Books
Tom Rolt, L T C Rolt on the covers of his many books, was to the 20th century what Samuel Smiles was to the 19th: the chronicler of engineering deed and history, profiling the great engineers of yesteryear and their works. But they were very different writers.
Smiles idolised his subjects and created myths that may have helped the reputations of his Victorian contemporaries, but have hardly done favours to those engineers who followed, most of whom paled by comparison. Smiles now reads poorly.
Rolt, a better historian and better engineer, concentrated more on incident, achievement and event, less on personality, and his books stand the test of time. Full of anecdote and humour, they read well 40 or 50 years after they were written.
More than that, Rolt had a proper, modern appreciation of the change in engineering in mid-Victorian times, when the subject mushroomed in influence, complexity and content to the point where the individual engineer became less of the story than the engineering team, and where the application of scientific rigour replaced the gut feel of earlier developments.
This year is the centenary of Rolt’s birth – last month actually – and the History Press, a small Gloucestershire publisher, is reissuing nine of his books. They include Victorian Engineering, which in less than 250 pages charts the progress of a whole century, his biographies of Brunel and Telford, plus his own autobiography.
Rolt’s life and books covered railways – he was among those who restored the Talyllyn to working order in the 1950s – and canals, where he was the founder of the Inland Waterways Association and lived for years on a narrowboat. The reissued books cover other interests too: early balloonists and the supernatural. And they include Red for Danger, his history of railway accidents, the investigations that followed and the development of the safety systems that make a UK train one of the safest places to be on the planet.
With death and destruction on virtually every page and an engaging and entertaining prose style, Red for Danger was pretty much the favourite book of my teenage years, and I can still quote large chunks of it at will. That one hasn’t appeared in the PE office yet and, when it does, it won’t stay there. Rolt’s books stand re-reading, and I need to renew my acquaintance with the Huntingdonshire snowstorm of 21 January 1876, the tragic figure of Signalman Holmes, and the train that blew off the Owencarrow viaduct.
- The backlist of L T C Rolt’s works are available from The History Press, priced £9.99-£17.99