Person Page 245

Charles Ralph Clinker was born at Rugby in 1906 and joined the Great Western Railway from school in 1923 as a passenger train runner. By the time of the outbreak of World War Two he had risen to become liaison officer for the four major railway companies with Southern Command HQ, and as such was involved in the planning and execution of the Dunkirk evacuation in 1940 and the D-Day Landings in 1944. He left railway service in 1946 and devoted the rest of his life to research and lecturing on railway history, a taste for which he had acquired when seconded to assist E T MacDermot in the preparation of his History of the Great Western Railway (London, 1964), and which Clinker subsequently revised for publication in 1982. Clinker wrote numerous books and pamphlets on railway history; his Clinker's Register of closed passenger stations and goods depots in England, Scotland and Wales, 1830-1977 (1963, revised 1978) is widely regarded as his magnum opus.
[extract from AIM25 Transport History Collection of Brunel University Library: http://www.aim25.ac.uk/cgi-bin/vcdf/detail?coll_id=4130&inst_id=34].

For further information see the citations below.¹

Elizabeth Nowell Meredith nee Johnson was a Director with the Red Cross.