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GUCCC Town Class Names


RogerM

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It would be nice to know, but so far it all seems conjecture, hopefully some company minutes or similar will surface , Aber doesn't seem to be a town unless it's short for aberystwyth but why hoose a name so remote from the canal?

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It would be nice to know, but so far it all seems conjecture, hopefully some company minutes or similar will surface , Aber doesn't seem to be a town unless it's short for aberystwyth but why hoose a name so remote from the canal?

Most of them are nowhere near a canal. FMC snapped up a lot of canal towns for their boats. I wondered about Aber - what does Tarboat's Bradshaw say?

 

Aha! Wikipedia tells me that there is an Aber railway station (and there was another one as well).

 

Seems to add credence to the Bradshaw hypothesis if there were not actually places of that name.

Edited by Chertsey
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Yes, King George V stayed thereabouts convalescing and the town took the title 'of the King' - Regis.

 

Bit of a dull place. http://www.bognor-regis.org/History/history_home.htm

 

and the award for understatement of the year goes to ..... Derek! dull isn't a word i'd use for the cess pit of a town I should know i lived there for 10years at 16 yrs of age i escaped the dump!!

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Most of them are nowhere near a canal. FMC snapped up a lot of canal towns for their boats. I wondered about Aber - what does Tarboat's Bradshaw say?

 

Aha! Wikipedia tells me that there is an Aber railway station (and there was another one as well).

 

Seems to add credence to the Bradshaw hypothesis if there were not actually places of that name.

 

 

 

 

Ok I bow to your superior knowledge I just find it difficult given the competition between canals and railways that hey would deliberately choose station names.

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The thing that convinced me about the station theory is that (contrary to what has been claimed earlier in this thread) several of the names refer to places that are really quite small villages e.g. Aynho, Calstock, Fulbourne, Padbury, Purton, Seascale, Starcross Staverton etc. That is just a few that I know are small off the top of my head but there are probably more.

 

Now, if GUCCC had picked the names of 172 towns and cities in Britain then the fact that all of them had a railway station would not be significant. However, they didn't, they compiled a list that contained a significant number of small villages and yet it turns out they still all had a railway station. The odds of accidentally picking villages that all had stations is surely very low. It therefore points to the names having been compiled from a railway directory or some other list of railway stations.

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Pedant Alert

 

Or even Yeovil Town (GW/SR Joint I think)

 

Oh, and Yeovil Pen Mill was GW (on the line from Castle Cary to Dorchester, formerly the Bristol and Weymouth railway)

 

 

N

 

I can't believe I got that wrong. How embarrassing! :blush:

 

My excuse is that whenever I think of Yeovil Pen Mill it brings to mind this picture my dad took there in the early 1960s:

Yeovil

 

The loco is an ex-Southern one and that is what put me off the scent!

Edited by RogerM
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I can't believe there is such a topic over origins of town or village names. They are just names. A towns size in population is always changing, it matters not. Bradshaw died in 1853 so any timetable attibuted to his name thereafter and used as a kind of definitive guide is . . . . ?

 

As for 'Class' distinction - sheesh! Simple enough little word categorising a type.

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It would be nice to know, but so far it all seems conjecture, hopefully some company minutes or similar will surface , Aber doesn't seem to be a town unless it's short for aberystwyth but why hoose a name so remote from the canal?

I think Aber was a location on the Chester & Holyhead, between Penmaenmawr and Bangor, in fact a contraction of Abergwyngregyn; I believe it was the location of the first set of water troughs.

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I think Aber was a location on the Chester & Holyhead, between Penmaenmawr and Bangor, in fact a contraction of Abergwyngregyn; I believe it was the location of the first set of water troughs.

 

 

 

Thank you - Perhaps the birth place of one of the GU managers or other co-incidence.

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Ok I bow to your superior knowledge I just find it difficult given the competition between canals and railways that hey would deliberately choose station names.

I have no superior knowledge, just consulted Wikipedia.

My hypothesis is that they decided to use town names and then turned to a railway gazetteer as an easy source for a large number of them. Aside from being alphabetical I would guess the selection was pretty random.

We will probably never know for sure but such a theory does fit the known facts.

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I have no superior knowledge, just consulted Wikipedia.

My hypothesis is that they decided to use town names and then turned to a railway gazetteer as an easy source for a large number of them. Aside from being alphabetical I would guess the selection was pretty random.

We will probably never know for sure but such a theory does fit the known facts.

 

Why a railway gazetteer rather than a trade directory though? Were I doing the job, I would be trying to select names that had some meaning to my potential customers

 

Richard

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There's a thought, we might have had boats called: Draw pull, Deck light, Three eights Whitworth, Ardazrocs (a trade name of a company supplying drill bits), - or Elsan . . .

 

Never had 'Droylsden', but as it sounds like someone having just tasted black molasses for the first time - understandable.

 

In picking town names one only had to go to the index in any road gazeteer. But as it was during a time when public transport was used by most, a railway gazeteer might well have been the more handy item.

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Why a railway gazetteer rather than a trade directory though? Were I doing the job, I would be trying to select names that had some meaning to my potential customers

 

Richard

 

During that time, most people in any commercial business would have kept a 'Bradshaw' and, most probably, a directory of railway goods facilities. Railway companies issued the latter free of charge to potential customers . . .

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During that time, most people in any commercial business would have kept a 'Bradshaw' and, most probably, a directory of railway goods facilities. Railway companies issued the latter free of charge to potential customers . . .

 

How much speculation is it possible to put behind this naming theory before it collapses

 

Richard

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How much speculation is it possible to put behind this naming theory before it collapses

 

Richard

 

My post did not contain speculation. Prior to nationalization, railway companies were extremely pro-active in securing business and their publications were far more widespread than, for example, road maps.

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My post did not contain speculation. Prior to nationalization, railway companies were extremely pro-active in securing business and their publications were far more widespread than, for example, road maps.

 

And so were trade directories, I guess the Post Office and so on

 

The OPs contention is that the boats were exclusively named after railway stations. I can think of other sources of lists of names - assuming they were looking for a convenient list and didn't have a more logical method like where their customer's had their head offices

 

So, I think the proposal falls on two counts. Railway Gazetters were not the only handy list of names, there is no evidence that using a convenient list of names is how they went about the job

 

Richard

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Would a trade directory have contained a list of place names across the whole country? Why not a Bradshaw? The evidence for it is the very fact that all the places chosen do have a station.

 

I wouldn't imagine that GUCCCo would have felt any need for the names to be relevant to their customers. Customers wouldn't care what the boats carrying their goods were called. Very much for internal use - and even then largely because of tradition; after all, they all had numbers too but most documentation I am aware off carries the names.

 

Why towns at all? Simply because there are plenty of them and the were lots of boats to name.

 

It can only be hypothesis and theory, but that is the theory that fits the known facts most closely.

Edited by Chertsey
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How much speculation is it possible to put behind this naming theory before it collapses

 

Richard

 

Hah! As much as people have time to spend at a keyboard!!

 

Seriously, as regards to evidence, we seem only to have the fact that many boats were named after towns, and erroneously or otherwise, called 'Town' class boats if built by the two main builders for GUCCC and the larger not the smaller. But conjecture can still be fun, and some interesting facts often pop up along the way.

 

Edited to add:

Better not forget Walkers as builders of many boats named after towns before Laurence jumps on me.

Edited by Derek R.
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Where did the railway gazetteer legend first appear anyway? Could it be traced back to someone who was actually in a position to know?

 

A theory doesn't collapse because of speculation. If the speculation doesn't disprove it, it becomes more credible.

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I have been looking through my 'Bradshaws' - I cannot locate those from the 193os (probably in a box in the loft) but quick glance through the September 1910 edition confirms use of the modern spelling of 'Berkhamsted' in that publication at that time. That doesn't discount the theory that the names were taken from a 'Bradshaw' because, as is likely, if the names were copied out in handwriting, there is every possibility that a signwriter subsequently used had difficulty reading the names and used their own interpretation of the spelling.

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<snip>

 

A theory doesn't collapse because of speculation. If the speculation doesn't disprove it, it becomes more credible.

 

Sorry, I can't see how speculation proves a theory. Speculation is derived from assumption. It may suggest places to look for evidence but it doesn't make a theory more credible.

 

For instance, I speculate JFK was shot by John Wayne

 

Doesn't do anything for credibility - does it

 

Richard

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Sorry, I can't see how speculation proves a theory. Speculation is derived from assumption. It may suggest places to look for evidence but it doesn't make a theory more credible.

 

For instance, I speculate JFK was shot by John Wayne

Doesn't do anything for credibility - does it

 

Richard

He had a alibi

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I have been looking through my 'Bradshaws' - I cannot locate those from the 193os (probably in a box in the loft) but quick glance through the September 1910 edition confirms use of the modern spelling of 'Berkhamsted' in that publication at that time. That doesn't discount the theory that the names were taken from a 'Bradshaw' because, as is likely, if the names were copied out in handwriting, there is every possibility that a signwriter subsequently used had difficulty reading the names and used their own interpretation of the spelling.

 

The Berkhamstead thing is a red herring, In the OP misspelling is used as positive proof (Berkhamstead) and is discounted as negative proof (Bilster, Glossor)

 

Richard

 

Where did the railway gazetteer legend first appear anyway?

 

<snip>

 

This is a very interesting question

 

Richard

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Sorry, I can't see how speculation proves a theory. Speculation is derived from assumption. It may suggest places to look for evidence but it doesn't make a theory more credible.

 

For instance, I speculate JFK was shot by John Wayne

 

Doesn't do anything for credibility - does it

 

Richard

Speculation challenges the hypothesis. If it stands up to the challenge, it is more credible. Falsifiability and all that. I think the Bradshaw hypothesis is standing up to the challenging speculation rather well, while alternative hypotheses have been challenged more successfully by, for example, evidence and known facts.

 

We have accepted that we don't, and are unlikely ever, to know for sure unless new evidence emerges, but should that stop us trying to build the best theory we can on the basis of what we do know, through a process of discussion and, yes, speculation?

 

You start with a hypothesis, try to prove it false, and what remains after that process is a theory, if I remember correctly from my brief foray into the philosophy of science.

Edited by Chertsey
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Bradshaw died in 1853 so any timetable attibuted to his name thereafter and used as a kind of definitive guide is . . . . ?

 

Bradshaw's timetables were published under his name until 1961. Between 1923 and 1939 3 of the 4 post-grouping railway companies (except GWR) used Bradshaw's publisher Henry Blacklock to print their own timetables, which were mainly reprints of the Bradshaw pages. So 'Bradshaws' was the de facto standard for railway timetables at the time the GU boats were named.

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