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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Railway marvel that beat the world..., 19 May 2008
YORKSHIRE POST.
The railway marvel that beat the world
For those who marvel at the British star of the National Railway Museum, a new book contains some startling disclosures. The Nazis and an Italian car designer played their part in Mallard's world speed record.
John Woodcock reports.
In the age of steam, the footplate rather than a football, was the route to celebrity. Unbelievable though it seems now, engine drivers on the East Coast Main Line were almost as famous as today's soccer stars.
The London & North Eastern Railway saw valuable mileage in promoting those who propelled their expresses. A man entrusted with Flying Scotsman and the other classic names had his face featured on all kinds of marketing material. Biscuit tins, playing cards, jigsaws and posters. Few jobs were as prestigious in any sphere.
Among the sooty, oil-stained heroes was Joe Duddington, based at the Doncaster depot, and making a flambuoyant fashion statement 70 and more years before David Beckham.
He almost always wore his cloth cap back to front, in traditional racing style, a particularly appropriate gesture given the place in history he was to claim on the afternoon of July 3, 1938.
He was 61 at the time. How many individuals approaching their old-age pension today would be given the chance to a break a world speed record?
Duddington and his colleague, fireman Tommy Bray, had been informed they were needed for a secret mission. Its outcome would reverberate around the world, not least in Nazi Germany, and owe much to the influence of a brilliant Italian who out of economic necessity had switched from building racing cars, to designing and manufacturing trains.
Adolf Hitler's propaganda machine, and the genius of Ettore Bugatti, are two of the lesser-known factors behind Mallard's immortal fiery dash between Grantham and Peterborough on that Sunday afternoon.
Their impact on events over those few miles, and on a Derbyshire vicar's son, Nigel Gresley, who designed the extraordinary locomotive, are detailed in a new book about the record-breaker.
It was an era of political and social crisis that produced fertile ground for uplifting diversions. There was an almost fanatical obsession with breaking air and land speed records, not least in Germany where the feats of the Reichsbahn's steam engines and diesels were trumpeted by Joseph Goebbels as symbolic of Nazi power.
At one point Gresley, the innovative chief mechanical engineer of the LNER, but receptive to the ideas of others, thought an adapted version of the Germans' 100mph Flying Hamburger could have a role on the East Coast route. He was also facing fearsome domestic competition from the LMS, the company with a rival route to Scotland.
In the end Gresley found a conqueror of both on his own drawing boards at Doncaster works. It was an improved version of Silver Link, an A4 Pacific whose curved, wedge-shaped front, "more dart than tube", owed much to his association with Bugatti and his streamlined motor designs.
What names should he give his new fleet? Apart from golf, Gresley had a love of wild birds, and in his office at King's Cross, a clerk saw him jotting down names on the back of an envelope.
Suggestions included Guillemot, Herring Gull, Wild Swan, Gannet and Seagull, all "strong on the wing" in keeping with the imageof the railway's fliers.
Come the day, No. 4468 Mallard was chosen for what had officially been scheduled as a brake-testing run, but which, to the few in the know, was also to be an attempt on the British steam speed record, held by the LMS.
Even without fare-paying passengers the train looked majestic; locomotive in garter-blue, its enormous driving wheels a rich Coronation red, six carriages from the Coronation Pullman, and a teak-pannelled dynamometer car, packed with recording equipment. Destiny beckoned, and with typically-British elements. Those on board had a packed lunch and cup of tea, a stink bomb was added to lubricants to provide an early warning if the engine's middle
big end overheated, and the record bid began with a speed restriction of 18mph at Grantham caused by Sunday track maintenance.
Driver Duddington described what happened next. "I accelerated up the bank to Stoke summit and passed Stoke box at 85. Once over the top, I gave Mallard her head and she just jumped to it like a live thing."
In Stoke Tunnel one of those taking measurements recalled how they "were treated to a thrilling display as the whole
car was lit up by a torrent of red-hot cinders streaming back from the locomotive's twin chimneys".
Up front, Duddington and his fireman were pushing ever closer to the previous national best of 114mph. "After three miles the speedometer in my cab showed
107 miles an hour, then 108, 109,110... before I knew it, the needle was at 116 and we'd got the record'.
There was a momentum to press on and challenge the world mark of 124.5mph, set by a German steam locomotive. Could Mallard beat it? She "took wing" and Duddington told later how he urged her on. "Go on girl, I thought, we can do better than this. I nursed her and shot through Little Bytham at 123..."
As the train shook violently, crockery crashed to the floor, and "given the chance the guard would have happily got off" according to official archives, monitoring machines revealed that the locomotive reached 126.1mph for a few moments before a distinctive odour indicated that the stink bomb had done its job.
Mallard limped into Peterborough, all but exhausted, but with a new name, "Blue Streak", courtesy of an ecstatic media, and a record that would never be broken.
Gresley, who had already received a knighthood for his achievements in railway technology, was not on board for his finest hour. While his deteriorating health kept him at home, the driver and fireman he'd chosen for the task became national celebrities.
Duddington responded by heaping praise where it was most deserved. Mallard, he said, was "the best engine ever built, and which ever will be built".
Hard as he tried, even spinmeister Goebbels couldn't undermine the universal acclaim for Britain's first conquest of the Nazis, an event, incidentally, which is still much debated among German rail enthusiasts.
The book's author, journalist Don Hale, became as nationally famous as his subject through his campaign to clear the name
of Stephen Downing, imprisoned for 27 years for the murder of
a woman in Bakewell, Derbyshire.
Researching the Mallard story, much of which had not been told publicly before, took Hale to Germany and into the records here of a time when luxurious steam trains contrasted with soup kitchens, Mosley's Black Shirts and the Jarrow Hunger March - whose 200 protesters were transported home from London on a special train, courtesy of LNER.
Mallard was finally withdrawn from service in April, 1963, with a total mileage of 1,414,138, and five years before the last steam trains ran for British Railways.
She is now the most popular exhibit at the National Railway Museum, unlikely ever to steam again, but a memorial, as Hale points out, to intelligent, startling design, brilliant construction, and the pride of those who drove, fired, repaired and cleaned her.
Still ahead of her time, too. With the exception of the Eurostar service, no everyday passenger trains in Britain exceed her record speed.
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by P. W. B. Semmens
by David McIntosh
