I am very sorry to have to announce the death earlier today of Winstan
Bond, CBE. He had been in poor health for some time. Although a highly
successful chartered accountant by profession, Winstan was known to most
of us for his work with The Tramway Museum Society and the The National
Tramway Museum at Crich, Derbyshire, UK, with which he had been involved
since the earliest days in the 1950s.
For many years the Treasurer, he made sure that the Museum - which as a
independent institution receives no regular grant-in-aid from the state
- was always in a much healthier financial position than many others of
its ilk. Deeply knowledgeable about tramways in the UK and abroad, as
well as other forms of urban transport and urban planning, Winstan's
lasting legacy will be the superb, world-class library and research
facility which he built up at Crich. Visitors to his nearby house - a
large rambling affair set in splendid grounds - were surprised to find
much of the premises taken up with an equally huge collection of books
and archival materials, built up over many decades of world-wide travel
and complementing that at the Museum. This collection was by no means
restricted to tramways, containing many rare reports and documents in
several languages on urban planning and transport, the better to set
tramways in their context. It was always Winstan's intention that this
collection would join that at Crich, and at the time of his death he had
made financial provision for the Museum to install the large amount of
extra racking needed to achieve this. The result will arguably be the
most comprehensive resource for historians of urban mobility in the world.
Winstan was always a keen supporter of the IRS&TH, co-organizing an
early and highly successful conference, Suburbanizing the Masses: Public
Transport and Urban Development in Historical Perspective. This resulted
in a collected volume which he edited with me and to which he
contributed a stimulating essay demolishing many of the myths
surrounding the effects of the flat-fare policy often found on US
streetcar systems. He was also instrumental in securing funding for a
module on the history of urban transport for our Graduate Certificate in
Transport History.
A gentleman of the old school, with a line dapper waistcoats, he will be
sadly missed.
Colin Divall
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