I WONDER if you could possibly publish this letter and photo which was taken on August 6 1958.

I was 14 years old, and it shows two lads standing in front of what appears to be the Highworth train in the bay platform at the east end of Swindon station. 

Every summer I would spend my school holidays at my uncle and aunty’s’ farm, Lower Tadpole Farm, which was situated alongside the old M & SWJ Railway line just a few hundred yards from where the Swindon & Cricklade Railway is now based. 

As the sixth was a Wednesday, and being a trainspotter, I no doubt just had to have a day off from helping on the farm to visit the railway workshops. 

I must have struck up a passing friendship with these two lads while waiting for my train back to Purton.

A couple of years ago, the photo and a letter was published in the Swindon Advertiser but I didn’t have any replies to my query. 

Since then I have met a private pilot, it’s a long story but one of those ‘what a small world’ moments, by the name of Peter Gill who had been a trainspotter at roughly the same time as me and regularly travelled from Cirencester Watermoor to Swindon, no doubt passing the farm, with me trying to get the cows ‘in’ for milking over the line between trains.

On seeing the photo he told me that the blazer badges were most certainly from Cirencester Grammar School as he himself had attended there. 

He thinks that the lad on the left may be Dave Hopkins.

It would be great to put names to the faces after all these years.

JOHN PHILLIPS
Trowbridge