The Hindu Business Line : Carry on, Thomas

Even those who've merely glanced at the television series Thomas and Friends (available on Pogo) will vouch: It's hard not to be moved by the innocence of its characters, the simplicity of its storylines and the old-world charm of its halcyon locales. For souls battered by everyday anxieties, annoyances, mean motives and insecurities, everything about these tales, right from their unalloyed morality of the 1950s to the idyllic English country-life, wields a soothing influence. This is what sets apart these railway engines that talk, play pranks, sulk and do good deeds. And this is also why their appeal isn't limited to children.

Thomas, a cheeky little tank engine, and his affable engine friends have turned 60 this year. But their guileless antics are far from retiring. It was Rev Wilbert Awdry (1911-97) who created and nurtured them over 26 well-received volumes (1946-72) before son Christopher picked the baton for another 14. Imbued with the romance of steam on rails, these engines have earned the Awdrys over £10 million. The Ringo Starr-narrated series Thomas and Friends is a rage in 130 countries. Thomas books, best known for their vivid illustrations, have sold over 90 million copies. Backed by assorted Thomas merchandise, the brand has soared up popularity ratings among pre-schoolers, even inspiring a theme park in faraway Japan.

Set on an imaginary Island of Sodor where all vehicles have distinct personalities, these stories are about Thomas and his chums, their adventures and pursuits at behaving well, working hard and earning their ultimate praise — being called "Really Useful" by their boss, the Fat Controller. Wearing human expressions on their smoke boxes, Awdry's playful protagonists run into all-too-recurrent problems with unruly trucks, conceited peers and domineering technologies (to Awdry, electric trains were "like worms" and diesels "cold and efficient"). That's until the Fat Controller metes out his all-too-familiar comeuppance: denying work to wrongdoers. The invariable result: triumph of duteousness and goodwill.

From the bedside

First created by Awdry in 1943 to humour a measles-afflicted Christopher, the stories of steam engines Edward, Henry and Gordon had to be written down when the young Christopher asked to hear them repeatedly without any inconsistencies in the re-telling. Subsequently, Awdry's wife sent the scribbled words to a literary agent, paving the way for the first book. In 1946, Thomas, the hero engine, made his public debut.

Besides stories from the railway gazette, Awdry's inspiration came from real people, real engines and real issues. In `Blunkett the Diesel Gets Tough', the Home Secretary made an appearance to rid railway sidings of beggars and place them in the Isle of Sodor Penitentiary. Edward's driver Charlie and his fireman Sam were based on real-life railway workers.

While Toby the Tram was like Wisbech's small engines, the rail-buses were modelled after Upwell's lightweight trains. Even the infamous Beeching Axe, the British government's attempt in the 1960s to control the spiralling cost of running the railway system by closing underused and unprofitable railway lines, crept into the story with Bertie the Bus trying to wrest branch-line services from the engines.

Awdry senior grew up enamoured with the Great Western Railway, often imagining engines in conversation. Even as a three-year-old in 1914, he was greatly fascinated by the Great Bear chugging down the Paddington-Bristol line at the bottom of their garden in Wiltshire. This fascination lived with him until his death in 1997 aged 85: he sported a `Stationmaster's Office' sign on the door of his living room. Known as "the Puff Puff Parson", he often took his own 12ft by 2ft model railway to exhibitions.

Even today, every summer, Thomas steams in Leicestershire on a privately run, eight-mile tourist track as the star of a one-day children's festival that draws over 25,000 people. The smoke and toot-tooting revives memories of an uncomplicated era gone by.

The credit for Thomas's worldwide following must go to Britt Allcroft, the lady who brought the stories to the small screen in 1984 and who often remarked that she saw herself "as protecting the spirit of Thomas".

It was while making a documentary about steam engines in the late 1970s that she met Awdry Senior. In 1983, she convinced Awdry that she could make a television show on the trains. Such was her involvement with the engines that when Apax Partners proposed to buy Thomas's corporate owner last year, she placed a newspaper advertisement asking the buyer to embrace the ethics and values associated with Thomas. "They have always been intrinsic to his appeal. They are the reason your cash registers ring."

Chugging into controversy

In Awdry's stories, these values and ethics came wrapped in reassuring prose full of incident. These engines often jumped the tracks, albeit without mortal damage, whenever they disobeyed orders or indulged in petulant rivalries. That led to Awdry's brush with controversy. Psychologists attacked Awdry for seeding in little minds the fear of trains by derailing them. In 2003, a senior psychology lecturer from Exeter even went to the extent of inferring that up to 15 adults-an-hour suffer narcolepsy while reading these books to their offspring.

Critics also accused him of "mid-20th-century masculinist attitudes" in showing male engines hauling dim, gabby female carriages. A 1991 report on gender-equality by education officers in the West Midlands stated that, while the male engines had adventures, Annie and Clarabel, two of the carriages, were merely shunted about. To keep young children from "heroic, macho male stereotypes", his tales were even banned from 85 nursery and primary schools. "They (carriages) are towed, pulled and `looked after'," carped a 1983 report, "They cry and sob when things go wrong ... True to the demands placed upon women in the 1950s, the gendered coaches pick up the emotional and unpaid labour of servicing capitalism."

Awdry had earlier renamed the Fat Controller as Sir Topham Hatt to placate well-girthed Americans offended by the word "Fat". A 1967 story `Thomas and the Pigs' setting Thomas in an anti-Vietnam demonstration had to be withdrawn. Another story had to be withdrawn for carrying the word "nigger". Political correctness, maintained Awdry, is "a load of codswallop" that "waters down children's stories." More so, as evident nowadays, when it surrenders children's fiction to adult anxieties. But Thomas stories are in fact antidotes to these anxieties. And we must thank Rev Awdry for them.

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