THE SOUTHERN ‘KING ARTHURS’
The Urie legacy
It’s an ill wind that blows no good and this was never truer than in 1912 for the London & South Western Railway. Its Chief Mechanical Engineer, the fiery and obstinate Scot, Dugald Drummond, had embarked upon an ill-fated project to supply the LSWR with four-cylinder 4-6-0s for handling the increasingly heavy trains which were becoming the norm throughout the railways of Britain in the early 1900s. Drummond’s brilliance at producing small 4-4-0s first for the North British Railway and now for his new masters in the form of T9 ‘Greyhounds’ was in stark contrast to the dismal reputation acquired by his six-coupled creations which arrived on the scene between 1905 and 1912 (26 in all, of five different types).
Drummond was not alone, for none of the Victorian engineers enjoyed much success when forced to address the need for bigger, more powerful locomotives at around this time. Sad to relate, the ill wind blowing proved to be Drummond’s untimely and somewhat bizzarre death as a result of scalding. He was 72 years of age and showing no inclination to consider retirement. An accident occurred on the footplate of one of his own locomotives and resulted in severe burning to his feet. The wounds were not properly treated because as usual, Dugald Drummond knew better than anyone else what needed to be done – or not done – and gangrene was allowed to set in. An amputated leg did not save him and he died just days after the accident. He was buried beside the LSWR main line at Brookwood and enginemen’s folklore has it that half a ton of brake-blocks was laid over the grave to ensure that its occupant would rest in peace. Drummond’s demise opened the door for his deputy, Robert Urie, to take over the CME mantle.
Urie had followed his predecessor down from Scotland where both men had been employed by the Caledonian Railway in the 1890s and was of a quite different temperament from Drummond, accepting from the outset that a different approach would be required. Urie’s answer to the need for a large locomotive was the 6ft 0in coupled wheel H15 Class 4-6-0, Nos.482-91, which emerged from Eastleigh in 1914. Battleship construction was the new order of the day with heavy main frames, generous bearing surfaces and a relatively modern front end which supplied just two cylinders with plentiful steam from a well proportioned boiler. These ten locomotives became affectionately known as ‘Chonkers’ and were the pioneers of a long and distinguished line of two cylinder 4-6-0s, represented in later years by ‘Black 5s’, B1s and BR Standard Class 5s. The H15s were not
