The relevance of railway heroes today
Averting disaster needs preparation and organisation. And, above all, care.
Vince Coleman, Canadian railway dispatcher and hero.
There are two scenes in particular in the 1970 film The Railway Children that have remained with me my life long.
The first is the reaction the children get for their acts of charity towards the family of the station porter. I had never till then realised that a selfless act of charity can be offensive: not everyone’s happy to receive something for nothing.
The second is when the children of the film’s title go, as has become their habit, to watch the train chuffing along the railway line, when they observe a landslip. The hillside slips, as one solid stretch of vegetation and soil onto the line, blocking it, and there’s a train approaching. The two girls whip off their red-coloured petticoats, and attach them to branches, and the three children run down the line, crying out and waving their flags, beseeching the train to stop, in order to avoid disaster. The driver closes the regulator, sounds the whistle, and applies the brakes. The train slows but the children are adamant: it must stop, or an accident will occur. The engine finally draws to a halt, nose to nose with actress Jenny Agutter, who faints as it stops. All very melodramatic, exciting, and overplayed. Beware appearances.
The engine is the preserved Great Western Railway pannier tank 5775 (suitably repainted for the film and built in 1929—too late for the film’s period, in actual fact). Its erstwhile stable mate 7758 (built 1930) was the subject of another act of heroism, this time in real life. I quote from Wikipedia:
On 26 August 1940, a bombing raid destroyed a goods shed at Bordesley, West Midlands. During the raid Peter Smout, an 18-year-old engine cleaner who was acting as the fireman on a shunter, volunteered to drive No. 7758 to pull wagons out of the blazing goods shed. He made three more trips. He was assisted by Frederick Blake, a wagon examiner and a navy veteran from World War I, who operated the points levers. When they finished, the right hand side of the footplate was too hot to touch, and Blake had to use his hat to work the points as the levers were also too hot to touch. Both men were awarded the George Medal for their courage.
One of the greatest acts of railway heroism I ever heard of occurred in the context of the Halifax Explosion in Canada in 1917. Two ships collided in the harbour of Halifax, one of which was carrying very volatile explosives. An almighty explosion resulted, which destroyed huge swathes of the town. It was the greatest maritime disaster that was not an act of war, even though it occurred in wartime. Around 1,800 people died, and there were some 9,000 with injuries, including instantaneous amputations and blindings from flying glass. Again, Wikipedia takes up the story:
The death toll could have been worse had it not been for the self-sacrifice of an Intercolonial Railway dispatcher, Patrick Vincent (Vince) Coleman, operating at the railyard about 230 metres (750 ft) from Pier 6, where the explosion occurred. He and his co-worker, William Lovett, learned of the dangerous cargo aboard the burning Mont-Blanc from a sailor and began to flee. Coleman remembered that an incoming passenger train from Saint John, New Brunswick, was due to arrive at the railyard within minutes. He returned to his post alone and continued to send out urgent telegraph messages to stop the train. Several variations of the message have been reported, among them this from the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic: Hold up the train. Ammunition ship afire in harbor making for Pier 6 and will explode. Guess this will be my last message. Good-bye boys. Coleman’s message was responsible for bringing all incoming trains around Halifax to a halt. It was heard by other stations all along the Intercolonial Railway, helping railway officials to respond immediately. Passenger Train No. 10, the overnight train from Saint John, is believed to have heeded the warning and stopped a safe distance from the blast at Rockingham, saving the lives of about 300 railway passengers. Coleman was killed at his post.
The Halifax Explosion of 6 December 1917 released a force equivalent to 2.9 kilotonnes of TNT.
Halifax, Nova Scotia, just after the 1917 explosion.1
Jenny Agutter is still with us, God bless her, and The Railway Children is still a great classic children’s novel and movie. But the story it tells never happened, although its telling still inspires. Peter Smout’s deeds have probably been long forgotten by all but a few. Vince Coleman is fondly remembered to this day in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
The four stories are different: two never occurred, and are pure fiction: the first was an act of generosity that offended the beneficiary, the second was an act of bravery that saved lives; Smout’s acts of bravery really did occur, with the hero surviving; Coleman’s really occurred, in which he, the hero, perished. All of them gave an example. They stood up to a situation for which they were not responsible, which they identified as posing a danger for others, and they acted with the best of intentions. Unwittingly in the case of the act of charity by the railway children, wittingly in the other cases, they put themselves in the path of danger because they were convinced that acting thus was in the best interests of all. They put the commonality before their own safety.
Reading of such ventures and adventures is sobering. Not because of what one reads, but of what one asks oneself: would I have done the same?
If you rejoice in the election of Donald Trump and see no reason to take a stand against anything that he and his government are doing, then this is as far as you need to read, for the rest is of no interest to you whatsoever.
But, if you see the election of Mr Trump as posing a danger, to America, to Europe, to Palestine, to Ukraine, to the world order and to world peace, to the United Nations, to the World Health Organization, then you will feel overwhelmed. Even the world’s politicians, I am certain, feel a little overwhelmed, uncertain, unsure what to do. Unsure of how they can do anything, or how they can respond to avert danger, disaster, to keep everything safe.
Agutter inspired me as a boy with her acted bravery. Smout inspires even if you never knew anything about him. Coleman still inspires people in Canada today. Sometimes, it’s not enough to simply know that danger is in the offing. We need to see people acting in response, before we ourselves respond. Well, now you’ve seen three.
There’s one last story I’d like to leave you with in this section, and that’s the airliner crash in Tokyo on 2 January 2024. A Japanese airliner with 379 souls on board landed at Haneda airport as directed, and came down on top of a rescue aircraft with six occupants that was preparing to take off to help victims of an earthquake elsewhere in the country. In the smaller aircraft, only one person survived the incident. In the airliner, everyone survived. Every single person got out alive, some with injury, but all alive, and that was because of two things.
First, Japanese people are very conventional and very compliant. One might be tempted to say that they are submissive, or automatons, and I don’t think that is true at all. There is a recognition that, in a small, crowded country like Japan, the widespread sense of common good is not there for nothing. People do as they are bidden.
Second, the cabin crew of the Japan Airlines plane did nothing less than a heroic job. The only reason that cabin crew serve drinks and help you stow luggage is to fill the time until disaster strikes. Their primary function on an aeroplane is to save your life. The cabin crew of flight JAL 516 sprang immediately into action and saved not only themselves but all of the passengers in their care, and the pilots.
The moral to these stories is twofold: that, with care, preparation and organisation, you can destroy things, if destruction is what you are bent on. And, with care, preparation and organisation, you can avert destruction, if averting destruction is what you are bent on.
Self-sacrifice is expected only of very few; and it is honoured when it happens. But averting disaster needs care, preparation and organisation. And someone needs to do it.
I, like JD Vance, fear that free speech is on the retreat. And, what’s more, I fear that JD Vance’s America is leading the retreat. It’s speaking to its adversaries before it speaks to its allies. It’s retreating into isolationism, whilst meddling its fingers in everyone else’s pies. It wants to depose Canada’s King (I’m surprised the Palace hasn’t had something to say about this) and it wants to depose Greenland’s King. It is breaking things before it knows what it even is that it’s breaking (Musk denounced an official in charge of diversification whose job is to ensure crop diversification for farmers). And it is doing so based on one single rationale: America has never been invaded and it doesn’t really know what an invasion is (its drugs and immigration policies are grounded in an irrational belief that it has been invaded). Whatever, in the military sense, having been an invader since it was founded, the US believes it never will be invaded, not by anyone who can actually shoot back. It’s retreating from the world stage, along with free speech, in order to save money. And it likely will, oodles of it, and funnel the savings to the top 0.1 per cent. It doesn’t care a hoot.
As the battles rage around it, it will isolate itself from all and any effects. That’s what it thinks. The fact it is the wealthiest nation in the world does nothing to alter this; nor does the fact that most of its wealth is based on it having stolen the country it calls its own. Which makes it easier, in its mind, to steal any country it pleases from other people who live there. America is naught but a nation of pirates. And, when we all lie in destruction and death, America’s artful dealmaker will say, “We are here. We have a plan to help …”, and you will expect that sentence to finish with “you get back on your feet”, but it won’t. It will end with “ourselves.”
Donald Trump will never in a million years be a Vince Coleman. America’s peace proposal for Ukraine is not a panacea to Russia. It is America’s plan to take Ukraine for itself. He will stiff Zelenskyy and Putin.
By William James (Toronto) - Derivative of File:DNDHfxExplosion-2.jpg. Nova Scotia Archives and Records Management, Negative Number DNDHfxExplosion-2, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5751389.