The History of the Midland Railway Society

The incentive for the establishment of the Midland Railway Society lay with Bob Essery, who persuaded the editor of Railway Modeller, John Brewer, to put a paragraph in the editorial for the October 1980 issue of the magazine as follows:

‘Although the old Midland Railway and its successors have always been popular lines with modellers, it is somewhat surprising that no specialist society exists to study the MR. Bob Essery has such a venture in mind and would like to hear from readers who would be interested in the formation of such a group. Views and comments on the idea should be sent to Bob c/o Matlock Bath Model Railway, Temple Road, Matlock Bath, Derbys.’

The item attracted sufficient positive replies for the idea to be taken forward and after some further correspondence an inaugural meeting was held on 21 February 1981 in a small café/restaurant at Farnah Green just off the A617 Ashbourne – Belper road overlooking the Ecclesbourne Valley. The venue was arranged by Jeff Dove, who had taken on the role of Secretary pro tem. There were thirteen attendees with apologies for absence from another eleven and after much discussion it was decided that the aims of the Society would be:

1. To act as a general information service on all aspects of the Midland Railway.
2. To carry out historical research with the aim of creating a fund of accurate information on the Midland Railway.
3. To popularise the Midland Railway, in furtherance of which aim the Society should look for a venue or other means of ‘putting the Midland on display’.

It was also decided that the Society would be a closed one with admittance being by agreement of the membership as a whole. This was not uncommon at the time for what became known as ‘line societies’ and was intended to keep the administrative burden down as well as trying to ensure that the membership would be productive and interactive. In the latter sense the policy was successful as the majority of members regularly attended meetings and the output of written material by members concerning the Midland was notable. There were deliberately no rules or constitution so that the Society could develop without constraint and initially the only officer was to be the Secretary. As well as filling that role, Jeff Dove undertook to prepare a newsletter.

The second meeting took place on the weekend of 12 and 13 September 1981 with formal business conducted on the Saturday afternoon in the Duffield Post Office after it closed, Jeff Dove being the postmaster there. Bob Essery was unable to attend as he had broken his arm but he sent a taped message that David White played to us concerning the Matlock Bath model railway. This huge 0 Gauge layout with a scene depicting Miller’s Dale station and surroundings and another showing Monsal Dale viaduct, had been built by David White in a building that was part of the Slater’s Plastikard factory, of which David was Managing Director, during the mid- and late-1970s as a museum of the Midland Railway in the Peak District. By 1980, however, David was unable to continue with the project and was looking for some way of it continuing, at which stage Bob Essery had suggested setting up a trust to complete and operate the layout as a public attraction. The formation of the Midland Railway Society was, of course, seen by Bob and David as an ideal opportunity to realise this aim so the taped presentation outlined the case for the Society taking on the task. The meeting agreed to the proposal and it was decided to approach the County Council with a view to forming a joint trust to take over the layout.

It was at this stage that Dave Hunt incautiously said that there really should be a Chairman for this to go forward. There was then a discussion during a coffee break between David White and Bob Davey, who was a solicitor, following which Dave Hunt was asked if he would take on the role, which he filled for the next fourteen years. The meeting also decided that to meet expected outgoings the annual subscription would henceforth be £5 and that a Treasurer should be appointed. Adrian Prescott volunteered for the role and continued to fill it for many years, his greeting to new members of, ‘Hi, I’m Adrian Prescott the Treasurer. You owe me five quid.’ becoming quite famous,

The rest of the weekend followed what was for a long time the usual format after the formal business for the Society’s twice-yearly meetings of a dinner and evening gathering at a local hostelry then on the Sunday a visit to a site of Midland interest. For that meeting the Sunday venue was the Midland Railway Trust at Butterly. Since the initial advert for setting up the Society had been in Railway Modeller, it was unsurprising that nearly all the early members were, in fact, modellers and the Saturday evenings featured quite a few members’ models brought along for display.

By the next meeting, which also began at the Duffield post office on 27 March 1982, the Society membership had increased to about thirty and there had been some changes in organisation. Peter Truman was Newsletter Editor and had temporarily become Secretary in place of Jeff Dove. Setting up of the trust to take over and run the railway with the co-operation of, and a loan from, the County Council had been delayed since our legal representative had dropped out through pressure of work, so David White was in the process of handing over the paperwork to Slaters’ solicitors. However, the project was still progressing and by the spring of 1983 the Midland Railway Educational Society had been set up as a vehicle through which the Midland Railway Society controlled the Matlock Bath Model Railway Museum. The layout featured as Railway of the Month in the May issue of Railway Modeller with further photographic coverage the following month.

In September 1983, to mark its 20 anniversary the LMS Society organised a large and well attended exhibition of models and ephemera at the Queen’s Hotel in Leeds, for which the Midland Railway Society was invited to contribute a display. In this, the Society was extremely successful and its reputation enhanced, which resulted in an increase in the number of requests that the Secretary received on Midland matters. Also at this time, Maurice Loydall took over as Secretary and Roy Spalding became Newsletter Editor. At the beginning of 1984 Dave Hunt presented a cup to the Society to be awarded at the March meeting each year for the best model of a Midland Railway subject displayed at that event, the first winner being Peter Truman for some scratchbuilt 0 Gauge dumb buffered wagons.

By that time, a manager for the day to day running of the Matlock Bath Model Railway had been appointed who also ran a model shop on the premises. This meant that the layout would be open to visitors every day, which, it was hoped, would generate an income stream that would cover running costs and enable the work needed to complete the exhibition as well the loan from Derbyshire council to be repaid. Sadly, the number of people visiting the layout fell far short of expectations and the Educational Society was soon experiencing financial difficulties. Various initiatives were tried, including setting up a prize draw and work starting on a Midland miscellany type book, the proceeds of which would go to the Society, but before they could take proper effect the financial situation had deteriorated to the extent that the council appointed a receiver and the exhibition closed. Some last minute attempts were made to preserve the model intact but failed and despite all the hard work put into it, during the winter of 1984 Derbyshire County Council had the Monsal Dale section dismantled and sold. For a while it was on display at Butterly but the viaduct was then sold on to a private customer and the scenery broken up. The Millers Dale scene was purchased by Slaters from the council to save it from being broken up and for some time was kept in its original building where it was looked after by Bill Hudson, who had taken over the rest of the premises as a bookshop. When Bill moved his shop to Matlock station, the HMRS agreed to take the model and a group of volunteers worked every Thursday for a year to dismantle it. Unfortunately it was then stored in a shipping container with no heating or ventilation so the scenery was effectively destroyed but the station buildings and the viaducts survived and are in now in store in the HMRS building at Butterly. Fortunately, all the locomotives and rolling stock had remained the property of private individuals and so were saved and returned to their owners. Work on the book by Peter Truman and myself continued, however, and it eventually became Midland Railway Portrait. The whole sorry saga of the Educational Society, whilst not affecting the Midland Railway Society directly, caused a great deal of stress and heartache for those members who were trustees or who had been otherwise involved and certainly had a detrimental effect on levels of enthusiasm for a time.

Following the demise of the Educational Society trust and the loss of the Matlock Bath Model Railway, the Midland Railway Society’s emphasis shifted somewhat. While a significant number of members were still railway modellers, a growing number were not and the Society’s raison d’être became more concerned with researching the Midland for its own sake rather than in order primarily to facilitate the construction of accurate models. Membership was still ‘closed’, i.e., applications were considered by the members present at meetings, and was maintained at about forty. Meetings were held twice a year in Spring and Autumn and rather than always being in the Matlock area began to be held at various locations around the country in areas of Midland interest.  They took place over a whole weekend, the Saturday afternoon generally starting with a ‘business’ meeting kept as brief as possible then the remainder of the day as well as the Sunday would consist of looking at places of Midland involvement in the area. Saturday evenings would be spent at a suitable small hotel and after dinner many items of interest such as drawings and diagrams, photographs, models and other artefacts brought along by members would be displayed and discussed. In 1987 Andy Brown took over as Secretary, a position he held until 1995.

But as the 1980s came to a close there were rumblings of discontent within the Society’s ranks. Some members felt that the MRS should be paying more attention to its original aims by writing more books and articles for publication and there were many discussions on whither the Society or is the Society withering? Although attendance at meetings had fallen off somewhat in the mid 1980s, by 1990 numbers had recovered but there was a feeling in some quarters that we should be trying to attract more members. In order to do that, though, the Society would have to raise its profile, which, it was felt, could be achieved by developing projects to provide more information to the public and featuring the fruits of members’ research in the railway and modelling press. There was some discussion about making the Society ‘open’ but at the time this was not generally supported.

Despite a resurgence in fortunes at the beginning of the 1990s, by 1993 the Society was somewhat in the doldrums. There had been insufficient interest of late in meetings with the result that none was held that year, material for the Newsletter was not forthcoming in sufficient quantity and progress was lacking in the production of publications that members were supposed to be working on. There was a hiatus in Newsletter production as well since Roy Spalding was forced through ill health to resign as Newsletter Editor after undertaking the task for nine years and sadly died just before Christmas. During his tenure the Newsletter had become what today’s membership would probably think of as a combination of Newsletter and Journal and often contained small anecdotes and cartoons that Roy produced. His replacement was Barrie Fitch.

The question of the Society’s future came to a head in 1994. As part of what was intended to have been a celebration of the 150th anniversary of the formation of the Midland Railway, Bob Essery had undertaken to produce a commemorative issue of British Railway Journal and had been promised sufficient material from within the Society’s ranks to achieve that aim. By the time the deadline for material to be sent to the publishers arrived, however, very little of that promised had been completed and the project was abandoned. This failure caused severe embarrassment for both Bob and the Society as well as dissatisfaction that a milestone such as the sesquicentenary did not attract sufficient interest from members, which precipitated more discussion on whether the Society had a future. Although there was a group who were content to see the Society as simply a vehicle for like minded Midland enthusiasts to get together a couple of times a year and to help each other with research and/or modelling projects as well as answering queries from outside, there was also a faction who considered that, in order to fulfil the original aims, the Society had to expand. The launch of Midland Record by Wild Swan under Bob Essery’s editorship was seen as a complicating factor as although it would help in achieving the aim of popularizing the Midland Railway, it also potentially diverted material from the Society’s Newsletter and hoped-for publications.

Despite all this, a very successful meeting was held based in Oakham during the weekend of September 24 and 25 1994, at which the whole subject of the direction the Society should take was discussed at length. It was decided that a steering committee should be established consisting of Bob Essery, Peter Truman and Roy Burrows, the latter having mounted an exhibition of his own collection and held a dinner at the Derby Midland Hotel in celebration of Midland 150 that been a great success. The aim was for those three to canvass as far as possible members’ ideas and suggestions on the future and to come up with proposals based on them.

During the following year the deliberations of the steering committee coalesced into what was a fairly simple choice; either the Society continued in its ‘closed’ form, albeit with some changes in order to encourage participation and increase membership, or it became an ‘open’ society with a whole new structure and set of aims along lines suggested by Roy Burrows. There was also a suggestion that was something of a half-way house between the two. The options were communicated to members and it was announced that a postal vote as well as a vote of those present at the next meeting would be taken to decide the issue. At a meeting held over the weekend of 28 and 29 October 1995 in Lincoln the matter was decided in favour of the Society becoming open with a new constitution and an Executive Committee to steer it through what was obviously going to be a fairly demanding transition. For various personal reasons neither Andy Brown nor Dave Hunt felt able to carry on in the roles of Secretary or Chairman at the time so with the exception of Adrian Prescott, who continued as Treasurer, the baton was passed on to a new Executive Committee headed by Glynn Waite.

And so the ‘new’ Midland Railway Society came into being.

Based on a Newsletter article marking the Society’s fortieth anniversary in 2021, by Dave Hunt with assistance from Andy Brown, David White, and Adrian Tester.