Although my family couldn't afford a family holiday away, we children did have our annual one-day outings by train to Southend-on-sea, run by the Sunday School, and these were as good as far as we were concerned. Off my brothers and I would go, carrying our packets of sandwiches, full of excitement, to meet our friends.
A busy train station in the early 1900s. An enhanced detail of a photo in the Steam Museum at Swindon.
The journey was part of the treat as far as I was concerned and it was all the better because we were with our friends. At the big London station, it was lovely to look around, and to see the trains arriving, looking so majestic and important, then letting off their steam with a deafening blast. When a train came to a standstill, porters were always at the ready, in the expectation of a tip, to carry passengers' baggage. They had two wheel trolleys for heavy luggage. The drivers and fireman would climb out of their cabins, wiping their brows to cool themselves off from the heat of the coal fires that they had kept burning all journey-long by shovelling in more and more coal to feed the monster engine.
As it was summer, families would be bustling along the platforms for their holiday, with children carrying buckets and spades and Dad carrying the cases, all made of a dark brown fibre, like very thick cardboard and coloured to imitate leather. Children would stop a the Nestles chocolate machine and put a penny in the slot and out would come a bar of chocolate. All part of their holiday.
If you have an old photo which would illustrate this page, I would very much appreciate a copy. Pat Cryer
I liked to watch the trains leaving the platform. Each train had a guard with a flag and a whistle to give the all-clear for the train to start moving. Then the train would snort away as it picked up steam. There were quite a few sad faces left on the platform from people seeing off friends and relatives after a visit.
Families getting off trains, coming back from their holidays would have seashells in their buckets, and different Dads would be carrying the cases and sticks of rock that had been bought for aunties, uncles and grandmas, mostly of peppermint flavour. I remember that when my grandmother Cole came back home from holiday she bought me a net of sweets that looked like seashells. I had never seen anything like them and thought they were wonderful. She and my grandfather Cole were better off than our family.
When we got on a train ourselves, it was just as much fun. There were separate compartments seating about eight of us, and each compartment had two doors: one to the platform and the other to a corridor that connected the compartments. The windows of the platform door would slide down, and the amount of the opening could be controlled with a leather strap. So we liked to take it in turns to lean out of the windows to watch the engine as it went round a bend puffing away or to hear the shrill whistle when it went into a tunnel. The trouble was that the steam from the engine was very dirty. Not only did it make our faces look a sooty mess, but it also blew bits into our eyes. So we didn’t lean out as much as we might otherwise have liked. I never questioned how secure the door was as we leaned out of its window. I don't suppose there was such a thing as central locking then. As we neared the end of our journey we would scramble to the train window to catch our first glimpse of the sea. Then whoever saw it first would shout out, "The sea! The sea!".
I don’t remember much in the way of discipline on the outing. Perhaps in those days we didn't need it.
When we got home, our mothers would always exclaim about how dirty we were from the smoke of the engine and the sand from the beach in our hair. We were washed, given something to eat and packed off to bed. We slept very soundly indeed that night.
These childhood recollections are of train journeys to the seaside by working class London families in Edwardian times.