From 1913 to 1933 the electric trams called the Ripley Rattlers³ ran precariously along a clickety-clack switchback track up and down the steep hills between Nottingham and Ripley in Derbyshire. There were plenty of accidents, one tram crashed into a church wall throwing passengers over into the graveyard after the brakes failed⁵.
An intriguing story has emerged concerning what colour they were painted. DH Lawrence does not help here. He wrote an excellent short story called "Tickets, Please!", a kind of Edwardian "On The Buses", about life on the trams and the newly emancipated women who worked on them during the war. However, it turns out that he wrote at least two quite different versions for publication, one of the main revisions being the tram's colour. So were they "blue and cream" or "green and cream"? Even local museums have conflicting information...
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| Incorrectly coloured museum model |
I had an online conversation with tram expert Brian Yeoman's on the subject during which we realised DHL had actually written different versions...
Brian - "In the DH Lawrence short story 'Tickets, Please', I believe he is obviously describing a journey on the Notts and Derbyshire Tramway, travelling from Ripley to Nottingham. But in the story he describes the tramcars as being blue and cream, all references I have read about the trams say they were green and cream. I'm not clear why he would do that, unless he didn't want local people to make the assumption that the characters in the story were based on people from this area, none of the towns or even the city that was the destination were named. There are some old models of Notts and Derbys Tramcars at the industrial museum at Wollaton Hall that have been painted blue and cream. Had the model maker read Lawrence's fictional story?"
Brian - "Yes I think many people struggle to remember colours even though they remember the object. The Notts and Derby's trams were recorded as being bright green and cream. Though in later years it is possible the green became darker and there was less cream."
We then had a disagreement over what colour Lawrence's story paints them until we realised that we were reading two different versions! The "blue" version starts... "There is in the North a single-line system of tramcars... pert as a blue-tit out of a black colliery garden" and the "green" version starts... "There is in the Midlands a single-line tramway system... green as a jaunty sprig of parsley out of a black colliery garden."
I used an online text comparer² and there are lots of subtle and not so subtle differences. The first version seems to be the blue one and it was written in late 1918 while he was living at Mountain Cottage at Middleton near Matlock after a visit to see his sister in Ripley and a trip to Eastwood (by tram maybe?)¹. The Middleton Statutes fair gets a mention in the story but that gets changed in the green version to Bestwood fair. It was originally¹ titled "John Thomas" but was cleaned up and stripped of sexual innuendo before publication in the April 1919 edition of "The Strand" magazine as "Tickets, Please!". The Strand version can be read here and it has some nice illustrations...
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| Strand magazine April 1919 |
Another interesting aspect of the story is that the young Lawrence himself had undergone an embarrassing ritual like that suffered by John Thomas when he worked with factory girls at a Nottingham surgical goods supplier. So it must have been a difficult subject for him, exorcising a few demons perhaps.
Conclusion - if the true colour of the real-life Ripley Rattler trams was green and cream, as Brian Yeomans has verified, perhaps Lawrence took the opportunity to correct the colour of the trams in the revised versions. Maybe he realised he'd made a mistake in the original version. The different versions of Tickets, Please! are an example of Lawrence's habit of constantly revising his manuscripts and even, as in this case, altering his previously published works. This was sometimes at the publisher's request to meet the morality standards of a particular audience (such as the populist Strand magazine) but even after publication it was not unusual for him to do a rewrite just for his own satisfaction. He certainly also had a habit of subtly changing the names of real places and people in his work e.g. Bestwood for Eastwood.
You can read the original 1918 blue version here
The 1919 Strand magazine version with nice illustrations is here
The 1922 John Thomas green version in "England, My England" is here
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| Brian Yeoman's colourised picture in the as "near-as-careful-research-allows" correct green livery. "the only evidence out there seems to be that they were painted In Balfour Beatty's usual bright green and cream livery." |
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| Even in 1993, Nottingham couldn't decide between blue-and-cream or green-and-cream! |
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| The extent of DHL's revisions can be seen here in the 3 times rewritten manuscript for "Odour of Chrysanthemums" |
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| And finally.... "Tickets, Please!" was DH Lawrence's "On The Buses" - the trams were run by... “fearless young hussies. In their ugly blue uniform, skirts up to their knees, shapeless old peaked caps on their heads, they have all the sang-froid of an old non-commissioned officer. With a tram packed with howling colliers, roaring hymns downstairs and a sort of antiphony of obscenities upstairs, the lasses are perfectly at their ease.” |
Notes and sources
1 - DH Lawrence Cambridge Biography 1912-1922 by Mark Kinkead-Weekes
https://archive.org/details/dhlawrencetriump0000kink/page/482/mode/2up?view=theater&q=tickets
Tickets, Please! the one act play by local writer Becky Deans - https://thedigitalpilgrimage.wordpress.com/2017/03/18/codnor-and-tickets-please/
Tickets, Please! vs On the Buses http://torpedotheark.blogspot.com/2016/03/tickets-please-on-buses-with-d-h.html
The Many Drafts of D. H. Lawrence - Creative Flux, Genetic Dialogism, and the Dilemma of Endings by Elliott Morsia
Ruth Gray's paintings of the Ripley Rattler route https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.446116902132814&type=3
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| Co-op terminus Ripley |
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