In the 1940s, it was possible to catch a Bakerloo line train from Ampersand station, even though no such station officially existed.
The station was officially called Bushey & Oxhey, and the oft-repeated story is that during WWII, railway station names were obscured to make life difficult for spies. When the order said station names needed painting out, someone decided that meant the & symbol wasn’t part of the rules.
Hence, the station gained the nickname of Ampersand station.
Although often described as making life difficult for spies or invaders, in fact, with the signs sometimes simply painted out, it was quite easy to walk up to the sign and still read the whitewashed embossed text. Also, railway maps were freely available to buy in mainland Europe prior to the war, so it wasn’t really a secret as to what was where.
The main reason for obscuring the railway signs was up in the skies.
Before modern navigation, aircraft pilots used paper maps and looked for local landmarks to work out where they were. If a pilot got lost over the countryside, it was common practice to find a railway and follow it until they saw a railway station. Then, they would bring the plane down low enough to read the large railway station signs to work out where they were.
The government, knowing this, was worried that the railways would assist enemy aircraft. Therefore, although some stations had already started painting out their signs at the outbreak of war, in early June 1940 it was decided to formalise the rules.
The order went out on 7th June 1940 stating “Will you please arrange, as soon as possible that all signal box and platform name boards, which are of sufficient size or so located as to be visible to a low flying aeroplane, be obliterated, or hooded so as not to be visible from the air.”
However, the London Passenger Transport Board was exempted from most of the rules within the County of London, so tube stations that were above ground generally didn’t need to have their signs hidden. It’s not stated, but likely that they assumed that an enemy would be satisfied to be flying “over London” and not that fussed if they were over East Ham or West Ham when dropping bombs on the civilians and factories below.
In fact, the exemption applied to London Transport would later annoy people as tube stations could keep some signs, but a nearby mainline railway company couldn’t.
Then, on 18th June 1940, the government issued a wide-ranging order requiring all direction and name signs to be removed from across the country — not just railways but everywhere, but only for geographic signs.
So, for example, an estate agent could continue to show their signs if they were called “Sproggs Estate Agents,” but not if they were called “Eastbourne Estate Agents.” Companies that were well known locally had to cover their names, and any public notice from the council had to ensure the locality names could only be read when close on foot and not from a passing car.
The rules were strictly enforced within 20 miles of the coastline, if less so as you got further inland. Presumably, on the theory that if the enemy was that far inland, they’re probably winning.
That brings us to the — in railway lore — famous photograph of the railway sign at Bushey & Oxhey being painted out.
Although not unheard of, painting out the signs was unusual as it was preferred to have them removed and put into storage so they could be reused after the war ended. There’s an amusing incident at Esher station where they removed the metal signs only to reveal the station name was painted on the wooden board behind anyway.
I suspect that at Bushey & Oxhey, an enthusiastic publicity officer spotted an opportunity to preserve the & and come up with a light-hearted joke. There are certainly a number of examples in the archives of railway publicity officers being slapped down for being too keen to make announcements before they were signed off by the military folk.
But the main reason I doubt it was “a typically bureaucratic application of emergency regulations” is that not only was it not the only station with an & in the name, it was, at the time, shared with the Bakerloo line, and as part of the London Underground, it was exempted from many of the rules anyway.
So, in the absence of written evidence, I suspect this was a local joke for wartime morale where half the station had the signs painted out and the other half didn’t, rather than, as is often claimed, a pedantic observation that the names were to be painted out, which left the & symbol intact.
It’s war, and people weren’t that petty minded.
Elsewhere, though, the reaction to the removal of railway signs was mixed, ranging from complaints about the confusion caused to passengers to complaints that the signs weren’t removed quickly enough to confuse the enemy. As it happened, the local police could provide exemptions if they felt it was appropriate, so sometimes station signs reappeared if the travelling public kicked up enough of a fuss.
The railways were also allowed to have very small signs – no larger than 3 inches high — in the stations if needed for passenger convenience. You can see an example of a small sign on the frame that used to house a large station sign at 45 seconds into this film.
Station staff were also supposed to call out the station’s name when trains stopped there, but that was ignored often enough that minutes from the Railway Executive Committee reminded the railway companies of the rules.
The rules, while annoying, were not unfounded. Although the main concern was aircraft, in October 1940, two spies who had come to the shore in a small boat were apprehended in Scotland after arousing the suspicion of an LNER Station Master when asking for the name of the railway station they were at.
Later, the sign rules were relaxed a bit to allow non-geographic “To the Railway Station” signs to be installed in towns, but that caused a problem as many of the enamel signs removed at the start of the war had included the station name. These couldn’t be used, but wartime restrictions meant there weren’t the materials available to make new signs without the station name.
So a bit of a pointless decision.
I was amused that one of the memos discussing this issue just happened to use Bletchley as an example, and considering the top-secret work going on there at the time, I wonder if a War Office official panicked when seeing that particular name in an unclassified memo.
Away from the stations, the removal of the signs from the signal boxes, while initially not a problem, later started to cause a lot of problems as experienced staff were taken away for war efforts and other tasks. It was becoming increasingly difficult for new inexperienced train drivers and guards to learn their routes. In the end, in early 1943, the Air Ministry allowed a modest relaxation of the rules to allow signal box names to be restored while also warning that “every additional name is an additional risk”, so please only restore signal box names where absolutely necessary.
In June 1943, the rules were relaxed again within the County of London. From that point, railway stations were allowed to display signs up to 6 inches in height, so long as they were under platform canopies and not visible from the air or nearby roads.
Except in Woolwich.
The Woolwich exemption applied because of the huge munitions factory at Woolwich Arsenal (where Arsenal football club originated). So important were the Arsenal’s factories to the war effort that despite occupying a vast amount of land and employing thousands of people, it was blanked out on maps.
The rules for stations in other urban areas outside London were also somewhat relaxed, except within 20 miles of the south and eastern coastline, where the total ban on station signs remained in force.
Following D-Day in June 1944, the threat of invasion receded somewhat, so another relaxation of the rules followed in October 1944, with a statement from the Home Office that: “The Railways welcome permission now given by the Home Office for the restoration of station name boards, and they will reinstate them as quickly as labour conditions permit”
Full blackout restrictions, although relaxed, formally ended on 11th May 1945, so railway stations were once again allowed to put bright lamps next to their main station signs at nighttime, with a request from the Ministry of War Transport to restore stations to peacetime standards as swiftly as possible.
By now, people were becoming increasingly annoyed with the wartime restrictions. The matter of signs was repeatedly raised in the House of Commons as MPs asked when railway stations would be able to improve their signage. In fact, the railway companies were keen to improve signage and lighting so they could encourage more people to travel by train, but, well, there’s a war on don’t you know, and there’s a bit of a shortage of manpower to deal with these things.
At one point, the formidable Devon Federation of Women’s Institutions passed a resolution calling on the railway companies to improve the illumination of railway signs at night.
You ignore the Women’s Institute at your peril.
At the same time, there was also a serious effort at the time to see if there was a way of standardising the railway signage across the UK before too much work had been done, but in the end the necessity for speedy restoration of railway signs meant that often people just pulled out the old signs from storage and reused them.
By January 1946, seven months after V.E. Day, the railways said that 85% of stations had their lighting restored, but there was also a huge backlog in maintenance and wartime repairs that also needed to be dealt with.
Eventually, the railway station signs were restored and peacetime repairs to wartime damage could get underway.
And at Bushey & Oxhey, it got its full name back, but not for long because in 1974 the station was renamed “Bushey”, losing the & entirely. So if you visit today, other than a small heritage sign on one platform, there’s nowhere to pose next to a relic of WWII heritage.
However, you can if you wander down the road, as many key transport junctions across the country had additional protections, from large concrete barriers to slow tanks advancing to fortified buildings that soldiers could use to defend the road.
These fortifications were called pill boxes, and while most were demolished to make space for something else after the war, where such a need never occured, the pill boxes survive.
And under the railway at Bushey station, in the middle of a large road junction, a WWII pill box is still there, ready to protect Britain if needed. Maybe someone can put a giant & on top in memory of the time this was Ampersand station.
Sources:
Oxhey Village Environment Group