The Vicar Who Created Thomas Was… “Difficult”

Sources/References

Artists

  • "he burned through multiple illustrators"

    • This is mostly the case with the first three illustrators of the Railway Series. Awdry felt that William Middleton’s illustrations in The Three Railway Engines (1945) lacked the technical accuracy and was full of errors, such as Henry’s design. Awdry initially disliked Reginald Payne’s illustrations of Thomas the Tank Engine (1946) as Thomas’s design deviated from he’s desired model (based on a model Awdry had carved for his son), but accepted it when he learnt the design was based on a real life engine (Billinton E2 0-6-0 tank engine). There were other errors regarding the technical accuracy, such as the position of points. Awdry had a far more combative relationship with Reginald Dalby who illustrated the next nine books in the series and tended to disregard technical accuracy. Despite this, Dalby was also responsible for redoing the illustrations for The Three Railway Engines to replace Middleton’s and corrections to Payne’s illustrations in Thomas the Tank Engine. Awdry had a much better working relationship with the subsequent artists for his books, John T. Kenney and Peter & Gunvor Edwards.

  • Thomas's Mystery (Western Daily Press - 1995)

    • “Missing artist could be owed a fortune”

    • ““I’m told he had a nervous breakdown,” Mr Awdry said.”

    • “A later letter to Mr Awdry from Miss Gregorson says: “The artist, unfortunately has since had a nervous breakdown due, I believe, to work at the Admiralty and has disappeared from view.””

  • The Thomas The Tank Engine Man: The Story Of The Reverend W. Awdry And His Really Useful Engines (2015)

    • Page 118: ‘Although the pictures I drew were crude,’ admits Wilbert, ‘with “stick men” and very elementary scenery, I was careful with the three engines. Each had a different wheel arrangement and shape so that Christopher could tell them apart easily.’ Wilbert’s sketches for the original manuscript showed Henry as a 4-4-2 engine (four bogey wheels, four driving wheels and two trailing wheels under the cab), but Middleton drew him, like Gordon, as a 4-6-2 engine.

    • Page 200: Long after publication, it was discovered that this illustration contained another mistake. Jonathan Atkinson, aged seven and a quarter, wrote to point out that ‘James’ wheels were wrong’; and, indeed, Dalby had depicted the red engine as having a four-wheel leading bogie, making it a 4-6-0 instead of the 2-6-0 which it had previously been, and still was in other illustrations in the same book!

    • Page 146: ‘During the whole of our ten or eleven year association,’ recalled the illustrator (it was actually only eight years) ‘I only met him twice.’ Reginald Dalby’s reaction to the author of the Railway Series was forthright: in his eyes Wilbert Awdry was ‘a pedantic, remote man with whom co-operation was difficult’

    • Page 192: The trees were duly uprooted and Henry’s front re-worked, but Wilbert’s chief objection was to the way in which Dalby drew Percy: ‘I wrote to him and said: “I beg, pray and exhort you not to make Percy look like a green caterpillar with red stripes!”

      Wilbert’s memory of these events is that the artist took umbrage and resigned. Reginald Dalby, writing in his unpublished autobiography, tells the story differently: ‘Press dates were of major importance yet it became later and later before I received the script, despite many requests. Finally, it was so late that I returned the copy and our association ended.’

World War 2

Diesels

  • The Modernisation Plan (1955)

    • Page 17: Although it is proposed shortly to bring to an end the building of new steam locomotives, there are at present some 19,000 steam locomotives on British Railways, a susbtantial proportion being of modern design. The steam locomotive has a useful lie in service of some forty years, and obviously careful planning will be required to ensure that, as the existing stock is gradually replaced by diesel or electric power, it is still used to the best advantage. There will accordingly be careful selection of types for the condemnation programme, designed to eliminate as quickly as possible the less efficient types and small classes for which it would not be economical to maintain spares. 

  • The Scrap Heap (The Railway Gazette - 1947)

    • The 8 a.m. train from Clacton to London stopped on a lonely section of the London & North Eastern Railway line near Weeley. Essex. And for ten minutes the passengers wondered. Then the guard entered a first class carriage. He said: “Could anyone oblige the driver with a leather bootlace? We've been all along the train…” A passenger was wearing a rare pair [most bootlaces are now made of cotton], and he surrendered one. With the lace and a wad of newspapers the driver mended a vacuum pine which had burst. jamming the brakes. And the train went on.

  • The Rai

Chuck Jones

  • Chuck Jones: Conversations by Maureen Furniss (2005)

    • Page 36: “The distinction for me was that they would use a kind of personal damage. For example, Jerry might drive a golf ball right through ‘Tom's teeth and all of Tom's teeth would break and fall out. To me, that's pretty painful. Now, the Coyote falling eight thousand feet and landing and getting up Immediately, that seems to me to be a broad humor. Abraham Lincoln once told a story about an old dog who was sleeping in a stump while they were dynamiting stumps to dear a field. They didn't know the dog was in there, so they blew up the stump. Lincoln said, “Poor Rover, his usefulness as a dog was about over.” Translated into other terms, you could describe the bloody bits. My point is, I don't describe the bloody bits. I don't allow people to be hurt personally. But all this sounds like an apology. I don't apologize for it. I apologize when I'm not funny.”

    • Page 50: “Well, I didn't understand them the way Bill and Joe did. I tried to make them like Bill and Joe, tried to think the way they thought, but it didn't work out well, so I just kind of changed the characters to fit my ‘own way of thinking. They used a kind of violence I seldom used, and if I did use it, it was a mistake and I regretted it. One example would be in their golfing film where the ball hits Tom in the teeth and leaves a hole there, and then the teeth fail out.’ They would have an axe come down and take all the fur off the back, including his tail. That kind of thing, to me, is much more hurtful than somebody falling off a ciiff. Or if the Coyote lights a bomb and the whole thing explodes, he's left there all black, and then you cut immediately and he's whole again—death and resurrection. So mine were, I'd say, much gentler than theirs, but probably not as funny. I was never able to get quite as much character in Jerry. I thought they did a smashing job on Jerry; I thought his personality was always delightful. I probably got a more human personality out of Tom than they did, but not the same character. Tom was pretty vicious in their stuff, and was a clear-cut villain.”

    • Page 113: “I wasn't really at home with the Tom and Jerry characters. Hanna-Barbara handled those characters beautifully, much better than I did. Jerry was a much more charming character in their best cartoons than I could ever make him, simply because I could never understand him. And I couldn't really draw Tom very well; I had to tum him into a different cat really. So I purposely said, “The hell with him.” And I tried to keep Jerry attractive personally, more like the Road Runner, in that he never really hurt Tom in my version. Bill and Joe's Jerry would sometimes cut Tom into slices, It became sort of half-assed with my Tom becoming a combination of the Coyote and the original Tom. It’s difficult to work with someone else's characters.”

  • "Abe" Lincoln's anecdotes and stories by RD Wordsworth (1908)

    • "Finally, all other means having failed to subdue the creature, a man loaded a lump of meat with a Charge of powder, to which was attached a slow fuse; this was dropped where the dreaded dog would find it, and the animal gulped down the tempting bait.

      "There was a dull rumbling, a muffled explosion, and fragments of the dog were seen flying in every direction. The grieved owner, picking up the shattered remains of his cruel favorite, said: 'He was a good dog, but as a dog, his days of usefulness are over. '

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