Steaming up to the Smoke...

AN air of sepia-tinted nostalgia descends upon Swindon Railway Station as a very familiar figure strides purposefully along the platform chewing on a big fat trademark cigar beneath an impressive top hat while the tails of his fashionable Victorian suit flap along in his wake.

Clearly, it is not him because Isambard Kingdom Brunel entered that great (western) railway in the sky 137 years earlier. So who is this cunning impersonator of The Father of the GWR and why does he exude the self-importance of a Man on a Mission?

Good grief, it is Councillor Derique Montaut, a one-time Mayor of Thamesdown who is about to board the 09.50 to Paddington in full, unashamed IKB regalia.

His purpose? To secure nearly eight million smackers from the National Lottery – a task, you may feel, akin to breaking into Fort Knox.

Looking back nearly two decades hence, we know that he bagged the readies because 15 years ago this month STEAM, The Museum of the Great Western Railway, opened at Brunel’s former stomping ground, the old Swindon Railway Works.

The dosh our modern-day Brunel impressionist and his small posse of civic officials were seeking back in 1996 would become the bulk of the outlay required to transform into a reality Swindon’s long held dream of a state-of-the-art railway museum.

Before clambering into a carriage with a briefcase containing our detailed bid to prise a bulging cache of pretty green from the jealously guarded Lottery coffers, he made some hefty, confident promises…..that Swindon’s proposed heritage centre would be “at the forefront of the current museums revolution” and “light years away from the old image of static displays.”

You can judge for yourself whether Derique Montaut, who is still a Swindon councillor, was bang on the ball or perhaps gilding the lily a trifle as the living proof, located next to the Designer Outlet Village at Churchward, can be visited seven days-a-week.

Personally, I am a big admirer of the museum that occupies a huge old engineering workshop that rather fittingly dates to 1846….the very Dawn of The Works – and thus, of modern Swindon.

Before its transformation it had become a leaky, pigeon poop encrusted shell, scattered with rusting machinery and other remnants of a factory once alive with clanks and curses.

Locked in time like Miss Havisham’s banqueting hall, it appeared virtually un-touched, with its dusty, un-swept floors and cast-off bits of metal, since the very afternoon the doors were slammed shut on The Works: March 27, 1986 - Black Thursday.

It wasn’t long after that fateful day 29 years ago that whispers began to circulate concerning the creation of a “proper” Swindon railway museum…..one that would truly reflect the significance of the arrival and evolution of the Great Western Railway not just on our town but on the region as a whole.

Let’s face it, Mr Brunel’s railway was the biggest thing to hit the West Country since the marauding Saxons around 1,300 years earlier, changing life, commerce and travel forever.

For some years Swindon’s rather quaint railway museum had resided in what had been both a lodging house for Works families, known as The Barracks, and a Wesleyan chapel.

But the ornate Faringdon Road structure, with its Disney-like facade of octagonal louvered turrets and pyramid spirelets, was wheezing under the pressure of the stuff that it couldn’t exhibit – just like today’s Bath Road Museum and Art Gallery.

The closure of The Works after almost 150 years at least provided a possible location for our new, ground-breaking museum as the site was littered with cavernous, empty railway buildings just ripe for revival.

Visiting heritage centres around the UK to nick some ideas, Swindon museum staff returned with some very fancy notions, one being to recreate scenes from late 19th/early 20thCentury Swindon as part of a multi-faceted, railway-themed heritage complex.

Long gone establishments that once existed in the Bridge Street/Faringdon Road area such as Nash’s sweetshop and Keogh’s china shop would make an unexpected comeback.

A replica of the original Sir Daniel Arms pub would materialise and we’d all be able to pop in for a pint. Swindon’s Arcadia cinema would flicker back to life screening “a changing programme of films of a railway nature.”

“The shops will be open and manned by staff in period costume,” Swindon’s indomitable museum keeper Tim Bryan enthused in 1990.

Nothing wrong with a little imagination but a Swindon version of Blists Hill Victorian Town at Ironbridge proved a tad over-ambitious.

Tim’s vision of “Old GWR steam trains lining a replica platform,” however, was spot on and £100,000 was ploughed into a detailed plan as deliverable as it was exciting and relevant to the history and heritage of this town and region.

“Cough-up,” was the message to Lottery chiefs when our Brunel era attired civic party presented it to them on March 28, 1996, coinciding with the tenth anniversary of the closure of The Works.

And cough up they eventually did….to the tune of almost £8 million, leaving the council, site owners Tarmac, and the factory shopping complex to provide a further £5 million or so.

On November 5, 1998 around 500 former railworkers gathered in the soon-to-be-converted 7,000 square metre, Grade II listed 20 Shop to mark, with no little poignancy, the start of Swindon’s flagship Millennium Project.

Imagine the feelings of former fitter, turner and erector Alf Neat, 55, of Greenmeadow when he was invited to signal the re-birth of this derelict Victorian factory building by switching on its giant clock which had stopped at 2.35pm on Black Thursday, more than 12-and-a-half years earlier. Still worked, too.

“I must have looked at that clock thousands of times when I worked here,” said Alf, who spent 35 years at The Works.

As the bells from Swindon’s “railway church” St Marks chimed, he added: “I think the museum will be fantastic, a real tribute to all the people who worked there.”

When STEAM opened on June 4, 2000 – 15 years ago last Sunday – the one thing it lacked, ironically and disappointingly, was steam.

Dreams of creating a branch link into STEAM, enabling regular loco swaps with other museums, and even running engines to and from the former GWR weighbridge-turned brewery/bar/restaurant evaporated.

Bu it was all smiles when the Prince of Wales officially opened STEAM on June 28, sharing his earliest memories of thundering great locos with those gathered. “I remember being taken as a child to stand on a bridge in Kent to watch the Golden Arrow go past,” he reflected.

During his visit Charles “clocked in,” punching a time clock card like so many thousands of Swindon railworkers had on so many occasions earlier.

www.steam-museum.org.uk

Locomotive worker John Charlesworth never thought he’d show his face back at the Swindon Works again after the complex was shut down in 1986. How wrong could he be!

Visitors to STEAM see him there every day after John, 62, was among a dozen or so ex-railworkers who modelled for the museum’s many fibre-glass figures.

During the face-casting at Swindon Arts Centre in February 1999 his mug was smothered with a mixture of plaster and Alginate – the stuff dentists use to make teeth moulds.

Twenty minutes later he resembled the Return of the Mummy.

Fast forward to June, 2000, and John is standing next to his body double, an engine driver. “It’s not a bad likeness – but it isn’t quite as good looking as me.”

Perhaps less to his liking was the other model his phizog was used for… you’ve guessed it, the wretched Garvey.

IT is impossible not to feel sorry for the hapless Garvey because we’ve all been in his boots at one time or other, be it in the headmaster’s office or that of the chief clerk or indeed, the editor.

“Well Garvey, what have you got to say for yourself? The unfortunate sap has been summoned by his stern faced foreman Mr Mitchell for a right, royal rollicking.

“You’re over 20 minutes late. You don’t see me turning up late for work without any excuse,” he snaps, gazing at his timepiece in order to emphasise Garvey’s misdemeanour.

You almost cringe at the poor fellow’s discomfort as he stands head bowed while glumly mumbling some weak, inadequate excuse.

“I’m docking you half-a-day’s pay. Next time you’re out on the street,” barks Mr Mitchell.

The dozens of fibre-glass statues (some of which are equipped with pre-recorded tapes) that stand, sit or – as in Garvey’s case – slump amidst the museum’s shiny locos, carriages and assorted railway-themed pieces help bring STEAM to life.

I am especially fond of sweat-soaked navvies who built the railway, depicted smashing their way westwards. No wonder they drank a gallon of beer a day.