A GREAT WESTERN TENANCY

“We’re looking for someone to research Great Western Railway camp coaches!” The speaker was Paul Karau, boss of Wild Swan Publications in his front room/office in Didcot, talking from behind a table piled high with photographs, maps, plans, signalling diagrams, manuscripts and proofs. He was undoubtedly the man who did more than any other to raise the bar in railway publishing and research in the 1980s. I had just brought fifteen years of investigation into the Malmesbury branch to fruition with the delivery of a work on the history of the old Wiltshire line, which would result in a hardback branch line tome two years hence. Paul rightly felt that I should capitalise on the impetus and skills gained from the project by getting my teeth into another. I wasn’t sure, I told him, what was a camp coach, exactly?

“If you’re interested, take these as a starting point” and he handed me a little GWR booklet from 1936 advertising the GWR holiday scheme, a copy of a 1968 Great Western Echo with an article in it by a Bristol headmistress chronicling her experiences on a 1937 holiday in the Wye Valley, and a Senior Service cigarette card bearing an official photograph showing a clerestory coach at Gara Bridge in Devon. I perused the offered material and it looked really interesting, but I still wasn’t sure. Having ascertained that a camp coach was a life-expired railway carriage taken out of regular use in traffic by a railway company, which instead of being scrapped was converted into mobile basic living accommodation and thereby becoming a potential holiday home which could be sent to stations in scenic areas around the system and hired out to the public during the summer months, I then had to consider a productive way to proceed.

Looking through the GWR booklet, an idea occurred to me. Seeing the smiling faces of folk around a meal table in the coach on the cover, it hit me that many of the folk who patronised the scheme in the 1930s would still be around in the 1990s. It was probably too late in the day to find Swindon Works men who had actually undertaken the conversion of the stock there, but what of holidaymakers themselves, who were children and young adults in the decade before World War II? Maybe if I could find them there could be memories imparted and holiday photographs brought out? It could be a priceless exercise in social history, a story of non-railway folk living temporarily in a railway environment. However, at that stage I did not think of the idea as anything more than an extended journal topic which would occupy me until something more substantial turned up! Well, how wrong I was!

I decided that the best way to trace camp coach holidaymakers from the 1930s would be to send a photograph of a coach with a short appeal to the letters page of a local paper, explaining what I was doing and asking folk to contact me if they could assist. Living near Worcester at the time, I settled on the Birmingham Post & Mail and the published appeal elicited four replies. All of them looked promising, offering me the chance to visit them to run an interview and borrow photographs. I also sent in an appeal to The Railway Magazine.

Then I met Graham Vincent. Graham was one of those who saw the appeal in the aforementioned long-established railway monthly. He lived in Wolverhampton, was a railway enthusiast, involved with the Talyllyn in Wales, and had