THE BERKELEY-SHARPNESS LINK.
It is not often these days that one captures the distinctive smell
of a steam railway train but for me, every time this occurs, I find
myself carried back in thought to the time of school blazers and gaberdine
macs. My first year as one of the Grammar School pupils "from
the other side" was 1956 although pupils had been making the
journey since the time the school was opened. My family had a strong
link with Lydney Grammar School, and my mother, sister, and many aunts
and cousins travelled on the old "Puffing Billy". Of course
we can't be sure that it was exactly the same train which transported
the different generations but it was nice to believe that it was!
I would like to convey some idea of the train journey itself. Pupils gathered
at both Berkeley and Sharpness stations. At Sharpness (I can only speak for
this), there was always a last minute rush of people running up the hill shouting
that they were on their way, and others (myself often among them), pedalling
along on bicycles waving an arm at the driver to wait. Many were the days that
in our haste we hid our bicycles under the hedge, with no time to put them
away properly. At least once a week the train would go chuffing out of the
station with Mabel Tyrell, the station mistress, running along the platform
shouting after it to come back; it always did.
When we were finally all shut into carriages the train started on its journey.
The first stage was to cross the Severn Railway Bridge, a fine old bridge,
alas no longer there. As a junior I recall that one of the main aims while
crossing the bridge was to touch each span with a twelve-inch ruler and avoid
breaking the ruler - quite difficult and, in retrospect, quite dangerous! There
was one occasion, this time on the homeward journey, when a certain young lady
was drying her bathing-costume from the train window as we crossed the bridge.
Unfortunately, the bathing -costume wrapped itself around one of the bridge
girders and was locked firmly. I'm pleased to add, however, that it was
later retrieved.
A short while after crossing the bridge we plunged in to the Tunnel. Somehow,
the lights in the compartment had always been removed and it was not unusual
to emerge into the daylight again to find at least one member of the carriage
missing - inevitably hiding under piles of coats and satchels, on the luggage
rack.
These were the "good old days"; the days that are remembered by
all the pupils who were at school before the 1960s. But in October 1960, a
tragic accident occurred in the River Severn. It was a very foggy night and
two oil tankers collided and struck the bridge, bursting into flames.
Two of the central spans were extensively damaged, and so, it was later to
be seen, was the Berkeley-Sharpness link with Lydney Grammar School. For the
rest of that academic year, and indeed for well into the next, some forty school
children undertook the mammoth train journey, every day travelling up to Gloucester
and then down to Lydney along the west side of the river. The journey was over
thirty miles each way, by the service passenger trains in the morning (when
we had to be on our best behaviour) and by our old "Puffing Billy" in
the evenings specially commissioned for the new route.
We desperately tried to hold on to the old established link with Lydney. At
the beginning of the academic year of 1961 new pupils started at the school,
despite the journey, just in the anticipation that one day the bridge would
be repaired. Alas, the word finally came that the Severn Railway Bridge would
never be rebuilt and our link with Lydney was finally broken. The remaining
pupils were transferred to Dursley, myself excepted as a sixth-former. I was
permitted, if I wished, to stay in digs and travel at weekends. There was no
choice to make - I stayed.. Thus sadly, I can claim to have been the last remaining
link from "the other side", a link which had spread over generations.
Jennifer M. Phillips.
Geoff Kerr added (August 2015): "... I grew up in Bristol in the 1950s and my uncle Jack Hale kept the Prince of Wales hotel at Berkeley Road. I travelled across the bridge just once with him and my cousin in around 1956, but as I did not take up train spotting until 1958, I've no recollection of the train. Much later, when working for Gloucestershire County Council, I was talking to Councillor Basil Booth who was in the pub when the collision happened and heard the crash. He described some the events of that night and the aftermath".
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