Lydd on Sea and Dungeness station - with a note on the origins of the Jack Straw Memorial Reform School

Atmospheric photographs and atmospheric music. The blurb on YouTube explains what we are looking at:

Although the trackbed from Romney Junction towards New Romney is easily traceable, nothing remains of Lydd-on-Sea Halt today except for a gated concrete approach road from Kerton Road. 

Promoted  by holiday camp development in the area, the Southern Railway decided in 1937 to realign its branch line to New Romney (which had been opened in 1884) closer to the sea and to open two intermediate stations - Lydd-on-Sea and Greatstone-on-Sea. 

The opening of Lydd-on-Sea on 4 July 1937 coincided with the closure of Dungeness station to passengers; it was intended that Lydd-on-Sea, ½-mile from Dungeness, would serve both locations and its running in board read "Lydd-on-Sea (for Dungeness)".

To handle the expected flow of holiday traffic, the station was equipped with a long curved island platform with a passing loop on which was perched a small wooden shed. The traffic never materialised and the station was downgraded to an unstaffed halt on 20 September 1954 when its passing loop was also lifted. 

As passenger traffic dwindled and freight became insignificant, the New Romney branch fell into decline and was listed for closure in the Beeching Report. In 1966 the Minister of Transport Barbara Castle announced her intention of closing the Appledore to New Romney Branch and passenger services ceased on 6 March 1967.

Trains still run from Appledore to Dungeness to collect nuclear waste for reprocessing at Sellafield. There's more about that and the history of the line on Kent Rail, and Derek Hayward has photographs of the old Dungeness station and its site today.

Dungeness still has a station on the narrow-gauge Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway, and Jon and David get off a train there in The Elusive Grasshopper, the sixth of Malcolm Saville's Lone Pine stories:

When they got out at the station the wind was so strong that for a moment they held on to each other. It howled and roared over the flat wastes and round the lighthouse towering above them. It whipped the smoke and steam from the engine's little smoke-stack into nothing and flattened the sea poppies growing in the shingle at the side of the track, and as they stumbled up the old full-gauge railway lines towards the school it whistled and sang strange songs among the telegraph wires.

It was not very pleasant exploring the school because the wind played odd tricks in those empty rooms and corridors and the house was full of mysterious groans and whisperings and thuds. But there was nobody there and no sign that anybody had been there since they had found Wilson stunned on the floor. Jon showed David the loose floorboard with a sketch of the grasshopper and they even searched for cigarette ends or pipe ash, without success.

I assume there really was a ruined school beside the old standard-gauge branch at Dungeness when Saville knew it. And it's also the inspiration for the Jack Straw Memorial Reform School, Dungeness, which Lord Bonkers mentions from time to time.

Six of the Best 947

"We aren’t puritans. We aren’t miserable. We aren’t automatons. We are liberals. So why oh why is the party resorting to wringing its collective hands about 'unhealthy' Eat Out to Help Out discounts?" Judging by the reaction on Twitter, Max Wilkinson speaks for many party members.

Peter Franklin calls on the chancellor to repair the public finances after Covid-19 by introducing a form of land value taxation: "If Rishi Sunak introduces it, we’d be facing a truly remarkable moment in British politics: the first step toward a seemingly impossible political philosophy - Tory Georgism."

"A holistic approach is needed to get more people on their bikes, one that makes cycling desirable, accessible and fun. To truly make it safe, cycling in the capital needs to take priority over driving." Caz Nicklin says that if the prime minister wants to get us all on our bikes, he needs to look at what’s been stopping us for so long.

John Boughton looks at the history of council housing in Oxford, which includes a wall built to separate a private estate from the council houses next door.

Alwyn Turner looks at the strange fame of the Italian heavyweight boxer Primo Carnera.

"To get a sense of what it is like, think of an artists’ community in a near-desert of shingle, consisting of houses built from driftwood and old train carriages, all on a storm-battered headland in Kent, with a globally unique ecosystem, a tiny steam railway, and of course those two gigantic nuclear plants dominating the view to the south." Niall Gooch takes us to Dungeness.

The railway from Hastings to Ashford: Part 1

In 1967 my family had a caravan holiday at Winchelsea Beach in Sussex. And I do remember the summer of love: All You Need is Love by the Beatles and (rather less cool) Up, Up and Away by the Johnny Mann Singers were always playing.

What I also remember, on the journey there, is that people were on the train at Ashford collecting signatures on a petition to save the line across Romney Marsh to Hastings.

It worked. The line is still open today.

This is the first part of a film made in 1987 that will tell you all about it and also about the branch to Dungeness.

British railways and pop music from 1967-80

This is wonderful stuff. Footage of Britain's railways matched to pop songs, radio recordings and television theme tunes from the same year.

It is odd how some things date faster than others. I have a book about Romney Marsh from the 1960s that contains a photograph of the car park at the nuclear power station at Dungeness.

The power station itself still looks strange and futuristic today. The cars are laughably old fashioned.

Here I think that, in many cases, the railway footage appears more dated than the music sounds.

The Hawkhurst Branch in 1958

Built on the cheap and opened as late as 1892, the Hawkhurst Branch ran through the orchard and hop country of Kent.

Plans for extensions to Tenterden, Appledore or Dungeness came to nothing and the line was thoroughly uneconomic when it closed in 1961.

Wikipedia records the intriguing detail that:

Elisabeth Beresford, who was subsequently well known as the creator of The Wombles, wrote a children's book Danger on the "Old Pull 'n Push" based on the Hawkhurst branch. 

Subsequently this was televised by Rediffusion for ITV in two six-part series The Old Pull 'n Push and Return of the old Pull 'n Push, shown in 1960-61. These were filmed on the Hawkhurst Line shortly before it closed.

Laurel and Hardy on the Romney, Hythe & Dymchurch

The film describes the proceedings shown as the 21st birthday of the Romney, Hythe & Dymchurch.

That celebration must have taken place in 1948. But in 1947 Laurel and Hardy visited the railway to reopen the line to Dungeness - it had been used by the military during the war.

So unless they visited it twice, it is that 1947 visit that is shown here. You can read more about it on the Laurel and Hardy Magazine site.

Incidentally, I have never found Laurel and Hardy that funny - they are just two silly men doing silly things.

Book review: Engel's England by Matthew Engel

Engel's England: Thirty-nine counties, one capital and one man
Matthew Engel
Profile Books, 2015, £9.99

When I was a small boy one of my favourite things was a wooden jigsaw of England and Wales, where each piece was an individual county and the pieces were decorated with little pictures showing the local industries.

It is very much that England that Matthew Engel sets off to look for in this book. Rarely does he find it, but he is an amiable companion and Engel's England is a likeable book.

I first came across Engel as the Guardian’s cricket correspondent. He reminds be particularly of the summer of 1985 when David Gower batted and batted and England won back the Ashes. He writes on a wider range of subjects these days and the travel book format certainly suits him.

Here he is in Norfolk:

Norwich is more than just a county town, more like a capital. It evens feels like a capital, of an agreeable and small Continental country: all those huddled, companionable streets with Dutch gables – plus repulsive modern additions that hint at a phase of joyless Communism. A bit like somewhere round the Baltic, maybe. 

There are many good things in the book and places Engel makes you want to visit. Farleigh, an unspoilt village four miles from the centre of Croydon. Barrow-in-Furness, where he seeks and finds the England of Coronation Street. Dungeness, which is “not everyone’s cup of tea,” as a resident tells him, but is mine.

Talking of places I know well, in Leicestershire Engel covers the obvious subjects of multicultural Leicester and fox hunting, but he gains bonus points for getting to Breedon on the Hill. He does better in Rutland, where he meets the indefatigable blogger Martin Brookes.

When he gets to Shropshire there is a lamentable failure to write about derelict lead mines, and his sociology of the south of the county is awry. Bishop’s Castle was a centre of the counter culture two decades before London foodies discovered Ludlow.

Few places are treated unfairly. I would suggest the east side of Derbyshire (the Derwent Valley is a marvel), Birmingham and Swindon, where has more to it – the Great Western Railway, Richard Jefferies, Don Rogers – than the Magic Roundabout.

And in Buckinghamshire, after being half seduced by Eton, he is damning of the county’s selective secondary education. Hell hath no fury like a privately educated Guardian journalist confronted by a grammar school.

Before he return to his adopted home of Herefordshire for the final chapter, Engel takes us to London. In his discussion of the way the capital dominates our national life, and the way it is being remade by foreign monies, he makes important points.

Local boundaries have been rubbed out or redrawn in a way that would be simply unthinkable in the more federal United States. My jigsaw, for instance, can be dated to between 1965, when Huntingdonshire absorbed the Soke of Peterborough, and 1974, when it was itself absorbed into Cambridgeshire.

Some counties have resisted their erasure from history, notably Yorkshire (the largest) and Rutland (the smallest). Elsewhere Berkshire is fading from memory and no one seems to have heard of Huntingdonshire at all.

Soon it will be as lost as the Cotswold county of Winchcombeshire from the 10th and 11th centuries.

Out of my brain on the 5:15 to Dungeness

.@TheWho frontman Roger Daltrey has visited the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway. pic.twitter.com/vlz5QPP6Jd

— BBC Radio Kent (@BBCRADIOKENT) August 2, 2016

Roger Daltrey was on Dungeness today for the official opening of the new restaurant at the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway station.

The Great Train Robbery on the Romney, Hythe and Dymchuch

A gang of criminals, led by Derek Guyler and Clive Dunn, restage the Great Train Robbery on the Romney, Hythe and Dymchuch Railway.

This is a sketch from Michael Bentine's show It's a Square World, which ran from 1960 to 1964.

The BFI site makes it sound something of a lost gem:

It's a Square World employed location filming, ingenious special effects and elaborate models to realise the more extreme visions from the imaginations of Bentine and his co-writer John Law. Ranging from gentle satire to surreal slapstick, the fast-moving agenda was anchored by Bentine, usually appearing as a hapless authority figure trying manfully to remain calm in the face of a conveyor belt of unlikely eccentrics and lunatic situations. 

Recurring characters included Oil Sheiks speaking in a cod-Arabic language of Bentine's own invention; feuding magicians; inept Russian spies and incident-prone Egyptologists. Themes included the military, the United Nations, uncharted lands and the BBC itself. 

Skits were often linked by Bentine as a newsreader introducing stories and introducing assorted correspondents in the field. Memorable moments included the BBC Centre portrayed as a POW camp that held the Corporation's creative staff to prevent them defecting to ITV; the Slabodian mountaineering team's attempt to scale the Woolwich gasometer; the Triffid invasion of the BBC; and the sinking of the House of Commons by a Chinese junk. 

Many of the themes and character types were echoed later by the Monty Python team, especially Bentine's linking newsreader and his preoccupations with the military and bizarre officialdom (a Square World sketch featuring the Ministry of Holes predates the Pythons' Ministry of Silly Walks).

Dungeness sold to the French government

Or very nearly.

Kent Online reports:

French energy company EDF Energy has bought the UK's only desert... in Kent. 

It has exchanged contracts on the Dungeness Estate after it went on sale for £1.5 million in August. 

The 468-acre estate is designated as a National Nature Reserve, a Special Area of Conservation and a Site of Special Scientific Interest.

And EDF energy, of course, is largely owned by the French government. (It's only the British government that cannot own British utilities.)

Still it may not be bad news. A trustee of the Dungeness Estate is quoted as saying:

"After the decision was made to sell the estate it was important the purchaser would have the ability, track record and correct intentions of maintaining an estate such as this and we are very happy to be passing that responsibility to EDF Energy."

Malcolm Saville wrote about the place in the foreword his sixth Lone Pine Club story, The Elusive Grasshopper, in 1951:

At the eastern extremity of Rye Bay is the great tongue of shingle called Dungeness with its black and white lighthouse, enormous foghorn and wilderness of  shacks, huts and bungalows. It is difficult to believe that there is any place in the world with more shingle than Dungeness, which indeed, is being piled up here the waves so fast that each year the lighthouse is several yards further inland. 

You can travel for yourself on the remarkable Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway to Dungeness and not only see the ships standing close to the shore in exceptionally deep water, but explore the little station and restaurant ... and even walk up the other deserted railway line towards the ruined school which, for all I know, still stands there in a wilderness of shingle and nodding sea-poppies.

It may have done when Saville was writing The Elusive Grasshopeer, but it does not today. I went to look for it with some fellow members of the Malcolm Saville Society many years ago and there was nothing left to see.

It does, however, live on in Lord Bonkers' occasional references to the Jack Straw Memorial Reform School, Dungeness.

Romney, Hythe & Dymchurch Railway

After being derailed at Chilham I decided to regain my confidence with railways by riding on the narrow gauge Romney, Hythe & Dymchurch.

As Ben Goldacre (somewhat unexpectedly) says in the guidebook they sell you, this is a line built for pleasure. Many other heritage lines were built to serve back-breaking industries, but the RH&DR was built by two millionaires to show off their miniature locomotives.

That book also confirms that an armoured train operated on the line during the Second World War. But the clearance was so restricted that the gun had to be taken down each time it passed under a bridge.

Nothing though about the train full of policemen that arrives to catch the smugglers at the end of Malcolm Saville's The Elusive Grasshopper.

The Romney, Hythe & Dymchurch in 1959

I have not yet shown you the photographs I took of this line in July.

While you wait, here is some colour film of it from 1959.

Selling Dungeness by the pound

Kent Online reports:

For sale: a spacious seaside property. 

The Dungeness Estate - which has been described as the UK's only desert - is up for sale and yours for £1.5 million. 

Owen Leyshon, of the estate’s managers Romney Marsh Country Partnership, said: “This is the sale of an incredibly unique landscape and a very popular tourist destination. 

“We are expecting a massive scrum of people making offers.” 

The 468 acres of private land has been owned by the Paine family trust since 1964. 

But now it is in the open market in a unique sale is being handled by Strutt and Parker estate agents. 

The sale does not cover the Dungeness nuclear power site, the two lighthouses, the Pilot pub, Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway station. or the neighbouring RSPB reserve.

I was at Dungeness a couple weeks ago, when I took these photographs.

Let me also quote Malcolm Saville's description of Dungeness at its most run down after the war. It is taken from The Elusive Grasshopper (1951):

Some days later Jon tried to describe Dungeness to his mother and found it very difficult, although it was little more than a desert of shingle which had been made even uglier by slovenly and haphazard building of bungalows, shacks and old railway coaches. 

There were a few fishermen's sheds of tarred timber on the sea side of the road, besides the group of well-built cottages round the lighthouse and the square, white building which housed the great foghorn. 

Many of the little bungalows had been badly damaged by bombs and the blank eyes of their broken windows gave them a look of unheeded death. There is, perhaps, nothing more depressing than an untenanted house, but one that is empty, damaged and neglected as well is a horrid sight and even on this sunny afternoon Jon felt that this outpost was both curious and uncanny.

Disused railway stations in Kent

Includes a rare photo of the Southern Railway's Dungeness station. Dungeness, as Lord Bonkers often reminds me, is home to the Jack Straw Memorial Reform School.

If you enjoyed this slide show, there's also Devon, Bedfordshire, North Lincolnshire, East Sussex, Leicestershire, Herefordshire, Hampshire, Cumbria and Cambridgeshire.

A railway poster for Dungeness

#90736022 / gettyimages.com

Here is Malcolm Saville writing in The Elusive Grasshopper in 1951:

The Dungeness terminus of the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway is not much more than a hundred yards from the lighthouse and consists of only one platform, a signal-box, the buildings housing the café, and a water tank filled with the aid of a windmill pump. 

In order to dispense with a turntable and double track for reversing the engine, the single line runs into the station on a wide loop which, after completing nearly a full circle, rejoins the main track.

London's termini in the fifties, sixties and early seventies

London's Termini in the 50s, 60s & Early 70s from Lewisham Bill on Vimeo.

I have a book on Romney Marsh, published in the early 1960s, that has a photograph of the new nuclear power station at Dungeness.

While the power station itself still looks modern, even futuristic, the cars parked outside seem quaint and comically bulbous. In short the power station and the cars look as though they come from quite different eras and it feels strange to see them together.

I get the same feeling from this video of trains at London termini with a contemporary soundtrack. The pop songs sound much more modern than the trains look.

Anyway, here is 44 minutes of sheer pleasure. And if anyone read my mention of Broad Street the other day and thought I had dreamt it, you can see the station at 32:42 and then enjoy a short trip along its viaduct north out of the City.

A nuclear flask train passing Appledore

A pair of class 37s (in case one breaks down on the journey) emerges from the undergrowth at Appledore station in Kent, hauling a nuclear flask. They have come from Dungeness nuclear power station and are on the way to Crewe.

The flask will end up at Sellafield so its contents can be reprocessed.

St Jude's storm closed both reactors at Dungeness B

"So what?" asks Herbert Eppel in a comment on my recent Headline of the Day winner "Wind turbine brought down in high winds in Devon".

The point is that it's funny.

Or at least it's funny the first time you read it. Most of these headlines aren't funny at all once you have thought about them for a moment. Ask the man on the toilet or the girl in the chicken costume.

But, more importantly, Herbert has put me on to a much more serious story about the storm and energy supply in that comment.

Over to Energy Business Review:

UK energy supplier EDF Energy has announced automatic shut down of both Dungeness B reactors following power cut off caused by debris landing on the incoming power lines. 

With shut down of the Dungeness B21 and B22 units, the nuclear power station is relying on the site's own diesel generators for power, to continue operation of essential safety systems.

Six of the Best 261

The Potter Blogger attended the Social Liberal Forum's second annual conference in London on Saturday.

"I was walking down a street near my home when I heard sirens. No surprise in that. A police car raced past. No surprise in that. It was followed by a people mover, with darkened windows. Its sliding door was open and paramilitary-attired officers were pointing out sub-machine guns at passers by. I have witnessed such scenes in the various authoritarian countries I have worked in. But this was central London in 2012." The price of our safety shouldn't be our freedom, says John Kampfner in the Independent.

Transparency Books claims to have the dope on the dark side of the Olympics.

"I've visited the site perhaps four times and it has a strange power for me. It is not hard to imagine myself there on 14 June 1645. Other things to attract visitors? A short way to the north over the Leicestershire border is picturesque Market Harborough." Siba The Hat visits Naseby, site of the decisive battle of the English Civil War.
Dory's World is equally taken with Dungeness: "It is like a post-apocalyptic landscape, a graveyard for old boats and sheds. It is completely amazing and I want to live there."
The Hobbit was published in the Soviet Union, complete with some striking illustrations, reports Retronaut.