Britain’s Railways in the Great War, 1914-1918: Fully-funded AHRC PhD studentship
Applications are invited
for an AHRC-funded PhD about Britain’s railways in the First World War.
This studentship is a fully-funded award made by the Collaborative
Doctoral Partnership managed by the Science Museum
Group. The project will be supervised by Professor Tony Heywood and Dr
Ben Marsden (University of Aberdeen) and Dr Oliver Betts (National
Railway Museum, York). The studentship, which is funded for three years
full-time equivalent, will begin in October 2019
or earlier if the successful candidate’s circumstances permit.
The Studentship
This project will produce the first full-length
scholarly study of how Britain’s railways were managed and operated
during the First World War. The project will be based on extensive
archival research to be undertaken mainly at the National
Railway Museum (York), the UK National Archives (Kew) and the National
Archives of Scotland (Edinburgh). Funds will be available to help pay
for the necessary research travel.
The project will address six core inter-connected
themes - political, administrative, economic, technical, cultural and
social - both to explore the basic questions of how, and how well, the
railways coped and to serve as a framework for
future research. The geographical scope will be limited to the lines
under state control via the Board of Trade and Railway Executive
Committee - in other words, excluding Ireland’s railways, which were
managed separately. Case-studies might be used to analyse
the performance and impacts on selected strategic routes (such as the
lines to the Channel ports) and fixed assets such as major workshops.
The assessments are expected to be mainly qualitative, with statistics
used where appropriate to identify basic trends.
The research will need to start by reassessing
pre-war preparations and mobilisation, especially J.A.B. Hamilton’s view
that the network entered the war with a sensible and workable
organisation largely as a matter of luck, and A.J.P. Taylor’s
claim about the mobilisation timetable’s inflexibility: could the
network have coped with an order to send the army to, say, Antwerp
instead of France? As for the subsequent reaction of the railways to the
war emergency, key issues for analysis are likely
to include the meaning of ‘total war’ in relation to the network; state
control (for example: how did it affect operations, infrastructure,
finances and inter-company relations?); traffic performance (how did the
demands change? where were the key bottlenecks?);
relations with the armed forces (how effective was the coordination?
how were military demands communicated and implemented?); the
infrastructure (how far were railway supply needs met? does poor
management explain the wagon shortages? how did the railway
workshops contribute? how bad was the maintenance backlog by 1918?);
and the workforce (how did losses of skilled staff affect the railways?
how important were female employment and strikes?). And in the immediate
aftermath, how did the war experience affect
the government’s decision not to nationalise the network, but instead
to create four large geographically-based private companies?
How to Apply
Applicants should submit a single Word file, maximum length strictly four pages, with:
1/ a curriculum vitae (1 page)
2/ a letter explaining your interest in the studentship and outlining your qualifications for it (2 pages)
3/ a brief cover note
that includes your full contact details together with the names and
contact details of two academic referees (1 page).
Applications must be emailed to both Professor Tony Heywood and Dr Oliver Betts (t.heywood@abdn.ac.uk;
Oliver.Betts@railwaymuseum.
Interviews are scheduled to be held in the National Railway Museum, York, on Friday 16 November 2018.
If you have any questions concerning the project, please contact Tony Heywood (t.heywood@abdn.ac.uk).