Chasewater Railway Museum January 2021 Newsletter.

Nothing to report as far as the Museum is concerned again this month, so I have raided the archives, courtesy of David Bathurst’s collection.
Click on the link below to see the full list
Caption text: Object number, name, description, location in the museum.
Click on a picture to see a larger image, the click on the side arrow to move on.
The Museum grapevine has been working well recently. Anthony Coulls of the National Railway Museum called Mark Sealey about a worksplate off a Cannock Chase Colliery locomotive, Alfred Paget on EBay. Mark passed the message on to Barry Bull, who signed up to EBay and eventually won the plate.
Following advice from Rob Cadman we came to the conclusion that the size of the Beyer Peacock worksplate on EBay and purporting to be off Alfred Paget didn’t quite measure up. A fraction smaller than details in the Buckle and Love worksplate book gave the game away that likely a copy of the original with if correct the usual shrinkage to be expected. We are grateful to Rob Cadman for his research and pointing this out. However with this in mind I enlisted Rob to help with a low bid, and can report success at £104 . It is certainly possible maybe even probable that the plate was copied from an original in the NCB Chasetown workshops in the 1950s at the time when the seller’s father was employed there.
Rob has collected the worksplate from Roy Fairbanks who lives at Shire Oak. His father Freddie Fairbanks was a loco fitter at Cannock Chase and as the pits closed he went to the Chasetown workshops. He died in 1984 and son has had it since, seems he expected it to realise £30 or so. Now Rob has it he’s coming round to the idea that it may be original. He’s now swayed to thinking it is.
It has now been decided that the Beyer Peacock 1861 worksplate is indeed an original off CCC Co loco Alfred Paget. A good few days all round.
Footnote
The original ‘Alfred Paget’, an 0-4-2ST No.204/1861, was acquired new, scrapped by NCB at Chasetown circa 1952. ‘Paget’ was the family name of the Marquis of Anglesey, one of the major land-owners in the district, and Chasewater Railway has kept the name – now on a Neilson engine.
The Museum has obtained a grant of £3745 to cover electricity costs. This follows an application to ensure the Museum’s fragile collections can receive appropriate environmental control in these difficult times.
The grant is from Arts Council England’s Covid-19 Emergency Response Fund and was only made possible due to public funding from the National Lottery.
Our thanks to the National Lottery and its players.
Our curator, Barry Bull, nowadays becoming known as the Museum ‘Geek’, since he’s had his new phone and time to play with it, has found a couple of items for the collection on Ebay, the first one is the badge shown above.
Referring to the excellent book by the late Ronald Redman on the Railway Foundry it confirms the badge to be a world war 2 issue and not as described on Ebay from the previous conflict
The service badge would have been issued at the time that Hudswell Clark were heavily involved with aircraft production of several types including the Fairey Swordfish
An association had been formed with a Yorkshire company, Blackburn Aircraft in 1938 when war loomed and eventually over a 1000 men and woman were engaged at Hudswell Clark in the war effort building sub assemblies. Locomotive work continued including the production of 50 austerity 0 6 0 saddle tanks for the War Department plus others of various types for industrial use. Employees were issued with a bright metal button hole badge just a fraction less than an inch in diameter featuring a simple front view of a locomotive with the initials H C on each side also &Co Ltd with the employees works number stamped underneath. The example acquired for the Chasewater Railway museum is number 905.