A Railway Holiday - the Swindon Trip
STEAM: The Museum of the Great Western Railway in Swindon, Wiltshire, is rather special.
Like any other rail museum, there are engines and carriages on show, and displays and
pictures showing the history of the railway, and how it used to be run. But at STEAM,
there’s a little extra. As part of the museum, and a short distance from the main building,
there’s a faithful reconstruction of a railwayman’s house. That, and other exhibits,
demonstrates that the museum authorities regard the family life of railway personnel as
equally important as the equipment and operation of the railway.
Many people nowadays say that there’s no such thing as a ‘job for life’. Indeed, anyone who spends all his or her working life working for only one employer is often regarded as unambitious, or even 'sad'. But, only a generation ago, this wasn’t unusual. Sometimes, if the employer was a large concern, not only was your work taken care of, but also, frequently, where you lived, and how you spent your leisure time.
Mines and factories provided housing for the workers and their families, either directly or through agents. Medical care would sometimes be arranged for a small levy from wages, and, sometimes, a social club might be provided. Holidays were taken when the workplace shut down for annual maintenance. Many people in Swindon with connections to the railway still treasure memories of the ‘Swindon Trip’. Most people in the town worked in, or dealt with the Great Western Railway’s locomotive works.
When the factory closed for its annual maintenance, the exodus surpassed that at many other places with similar arrangements. The GWR was prepared to provide holiday transport for its employees and their families free of charge…on their trains, of course! One resident claimed that, during ‘Trip Week’ you could fire off a gun at random anywhere in Swindon, and there would be only the remotest chance that you would hit anyone!
‘Trip Week’ was first organised in 1849, becoming ‘Trip Fortnight’ in the 1920s. During this time, workers at the loco works could travel anywhere that Great Western trains ran. After nationalisation, they could ride anywhere on British Railways at no cost.
‘We used to go to York to visit relatives’ said Kevin Shurmer, who works in the STEAM museum, which is in the works’ former machine shop ‘but my father always requested tickets to Scarborough, so we could do a day trip from York’. That, he explained, was in the 1950s. At that time, to the young son of a Supply Foreman at the works, the Yorkshire Coast seemed a world away.
‘Very few people travelled very far from their homes in those days’ he said ‘and it’s difficult to describe the feeling of excitement as the Trip drew closer’.
But former loco works staff did indeed try to describe the feeling, and someone was foresighted enough to record their reminiscences on a video, which visitors to the STEAM museum can see among a display of memorabilia of the golden age of the ‘Trip’. In 1912, for instance, 23 special trains moved 25,000 people in one night! The trains had to leave before the GWR’s scheduled services started, which meant an early-morning start for those travelling to nearby resorts. Those bound for destinations further afield, such as Cornwall and Devon would have left the previous evening, and travelled overnight.
Swindon Station was quite inadequate to handle such numbers, and passengers boarded at a
siding near the works. Special steps were provided, so that they could climb into the
carriages from ground level.
This, of course, didn’t ‘just happen’. Locomotives, crews and carriages all had to be arranged; the Traffic Manager usually started his planning for ‘Trip Week’ in early January!
‘The carriages were absolutely packed!’ recalled Ivy Lawrence, on the video ‘They would put us children on the luggage rack to sleep, so we would be out of the way!’
One of the more popular destinations for the rail workers was Weymouth, in Dorset. So
many would stay in the resort over ‘Trip Week’ that it was sometimes referred to as
‘Swindon-on-Sea’. Most families would stay at the familiar ‘bed & breakfast’ boarding
house; some would return to the same one year after year.
Those who hadn’t booked didn’t need to worry. Landladies with vacancies often met the
trains from Swindon, on the look-out for customers!
But, until 1938, these holidays were unpaid. Quite often, the lower-paid, unskilled workers were unable to save up enough to pay for holiday accommodation. However, they still had the option of taking a day-trip … or even several trips; there was no limit on the number of times the holiday trains could be used. Alan Peck recalled that, quite frequently, mothers would take their children to the beach to enjoy the Punch-and-Judy shows and the donkey rides. Dad would adjourn to a nearby hostelry, to be collected in time for the train back to Swindon!
There was one slight drawback. As Peter Reed said on the video ‘You’d be sat on the beach at Weymouth, and quite often, people would come up and say ‘Hello, Pete!’ or something. You worked with them all the time, and, sometimes, you got fed up with it...’
Well, the work-mate was probably also a neighbour, and it’s possible that, however good a friend he is normally, he might not be the person you might wish to meet on holiday! But, judging by the smiling, excited faces in the pictures on display at STEAM, it would seem that, for the greater part ….. ‘a good time was had by all’ .