OTD in early British television: 19 September 1938
John Wyver writes: Today, a short original post about an outside broadcast from Euston station on Monday 19 September 1938, along with links to two earlier columns about railway-related broadcasts.
The OB was a half-hour mid-morning presentation with Leslie Mitchell to celebrate the centenary of the London, Midland and Scottish Railway company, which in fact had only been formally created in a complex merger of numerous companies in January 1923. I assume therefore that the anniversary was for the London & Birmingham Railway, a precursor to the LMS, which completed its main line in 1838.
The Monday broadcast followed a more elaborate hour-long transmission the previous day which was billed as A Hundred Years of Railways: 1838 to 1938. Mitchell was again the Michael Portillo of the moment, along with D.S. Barrie of the advertising and publicity department of the LMS.
Actual engines at Euston were shown alongside models, with trains and carriages featured including Queen Victoria’s saloon, an 1847 ‘Cornwall’ engine, a 1911 ‘Coronation’ engine, the ‘Lion’, and the Coropnation Scot class ‘Duchess of Gloucester’.
The ‘Duchess of Gloucester’ took centre-stage on Monday morning, when it was seen steaming out of Euston driven apparently by Lord Stamp, LMS chairman, who would die in a German air raid in April 1941. The ‘Lion’ was there too, driven by a crew in period clothes, and there were speeches from the Mayor of St Pancras and the Lord Mayor of Birmingham.
For more about early television’s alignment with the modernity of the railways, see:
OTD in early British television: 17 April 1937
A ‘local OB’ from the railway terminus adjacent to Alexandra Palace (pictured).
OTD in early British television: 5 July 1937
A shot from a studio Emitron run out onto the balcony of Alexandra Palace of LNER’s ‘Coronation Train’ passing by in the distance.
[OTD post no. 275; part of a long-running series leading up to the publication on 8 January 2026 of my book Magic Rays of Light: The Early Years of Television in Britain, which can now be pre-ordered from Bloomsbury here.]
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