Sunday Times Where Was I?

Second question is a little tricky this week but near as I can figure it, the answers are

Q1. The Spa Valley Railway

Q2. Disgusted, Tunbridge Wells

The initial clues place us in Groombridge, a village in Kent. Groombridge place was allegedly used as the model for Birlstone manor, by Arthur Conan Doyle in the Sherlock Holmes adventure 'The Valley of Fear'. The Spa Valley railway line has a station at Groombridge and from reading the railway's web site, it was operating around 1866 and passed from public ownership in 1985. The headquarters of the Spa Valley Railway are in Tunbridge Wells West. You can see from the satellite picture that there is indeed a railway track running from Groombridge to Tunbridge Wells West (or there was, when the picture was taken).

The Baron who put Tunbridge Wells on the map was Dudley, Third Baron North (born c1581-82) .He looks a bit like Blackadder but it was he who discovered what is known in the trade as 'chalybeate springs' there (ferruginous waters). The architect known for 'The Great Stove' was a guy called 'Joseph Paxton' (he seems to have been a workaholic) and the gambling operation in Tunbridge Wells was taken over from a gangster called Bell Causey, by a dandy called Beau Nash (c1735).

From looking at the list of claret plaques in Tunbridge Wells, a famous novelist who lived there was E.M.Forster, and the first leader of fighter command, was the far sighted air defence visionary genius, Hugh Dowding (gawrd bless 'im, everyone on this island owes him, big time!). The famous musician (born c1905) was most likely Mantovani (for some reason, he doesn't seem to merit a claret plaque, probably because he didn't actually live there for very long). This is where the second question becomes tricky, the town's most famous scriptorial resident, was not a real scriptwriter at all but was in fact a brainchild of the town's newspaper editor, who used to get his staff to write a bit of banter in the letters section to keep the readers interested and sometimes they would sign their names to these bits of 'outraged' prose as 'Disgusted, Tunbridge Wells'. 'Disgusted, Tunbridge Wells' became the name of a BBC radio four feedback program which started in 1978.

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