Tags
Black Country, Black Country Living Museum, Blackpole, Cadbury's, chocolate, Dudley, railways, Railways in Worchester, Trains., Winston Churchill, Worchester, Worchester News
According to my notes, this is a “O-6-OST Manning Wardle locomotive built at the Boyne Engine Works, Leeds in 1923” (I hope I have made a note of this correctly, for those of you who are interested in the technicalities of these things), but I’m going to refer to it as Winston.
For those of you more interested in chocolate than steam locomotives you might be interested to know that Winston was ordered in 1923 by the Cadbury brothers, of Cadbury’s Chocolate fame, and spent a considerable time at Cadbury’s Blackpole factory, near Worchester (a place I had previous known absolutely nothing about).
According to the Worchester News, the Cadbury brothers bought the former munitions factory site at Blackpole from the Government in 1921 and it became a centre for “marzipan manufacturing” and “the sorting of nuts“, amongst other things. In 1966 the Board of Trade refused permission for a new cake factory on the site and by 1971 production had moved to Moreton-in-the-Wirral. To quote from the newspaper again, “…of the 680 employees losing their jobs, 320 were described as “part-time married women“”.
Another interesting fact from the BBC News website, “The site had its own sports ground – BBC Hereford & Worcester’s Dave Bradley remembers that cricket teams loved playing there, as they were served chocolate cake“. That sounds like my sort of gig!
The Railways in Worchester website has some wonderful photographs of trains working at the Blackpole factory and they give a good impression of how busy the factory must have been in its hay day.
The Antics Roadshow blog 
Nice picture – pity they do not make them like that any more. Interesting that it was built in the “Boyne” Engineering Works, Leeds, since the main Irish engineering works for the GNR was at Dundalk, close to the River Boyne in Ireland. Des
That’s an interesting point, Dez. I hadn’t considered looking into the Leeds/Boyne angle. It seems that the gate piers leading into what remains of the Boyne Engineering Works are Grade II listed and I this website says the land the works was built on belong to a “Lord Boyne”, so there is probably an Irish connection somewhere: http://www.leedsengine.info/leeds/histmw.asp
Yes – I did some checking. The link is Lord Boyne (an Irish title) and he owned the land the works were on. So the link is there but it is connected with the title and not the engine-building function. Coincidence! Des.