Recently, lingering in my loft over books and back numbers of this journal and that, I stumbled on a photo of some schoolboys, paper and pencils in hand, sitting on a fence and watching a train go by. The location was Tring; the date, 1933. It’s a safe bet that what those lads were jotting down was the number of the steam locomotive at the head of the express.
That date, 1933, surprised me. I’d always thought that loco-spotting – collecting engine numbers as if they were physical entities, like stamps or butterflies – wasn’t invented until a decade later, when a 20-year-old clerk in the Southern Railway’s publicity department hit upon an idea, one that would make his name and fortune. Ian Allan had been spared military service courtesy of an amputated leg, and had been entrusted with a swelling postbag of requests for information about the Southern’s locomotives. His idea was to issue a booklet listing the hundreds of engines the company owned, and sell it for a shilling.
It was an immediate hit. It told the purchaser – doubtless roughly 98 per cent male – whether a particular locomotive was large ormedium or puny, whether used on passenger or freight trains or to shunt things around, whether to be found on main or branch lines or in sidings. The identification numbers they carried were printed in sequence, columns of figures down the page, asking to be ticked or underlined. As indeed they would be by a myriad schoolboys and, it was said, several vicars and the odd bishop. Thus, with one simple stroke of commercial genius, was born a book of numbers that launched several decades’ worth of the Ian Allan ABC of British Locomotives, the loco-spotters’ bible.
I’ve never seen that first ABC, but I’d like to think that Mr Allan enriched his list with the names the Southern gave their most glamorous engines: King Arthur, Queen Guinevere, Camelot, Maid of Astolat, Excalibur, Lord Nelson
Recently, lingering in my loft over books and back numbers of this journal and that, I stumbled on a photo of some schoolboys, paper and pencils in hand, sitting on a fence and watching a train go by. The location was Tring; the date, 1933. It’s a safe bet that what those lads were jotting down was the number of the steam locomotive at the head of the express. That date, 1933, surprised me. I’d always thought that loco-spotting – collecting engine numbers as if they were physical entities, like stamps or butterflies – wasn’t invented until a decade later, when a 20-year-old clerk in the Southern Railway’s publicity department hit upon an idea, one that would make his name and fortune. Ian Allan had been spared military service courtesy of an amputated leg, and had been entrusted with a swelling postbag of requests for information about the Southern’s locomotives. His idea was to issue a booklet listing the hundreds of engines the company owned, and sell it for a shilling. It was an immediate hit. It told the purchaser – doubtless roughly 98 per cent male – whether a particular locomotive was large ormedium or puny, whether used on passenger or freight trains or to shunt things around, whether to be found on main or branch lines or in sidings. The identification numbers they carried were printed in sequence, columns of figures down the page, asking to be ticked or underlined. As indeed they would be by a myriad schoolboys and, it was said, several vicars and the odd bishop. Thus, with one simple stroke of commercial genius, was born a book of numbers that launched several decades’ worth of the Ian Allan ABC of British Locomotives, the loco-spotters’ bible. I’ve never seen that first ABC, but I’d like to think that Mr Allan enriched his list with the names the Southern gave their most glamorous engines:
King Arthur,
Queen Guinevere,
Camelot,
Maid of Astolat,
Excalibur,
Lord Nelson,
Sir Walter Raleigh,
Howard of Effingham . . . But, with or without those names, Allan’s pioneer booklet of 1942 kick-started a national craze. Kick-started, because evidently the craze had long been gathering steam on stations and fences in Tring and everywhere else. And what a craze! It may have quietened down now, but in the mid-1950s, when I was growing up, there can’t have been more than seven or eight boys in any classroom of thirty plus who didn’t talk trains and numbers (when not busy recreating the latest
Goon Show, our other obsession). Spotting was the perfect hobby in those post-war years of make-do, because it could be indulged in for free; the minimum requirements were an exercise book and a pencil, both ‘borrowable’ from school. Plus access to a railway line, of course. But most of us acquired at least one of the
Ian Allan ABCs which had been hitting the market since the late 1940s. By that time Allan’s original list had spawned a series of booklets illustrated with black-and-white photos. There was one booklet for each region of Britain’s newly nationalized railways. As our school was in Sussex, the ABC of choice was the
Southern. The
pièce de résistance, however, was the
Combined Volume; every engine number in the UK contained in one compact hardback. When finally I got to own one, I spent a happy half-hour covering it in protective brown paper and inscribing it in dodgy italics. At 10s 6d, the
Combined didn’t come cheap: though that’s 53 pence in today’s money, it’s nowhere near the true cost. When I cycled to Thakeham at weekends to pick mushrooms for four solid hours in a sunless shed sans tea-break, I was paid off with a ten-shilling note. New
ABCs came out every year or two. They needed to, because locomotives were constantly falling off the record, scrapped or put in store for a rainy day, as happened when the hapless post-Beeching diesels kept collapsing. And steam locomotives were still being built in the ’50s and so had to be added to the tally. For me, that was of extra interest, as one design – a handsome tank engine – was being built in large quantities at the nearby Brighton Works, and each new example was tried out on my branch line. More numbers to harvest. The spotter’s basic objective was to cop – see for the first time – as many locomotives as possible and note down their numbers. Now I look back on it, it does seem a batty idea to ‘collect’ something as arbitrary and insubstantial as a number on metal. Especially as what it denoted was not fixed for life but comprised an assembly of parts constantly getting changed. Boilers, wheels and much else would be swapped around with equivalents from sister engines. A thorny issue of identity, then. What exactly
were we spotting? And why did we do it? Perhaps, as Everest was for Mallory, just because those engines were there – and because they
weren’t there. There was no guarantee that a locomotive we were seeking would ever materialize. That of course only increased the thrill of the hunt, which is what loco-spotting was about, as birding is for some twitchers. But what joy it was to cop an especially elusive engine, as happened to me one August afternoon on Andover station when an express thundered past, headed by the gleaming green
Shaftesbury, the one member of its class I still hadn’t spotted. I yelped with the emotion of it, jumped up and down and, tearful with gratitude, raised my arms in salute to the locomotive’s unseen crew. I don’t recall whether at that stage I was in possession of the crucial annex to the
ABCs which Ian Allan Ltd, as it now was, had started to produce: the
Locoshed Book. It was like the
ABC in that every engine number was listed, but the extra detail provided was the identity of each one’s home depot, where it was
shedded. Every shed in the land had its code number: nearest to my village was 75A, Brighton. In effect, the
Locoshed Book was a coded map; but it was also an atlas for the imagination, the way railway timetables were for Proust. Armed with it, I did what the sickly Proust couldn’t, I planned and executed complicated journeys of well over 300 miles in a day. The aim as ever was to cop new engines, among them namers rarer even than
Shaftesbury.
Namers: giving names to locomotives seems to be mostly a British quirk. It still goes on. Stand by any main line today and before long you’ll see at least one diesel or electric locomotive with a nameplate bolted to its flanks. But the choice of name! It’s odds on that it will be of a power station or a freight depot. So much for imagination, then. Gone are the brass plates proclaiming
Shooting Star and
Golden Fleece,
Ivanhoe and
Owen Glendower . . . But hold on, let’s not get too dewy-eyed. The publicity people in the Good Old Days could also get it wrong. Think only of the world’s fastest steam locomotive, a beautiful streamlined masterpiece of the 1930s; it was named after a duck –
Mallard! On the very last day of the 1950s, my family moved from our house by a Sussex branch line, and within a couple of years I was starting university. Determined never to be thought uncool, I steered clear of the city’s station, ironically the best location in the country to see locomotives from every region except Scotland. And I sold my railway stuff to a fellow inmate of my college, a cheery extrovert with no hang-ups about loving trains. But I wish I’d kept my ABCs at least. They’d have been the most potent of aide-memoires. And I realize now how educational they were, more than I knew at the time. Those strings of numbers, of no value in themselves, unlike stamp and butterfly collections, were keys that opened doors to geography, history, legend, and more besides. Among the rewards of my number-chases was the discovery of fifty-four Knights of the Round Table, sixteen admirals of the fleet, forty public schools, sixty- six West Country towns and places, several outposts of the fading Empire, and a few characters from Wales’s and Scotland’s distant past. More importantly still, loco-spotting taught me and my generation to be independent, to journey alone, read maps and timetables, use our initiative, nurture the imagination. And exist on corned beef sandwiches. These days, I check charity shops for old
ABCs. They’re difficult to find, especially the original
Combined of the dates I want, the mid-50s. The closest I’ve come is a damaged
Combined of 1961. Several pages have been torn out. Why, I can’t fathom. Still, it’s better than nothing, even though its first owner’s underlinings coincide with hardly a single locomotive I ever saw. But this honeycomb of a book will have to do for now, the half-glimpsed record of another person’s past.
Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 67 © Martin Sorrell 2020
