L. T. C. Rolt

He is also regarded as one of the pioneers of the leisure cruising industry on Britain's inland waterways, and was an enthusiast for vintage cars and heritage railways.

His father Lionel had settled back in Britain in Hay-on-Wye after working on a cattle station in Australia and a plantation in India, and joining (unsuccessfully) in the Klondike Gold Rush of 1898.

However, Lionel Rolt lost most of his money in 1920 after investing his capital in a company that failed, and the family moved to a pair of stone cottages in Stanley Pontlarge in Gloucestershire.

[3] Rolt studied at Cheltenham College and at the age of 16 he took a job learning about steam traction, before starting an apprenticeship at the Kerr Stuart locomotive works in Stoke-on-Trent, where his uncle, Kyrle Willans, was chief development engineer.

In 1936 Kyrle Willans bought back Cressy, which he had earlier sold, and several trips on the waterways convinced Rolt that he wanted a life afloat.

She was a young blonde in a white polonecked sweater who had swept into his garage in an Alfa Romeo in 1937 and been caught up in the vintage car scene.

The outbreak of the Second World War intervened and Rolt, a pacifist at heart, immediately signed up at the Rolls-Royce factory at Crewe to work on the production line of the Spitfire's Merlin engine.

It was not until after a magazine article he wrote came to the attention of the countryside writer H. J. Massingham that Rolt's book was published, in December 1944, under the title Narrow Boat.

Aickman, who had a private income, was working full time on the campaign, while Rolt, who had only his writing to support him and was still living aboard Cressy, struggled to meet all his commitments.

"By the time the fateful letter terminating his IWA membership arrived, he was already busy issuing and stamping passengers' tickets from the little station in Towyn".

[6] His time at Talyllyn gave rise to his book Railway Adventure (1953), which became the basis for the Ealing comedy film The Titfield Thunderbolt.

His best-known works were biographies of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, which stimulated a revival of interest in a forgotten hero,[8][9] George and Robert Stephenson, and Thomas Telford.

[10][11] The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural described Sleep No More as "An exceptionally original collection of ghost stories ... Rolt had the special talent of combining folkloric spontaneity with artful sophistication.

Rolt was vice-president of the Newcomen Society, which established a Rolt Prize;[13] a trustee and member of the Advisory Council of the Science Museum; a member of the York Railway Museum Committee; an honorary MA of Newcastle; an honorary MSc of the University of Bath (1973)[14] and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

But so soon as science and the arts became divorced, so soon as they ceased to speak a common language, confidence vanished, and doubts and fears came crowding in.He set out these ideas more fully in his book High Horse Riderless, now seen by some as a classic of green philosophy.