Manager with British Railways who claimed to know 25,000 staff but was happiest shovelling coal
RICHARD HARDY, who has died aged 94, was one of British Railways’ most charismatic managers during the last years of steam and beyond. Chosen for difficult posts as “a large man of aldermanic appearance”, Hardy always gave as good as he got. His facility with people was renowned; by the end of his career he reckoned to know 25,000 BR staff.
Hardy’s passion was firing steam engines. Though appreciative if the driver let him “have hold”, he was happiest with his jacket off, shovelling to maintain boiler pressure. One attraction was the chance to learn from, and banter with, the most difficult of drivers.
Among the engines he fired as an off-duty apprentice in wartime was Flying Scotsman – “a very fair machine, but not one of the best”. In 1981 he again fired Scotsman, on the Carlislesettle run. As they breasted Ais Gill summit, the highest point on the line, the driver told him: “I don’t know who you are, but you’re a credit to your profession.”
Richard (Dick) Harry Norman Hardy was born at Leatherhead, Surrey, on October 8 1923. His father was a former tea planter. At five, he won a Royal Drawing Society competition with a sketch of a locomotive. When he was 10 the family moved to Amersham on the former Great Central, where young Dick soon penetrated the signal box.
Sent to Marlborough, he was 14 when his father died. Three years later the money ran out, so he joined the LNER after a careers adviser told him that it had “gentlemen at the top”.
In January 1941 he started at Doncaster works as a “premium apprentice” – the premium being £50 paid by his mother. He was put on a lathe with local lads who had left school at 14. After a month, his mother could hardly understand his accent.
Hardy found the privations of Marlborough ideal preparation for a repair shop under the pressure of wartime. He struggled studying mechanical engineering at technical college, so was trained for management. One of his duties was firing the breakdown train, which one night secretly loaded a midget submarine at Gainsborough.
One weekend, he alighted from an engine at Wakefield to find his ultimate boss, Edward Thompson, on the platform. Thompson’s father had been a housemaster at Marlborough, and Hardy came away with an open invitation to the footplate.
Leaving Doncaster as the war ended, he worked his way up at several small sheds. At 26 he was appointed shedmaster at Woodford Halse, with 280 men under him, 24 short, and 45 engines. He unloaded the nine worst on to Ipswich shed – then was promoted to run it.
He was promoted again in 1952 to run the Southern Region’s Stewarts Lane, Battersea depot, with 730 staff. This was his toughest job – he was put in to end unjustified overtime and a “culture of barter” – but the one he enjoyed most.
Transferred to Stratford depot on the Eastern Region, he faced “strikes, go-slows, critical shortages of locomotives and manpower, nervous breakdown, long hours and bitter controversy over the condition of locomotives”. These were offset by the camaraderie, ability and resilience of the 3,000 staff.
After a desk-bound year at Liverpool Street, he returned to Stratford in 1959 as district motive power superintendent. His four years in charge coincided with the end of steam, with drivers and maintenance staff becoming diesel or electric specialists.
On February 15 1962 Hardy showed the Queen round the new Stratford diesel depot, with Dr Beeching in tow. Months before, a diesel had failed on the royal train; Hardy showed the Queen the offending component. She was then supposed to start the engine, cued by a red light, but none came on. She left to the accompaniment of cheers, diesel horns and the whistle of one of the last Great Eastern locos.
In 1964 Hardy became divisional manager at King’s Cross. Closure of the station was a possibility, and when he told staff that the plan had been dropped, he was cheered to the rafters.
Four years later two freight trains collided near Peterborough, killing both drivers. Hardy had to decide whether to end the career of the surviving fireman by having his leg amputated or lift the wreckage off him, with any slip likely to prove fatal. The crane did its job, and the man was back at work within months.
Hardy went to Liverpool that year as divisional manager; during his five years there BR shed 3,000 of 8,000 staff locally, but there was also the launch of Merseyrail. In 1973 he moved to BR’S Marylebone headquarters, fostering the development of civil and mechanical engineers. By his retirement in 1982 he had recruited BR’S first female engineers.
In 1977 Hardy became a director of the narrow-gauge Ffestiniog Railway. His books include Steam in the Blood (1971), Railways in the Blood (1985) and A Life on the Lines (2012).
Hardy’s other love, family apart, was horsemanship. “A day’s hunting,” he wrote, “holds the same fascination for me, the same primeval excitement, as does a day’s battle with a steam locomotive.”
Richard Hardy married Gwenda in 1949; she predeceased him and he is survived by a son and a daughter.
Richard Hardy, born October 8 1923, died February 18 2018