The Thomas the Tank Engine Man (eBook)

PROLOGUE

The Station Master’s Office

‘Well, now,’ says Wilbert Awdry in response to another of my interminable questions, ‘if you want the answer to that, you’ll have to go into the office and fetch me a folder. It’s a green ring-binder file and you’ll find it under a pile of papers on the third shelf down next to the filing cabinet.”

So off I go. The sign on the door reads ‘Station Master’, and inside the Station Master’s office an agreeable clutter abounds. There are railway books, journals, magazines, maps and timetables, tottering piles of newspaper cuttings and clippings, and filing cabinets crammed with correspondence, much of it from young readers of the Railway Series.

It was here, in 1986, that I had my first conversations with Wilbert Awdry. I remember him then as a lean, slightly hunched figure with a mane of silver hair and beetling brows that loured upon his spectacles, behind which twinkled sharp blue-grey eyes. Puffing – engine-like – on a battered pipe, he had theorized about the personality of the steam engine. ‘He’s an extrovert,’ he explained. ‘Unless he is standing in a siding with his fire drawn, he has always got something to say. He likes people to know how he’s getting on. For example, there’s the goods engine who’s always complaining of being badly treated.’

Giving a self-mocking chuckle – lest I should take him too seriously – he stoked his pipe with fresh tobacco, got up a new head of steam and was off once more. ‘Then there’s the express engine, bustling about saying, “Come on! Come on!”, followed by a train of calm, unflappable coaches saying, like dutiful wives, “Yes, dear, of course! Yes, dear, of course!”, while all along you know they’re thinking about much more important things, like when they’re going to get a new coat of paint!’

Such views have occasionally got Wilbert Awdry into hot water, raising the hackles of those on the look-out for political incorrectness, and have even resulted in his books being banned from certain libraries. Other critical voices have vehemently condemned the Railway Series for being dull, predictable and repetitious. Admirers of the little books see them as inventive, imaginative and (with one or two exceptions, permissible in such a long series) written with wit, charm and energy.

On whatever side you come down, one thing is certain: nothing is going to change now. Although Wilbert’s son, Christopher Awdry, continues to add new books to the series, the ‘onlie begetter’ of Thomas the Tank Engine and the others hasn’t written about his famous engines for many years.

His physical health no longer allows him to be as active as he was. His beloved model railway gathers dust, he seldom gets into the office these days – hence my mission in search of the green folder – and he rarely puffs on one of his old pipes. He still smokes cigarettes, however, particularly when settling down with ‘a good book’ (by which he means P. G. Wodehouse, Agatha Christie, Hammond Innes, Georgette Heyer and Ellis Peters, among others) or to talk about those engine characters that played such an important part in his life and which have guaranteed him some kind of immortality.

Despite almost weekly articles in the press speculating on how much he earns from the sale of his books and all the subsidiary paraphernalia, Wilbert has a modest lifestyle. His only luxuries – apart from the cigarettes and fresh supplies of thick historical novels – are a video recorder which he uses to tape any good thrillers and Westerns that may be televised, a chair lift (originally installed for his late wife Margaret), and the services of a live-in carer. His house in Stroud says much about his character: it is one of those sensible, four square, red-brick houses such as a stationmaster might once have lived in – if only the railway line had been nearer.

Wilbert Awdry has spent over half his life being labelled an eccentric. His eccentricity, such as it is, is an abiding affection for the lost age of steam locomotion: an age that he has celebrated – and, in a very real sense, kept alive – by creating the characters in his children’s books, which now sell all over the world.

The children who read them still write to tell the author which of these little engine characters is their favourite – boastful Gordon, grumpy Henry, hard-working Edward, cheerful Percy or, most famous of all, mischievous Thomas the Tank Engine. They sometimes write to tell the author that they have spotted inconsistencies in the illustrations but, most of all, they write to ask questions. Thirty years ago, such questions tended to be along the lines of ‘Can you tell where Toby keeps his coal?’ Today, they’re more likely to be: ‘Does Thomas have a girlfriend?’, ‘Has Thomas ever become sick?’, ‘How old is Thomas?’ or ‘Does Thomas have summer holidays?’

Thomas and his friends are very much in evidence in the Station Master’s office and indeed in the rest of his house. Their smiling smoke-box faces are to be found on wastepaper bins, lampshades, clocks, trays, cushion covers, cups and saucers as well as on embroidered pictures worked by Margaret Awdry.

The things which Mr Awdry has around him are but a tiny fraction of a phenomenal merchandising enterprise of the kind usually associated with such characters as Mickey Mouse or Snoopy. He is only marginally of products being marketed on the strength of the worldwide fame of his characters, from Thomas lunch-boxes (as famously carried by Prince William on his first day at school) to notebooks and stationery, bedside lights, duvet covers, money-boxes, toothbrushes, nursery cutlery, mug and egg cup sets and a Thomas plate on which to serve a meal of Thomas spaghetti shapes (signals, tracks, guards, Fat Controllers and Thomases) in tomato sauce.

There are also various three-dimensional steam train models. Some, improbably, are ‘cuddly engines’ made of soft fabrics. More authentically, there are engines to push along, pull along or wind up, and others ironically powered by electricity. The demand for Thomas merchandise is seemingly limitless and the earning power of such products substantial. Ertl, manufacturers of die-cast metal toys based on the Railway Series, put three million character engines into the market during 1994 alone. This vast industry is largely a spin-off from the highly successful film series produced by the company Britt Allcroft (Thomas) Ltd, first shown on television and subsequently available on video with worldwide sales running into millions. Yet, for all the ingenuity with which these films are produced (and the skill with which they have been marketed) their success is founded on twenty-six little books whose author is described on their title-pages as ‘The Rev W. Awdry’.

So what is the reason for the success of these books? Is it their text: sharp and tightly written with sly little jokes and rhythmic sounds but, nevertheless, always true to railway lore? Or is it the illustrations: capturing the hustle and bustle of station and shed and those trackside scenes – embankments of spring flowers, rolling meadows of summer lushness, whirling autumn leaves, brooding clouds of winter rain and frosted Christmas-card landscapes – depicted in vivid, iridescent colours?

Perhaps the reason children first come to love the books is rather more prosaic. For Brian Doyle, writer on children’s literature, it is all a matter of size – or rather the lack of it: ‘They can be slipped into small pockets without any trouble at all, to be taken out at convenient (or, indeed, inconvenient) moments during the day to be read or looked at or chuckled over.’ Adults may refer to them as ‘little books’, but to a child the Railway Series – like the books of Beatrix Potter – are essentially child-sized.

In 1994, sales of Wilbert Awdry’s books, in their familiar oblong format with brightly-coloured illustrations, totalled some twenty-five million copies. In addition, the stories now appear in many other versions including board books, bath books, sticker books, lift-the-flap books, pop-up books, peep-through books, press-out model books and easy-to-read books. Wilbert Awdry’s characters – appearing in all this diversity of shapes and sizes – have now reached total worldwide sales of fifty million copies, making him the most successful children’s writer of the century.

The original stories were written to be read aloud and a few years after they were published, a record was produced of the author doing just that. Since then, the stories have been recorded on disc by Johnny Morris and William Rushton, on radio by Sir John Gielgud, and on the soundtrack of the television series by former Beatle, Ringo Starr. Most of all, of course, they have been read aloud by many millions of parents.

In reading these stories to their children, parents have come to know the characters and their various exploits every bit as well as their offspring. Some years ago, Mrs Pat Powell (a mother of three) wrote a charming letter of mock complaint to the author: