Transport

William Robert Knight was born in Essex in 1927. He volunteered for the Royal Navy when he was 16 and returned to civilian life in 1946. His friend Leslie told him about the porter vacancy at Epping Station. He set up an interview for him with Mr Catchpole, the stationmaster. Leslie also warned him about the trick question the stationmaster usually asked: 'If you were a fog man and the wind blew the signal post down, what would you do?'

Steam train to Ongar leaving Epping Station, 1947.
Courtesy of Vestry House Museum.

Transcript

Bob Knight:
'I duly met Mr Catchpole at 10 o’clock the following morning and he said: ‘Hello’, he said: ‘My name is Mr Catchpole’, he said: ‘What is you name?’ So I said: ‘Bob’. So he said: ‘All right, we’ll call you Bobby’. And this question came out. ‘Oh’ I said, ‘if the wind is strong enough to blow the post down there won’t be any fog.’ ‘That’s it’, he said. ‘Can you start tomorrow?’ I said ‘No, my week starts on a Monday like.’

And it started off. You didn’t get any training. You went with a chap and you followed what he did. And after a week of that with the different shifts, you were on your own. And the jobs were… That was the London North Eastern Railway. The steam trains used to run from Epping and Ongar to Liverpool Street. The first day, on the Monday, on the early shift, you had to get there at 5 o’clock in the morning, walk round the station in the winter, pull all the gas lamps on. With a pole, switch them on and hopefully the pole was still alight. Then you would go into the waiting rooms and light the two waiting rooms fires. The ladies waiting room on the downside and the general waiting room on the upside, the ladies waiting room…oh no, there was only a fire in the general waiting room on the upside. Then you had to go into the Station Master’s office and do his fire. Because at half past 7 he would come out to greet the ex-first class passengers and open the carriage doors for them. But there was no first class so it was the ex-first class passengers.

In between this, as the trains came in, you had to go and collect tickets on the ticket gate. Change the lamps to the tail lamps. It was the porter’s responsibility to take the tail lamp of the rear of the train and place it on what would be the rear when reversing. Put a fault line on to make sure it was alight. Go to the guards van and unload all the parcels or whatever was on it. Fish, boxes of fish, mailbags, papers. And sometimes the guard would have a book, a registered one where you would offload a registered parcel. And every Thursday, they used to take off an attaché case with wages for Pickets factory at Ongar, Stanford Rivers. That used to come down from London in an attaché case, all notes, with the guard and we had to sign for that. We would take it to the booking office and get the signature for it there, until the people from Pickets used to come up and pick it up.

What else did we do… pigeons. They would be sent down on the guards van and with a label on it ‘to be released at such and such a time’ and we had to release those singly, all in a day’s work.'

Copyright. Bob Knight was interviewed by Jenny Coumbe on 26 February 2004. Photograph courtesy of Vestry House Museum. For access to the full interview please contact the Museum.