Wellington Railway Station
By the advent of the First World War, Wellington’s railway station had been the town’s main transport hub for 65 years. With lines radiating to all points of the compass, it was a busy place in wartime but, after the conflict, it was also a local focal point for unrest that increasingly characterised British industrial relations in 1919.
Vive L’Anglais!
For many townsfolk, Wellington station provided the closest first hand contact with the Great War they would ever experience. Almost as soon as the conflict began, the sight of trains packed with troops heading for the frontline became very familiar. One particularly memorable encounter occurred on Wednesday 12th August 1914, when the 4.48 from Birkenhead to Paddington arrived at the station. Onboard were hundreds of French reservists heading for their homeland, having recently made landfall on the Wirral after crossing the Atlantic. In a scene unlikely ever to be repeated, the Wellington Journal described the sights and sound of the men waving Tricolore flags, singing the Marseillaise and shouting ‘Vive l’Anglais’.

As the fighting wore on, and casualties mounted, hospital trains carrying the wounded to Shrewsbury (from where, after triage, they were ferried to various military infirmaries around the county) would no doubt have become equally common. The railway would also have been the only place where those on the homefront could see the enemy firsthand. In fact, so frequent was the sight of prisoners of war that, in 1916, platform tickets could even be purchased to view their passage through the station. In 1918, this spectacle resulted in an incident that was deemed important enough to be discussed at a Parliamentary Committee debate on the lack of adequate supervision for prisoners. Those assembled heard the testimony of one General McAlmont, who claimed a German captive had jeered at a wounded British soldier from a carriage at Wellington station, leading the man to ‘take the question of discipline into his own hands’, board the train and ‘give the man a jolly good hiding’. However, not all Wellingtonians were left with such a negative impression of their adversaries as one local, Mrs Duffy, remembered:
“I used to travel to Shrewsbury by train; every day our train used to pass the train carrying prisoners of war from the camp on the other side of Shrewsbury. Their train used to stop at Harlescott or Walcot station where they would help the farmers. Our train used to stop at the station at the same time as the train the Germans were in, we used to pretend we were not taking any notice of them but some of them were very good looking and everybody had their eye on them. We used to have a jolly old time pretending we hadn’t noticed, but we did”.
The Triple Threat
Just as it had been the location where many servicemen departed the town in 1914, so the railway station was also the place where practically all demobilised Wellingtonians arrived home when the war was over. Yet, for those in reserved occupations who had remained on the homefront, the end of the conflict brought about a very different set of circumstances. In September 1919, the National Union of Railwaymen called a countrywide strike in response to a Government threat to reduce the improved rates of pay its members had enjoyed in wartime. In official circles, the potential for disruption was taken very seriously and the threat posed by a Triple Alliance of mining, rail and maritime workers was viewed with increasing alarm by those still wary of the potential for a cycle of events similar to those that had unfolded in Russia just two years earlier.
Early in proceedings, detachments of military personnel were posted at various key points along the local network, while passenger traffic (save for a few trains travelling between Wellington and Shrewsbury) practically ground to a halt. Contingencies, however, were in place and the Journal provided a vivid recollection of the scene:
‘Large numbers of vehicles of all types have been seen this week, King Street presenting a military and war-like appearance with its long line of Government lorries. They have rendered valuable assistance in the supply of foodstuffs and in the transport of mails’.

Nearby, the strike also led to the temporary closure of the steelworks at Snedshill, where 600 men were reportedly ‘idle’. Just nine days after it began, however, the strike was over, with the Government agreeing to maintain wage levels for another year. Contrary to expectations, the action was notable for a complete absence of violence that arguably helped to galvanise public opinion towards the railwaymen’s cause. Indeed, Shropshire’s Chief of Police, Major Becke, praised the exemplary conduct of the county’s railway workers while the Liberal MP for The Wrekin, Sir Charles Henry, even appeared to throw his weight behind their action when he wrote in the Journal:
‘Personally, I very much regret that the present crisis was not averted and anything I can do to further a settlement you many rely upon my doing. I am strongly of the opinion that the strike might have been averted if it had not been for the drastic and autocratic attitude of the Minister of Transport and the President of the Board of Trade. My view is – and this is shared by a good many – that the gentlemen, instead of trying to promote a settlement, were anxious to show their authority’.
A week later, the local newspaper reflected on the eventful episode in its near-prescient ‘Current Topics’ column. Counter-intuitively quoting the Labour grandee Philip Snowden, the author sought to highlight the futility of strike action, arguing that ‘if employers and men had been allowed to fight to a finish, the men would have been beaten’. While recognising the right of ‘working people who perform services essential to the existence of happiness’ to a decent standard of ‘food, clothing, leisure and recreation’, the writer thought the energies of the strikers would be better served by placing ‘steady pressure on Parliament’, and asking ‘are strikes worth it’? A question that many local railway workers would have no doubt have reflected on with some interest in 1919.