What kind of transport history did we get? Half a century of JTH and the future of the field

Journal of Transport History, The, Sep 2003 by Mom, Gijs

I have not yet heard of a camel addict making his contribution to transport history; but it should be done. Enthusiasm is no bar to good history. [Michael Robbins, founding editor of JTH1]

Exactly a decade ago, when editor John Armstrong and his Editorial Board prepared the celebration of the Journal of Transport History's fortieth anniversary, they chose to dedicate a special issue to a survey of the field. For this purpose the field was subdivided into five sub-fields, each covering forty turbulent years of the journal and each dealing with one transport mode: inland navigation, maritime history, railway history, the history of road transport and aviation history.2 Armstrong also invited the 'founding fathers', Jack Simmons (1915-2000) and Michael Robbins (1915-2002), to comment on the past forty years. They were rather candid in their appraisal of their and their successors' work. 'In the first forty years of a journal dealing with a relatively new and developing field of study,' they ended their contribution, 'it might have been hoped that some broad view of its potential scope would have emerged. But our hope and intention that transport as a whole should be studied have not so far been fulfilled; at any rate, there is little sign of it as yet. We should like to see some early indication of a hopeful kind-at the latest, by the journal's fiftieth anniversary'.3

Now, on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary, it seems appropriate to follow their suggestion, and to try to find any 'early indication(s) of a hopeful kind' of a history of 'transport as a whole', and to attempt to depict a 'broad view of [the journal's] potential scope'. The central question, then, is whether these indications can be found within or outside the journal, in other words: what was, is and should be the role of 'the world's only specialist journal of transport history', as the subtitle of the journal ran during the years 1991-95?4

Roots of JTH and the emergence of a new field

The foundation of the journal was the result of several developments, both in and outside academia. Firstly, it took place against a societal background of a 'huge groundswell of general interest in history', including 'nostalgia [as a] big and expanding business', on the one side, and the development of the social sciences into a large intellectual field on the other. As a result of this, not only did social scientists begin to use historical case studies for their modelling, but within the historical profession specialisation emerged, giving rise to agricultural, transport, business history, and the history of technology, to name but a few.5

Secondly, the Cold War encouraged economic historians, especially the Americans, to study the causes of economic growth of capitalist countries 'in the hope that lessons could be learnt to transplant to the less developed countries'.6 These historians rediscovered transport as an important contributor to growth and the development of the world economy. Most of them used the existing scholarly economic history journals as their outlet, but in Britain an opportunity arose when the Attlee government (1945-51) nationalised much of British transport and the British Transport Commission inherited the records of railway, canal and dock companies, which were subsequently made available to researchers in 1952. A year later, in May 1953, Michael Robbins, working for the London Passenger Transport Board since 1939, and his school friend Jack Simmons, brought out the first issue of JTH, published by the press of the University College of Leicester.7 The initiative was Simmons's, who shortly before had been appointed to the new chair of history at Leicester University College (from 1957 Leicester University), who started a 'school of historians . . . in English local history and in museum studies', and who was later to become 'the undoubted doyen of British railway historians'.8 The times were ripe, apparently, because a year later, in 1954, the Railway & Canal Historical Society was founded, which brought out its own Journal a year later and which became a meeting point for both professional and amateur historians.

The ambitions of the first two editors, who together were to lead the journal for more than a dozen years, were clear and outspoken. Transport history was to be treated as a sub-discipline of economic and social history. The journal, then, was 'to offer common ground to historians both in the academic world and in the actual world of transport, who will in turn be writing for readers of both kinds'. It would cover 'transport as a whole [and] in all ages', although railway transport 'will claim a particular share of attention partly because it is (so far) the form of inland transport that has had the most far-reaching and recognisable influence, and partly because the documentary and other evidence for the historian of railways is much more extensive than that for any other form'. Nevertheless, the editors concluded in line with the national focus of general history of that period that 'our main interest will . . . lie within Great Britain'.9