We are still looking for a photo of L. T. C. Rolt!
L. T. C. Rolt, who died on May 9, 1974 at the age of sixty-four, had been for some years a member of the Advisory Council of SHOT. He was one of the most distinguished engineering and transport historians of his generation, and by the time of his death his works had won for him an international reputation. Over the last thirty years he published almost a book a year, covering a range of subjects including novels, topography, and ghost stories, although the most substantial volumes were devoted to the history of transport, accounts of industrial enterprises, and engineering biographies. But, in addition to his achievements as a writer, Rolt was also a practical conservationist, pioneering a variety of important preservation schemes, and in his later years his advice was sought by a large number of societies so that he became heavily involved in the politics of preservation. This relationship between practical activity and literary skill is perhaps the clue to his greatest successes, because Rolt possessed a rare facility for expressing complicated technical matters in language which was not only intelligible to the layman but which also excited his interest in the subject.
Tom Rolt was born in Chester and spent his childhood in the Welsh border countryside, where he acquired a love of nature which he never lost and which animated much of his descriptive writing. He was apprenticed as a mechanical engineer on the advice of a family friend, and had early experience of agricultural and locomotive engineering in Britain before establishing himself with a small group of friends as automobile engineers specializing in the maintenance of veteran and vintage vehicles, it was at this time, in the 1930s, that he took a leading part in the formation of the Vintage Sports Car Club, in which he continued to take a personal interest for the rest of his life.
Shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, Tom Rolt made the most crucial single decision of his life: he abandoned his career as a practicing engineer and committed himself to a life as a writer. Living on board the canal narrow boat Cressy, he traveled over the British canal system, at that time fast approaching a condition of complete obsolescence, and his first books, beginning with Narrow Boat in 1944, were the result of this experience. In 1946 he participated in the foundation of the Inland Waterways Association, which still flourishes as one of the most influential British amenity societies.
Rolt was one of the first people to recognize the enormous leisure and tourist potential of transport systems that had lost their commercial purpose. From canals he turned to the narrow-gauge slate quarry railways of North Wales, promoting the formation of the Talyllyn Railway Preservation Society in 1950, and he became an active participant in many other enterprises of this nature. He was increasingly consulted and involved in national committees, so that when the study of industrial archaeology was adopted by the Council for British Archaeology in 1959 he was among the first experts to be recruited to the new Research Committee. Fie eventually became chairman of this committee, as well as a vice president of the Newcomen Society, a member of the Science Museum Advisory Council, a member of the National Trust Properties Committee, and the first president of the Association for Industrial Archaeology when this was established in Britain in 1973. His last public appearance was to preside at the inaugural meeting of the AIA in London in March 1974.
All these organizations will miss Rolt’s advice and encouragement. But without doubt it will be by his written work that he will be longest remembered, and it is by this that any assessment of his contribution to the history of technology must be made. In this respect it should be observed that Tom Rolt was not an academic scholar, although his honorary degrees of M.A. at the University of Newcastle and M.Sc. at the University of Bath demonstrated that academics appreciated the quality of his writing. His work was always based on careful research, but he was impatient of much of what he saw as pedantry in the academic approach to research, and eschewed footnotes and precise references. This is probably why he never contributed a paper to the Transactions of the Newcomen Society, despite his highly respected position on the council of that society. When he was invited to deliver the Ninth Dickinson Memorial Lecture to the Society in 1970, he chose as his subject “The History of the History of Engineering,” leaving his audience in no uncertainty about his views:
. . . the so-called social sciences are increasingly dominated by the views of economic historians who appear to assume that the proper study of mankind is economics. This new generation of academic social historians have produced a number of books recently on various aspects of Britain’s Industrial Revolution. Some of them may be valuable studies of the period, but because they carry on their jackets attractive pictures of beam engines or prints of early ironworks or factories they seem to be calculated to mislead the public into thinking they are contributions to engineering history. They are nothing of the kind. Because they assume that the engineer is merely a puppet twitched by the strings of Economic necessity, his particular strivings are of no concern to their authors. They have no knowledge of engineering principles or methods because they consider such knowledge irrelevant to their economic thesis.
This passage is worth reflecting on for several reasons. It demonstrates the antipathy which Rolt felt toward the negative aspects of some contemporary scholarship, and explains in part why he chose a nonacademic form of expression himself. It spotlights the quality which he disliked most in this scholarship—the lack of humanity, of concern for people. And it states by implication the philosophy which inspired the whole corpus of Rolt’s work on engineering history, which was to reveal the relationship between the inner strivings of his chosen subjects and their practical achievements. It was—and is—a worthy goal, and one in which Rolt excelled.
Another point which appeared strongly in Rolt’s Dickinson Memorial Lecture was the warmth of his admiration for Samuel Smiles. Smiles’s Lives of the Engineers had inspired him and provided a model for his own great works of engineering biography. In a real sense, Rolt was doing lor the engineer and for engineering history in the second half of the 20th century what Smiles had done in the second half of the 19th century. They were both popularizers, in the best possible meaning of the word, interpreting the engineer and his works to their own society. They both did it with distinction and outstanding success. And just as Smiles’s work on engineering history has stood the test of the years, so will Rolt’s biographies of Brunel, Telford, the Stephensons, Newcomen, and Watt continue to be read for both instruction and entertainment for many years. Indeed, insofar as Rolt had less didactic intention than Smiles, it is likely that his work will date less rapidly and be welcomed by a more enduring readership than that of Smiles.
It is thus as a popularizer rather than as a scholar that Rolt should be judged, and in this respect he served the history of technology well by illuminating with his vivid prose the personalities of some of the master craftsmen of the British Industrial Revolution who, though known for their engineering achievements, had until his work remained disappointingly shadowy characters. When he undertook a biography or, for that matter, any work of historical exploration, he carried out a thorough investigation of the available evidence. In his study of I. K. Brunel, for example, he worked through the voluminous letter books and sketchbooks which have engaged the attention of some academic students for many years, and found time to check his interpretations with surviving members of Brunel’s family. But the resulting study—possibly the best of Rolt’s biographies and certainly one of the best engineering biographies of the 20th century—rides light to the apparatus of research underlying it. The author aims steadfastly at an account of Brunel’s life which, while as accurate as careful research can make it, is a lucid exposition of his hopes, fears, plans, and achievements, in a style which any serious reader can follow without difficulty. The same objectives inspired all Rolt’s work on engineering and transport history.
The end-product of Tom Rolt’s literary efforts is, however, not just a collection of superb popular biographies which will remain in print for many years. By opening the minds of thoughtful readers to a new perspective of modern history, he has done more than any other single person in Britain to improve the climate of opinion—both general and academic—about the history of technology. As in so many other aspects of his remarkable career, Tom pioneered the popularization of the subject. For this we must all be profoundly grateful to him.
R . A . Buchanan
Originally published as R. A. Buchanan, “Lionel Thomas Caswall Rolt (1910–1974),” Technology and Culture 16, no. 3 (1975): 454–57, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.1975.a891568.
Rolt, L. T. C., and J. S. Allen. The Steam Engine of Thomas Newcomen. Ashbourne: Landmark, 1997.
Rolt, L. T. C., and Science Museum (Great Britain). Tools for the Job : A History of Machine Tools to 1950. London: H. M. Stationary Office, 1986.
Rolt, L. T. C. The Aeronauts: A History of Ballooning, 1783–1903. Gloucester: Sutton, 1985. [Reprinted The Balloonists: The History of the First Aeronauts. Stroud: Sutton, 2006.]
Rolt, L. T. C. From Sea to Sea: The Canal du Midi. London: Allen Lane, 1973.
Rolt, L. T. C. Victorian Engineering. Harmondsorth: Penguin, 1970. [Reprinted Stroud: Sutton, 2007.]
Rolt, L. T. C. Navigable Waterways. London: Longmans, 1969.
Rolt, L. T. C. Railway Engineering. London: Macmillan, 1968.
Rolt, L. T. C. The Mechanicals: Progress of a Profession. Published on behalf of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. London: Heinemann, 1967.
Smiles, Samuel, and L. T. C. Rolt. Industrial Biography: Iron Workers and Tool Makers. Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1967.
Rolt, L. T. C. A Short History of Machine Tools. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965.
Rolt, L. T. C. Patrick Stirling’s Locomotives. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1964.
Rolt, L. T. C. Great Engineers. London: G. Bell, 1962.
Rolt, L. T. C. James Watt. London: Batsford, 1962.
Rolt, L. T. C. George and Robert Stephenson: The Railway Revolution. London: Longmans, 1960.
Rolt, L. T. C. The Cornish Giant: The Story of Richard Trevithick, Father of the Steam Locomotive. London: Lutterworth Press, 1960.
Rolt, L. T. C. Thomas Telford. London: Longmans, 1958. [Reprinted Stroud: Sutton, 2007.]
Rolt, L. T. C. Isambard Kingdom Brunel: A Biography. London: Longmans, 1957. [Reprinted London: Penguin, 1989.]
Rolt, L. T. C. Red for Danger: A History of Railway Accidents and Railway Safety. London: Bodley Head, 1955. [Reprinted Red for Danger: The Classic History of British Railway Disasters. Stroud: Penguin, 2009.]
Rolt, L. T. C. The Inland Waterways of England. London: Allen and Unwin., 1950.