5 October to 30 November 2002
Penrith Museum is hosting a unique exhibition which brings before the public for the first time railway and steamboat photographs taken in the 1920s by teenager William Nash, born in St Bees, Cumberland. It commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of his death on 8 October 1952, when, as a 43 year old railway manager, he was involved in an accident which claimed the lives of 112 people. In what remains one of Britain's worst railway disasters, three passenger trains ploughed into one another at Harrow station on the West Coast Main Line. Nash was travelling in the train from Watford to his office at London Midland Region headquarters. He left a wife and three daughters.
Anniversaries like this will always be tinged with sadness but William's youngest daughter Kate Robinson has spent the last eighteen months working with transport historian Robert Forsythe in order that this anniversary can be marked rather differently. Kate is an accomplished amateur photographer from Hexham and at the beginning of this process was one of the few people who knew that her father had once photographed railway trains across the spread of Great Britain.
He had started taking railway pictures on the miniature Ravenglass and Eskdale Railway when he was 14 in 1923. He continued to do so until the pressures of family and working on the railway for a career got the upper hand. What Kate learnt as she unearthed his old albums and negatives was that her father had a very worthwhile eye and technique for one so young to be taking on the challenge of railway photography (with all that movement) in the 1920s. His material was strong on Cumbria but ventured much further afield. Railways from Jersey to Kyle of Lochalsh feature. Many of the trains he saw were Victorian antiques.
Penrith Museum has been happy to become involved in hosting the exhibition because of the strong local content in the collection. Penrith Station featured in a substantial number of Nash's pictures, possibly because it was the nearest station on the West Coast Main Line that he could access. There is also good coverage of the Ullswater steamers and surrounding landscape. Nash found his way by bike and train to many isolated places, so Alston is also represented.
It is not a frequent experience for a major collection of 70 year old railway pictures, hitherto unseen and unpublished, to come to light. Kate discovered, for she is not a railway enthusiast herself, that many people were interested in her father's material. Some prints (all are hand produced by Kate) have already been printed in railway magazines.
To accompany the exhibition there will be a book called Cumbrian Railway Photographer. This will contain the exhibition images and certain further materials including a biographical note. The book will be published by Oakwood Press and will retail for £9.95. Its ISBN is 0 85361 592 6. For queries about the book availability please contact Oakwood Press FAO Mrs J Kennedy, PO Box 13, Usk, Monmouth, NP15 1YS, telephone: 01291 650444.
For queries about the collection content and its use you can contact either Robert Forsythe, email: robert@forsythe.demon.co.uk or Kate Robinson, email: robinson@lowshield.fsbusiness.co.uk.
