Philip S. Bagwell

The railwaymen: the history of the National Union of Railwaymen. London:  George Allen & Unwin, 1963. 725pp.
Very different from Norman McKillop's Lighted flame: the workers could have been from any industry: very little aattention is paid to working conditions. Bagwell seemed only to be interested in the politics of mass labour. Nonetheless, he does bring out the effect of firing larger locomotives without any increase in pay (page 262) and the poor cab conditions on the Great Western The Great Bear and on the Star class where the inside mechanism was very difficult to reach for lubrication and adjustment. On pp. 315 and 318 Bagwell takes up the Luddite approach towards electrification where the railways rejected feather bedding for former firemen. The issues of right hand versus left hand drive, the failure to introduce automatic warning systems, blow backs, etc are utterly ignored, but brotherly relations with the USSR are recorded.