Take the Train for the Boat
The uncredited letter in the May issue was from Mr. John Bushby whom I’m now pleased to acknowledge
Ed.
A Dangerous Liaison
I was interested to read Tim Graves’s article in BT April 2022 but I have to take Tim up on one matter of accuracy, which is nothing to do with railways at all.
A couple of times in the article, Tim refers to Josiah Stamp as being a “civil servant” amongst all his other attributes. That isn’t really accurate. Stamp had been in the Civil Service; Wikipedia tells us that he joined the Inland Revenue as a boy clerk in 1896 at the age of sixteen and rose to the position of an Assistant Secretary in the Revenue by 1916. That is the equivalent of a modern Civil Service Grade 5 and would generally be the grade expected of a Regional Director in one of the big Departments of State, such as the Revenue or today’s Dept.of Work and Pensions. It would not be a policy-making grade.
Stamp studied economics as an external student during his later years in the Service, but left in 1919 to join the board of Nobel Industries. His elevation to the ranks of ‘the Great and the Good’ started here. Obviously, his experience in the Civil Service marked him out as ‘one of us’ when plum jobs were up for grabs; his seats on various commissions and committees would brand him as what we would now call a ‘quangocrat’. But his ambivalence towards the Nazi regime in Germany should not be taken as typical of the civil service in the inter-war years, as may be the impression given by Tim’s inadvertent misidentification of Stamp as a serving Civil Servant in the 1930s.
Robert Day, Kirby Muxloe, Leics.
Williams revisited
In his article (April 2022) Gordon Biddle says that in his well-received book F. S.Williams lumps the town of Northampton along with the colleges of Eton and Oxford in their early hostility to railways. By this date (first edition 1852) this calumny on Northampton was sadly well established, having certainly been aired in Roscoe’s little guidebook to the London & Birmingham Railway in 1839 and taken up by others including the he replied that “Northampton distinguished itself by being rather more furious than other places in opposition to railways and begged that the line be kept away”.
