“It was not a job, it was a way of life”.

Bateman quotes Harry Roberts, who, in 1972, was sent to close Swindon Works down, but liked what he saw despite the ‘disorientated, disordered atmosphere’, and decided to try to renew the works instead.

This book dates back to another time when enormous social upheaval was taking place that would change the face and nature of railways throughout the land, and of Swindon and its works forever.

Little did he realise when he wrote his observations and records in the late 1970s and early ‘80s that a few short years down the line what he wrote of would no longer exist. Without such books as this one, insider grass roots history would be lost.

When Ron Bateman stepped across the threshold of the renowned Works Training School, then British Rail, in 1977, the works and Swindon had long since said goodbye to the era of steam – ‘the very thing on which the proud reputation of the works had been built’.

Its final goodbye had been the 9F freight locomotive No. 92220 Evening Star (1960) and the book coincides with the sixtieth anniversary of its naming. Bateman recreates the hopeful and welcoming atmosphere that greeted him and all the other young, eager, wet-behind-the-ears would-be apprentices.

He recalls how they were made to feel ‘special’ which helped him through the first year of the Engineering Industry Training Board training certificate.

His first day on entering the works was one of the most memorable moments of his life. The then-much-reduced works still housed ‘the once largest building in Europe under one roof – the mighty A-shop’, and we are treated to such a first-impressions description that one can almost smell the smells.

Bateman was fortunate in being offered a full four-year apprenticeship to become a painter. One of his first initiations, amongst the many, was to learn a whole new vocabulary. Another important rule every ‘greenback’ had to learn was the works’ etiquette, and he takes the reader through the ins-and-outs as well as the penalties for oversights. The works was full of characters, with their own nicknames and quirks and we meet many of them in the book.

By the end of his apprenticeship and the beginning of employment as a skilled craftsman, the ever-present anxieties regarding the works, and his and his work-mates’ futures, were becoming more prominent, ‘vacillating between feelings of hope and moods of despair’.

Unemployment was the word on everyone’s lips and at the back of everyone’s minds. It never went away.. Bateman skilfully captures the mood from the early 1980s as the desperation of the men mounted as they waited and wondered.

When the axe falls in May 1984 and the Adver carried the fateful word ‘DOOMED’, the fight to the death began. It was a fight to the bitter end, but the end came on March 26, 1986, as the men walked away taking the soul of the works with them.

Dr Rosa Matheson's review of End of the Line by Ron Bateman.