Foot to the plate
A campaign for a memorial to Mallard’s driver when it set a new steam locomotive world speed record has hit its target. Phil Penfold reports.
When the remodelling of Kings Cross station started in 2007, it produced – among many other things – a stunning new Western Concourse, with a fan-like vaulted ceiling. Here are all the facilities that you would wish to find – plus a few that might be rather unexpected. There’s always a long line for those who wish to enjoy an encounter with Harry Potter adjacent to platform 9¾ (photo opportunities and a lot of retail therapy).
Many busy commuters and travellers, though, will walk past the beautifully-crafted statue (by sculptor Hazel Reeves) to a true railway pioneer without a second glance.
The statue of Sir Nigel Gresley was unveiled five years ago. Gresley was an engineer par excellence, an innovator and inventor. If there was a problem on the rail tracks, he solved it.
Many of Gresley’s designs and ideas were thought through – and then built – in Doncaster, at the famous plant works, adjacent to the main line station. The most famous was Mallard, which gloriously broke the record for the fastest steam locomotive in 1938. It rocketed from King’s Cross to Edinburgh, and over one stretch, hit an astonishing 126mph. That record still stands today.
The town honoured him in 2012 by naming the redeveloped area in front of the new civic quarter and Cast theatre Sir Nigel Gresley Square, and the ceremony was attended by his two grandsons. Gresley also has a commemorative plaque at
Waverley Station in Edinburgh, and another in the city itself. There’s a huge sign alongside the track on the East Coast main line, just south of milepost 90¼ (on the “up” side) which reads “Mallard 126mph July 3, 1938” and is seen by rail passengers every day. A plaque has also been put up at Hadley Wood station, near Gresley’s former north London home.
There’s even a Gresley Society, which celebrates his memory – he died in 1941 aged 64 – as well as a pub named after him in Derbyshire, near where he was brought up, and two called the Mallard in Doncaster.
Mallard (officially “LNER 4468 Class A 4-6-2 steam locomotive”) is today housed in the National Railway Museum in York. She is 70 feet long, weighs 165 long tons (including her tender), and painted in LNER “garter blue”. She left active service in 1963, and ever since her debut in the late Thirties she has been venerated by rail enthusiasts. However, while Gresley is rightly remembered for his achievements, if you mentioned the name Joe Duddington to most people you would be met with blank looks. But there’s a group in Doncaster which has just changed all that. Joe Duddington was the driver on the footplate of Mallard when she broke that speed record, and, while Nigel Gresley and the directors of the (then) LNER were probably celebrating the momentous event with a slap-up meal and a few glasses of Champagne, Joe and his fireman Thomas Bray (who was later to become a driver in his own right) more than likely wiped their brows, cleaned the grease from their hands, and had a couple of welldeserved pints in the nearest pub. Gresley had specified quite clearly that it was to be Duddington and Bray on the footplate, and no-one else.
The day after the record was established, Duddington and Bray drove another train