Stationary Steam Engines of Great Britain: The National Photographic Collection (review)

This multivolume series, organized geographically, offers a photographic survey of British stationary steam engines. A glance through any one of the several volumes published so far reveals that the content is almost but not quite that single-minded: waterwheels, traction engines, industrial buildings, and workshop scenes make occasional appearances. The photos and captions are the work of George Watkins (1904-89), who visited nearly two thousand industrial sites from the 1930s until the 1970s. To say that Watkins was utterly devoted to his subject would be an understatement; his explorations and documentation activities suggest a vocation rather than an enthusiasm.

Watkins's site visits were made during annual leave from his job as a heating engineer and boiler operator. Upon his return to the one-room flat that housed his steam engineering library he would write up his notes and begin planning the next year's itinerary. His archive is a magnificent achievement, and the photographic collection (numbering around ten thousand negatives) and field notes are now housed in the English Heritage National Monument Record Center in Swindon. The published material is a selection of about fifteen hundred prints that was assembled and annotated by the photographer for Bath University. The format adopted here (full-page reproductions, grouped in threes and accompanied by a page of extended captions) echoes that used in Watkins's two-volume The Textile Mill Engine (1970-71).

These are odd books. They have the finish you would expect of a published hardcover—sturdy binding, good paper, clear reproduction—but they are made up of what is essentially raw research material. The photos are occasionally blurred, flared, or improperly exposed, and the captions are made up of stark data, notes, observations, and reminiscences. Material such as this is familiar enough to any researcher who has delved into documentation photographs and field notes in archival holdings, but is disconcerting to encounter in a published work.

The captions are replete with fact and insight, but readers hoping for any form of historical framework will find it limited to the biographical foreword by the editor, A. P. Woolrich. Each volume has been provided with a glossary of mechanical and technical terms, but the accompanying thumbnail diagrams appear to have been poached from other sources and are indifferently pasted into the text. Woolrich acknowledges not only that errors have been identified in Watkins's original annotations but also that they have been retained in the captions. A note at the close of the more recent volumes worryingly suggests that addressing these errors would entail rewriting Watkins's work and characterizes such an effort as "an impossible task."

Whether this series is a fascinating and unadulterated testament to Watkins's lifelong interests—a kind of "In Search of Lost Steam," if you will—or an undisciplined, sprawling, and yet narrow publishing exercise depends on your perspective. For the true stationary steam enthusiast (and certain industrial archaeologists) it is certainly a treat, a transport into a maze of unexpected complexities and textures. For the uninitiated, the seemingly endless tracery of spokes, beams, linkages, and cranks will seem merely impenetrable, while the specialist terminology in the captions lies in wait to trip up the unwary.

The photographic content veers from the prosaic to the stunning. Watkins had both foresight and tenacity, and he gained access to all manner of installations, regardless of their grime or grandeur. His photographs were usually made in difficult spaces, and while this occasionally results in views that are hard to decipher, there are few images that are altogether devoid of useful detail. While not intended as artistic statements, there is an expressive quality to many of these images, a pervasive melancholy, a sense of magnificence and modest detail brought back from the brink: engine operators prophetically ghosted by time exposures; tools abandoned on now forgotten workbenches; sparkling visions of spit and polish side by...