Centenarian cameraman: Ron Buckley – Britain’s Oldest Railway Photographer: Part Two

Posted

by

Chris Milner concludes his interview with 100-year-old photographer Ron Buckley, who returned from wartime military service to a railway preparing for Nationalisation.

AFTER leaving England in 1940 and serving with the Worcestershire Regiment, Ron returned home after demobilisation in 1945 after four-and-a-half years away – and to a very different railway.

Article continues below…
Advert

The ‘Big Four’ had worked as one railway under the Railway Executive, and with Luftwaffe action destroying or damaging 482 locos, 13,314 carriages and 16,132 wagons, the railways were badly run down. It was the Transport Act of 1947 which aimed to bring stability and investment under the guise of British Railways leading to Nationalisation of the railways on January 1, 1948.

Rejoining his former employer – the LMS – late in 1945, Ron worked at King’s Heath station dealing with goods traffic under stationmaster J J Ashwell; he had a friendship with local butchers who used to give him quite a bit of meat at a weekend.

This meat, along with vegetables that were grown in a nearby allotment, were cooked on a single gas ring in the station building, and served to staff. “It was superb,” Ron commented.

Article continues below…
Advert

Proximity

King’s Heath closed to passenger traffic in 1941 as a result of the war, and although it never reopened the station continued to deal with goods traffic until the early 1960s.

Film was still difficult to obtain just after the war – even in 1946 and 1947 – so Ron’s output of photographs was reduced.

Article continues below…
Advert

After two more years in the south Birmingham suburb, Ron moved to the divisional managers’ offices at Derby in 1948, where he was interviewed by former Lancashire & Yorkshire Premium apprentice and BR locomotive engineer E S Cox.

Many readers will remember the character of Leicester London Road station with its overall roof and the two bay-windowed signalboxes part way down the platform. On May 20, 1950, Ivatt Class 4 2-6-0 No. 43045 calls at platform 3 with the 08.45 Lowestoft Central-Birmingham New Street working. All pictures RON BUCKLEY
Outside-framed Kirtley 0-6-0 No. 20002 was already 80 years old when this picture was taken on April 28, 1946 at Nottingham shed. Originally numbered 158A, the former station pilot was taken into the National Collection, and is based at Butterley, Derbyshire.
This loco is numbered 069 and has LNER on the tender, being part of the ‘J41’ class, but the loco was built by Kitson for the Midland & Great Northern Railway in 1899 to a Samuel Johnson design for the Midland Railway. A former Yarmouth Beach shed engine, it is seen at Stratford Works on March 12, 1938, but was withdrawn just four years later.
Said to be one of the most graceful of Great Eastern locomotives, ‘Claud Hamilton’ 4-4-0 No. 8781 is in the shed yard at Stratford on March 12, 1938. Reclassified as a class D16/2 by the LNER, the loco went on to become BR No. 62612 and survived in traffic until January 1960.
One of Ron’s published images in the May 1952 Railway Magazine

Working in close proximity to Cox, Ron was often invited by his superior, or the locomotive works manager, into the workshops where, from 1951, BR was building the 130 locos of an order for 171 Class 5 4-6-0s.

During that postwar period, Derby was also building a batch of 10 Ivatt ‘2MT’ 2-6-2Ts destined for the Southern and Western regions, the first 10 BR ‘4MT’ 2-6-4T Nos. 80000-9/54-58, and had also completed an order in 1950 from the Northern Counties Committee for 18 ‘WT’ 2-6-4Ts to the Irish 5ft 3in gauge.

Article continues below…
Advert

Because of Ron’s visits with senior management, he became well known to shop floor staff, often left to wander in on his own to see what was being built, taking a few photos at the same time.

Ron’s period at Derby was at the time when the Fell diesel, No. 10100, was being constructed, and he occasionally ventured out to see its initial workings, a picture of it being published in the April 1952 Railway Magazine. 

Ron then met a lady called Joyce, who was the daughter of a driver at the former LNER Langwith Junction shed. They married in 1948 (it is their platinum wedding anniversary this year) after Ron got a promotion, and bought a two-bed semi-detached house in Shropshire Avenue, Chaddesden, for £1,425.

With ‘NE’ on its tender, former Great Eastern Railway ‘E4’ class 2-4-0 No. 2792, with stovepipe chimney, is in the shed yard at Norwich on October 1, 1946. The loco lasted another 10 years in service.
One of Ron Buckley’s favourite classes were the Midland Railway Compound ‘4P’ 4-4-0s. Here No. 41091 is seen waiting to leave Bedford Midland on September 16, 1950, with the 1.05pm to London St Pancras.
Making a change from the procession of Pacifics on passenger duties on the East Coast Main Line, ‘WD’ 2-8-0 No. 90648 passes the south end of Grantham station with a rake of mineral and other wagons on September 2, 1950.
Melton Mowbray once sported two stations, the Midland station which remains open today and the North station, which was built by the Great Northern and London and North Western Joint Railway. On April 24, 1948, Stanier ‘8F’ No. 8624, constructed at Ashford Works in 1943 to an order from the Railway Executive, rumbles through the sorry-looking station. It lost regular passenger services in 1953, summer specials in 1962, and by 1964 closed completely.

“I had £91,” said Ron. “Joyce had £9 and this was the down payment on the house. It should have been £1,450 but we knocked them down,” he chuckled. Joyce added: “They were nice houses with lovely gardens. No one had a car at the time, but today, there are cars everywhere in that street and even a caravan parked in front of our old bay window!”

Makeshift darkroom

Like many railway photographers at the time, Ron used to develop his own black and white films and also print the negatives. Every Tuesday, the family bathroom would be turned over to be a makeshift darkroom with the printing beginning at 7pm, just after dinner.

He’d tie the bathroom up for long periods of time, thinking nothing of spending three or more hours with the acrid chemical smell of developer and fixer – at which point Joyce nods in agreement and rolls her eyes: “On one occasion he set the bathroom on fire!”

A subsequent promotion saw Ron move to the Express Passenger Office, where he monitored all the Class 1 trains from St Pancras to Carlisle, while a colleague did the same on Derby to Bristol workings.

“Promotion was made easy, you just had to outwit three or four other candidates,” he quipped.

With a 38C Leicester Central shed plate, ‘A3’ 4-6-2 No. 60102 Sir Fredrick Banbury passes ‘J39’ 0-6-0 No. 64885 by Retford North signalbox on August 18, 1951, the Pacific destined for King’s Cross.
It’s not very often you see a loco with three tenders! ‘J6’ 0-6-0 No. 64179, in ex-works condition, approaches Dukeries Junction on the East Coast Main Line with an Up mixed goods from Doncaster on August 23, 1951.

Ron also got involved with the Derby Railway Society, and became treasurer. “The society was made up mainly of apprentices from the works, but it never really took off. 

“As soon as the apprentices had completed their time, they left the railway for other businesses in the area,” explained Ron.

“We did trips every year by rail, around three was normal, and went to York, Doncaster, Goole. We tried to get to Hull, but that wasn’t easy from Derby. Eventually, the society folded.”

Photographic trips

It was during his time at Derby that Ron first met Henry Casserley, who was visiting the shed and Works, and he formed a friendship with the prolific railway photographer, often embarking on photographic trips together.

“I once had to share a bed with him,” he roared. “It would have been in 1952 when BR were closing Newcastle Emlyn. We went to Cardigan on the train, but there were no trains to Emlyn, so we had to take a taxi, only to find the hotels were pretty full up due to the closure of the railway. We were offered a room with a double bed!”

Having just passed a fine array of semaphore signals, ‘A1’ Pacific No. 60134 Foxhunter passes Retford on August 2, 1958 in charge of the ‘Queen of Scots’ Pullman from London King’s Cross to Edinburgh and Glasgow via Leeds.

During the 1950s, Ron was heavily involved with timetabling – a task he enjoyed immensely, plotting movements of additional workings on the massive train graphs.

On occasions when diversions were being organised, because of planned work, Ron was required to go to meetings during the week – Sheffield, Millers Dale and elsewhere – and always took his camera when on company business.

Favourite locos

Further trips to Scotland were undertaken by Ron in 1946, 1950 and 1959, observing the many changes that had taken place since his pre-war visits. He also took Joyce to Scotland on two occasions for what might euphemistically be called a railway holiday!

In the 1960s, Ron was promoted again, this time with a job back in Birmingham, which he describes as a mixed blessing. “Before I knew what was happening, I was employed on ‘Dr Beeching’ work, closing lines and stations down. I had to work on as many as a dozen closures at a time, and Euston always wanted the information yesterday. After that I just played out time till my retirement.”

Having taken around 7,000 images – Ron did take diesel and electric pictures, and in colour too, but scans of the negatives were lost from a computer, somehow – he admits his favourite locos were the LMS ‘Compounds’ or any Highland Railway loco, many of which had been built by Hawthorn Leslie.

Lincolnshire’s railways were decimated by closures in the 1960s, with one of the casualties being the popular resort of Mablethorpe, which lay on a loop from the Boston-Firsby-Louth-Grimsby line. In good external condition, ‘C12’ class 4-4-2T No. 67398 is about to depart from Mablethorpe with the 1.46pm Louth-Sutton-on-Sea train on September 14, 1954.

It was in the early-1950s that Ron’s first pictures appeared in The Railway Magazine, and for a few years he had several images published. “It was a great honour to have a picture published in The RM,” said Ron.

“As a youngster, I’d see Railway Magazine on the bookstall, priced one shilling, but I only got sixpence pocket money a week, and couldn’t afford it at the time.”.

Taking retirement in 1977, after a 43-year career on the railways, Ron spent much of his time honing his carpentry skills. His chief success, he says proudly, was making a grandfather clock from a £30 kit. “There were many dodgy moments, but it still stands in our hallway, keeping perfect time after 37 years so far.”

Discovered

With age catching up on Ron, and being less mobile, he finally gave up taking pictures of trains in 2014, aged 97 – yet three years earlier, had often still travelled to places by train, and took time to visit Lichfield Trent Valley station, close to his Staffordshire home.

Johnson ‘1P’ 0-4-4T No. 58087 was used on the Stephenson Locomotive Society’s Derby area railtour on June 28, 1952, visiting Melbourne, Worthington, and Ashby-de-la-Zouch. With all the carriage doors open, a break is taken near Ashby.

While the trusty Rolleiflex may be a distant memory, Ron does have a small Panasonic digital camera to take the occasional family snap, and has indeed moved with the times into the digital age.

Just how Ron’s pictures, which were lodged with a small photo library, were discovered and came to be published is another interesting story.

Railway author Brian Dickson, who is also a volunteer at the Chinnor & Princes Risborough Railway, had been researching pictures for a railway book on Scotland when he stumbled over Ron’s negatives. Realising they depicted many rare and unusual pre-Grouping locos, he felt there was enough material for a book, which led to the publication in 2015 of the first volume, featuring Scotland,
by The History Press.

‘Aladdin’s Cave’

As Brian trawled through Ron’s other material, he realised it was like an ‘Aladdin’s Cave’, full of top-quality unpublished railway photographs, and these have spurned four other volumes – North Eastern, Great Western, Southern, and published at the end of March, the album covering the East Midlands and East Anglia.

Taken at a time when film was still difficult to obtain, Urie ‘S15’ class 4-6-0 No. 502 sits on Salisbury shed on August 17, 1947, awaiting its next duty.
An excellent post-Grouping portrait of Brighton-built Marsh ‘H2’ class Atlantic 4-4-2 No. 2426 St Albans Head on shed at New Cross Gate on March 20, 1948, designed to work from London to Brighton in one hour. A project to re-create an ‘H2’ is taking place at the Bluebell Railway.

There is at least one other book in the pipeline too, and given the quality of Ron’s wonderful images, that should be worth waiting for.

It has been an absolute pleasure to meet Ron Buckley, to listen and record some of his wonderful tales, perfectly recollected, from a very full, active and colourful 100 years. ■

The Railway Magazine Archive

Access to The Railway Magazine digital archive online, on your computer, tablet, and smartphone. The archive is now complete – with 123 years of back issues available, that’s 140,000 pages of your favourite rail news magazine.

The archive is available to subscribers of The Railway Magazine, and can be purchased as an add-on for just £24 per year. Existing subscribers should click the Add Archive button above, or call 01507 529529 – you will need your subscription details to hand. Follow @railwayarchive on Twitter.

Read more News and Features at https://www.therailwayhub.co.uk/ and also in the latest issue of The Railway Magazine – on sale now!


Advert

Railway Reads

From the history of steam through to 21st century rail transport news, we have titles that cater for all rail enthusiasts. Covering diesels, modelling, steam and modern railways, check out our range of magazines and fantastic subscription offers.

Posted

in

Latest Issue

Newsletter Signup