Rolt’s practical involvements were bookended by two books that he wrote. Narrow Boat, written in 1939-40 but published late in 1944, was his account of a leisurely journey over a declining canal system in the English Midlands. He travelled in his own boat, Cressy, converted into a floating home, and explored what seemed to be a hidden world distant from modernity. Rolt depicted boats, trades, ways of life and landscapes that he saw as changing in adverse ways; he felt that the aspects that appealed to him were threatened, but mainly expressed regret and despair rather than any call for action. This approached an apocalyptic vision, akin to an early Green viewpoint. He declared that he was ‘appalled at the loss which our civilisation has sustained’, but this was not through the destruction brought by war, but in the decline of a rural social and material order.

He had anticipated modest interest in Narrow Boat, but, writing later, ‘no one was more astonished than I by the recption it received’. Its readers included some whom it inspired to seek to use canals for pleasure boating, while a smaller number felt that something could be done to rescue canals, and in 1946 formed, with him, the Inland Waterways Association (IWA).

From the outset this body,which continues in being 80 years later, campaigned for the revival and development of Britain’s waterways, rather than to simply seek to provide public information or critical support for the owners of waterways, many of which would be nationalised.

Rolt was to use his powers of writing in acting as honorary secretary to the IWA, mainly in the composition of documents and the writing of numerous letters. He found, however, that, along with many meetings, this took up so much time that it inhibited his book-writing projects, and put him in a precarious financial position; he had aimed to make a living as a full-time writer while living cheaply on his boat. In retrospect, long after the extinction of much that he favoured and admired, although the canal lines themselves have survived for leisure use, it all seems hopelessly nostalgic. The book itself stands as a form of preservation of a vanished world.

Rolt was to discover, with others, another transport-related cause – the decrepit but functioning Talyllyn Railway. This was a former quarry and passenger line that was not nationalised, running up the rural Fathew valley from the seaside resort of Tywyn.

Prior to writing, Rolt here helped to draw together members to form a Preservation Society, and became the paid manager of the Railway for the first two seasons of voluntary preservation, in 1951 and 1952. He completed Railway Adventure about his experiences, after he had ceased to be manager, a role in which he organised volunteers (then a pioneering involvement) and staff, and effected many practical tasks. This book did not prove quite as inspirational as Narrow Boat, but by the time it was published a railway preservation movement was slowly developing. He was pessimistic enough to envisage the possibility of failure in the closing pages of Railway Adventure, but saw this as a gesture of defiance against a new Dark Age of bureaucratic centralised control. In contrast with Narrow Boat, the railway book did not sell well after 1953 or inspire much further interest until the 1960s. He later wrote that ‘the hush that greeted it was positively deafening and soon the book had sunk’.

After this, Rolt returned to his main purpose of making a living through authorship, although he did get involved in committee work in various contexts. Like others, he was capable of practical involvement, but this diverted time and attention from the writing of books. He commented later that when when writing was seen as a freelance career, readers might expect involvements in unpaid work which could, as Rolt found, prove to pose major problems. In his case, his accounts veer from the parochial to giant adverse statements about civilisation, but his practical moves were modest, considered and careful.

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And I’ve been at it in the car world for some 40 years, writing profiles, interviews and even obituaries on a vast array of people whose lives have been on four wheels. One of the first was an assignment from my first editor to interview a man for our magazine who’d lost his fortune trying to make an affordable sports car in 1950s Britain. No-one had bothered to talk to him about what had happened until I rang out of the blue, and he and his by-then elderly wife welcomed me to their modest home to relay the untold story. They were so generous, and their plight so touching, that, of course, it made a great tale on the page.

It set me off on a working lifetime of tape-recording interviewees to try and get at what really made them tick. Meanwhile, I became heavily involved in writing in-depth historical pieces about enigmatic characters in and around the motor industry, both from the UK and further afield. In a few cases I believe I’ve pieced together definitive accounts that no-one else had attempted; very deep rabbit-holes, for sure, yet also very satisfying.
And then one day, after years and years of all this, I realised I had so much material that a compendium of the best of it could be, once again, something that hadn’t been tried before. Hence this new book, Three Million Miles In A Volvo And Other Curious Car Stories.

The title is a little bit crazy but it’s the only way I could corral my 50 subjects into something cohesive. The theme, really, is that there isn’t one. These are simply the best car-life stories I’ve written on all manner of well- and lesser-known people. I have for you designers and engineers, racing and rally drivers, entrepreneurs and super-salesmen, stunt drivers and oil barons, artists and movie stars. And they’re all pictured along with some of their most interesting achievements. This way, for example, you can read about the never-ending road-trip of the world’s most travelled driver, and see the Volvo he did it in.

It’s a very different book to any other I’ve attempted. All I hope is that readers find these random yet remarkable petrolheads as fascinating to discover as they have been to research and write about.

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By 1822 there was a decline in production of exposed coalfields in County Durham and the owners of the new Hetton Lyons pit turned to previously un-mined land that lay on the magnesian limestone plateau in the east of the county to excavate for coal that lay underneath. As a result of the success of this venture Hetton became the first deep coal mine in the world and together with the development of a railway network, the previously unexplored land to the east of the county became increasingly developed for coal, creating the resulting villages and became known as east Durham.

The family stayed in east Durham and my second book followed Hannah’s family after her death, into a new century which must have filled them with optimism. We followed the fortunes of Hannah’s youngest daughter Susan and her family through her struggles of making ends meet with the low wages brought home by her husband who couldn’t be fully involved in coal production as a result of the debilitating eye complaint, nystagmus. In addition, the family business of dressmaking continued but was facing severe competition from ready-to-wear clothing that was available at the beginning of the 20th century.

Life hadn’t changed much for Susan and her family, and she was living in very similar circumstances as her mother had, in the same village, in the same poor-quality housing and still without any basic amenities such as a water supply and sewage system. However new challenges were presented to Susan and her generation by the First World War and whilst miners were in a protected industry, many from the village of Ludworth signed up to war and the village suffered the inevitable losses as a result, losses that were felt by everyone in the tight-knit community.

Susan and her family continued to share the similar heartaches that Hannah had experienced with her family and dealt with them in the same, strong and determined way with never a thought to letting anything get her down. When she died in 1940, just after the announcement of World War Two, we are now following the fortunes Hannah’s Grand-daughter, in The Last Women of the Durham Coalfield, who continued to live in east Durham.

Eventually, by the 1940’s life had begun to change for the County Durham mining communities. Electricity was available, even to colliery-owned housing, it wasn’t in every room but at least it was there and running water and a sewage system had been installed. Things became even better after the War when the Government of the day had all sorts of changes planned to improve life for everyone including the 1944 Education Act, the introduction of a National Health Service and a Town and County Planning Act that set out a target of new house building across the country to replace the massive amounts of poor-quality housing.

Through the experiences of Hannah’s family, this book looks at the early effects of the post-war Government innovations in the 1950’s and 60’s in respect of colliery village life and how education, health and housing affected them. We witness the dismantling of the colliery village in favour of new town life at Peterlee and whilst this would not constitute the closure of the whole of the east Durham area which grew from the development of the coal industry, we certainly witness changes on a massive scale, the main one being the separation of the miner from his place of work which signalled the beginning of the end of colliery village.

The saga has come full circle – Hannah was there in the beginning of the east Durham coal mining industry, an industry she probably believed would be forever, and I was there at the end, in Wheatley Hill – 138 years later.

The post The Last Women of the Durham Coalfield – Hannah’s grand-daughter appeared first on The History Press.

Over the past 8 years I’ve been slowly trying to capture visual moments at every London Underground station for my Tube Mapper photography project. As I wander the many hallways, staircases and platforms of the London tube network; symmetry has been a recurring theme that ignites my creativity and holds my interest.

I love trying to spot and even anticipate symmetrical compositions, and I have found that the layout and architecture of stations help to encourage this outcome. Transport for London instructs architects, designers and spatial capacity planners control the ‘customer flow to and from trains’, creating a fluid and continuous motion that keeps people moving to maximise the efficiency of their journeys across the city. Observing the movements of the guided crowd allows you to sometimes predict the interactions that people and transport have with their surroundings. This results in a visual balance that often rewards us with a symmetrical image.

Here’s some photography from my recently released second photography book London Underground: Symmetry and Imperfections, which showcases some of my favourite symmetrical encounters while I captured moments for my The Tube Mapper Project.

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In 1804 Richard Trevithick pioneered steam traction that was mobile on metal rails. Since the 1700s, wagonways had been used to feed mines and other industries using primitive, horse-drawn trucks on wooden rails, but Trevithick revolutionised this procedure with his steam-driven railway. Static steam boilers already existed to pump water and drive mills and coal mines, but with wheels and the ability to pull loaded wagons, here was a different use for the steam engine. Trevithick first used this new power on the Penydarren Tramroad in South Wales, and it worked. Steam-driven railway traction was born.

Trevithick’s idea was to open colliery railways in the north-east, and designers such as Timothy Hackworth and John Blenkinsop designed the steam engines to haul the colliery wagons. They were, however, still primitive, but onto the scene came George Stephenson, who was to become known as ‘the father of the railways’. Like the other engineers, he continued to work on locomotives for colliery use. He built the first line, the Stockton and Darlington Railway (S&DR), to link collieries near Shildon with Darlington and Stockton-on-Tees in the north-east, and it officially opened on 27 September 1825. However, Stephenson wanted this new power source to go further. There was more to it than designing engines to haul industrial products. If it could do that, why could it not carry paying passengers? He built the first inter-city line from Liverpool to Manchester in 1830; before it fully opened, the Rainhill Trials took place in 1829 to test his argument that steam-powered locomotives would be the best form of transport to run along it.

Stephenson’s son, Robert, shared his father’s passion for steam and entered a locomotive design of his own that he called Rocket. It went on to win the race, travelling at 30mph, although some of the shine was taken off as Rocket was the only entrant to finish! Stephenson’s prize was worth £44,324 in today’s money.

On 15 September the following year, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway (L&MR) opened. There was a race to get to Manchester, but sadly, the MP for Liverpool, William Huskisson, was struck by Rocket. He had travelled in a train pulled by Northumbrian, built for the Duke of Wellington, the prime minister, and driven by George Stephenson. When the train stopped for water and coal at Parkside station, Huskisson got out onto the adjoining track. Rocket, being driven by George Stephenson’s assistant and future eminent railway engineer Joseph Locke, was travelling along that track and struck Huskisson, who later died of his injuries. There is a memorial to him at the accident site today; he was the first person to be killed in a railway accident.

Railway development moved quickly, from Trevithick in 1804, with his first high-pressure steam locomotive hauling a loaded train along a plateway in South Wales, to the Stephensons thirty years later, with their locomotives capable of hauling trains from Liverpool to Manchester. After this, Railway Mania started when vast profits could be made from investing in new railway companies. New lines spread like a spider’s web across the country and abroad. Passenger trains that originally carried people in open trucks advanced through to comfortable and not-so-comfortable carriages that could be booked depending on the traveller’s wealth. By 1846, 272 railway companies had received government approval. This included those at an early stage when shares were being sold to recoup the proposed cost of laying the tracks. It was a ‘feeding frenzy’ where the lucky ones could get fabulously wealthy, but some simply lost money.

Between 1845 and 1847, Parliament authorised the building of 8,000 miles of railway lines. Some worked, while some did not and were soon sucked into the larger companies, scrapped, or joined with others to form more successful business ventures, such as the L&MR’s amalgamation with the Grand Junction Railway (GJR). This then joined with the Manchester and Birmingham Railway (M&BR) and the London and Birmingham Railway (L&BR). Then followed the final offering before amalgamation, the London and North Western Railway (LNWR). There was little in the way of organisation: some companies simply ran from town to town; some travelled the same route. Larger companies emerged, such as the Great Western and many, many others.

When the First World War broke out in 1914, the railway consisted of 20,000 miles of track owned by 120 companies. Going into the war, they were all controlled by the government and were worked hard. They came out battered and bruised, and soon it was decided that something had to be done. The country could not support so many diverse and, in some cases, overlapping companies. They would have to be brought together into a neat bundle of just four to cover England, Scotland and Wales and part of Northern Ireland.

The Railways Act 1921, also known as the Grouping Act, became law on 1 January 1923. After this, just four large companies, nicknamed the ‘Big Four’, came into being after incorporating all but a few of the small companies. This meant that 120 separate railways were combined to make just four.

The London, Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS)

The LMS became the most significant commercial enterprise in the UK and second only to the Post Office in the number of people employed in Britain. It was also the biggest joint-stock company globally and the most extensive transport organisation in the world. Then there was the fact that it was also the most significant commercial enterprise in the British Empire. It was also the only member of the Big Four to operate in Northern Ireland, serving most of the province. The chief mechanical engineers (CMEs) were George Hughes (1923–25), Henry Fowler (1925–31), Ernest Lemon (1931–32), Sir William A. Stanier (1932–44) and Henry George Ivatt (1944–47).

The London and North Eastern Railway (LNER)

This was the second-largest operator after the LMS and owned 7,700 locomotives together with passenger and freight vehicles. It also held and inherited forty-two steam and turbine ferries, and river and lake steamboats, twenty-three hotels, eight canals, and twenty ports and harbours. The CMEs were Sir Nigel Gresley, who served from 1923 to his death in 1941, Edward Thompson, from 1941 to 1946, and Arthur Peppercorn from 1946 to nationalisation in 1948.

The Southern Railway (SR)

The Southern was the smallest of the Big Four, and its business catered more for passengers than freight. It became the first railway company to move extensively to electrification, including on the main lines. As time went on, it was the world’s most extensive railway system powered by electricity and was also the wealthiest. The company replaced most of the stock that it inherited and had two CMEs, Richard Maunsell (1923–37) and Oliver Bulleid (1937–48).

The Great Western Railway (GWR)

The GWR was the only one of the Big Four to retain its name, which dated back to 1833. (In this book, I have marked pre-1921 GWR as ‘original GWR’.) The company operated a series of bus routes and an airline, Railway Air Services. It also owned hotels and ports. There were just two CMEs under the Big Four, Charles Collett (1922–41) and Frederick Hawksworth (1941–47).

Extracted from The Story of the Big Four Railway Companies by Colin G. Maggs

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Meeting regularly at New Southgate station to record the steam-handled traffic, their focus was initially on all things connected with the former London and North Eastern Railway, but as steam traction became restricted to smaller and smaller areas of operation, regular visits were made further afield, to the north-east of England, Scotland and the former London Midland and Scottish Railway sheds and lines. Here are a selection of photos…

Extracted from The Last Ten Years by Brian J Dickson

The post The Last Ten Years: The End of Steam – in pictures appeared first on The History Press.

1. Canals and industrialisation

The first is that British canals are said to have been a crucial force in the industrial revolution, and that, starting with the Bridgewater Canal near Manchester, engineered by James Brindley, these greatly lowered prices of coal and other raw materials. Before the canals, however, there were coastal trading and river navigations, and the latter developed in engineering and economic terms well before the first modern canals. Not all river navigations were successful, but neither were some early canals – the Stamford Canal, for instance, and in the north of Ireland, the Newry Canal. Both of these, and the Sankey Canal in Lancashire, preceded the better-known Bridgewater. The extensive network through Ireland did not foster industrialisation.

2. The forgotten engineers

Second, although James Brindley was a significant figure in early canal engineering, and Thomas Telford an important later figure (who also furthered civil engineering as a profession), there were many others, and much depended on their assistants. Neither Telford nor Brindley had any involvement with waterways in Ireland or South Wales. William Jessop engineered more waterways than either (and had a larger hand in the major Pontcysyllte Aqueduct in Wales than Telford’s memoirs asserted), but did not fit the somewhat romanticised view, propagated by Victorian writers like Samuel Smiles, of the engineer as pioneering genius.

3. The growth of the railways extinguished waterborne trade on canals

Third, it is often assumed that the growth of railways served to stifle waterborne trade on canals, and that railway companies deliberately acquired canal companies in order to destroy potential competition. This could be seen as true in some cases – passenger traffic soon disappeared on canals with railway competition, while the sites of some canals were used to build railways. Often, however, this was not the case – sometimes the canal had a local monopoly, and while traffic actually increased in the early railway era, revenues declined as tolls had to be lowered. In many cases canal companies sold out to the railways for higher capital sums than their revenues would justify, simply to remove opposition to the promotion and development of the railway. Victorian legislation prevented railway companies from neglecting their waterways, and some railway companies continued to encourage and develop trade on their canals.

4. The canals in the Midlands weren’t always the most successful

Fourth, the canals of the English midlands were some of the smallest navigable trade canals in the world, although those in Scotland, Northern England and Ireland were all larger – and sometimes more successful in their time. The reasons for this small scale lay partly in engineering and water supply, and partly in underestimates of their likely traffic. A further reason was the failure to enlarge these – with exceptions, even smaller canals in continental Europe were developed with much bigger dimensions than the larger canals in the British Isles. State ownership elsewhere fostered new development and improvements, along with controls over competing railway routes. In the British Isles, major enlargements, improvements and new lines were proposed from the 1880s to the 1940s, but, by the time nationalisation had finally taken place, it was too late to counter road competition. An exception was the Manchester Ship Canal, which made Salford and Manchester into inland ports, and forms one of the most significant survivals of Victorian engineering achievements. Ship and large barge canals elsewhere were repeatedly advocated, but little was developed bar some river improvements.

5. Not all boatpeople lived on the water

Fifth, much stress has been laid upon trade boats as gaily painted narrow boats upon which families lived – an image that was fostered, among others, by L T C Rolt’s seminal Narrow Boat of 1944. But family narrow boats only operated on the narrow canals of the English midlands, and then formed a minority of such boats; most were ‘day boats’, whose steerers lived on land. Other trade boats – in Ireland, Wales and Scotland) did feature cabins in which boatmen (all men, no families) could sleep on board, prepare meals and rest, but the workers lived in houses. Conditions, far from being romantic, were often grim, and even at times of high interwar unemployment there were shortages of crews.

6. When did the leisure revival start?

Sixth, while many canals and rivers became unnavigable before the 1940s and nationalisation, there would be a revival following Rolt’s book and the formation of the Inland Waterways Association in 1946. This body (and its Irish equivalent, IWAI) played a major part in their revival, growth and restorations for leisure use. It has frequently been portrayed as the triumph of volunteers against an uncaring and capricious bureaucracy, in the form of the nationalised transport body. On closer examination, voluntary physical work on restoration was limited until the 1960s, while the Inland Waterways Association was primarily a pressure group that sought to revive waterways for transport, and only secondarily for leisure. Its perceived opponents were charged with the development only of waterways with significant transport potential, which meant that most of the smaller waterways need not be retained, even when the IWA saw this as faint-heartedness and negative. The inability, legal and practical, to rapidly withdraw traffics and destroy or sell less-used waterways formed an ill-acknowledged major factor in their retention and restoration, as did steadily-growing leisure use. Carrying by narrow boat did decline rapidly after the 1940s, with road competition and industrial modernisation, and the IWA and nationalised owners would come to consider leisure as a priority. In Ireland, almost all carrying had ceased suddenly in 1960, and the IWAI, with a less confrontational approach, had pressed for leisure revival. While most waterways would survive, it was a very close-run thing, and the position in Ulster, in which all but one navigation (the Lower Bann) was closed after 1945, could well have applied to most waterways in the British Isles.

The post Canals of the British Isles: A history appeared first on The History Press.

While some choose a ready-made van, for others the joy is in converting a vehicle themselves and making it personal and unique. With imaginative storage options, eco-friendly power sources, inventive layouts, and some very well-travelled pets, the options for these portable homes are limitless. Here we reveal just a small selection of some of the beautiful and innovative converted vehicles and the creative van-dwellers and vanlife converts featured in VanLifers, to inspire and delight!

“In a world where people are so protective of their territory, I love to roam.”

Sophie Cook, owner of Betty Blue

“We’ve been on a permanent adventure. We’ve met some of the most incredible people, stayed at the most beautiful locations and created the best memories.”

@TheRoadisOurHome

“It’s just a wonderful way to live. Knowing I built everything myself, using my own hands to create what I describe as a dream house on wheels, makes it even more meaningful.”

@RanVanga

“One thing which made our vanlife adventure even better was the people we met on the way, from forest workers in Poland who welcomed us into their house for pizza and wine, to other vanlifers doing their thing.”

@thehendersonsshop

“While travelling, we can take joy in a beautiful sunset in the countryside, or a charming medieval village found on a drive. We’re happy with the richness of nature and the outdoor life, and the benefits this brings to our life.”

@FlorrytheLorry

“Since converting our bus, we’ve been blessed with so many amazing opportunities, but the best one has been the ability to connect with people from all over the world who we’ve inspired with our story and travels.”

@Going_Boundless

“I feel it is time alternative lifestyles were encouraged, to both relieve the housing shortage and let people live the life they desire.”

@VeeVanVoom

If you have ever thought about turning your life into one long road trip, VanLifers could be the inspiration you need to make it happen. Whether you are converting your own vehicle, thinking about doing so in the future or just enjoy imagining a life on the road, these tales are sure to inspire you!

The post VanLifers: Beautiful conversions for life on the road appeared first on The History Press.

I became obsessed with these handheld masterpieces of modelling as a six-year old kid in the 1970s. There wasn’t much television in those days and being a boy with glasses I was none-too-keen on football; I was a bit young for pop music fandom, and seemed to have copious opportunities already to make, paint and draw things at school. But I loved cars, and so my hobby was collecting them, in miniature, constantly begging my parents for new additions to my fleet, which were helpfully supplied, via the local toyshop and newsagent, by those kindly yet unseen gods at Matchbox, Corgi and Dinky.

At the start of every year, these toymakers would issue their catalogues for the 12 months ahead, and I would plan what to aim for next. The checklists they provided on the back pages merely stoked it all. To tick off everything they had to offer seemed absolutely impossible to the young complete-ist in me.

Not, in a way, that I really wanted them all. These ranges were tremendously broad, mainly of the latest cars, trucks and buses but also including machines that held less appeal to me, such as motorbikes, aircraft, bulldozers, tanks, steamrollers, boats, cranes, hovercraft, you name it; if it moved, carried people or cargo, and made a noise in real life then they covered it at a handheld scale.

What I could never have known, as simply the fixated consumer at the far end of the retail chain, was that behind the scenes these three magical names were not only fighting each other but also fighting for survival. Dinky Toys had been around since the 1930s, and almost singlehandedly created the diecast toy car industry, making millions of pounds of profit in the process for their manufacturer Meccano.

Then, in the 1950s, Lesney Products introduced its tiny Matchbox series, with true pocket-money prices that democratised toy vehicles away from the privileged and into the hands of working class children. Just a couple of years after that Corgi appeared as an ambitious upstart from the Mettoy company. In a market that was now getting crowded with choice, Corgi took an aggressive route, quickening the pace of innovation so that the millions of young customers could revel in interesting features – from opening doors and bonnets to realistic steering and even, in one car, an illuminated TV screen in the back to entertain VIP passengers as the car travelled through your imaginary roadscape.

The battle for supremacy was all consuming for the three companies, but in the 1950s and ‘60s all three boomed in a way the toy industry hadn’t seen since Victorian times. Their export revenues were epic, and Lesney and Mettoy joined the stock market in share offers that were wildly over-subscribed…

But back to the junior me, and the early 1970s. I was perhaps at the tail end of the generation who just enjoyed toy cars for their simple charms. Electronic toys, Star Wars, teen magazines, Action Man (Britain’s version of GI Joe) music cassettes and recording – all offered irresistible distractions from old-fashioned toys, hugely shortening the appeal of toy vehicles. And that was before the 1980s dawned with MTV, branded sportswear, video games and an explosion of TV tie-in merchandise. It wasn’t long before Dinky, Corgi and Matchbox had all swerved off the highway of childhood, crashing into a ravine of indifference as their makers went bust.

And it was at about this time that collecting these simple playthings, rather bizarrely, became an all-consuming adult passion rather than a childish fad. With many toy cars practically destroyed in enthusiastic play, grown-ups started to hunt for pristine survivors, and pay the accordingly spiralling prices to own them all over again. The arcana extended to seeking out the original packaging and accessories, and to a crowded annual calendar of specific collectors’ fairs, called swapmeets, catering to this growing army of hunters.

When I was in my early 20s, I realised my extensive collection gathered through various means over the last 15 years, held quite some value. This was fed by visits, in my lunch hour away from work, to an antiques emporium just off London’s Oxford Street, called Grays In The Mews, where I was transfixed by the brilliantly lit glass cases groaning with Corgi and Dinky models the like of which I had never been able to acquire – pristine pre-1960 examples complete with their original cardboard boxes, and price tags to make you weep. One of the specialist dealers was Colin Baddiel, father of comedian David Baddiel. He was friendly and knowledgeable, and liked to chat, but was paying the high rent for his stand there because, no doubt, there were plenty of monied collectors around the West End keen to sneak in and indulge themselves on rare gems that started as mere toys.

So I took a deep breath and sold my collection, making the proceeds the bedrock of my deposit for a flat a few years later. But if you’ve once been enchanted by and compelled to collect things like this, it’s hard to ever stop. If I’m at a flea market, a car boot sale, auction sale, or in a charity shop, and there are Matchbox or Dinky cars at a reasonable price and in good nick, temptation will get the better of me. Corners of bookshelves and other nooks and crannies of my office have started getting congested with shiny metal traffic all over again. It’s just the odd few quid here and there, nothing too fanatical, yet for a grown man, I know, it’s hard to believe.

I’ve written over 50 titles on cars and car culture, so the fact I’ve written a book around all of this as well may not surprise you. But there are already numerous books that cover, in fastidious detail, the blow-by-blow output of the three brands. I didn’t just want to produce another ‘guide’. What I’ve been keen to get at in this undertaking are the stories and the intriguing characters behind Dinky, Corgi and Matchbox, and what drove them to produce the galaxy of diecast metal models that filled not just my childhood but that of millions of other boys (mostly, I’d say) down through the decades.

There is just so much history to unpack. I’ve done my level best to take readers right behind the scenes of enterprises that were as proud of their modelling skills as they were of the ability to organise huge labour forces to manufacture and assemble the vast quantities of tiny cars, trucks, tractors and buses they turned out. The products have been pored over by experts and investors for years, of course, but the processes and people are hardly known at all. Only the children of the ladies who made the factories in Hackney, Liverpool and Swansea hum with activity, for example, would have realised every British toy car a kid ever held in his sweaty palm was hand built by someone else’s mum, sister, aunt or even granny.

Dinky Toys were originally little more than decorative objects for model railway layouts, before taking on a life of their own. The impetus for Matchbox came from three demobbed chancers, a derelict pub, and some decidedly unscientific market research in the school gates. Corgi, meanwhile, arrived as the classic ‘disruptor’ of a growing market, and cannily exploited the power of the big and small screen to elbow its rivals aside with design boldness. And who would have thought that the glamour and horsepower of California’s hot-rod scene in the late 1960s could have turned the British toy car business upside down at the peak of its founders’ powers?

It is, as I discovered, one heck of a saga. I’ve been fortunate to track down several of the people who were in the thick of it all, most of whom had never been interviewed before about their roles, and to access information and documents that add background context – the real-world finance and business organisation that never troubled those with their noses pressed up against the toyshop window – to mix in with many memories of the classic models themselves. And, of course, the sad and complicated demise of all three as the 1980s arrived is also unravelled, tinged with sadness as it undoubtedly is.

All I can hope is that if you loved these fantastic little objects as much as I did, simple toys that often sparked a major enthusiasm for a love of cars in later life, then you’ll enjoy a deep dive into the tangled tales behind them.

The post The story behind Giles Chapman’s Britain’s Toy Car Wars appeared first on The History Press.

If no-one else knew it at the time, a local poet and innkeeper called John Freeth certainly knew. However modest the 10-mile stretch of canal linking the Black Country coalfields to Paradise Street in the centre of Birmingham may have looked when it first opened in 1769, this was going to be the tipping point. This unremarkable line of water would open up a world of trade for his hometown, Freeth insisted in a poem called Inland Navigation – a world of trade stretching all the way ‘from the Tagus to the Ganges’.

Nor was his gushing optimism back in the eighteenth century unfounded. Soon the barges shuffling into the sooty wharves of Birmingham laden with rough metals and coal from the Pennines and North Wales were feeding ‘the city of a thousand trades’ with the raw materials it needed to make the machinery and the finished metalware products it was now beginning to export all around the British Empire.

Despite the later arrival of the railways and road haulage, it was the beginning of a long relationship with the wider world that in many ways was built around the canals, the twists and turns of which can be traced by taking a journey around them.

A good starting point would be the Old Turn Junction sitting on the ‘cut’ (as Brummies often call their canals) leading northwards from the Gas Street Basin, the hub of the Midlands canal network. Here you will find a signpost sitting on an odd little island in the middle of the waterway ushering you in two different directions.

Take your narrowboat left and you will arrive at the Soho Loop where in the late eighteenth century industrial pioneers Matthew Boulton and James Watt started building the industrial steam engines soon to be found in manufacturing mills all around the world, not least two huge coin-minting foundries in Calcutta and Bombay.

Alternatively, if you head right, along the Birmingham & Fazeley Canal, you will come across a less savoury aspect of Birmingham’s industrial heritage, but one that nonetheless needs to be faced. Backing onto the water here is Shadwell Street, once the centre of the old gun-making quarter which for centuries supplied British troops in various fields of conflict including the two world wars, but also notoriously provided slave merchants in Bristol and Liverpool with arms, thus profiting from the transatlantic slave trade.

Carry on round the cut, however, and you will find the disused sites of Birmingham firms that make for easier reading. At Saltley, there are the old works of famous railway carriage maker Metro Cammell, which, in its heyday, exported coaches to just about everywhere – from Jamaica and Brazil on one side of the globe to Borneo and New Zealand on the other. Take a detour down the Digbeth Branch Canal, too, and, at the end of it, your barge will slip into the Typhoo Basin, where once upon a time a weekly relay of boats packed with chests of Sri Lankan tea would arrive, waiting to be unloaded at the Typhoo Packing Factory. Typhoo was set up by Birmingham businessman John Sumner in the early 1900s.

There was no shortage of Midlands entrepreneurs on the other side of town either. Over at Longbridge, Herbert Austin built a worldwide motor empire on the back of a cute little car called the Austin Seven, while on the banks of the Worcester and Birmingham Canal, George Cadbury built a chocolate empire based on ‘Dairy Milk’ bars and successful sales operations in India, South America and elsewhere.

The entry of Quaker George Cadbury into our story points to another ‘global’ aspect of Birmingham. Due to its lack of city status, which in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries placed restrictions on freedoms of worship, Birmingham had become a magnet for people of nonconformist creeds who faced discrimination elsewhere; and it was these communities – Quakers, Baptists and so on – who brought with them a strong sense of social justice and, in particular, a sense of outrage over the evils of the slave trade. In the 1820s and 1830s, the Female Society for Birmingham – a union of women, many of them Quakers – took to the international stage to wage a successful campaign to raise awareness of the appalling suffering of Caribbean slaves. In 1833, slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire.

Later on, George Cadbury took up the campaigning baton by using his newspaper ownership of the Daily News to lead the charge against the British use of concentration camps in the South African war against the Boers. A decade or so later, another Birmingham maverick, Charles Freer Andrews – an Anglican minister but nonetheless showing a very Brummie spirit of non-conformity – befriended Mahatma Gandhi and joined him in the civil rights struggle against the British Raj in India.

His alma mater in Birmingham, King Edward’s School, sitting in the vicinity of the Worcester and Birmingham cut in Edgbaston, now has a significant number of pupils of Indian descent. They are the descendants of the generation of Indians who arrived in boomtown Birmingham after the Second World War to seek work and stayed on, part of a Commonwealth diaspora which also saw African-Caribbeans settle in the city.

One in ten people now living in the city was born in an overseas Commonwealth country, and many more have family in countries such as India, Jamaica and Pakistan. Alongside Birmingham’s old non-conformist chapels and Quaker meeting houses, there are now mosques, gurdwaras and mandirs, all playing their part in the vibrant patchwork of a city that has become truly intercultural and global.

And never too far away, there is always an old Birmingham canal, lines of waterway which once reached out to the world, and then brought the world back to Birmingham.

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