A GREAT WESTERN TENANCY PART TWO 1937-40
In Part One of this story last month we left the Great Western Railway on the threshold of 1937, the one season before the war in which the company made no increase in its stock of available coaches for rental, in contrast to the London & North Eastern and London Midland & Scottish Railways which clearly had much disposable carriage stock left from former pre-grouping railway companies and continued to add to already large schemes covering a very wide geographical area. No railway paperwork has been traced which might throw any light on this apparent lack of new activity on the part of the GWR, but nevertheless the company rigidly adhered to its ‘one coach per site’ policy, that attitude of exclusivity which distinguished it from its rivals, and the majority of its 50 sites were fully booked for most of that season. During the 1937 season some 645 parties with an estimated 3,000 persons participated in GWR camp coach holidays.
On 12th May 1937 the coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth took place at Westminster Abbey and the GWR took the opportunity of stationing ten camp coaches on the Henley-on-Thames branch for visitors keen to be present during Coronation Week. Eight were placed at Henley itself with two at Wargrave, for which a hefty increased rental of £8 was charged for the week. Presumably ten of the regular camp coach sites were omitted from the normal season’s booking for that week – there would have been one at Wargrave anyway so nine would have been moved from elsewhere, then returned to their regular location for the following week.
From a writer’s point of view, in 1937, the adventures of the ‘camp coachers’ (or should it be ‘coach campers’?) continued to come my way as I continued newspaper appeals and by that year you already had many folk who had already slipped into a ‘camp coach routine’, including, on the one hand, people who went every year to the same location and maintained contact with station staff for years afterwards, and vacationers who tried out a different site each year in order to see as much as they could. An example of the former were Les and Mabel Clash from Bristol, whom we met in Part One.
Les and Mabel, after their early season experiment at Portesham in 1935, booked for Avonwick on the Kingsbridge branch in 1936 and henceforth never went anywhere else, continuing the tradition there when British Railways Western Region camping coaches returned in 1952. They were marvellous enthusiastic interviewees and their stays in the South Hams with two other couples in the ’30s were a treasured part of their early married life. By 1937 they were experts in camp coach culture. Many times I interviewed folk who had been children at the time of their camp coach stays, who furnished me with recollections in remarkable detail, but I was always very motivated and expectant whenever I was able to visit and interview folk who had actually booked and organised the holiday, particularly if, as with Les and Mabel, there was more than one person feeding memories into my cassette recorder:
“In the brochure they used to advise allocating certain duties, and I was used to fending
