Some years ago on a visit to Crofton Beam Engines, I spotted this plaque on their chimney. The name that caught my eye was actually ‘Aickman’, but in more recent times (and after reading our Dabchick Parish Magazine) I learned that Tom Rolt spent some time in Aldbourne. My friend, Warwick Hood, has very kindly sent me his original article – reproduced below.
Who lived in a village like ours: Tom Rolt
Lionel Thomas Caswall Rolt (1910-1974) was a prolific writer and biographer of 18 th and 19th century British engineers, and a successful early campaigner for the revival and preservation of heritage railways and canals.
Born in Chester and educated at Cheltenham College, in 1928 he became an apprentice at a locomotive works in Stoke-on-Trent. This move was to prove significant for Tom’s future, as the chief engineer at the works, who happened to be Tom’s uncle, introduced him to the canal system, on which they travelled in a converted narrow-boat called Cressy.
After being laid off in early 1932, he worked firstly for a firm of agricultural engineers in Hungerford, and then for a year from the summer of 1932 with the Aldbourne Engineering Company (previously W. T. Loveday) at the Foundry in Lottage Road. Here he lodged with the manager and his family “in a cottage at the back of the little works”. In his autobiography “Landscape with Machines” (1971), he devotes several pages to his time in Aldbourne, describing with great fondness various excursions into the surrounding countryside, often in his 1903 Humber. These trips included several to the Boulton and Watt beam engines at Crofton near Bedwyn, then still in full operation. He also recounts two amusing encounters with the local constabulary, in particular an officious sergeant from Ramsbury who spotted that the letters on his 30-year-old number plate were ⅜-inch too short; and he describes in some detail a work colleague at the Aldbourne Engineering Company, Mark Palmer, an elderly native of Aldbourne with a treasure trove of stories.
In 1934, he co-founded the Vintage Sports-Car Club, which is still going strong; and in 1936, he bought Cressy from his uncle, converted it for habitation, and set off on a life on the canals with his girl-friend, who later became his wife.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, Rolt joined the Rolls Royce factory in Crewe, producing Spitfire engines. However, as soon as he was offered a job back at the Aldbourne Foundry, the Rolts headed south in Cressy, arriving at Hungerford some four months later having survived storms, being ice-bound at Banbury and the Thames in flood!
In 1944, he published his book “Narrow Boat”, which kick-started the national revival of interest in the canal system and led directly to the formation of the Inland Waterways Association in 1946. He was also instrumental in the foundation of the Talyllyn Railway Preservation Society, the National Railway Museum, and the Iron Bridge Gorge Museum Trust; and he was a trustee of both the SS Great Britain Restoration Committee and of the Science Museum.
In the 30 years after “Narrow Boat”, he wrote biographies of the engineers Brunel, Telford, Trevithick, Watt, Newcomen and both Stevensons, as well as books about the railways and waterways of England, his 3-volume autobiography, and some ghost stories!
His second wife (Sonia) obtained an OBE in 2010 “for services to industrial archaeology and to heritage”. She died in 2014, aged 95.
Tom Rolt, engineer, author, biographer and heritage campaigner, once lived in our village.
Warwick Hood – October 2015
Jo Hutchings - Aldbourne Archive 