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Reginald the Surrealist Engine

In the first episode of the new era of University Challenge, presented by Amol Rajan and broadcast on 12 July 2023, the new question-master asks the team from Trinity College Cambridge the following bonus question: 'A murderer at the scene of his crime and two bowler-hatted men armed with a club and a net feature in which painter's 1927 Surrealist work The Menaced Assassin?' It's the detail of the bowler hats that allows the Trinity team to answer, with confidence, 'Magritte.'

Three years and one fortnight earlier, on 27 June 2020, just days after non-essential shops were allowed to reopen following the first national Coronavirus lockdown, I came off the M6 at Coventry, parking on Brighton Street in Upper Stoke. Or is it Barras Heath, or perhaps Ball Hill? I don't know, but the key thing was I was at least a mile from the centre of Coventry and parking was unrestricted. Plus, there was a good stretch of road with back gardens on one side and a high privet hedge on the other: I could park without inconveniencing anyone. Indeed, no one was actually parked here. There didn't appear to be anyone around at all. I walked down towards Walsgrave Road, a high brick wall having appeared on my right to shield local residents from the noise of the traffic on Jimmy Hill Way. At Gosford Green I turned right and walked along Far Gosford Street, heading towards the Big Comfy Bookshop and hoping it would be open. I had done my research, which suggested it was supposed to be, but in June 2020 we were all more used to seeing shops closed than open.

It was open and it turned out to be a good bookshop to visit immediately post-lockdown, because it had a generous amount of floor space - concrete, painted red, if you want to know. There were even armchairs, also red, but they were taped off. 'CAUTION,' shouted the yellow plastic tape. 'ATTENTION.' My eye was caught by a more welcoming, handwritten sign affixed to a shelf of old books. 'OLD BOOKS,' it said. 'Is there any better smell than that of old books? Come and browse for a while, you never know what you might find.' I found a novel, in hardback, The Exhibitionist, by Henry Sutton. I could see that it couldn't possibly be by my contemporary Henry Sutton, author of The Househunter and Flying and numerous other novels, unless he had been a child prodigy and written it when he was four. I decided to buy it and write to Sutton and ask him if he knew about it, maybe offer to send it to him if he was interested, and was about to head with it to the till when on a low shelf I spotted a short, slim black spine, title in white, Bodoni Ultra bold italic - that wasn't the title, that was the typeface. The title was Toby the Tram Engine. Or:

TOBY THE TRAM ENGINE

If you can imagine that white out of black.

In fact you don't need to.

TOBY THE TRAM ENGINE

I read it while walking back to the car. Toby the Tram Engine is number seven in the Railway Series of books by the Rev W Awdry, first published in 1952, but the reprints I collect are from the 1960s and '70s, as they remind me so strongly of my childhood. I love everything - well, almost everything - about them, from the typeface on the spine and front cover, to the small format, the very fact of their being a numbered series, and of course the stories themselves. But, most of all, I love the illustrations, which, as I hope to show, are not just engines with pretty faces, but evidence that the ambition of one of the Railway Series artists extended way beyond the island of Sodor.

There was tension and conflict on the railway, however, and not everything ran smoothly.

The first book in the series, The Three Railway Engines, was first published in 1945. Awdry had written three stories for his young son, Christopher, and, with his wife's encouragement, had submitted them to publisher Edmund Ward in 1943. A fourth story was requested and this set the template for The Three Railway Engines and the next twenty-five books in the series, all written by Awdry, the last of these, number twenty-six, appearing in 1972. Eleven years later, Christopher Awdry took up his pen and added a further sixteen books to the series.

The first edition of The Three Railway Engines was illustrated by William Middleton. Awdry was unhappy with Middleton's work and it's easy to see why - the features sit rather flatly and sketchily on the moon-like faces of the engines - and he was replaced for the second book, Thomas the Tank Engine, by Reginald Payne, whose style was livelier and more vivid, the faces more expressive. Sadly, however, Payne suffered a nervous breakdown and was himself replaced for book three, James the Red Engine, by C Reginald Dalby, who also redid Middleton's illustrations for later editions of The Three Railway Engines and made a number of alterations to Payne's work on Thomas the Tank Engine - Thomas backs into a station instead of facing forwards; extra luggage appears on a platform; telegraph poles and a signal gantry are added to countryside scenes; a water tower gets a different pipe; and a van changes colour from green to brown - although my edition, dating from 1969, does not credit either illustrator.

Dalby would remain the series' illustrator until (and including) book eleven, Percy the Small Engine, in spite of Awdry's increasing dissatisfaction with his work as well. The author complained that Dalby's illustrations were inaccurate and inconsistent. When we see, for example, in Tank Engine Thomas Again, Henry standing at a platform, still in his blue livery that he had been given at the end of the first book, but with square buffers and two side windows in his cab, instead of round buffers and one side window, in other words looking exactly like Gordon, who is also blue, it is hard to disagree with Awdry. There was further inconsistency in Henry's wheel arrangement: originally drawn as a 4-6-0 locomotive, he would sometimes appear as a 4-6-2 engine. Don't worry if you don't know what these mean; trust me, it's an inconsistency.

When Awdry described Percy, in the eleventh book, Percy the Small Engine, as resembling 'a green caterpillar with red stripes', Dalby, a successful commercial artist and the creator of the famous Fox's Glacier Mints polar bear logo, packed up his brushes and refused to illustrate any more Railway Series books, citing late delivery of scripts as the reason why.

'I was sorry to give up,' Dalby is quoted as saying, or writing, in a video posted on YouTube by ClickClackTrack. 'I had become intimately involved with my engines, their characters and personalities; but, like that other famous "artist" Adolf Hitler, my patience became exhausted.'

If Dalby did say, or write this, you have to think it's an unwise and somewhat baffling comparison to make, but when I look at the raised right arm of the vicar in the final illustration in Percy the Small Engine, I wonder if he was playing a long game. He certainly seems to have found Awdry - who, let's not forget, was a reverend - pedantic and difficult to work with, while the relationship between the two men might have been doomed from the start. When original Thomas the Tank Engine illustrator Reginald Payne had gone AWOL, Awdry had done some sketches of his own for book three, in collaboration with his friend Barbara Bean, but when he sent these to editor Eric Marriott, the answer came back that an artist, Dalby, had already been engaged. One can imagine even a cleric's nose might have been put out of joint.

Dalby was replaced by John T Kenney, whose colours were a little less bright, most noticeably in the green livery worn by Percy, Henry and Duck, but who enjoyed a good working relationship with Awdry and was only replaced after book seventeen, Gallant Old Engine, when his eyesight began to fail. For book eighteen, Stepney the 'Bluebell' Engine, the commission went to Swedish artist Gunvor Edwards, who asked her husband Peter to assist her and they shared the illustration credit until book twenty-six, Tramway Engines, which was Awdry's last. Their style was more impressionistic; to me, the faces look all wrong, perhaps because the first faces I had seen had been Dalby's and so those, to me, were the originals, the real faces, imprinted on my mind, and any that came later were inauthentic, unconvincing, poor substitutes.

For similar reasons, perhaps, actual trains today seem to me more like plastic toys than real trains. Which is not to say I miss the days of steam; I had to go out of my way, to the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway, for example, to encounter steam, or happen to be on York station when Sir Nigel Gresley called by with a special. The trains that moved me were the AM4 electric multiple units I would travel on as a boy from Altrincham to Manchester Piccadilly; the Class 25 diesel locomotives and Class 40s and occasional Type 3s and Brush 2s that I...