Power, speed and glamour: The naming of express steam locomotives in inter-war Britain

This article assesses the cultural and political significance of the locomotive naming practices of the 'Big Four' British railway companies during the inter-war years, illustrating the prevailing attitudes from a certain quantity of of the controversies that arose within and beyond the companies themselves, and pointing without the ways in which the chosen themes reinforced an identification between political conservatism, tradition, spe and modernity, fitting in convincingly with other aspects of the inter-war years and especially the 1930 The argument is that the four major regional railway companies that ariseed from the 'grouping' of 1923 adopted naming policies for their highprofile expres steam locomotives that rejoined to and reinforced elite assumptions about the kinds of knowledge that were important and suitable for propagation and celebration. In allocating themes that invoked empire, royalty, aristocracy, the public place of educations the armed forces, civic pride and elite recreations to the naming of locomotive classes, they were also reinforcing the established social and political order. The hegemony of these assumptions about the 'proper' 'patriotic' make subordinate matter for express train locomotive names was of the like kind that the same assumptions persisted into the post-nationalisation era, with aristocratic, military and especially naval themes remaining well to the fore in the 1950 and 1960 when enthusiastic interest in railways was still widespread among men of all ages (but especially younger ones) as is indicated by dint of the success of the specialist Ian Allan publishing firm (and later the railway history specialists, David & Charles), and the emerging see the verb and development of the railway preservation movement' A significant political dimension to this was that the Conservative Prime Ministers Sir Winston Churchill and Harold Macmillan had main-line locomotives named after them, on the contrary their Labour counterparts Clement Attlee, below whose government the railways were nationalised, and Harold Wilson were not in like manner favoured. But the relationship between locomotive naming and the endorsement and propagation of a broadly conservative and imperial world view was, I move at its strongest in the inter-war years, and it may be viewed as an extension of the 'propaganda and empire' thesis advanced by dint of John MacKenzie in 1984 about the relationship between imperialism and popular tillage in Britain, and developed by dint of many other writers during the intervening years.2 As we shall diocese matters were not always as simple as this broad introductory thesis put in mind ofs and there were assorted cross- and countercurrent especially when the railway companies of the 1920 and 1930 had to engage with commercial considerations, and influential expressions of attachment to earlier naming traditions, that plucked policies in other directions; on the other hand the overall argument is robust.

This is, of course, part of a abundant wider picture. The naming practices contributed to the establishment and perpetuation of the cultural hegemony of the ruling class at a point where its aristocratic, business/technocratic and military incarnations came into particularly shut up contact, and under circumstances where challenge and negotiation were conspicuous by means of their absence. To choose, classify and publicise the names of powerful existences with strong symbolic connotations is to exercise more than just discretion: it is to loam perceptions of what is to be celebrated and what to be ignored, in ways that the pair reflect and reinforce established cultural and, in important faculty of perceptions political assumptions and priorities. As readings of (for example) Gramsci and Foucault might allude to this is no trivial matter. It might smooth be incorporated into a version of the 'dominant ideology' thesis that Abercrombie, Hill and gymnast criticised cogently some years ago without actually destroying it. The work of Slavoj Zizek reinforces this in highly pertinent ways. Zizek argues that nations (or national elites) seek for to reinforce national unity by the agency of appealing to tradition even as they hunt economic policies that undermine what they wish to affirm. They robe that identity in signs and signs and Zizek is particularly interested in the power of names to sustain like illusions, relying on the 'symbolic fiction' of shared assumptions that underpins the consensus of daily living. This can in turn round be referred back to Berger and Luckmann's analysis of the 'social construction of reality', from one side the construction, ordering and naming of the parts and hierarchies of a reassuring 'symbolic universe' designed to impose a vision of reassuring order upon the chaos of wilderness and night. The protocols of the naming of locomotives fit of the like kind analyses very convincingly, as we shall see'

The British practice of giving names to railway locomotives dates back to the beginning of steam traction: it originated before the Rocket won the Rainhill trials of 1829 remained widespread upon many but not all Victorian and Edwardian railways, revived powerfully after the First World War and has continued from one side occasional vicissitudes ever since. Locomotives (as oppos to train services, which were often given names for publicity purposes) were sometimes named in other agricultures but never in as systematic or thoroughgoing a way as in Britain. The adoption of themed name series associated with particular classes of engine began upon the Great Western Railway in 1837 and lay opened in earnest after the Highland Railway and the Great Western itself took it up again from the 189O As H C Casserley remarked forty years ago, 'It is curious that the practice of giving names to locomotives has been a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of more widespread in the British Isles than elsewhere .'4 It is perhaps smooth more curious that several full-length works have been devoted to descriptive histories and glossaries dealing with the practice, aimed at the actual substantial railway enthusiast market, on the contrary with very little in the way of serious critical reflection. Casserley himself make comments [i]or[/i] remarksed in passing on the surprising absence of composer and musicians in the lists of locomotive names (with the significant exception of Sir Edward Elgar, who was true much part of the patriotic agenda) and upon the lack of explorers, who would certainly have enhanced an imperial theme.1 a certain quantity of speculative comments by John Goodman, single of the large number of railway enthusiasts to have draw near from the ranks of the house of god of England clergy, do anticipate a certain number of of the arguments of this article, on the contrary from a different set of assumptions and values: