The Rev Wilbert Vere Awdry was a country parson who knew that simplicity, realism and adventure were the recipe for children's literature. Long after steam engines have disappeared, young readers are still enthralled by his stories about Thomas the Tank Engine, Awdry's best-known creation. Boyish, uncomplicated, unambitious and unworldly, Awdry created lovable and mischievous locomotives and pompous but benign Aunt Sallies like the Fat Controller out of his observations of railways and of his fellow human beings.
The son of a country parson, Awdry spent his boy-hood listening to railway engines "talking" to one another on the old Great Western Railway Chippenham-to-Bath line, 200 yards from the rectory. (Strange that he wasn't locked up for listening to steam engines talking to each other.) He remained a serious student of railways and in 1979 published "The Steam Railways of Great Britain". But it was in 1943, when Awdry's son Christopher had measles, that the parson made up stories about steam engines for him. The first was about Edward, who had a sad face on the front of his boiler. Why? enquired the three-year-old. Because, his father extemporised, he hadn't been out for a long time. Why? Because the other engines were bigger and stronger and the drivers always chose them first.
Awdry scribbled the stories on the backs of parish pamphlets so that his son could not catch him out on details. Thomas himself was invented when Awdry, a skilled model engineer, made his son a little model of Edward, and then decided to make one of a bigger engine. But he found he was short of materials. So he made a little blue tank engine with six wheels, painted the number one on the side, and then asked his son what this engine's name was. Thomas was born.
When Awdry sent three stories to publishers there was no interest, partly through obtuseness in the face of originality, partly because of the wartime paper shortage. But eventually they were published by the retired director of a boot-making firm, Edmund Ward, who wanted material for a small publishing company in which he had an interest. (No, I'm not making this up !)
Though, until his retirement at 65, Awdry put his work as a clergyman first, he found himself writing a book a year, revising painfully and usually going to eight or nine drafts. The titles involved four illustrators and annual sales of 750,000 with a total of some 10 million by the 1990s.
He continued to publicise Thomas after his 26th and final book appeared in 1972. But his son Christopher took up the pen where his father left off. Thomas appeared as toys, in pop-up books, and on videos and television. And Awdry prided himself that everything that had happened to his engines could really have happened to real ones. (Right, lock the senile old git up……oh yeah, we can't.) In 1938 he married Margaret Emily Wale, by whom he had two daughters as well as his son.
The Rev Wilbert Vere Awdry, priest and writer,
born June 15 1911, died March 21, 1997.