Midland mundanities
With reference to the caption to the picture of banking locomotives at Bromsgrove, it is not quite true that the famous Lickey banker, No.58100, was universally known as ‘Big Bertha’. Certainly, most people called it that, but there were those, mainly of an older generation, who stuck resolutely to the alternative nickname, ‘Big Emma’, it then was, rolled out of Derby Works in 1919, just after the end of the Great War, and both names seem to have been derived from heavy artillery used by the Central Powers in that conflict. ‘Big Bertha’ was a 42cm siege mortar built by Krupps of Essen for the German army. Skoda had earlier built a 30.5 siege mortar, known as Schlanke Emma (‘Skinny Emma’) for the Austro-Hungarian army. Although this was…