12/05/2026
Quorn and the 1926 General Strike.
100 years ago today saw the end of the 1926 General Strike, it was 9 day strike called by the TUC to better worsening conditions for coal miners.
The railway system was virtually brought to a stand, and relied on ex-military personnel and members of the upper classes to keep trains moving. One gentleman recalled, “I immediately volunteered for the Great
Central Railway… sleeping happily on 3rd class carriage seats and jeered at by the
bloody-minded mutineers… a Lieutenant Colonel as driver… Our driver carried a
revolver which he said he would use if he were attacked.”
At Quorn & Woodhouse, William Curzon-Herrick who, in 1915 inherited the nearby Beaumanor Estate, helped at the station as a porter and saw to the few trains that ran.
He grew up in Woodhouse Eaves and often train spotted on the platform as a child. He married Lady Kathleen Hastings, the eldest daughter of the Earl and Countess of Huntingdon of Burton Hall in Burton-on-the-Wolds, and was quoted in a rather derogatory manner by his in-laws as "backward" saying that he could recite the whole of Bradshaw's off by heart and would have been "happiest living life as a Railway porter".
He and his wife Kathleen are pictured here.
