Description

When the professional institutions, or the British Association for the Advancement of Science for example, held their summer meetings away from London, it was customary for local works, factories, foundries etc. to either hold open days, or more usually visits by organised parties. Sometimes a leaflet, or more rarely a booklet would be produced for the visitors to take away.

The LNWR certainly produced such a booklet in 1903 and as one would expect of the ”Premier Line”, this was a bit more of a prestige publication than those produced for some other locomotive works.

Memoranda, Locomotive & Carriage Works Stratford,…

Workshops of the Lancashire & Yorkshire…

The fact that the Great Eastern produced a booklet for Stratford and Temple Mills in also in June 1903  suggests that there may have been a substantial railway or industrial foreign delegation visiting England that month.

Even guided tours might not go off quite as well as expected. When Sir Frederick Bramwell was either President of the Institution of Civil Engineers (1884-1886) or president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1888), he was participating in a tour of Crewe Works, when his enthusiasm ran away with him. At the steelworks (F. W. Webb’s pride and joy), he rather stole his host’s thunder, by insisting on explaining to the patty, the apparatus and processes involved. He brandished his umbrella in front of the air intake for the furnace blower, only to have it sucked out of his hand. There was a screech, a clatter and a loud bang as the fan broke. The furnace had to be closed down and steel making suspended. One imagines that Frank Webb was not amused…