d on that dusty little stage. From a scuffle of some sort in the
board room Mr. Gartside, a Director of the Oswestry and Newtown Railway
Company, beat a hasty retreat up the stairs to the clerk's room, closely
pursued by Mr. Whalley. Mr. Gartside being rather portly, was much out
of breath, and suddenly pausing and turning round to recover himself on
gaining the hearthrug he received Mr. Whalley's fist full in the stomach,
which completed his exhaustion. Recovering his breath and as much of his
dignity as the circumstances would permit, the disabled Director
appealing dramatically to the astonished clerks, exclaimed "Gentlemen, I
call on you to witness that the hon. Member for Peterboro' has struck
me." But the clerks unable to grapple with so unaccustomed a situation,
beat a hasty retreat, and nothing more was heard of what was presumably a
more or less accidental "assault."

From Great George Street, the offices were subsequently moved to No. 3,
Westminster Chambers, and soon after Mr. Savin's failure, in 1866, when
the directors took over the working of the line from the unfortunate
lessee, after a short trial of another London office, the Secretary and
his staff, in August of that year, packed up pens, ink, paper and
documents and settled themselves in Oswestry, where they have since
remained. In Oswestry, too, on a site under the Shelf Bank, close to
where the first sod on the Ellesmere and Oswestry line was cut, the works
were erected and have continued to be maintained.

[Picture: Oswestry station and Company's Head Offices. Reproduced from
the "Great Western Magazine."]

On a subsequent occasion, however, they were the ostensible cause of one
of those sudden storms which, as we have said, from time to time assailed
the board-room or even periodical assemblies of the proprietors. On this
occasion it was, indeed, a bolt from the blue. A few days before the
date fixed for the half yearly meeting, at Crewe, in February 1879, there
had been placed in the hands of the shareholders a pamphlet bearing the
innocent title "Cambrian Railways Workshops." But, when they read it,
the recipients discovered that, whatever the reason for the choice of
such a heading, the sermon was founded on a much wider text. It
traversed the whole policy of the Board, the constitution of the Company
and the management of its property, and it was written in highly
censorious terms. That, in itself, might have