King - Gilbert Szlumper and Leo Amery of the Southern Railway

Gilbert Szlumper and Leo Amery of the Southern Railway

The Diaries of a General Manager and a Director

John King

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by

Pen & Sword TRANSPORT

An imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

Yorkshire - Philadelphia

Copyright John King, 2018

ISBN 9781473835276

eISBN 9781473870383

Mobi ISBN 9781473870376

The right of John King to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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The work for this publication has been greatly facilitated by a number of people, most of them being the staff of various archives and libraries. They include Churchill College at Cambridge where Amerys diaries are held and the Imperial War Museum in London which holds Szlumpers diaries. I am also grateful to the staff of the Library at the National Railway Museum and of Southampton Local Studies & Maritime Library for assistance with photographs and other records. Other institutions include Dover Museum, Dover Library, the National Archives at Kew, the libraries of the Institute of Civil Engineers and of the London School of Economics.

Many others have helped including Gilbert Kendzior (Gilbert Szlumpers grandson) in North Carolina, the Old Southeronians Association, the LMS Society, the Railway & Canal Historical Society and Dover Ferry Photos. Last but not least, John Scott-Morgan of the publisher must not be forgotten for his patience and encouragement.

I have attempted to detail the copyright holder of photographs but in some cases I have been unable to discover the identity.

The diaries of leading railway managers and directors can be very interesting if they reveal the workings of the company, the character of its people and its internal politics, especially when many primary records have not survived as in the case of the Southern Railway. Unfortunately few diaries appear to have been kept by such people and even fewer have survived to enter the public domain. In the case of Leopold Amery who was a director of the Southern Railway from 1932, his diaries have not only survived but have been published at length. Unfortunately the publisher limited them to Amerys political life with the result that the entries on the railway and other business activities were largely omitted. This was unfortunate as Amery was usually at meetings at the Waterloo headquarters at least twice a week until 1940. The entries themselves are, however, a little disappointing as they were brief and rarely revealed any insight into developments and people. Nevertheless they do add some relevant information that is not available elsewhere. Amerys autobiography was also disappointing and contained little on the Southern Railway and other directorships, all of which he took very seriously.

By contrast, the diary entries of Gilbert Szlumper who was General Manager of the Southern Railway from 1937, were very rich in comments on developments and people but unfortunately only started in 1936 and initially were very uneven with many gaps. It is not known whether Gilbert kept diaries in his early years but he sometimes made no entries in the mid-1930s for weeks at a time. Szlumpers diaries were, however, very revealing in their portrayal of relationships in the head office at Waterloo. Previous histories of the Southern have tended to portray the railway as a very happy family. These diaries have revealed this to be somewhat of an exaggeration. His diaries were also interesting where they revealed his anguish in his relations with the General Manager, Sir Herbert Walker, to whom he was deputy for several years. Later they revealed his greater anguish over his inability to get back to the position at Waterloo that he vacated temporarily at the beginning of the war. It is surprising that his diaries have not been published before. There is some evidence that they have been examined by historians and others but they have been little mentioned and never quoted.

The unevenness of the 1930 entries is, in part, compensated by the war years, although Gilbert was no longer working for the railway. But he was still involved in transport and made some very detailed and interesting entries. His comments on the military world, the social scene in the war and the workings of Whitehall where in effect he was working as an unpaid civil servant, were also important. A shrewd judge of character, his opinions of people were always interesting. In most cases, it has been easy to identify nearly all the people as so many of them were amongst the great and good in transport, the Civil Service and politics. In addition, Szlumper often explained who people were and even recorded times of meetings and trains. It is interesting just how many people the two diarists knew.

It has not been practical to detail every entry of the two while several entries have been edited. In many cases, the actual words have been reproduced but in several cases a narrative style has been adopted in the interest of the flow of words and brevity. Amerys railway entries ceased in 1940 when he returned to government service and resigned his directorships but Szlumpers diary continued until 1945.

In an ideal world, records of many railway policy meetings and correspondence would have survived but in the case of the Southern Railway, many were destroyed by enemy action on Waterloo or were later disposed of without authority while others never came into the public domain and disappeared. The diaries are therefore very important in that they contain details of meetings, conversations and sentiments that the historian would not otherwise discover.

John King,

Grove Park, London SE12

Leopold Amery and Gilbert Szlumper were born within twelve years of one another in the nineteenth century. They had some points in common but in many ways were very different. They were both very conscientious, hard working and professional. They both went to primary schools in Brighton and then to schools of note; and they both went to university colleges. Involvement in the Southern Railway was of course something else they had in common, Amery as a director and Szlumper as an employee. They both kept diaries but that broadly was the extent of their commonality.

Leopold Charles Maurice Stennett Amery was born on 22 November 1873. He never appeared to have an interest in railways until 1932 when he became a director of the Southern Railway which was largely the result of the need to improve his finances by company directorships. He was essentially a journalist, historian and politician but with the reputation of a statesman. His primary education was at small schools in Brighton, Cologne and Folkestone. At Harrow School, he excelled and this continued at Balliol College at Oxford. His early career was academic as a fellow at All Saints College in Oxford, although this was mixed with journalism from 1899 when he also joined the staff of The Times newspaper . With a great intellect, he had a capacity and appetite for work. According to the Dictionary of National Biography (DNB), he acquired a reputation for rejecting prevailing philosophical and economic orthodoxies. In 1908 he turned down the editorship of The Times for politics; and in 1912 he turned down the editorship of The Observer . He kept a diary from 1910 which was the year that he married Florence Greenwood. The following year he was elected as Conservative Member of Parliament for South Birmingham, later Sparkbrook, which seat he held until 1945.