Just in front of the good Doctor –The musical!!

The new decade was welcomed with a vengeance at Central London branch on 15/1 with Just in front of the good Doctor -The musical! Blake Paterson’s series of pictures of the pre-Beeching era has proved very popular for the past ten years.

Last year, a chance conversation between musician and enthusiast Don Kennedy, who organises the Branch’s September Lost Railways of London walk, and the Branch Chairman led to the suggestion of performing the lovely song The Slow Train, by Michael Flanders and Donald Swann, to supplement Blake’s programme.

This song referred to some of the many stations with such wonderful and evocative names that would be closed for ever under the Beeching reshaping plan of 1963. The outcome was a combination of music and pictures, accompanied at the keyboard by the exceptional freelance musician Paul Ayres (visit www.pauylayres.co.uk for further information).

The Slow Train was performed by the branch Chairman and Don Kennedy while Jeremy Harrison, always reliable and competent, projected digitalised pictures taken by Blake, with at least one by Charles Firminger, of some of the actual stations as they occurred in the song.

The second and last song, also by Flanders and Swann and performed at the end of the evening’s show, was joyous in tone celebrating the London omnibus, indeed A Transport of Delight!

One imagines the song’s authors had in mind an RT or perhaps an RM. It is now perhaps a little dated in the details -tickets do indeed cost more than ‘a pound apiece’ and two-man crew buses are rare but there cannot have been many LCGB meetings where the audience has ended the evening with singing choruses of a song about a bus!!!!

At the interval the first half closing thanks and the second half opening announcements were given as a psalm chant in a three-part setting especially composed for the occasion by Paul Ayres. That must be another first for any LCGB branch!!

Sandwiched in between the musical offerings were Blake’s wonderful pictures of such joys as H class and M7 tank locomotives, BR 4MT 2-6-4Ts and diesel units on the Three Bridges to East Grinstead and Oxted to Tunbridge Wells West lines, diesels on the Appledore to New Romney and on the Mid-Hants line at Alton and Itchen Abbas, plus on the Ashford to Hastings line at Rye and Winchelsea.

The Southern main line line at Winchfield produced views of steam, diesel, and electric traction. Of particular note was the station at Droxford at the end of the Alton-Fareham Meon Valley line where the Sadler Pacerailer -in effect a bus on rails- was seen.

The writer was particularly intrigued to see a GW 14xx 0-4-4T No.1472 on a Gloucester-Chalford autotrain working at Stonehouse, Gloucestershire. The pictures extended to scenes from the early 1970s, with the historic return of steam to BR metals in 1971 with GWR King No 6000 King George V. It was photographed leaving the Severn Tunnel with the Bulmer Pullmans in tow.

A significant point about these scenes is that next year, in 2011, it will be forty years since that occurrence and that the heritage main line steam era has thus lasted twice as long as the BR one!!

Full acknowledgement of the song source material was made in a simple printed illustrated programme and in the narration. A much briefer modified version of this report will appear in the Bulletin in due course.

It sounds inadequate, but the Branch gives deep and grateful thanks not only to Blake Paterson but also to Paul Ayres and Don Kennedy for making the evening such an enjoyable unique occasion and a great success. Maybe there will be another time………!