MORE than two dozen people have got in touch with the organisers of a forthcoming Works Training School reunion after reading about it in Remember When.

The 50th anniversary of the school will be marked on Saturday, September 22 with a reunion at Steam, the Museum of the Great Western Railway.

The school was open from 1962 until 1984, and about 2,400 young people studied there.

Andy Binks, a local historian and former railway worker, is one of the organisers of the celebration. “We’ve had about 25 people get in touch with us since the Adver piece,” he said.

“Things are going well. We’ve even heard from as far away as Australia, from a man who comes back to Swindon to see his mum.”

The Adver has also heard from the widow of one of the most important and fondly-remembered figures in the history of the training school – and in the history of 20th Century works apprenticeships as a whole.

Kenneth Dann, who died in 1988, was a draughtsman by trade who rose to become training manager for the whole of the works, so he features prominently in the memories of many former Swindon railway workers.

Mrs Dann, 82, who lives in Old Town, said: “I saw the article in the Swindon Advertiser about the 50th anniversary and decided to get in touch.”

She kindly allowed us to use images and memorabilia for her collection, including a group shot of training school apprentices taken in August of 1963.

There is also a shot of Mr Dann standing at second left in a row of instructors, officials and apprentices in front of Class 35 ‘Hymek’ number D7067.

The loco was built at Swindon in 1963 and spent much of its working life based in Cardiff before being returned to its birthplace for scrapping in 1972.

In another of Mrs Dann’s photographs, her late husband is shown among a group of works officials inspecting a test piece created at the school, and there is also a cutting from a short-lived local newspaper called the Swindon Echo, headlined: “New Railway School Cost £182,000.” This sum translates to between £3m and £4m in 2012 funds.

Mrs Dann said: “My husband started as an apprentice with the railway before being called up in 1950 for National Service.”

Mrs Dann was working as a school lab assistant. Both young people were also committed youth workers.

The couple were to have two daughters and four grandchildren.

On completing his service after two years, Mr Dann returned to the Works. “By 1960 he was in the drawing office,” said Mrs Dann.

“The the office moved to Derby and we were going to go there, but then they opened the training school in Swindon and he thought he’d go there instead.”

Mr Dann was to stay until the school closed and he was made redundant. Over the years his volunteer work expanded from youth work to school governorships and countless other projects.

After redundancy, he worked for a Gorse Hill group devoted to helping unemployed people back to work, and it was while at work there one day in 1988 that he suffered a massive heart attack. Another followed later the same day at the old Princess Margaret Hospital, and he died. He was 59.