You may be aware that a regular fixture on the Sunday morning of our Annual Conference is the “Rolt Lecture”. Members of long standing knew that the lecture was given in memory of the Association’s first President L. T. C. (Tom) Rolt, but Council members were increasingly being asked by newer members, those of a newer generation, why the lecture was so named.
In response to this, Council has decided we should try and explain who Tom Rolt was, why he was important to the early days of Industrial Archaeology and to the formation of the society and why it is appropriate therefore to give the lecture in his name. To this end we approached Victoria Owens, author of a new (2024) biography of Rolt, to ask if she would compose an introduction to his life and times. We are hugely grateful that she was prepared to do so and the result is below.
(Numbers in brackets) refer to the notes at the end.
Tom Rolt
Born in 1910 Lionel Thomas Caswall Rolt, known as Tom, qualifies – albeit narrowly – as an Edwardian (1).
At the time of his birth, his parents – Lionel and Jemima, known as Lily and Mima – lived in Chester. While they were not conspicuously wealthy, their means were sufficiently comfortable for them to entrust much of Tom’s early upbringing to a nurse. Walking with her one day in Chester’s Eaton Park, Tom who would have been about three years old at the time had a life-defining experience. He saw Katie, a fifteen-inch gauge four wheeled steam locomotive, the property of the Duke of Westminster . She was, he remembers, ‘puffing energetically’ along the private ducal narrow-gauge railway which connected Eaton Hall – the Duke’s ancestral home – with the mainline between Birmingham and Birkenhead. Entranced, he became, he writes, ‘a railway enthusiast from that very moment.’
The Rolts moved to Cusop, on the Welsh Border, in Summer 1914 and remained there for the duration of the Great War and its immediate aftermath. In 1920, following a financial ‘Misfortune’, they relocated to Stanley Pontlarge in Gloucestershire. Despite their depleted funds, to Tom’s dismay, his parents sent him to board at Cheltenham College which he hated. After his 16th birthday, he begged to be allowed to leave. Perhaps surprisingly, Lily Rolt acceded to his request and Tom began a two-year pupillage with Bomfords of Pitchill, a small agricultural engineering business based near Evesham.
At Pitchill, he not only acquired practical hammer and chisel skills, but got used to doing the jobs that no-one else wanted. To him fell the task of cleaning up after the ‘Dudleys’ – families from the industrial west midlands who came to Pitchill for summer fruit-picking whom he describes as ‘wild, dirty and […] verminous’ – or collecting ‘shoddy’ – foul smelling wool-waste which made excellent fertiliser – from Salford Priors station. He began to recognise that, unlike school, the workplace did not always follow simplistic rules. Helping to grub up dead trees by chaining them to a ploughing engine and watching aghast as the driver increased his steam pressure far in excess of the safe limit initially had Tom cowering under a hedge, in expectation of an imminent explosion, which – perhaps miraculously – never came. The brass plates on the Fowler engines’ smokeboxes which gave their weight as ‘14T’ told, in a literal sense, a brazen lie; each engine weighed far more, and Tom tacitly fell in with the general workplace view that certain local bridges were best avoided when taking the ploughing tackle from farm to farm.
After two years, Tom took up a premium apprenticeship with locomotive manufacturers Kerr Stuart & Co in Stoke on Trent. To judge from his account in Landscape with Machines, he enjoyed progressing from shop to shop at Kerr Stuart’s works as he familiarised himself with the discrete stages of locomotive production. He also relished demonstrating KS 4415 – the company’s pioneering diesel locomotive – at exhibitions and shows. In his spare time, he explored the canals around Stoke with his ‘courtesy uncle’ Kyrle Willans and his family aboard their narrow boat Cressy.(2) He also began to write – first, a handwritten collection of railway related short stories, poems and nonfiction pieces to which he gave the title ‘The Railway’ and, in time, a novel – ‘Strange Vista’ – which Tom set in a town resembling Stoke.(3)
In May 1930, it emerged that Herbert Langham Reed, Kerr Stuart’s Chairman and Managing Director, had used company funds to prop up a failing firm – Evos Doorways Ltd. When the Doorways company went bust, its bankers petitioned for the winding up of Kerr Stuart. There followed a rollercoaster summer in which the morale of Kerr Stuart employees rose at any sign of reprieve, only to plummet as their hopes evaporated. In Autumn 1930, the firm definitively closed. Hunslet of Leeds acquired the goodwill of the company together with the rights in their designs and took on some of the senior staff, but most of the Kerr Stuart men were left redundant.
Tom completed his apprenticeship with Dursley-based agricultural engineers R.A. Lister & Co of Dursley but, in a time of economic depression, Listers could not keep him on. He found various short-lived jobs, and during a brief spell of employment with Thornycroft’s of Basingstoke, he met John Passini. Having immediately taken to one another, the two men decided to go into partnership, running the Phoenix Garage at Hartley Wintney. Soon, John introduced Tom to racing driver Tim Carson and before long Tom joined the Vintage Sports Car Club.
One morning in 1937, club member Angela Orred swept onto the Phoenix Garage forecourt driving a white Alfa Romeo to which, Tom conjectured, she had given ‘a very hurried and superficial facelift which included repainting it with what looked like whitewash.’(4) The couple fell in love, and after a brief boating holiday on the Warwickshire Avon, resolved to live on the canals. In January 1939,Tom quit the garage business to make writing his career. Having persuaded Kyrle Willans to sell him Cressy for a knockdown sum, he moved to Banbury – the boat’s home port – and converted her into a comfortable houseboat. In the face of Angela’s father’s violent opposition, Tom and Angela got married at Caxton Hall on 11 July 1939 and set off on a honeymoon canal trip.
The declaration of war in September 1939 cut short their travel. A pacifist, Tom had no intention of joining the armed services. Since engineering was a reserved occupation, he easily secured wartime employment with Roll Royce at Crewe, but soon realised that he loathed it. At the first opportunity, he and Angela navigated their way south, and over-wintered at Banbury, where Tom wrote Narrow Boat. Initially titled A Painted Ship, the book describes the couple’s life aboard Cressy and – following several rejections – achieved publication in 1944. It would be his first great success.
After a brief spell of poorly paid work for the Aldbourne Engineering Company, Tom secured well-paid employment with the Ministry of Supply. It meant moving to the west midlands and the Rolts moored Cressy at Tardebigge on the Worcester and Birmingham Canal. While Tom drove around factories in the area inspecting vehicle parts intended for military and essential civilian use, Angela worked at a Worcestershire fruit farm. In 1943, the couple took a holiday in Wales during which they hoped to travel on the Talyllyn Railway; confronted by a notice at Towyn’s Wharf station stating ‘NO TRAINS TODAY’ they had to content themselves with a long walk up the line, back to their Minffordd lodging.
In 1946, literary agent Robert Aickman, who had enjoyed Narrow Boat, visited Tom at Tardebigge and the two men decided to set up the Inland Waterways Association – a society-cum-pressure group committed to regenerating the nation’s canals. Aickman would be elected Chairman and Tom, secretary. By now, Tom was writing prolifically; he followed Narrow Boat (1944) with High Horse Riderless (1947) – his plea for sustainable living; Sleep No More, a collection of supernatural stories (1948) followed, Green and Silver – Tom’s account of the Irish canals and Worcestershire – a historical and topographical study of the county both appeared in 1949.
Relations between Tom and Aickman were often stormy. Aickman enjoyed campaigning and bringing the waterways’ parlous condition to public attention. While he relished Cressy’s passage under Tunnel Lane bridge on the neglected Stratford-upon-Avon Canal in full view of the press, such exploits left Tom concerned about damaging the boat. Aickman considered it imperative to save every mile of the inland waterway network; Tom thought it wiser to focus on commercially viable routes. Organising the 1950 Market Harborough Rally of Boats exacerbated the tensions between them. By this time, rot was eating into Cressy’s hull and Tom’s and Angela’s marriage was falling apart. In the winter of 1950-51, they separated. While she joined Billy Smart’s Circus; Tom abandoned Cressy near Stone on the Trent and Mersey canal, returning only to recover her Model T Ford engine for use on his next venture, the Talyllyn Railway.
Tom had been interested in the Talyllyn ever since his 1943 visit with Angela. In September 1949, the Birmingham Post had published a piece about the railway’s visible decline, and he immediately wrote to the paper inviting anyone who wished to ensure that the line should have a future to contact him. He received many replies. In late Autumn 1949 he and his Banbury-based friend Bill Trinder broached discussion about the line’s future with its owner, Sir Henry Haydn Jones, Towyn ironmonger and MP for Merioneth. While Sir Haydn pledged to keep the railway running for as long as he was alive, he totally declined to spend any money on it.
Early in July 1950, Tom learned that Sir Haydn had died. He arranged a public meeting to take place in Birmingham on 11 October 1950 to discuss the line’s future and invited everyone who had written to him about the Birmingham Post article to attend. .The meeting, at which Trinder took the chair, resulted in the formation of Talyllyn Railway Preservation Society. Not only would the members finance the railway through their subscriptions, but they would also provide volunteer labour. Sir Haydn’s widow allowed the Society to run the railway for an initial trial period of three years.
Tom served as the railway’s manager for its first two years in Preservation Society hands. He endeavoured to keep stringently to the timetable as far as possible. For passengers who wandered off to the Dolgoch Falls, or up to the old quarries beyond Abergynolwyn, missed their return train back to Towyn and then expected a refund, he had little sympathy.(5) But he took care to ensure that local passengers should not be inconvenienced by the holiday crowds, and was always ready to accommodate ‘the odd sack of coal, or chicken meal or […] a second-hand bedstead or a new hay rake’ on the trains for delivery to the farms and households along the railway’s route.(6)
Repairing and maintaining the 1860s locomotive Dolgoch, product of Messrs Fletcher Jennings’ Lowca Works near Whitehaven and the Talyllyn’s sole engine for the 1951 season – could be a significant challenge. As Tom observes, “Most of the nuts and bolts which held her together were not only of sizes unknown to Mr Whitworth, but differed from one another and individually across their flats”.(7)
It was, in other words, an ongoing exercise in industrial archaeology on the hoof.
In 1952, Sonia Smith, actress turned boatwoman, whom Tom had come to know through various IWA campaigns, joined him at the Talyllyn. While he based himself at the Pendre workshops to look after the mechanical side of things, Sonia ran the booking office at Wharf Station. Preservation Society members who fretted about the propriety of the couple’s living together in a caravan up the line at Dolgoch got short shrift, both from Tom and from Edward Thomas, the line’s previous manager, who had held his post from 1897 to 1950. Tom’s and Sonia’s son Richard was born in 1953 at Roehampton, and after some months’ of staying with relatives and friends, the family moved into Stanley Pontlarge, and Tom built his mother a cottage in the garden.
Meanwhile, he wrote prolifically, bringing out Lines of Character (1952); Railway Adventure (1953), Winterstoke; the story of a town (1954) and The Clouded Mirror 1955 in rapid succession. With Red for Danger, his 1955 ‘History of Railway Accidents and Railway Safety’ he achieved what amounted to a second break-through. Not only did the book attract praise from its reviewers, but it also brought him to the attention of a new set of readers, paving the way for the success of his biographies of Brunel, Telford and the Stephensons, and indeed, his three-part ‘Landscape’ autobiography.(8) He also developed a useful sideline in writing company histories. Not only did it play to his strength as a story-teller, but the business of charting the evolution of such firms as Samuel Williams & Co. which developed Dagenham Dock; Burnyeats Ltd., ships’ chandlers of Whitehaven and Taskers of Andover, the engineering company which established the Waterloo Ironworks honed his understanding of historic work-practices.
For Tom, the research may have felt timely since he could not help but notice how, across the country, the vestiges of history were disappearing fast. In the years after the Second World War, Britain witnessed an ambitious building-regeneration programme. Not only was there a need to address bomb damage, but town planners seized the opportunity for slum clearance. Modernisation would be energetic and often ruthless. Liverpool’s Customs House, for example, sustained major bomb damage in 1941; rather than repair the elegant neo-classical building, in 1948 its owners – the government – had it pulled down. 1942 witnessed the so-called Baedeker raids on Exeter which wiped out much of the old city. When peace returned, Exeter came in for extensive redevelopment, with many of its surviving old buildings compulsorily purchased for removal in order to facilitate street widening. One of the local newspapers published a cartoon showing a work-gang demolishing a Tudor house with the caption, ‘Come to Exeter and watch the natives pull it down.’(9) Norwich’s 1945 regeneration plans included construction of an inner-city ring road complete with massive concrete viaduct over the River Wensum at Bracondale. Admittedly, the development never came into being, but the fact that it was even mooted speaks eloquently of the town planners’ enthusiasm for modern design.(10)
Removal and replacement of well-loved old buildings was seldom popular but the outcry that surrounded Conservative Minister for Transport Ernest Marples MP’s decision to sanction demolition of the 1837 Euston Arch was exceptional. The Arch, built in 1837 to Philip Hardwick’s design, was a monument of the Railway Age and a much-loved London landmark. Tom’s friend John Betjeman, poet and vice-president of the Victorian Society, initiated a well-supported campaign to save it for the nation and raise funds by public appeal to relocate it, but his efforts were in vain. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan stood by Marples and declined to allow the Arch’s preservation on the ground that relocating it would delay the reconstruction of Euston Station and greatly add to its cost.
By this time, the public were increasingly aware of what, in the widespread zeal to replace old structures with new ones, the nation stood to lose. The Council of British Archaeology, which had come into being in 1944, viewed the care of historic buildings as one of its chief aims and was quick to recognise that such buildings might well be of an industrial character. In 1955, Michael Rix, a tutor in English Literature in Birmingham University’s department of extra-mural studies, coined the term ‘industrial archaeology’ to denote the specialist study of historic buildings and artefacts of an industrial character, and in 1958 the Council of British Archaeology convened a conference – which Tom attended – specifically dedicated to this emerging discipline.(11)
The tendency of town planners to eye-up old industrial buildings with a view to replacing them with something more modern was the subject of much concern among conference delegates, among whom was Angus Buchanan, an Assistant Lecturer in Social and Economic History at the Bristol College of Science and Technology.(12) Buchanan, who became a great friend of Tom’s, not only took a leading role in formalising the emerging discipline of Industrial Archaeology but also, with Neil Cossons, established the Bristol Industrial Archaeological Society (BIAS) in 1967.
Such initiatives helped to bring industrial archaeology to public attention. In 1971, BBC 2’s ‘Chronicle’ programme ran a competition for ‘the best work by a group in researching, recording, and/or restoring part of Britain’s industrial heritage’ with a prize of £375.13 The following year, reviewing Arthur Raistrick’s book Industrial Archaeology: An Historical Survey (Eyre Methuen, 1972), Ian Donnachie observed that, once viewed as the province of the ‘lunatic fringe’, Industrial Archaeology had become ‘the trendiest of studies.’(14)
By this time Tom, who had done so much to raise awareness of Britain’s industrial heritage, was ill. A surgical intervention to remove his prostate had not gone entirely well, and in time, he would develop pancreatic cancer. Nevertheless, he was not only an energetic General Editor of Longman’s pioneering Industrial Archaeology series but at the recently formed Association of Industrial Archaeology’s 1973 Isle of Man Conference he agreed to serve as the Association’s President; in the event his presidency did not last long. He died on 11 May 1974, at pretty much the same time as the release of his final book The Potter’s Field: A History of the South Devon Ball Clay Industry.(15)
The Association would commemorate his energy and zest by instituting an annual Rolt Lecture in his memory. But perhaps one of the finest tribute to Tom’s life and work was a short piece which appeared in the Guardian, marking the 60th anniversary of the 1951 reopening of the Talyllyn Railway in Preservation Society hands. The event, the article suggests, was
“a celebration of those who made such enchanting journeys possible in an era of austerity, when the preservation of an obscure and archaic railway in North Wales was, at best, an eccentric diversion from the need to build a modern, postwar Britain…And Tom Rolt proved that you and I, with a sufficient head of enthusiasm and steam, could even run a railway”.(16)
Victoria Owens, author of The Life of L.T.C.Rolt – where engineering met literature (Pen and Sword, 2024)
Notes
- Edward VII died on 6 May 1910.
- Willans’ wife Hero was the sister of Dr George Taylor of Chester who married Jemima Rolt’s sister Augusta.
- ’The Railway’ is in Ironbridge Gorge Museum’s Rolt archive, ref ROLT 01/4A/03; ‘Strange Vista’ is in the possession of the Rolt family.
- L.T.C. Rolt, Landscape with Machines, (1st pub. Longmans, 1971); repr. Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1984) p.219
- L.T.C. Rolt Railway Adventure, (1st pub. Constable, 1953); repr. in combined edition with Talyllyn Century, David and Charles 1971) p.154.
- Ibid., p.162.
- Ibid, p.109. Incidentally, a ‘flat’ in this context denotes the parallel sides of the fastener head.
- Only the first volume, Landscape with Machines (1971) appeared in Tom’s lifetime. Landscape with Canals came out in 1977 and Landscape with Figures in 1992.
- https://municipaldreams.wordpress.com/2023/01/31/the-peculiarity-of-british-post-war-reconstruction-part-ii/
- City of Norwich Plan, 1945.
- https://industrial-archaeology.org/about-us/history-of-aia/
- Owens, A Life of L T C Rolt – Where Engineering met Literature (Pen & Sword; Barnsley, 2024, p.153, quoting Angus Buchanan, ‘The origins and early days of the AIA,’ Industrial Archaeology News 169, Summer 2014, pp.2-4.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronicle_(British_TV_programme). Sadly, I have not been able to discover the identity of the winning project.
- The Scotsman 25 March 1972, p.3.
- The Bookseller, 11 May 1974, p.2312.
- ‘In praise of LTC Rolt’, Guardian editorial, 12 May 2011.