Early years 1974 - 1982
Although I was born in Greenwich in 1971, my parents moved to Strood in the Medway towns in early 1972. This was for my father’s role as a signalman in one of the small boxes on the Medway valley line from Strood to Maidstone. In 1974, we moved to Teynham, which I think was linked to my father moving into management. The first role he had of which I am fairly confident is assistant station manager at Canterbury West, c. 1974 to c. 1979.

As a 7 or 8 year old child I was at school in the week, but at weekends my father used to take to me to work at Canterbury West on a Saturday, presumably to give my mother time for other things. She had a horse, I think, at about this time, and would ride it on Saturday mornings, so some child-management was required.

Being a small and presumably quite annoying child, my father would pass me on for others to look after me. I have clear memories of spending time in the beautiful wooden signal box, still in existence today, that spans the unusually wide tracks at one end of the station. I remember the signal levers towering over me, and being invited to try and pull one. I strained and pulled and gritted my teeth, but nothing moved. In later life, I learned about frames for levers, and I am now fairly sure the signalmen gave me a lever that was locked off, so that I couldn’t inadvertently cause a major rail disaster! Hearing the trains pass beneath the box was exciting for a small child, and I can still just about recall the noise and vibrations it caused in the box.

The signal box itself has an unusual history, having previously been ‘the signal box which formerly straddled the lines between London Bridge and Blackfriars (which was then) re-used at Canterbury West. Assembly of the … signal box occurred during 1927, and it took over the functions of the two SER cabins on 1st January 1928’¹ It is still proudly in use today, its charmingly old-fashioned wooden structure contrasting pleasingly with the modern high-speed trains that now link Canterbury West and St Pancras in London.

Health & Safety considerations may have prompted my father to find a rather more suitable lodging on a Saturday morning for his 7 or 8 year old child. I am fairly certain, although not absolutely so, that I was then baby-sat by a family who lived in a crossing-keeper’s house for a manual crossing gate somewhere in Canterbury’s suburbs. Sadly, I have been unable to locate this crossing, but I have fond memories of the family who lived there – the crossing-keeper’s wife read me the Beatrix Potter books, and bought me a much-treasured The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin as a present.

My father became assistant station manager at Faversham station in around 1979/1980, and with it came responsibility for our local station, Teynham. We lived opposite the station, so as a child I would be serenaded by the sound of Southern electric trains rumbling past us. When I lived there, Teynham station had a manual crossing for a minor road, so was manned 24 hours a day. It was only replaced by automatic gates in 2011. It also had a rather grand passenger bridge to take people platform to platform, and pedestrians from the main part of the village south of the railway to the lesser inhabited part north of the station. Built in around 1910, this lattice sided bridge was some 65 feet in length, and had 4 access stairways: two for the platforms and two for non-rail travelling pedestrians. It has been modernised now, and has lost its charm, although traces of its original look can still be spotted if you remember the bridge as was.

My interaction with the railway continued through my younger years, as during school holidays I accompanied my mother on shopping trips. Teynham was fairly small, and had little in the way of shops to sustain a family. My mother, not being able to drive, would once a week take the train to either Sittingbourne or Faversham (she switched a few times, based presumably on a level of dissatisfaction with one or the other). My mother worked in the quality control laboratory at Redland Brickworks in Conyer at this stage, and during school holidays I would sit astride my her bicycle crossbar as we shook and rattled down the ash-laid path through the orchards, referred to as the tramlines. It had been the site of a narrow-gauge line which had connected the brickworks with the mainline up until around 1962.

At school in Faversham 1982 - 1987
When I turned 11 and left my local primary school to enter the terrifying world of the Big School, or secondary, the railways played a defining role in for the next five years of my life. My primary school was a feeder school for Sittingbourne’s secondary school, St. John’s, and all my schoolfellows and friends went there. But it was a long way from the train station to the school and would mean that I would have to take the bus. The bus would cost my parents money, whereas train travel for a child of a rail worker, for such a short distance, was very cheap – not quite free, but extremely low cost, just 25% of the child fare, I think. The Faversham County Secondary School for Boys was just a few minutes from the station, so, alone of all my friends, I was sent there in 1982. It closed at the end of that academic year and amalgamated with the girl’s school, Lady Capel, to become the unloved Abbey School from September 1983.

My first day at Faversham County in September 1982 contains a tragi-comic highlight that has stayed with me. As part of welcoming new boys to the school a visual aid was created. It consisted of a large ship, called the ‘F.C.S.S.’, the initials of the school, and on it were cut out figures, one for every pupil from the second year (as it was called back then) and above up to the fifth year. Surrounding this ship where several smaller ships, all named after the schools that fed into the Faversham County that year, with cut outs of pupils on each boat, one figure for each new pupil. So, Davington primary school fed in maybe twelve pupils, Ospringe something similar. There were even five or six from Canterbury, a 20 minute train trip away. And the good ship Teynham C of E contained just One. Me. It was the only ship on the display to have just one pupil. I saw this display and my heart sank. I felt that my life was over – I had gone from a local primary, where you knew just about everyone, from a class of about fifteen pupils, to knowing no-one, no-one at all, and in a much larger school. I was also about 6 or 7 inches shorter than any other boy, having not grown, I am told, between the ages of 4 and 5. I was therefore a figure of amusement and ridicule. It did get better, and I did make friends at my new school, but those first days were hard.

Working for the railways, 1987 - 1990
I left school just before my 16th birthday, and entered upon a short and inglorious stint at Boots in Sittingbourne on the late 1980’s Youth Training Scheme, where you worked full time for £28.00 per week so as not to affect the unemployment figures. Dissatisfied with his son’s career prospects (nil), my father told me of a vacancy at Canterbury East station, working in the Telephone Enquiry Bureau (TEB), answering train time and fare enquiries from across East Kent. The bureau is long gone, the internet having made it easy to find times yourself, but you can still see where we had our office – it was on the first floor at Canterbury East, above the ticket hall and booking office.

During my time there I got quite adept at working out where in Kent a passenger had called from. Most people when they called asked something like, ‘When’s the next train from here to …[enter station of choice]’ without indicating where ‘here’ was. I could generally pin it down just by their accent to within two or three stations: Thanet had a different accent to Medway, or Canterbury. Within Thanet, Margate people sounded different to Broadstairs, as did those from Gillingham compared to Rochester residents in Medway. My accuracy was surprisingly high, as I was able to locate the caller in the right bit of Kent nine times out of ten. I couldn’t do it now, I have been away far too long.

I started at the Canterbury Telephone Enquiry Bureau on Monday the 12th October 1987, travelling by train from Teynham to Canterbury on a free pass as it was for work purposes. My timing was somewhat off, as on the night of Thursday 15th to Friday 16th October Kent was hit by the strongest winds in 200 years, the Great Storm of 1987. Having had a railway line rumbling and clanging past my house since I was 3, and being a somnolent teenager, I slept straight through it and got up at 6:30 to set off for my train at around 7. It did feel a bit blowy crossing to the station, but I didn’t think much of it. The on-duty booking clerk and crossing keeper looked at me astonished.

‘Where are you going?’ he asked as I headed through the booking hall, having waved good morning to him.
‘Work’ I replied.
‘You aren’t going anywhere!’
Genuinely puzzled, I asked why. Even more incredulous, he asked,
‘Don’t you know what’s happened?’
‘No.’ I didn’t have the radio on in the morning, as I didn’t want to disturb my still sleeping parents. ‘There’s no bloody trains ‘cos there’s no bloody track! All the trees are down, and the lines are shut.’

The line was cleared enough for me to go back to work, I think from the Monday or Tuesday the next week, but parts of the line remained blocked for a lot longer, if I remember correctly.

After around 18 months at Canterbury East TEB, I applied for a transfer to Gillingham ticket office in the Medway towns. Starting around April 1989, I spent about a year here selling commuter tickets, season tickets and combined train ticket and entry to Bembom Brothers, Margate, the theme park now known again by its original name, Dreamland.

During my time at Gillingham ticket office it was revamped, involving us spending a long hot summer in a portacabin at the front of the building, contained within a larger structure of cabins and roofed in. With no air-conditioning it was unbearably hot. After we moved back into the newly revamped offices and station building, I was subjected to yet another weather event, this time the gale of 25 January 1990. The trains were largely cancelled due to trees and debris on the line, so my workmate Adrian and I had nothing to do but stare out of the windows across the ticket hall to the doors opening onto the station frontage and road junction. As we watched traffic lights and streetlamps sway precariously in the wind, there was a strange sound as a piece of the new station front hoarding, proudly emblazoned with ‘Gillingham Station – Network SouthEast’ was ripped off the front and started a potentially deadly journey at roughly human head height across the station front and towards the road junction. Swearing in the kind of manner expected of rail workers in the 1980s, we ran out of the booking office as fast as we could and dashed after the floating hoarding. They look quite small and manageable when attached high up on a station, less so when literally flying, now at near ground level, potentially heading towards a disaster. I don’t remember the exact dimensions, but I think it was probably 2 ½ to 3 feet in depth, and around 8 to 10 feet long, big enough to cause damage and injury.

Somehow Adrian and I grabbed the hoarding, brought it to a halt and hauled it back into the station where it was safe. A brief and tentative glance at the remaining hoarding, this one we were manhandling being one piece of, I think, 4 or 5 other boards making up the hoarding, assured us that another piece was not about to fly off, and we headed back for the relative safety of the booking office.

Because the gale was in the daytime when people were around, it had a higher casualty rate than the more famous 1987 storm, but I am pleased to say that in one small way, Adrian and I prevented at least some damage by our quick reactions.

After a year or so at Gillingham, I transferred to London’s Victoria station. I commuted, by train of course, from my home in Kent for a few months before branching out on my own and in 1991 buying a house in Colchester, almost due North of where I had grown up. I remained with British rail until 1997 when it was de-nationalised. Like may others, I took the offered redundancy package and headed to new pastures in retail, later insurance and currently back in the public sector with the NHS.

I have not returned to live in Kent since and have visited the area just 2 or 3 times since moving away, most recently in 2023 and 2024, when I explored Canterbury, Faversham, and the countryside around Teynham, with its wonderful apple, pear, plum, and cherry orchards, which eventually peter out northwards as you arrive at the coast at the hamlet of Conyer, but seem to continue south for ever. I still feel the need to have fruit trees, and have planted them in every garden I have owned, a little bit of Kent that comes with me, wherever I am.

Banner Image: Orchard ©Lisa Hawkins
This article was written: August 2024

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