Railway Children
JOHN KENNETT, a founder member of the Eltham Society and the Edith Nesbit Society, discusses why Eltham, the author’s home for over 20 years, provided the perfect inspiration for her most famous tale
A founder member of the Edith Nesbit Society discusses why the author’s home for over 20 years inspired The Railway Children.
Claims regarding the places that inspired Edith Nesbit’s classic tale of The Railway Children have been aired in two articles in 2018 ( RAIL 845 and 849), with quite justifiable reasoning for those studying the life of this remarkable writer of stories for children.
But there is no mention of where she
actually wrote the likes of The Treasure Seekers,
The Wouldbegoods, Five Children and It, and The Phoenix and the Carpet, and which may also have had some influence in the mix of real locations that make up The Railway Children.
Nesbit wrote the story in her home at Well Hall, Eltham (south London, once part of Kent). She lived here from 1899-1922, in a rented detached house with a large garden within historic Tudor brick walls and a moat, where a public park now stands called Well Hall Pleasaunce alongside the historic Tudor Barn restaurant and venue.
She previously spent five years at Baring Road, Grove Park, where the footpath named Railway Children Walk now runs down to the railway line alongside the site of her former home - interestingly called Three Gables, almost like Three Chimneys where the family stayed in the book.
Her Well Hall home was close to Well Hall station, where from 1895 trains on the new, privately funded Bexleyheath Line could be taken to Kent or into London, and where a change of steam train was necessary at Blackheath.
From her home, Nesbit could see the wooden station buildings on an embankment. Nearby was a stationmaster’s house and a goods yard with deliveries of coal to Cannon Coal Company and Tyne Main Coal Company Limited. Could this have inspired the incident in the station goods yard, when the children were short of coal and decided to carry out a night-time raid?
“The hand of the station master fell on a collar, and there was Peter firmly held by the jacket, with an old carpenter’s bag full of coal in his trembling clutch.”
When Nesbit and the rest of the Bland (her married name) family arrived at Well Hall, their home was set in the country with farms and a narrow lane leading to Woolwich. This idyll was soon to change, as a new housing estate was constructed opposite their home by Scottish developer Archibald Cameron Corbett.
His other London estates were built close to railway lines, and he helped to fund new stations including Hither Green and Goodmayes. He was to do the same at Shooters Hill and Eltham Park in 1908, although his request to remove Well Hall station was unsuccessful for legal reasons.
A parade of shops fronted the new houses, which Nesbit’s family found useful. They included the Co-op, a post office, a shop for her Players cigarettes, and a chemist for medicines. She was accompanied by her children, who were remembered as ‘being well behaved’.
Could these shops have been the inspiration for when the railway children visited the shopkeepers to solicit presents for the birthday of stationmaster Perks, including “a tobacco pipe from the sweet shop, half a pound of tea from the grocer’s, a woollen scarf slightly faded from the draper’s, which was the other side of the grocer’s”?
Between Well Hall and Blackheath is Kidbrooke station, now awaiting rebuilding as part of Berkeley Homes’ redevelopment of the former local authority Ferrier Estate. The original station was built to placate the Blackheath landowner Sir Henry Barron, as was the nearby tunnel, because he did not want to see a railway from his home.
Could this be the tunnel that the ‘hares’ accessed in the episode about the crosscountry runners, which Nesbit would have seen on her trips to London?
The boys on the paper chase were from the unnamed grammar school. Could they have been from my own alma mater, Colfe’s Grammar School, then sited alongside nearby Lewisham station?
After going through the tunnel, near the Charlton (North Kent) connecting junction stood a signal box, which is also mentioned in the story where the children woke the sleeping signalman and were bribed by him with two shillings and told to “hold your tongues about what’s taken place today”.
Down the line, the next station after Well Hall was initially Welling. When the Corbett estate at Eltham was being constructed at Eltham Park, a public recreation ground of that name was being laid out south of the railway line where a landslip occurred in 1903. Could that have inspired Nesbit to write the famous episode in the story “when the three children saved the train from being wrecked by waving six little red-flannel-petticoat flags”?
Although we have not been able to claim an “old gentleman” as featured in the story, there was, living in Eltham at around the time of publication, Josiah Stamp. He was to become president of the London, Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS), and was commemorated in 1992 when an Intercity locomotive was named Lord Stamp.
Nesbit’s Eltham has long gone, but her memory lives on in two road names - Nesbit Road and Bland Street - on a local estate, and in Edith Nesbit Walk, which runs alongside the railway and her former home garden. Well Hall station closed in 1985 when the nearby Eltham station opened, as the site was needed (with a cutting) for the realigned A2 road, including a new railway bridge.
In Well Hall Pleasaunce, on the site of Nesbit’s house where she wrote The Railway Children, an informative plaque was unveiled in 2004 by Jenny Agutter, who played Roberta in the 1970 film directed by Lionel Jefferies. Unfortunately, several requests to railway officials to have ‘Home of The Railway Children’ inscribed at Eltham station have yet to receive a positive response, but we’ll keep on trying to give Nesbit’s famous story the credit it deserves in promoting the railways that gave her so much joy.
In 1922, she left Eltham with her second husband Tommy Tucker (a former chief engineer on the Woolwich Ferry) to live near Dymchurch at St Mary in the Marsh. Here they converted two ex-RAF huts into
The Long Boat and The Jolly Boat, which survive at the now-named Nesbit Road. Ironically, the road stands alongside St Mary’s Bay station on the Romney Hythe & Dymchurch Light Railway, which opened in 1927 two years after she died.