Trade unions often depict the tools of their members’ trades in their emblems, badges, membership certificates and banners: foundry workers with their huge crucible of molten metal, weavers at the loom, and print compositors hard at work with great cases of metal type. But few unions have done so with quite the verve of the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen (Aslef).

The membership certificate shown here captures to perfection what was for many a golden age of rail. The locomotive painted in the trademark blue of the London North Eastern Railway appears to be one of the great A4 class designed by Nigel Gresley and built at LNER’s Doncaster works. To judge by the number 2509 on its front, this would have been a very specific example of its class: not the ‘Unity’ as the certificate suggests but the ‘Silver Link’, which entered service on 27 September 1935 as the very first of the A4s, and on its demonstration journey out of King’s Cross reached a speed of 112.5mph to set a new UK record. Even a cursory glance at the sleek, art deco lines of the ‘Silver Link’ are enough to tell you immediately that you are in the 1930s, and at the cutting edge of transport technology.

Elsewhere on the certificate, a London Underground tube train makes its way along one of the rapidly expanding above-ground lines serving the new suburban commuter belt. Here too the image is clean and modern, the driver in his peaked cap, jacket and tie a far cry from everything that had gone before.

So often, as can be seen here, the imagery used by the rail unions was strikingly modern and lacking in nostalgia. Stephenson’s ‘Rocket’ appears here as an insubstantial grey ghost alongside the might and power of the modern locomotive, to which Aslef lays claim with a rebranding that adds its own name to the tender. By contrast the agricultural workers’ union continued to use an (admittedly rather attractive) image of a horsedrawn plough on its members’ badges until at least the late 1980s, by which time what had once been one of the largest unions in the country had been reduced to a trade group of the Transport and General Workers Union. It was not alone in its attachment to an earlier era – for agricultural workers, as with many others, mechanisation offered not exciting new opportunites but job losses on a massive scale.

In its use of imagery such as that found here, however, Aslef was a union that looked forward to a better future, not back to a lost arcadia. Its members were at the forefront of industry and technology, and the union was proud to claim ownership of it.

Further information

The ‘Silver Link’ was withdrawn from service in December 1962 when diesel locomotives took over the East Coast Main Line route, and was broken up at the Doncaster Works the following year. A slightly later example of the A4 Class – the famous and even faster ‘Mallard’ – survives and can be seen in the National Railway Museum at York.

Books
The Art and Ideology of the Trade Union Emblem 1850-1925 by Annie Ravenhill-Johnson, edited by Paula James, 2013, London: Anthem Press.

United We Stand: An Illustrated Account of Trade Union Emblems by R.A. Leeson, 1971, Bath: Adams & Dart.

Banner Bright: An Illustrated History of the Banners of the British Trade Union Movement, by John Gorman, 1973, London: Allen Lane.