Miss Bessemer's Crusade

Once upon a Victorian time the Sheffield Park Branch Railway chuffed for 17 miles through the Sussex countryside, wandering through woodland, farms and bright fields of flowers, bearing children to school, farmers to market and housewives to the shops of Lewes and East Grinstead.

The "Bluebell and Primrose," as its passengers fondly called it, was just the kind of road that progress passes by. London was only 50 miles to the northwest, but no factory chimneys thrust their way above the quiet countryside to give the railway a new excuse for existence. Soon a few forlorn trains, carrying in all an average of four passengers a day, were all that was left of the once profitable road. Last year the British Transport Commission, which has done in many a small railroad since nationalization began, closed down the Bluebell and Primrose.

To most of the people of Sussex, the decision was no hardship. It was no hardship at all to Miss R.E.M. Bessemer, the lean, sixtyish granddaughter of famed Steelman-Inventor Sir Henry Bessemer, whose family home is within a stone's throw of the Bluebell and Primrose. Though she usually rode about in her own motorcar, wealthy Miss Bessemer had an odd affection for the Bluebell and Primrose. "We oughtn't," she told her neighbors, "to look at it as a wee strip of line, but as part of a whole principle." In England there is always an appropriate society for such invokers of principle. She sought the aid of the Society for the Reinvigoration of Unremunerative Branch Lines in the United Kingdom, but found the society hopelessly sentimental and impractical on the subject.

Then, poring over documents on the line's past history, Spinster Bessemer found just what she needed: an Act of Parliament, passed when the railway was built in 1877, requiring the owners to run at least four trains daily. "They," said Miss Bessemer scornfully of the Transport Commission, "have got to keep the law just like everyone else." Fire in her eyes, she enlisted the aid of her M.P., a Tory who answers to the name of Tufton Beamish.

One day last week more than 100 passengers in holiday mood boarded the Bluebell and Primrose, hung from windows and pummeled each other gayly as--for the first time since May 1955--the half-century-old engine and two wooden coaches puffed through the countryside. "I've never seen anything like this!" said an amazed conductor. "In the old days the passengers used to sit glumly, never speaking to each other." But with the first day's excitement over, the Bluebell and Primrose, keeping to its required four trips a day, found itself again with only five passengers. Never one to give up, Miss Bessemer began a new crusade--to electrify the Bluebell and Primrose and connect it with the main line to London. Just as determinedly, the Transport Commission set to work preparing a new bill to repeal the 1877 act and stop the Bluebell and Primrose forever.

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