In 1935 it was every small boy’s ambition to be an engine driver. Or was it? Tom Watkins, about to start work, isn’t so sure, especially as his father, Fred, a top link driver, is something of a legend at the Acton Chalcote engine shed.
For Fred, loyalty to his strict Welsh Baptist upbringing has given way to loyalty to the Great Western Railway. Forceful and dictatorial, Fred is in his element on the footplate of a steam engine, travelling at speed through the countryside at the head of a long line of chocolate and cream-coloured coaches full of passengers. ‘You’re king of these wonderful machines. You’re in control, you nurse it, you work with it, you let it know who’s boss and it responds. It’s a living thing.’ Steam is, as Fred puts it, ‘in the blood’ as he can trace his family’s ancestry right back to the building of the line in the 1830s. His assumption that his son will be proud to follow the family tradition is misplaced. Although Tom becomes a cleaner, the first rung on the ladder to become an engine driver, he doesn’t share his father’s passion nor his feelings for the Company. He takes the job because it is expected of him and because his father’s personality makes any other option unthinkable. Tom is no rebel. Bitter conflict is bound to follow as Tom grows up in search of his own identity, and Fred, a proud and confident man at the peak of his profession and head of the family, has to face hard truths about his future. Another challenge comes when his daughter, Sylvia, an usherette at the local cinema, tries in her own way to free herself from the constraints of a highly prejudiced but well-meaning parent. Brought up in a railway town, Sylvia is determined not to marry a railwayman, having seen the effect on her mother of being married to someone who not only works unsocial hours but also has what amounts to an obsession with his job. Then she meets Dai Davies, an attractive Welshman who calls himself ‘a failed poet and passed fireman’. Set against the background of life in and around the Great Western engine shed at Acton Chalcote: its highly individual characters, its evocative atmosphere, and the appeal of the steam engines themselves, those who enjoy family stories in a period setting as well as those with a passion for railways will love Steam in the Family.
