Tom Rolt | |
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| Born | Lionel Thomas Caswall Rolt (1910-02-11)11 February 1910 Chester, England |
| Died | 9 May 1974(1974-05-09) (aged 64) |
| Resting place | Stanley Pontlarge |
| Occupation |
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| Nationality | British |
| Education | Cheltenham College |
| Period | 1944–1974 |
| Genre | Industrial history, Biography, Ghost stories |
| Subject | Railways, waterways, industrial history |
| Notable works | Narrow Boat, Winterstoke (1954), Railway Adventure, Red for Danger, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Thomas Telford, George and Robert Stephenson, The Landscape Trilogy (autobiography) |
| Notable awards | Hon MANewcastle University, Hon MScUniversity of Bath |
| Spouse | Angela Orred (1939–1951) Sonia Smith (1952–1974) |
| Children | Richard (1953), Timothy (1955) |
| Relatives | Lionel Rolt (father) |
| Website | |
| www | |
Lionel Thomas Caswall Rolt (usually abbreviated toTom Rolt orL. T. C. Rolt) (11 February 1910 – 9 May 1974[1][2]) was a prolific English writer and the biographer of majorcivil engineering figures, includingIsambard Kingdom Brunel andThomas Telford. He is also regarded as one of the pioneers of the leisure cruising industry on Britain's inland waterways, and was an enthusiast forvintage cars andheritage railways. He played a pioneering role in both the canal and railway preservation movements.
Tom Rolt was born inChester to a line of Rolts "dedicated to hunting and procreation". His father Lionel had settled back in Britain inHay-on-Wye after working on a cattle station in Australia and a plantation in India, and joining (unsuccessfully) in theKlondike Gold Rush of 1898. However, Lionel Rolt lost most of his money in 1920 after investing his capital in a company that failed, and the family moved to a pair of stone cottages inStanley Pontlarge in Gloucestershire.[3]
Rolt studied atCheltenham College and at the age of 16 he took a job learning about steam traction, before starting an apprenticeship at theKerr Stuart locomotive works inStoke-on-Trent, where his uncle,Kyrle Willans, was chief development engineer. His uncle bought a wooden horse-drawn narrowflyboat calledCressy and fitted it with a steam engine. Then, having discovered that the steam made steering through tunnels impossible, he replaced the engine with aFord Model T engine. This was Rolt's introduction to the canal system.
After Kerr Stuart went into liquidation in 1930, Rolt became jobless and turned to vintage sports cars, taking part in theveteran run to Brighton, and acquiring a succession of cars including a 1924Alvis 12/50 two seater "duck's back" that he kept for the rest of his life.[4]
Rolt bought into a motor garage partnership next to the Phoenix public house inHartley Wintney in Hampshire. Its breakdown vehicle was an adapted 1911Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost. Together with the landlord of the Phoenix, Tim Carson, and others, Rolt formed theVintage Sports-Car Club in 1934. He also founded thePrescott hill climb. His 1950 bookHorseless Carriage contains a diatribe against the emergence ofmass production in the English car industry, claiming that "mass production methods must develop towards the ultimate end [of automatic procreation of machines by machines], although by doing so, they involve either the supersession of men by machines or a continual expansion of production".[5] His preference for traditional craftsmanship helps to explain his subsequent career.
In 1936 Kyrle Willans bought backCressy, which he had earlier sold, and several trips on the waterways convinced Rolt that he wanted a life afloat. He persuaded Angela Orred to join him in this idyll. She was a young blonde in a white polonecked sweater who had swept into his garage in an Alfa Romeo in 1937 and been caught up in the vintage car scene. Rolt boughtCressy from his uncle and set about converting her into a boat that could be lived on, the most notable addition being a bath.
During the summer of 1939 Rolt and Angela decided to defy her father's objections and married in secret on 11 July. Work onCressy was completed atTooley's Boatyard inBanbury, and on 27 July Rolt and his wife set off up theOxford Canal.
The outbreak of theSecond World War intervened and Rolt, a pacifist at heart, immediately signed up at the Rolls-Royce factory atCrewe to work on the production line of theSpitfire'sMerlin engine. He was saved from the tedium of the production line by the offer of a job in a bell foundry atAldbourne in Wiltshire. The Rolts headed south inCressy through storms, reaching Banbury a day before the canals were frozen over for the winter.
In March 1940 the Rolts negotiated theRiver Thames in flood and headed up theRiver Kennet to reachHungerford, near Aldbourne. Rolt then worked there for more than a year.
The Rolts' first four-month cruise was described in a book that Rolt initially calledPainted Ship. He sent the manuscript to several publishers, but it did not find acceptance, as it was felt that there was no market for books about canals. It was not until after a magazine article he wrote came to the attention of the countryside writerH. J. Massingham that Rolt's book was published, in December 1944, under the titleNarrow Boat.
Narrow Boat had an immediate success with critics and public, leading to fan mail arriving at the Rolts' boat, which was then moored atTardebigge. Two of the letters were fromRobert Aickman andCharles Hadfield, who were both to figure prominently in the next phase of Rolt's life, when he became a campaigner. He invited Aickman and his wife Ray to join the Rolts onCressy. Aickman later described the journey with the Rolts as "the best time I have ever spent on the waterways". It was on this journey that they decided to form an organisation that a few weeks later, in May 1946, at Aickman's flat in London, was named theInland Waterways Association, with Aickman as chairman, Hadfield as vice-chairman and Rolt as secretary.
The inland waterways of Britain were nationalised in 1947 and faced an uncertain future. The traditional life that Rolt had described seemed to be threatened with extinction. Rolt pioneered direct action on theStratford-upon-Avon Canal, which stoppedBritish Waterways from closing it; organised a hugely successful Inland Waterways Exhibition, which started in London but toured the country; and proposed the first boat rally atMarket Harborough. Aickman, who had a private income, was working full time on the campaign, while Rolt, who had only his writing to support him and was still living aboardCressy, struggled to meet all his commitments. Eventually he fell out with Aickman over the latter's insistence that every mile of canal should be saved. In early 1951 Rolt was expelled from the organisation he had inspired.
By this time he had decided to bring his life onCressy to an end and return to his family home in Stanley Pontlarge. Angela departed to continue the mobile life, joiningBilly Smart's Circus.
A letter Rolt had sent to theBirmingham Post in 1950 resulted in the formation of theTalyllyn Railway Preservation Society, and he now threw himself into its activities, becoming chairman of the company that operated the railway as a tourist attraction. "By the time the fateful letter terminating his IWA membership arrived, he was already busy issuing and stamping passengers' tickets from the little station inTowyn".[6] His time at Talyllyn gave rise to his bookRailway Adventure (1953), which became the basis for theEaling comedy filmThe Titfield Thunderbolt.
Rolt married again, toSonia Smith (née South), a former actress. During the war she had become one of the amateur boatwomen who worked the canals and had married a boatman. She had been on the council of the IWA. They had two sons, Tim and Dick, and continued to live in Stanley Pontlarge until Rolt's death in 1974.
Rolt became a full-time writer in 1939.[7] The 1950s were Rolt's most prolific time as an author. His best-known works were biographies ofIsambard Kingdom Brunel, which stimulated a revival of interest in a forgotten hero,[8][9]George andRobert Stephenson, andThomas Telford. His classic study of historic railway accidents,Red for Danger, became a textbook for numerous engineering courses. Rolt produced many works about subjects that had not previously been considered the stuff of literature, such ascivil engineering,canals and railways. In his later years he produced three volumes of autobiography, only one of which was published during his lifetime.
Rolt also publishedSleep No More (1948) a collection of supernatural horror stories featuringghosts,possession andatavism.[10] These were modelled after the work ofM. R. James, but used industrial settings such as railways instead of James' "antiquarian" settings.[10][11]The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural describedSleep No More as "An exceptionally original collection of ghost stories ... Rolt had the special talent of combining folkloric spontaneity with artful sophistication."[12] Several of Rolt's stories were anthologised; they were also adapted as radio dramas.[10] His "Winterstoke" (1954) is a unique perspective on the development of modern Britain from the Feudal system via thedissolution of the monasteries.
Rolt was vice-president of theNewcomen Society, which established a Rolt Prize;[13] a trustee and member of the Advisory Council of theScience Museum; a member of theYork Railway Museum Committee; an honorary MA ofNewcastle; an honorary MSc of theUniversity of Bath (1973)[14] and a Fellow of theRoyal Society of Literature. He was a joint founder of theAssociation for Industrial Archaeology, which has an annual Rolt lecture. He helped to form theIronbridge Gorge Museum Trust.
A locomotiveTom Rolt on theTalyllyn Railway, the world's first preserved railway, was named in his memory in 1991.
Rolt observed the changes in society resulting from the industrial-scientific revolution. In the epilogue to his biography of Brunel he wrote, two years beforeC. P. Snow made similar statements about the split between the arts and sciences:
Men spoke in one breath of the arts and sciences, and to the man of intelligence and culture it seemed essential that he should keep himself abreast of developments in both spheres. ... So long as the artist or the man of culture had been able to advance shoulder to shoulder with engineer and scientist, and with them see the picture whole, he could share their sense of mastery and confidence, and believe wholeheartedly in material progress. But so soon as science and the arts became divorced, so soon as they ceased to speak a common language, confidence vanished, and doubts and fears came crowding in.
He set out these ideas more fully in his bookHigh Horse Riderless, now seen by some as a classic of green philosophy.
A bridge (no. 164) on theOxford Canal inBanbury bears his name (in commemoration of his bookNarrow Boat), as does a centre at the boat museum atEllesmere Port in Cheshire. A blue plaque to Rolt was unveiled in atTooley's Boatyard, Banbury on 7 August 2010 as part of the centenary celebrations of his birth.[15]
Rolt's work (arranged by topic in rough chronological order) includes:[16]
From the period of 1958 onwards, Rolt was commissioned by many engineering companies to document their history. Many of these are unpublished internal documents; only the published works are listed here.
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