When I first encountered the 0-4-0VBT locomotives built by De Winton of Carnarvon I was immediately struck by how 'cobbled together' they looked, seeming to be part locomotive, part coffee-pot!
Now this turns out to be a bit of a coincidence strewn entry because the family of a close friend of mine always refer to anything that looks cobbled together as being 'George Henry'd' after an ancestor who was quite adept at what I would call 'the art of bodging' so during my recent visit to the Narrow Gauge Railway Museum I just had to take a photograph of a De Winton locomotive named 'GEORGE HENRY' that was used in the Slate Quarries at Penrhyn.
I showed the photo to my friend and after much rummaging in cupboards she produced the photo below, coincidentally showing the subjects of my last post DOWIE and TOMMY with none other than (her grandfather) George Henry himself on the footplate!
Photo courtesy of the Henson family archive.
It turns out that George Henry Henson was one of a number of family members that worked either in the quarry at Crich or on George Stephenson's mineral railway and along with his brother, Harold, was consulted during the writing of the book 'The Crich Mineral Railways' published in 1971 that first sparked my interest in the line.
What a small world we live in…
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