Mystery of royal visits to small Welsh station
TRAIN journeys by the Royal Family are doubtless rarer now than they were 85 years ago, and wherever they are undertaken, security would surely be tight, in keeping with the wary world we live in today.
But before the Second World War and in the conflict’s early days, a printed detailed itinerary of such journeys was readily distributed to railway personnel in the form of a Royal Train notice, and a number recently surfaced in a sale held by Brian Moakes’s Paperchase auction house.
They ran for up to 40 pages, and one of them listed on its cover the route to be followed by King George VI and Queen Elizabeth – and ‘Suites’ – from Paddington to Wales on July 13-15, 1937. Destinations included Newport, Swansea, and Aberystwyth, while two other notices, for journeys on February 6-10, 1940, and March 18-21 the following year, identified Yeovil, Bristol, Cardiff and Plymouth among other locations.
However, in all three cases, what caught my eye was another destination en route: Portskewett. My geography of the British Isles is reasonable, aided considerably by my travels through much of the UK trainspotting in the latter half of the 1950s, but Portskewett was a new one on me, and led me to wonder why such a location would have hosted overnight stays by royalty three times in four years.
My interest was further piqued when research revealed that this is a village on the Welsh bank of the Severn estuary in Monmouthshire that at the turn of the 20th century had a population of just 900 souls, a figure which perhaps had risen to 1000 by the time of these visits.
Portskewett station, 146 miles from Paddington, was opened by the South Wales Railway in 1850 between Chepstow and Newport, and in 1863 became a junction when a one-mile branch line was opened to a nearby pier at Black Rock for passengers to access a ferry that crossed the Severn to the English side. The ferry ceased operating in 1886 when it was replaced by a tunnel and the branch line was closed, but the track to Portskewett was not lifted, and therein lies the reason for the royal overnight stopovers in the village, as explained by local historian Peter Strong.
“The Royal Trains stopped in the branch line that went down to Black Rock,” he said. “The royals would stay on board, and being unused, the line gave privacy and security, and a policeman was posted at either end of the line.”
Children, said Peter, would wave to the Royal Train as it departed after its overnight stop, adding: “Local resident Rob Wilsher remembers waving as a child. He says a waving hand would often appear from the toilet window – although he couldn’t say who it belonged to!”