If you held an Appointed position of Driver or Fireman/Secondman you had a working roster which detailed your shifts. I think it was over a 13 week period. This allowed you to plan your life around the roster. Unless you were on a “rest day relief” shift it usually meant that you worked the same shift from Monday to Saturday with a rest day some when in the week.
Rest day relief was a working week involving covering other shifts rest days which meant different starting times and shifts through the week. Overtime included working over the standard 8 hour, working your rest day and working Sunday. For safety reasons you were restricted to the amount of days you worked without having a day off. One week you would work early shifts which meant you started work at any time between 00.01hrs to 11.59hrs. The following week you worked a late shift starting any time between 12.01hrs to 23.59hrs. The rest day relief shift gave a good example of shift working, especially the early shift. The following gives a rough idea of shift start times for rest day relief:
Monday 10.00hrs
Tuesday 07.00hrs
Wednesday 05.00hrs
Thursday 03.00hrs
Friday 00.01hrs
Rest day on Saturday meant that you were off duty from 08.00hrs on Friday to a late shift on Monday. This was OK if you was an Appointed Driver or Fireman/Secondman. If like me you were a Passed Fireman/Secondman you didn’t know what time you were going to start again on Monday. They didn’t either as the Roster hadn’t been completed before you booked off duty. In those days you didn’t have mobile phones or pagers. In fact only Doctors, Bank Managers, Station Masters and the like had telephones in their home. Oh, I forgot Estate Agent. In fact it was only a few years earlier that we had electricity connected to our house. There was a red telephone box just up from my house. 4 pennies a call (let’s see that’s about 3.8 pence now) with button “A” to connect your call or button “B” to get your 4 pennies back. Anyway there was no way I would be waiting outside of a telephone box for a call to tell me my next shift. They used to send a telegram to you detailing your next shift. Telegrams in those days usually meant bad news. Accidents, death and alike. It took my neighbours a while to get used to the postman delivering telegrams to our address. For a while they wondered what was going on.
I mentioned Estate Agents. Well I met my first girlfriend. Her father worked in an Estate Agents in Edenbridge, although I think he may have been higher up the ladder, an architect or the like. She was at a private all-girls school in Hurst Green, Surrey but lived in a large house in East Grinstead. We communicated by post and met up about once a week, usually to watch a film at the cinema in East Grinstead. It was on the quiet. Her parents didn’t know. After about 3 months they found out and I received a letter from her asking me to telephone her. I saved up the 4 pennies and called her from the red telephone box up the road. When she answered I pressed button “A” and she was on the line.
“Father wants a word” She said. The first thing he asked when he came to the phone was what I did for a living.
“I’m a Fireman on the Railway” I replied.
“Don’t call her or see her again”, he said and put the phone down. To this day I still regret not having pressed button “B”.
As mentioned in my first blog, if my work started before the arrival of my first train to Tonbridge in the morning I would need to catch the last train at night and sleep on a bench until my shift started. The late shifts were different. If I had finished before 22.00hrs I could catch a train home. If I finished after 22.00hrs and midnight there was a mail train. I used to get permission from the Driver and sit in the back cab of the Crompton. The mail train stopped at Edenbridge at about 00.30hrs. Edenbridge has staggered platforms. You walk down one platform, cross over the crossing and up onto the other platform. Another mail train travelling in the opposite direction would pull up into the station and the mail personnel would change trains. I used this train to get home quite frequently. Then came the “Great Train Robbery”. That was the end of my trip home on the mail train.
There was another way though. There were frequent freight trains travelling to Redhill through the night and if I knew the crew I could get them to drop me off at Edenbridge as they passed through. They never actually stopped, but slowed down enough for me to climb out and jump off onto the platform. One night I did this and we were travelling too fast. I jumped off at the start of the platform and I was still running at the other end. I almost run up the signal box steps.
It was time to start thinking about my own transport.
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