From Swinging the Shovel to Pressing the Button

Further Info

Funded by Bristol City Council. Watershed has created a new Bristol Stories theme to focus on the area now designated as the Bristol Temple Quarter Enterprise Zone.

The theme engages businesses, residents, and people travelling through Temple Meads and the surrounding neighbourhoods in projects that deliver creative digital representation of the area to ‘animate’ the heritage and personal experience of the area.

As part of this project Watershed worked with Knowle West Media Centre to deliver digital storytelling workshops with a group of ex-railway workers and ex-railway workers widows who lived and worked on the railways in Bristol.

This project was funded by Bristol City Council and delivered by Watershed and Knowle West Media Centre in collaboration with bigger house film

Transcript

Hello there!

My name’s George Gallop, I was born in 1929 (my knee’s gone to sleep I think). How old that makes me now I can’t work it out for the moment. Still, I’m young at heart.

I’m a professional photographer or retired now. I spent about 34-40 years taking photographs. I did all sorts, I worked for the news papers, I did a lot of public relation work, I did Royal visits ? I loved it, wouldn’t have changed it for the world!

When I was evacuated during the war years I lived with the village signalman. I used to go up into the box and spend a few hours with him and of course I used to see all these trains going by. And I always noticed the fireman on the engine there shovelling coal.

At the age of fourteen and a half my father my father had gone down to the railway to make a few enquiries for me and they said oh he’ll have to come back when he’s 15. Then after a couple of days I had a letter to say that I could start as a temporary engine cleaner and that’s what I did.

One day I went down to get a can of hot water for the tea. I put my hand on the buffer and I heard a clink at the other end and I jumped and that load of trucks went flying past me. That would have been me, that so I was very luck there.

As time went on we gradually went out on to the local motors firing as a fireman, but because I’d started on the railway at fourteen and a half I was quite an old hand and I never went back to cleaning once I started firing at the age of sixteen.

When you were out firing it was just you and the driver well was at all, I was just the lad that did the shovelling on the engine. Lots of rail men used to fry their egg and back on their shovel and before you put your egg and bacon on there you naturally washed it off and dried it. You didn’t need to be in there very long because you would have burnt your bacon (laughs).

I was due to go on to the passenger relief link, but I got called up instead. Unfortunately when you had medial and an X-ray they found I had a scar on my lung. Of course I never went back to the railway after that. Being a photographer was the longest job I had actually.

Credits