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Thomas the Tank Engine History | |
THOMAS THE TANK ENGINE HISTORY Thomas the Tank Engine was created by Reverend Wilbert Awdry and first published in 1945. The Reverend was born in 1911 in Hampshire (Great Britain). Both he and his younger brother George inherited their father’s love of railways. In fact, young Wilbert’s childhood home was so close to the main Great Western Railway line, that Wilbert would fall asleep listening to the engines making their way up a hill to a nearby tunnel. Wilbert was ordained in 1936 and married Margaret Wale, a teacher he had met in Palestine. In 1940 they had a son and named him Christopher Awdry. At the age of two years, Christopher was plagued by the measles and had to be isolated. It was during this illness that Reverend Awdry gave his son a small, simple, wooden model train, later christened Thomas. To entertain Christopher as he recovered, the Reverend made up stories about Thomas the Engine. Reverend Awdry wrote the first stories on available scraps of paper. He also drew simple pictures of steam locomotives to illustrate the stories. Early drawings show a row of locomotives standing in an engine shed with a human face and expression on each locomotive’s smokebox door. These original drawings capture the essence of the Thomas the Tank’s look today. Mrs. Awdry believed that the Reverend’s stories had merit and urged her husband to “do something about them”. A small publisher, Edmund Ward, printed his first book, “The Three Railway Engines” in 1945. “Thomas the Tank Engine” was actually the title of the second book which was published the following year in 1946. Although Thomas the Tank Engine is the most famous engine, many of the books that followed were about Thomas the Tank’s friends, who also happen to be railway engines. The illustrator for the first dozen publications was C. Reginald Dalby, who incorporated the look from the Reverend’s sketches and by looking at real steam engines in use in Britain at that time. Thus an 0-6-0T Class E2 shunting engine guilt in the Victorian era for the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway became the model for Thomas the Tank Engine. A new book title was published almost every year until 1972. After twenty six books, Reverend Awdry stopped writing Thomas the Tank Engine books. In 1983, his son, Christopher Awdry, began to write a group of “Thomas” stories for the amusement of his three year old son, Richard. Interestingly, Richard was about the same age Christopher was when his father made up the original railway stories. Christopher’s first book, “Really Useful Engines” was published in1983. From 1983 to 1996, Christopher wrote fourteen books, one a year. In 1984, the Thomas the Tank Engine television series was made and a new generation of children were introduced to Thomas the Tank Engine. In 1998, Reed Publishing sold the copyright of the Railway Series to Britt Allcroft Ltd (now Gullane Entertainment), who already held the TV rights. Unfortunately, there have been no new Thomas the Tank Engine books published since 1996. Interesting trivia about Thomas the Tank engine:
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