RAILWAY THEMED PLAQUES: 200 YEARS OF THE RAILWAYS
To celebrate 200 years of the railways Danny Coope of Street of Blue Plaques has been commissioned by Southeast Communities Rail Partnership to create 200 plaques across the South East for RAILWAY200; the nationwide celebrations.
If you’re unfamiliar with Danny’s plaques: where English Heritage’s ceramic blue plaques, as you know, celebrate famous, creative or otherwise successful people. Danny has been creating blue plaques for real, ordinary people like you and me - particularly for people that lived over 100, 150 years ago. What might’ve seemed like ordinary jobs at the time, can remind us today of how life, fashion and technology was often so much different then. Jobs such as ostrich feather curler (for those Victorian hats!) or ivory carvers, tallow melters, even cinema usherettes are jobs of the past.
For Railway 200 Danny has been invited to look through old census data and online archives for railway-related people to bring to life the evolution (and dangers) of the industry - through the lives of often humble employees and people who contributed to the industry or were affected by it very directly.
Danny wanted his plaques to have a specifically vintage, railway feel. The typeface is the one used on the railways nationwide from about 1948 on signs, posters and leaflets when British Rail was formed; to bring all the separate rail companies together. And he’s taken the fishtail shape of the enamel cap badge worn by uniformed railway staff in the 1950s and 60s, that displayed each employee’s role to the public - and used it on the plaques to highlight job titles or a headline link to the railway.
There’ll be 200 blue plaques - 20 for each of the 10 Southeast railway lines - half illustrating historical roles and half focussing more on the contemporary - giving an insight into how the railway industry has evolved and what sort of roles are required in the 21st century.
Here are the first five of the short histories of railway-linked lives - these are from the Reading, Winnersh and Wokingham stretch of line.
Winnersh church hall hosted the unveiling of the first five blue plaque stories: L-R Fiona Morton, Sandy Mahon, Tim Barkley, Danny Coope and Mike Lamport
“we aim to bring to life the evolution of the industry - through the lives of often humble employees and others who contributed to the industry or were affected by it”
CHARLES PARKER SHARPE
Charles was born in Slough in 1878, one of 9 children. He was employed as a cabinet maker, and married a lady called Elizabeth. By 1911 they were living at 70 Cromwell Road, Caversham with their two young children Ernest and Dorothy. Sadly Elizabeth died at 44. Charles remarried a couple of years later to Marian Parker and they had a daughter together, Marion Joyce.
By 1921, Charles and his family had moved to 19 Lorne Street in Reading. He was working as a carpenter and joiner for the Great Western Railway’s signal department on Caversham Road - possibly making the wooden semaphore signals, or even the woodwork of signal boxes themselves? Son Ernest, now 16, was a turner and fitter for John Warrick the Cycle & Motor manufacturer; who at the time was making bodywork for three-wheeled delivery motor vehicles destined for Selfridges and the Post Office.
Charles was still working as a railway carpenter during the Second World War, he was in his 60s, and was actually living right beside Winnersh station in 1939 (or Winnersh Halt as it was known then) at the house called Lockesley, at 19 Robin Hood Lane.
Daughter Marion’s husband Victor McLeonards was the son of an aeronautical engineer, and grandson of another railway carpenter at Caversham Road signal works - a colleague of his father-in-law Charles Sharpe!?
ELSIE LINDSEY
Elsie’s mother Rosa Shuff was a housemaid until her marriage in 1911 to London piano maker Albert Lindsey. They were living in Finsbury Park when Elsie was born. Albert was called up for World War I in 1915 and was serving as a Private in the Royal Fusiliers when he was killed in action on 27 July 1916, aged 31. Elsie was only 4.
Rosa was from Caversham and she and Elsie moved back there during the war and by 1921 they were living with seven relatives at Rosa’s parents house Dean’s Farm Cottage, near the Thames. Elsie’s uncle Walter lived there too - he was an engineman for Great Western Railway. In 1939, aged 27, Elsie was working for GWR herself, as an indicator board operator - updating departure times and platform numbers. Elsie and her mother were living at 6 Erleigh Court Gardens in Earley by now.
Elsie married Norman Parlour in 1941 and appear to have had two children. Norman was a seedsman’s clerk - presumably at Sutton’s Seeds - a company who benefitted from the railway at Reading to handle large consignments of seeds and bulbs.
Elsie’s mother, who was widowed at 25, never remarried, and lived to the ripe old age of 100. Elsie herself lived to 2003, she was 91.
GEORGE GIBBINS
George Edward William Gibbins was born in Oxfordshire in 1898 to Catherine and James Gibbins. In his teens, George joined the Royal Army Medical Corp as a Private, marrying Elizabeth Gale on Christmas Day 1919. George returned to the army was serving at their Headquarters in Lod hospital in Palestine in 1921. Meanwhile back in England, his wife Elizabeth and their daughter were living with his parents in Kingston-upon-Thames. Elizabeth, now 24, was working as a pantry maid at a hotel, describing herself as a widow, suggesting George’s whereabouts were unknown and presumed dead. But happily George did survive his time in the army and the family were reunited.
By 1939 they were living at a house called Sonoma on Watmore Lane in Winnersh - with possibly four children. George, now 40, had retrained and was working for Southern Rail as an ‘electric track lineman’ as part of the railway’s electrification using the ‘third rail’ system as the region transitioned away from steam.
George lived until 1970, he was 71.
LOTTIE MARTIN
Seven year old Lottie Martin was out picking primroses with her sister Mary and their 19 year old nurse maid Ellen Bird on Wednesday 18 April 1883. At Langborough railway crossing Lottie sat on the stile as they waited for a luggage train to pass shortly before 6pm; she promptly jumped down to cross the tracks. But at the same time a London & South Western passenger train, running 3 minutes late and obscured by the first, was coming in the opposite direction. Totally unaware, Lottie was struck by it and killed immediately. The driver himself, Edmund Mann, didn’t realise what had happened until he received a telegram on his train’s arrival at Reading Station.
Lottie was born in Wokingham in 1876; the youngest of six children to Hannah Smith and local baker Henry Martin, whose bakery was at 27 Denmark Street, Wokingham for many years (where The Lazy Frog Massage shop is now). Her brother Weston, a fire brigade member and baker like his father, continued the family’s bakery business until his death in 1955.
A few months after Lottie’s death, a wooden footbridge was erected over Langborough crossing, and the Railway Co decided to build a permanent bridge and a new station building at Wokingham. There’s a Wokingham Society blue plaque commemorating the unusual construction of the bridge in 1886 ‘from re-used rails’ but I’m really pleased this project has rediscovered Lottie’s tragic part in it.
CHARLES WILLOUGHBY
Charles was born in Dunsden in 1872, one of at least six children to parents Mary Ann Hamblin and husband Henry Willoughby, an agricultural labourer. After leaving school Charles worked on a farm, marrying Annie Purton in 1896.
By the time of the 1911 census, now aged 39, Charles described himself as a railway labourer and platelayer (laying and maintaining the tracks) and living with his family at Matthews Green, Wokingham. They would have 8 children in all, though only five survived: Sons Edmund and Charles and daughters Elsie, Gertrude and Lilian. Lilian went on to marry Reginald Brown, a former railway navvy - a tough, often dangerous, job of heavy, manual labour, building railway bridges, cuttings and tunnels, with little more than picks, shovels and gunpowder.
A decade later Charles is still platelaying, with the family now living at 144 London Road, Wokingham (opposite Froghall Green, where St Crispin’s School is now). He died in 1932, aged 59.
His son Charles was a railway gateman - manning level crossing gates - for South Eastern, though by 1939 he’d become a railway porter with office duties, and particularly at Winnersh Station after WWII. He was living at 9 Barkham Road, just yards from Wokingham Station (and Lottie’s railway bridge!) with his wife Edna May and their seven children including Gladys, Leonard and Cyril.
Cyril Willoughby (Charles’ grandson) started working on the railways himself when he was 15 years old, becoming a ‘fireman’ on the steam trains when he turned 16. He went on to drive trains from the age of 23 - steam trains initially and later diesels and electric - working the Reading-Waterloo line through Winnersh much of the time - until his retirement.