III.
But these are sorrowful records from which we gladly turn to the lighter side of railway annals. As a link between them we may mention one “accident” which happily unattended with very serious results in itself, was the direct cause of a famous, and at the time, a sensational “incident.” In 1887 the down morning mail train ran off the line at Ellesmere and it was held that this was due to delay on the part of the porter in not being at the points in time to work them properly. For at this time the interlocking system, made compulsory under the Act of 1889, had not been installed,
and the safety of trains depended on due attention to the pointsman’s functions. When, in 1891, a Committee of the House of Commons, of which Sir Michael Hicks-Beach was chairman, sat to inquire into the length of railway hours, the Ellesmere mishap was brought up as an example of what occurred when railway servants were expected to work for long stretches, though Mr. John Conacher (who had joined the Company’s staff in 1865, become secretary on the retirement of Mr. George Lewis in 1882, and later had succeeded to the managership) was able to produce evidence that it was not so much weariness of the flesh as the fact that the porter was playing cards with a postman waiting with the mails and a stranded passenger waiting for the train which led to his late arrival at the points.
The porter was consequently dismissed, whereupon a memorial praying for his re-instatement was signed, amongst others, by the then Ellesmere stationmaster, the late Mr. John Hood. This appeared to the management so undesirable an attitude for a stationmaster to take in the matter of service discipline that he was temporarily suspended and removed from Ellesmere,—a step which, it was publicly explained, had been contemplated some years before the accident, but not carried out,—to Montgomery. Mr. Hood himself gave evidence before the Parliamentary Committee, alleging that the mishap was due to the rotten condition of the permanent way, and though this created a good deal of sensation and alarm, public assurance was promptly restored when it was pointed out that such a conclusion was entirely rebutted by the report issued by the Board of Trade Inspector as a result of his personal examination of the line immediately after the accident.
Probably little, if anything, more might have been heard of the affair, for the Select Committee had risen for the Parliamentary recess, were it not that the directors, carrying out a
detailed examination of their own into the circumstances brought to light again by the inquiry, had laid before them a recommendation by their chief officials on which, rightly or wrongly, wisely or unwisely, they decided to dispense with Mr. Hood’s services altogether. Mr. Hood was summoned to Crewe, where he had an interview with the Chairman of the Company, Mr. J. F. Buckley, who was accompanied by two of his colleagues on the Board,—Mr. Bailey-Hawkins and Mr. J. W. Maclure, M.P., and Mr. Conacher, the manager, but to a memorial in favour of the stationmaster’s reinstatement, they declined to accede.
The fat was now in the fire, and a very fierce blaze ensued. It lit up the industrial world, then struggling into organic solidarity, with lurid flames, and there were those who had some trading or personal grievance against the company, who not less eagerly threw on fresh fuel of their own. Protest meetings were held at Wrexham and Newtown, at which resolutions were carried condemnatory of “excessive hours,” and the late Mr. A. C. Humphreys-Owen, of Glansevern, though he had not been present at the Crewe conclave, was, as a director of the Company and a prospective Parliamentary candidate for the Denbigh Boroughs, singled out for special attack, and as warmly defended by some of his friends.
Mr. Harford, general secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants of the United Kingdom, with what was, perhaps, an unconscious gift of prophecy, declared that “little railways were a gigantic mistake, and the sooner the better they are taken over by some larger concern, for the workmen and the shareholders.” The Labour Press echoed with resounding phrases about “Cambrian tyranny,” and “victimisation,” and Mr. Hood was acclaimed a martyr of overbearing officialism.
More serious was the attitude and the action of Parliament. The House of Commons, ever quick to resent any appearance of tampering with its “privileges,” were sensitive to the suggestion of what seemed to them some interference with a witness before their Select Committee, and not long after the new Session opened, in 1892, Mr. Conacher, who had, meanwhile, left the Cambrian, to the regret of the Board and many others, to assume the larger responsibility of management of the North British Railway Co., was summoned from Edinburgh to appear, with Mr. Buckley and Mr. Bailey-Hawkins, at the Bar of the House to receive the admonition of Mr. Speaker Peel. Mr. (afterwards Sir John) Maclure, being a Member of the House, was at the same time required to stand in his place, where, with bowed head, that burly and genial gentleman, looked very like a schoolboy listening to the stern rebuke of a formidable headmaster!
“Toby M.P.,” glancing down from his seat in the Press Gallery on this rare and impressive scene, has described it in the pages of “Punch” in characteristic fashion:—
“Thursday, April 7th.
“The Chairman of Cambrian Railways held a special meeting at Bar. It was attended by Mr. Bailey-Hawkins, and Mr. John Conacher, Manager of the Company . . . The latter, resolved to sell his life dearly, brought in his umbrella, which gave him a quite casual hope-I-don’t-intrude appearance as he stood at the Bar. Members, at first disposed to regard the whole matter as a joke, cheered Maclure when he came in at a half-trot; laughed when the Bar pulled out, difficulty arose about making both ends meet . . . Bursts of laughter and buzz of conversation in all parts of the House; general aspect more like appearance at theatre on Boxing Night, when audience waits for curtain to rise on new pantomime. Only the Speaker grave, even solemn; his voice occasionally rising above the merry din with stern cry of ‘Order! Order!’
“Hicks-Beach’s speech gave new and more serious turn to affairs. Concluded with Motion declaring Directors guilty of Breach of Privilege and sentencing them to admonition. But speech itself clearly made out that Directors were blameless; all the bother lying at door of Railway Servant who had been dismissed. Speech, in short, turned its back on Resolution. This riled the Radicals; not to be soothed even by Mr. G. interposing in favourite character as Grand Old Pacificator. Storm raged all night; division after division taken; finally, long past midnight, Directors again brought up to the Bar, the worn, almost shrivelled, appearance of Conacher’s umbrella testifying to the mental suffering undergone during the seven hours that had passed since last they stood there.
“Speaker, with awful mien and in terrible tones, ‘admonished’ them; and so to bed.”
The chief actors in this arresting and peculiar drama have now all past from the stage, almost the last survivor, Mr. Hood himself, dying in 1920, after a long career of public service in the local administration of civic affairs at Ellesmere, and not before, through the gracious good offices of the last General Manager, Mr. Samuel Williamson, full and formal reconciliation had taken place between him and the Company.
Rare, indeed, is such an “incident” in the annals of any British Railway. Much rarer, at any rate, than another cause for special managerial anxiety, though not untinged with pride,—the conveyance of a Royal passenger. In this respect the Company, particularly in more recent years, has borne its full share of responsibility and sustained it
with adequate cause for self satisfaction. Queen Victoria, though she visited North Wales in the eighties, travelled by another route, and the first Royal train to pass over any part of the Cambrian system was that which bore King Edward VII. and Queen Alexandra, when Prince and Princess of Wales, on their visit to Machynlleth and Aberystwyth, for the former’s installation as Chancellor of the University of Wales in the middle of June, 1896, and on the same occasion another distinguished traveller along the line from Wrexham to Aberystwyth was Mr. Gladstone.
Eight years later, in July 1904, the late King and his Consort journeyed over the Mid-Wales section to Rhayader, to participate in the opening of the Birmingham Water Works, and thence to Welshpool on their way to London. On March 16th, 1910, King George, as Prince of Wales, passed over the Cambrian on his way to Four Crosses, to perform a similar ceremony in connection with the extension of the Liverpool Waterworks at Lake Vyrnwy, and the longest of all monarchical tours over the system was when, in the middle of July, 1911, King George, Queen Mary, and other members of the Royal family proceeded from Carnarvon via Afonwen and the Coast section to Machynlleth as guests at Plâs Machynlleth, the following day to Aberystwyth for the foundation stone-laying of the Welsh National Library, and two days later, from Machynlleth to Whitchurch on their way to Scotland.
The last Royal journey was a short one, again over the Mid-Wales section, in July 1920, to enable the King to inaugurate the Welsh National Memorial institution at Talgarth, on which occasion his Majesty was graciously pleased to express high appreciation of the facilities ever afforded by the Board and management whenever he travelled over their system. And on this gratifying note we may appropriately bring our record of Cambrian “incidents” to a close.
CHAPTER XI. THE CAMBRIAN OF TO-DAY.
“To stretch the octave ’twixt the dream and deed,
Ah! that’s the thrill.”—Richard Le Gallienne.