Thomas the Tank Engine: 65 and still running

[John Ashworth]

Thomas the Tank Engine: 65 and still running

As 'Thomas the Tank Engine' celebrates his 65th anniversary, a box of documents sheds new light on the train’s origins, says Lorna Bradbury.

Daily Telegraph
By Lorna Bradbury
Published: 11:00PM BST 04 Jun 2010

It is the autumn of 1942, and a two-year-old boy is recovering from a bout of measles. His father entertains him by singing his favourite nursery rhyme, Down at the Station Early in the Morning. Bored and itchy, the child soon loses interest, so his father sketches out a sad railway engine and makes up a story to go with it.

A couple of months later, for Christmas, the child receives an engine, carved by his father from a piece of broomstick. As the boy's game starts to flag, he demands a story. "We need to name the engine first," his father tells him. "Why don't we call it Thomas the Tank Engine?"

The bare bones of this story may be familiar to enthusiasts of the children's series by the Rev W (Wilbert) Awdry. His best-selling books are this year celebrating their 65th anniversary, and their appeal remains constant, bolstered by the long-running television series narrated for a time by Ringo Starr and by the raft of spin-off toys and games (which now includes an iPhone application). But the contents of a box of documents, including Thomas the Tank Engine manuscripts from the Forties and Fifties, sheds new light on the early years.

Recently unearthed in the offices of the production company that makes the TV series, the box contains Awdry's original sketches, drawn on the back of old parish circulars in late 1944 or early 1945. He produced the sketches to guide the illustrators of his first book of stories, The Three Railway Engines. Wilbert, a railway obsessive and a stickler for accuracy, tried out two illustrators until one, E Reginald Dalby, finally found his approval. We can clearly see notes in what would seem to be Wilbert's hand stuck over the writing on the back of these sketches. "3 R Engines. Story 4. Page 5," reads one. "Fat Director [he became the Fat Controller in the third book] orders Henry to be released from tunnel," reads another.

There is the original manuscript of Edward's Day Out, the first story in the first book, in which Awdry's text appears on the left-hand pages and his sketches on the right. There are various promotional postcards, including one for the fifth book, Troublesome Engines (1950), by which time Thomas was a best-seller and a household name. And there are some early pop-ups, illustrated by Clive Spong, with paper engineering by Roy Laming, including the story Henry and the Elephant from Troublesome Engines.

Christopher Awdry, now 69, the measles-afflicted child for whom the stories were first conceived, is surprised at the contents of the box. "They must be the original materials my father sent to his publisher," he says, recalling the early months of 1943, when he was just three.

Towards the end of 1942, Christopher says, his mother tried to buy him some books, but was so dismayed by what was on offer that she set about persuading her husband, exempt from fighting in the war because of his job as a clergyman, to publish the stories with which he had entertained his son. A distant cousin, a junior producer at the BBC, was then roped in to hawk them around various publishing houses. The following year, the publisher Edmund Ward agreed to take them on – on the condition that Wilbert wrote a fourth one "to provide a happy ending for the set".

Paper and colour printing shortages stopped the book from being published during the war – but it came out just four days after VE day in May 1945 and was an immediate success. "I suppose you could say it's never looked back since," Christopher says, with typical understatement. Interestingly, this early collection contained stories about the sad engine, Edward, and about Gordon and Henry, but Thomas didn't appear in print until Wilbert's second book, in 1946.

Christopher's father was, by all accounts, an unassuming clergyman who knew little of life apart from his job and was surprised at the literary fame he achieved shortly after the war, and Christopher retains something of this unworldly air. Though Thomas the Tank Engine is now an enormous business – most of whose profits reside with the TV production company – and a global brand that stretches from America to Japan, its success has not gone to his head.

His abiding childhood memory is of the year he was sent to boarding school, aged nine. His father sent him a copy of his new book, Tank Engine Thomas Again, the fourth in the series. "My father had told me stories throughout my childhood, but that was the first time I was aware of him as a writer," Christopher says. "I remember my friends were impressed too – though I suppose that only lasted for a few days."

Wilbert passed on his enthusiasm for storytelling to his son, who carried on the series from 1983, with his father's blessing, shortly after his own son was born. And Wilbert also passed on a deep love for the railways. Theirs is a family in which the mystery of steam trains looms large. Christopher's grandfather was a clergyman and a railway enthusiast, like Wilbert, whose interest in trains grew out of his visits to parishioners who worked on the railways. Christopher is a railway historian first and foremost, and both he and his father have always been keen that their stories remain accurate in railway terms.

Christopher says that neither he nor his father were surprised that children identify so strongly with the series. "A steam engine is the nearest thing to a human being that has actually been created by man," he says. "You can see all the moving parts. You can see all the smoke. In a way, it's more logical to give a steam train a name than an animal." These stories carry on appealing to fresh generations of children, despite the fact that they are so much of their time. They convey a safe, structured, deeply moralistic world, which may explain why autistic children particularly love them.

Next year marks the centenary of Wilbert's birth so there will inevitably be more spin-offs. The brand lives on, as strong as ever. Christopher is working on a new book in the series, the 42nd, but he won't reveal any of the details. "I haven't put pen to paper yet," he says. But in this age of high-speed railways, you can be sure it will still feature boilers, funnels and the world's favourite tank engine.

Thomas the Tank Engine: 65th Anniversary Edition by The Rev W Awdry is published by Egmont (£14.99); www.thomasand friends.com