RECORDS of GOODS and PASSENGER AGENTS
for the Midland Railway

The Midland Railway Study Centre is indebted to Graham Bocking for the exceptional amount of work he has put into collating details of the Midland Railway's Goods Agents and associated staff. The notes that follow have been prepared by Graham.

I started off with the Accountant’s lists of agents and those from the back pages of timetables, but supplemented these with information from the MR and LMS staff records in the National Archives and the census returns (both online via Ancestry) and newspaper reports from the BNA of MR staff appointments, particularly those in Railway News which were really comprehensive.

The resulting spreadsheet now has more than 1200 entries and is of course, like many such projects, a work in progress. I still have it in mind to add data myself as not all of the agents in your lists have been covered until now, although most Goods and some Passenger are in there, even if not with complete information on the different posts held during their careers.

Names

Currently there are two separate fields for surname and first name/initials.

Dates of birth and commencement of employment

In the meantime, compared with the first version which you saw, there are now more dates of birth, in many cases the full date is included from staff records or census returns, but for a majority at least the year of birth. The staff records also provided dates on which a person commenced employment with the Midland and started and ended a specific post; you’ll see that some of these dates are in the form pre-1901 or post-1901, this is because the status is at a specific date, such as that of a census, but no information is available about how long before or after the appointment started or ended. At least it helps to follow how a career developed. Newspaper reports also had mostly just the year or month and year, only occasionally the exact date, except when there was a major reorganisation such as the Goods Department decentralisation on 1 January 1903.

Place of Birth

This is almost exclusively from census returns, occasionally from a newspaper report of appointment, retirement or an obituary. In many cases the first appointment with the Midland at the age of 14-16 was close to the place of birth or childhood residence.

Place of employment

Each separate posting has a separate entry, but the foregoing items, name, date of birth, etc, are repeated for each entry so that if necessary it stands on its own.

Position

Although I started off with Goods Agents, the scope of the spreadsheet has extended considerably to include data on people who at some stage in their Midland careers were Goods, Passenger or General Agents, also Station Masters given that at many small and medium sized places one person fulfilled both roles. For these people I’ve added data on other posts which they held, for example starting as a Goods or Booking Clerk and progressing to District Goods Manager, District Superintendent or higher still. Stepping stones along the way such as Canvasser or Inspector positions are also there.

Sources

As it soon became necessary to check back for further details of a person’s career, or resolve conflicting information, I started adding the sources of information for each entry, listed in this column.

Notes

These are not included in every case but cover details ancillary to a person’s career, for example date when a person retired or died, details of family members with relevant and or prominent positions with the Midland. Where I haven’t had time to enter all separate positions for a person, sometimes I’ve listed them in the notes instead.