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DB McNeill & Frank HW Green Collection

D. B. McNEILL AND FRANK H. W. GREEN COLLECTION

The Green Collection of United Kingdom Bus and Rail Time Tables

The McNeill-Green Collection is the combined transport collections of two brothers-in-law, D.B. McNeill and Frank H.W. Green (Frank marrying DB’s sister Jean). They were born within weeks of each other in 1911: DB in Belfast, Frank in London. Both spent time on the academic staff of University College, Southampton (now the University of Southampton) both served as officers in the 1939-45 war and retained their boyhood interest in transport throughout their lives.

DB’s connection with trains goes back to 1916 when his grandfather used to take him to watch the trains at Bloomfield Station, in the suburbs of Belfast. DB has visited, and ridden on railways throughout the world: from the narrow gauge Clogher Valley Railway to the grand routes through the Andes and Rockies.

DB’s first railway book was the ‘Wonder Book of Railways’ given to him for Christmas in 1918. Others soon followed, along with the desire to add his contribution to the railway records. The Railway Magazine published his first article in December 1930.

At Queen’s, he was involved with the Officers Training Corps and he remained a part-time soldier until 25^th August 1939 when he was called up for full time service with the Royal Corps of Signals. On his return to civilian life, he continued in the Territorial Army until his retirement as a Major in 1954.

A year before the start of 1939-45 war Dr McNeill, as he then was, became a lecturer at University College, Southampton. He returned there after the war and remained at Southampton until his retirement as a Senior Lecturer in 1971.

Throughout his time at Southampton he was a non-executive director of the McNeill Group a Belfast based group in the construction and building supply sector, which his father had started in the early 1900s. On the death of his brother Sean in 1974 DB became Chairman. The McNeill group later ran into financial difficulties and had to be split up. The logo that the McNeill Group adopted in the 1950s lives on in the ringed compass shown in the collection’s bookplate and stamp.

In the 1970s DB was invited to become a Trustee, later Chairman of the Trustees of Ulster Museum (1978-1983), in which capacity he was painted by Rita Duffy along with the steam locomotive No.93 of the Great Northern Railway. The picture is now in the Art collection of the Ulster Museum.

During his time at Southampton and thereafter he published a number of books and articles, including three of the seven transport handbooks published by the Ulster Museum, and four books on local transport history.

Like DB, Frank was given the ‘Wonder Book of Railways’ as a young boy, but in his school days – latterly at Haberdashers Aske in London – his interest was firmly fixed on buses. By the time he had completed his degree at the London School of Economics and gone on to teach at Southampton University, his mother was reluctantly housing a formidable collection of bus timetables.

Also like DB, Frank joined the services before the war, in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve, and was formally called up in September 1939. Despite his wartime service his collection remained much on his mind. Lying in the 64^th General Hospital in Egypt ill with jaundice he wrote the following to his mother.

Don’t sacrifice my collections of guides, time tables etc., or the transport periodicals, to add to the paper collections some of these (especially the time tables will be of considerable historic value.

Such sentiments were repeated at intervals throughout the war, so that it was with relief when he got home at the end of December 1945 and could personally take responsibility for his collection.

After the war, Frank moved quickly from Southampton University to the ministry of Town and Country Planning where he used transport patterns – principally buses – to determine the sphere of influence of towns and other centre.

In his obituary in the Times (31 January 1983) he was described as ‘a polymath and innovative thinker in various geographical disciplines. Not only did he publish nearly one hundred papers, but he was also, for a time, the editor of the Royal Meteorological Society’s ‘Weather,’ a founder of the Institute of British Geographers in 1933 and also of the Association of British Climatologists in the early 1970s’

Before he died, his daughter Frances Green had looked at the piles and piles of time tables and persuaded her father that the best place for them was in a museum. With his blessing she duly gave them to the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, which now houses what the Omnibus Society then believed was possibly the largest private collection of British bus time tables in the British Isles.

With DB moving into a nursing home and giving his transport books and periodicals to the Museum, it seemed the logical thing to join these unique collections under the single banner of the McNeill/Green Collection.

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