NEW FEBRUARY 2016. The late Peter Proud donated some of his papers to our Collection. Among them is a file of correspondence with one Charles Boris Ivanhoe, dating back to Peter’s time as editor of the RCTS Railway Observer in the early 1950s.

Charles was born in 1883. He spent his childhood around Stratford and Tottenham. Although not from a railway family he took much interest in the Great Eastern Railway and kept notebooks of his observations. During the 1914‐1918 War he was in the Royal Engineers. He served in France driving railway engines, amongst them some GER locomotives which had been shipped over there. At the time of these letters he had married a Bristol lady and now lived in the West Country, but he still clearly retained a strong interest in the GER he remembered. He appeared to write with spontaneity, probably in much the same way as he would speak. Most of the material relates to GER locomotives, but unusually a frequent theme was the tenders to which they were coupled at different stages of their lives. He was certainly not overawed by other writers’ reputations, in particular Ahrons and Langley Aldrich, both of whom he regarded as unreliable.

In fairness it should be stressed that we have no way of checking what he puts forward as facts. At one point he implied that his records should go on a bonfire, and as far as we know they have not survived. Nevertheless what he wrote is of sufficient interest to be made widely available for the first time.

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