According to the Coventry Herald, it was a ‘remarkable accident near Warwick’. On 28 March 1926, a Great Western Railway (GWR) steam engine collided with a coach and van, injuring three men. However, the two accounts of what happened we’ve been able to find give a quite different picture of the causes of the incident. They demonstrate how records might be less neutral than they seem.
The GWR accident record
The GWR record comes from a register of money paid under the Workmen’s Compensation Act (WCA). It features in the Railway Work, Life & Death project database of accidents to British and Irish railway workers before 1939. It was one of the records, held at The National Archives of the UK, that we brought into the project in last year’s data release.
Courtesy National Library of Scotland Maps.
Details of the incident are quite brief, but on 28 March 1926 the double-track line between Lapworth and Rowington Junction in Warwickshire was being worked as a single track line. The record doesn’t say why this was, but it meant that both north- and south-bound traffic would have to use the same line. 28 March 1926 was a Sunday, presumably chosen to minimise the disruption to regular services.
Fireman EG Grimwood, driver H Wilkins and relief signalman J Hicken, acting as a pilotman, were on board an engine heading towards Rowington Junction. This was where the former branch line to Henley-in-Arden left the Birmingham-Oxford mainline. The branch had been closed in 1917, leaving only a short spur, used as a siding. The GWR record notes that the engine ‘failed to stop’ when it reached a refuge siding, and crashed into the vehicles in the siding. It put the incident down to ‘judgement error by enginemen approaching Rowington too fast’. In addition it notes that ‘Groundman was not standing in proper position.’
Courtesy National Library of Scotland Maps.
And that’s it! This record wasn’t intended as a full report or investigation into the incident – that would have been undertaken by the GWR and recorded elsewhere. This merely summarised that conclusion already determined, hence its brevity. Sadly, so far as we’re aware, the full Company record of the investigation doesn’t survive.
How much money did the GWR pay to the men involved, by way of compensation? Well, the register which contains the record doesn’t actually say! Oddly, for a document purporting to be a record of such payments, it rarely includes that information. It doesn’t mean the GWR wasn’t paying compensation – it almost certainly was, given the way the WCA was set up (more on that here).
The Coventry Herald version
A rather different picture emerged from the brief report in the Coventry Herald newspaper. An engine left Leamington Spa on the morning of 28 March, pulling a carriage and a van. This was to get a gang of track workers to site, to undertake track maintenance between Rowington and Lapworth. The carriage and van were left in a siding.
The paper goes on: ‘During the afternoon something went wrong with the regulator [the part of the locomotive which allows steam into the cylinders and thus the engine to move] of the engine’. This starts to look like a mechanical fault, rather than something the staff had control over. Driver Wilkins opened the regulator but could not close it ‘and the engine ran away’.
From the report, what followed next went ‘by the book’: ‘Acting on the general instructions of the railway authorities, the engine was turned at the first opportunity into a siding.’ So, there was a clear protocol for the rare event of a runaway engine or train, and in this case the workers acted upon it. Unfortunately the siding was the one in which the carriage and van were standing, so ‘the engine crashed into them with considerable violence and they were smashed.’
Clearly seeing what was to happen, the three men on the footplate of the engine ‘jumped to safety.’ Wilkins and Grimwood received only minor injuries, but Hicken ‘struck something hard with his head’ and was more seriously hurt. All three were taken to Leamington Hospital – though not stated, presumably a train was laid on to get them there, something we’ve seen in other such cases of injury. Hicken was unconscious when admitted and for several hours, but did wake; he was kept in for observation.
The groundsman noted in the GWR report did not feature at all in this account. Presumably he would have been responsible for spotting the runaway engine and turning it into the siding to stop it. If so, he would seem to have acted in keeping with his instructions. This same report features, word-for-word, in a number of other newspapers, local to the area and further afield. This reflects a common practice of the time, syndication, in which stories were effectively ‘pooled’ across different titles and could be reproduced widely.
Explaining the difference in accounts
The two accounts beg the question – why was there a difference between the GWR version and the Coventry Herald story? What’s missing from the GWR account is the mechanical issues – was the Company obscuring an issue which might point to poor maintenance? This might have reputational implications, as the engines were, of course, used to haul passenger trains. It would have been far easier to find staff responsible for the incident and quietly repair the engine’s hardware fault.
Sadly, this kind of approach was certainly not unknown. We’ve recently seen an account of an incident which led to the death of a GWR worker in 1941. Recalling the accident in later life, his daughter alleged that the mechanical fault at the heart of the incident was quietly fixed between accident and investigation. Clearly her account had its own interest at heart, so needs to be read critically – but such allegations were not unique. The railway companies were regarded by some as acting to protect their interests.
Pitted against this interpretation of the Rowington Junction accident as involving a cover-up, it’s unclear where the Coventry Herald acquired its information about the mechanical fault. Presumably it heard from one or more witnesses at the time, but it would be helpful if it were possible to find further evidence. At this distance from the event, that seems unlikely.
It’s slightly unfair to say that this was a Company cover-up, of course. The GWR record that survives wasn’t intended to give a full account, so the full investigation might have shown the mechanical issues. Ultimately, we have an insoluble conundrum, and can probably never know with certainty. What this demonstrates is the importance of cross-referencing accounts. With only one of these records we wouldn’t see the potential discrepancies. Yet they have opened up some productive areas to consider and which shape how we understand railway staff accidents of the past.
The men: Edward George Grimwood
And what of the three men hurt in the accident? The fireman was Edward George Grimwood. He was born in Leamington Spa on 11 September 1897. By 1911 his older brother was working as a railway clerk, and in February 1915 Edward joined the GWR at Leamington as an engine cleaner – had his brother introduced him to the idea of railway work? Initially he was paid 2/4 per day – around £12.50 in 2026 – rising to 2/6 in 1919.
By 1921 he was a fireman. He was still living in Leamington, at 30 Althorpe Street, with his parents, younger sister and a nephew. He married Gladys Hope in 1923, and over the next 10 years they had four children. In April 1927 he joined the National Union of Railwaymen (NUR), though appears only to have remained a member for a year. At 1939 the family was living at 98 Warenby Road in Leamington. Edward was recorded as a locomotive foreman, so had passed through the driver grade to reach a modest supervisory position. He died in 1980.
The men: Harry Wilkins
Driver Harry Wilkins was born in 1887 in Leamington. It’s not clear when he joined the GWR, but he was certainly a fireman by 1911. In 1909 he married Elizabeth Elkington; they had a daughter in the following year. They were living at 182 Leam Terrace, Leamington, in 1911. In October 1916 Harry joined the NUR, though he too only remained a member for about a year.
By 1921 Harry and Elizabeth had had another daughter; together the family lived at 3 Waterloo Street. Harry was, by this time, an engine driver. He and Elizabeth had, in 1925, had a final daughter, Joyce, who was living at home with her parents in 1939 at 101 Radford Road. She was working as a railway clerk; Harry was still an engine driver. He died in 1958.
The men: Joseph Hicken
Relief signalman Joseph Hicken was born on 11 July 1893, in Warwickshire. It looks like he joined the GWR as a porter at Lapworth station in March 1913. For this, he was paid 17 shillings per week (c.£105 in 2026). He married Ethel Colledge in December 1914, and they had a daughter in 1915.
By 1921 the family was living in Hatton, and Joseph was a signalman. He and Elizabeth had a son, Stanley, in 1923. Though he was the most seriously injured of those involved in the accident, he returned to work. In 1939 Joseph, Elisabeth and Stanley were living at 24 Ulleries Road, Solihull. Joseph was a district relief signalman. He died in 1975.
On one level the incident at Rowington Junction was unusual. Across the Railway Work, Life & Death project dataset (so far) there are relatively few runaway trains. Similarly, by far the majority of cases recorded involved one person – incidents injuring multiple workers were relatively uncommon. However, focusing on an exceptional case has, largely by chance, revealed some interesting aspects about how surviving records might conceal contested understandings of railway employee accidents. And, as ever, thinking about the people involved has allowed us to see more of the lives and times of past railway staff.