the Peppercorn A1 pacifics had double Kylchaps from new. 4 or 5 A4s and 1 A3 had them prior to WW2 but the rest were fitted with them in the late 50s, so in any comparison between Gresley or peppercorn express locos, unless one of the 6 Gresley locos fitted with a kylchap was used, the Gresley engine would always be at a disadvantage until the late 50s.

 

Regarding the conjugated motion, the reality is that in the late 1920s and early 1930s it looked like a great idea, by the early 1940s it looked like a very bad idea, and by the late 1950s it looked like an OK idea, but no so good that those who didn't follow it were idiots. That's it, you see, in engineering the facts change. As an engineer I find all this post hoc armchair engineering about what a report in the 1940s should have said given hindsight from a decade later or facts not widely known at the time rather irritating.
If all of the most qualified professional loco engineers at the time thought the gear should go (or at least not be produced further), you can't criticise one of them for doing that.
This is all coming from someone who thinks Gresley locos are magnificent, Thompson's either competent or rather odd.

 

One point about 2 cylinder locos outside the UK. The larger loading gauge outside the UK means that much larger outside cylinders can be easily incorporated, allowing more flexibility.

 

There were 3-cyl locos built very successfully for the Irish and Australian 5'3'' gauge and the Argentine 5'6'' gauge, and 4-cyl for the Indian and Argentine 5'6'' gauge. Some of the above were compounds. Some tried the Gresley gear, but none replicated it.

 

Does a Peppercorn A1 have more Gresley in its DNA or more Thompson?

(My answer would be that with three sets of valve gear and divided drive it's more Thompson than Gresley)

 

All of those of course have widely-spaced frames, making inside cylinder locos, or multi-cylinder locos, relatively favourable - cf. New Zealand or South African practice, with narrow space between frames and relatively generous loading gauge, which favours two big outside cylinders.

Tom

 

Most like a Gresley engine with a Stanier front end.