For generations, children have known Thomas the Tank Engine as the cheerful blue locomotive from the fictional Island of Sodor. But how many know behind Thomas’s familiar blue paintwork lies a surprising web of Jewish railway connections? None of these were intended by his creator, the Reverend Wilbert Awdry, but together they reveal how deeply Jewish enterprise became woven into the wider history of the railways that Thomas came to represent.
The first connections begin not in Britain but, in what was then, Mandatory Palestine. Long before he became one of the world’s best-loved children’s authors, Awdry spent three years in Jerusalem. Between 1933 and 1936 he taught at St George’s School while preparing for ordination as an Anglican priest. At the school Awdry met Margaret Wale, a fellow teacher, whom he married two years later in 1938. Their son Christopher, born in 1940, became the original audience for the bedtime stories that eventually grew into The Railway Series. Had Awdry never gone to Jerusalem, Thomas’s story might never have been told.
During those Jerusalem years Awdry lived in a city served by the famous Jaffa–Jerusalem Railway, the first railway built in what he would have called the Holy Land. It owed its existence to Joseph Navon, a Jerusalem-born Sephardi Jewish entrepreneur who, after years of persistence, secured the Ottoman concession to build the line, overcoming formidable political and financial obstacles before French investors eventually joined the project. By the time Awdry arrived, the railway had become part of the British-administered railway system. There is no concrete evidence that it directly inspired Thomas, but it is difficult to imagine that such an enthusiastic railwayman as Awdry would not have known the line that climbed spectacularly from the Mediterranean coast into the Judean Hills. Put it like this: it is an intriguing coincidence that, before creating the world’s most famous fictional railway, Awdry spent three years living in the vicinity of one of its most remarkable Jewish ones.
Like the fictional railway that Awdry would later create, the Jaffa–Jerusalem Railway became closely associated with tank locomotives working demanding line duties through spectacular scenery. Both, too, possessed distinctive characters all of their own. In Awdry’s stories, the locomotives respond to steep gradients and heavy loads with recognisably human responses, puffing, wheezing and straining as they tackle difficult terrain. The Jerusalem line, for its part, was renowned for the slow progress of its engines as they laboured through the winding ascent into the Judean Hills, a journey that became as much an experience of the landscape as a means of transport. Indeed, its pace became the subject of affectionate jokes – one claimed that a father could begin the journey when his child was born and arrive at his destination in time for their wedding. Consciously or not, the connection between the Jaffa–Jerusalem Railway and the world of Thomas the Tank Engine exists.
Another connection lies in Thomas himself. When he first appeared in 1946, illustrator Reginald Payne gave him the unmistakable appearance of a London, Brighton and South Coast Railway E2 class tank engine. It was a choice of styling that carried an unexpected significance, as the LB&SCR wasn’t simply another railway company. Throughout much of its history it enjoyed an unusually strong association with prominent Jewish businessmen. Sir Isaac Lyon Goldsmid, one of the great figures of Anglo-Jewish emancipation, helped promote the earlier London and Brighton Railway from which the LB&SCR emerged. Leo Schuster served as chairman during a critical period of the company’s development. Other Jewish directors included Ralph Lopes, Hananel de Castro, Jonas Levy, Sir Julian Goldsmid and Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild. Four of them had locomotives named after them: Ralph Lopes and Jonas Levy, in 1888, Goldsmid, in 1892 and Rothschild in 1896.
Nor was the influence confined to the boardroom. David Mocatta, one of Britain’s foremost Jewish architects, designed stations for the railway while simultaneously designing some of Britain’s finest synagogues. The railway that ultimately gave Thomas his physical appearance was therefore one whose financing, governance and architecture had all been shaped by Jewish initiative.
In fact, Awdry later made the LB&SCR part of the official history of Sodor. In The Island of Sodor: Its People, History and Railways, he tells us that Thomas was an E2 from the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway. We also learn that he was acquired by the Fat Controller after the First World War through some particularly astute accounting. It is fair to say that Thomas’s LB&SCR ancestry became part of Awdry’s own canon.
This is more significant than it might seem. Only ten E2 locomotives were ever built, making them among the rarest British tank engines. Even fewer carried the distinctive forward extensions to the side water tanks that Payne gave Thomas, creating one of the most recognisable silhouettes in children’s literature.
Payne didn’t merely draw Thomas as an E2 locomotive. In his earliest adventures Thomas works as a station pilot beneath the great roof of a vast Victorian terminus. It suggests another connection, as the fictional station bears a striking resemblance to Brighton station, the operational heart of the old LB&SCR, where E2 locomotives performed exactly the sort of duties Thomas undertook in Awdry’s stories. No surviving evidence proves that Payne intended Brighton specifically as his blueprint, but the visual and operational setting is unmistakably rooted in the world of the old Brighton Railway.
That world and the stories depicting it took on a new lease of life when they first aired on British television in 1984. There, they not only gained a wider audience but also another Jewish association, this time through the voice of former Beatle Ringo Starr, who narrated the series. Starr wasn’t Jewish, but, like Thomas, he acquired some intriguing Jewish connections of his own. His stepfather, Harry Graves, was Jewish, while his second wife, the actor Barbara Bach – born Barbara Goldbach – had an Austrian-Jewish father. The Beatles, of course, were managed by Brian Epstein, who was Jewish. And bizarrely, when the Beatles played in Montreal in 1964, Starr was mistakenly believed to be Jewish and received an antisemitic death threat, forcing him to perform under heightened security.
When it comes to human characters in the stories, the Fat Controller (Sir Topham Hatt) is perhaps the most visible and well-known. And it would be tempting to see him echoing a familiar image sometimes associated with successful Jewish businessmen of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras – somewhat stout, formally dressed wearing a top hat and a fob watch on his waistcoat, familiar with accounting practices, imperious, perhaps even a bit bossy. But my research indicates that Awdry conceived him simply as the archetypal railway director of his day: prosperous, authoritative and paternal.
The Fat Controller aside, we are, of course, talking about suspicious coincidence here. Awdry never suggested Thomas was inspired by Jewish history and his stories do not contain Jewish characters or themes. But his charming tales about endearing engines with personalities that children can identify with reveal something that is easily overlooked. Thomas’s world was built from authentic fragments of railway life. And the world from which this little engine emerged had been shaped by people of many backgrounds, but particularly Jewish entrepreneurs, financiers, architects and railway directors whose contributions have too often been forgotten.
And isn’t this ironic. Millions of children have grown up loving Thomas and his friends and, as a result, developed a lifelong affection not only for their stories but often also for railways themselves. Yet few will have heard of Joseph Navon, Isaac Lyon Goldsmid, Leo Schuster, Hananel de Castro, David Mocatta or the many other Jewish pioneers who helped finance, build, manage and design railways across Britain and the wider world.
Refracted through this prism, Thomas the Tank Engine acquires an unexpected historical dimension. Behind the smiling little blue engine lies a fascinating network of connections stretching from Victorian Brighton to Jerusalem, and from the boardrooms of the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway to the broader, largely untold story of Jewish participation in the railway age.
Happy Birthday, Thomas – here’s to your next 80 years!
Dr Jonathan Myers is an organisational psychologist with an interest in how Jews
influenced industries
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