I wrote an article a few weeks back about Jimmy Thomas and it appeared to have raised a bit of interest as it was not a name familiar to people in Swindon.

He only spent a few years here. However, in that short period he brought about a step change.

Jimmy Thomas, I believe, was the most famous engine driver in history.

He was a man who was destined to become a powerful influence in the National Union Railwaymen with a career of almost 40 years and he was a politician for almost as long. He was born James Thomas in Newport in 1874.

He was brought up by his grandmother, who he thought was his mother.

In fact, his mother was the woman he thought of as his eldest sister.

His grandmother was a washerwoman who took in clothes and uniforms from sailors working in the Newport docks.

He lived next to the marshalling yards, in which trains are assembled and goods are loaded, and would have been reminded 24 hours a day of the GWR and its influence.

Before his ninth birthday his poverty caught up with him when he was not taken on a school outing as his threadbare, though clean and tidy clothing, did not fit in with the image that the school wish to portray on its visit.

He was left behind crying in the toilets.

But once he was nine he took a job helping out at a chemist.

He would attend the chemist’s before and after school and at weekends to sweep the floor and run errands.

He worked for about 35 hours a week and his pleasure was polishing the chemist’s brass name plate.

He left school aged 12 and worked full time as a delivery boy for the chemist.

At 15 he became an engine cleaner on the GWR.

Three years later he passed his fireman’s exams and began work at a colliery in the Sirhowy Valley.

Here, he joined the Amalgamated Society Railway Servants, eventually becoming a full-time organiser and remaining so when it became the NUR.

He enjoyed cleaning the locomotives and was proud of his work.

He became a spokesman for workers when the GWR cut down on the tallow available to cleaners to dress the locomotives.

He pressed his point of view on the management that it would be detrimental to the standard of their work and the image of the GWR and the management listened and did not cut the amount of tallow. He went on to be involved in raising money for strikers on the Taff Vale Railway and striking miners The management did not want to sack a popular firebrand so transferred him to the GWR fortress of Swindon and marked a secret file to say he was a young agitator of whom no notice should be taken.

In my next article we shall look at Thomas and his time in Swindon, and his election as a councillor for Swindon.