Thomas the Tank Engine is fifty years old. The stories were first created by an Anglican clergyman, the Reverend Wilbert Awdry, as a way of entertaining his young son Christopher as he recovered, in isolation, from scarlet fever. Christopher demanded that he be told the stories again and again and, in the way of small children, corrected his father whenever inconsistencies crept into the retold stories. In self defense the Rev. Awdry wrote the first stories down on available scraps of paper. To add to the story telling, the Rev. Awdry drew simple pictures of steam locomotives on the paper along with the stories. A head on view being the easiest to draw, he drew a row of locomotives standing in an engine shed with a human face and expression on each locomotive's smokebox door.
"Why is this engine sad, Daddy?", asked Christopher, pointing at an unhappy faced locomotive. "Because he's old and tired and he hasn't been out in a long time.", replied his father. "What's his name, Daddy?"
"Edward" was the first name that came into the Rev. Awdry's mind. This was the genesis of "Edward's Day Out", the first in almost a hundred simple moral tales about the exploits and adventures of a group of railway engines given human personalities.
Mrs Awdry believed that these children's stories had some merit and so pestered her husband to "do something about them". Through a distant cousin a small publisher, Edmund Ward, was found who was interested in these railway stories. The connection was made so suddenly that the Rev. Awdry had to send the stories as they were written on scraps of paper as the original manuscript. Nevertheless in 1945 the first of the Railway Series of books "The Three Railway Engines" appeared. This was a book, small enough for children's hands, containing three stories, "Edward's Day Out" being the first. The book was laid out with the text on the left hand page and a full page illustration of an incident in the story on the right.
Thomas the Tank Engine did not appear until the second book was published a year later in 1946 and more books followed at yearly intervals. The illustrator for the first dozen or so books was C. Reginald Dalby, who established the basic appearance of each locomotive character from the Rev. Awdry's sketches and by looking at real steam engines in use in Britain at that time. Thus an obscure 0-6-0T Class E2 shunting engine built in the Victorian era for the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway became the model for Thomas, now known to millions of children worldwide. Gordon can be seen to be based on a Gresley A3 Pacific from the London and North Eastern Railway; Flying Scotsman being the most famous real locomotive of this class. |
