Letters intended for publication should ideally add extra detail to our articles (or offer corrections of course!) and not be too long, consistent with the detail they offer. As always, we are sorry that space and time prevent us from printing them all or sending personal replies. ED.
A Dangerous Liaison
May I be allowed to make some comments on Tim Graves’s article in the April Backtrack highlighting the relationship between British railway engineers and their counterparts in Nazi Germany? A book could be written on this issue but I will restrict myself to two points, firstly, that Mr.Graves, while adequately summing up the situation in the years between 1919 and 1939, does not go deeply enough into the contemporary Zeitgeist. In Britain, since the 1950s, we have had no experience of the deep schism that existed in those years between the Conservative right and the Socialist left, with the former, obsessed with financial orthodoxy, scared witless of communism and fearing revolution, with the latter, justifiably concerned about economic policy and social conditions, and sometimes over-enthusiastic about what it saw as the positive results of communism. In those circumstances, railway managers at most levels above the workshop floor would, inevitably, have supported centre right governments, and been opposed to industrial action which seemed, in their minds, to be the precursor to revolution. Thus, a degree of appreciation for what was happening in Germany was not inevitable, but it is certainly understandable. As an aside Stamp was also an enthusiast for American business administration.
The members of most professions appreciate meeting their contemporaries wherever they are and there is a modern parallel with British railway engineers ignoring political reality in order to meet engineers from the Reichsbahn; in the apartheid era, British cricketers supporting racist South Africa by going there to play was a scandal, maybe only a openly supported Hitler almost to the end of the peace period.
