Before the Angry Engines became a global megabrand and Ringo Starr’s side hustle, The Observer (22 July 1979) went to meet their creator: the Reverend Wilbert Vere Awdry. Then 68, retired and living in Stroud, he appears otherworldly and bemused at his own celebrity, in a surprisingly loud checked jacket, dog collar and tinted specs.
Steam was a family affair: Awdry’s father, also a vicar, was an enthusiast and as a child, Awdry Jr lay in bed listening to engines along the tracks near the vicarage. His vision of them speaking, ‘boasting, complaining’ became the stories he told his three-year-old son, sick with measles, then, eventually, the first Thomas the Tank Engine books.
In the 30 years since the first slim volume, sales had exceeded 6m, but only one foreign language edition (Japanese) had appeared. ‘The problem is quite simply one of sex,’ the article explains; engines are feminine in French and German. ‘For the mighty Gordon to change his gender is no less out of the question than for Scarlett O’Hara to turn male to suit some foreign linguistic foible.’ Times have changed: Gordon can be ‘la grosse locomotive’ now and no one is offended.
The lucky Observer writer gets access to Awdry operating his model railway in the spare room, like watching Leonardo doodle, I suppose. ‘Mr Awdry attached a wooden box to a canvas belt about his waist and proceeded to operate it faultlessly for half an hour.’ She devotes a chunk of the article to the Rev’s happily absorbed narration: ‘This is Ffarquhar, the main terminus on Thomas’s branch line. (Gordon thinks branch lines are vulgar.) We will do the section 6.45 to 11.48… 7.25 here’s Toby.’
Put on the spot to choose between ‘puffed up and boastful’ Gordon, ‘wilful and disobedient’ Henry and ‘saucy, plucky’ Thomas, Awdry refused to play favourites. ‘Suppose you had a family of 10 or 12 children and I asked you which was your favourite? What would you say?’
