Station to Station: Searching for Stories on the Great Western Line by James Attlee, review: 'magical'

Murderers, politicians, sex parties and dogs: all life is evoked in a magical history of the Great Western Railway, says Michael Kerr

By Michael Kerr 03 May 2015 • 11:00pm

Gloucester Cathedral with an antique locomotive before it Credit: Photo: Wiltshire/REX Shutterstock

Which mode of transport links John Tawell, who murdered his mistress in 1845, and George Osborne, who needs his party to murder Labour next week? Answer: the railway.

Tawell, a Quaker businessman and pharmacist, forced his mistress, Sarah Hart, to drink prussic acid, a treatment for varicose veins. He then fled from Slough to Paddington by train. He was caught when the new electric telegraph, intended for railway communications, was used to send his description, mentioning his full-length Quaker greatcoat, ahead of him to London.

Nearly 170 years later, in 2012, Osborne (champion of the HS2 and HS3 rail projects) discovered that Twitter can outpace a train. He was travelling from Wilmslow to London, holding a standard-class ticket but sitting in a first-class compartment. When an inspector took this up with one of the Chancellor’s aides, an argument began, which a journalist overheard and tweeted. Osborne, like Tawell, was preceded into the capital by news of himself.

The incidents are recounted, and the connections between them drawn, by James Attlee in Station to Station. “God’s Wonderful Railway”, they used to call the link Isambard Kingdom Brunel forged between London and Bristol, and in Attlee’s hands the Great Western Line is indeed full of wonders, prompting passages on everything from infrared technology to resurrection as painted by Stanley Spencer in Cookham.

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In previous books, one about moonlight, the other about the Cowley Road in Oxford, Attlee made magic with what others overlook. Here he does it again. Station to Station is partly an exploration of places and buildings on or just off the line; partly a collection of stories about people who have been associated with it, whether as planners, navvies, staff or passengers; and partly a rumination on the nature of travel.

It takes him to a 19th-century asylum, designed to keep madness confined, and a 21st-century bus station, where passengers embark on journeys that could send them around the world. It takes him to a burial mound at Taplow, which has survived since Anglo-Saxon times, and a fossil-fuel power station at Didcot, which was seen off in 2014 with a night of “blowdown barbecues”.

He sounds out a few of today’s passengers and staff (among them the falconer charged with scaring off Paddington’s pigeons), but on most of his outings he is “sensing the souls” of their predecessors, from Diana Dors, pioneer of the British sex party at her mansion near Maidenhead, who’d interrupt her coupling guests to offer tea and scones, to Haile Selassie, King of Kings of all Ethiopia, who, having been run out of his country by the Italian army, set up his government-in-exile in 1936 in a Roman city – Bath.

Attlee’s book grew out of a stint as “writer on the train” for the rail operator First Great Western, which agreed he could be frank. And he is: he points out that the original investors in the Great Western Railway included at least five men with links to the slave trade.

Partly written on trains, Station to Station gains force from being read on one. Just be careful around Slough, where the author’s reappraisal of a place damned by Betjeman and derided in the The Office could have you making an unscheduled stop. He’s struck there by the memorial to Station Jim, a dog that charmed loose change from passengers for the GWR’s widows and orphans, and is preserved, stuffed, in a glass case.

Maybe, he muses, we could do the same with the much-loved member of station staff who passes on, or the commuter who pops his clogs on the train. “Among the jostle and flow of the crowd on our rush-hour platforms these figures would not move, frozen in attitudes and gestures once familiar, their continued presence a reassuring reminder of values that endure.”

Michael Kerr is the editor of two Telegraph anthologies of train journeys, Last Call for the Dining Car and Sunrise on the Southbound Sleeper