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NIGEL GRESLEY AND THE GREAT NORTHERN

Around the time of the 1895 races to the north, Nigel Gresley, a young apprentice with the London& North Western Railway (LNWR), was employed at Crewe, Cheshire. While he must have watched the races with interest, he could not have known that some forty years later he would force the statisticians to rewrite their record books. For an observer of the 1890s, Gresley’s creations would have seemed beyond belief.

Born in Edinburgh on 19 June 1876, Gresley was the fourth son of the Reverend Nigel Gresley. He spent his early childhood years at the family home in Netherseale, near Swadlincote in Derbyshire, a comfortable existence with several live-in servants. Although Gresley came from a privileged background, he probably had the railway in his blood from birth: he was almost born on a train when his mother, Joanna, was forced to visit the Scottish capital whilst heavily pregnant. She had travelled to Edinburgh to see a specialist because she was suffering from problems in her pregnancy. It was a brave decision, for the experience would have been extremely slow, uncomfortable and arduous, requiring a journey via Burton-on-Trent to Derby, and then onward by a precarious schedule and numerous stops and starts to Scotland.

While she was in Scotland, Joanna Gresley gave birth in a lodging house at number 14 Dublin Street, a location probably influenced by the Reverend William Douglas, a close relative who lived at an adjacent property. The child was given the first name Herbert after one of his godfathers, and then Nigel, as a link to family ancestors dating back to Norman times. Perhaps pride in their heredity also partly explains the family’s unusually competitive spirit: family members were able to trace their roots back many generations to Robert de Toesni, who accompanied William the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. After the Norman Conquest, the family took their name from the local village of Church Gresley, later making their home in nearby Drakelow in South Derbyshire. Gresley’s mother, Joanna Wilson, was a local resident hailing from Barton under Needwood.

The infant Gresley accompanied his mother home from Edinburgh by train. His father was the rector at St Peter’s church in the village, continuing a long-standing family tradition, and it was understood, if not expected, that young Gresley would follow in his father’s footsteps. But from an early age he told friends of his desire to become an engine driver, an unusual ambition for someone of his class in the days before a model railway became an essential possession for a small boy. Given his sheltered lifestyle, it certainly seems odd that he should want to get his hands dirty in some form of industrial occupation. But even as a child Gresley clearly possessed an ind