A HISTORY OF WAGON REPAIRS LIMITED

Its specific aim was

" To carry out in the UK or elsewhere the trade or business of repairing, rebuilding, reconstruction, painting, altering, converting, equipping, adapting, making fit for traffic, supplying and dealing with railway and other wagons, trucks, corves, carriages, trolleys, vans and vehicles, and repairing wheels, axles and components.

To carry out in the UK the building and constructing of new railway and other wagons.

To build, establish, acquire, hire, rent sublet, occupy, use, manage, carry on and deal with any factories, workshops, foundries, depots, mills, buildings sheds, outstations, warehouses, wharves, erections, yards, railways, tramways, sidings etc."

The driving force behind Wagon Repairs Ltd was Dudley Docker ( see below ) but from the beginning the company was supported in its intended trade by many of the major wagon builders, in particular Charles Roberts & Co Ltd of Wakefield. A Director of Charles Roberts & Co, Mr Duncan Bailey, was also a Director of Wagon Repairs Ltd and in 1930 the goodwill and certain repair facilities of Charles Roberts were transferred to Wagon Repairs in return for a fully paid issue of ordinary and preference shares.

Initially, the combined might of Charles Roberts, the Midland Railway Carriage & Wagon Company and Metropolitan RCW – both of Birmingham – Motherwell’s Hurst Nelson and the Gloucester Railway Carriage and Wagon Company Ltd owned this nationwide wagon repair facility.

Indeed, the formation of a company such as Wagon Repairs Ltd was a long overdue consolidation by the various wagon builders, many of whom had repair depots scattered all over the country, often duplicating the work of each other. An example of this was the City of Chester, where four competing depots were ripe for rationalisation. Similarly, Wagon Repairs Ltd could offer private owner wagon fleets better value repairs and – in turn – higher wagon availability. An early customer was Reading Gas Works and the sponsoring companies behind Wagon Repairs Limited also encouraged their customers to use its facilities. As a result, repairs disappeared from Gloucester RCW’s order books by June 1918.

Similarly between 1934 and 1936 a repair contract for 482 wagons owned by Imperial Chemical Industries was transferred from the Gloucester Railway Carriage and Wagon Company to Wagon Repairs Ltd.

Wagon Repairs Ltd had already established a works depot at Stoke on Trent in 1920 and soon afterwards had similar depots in the important traffic centres of South Wales such as Swansea, Cardiff, Bridgend, Barry, Llanelli, Newport, Aberdare and Llanharan. Other wagon repair locations included Lydney, St Phillips in Bristol and Radstock on the Somerset & Dorset Railway. Such depots could undertake any work from replacing a three link coupling or brake block to rebuilding an entire wagon damaged in a shunting mishap or derailment. The periodic repainting of an entire fleet could also be undertaken with the range of metal based paints available at the time ( see below for details ).

Some repair stations, such as the one at Wellingborough, were large enough to need its own works shunter and in 1921 even the Birmingham Railway Carriage and Wagon Company were repairing wagons for several owners on behalf of Wagon Repairs Ltd in their Smethwick factory despite Birmingham RCW not being a founding partner in Wagon Repairs Ltd. S.J. Claye Limited similarly carried out work on behalf of Wagon Repairs Ltd inside its Long Eaton works, as did the Lincoln Engine and Wagon Company.

Indeed, by 1923 Charles Roberts were replaced as shareholders by the Birmingham Railway Carriage & Wagon Company, the British Wagon Company, S.J. Claye Limited of Long Eaton, Harrison & Camm and fellow Rotherham firm the North Central Wagon Company, the latter being the most substantial shareholder with some 25% of preference shares.

Harrison & Camm were to cease trading in 1927 and soon afterwards Wagon Repairs Ltd took over all the repair contracts of the short lived Cardiff-based wagon hire and finance company H.G. Lewis and Company and its associated I.W.Co. Ltd who had over 40 000 wagons on simple hire. Repair contracts were also gained from other wagon repairers and builders and an arrangement with Gloucester RCW was that 10% commission on the cost of repairs to any wagon for which Gloucester held the contract was passed on to Wagon Repairs Ltd.

In fact by July 1936 Gloucester RCW was a major corporate shareholder in Wagon Repairs Ltd with its Chairman, Sir Leslie Boyce, also a personal shareholder. Other shareholders included Metro-Cammell and its subsidiary Midland RCW, Hurst Nelson, North Central Wagon and by this time Charles Roberts of Wakefield had also returned to the fold.

Wagon Repairs Limited continued to be a vital national asset during the frantic days of World War II and continued during the period of austerity that followed for as long as wooden wagons needed repairing.

WAGON COLOURS

REDS AND BROWNS

Iron oxide occurs naturally in many forms in various minerals and yields a large number of pigments. Ochre, sienna and umber – either "raw" or "burnt" – for example are special grades of ferric oxide whose names originally came from regions in Italy where they were purportedly first discovered. In practice these iron pigments can vary from the yellow of ochre through red-brown and deep umber brown to purple brown according to chemistry and particle size. Deliberate calcining – or roasting – iron oxide bearing ores can also increase the range of final colours available and iron oxides have the advantages of being cheap, non toxic ( unlike lead colours ) and fade and weather resistant.

However, iron oxide pigments are dull and the bright Crimson Lake of Midland Railway locomotives was based on a mixture of aluminium and alizarin – a coal tar based synthetic substitute for the organic pigment derived from the root of the madder plant. This would be applied on top of a number of purple brown iron oxide undercoats.

Purple brown – which can vary in appearance from a rich chestnut to plum shades depending on light conditions – in fact conforms to British Standard 449.

VERMILLION

True vermillion is expensively obtained from the cinnabar, the hexagonal crystalline form of mercuric sulphide. However, it can also be made artificially by reacting mercury with alkaline sodium sulphide and heat treating the resultant product to obtain the correct crystalline form. In either case, the tinctorially weak vermillion fades easily in ultra violet light although antimony vermillion ( made from antimony trisulphate ) can be used to create hues from orange to bright red and was much cheaper than the mercury based pigments.

YELLOW

In contrast to the carbon based hard-wearing black, the chrome yellow made from lead chromate –like all lead pigments – darkens on contact with sulphurous fumes to a dull orange. This explains why it was rarely used in the days before the Clean Air Act of 1956!

THE INLAND DOCKERS

Dudley Docker, whose initiative led to the founding of Wagon Repairs Ltd, was the first Chairman of the Metropolitan Amalgamated Carriage and Wagon Company. He was also joint Managing Director of Docker Brothers Ltd, manufacturer of paints and varnishes which was eventually absorbed into the Metropolitan company, and father of Sir Bernard Docker.

In turn, Sir Bernard Docker also became a well known Birmingham industrialist who was Chairman of the Birmingham Railway Carriage and Wagon Company, the Birmingham Small Arms Company ( better known to motorcyclists as BSA ) and also a Director of the Daimler Car Company.

Ironically though it was a special edition Daimler styled by Hoopers, a subsidiary of BSA, that was to lead to his downfall.

The gold-dripping DK400 coupé was created for the 1955 London Motor Show by his wife Lady Norah Docker and cost £12,000 - eight times the price of a Daimler Conquest saloon. It was called the Golden Zebra because of its dual-design theme: everything that would normally be chrome was gold and it was upholstered in real zebra hide. The one-off was crammed with black, white and gold-trimmed accessories.

Norah was Sir Bernard's second wife and Sir Bernard was her third husband, the first two having been millionaires. Sir Bernard’s first marriage was effectively ended by his father Dudley who thought that the actress Jeanne Stuart was not a suitable wife for his son. However due to the Dockers' controversial and extravagant lifestyles during this period of post-war austerity Lady Docker's marketing ploy actually did the company more harm than good. This was particularly true when Sir Bernard and Lady Docker then took The Golden Zebra to Monaco in April 1956 for the wedding of Prince Rainier and actress Grace Kelly, only to be barred from the Mediterranean Principality after Lady Docker tore up the national flag. Weeks later both Sir Bernard and Lady Docker were sacked from Daimler's board for squandering company cash.

BSA AND BLING

Daimler maintained its long-established position as royalty’s favourite in the immediate post-World War II years while grabbing headlines in the popular press thanks to a succession of often outrageous ‘Docker Specials’ featuring bodies by in-house coachbuilder Hooper & Co. The driving force behind these sensational styling exercises - all the more remarkable for their appearance at a time of great austerity - was Lady Docker (née Norah Turner), wife of the parent BSA Group’s millionaire chairman, Sir Bernard Docker.

Lady Docker had been appointed a director of Hooper’s, with special responsibility for styling matters, and set about transforming Daimler’s staid image into something altogether more exciting, commencing with the spectacular ‘Golden Daimler’ which amazed crowds at the 1951 Motor Show.

The culmination of this succession of sensational Docker cars was the ‘Golden Zebra’, a voluptuous extravagance on the 4.6-litre, six-cylinder, DK400 limousine chassis, which debuted on Hooper’s stand at the 1955 Earls Court Motor Show.

"The Motor" magazine commented on Hooper’s masterpiece in glowing terms: ‘The annual set-piece on the Hooper stand is now almost a Motor Show tradition. The Show would hardly be the show it is without a new ‘Docker Special’ to show the world that Britain today has designers and craftsmen able to equal, or excel, the finest artisans of the past. Certainly no one, looking at this year’s Daimler coupé, could say: "They don’t build cars like that now! Fabergé himself might have made it. The outside is cellulosed in perfectly plain ivory-white, with all the bright parts plated in gold. Gold plate is used throughout the interior, while real ivory replaces wood on the instrument panel, and for all capping and finishers set in a very slim, gold-plated framework. The most striking feature however, is the upholstery of the seats and the doors, which is zebra skin. The bench-type front seat is made up of three definite panels and there are two folding armchair seats behind. The zebra skin is applied only to the faces of the cushions and squabs; the borders are in ivory-coloured leather. A new nylon material the colour of ivory and with a tiny spot has been specially woven for the headlining by Messrs Fothergill and Harvey. The roof has a Perspex panel with occluding shutter, and the boot contains rawhide suitcases with Bramah locks. All cocktail and toilet accessories are in ivory or cut-glass and gold; there is even a gilt-and-nylon umbrella sheathed in the near-side door."

Lady Docker was particularly proud of the zebra skin upholstery. When asked ‘Why zebra?’ she famously replied with a flippancy that would have made Marie Antionette blush: ‘Because mink is too hot to sit on.’

In April 1956, ‘Golden Zebra’ and ‘Stardust’, another Hooper show car, were shipped to the South of France for the wedding of Prince Rainier of Monaco and film star Grace Kelly, to which Sir Bernard and Lady Docker had been invited. By this time the Dockers’ perceived extravagance was causing rumblings of discontent within the BSA Group board and on 30th May 1956 a special meeting was called that resulted in Sir Bernard being voted out of office.

The Dockers finally made the Channel Islands their home until Lady Docker died in 1983, although later in the 1980s her name was honoured aboard a floating restaurant in Gloucester Docks.