Midgham Station 1943

[whole diary]

[Marlburian]

Midgham Station featured briefly in a 1943 film advising American soldiers on:


How to behave in Britain

Around 22.45 in the film, the soldier arrives there and walks past a sign for the Reading company C & G Ayres. He wants to get to Cirencester, but the station-master seems to think he means to get to Chichester and tells him to change at Reading! There's a sign saying it's Midgham Station. His train comes in drawn by a tank engine running boiler-first. But it leaves bunker-first, with a footbridge in the background that definitely isn't Midgham - this would have been a piece of stock film inserted into the footage made for the film.
 
To get to Cirencester in those days, the soldier would have travelled from Reading to Kemble and changed on to the branch line for Cirencester. A longer route would have been to head west to Savernake Station and change onto the Midland & South Western Junction Railway through Marlborough and Swindon.

Marlburian

[Red Squirrel]

Thanks Malburian - a little gem!

I think the Station Master is correcting his pronunciation - in the fairly recent past Cirencester was pronounced 'Sissester'.

The next section where General Lee explains how not to be a racist is a bit of an eye-opener...

[Marlburian]

Thanks for pointing that out, Red Squirrel. Of course there's the other curiosity that Midgham Station is actually in the village of Woolhampton but was named after another, even smaller, village a couple of miles away to avoid confusing travellers wishing to go to Wolverhampton and Wolverton.

Marlburian

[johnneyw]

Interesting seeing, who I am sure is, a very young Burgess Meredith in the film before finding fame as The Penguin in the 1960s Batman series.

[Western Pathfinder]

Quite so it is him.

[Thatcham Crossing]

Thanks for pointing that out, Red Squirrel. Of course there's the other curiosity that Midgham Station is actually in the village of Woolhampton but was named after another, even smaller, village a couple of miles away to avoid confusing travellers wishing to go to Wolverhampton and Wolverton.

Indeed so, Marlburian (I am a local to both Midgham and Woolhampton), but what still might confuse people is that the on-train announcements for Midgham still sound like "Mitcham" (which is nowhere near here) to me.