Philip Sidney Bagwell

Who was Philip Sidney Bagwell?

Philip Bagwell was a prolific and widely respected British labour and transport historian.

Born in Ventnor, on the Isle of Wight, he grew up in a radical tradition. His father was a conscientious objector in the First World War, and although Bagwell rejected pacifism, he maintained a lifelong commitment to radical social causes associated with Christian socialism, a commitment that infused all his major published work.

Bagwell was a lifelong advocate of public transport and especially of the economic, social and cultural virtues of railway travel. He wrote the official history of the National Union of Railwaymen, published in two volumes in 1963 and 1982. His The Transport Revolution became essential reading on university economic and social history courses.

He spent most of his career at the Polytechnic of Central London, where in 1972 he was given one of the first professorships created in the polytechnic sector of British higher education. He continued to write influential and impeccably researched books, pamphlets and articles on public and communal issues in transport policy in a period when official opinion in Britain was gradually swinging increasingly towards purely private emphases.