In a recent post, I wrote about the old railway workers known as wheeltappers – those men with long-handled hammers who walked beside trains, listening for flaws. That search led me on a delightful detour into the world of vintage railway films.
These tappers show up again and again.
Night Mail (1936) tells the story of the mail train and its workers as it journeys north from Euston station in London to Glasgow and beyond.
“Four million miles every year. Five hundred million letters every year.”
At Crewe, the train stops – and the wheels are tapped.
If you’ve never seen this documentary make up for lost time now. And not just for the poetry of W.H. Auden and the music by Benjamin Britten, wonderful though they both are.
“Letters for the rich, letters for the poor, the shop at the corner and the girl next door.”
“Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder shovelling white steam over her shoulder.”
“All Scotland waits for her. In the dark glens, beside the pale-green sea lochs, men long for news.”
Waterloo
There are at least two films specifically about Waterloo Station, and both feature the wheeltapper.
In John Schlesinger’s Terminus (1961) a day-in-the-life portrait of the station, we not only see tapping in action but are also introduced to rooftop beehives (a jokey Pathé film covers those here), a lost child, and two cats – Minnie the signal-box cat, and a second cat at work in the Lost Property Office.
You’ll find a wheeltapper in The Railwaymen (1946), a recruitment film showcasing the range of careers the railway once offered.
You’ll learn about job responsibilities, promotion prospects, wages and benefits plus see some great trains.
All of these films are opportunities to peek into the past. And for train fans – pure joy!
And then there’s Will Hay’s 1937 comedy Oh, Mr. Porter!, where a wheeltapper is seen mindlessly clanging away. Asked why he does it, he hasn’t a clue.
That’s the punchline, and it lands because it resonates. How often do people carry out rituals or follow procedures without understanding the reason behind them?
For those who remember the age of steam, wheeltappers were a common sight. But they’ve also become a symbol of hollow ritual. The Kiplingesque story of a wheeltapper dutifully performing his task without knowing its purpose crops up in management textbooks and metaphors alike.
Wheeltappers and Writers: Listening for the True Ring
“I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places”
Railway tappers belong to the steam age. Robert Duncan’s metaphor – testing language as a railway worker taps a wheel – belongs in this world. The tapper listens for resonance: a cracked wheel gives off a dull, flat tone; a sound one rings clear and true. The job required precision, a trained ear, and faith in tone. Writers do the same. And when we stop listening for what rings true, we fall into the habit of empty gestures.
Other Tappings: Boats, Bodies, and Watermelons
As a comment from the ever perceptive blogger Shoreacres – who varnishes boats for a living – reminded me that boat surveyors still tap hulls to check for flaws. “Just a week or so ago, I spent an entire day at work listening to a surveyor tap-tap-tapping.”
She also offered a striking echo from Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life:
“When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner’s pick, a woodcarver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe… Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year.”
Will (who blogs here) noted that bodies are tapped too – knees for reflexes.
Water barrels get tapped for fullness, watermelons for ripeness.
And of course, there’s wall tapping.
Tapping the Walls
Wall tapping is one of the oldest known systems of prisoner communication. Across cultures and centuries, it has preserved sanity, solidarity, and the human need to speak and be heard.
In Edwardian Britain, imprisoned suffragettes tapped the walls and called out “No Surrender!” in defiant support, especially during episodes of brutal forced feeding.
The practice appears again in Soviet prisons. In Journey into the Whirlwind, Eugenia Ginzburg recalls piecing together a tapping alphabet described decades earlier by Vera Figner, a fellow political prisoner. That remembered code enabled her to reach out to another cell, re-establishing connection – and resistance.
Judith A. Scheffler’s anthology Wall Tappings: An International Anthology of Women’s Prison Writings, 200 A.D. to the Present preserves these practices and the voices behind them. I
t’s out of print, but the second edition, can be found at the Open Library.
It spans memoir, fiction, poetry, drama, and more, with contributions from women imprisoned in ancient Carthage, Iran, Egypt, Malta, Chile, Malaysia, Eritrea, as well as in Europe and US.
It’s an astonishing anthology and well worth a look. The introduction is invaluable.
The Hanoi Hilton
American POWs in Vietnam developed a related technique: the Tap Code particularly in Hỏa Lò Prison – the “Hanoi Hilton.” This system relied on a 5×5 grid, with one set of taps indicating the row and another the column. One tap, a pause, two taps: B.
This method enabled communication, coordination, and morale – even under torture and solitary confinement.
Among those who used the code was Air Force pilot John Borling. Shot down in 1966, he spent nearly seven years imprisoned and composed poetry entirely in his head. He shared it with fellow captives by tapping on the walls – keeping memory and meaning alive in the dark.
Words That Ring True – and Those That Don’t
Tapping is a test. A means of discernment. Not everything that sounds polished is sound. Language changes. Words lose meaning. Some get co-opted and hollowed out by overuse or ideology.
Words like “inclusive,” “tolerance,” “empowerment” and “diversity” once rang with idealism. Now – drained of meaning they usually land with the empty thud of stock phrases used to shut down thought. The list of these words gets longer with every dead debate.
A writer, like the wheeltapper, walks the length of the lines tapping for soundness. One rings with clarity, another with a clang or a thud. This one holds; that one needs to be replaced.
The metaphor extends. We tap not only poems, but beliefs, slogans, friendships. What rings true stays. What doesn’t, falls away.
Sometimes what fails the test is an idea. Sometimes a person. Sometimes it’s our own assumptions – the clang of inherited certainties. We change our minds.
Knock Three Times
When English Heritage unveiled a blue plaque at the corner of King’s Road and Bramerton Street this week – marking the site of the old Gateways Club – it was a chance to reconnect. Some of the friends I made there I haven’t seen in years.
I tapped. The line was still open.
And in fond memory of those friends, those times, and that smoke-filled Chelsea basement, the jukebox – three tunes for a shilling? – plays and we sing along to Tony Orlando and Dawn:
Oh, my darling, knock three timeOn the ceiling if you want meTwice on the pipeIf the answer is no
We tap to remember. We tap to test. We tap to reach each other across walls, time, distance – and sometimes just to say we’re still here, still listening.
Keep tapping.
The featured image is a still from Terminus: It’s an atmospheric portrayal of a parcels train pulling out of the station in the hands of BR Class 5MT 4-6-0 No.73116 Iseult.
delightful
Thank-you,
Tapping in!The Mail train…its keeping me awake, thundering over the rails and crossings through an England i once knew that has slipped away…heavy metals, smoke, hessian, leather, muscles and personal connection and camaraderie …i wanted to get out of bed and go to the old wooden chest that holds letters, postcards, birthday cards sent yesteryear to me, my family…handwriting of those people preserved as e mail does not…the texture colour of the paper, smell; the very small ones when post could be sent six times a day, to the regulation standard size of today. The stamps, the franking with dates. But i tapped on my ipad instead and was shocked at all the decades that have shot past without me really noticing.
The speed of change speeds up. All the more reason to know history and reject those who would misappropriate it.
Indeed. Tap on. I cannot imagine the determination and mental strength required to survive 7 years at the Hanoi Hilton. for what absurd purpose?
How does anyone survive years of solitary confinement….