By 1972 things were not looking good for the Flying Scotsman, 50 years old and the world’s most famous steam locomotive. In 1934 it had set a world record becoming the first self-propelled track-borne steam engine to reach 100 miles per hour; now it had reached a dead end in California, forced to haul a nine-coach exhibition train promoting British goods abroad and, humiliatingly, kitted out with American Frontier-era trappings, including a ‘cowcatcher’ fender at the front and a large brass bell that clanged at every given opportunity. Its private owner, British, had gone bankrupt and was now working his passage home as an entertainer on a P&O cruise liner, while the pride of the LNER was holed up in a shed at a US army depot. The end of the line.
But in swooped Sir William McAlpine, scion of the construction dynasty Robert McAlpine & Sons (the Dorchester, Wembley Stadium, D-Day’s Mulberry harbours…) with a lifelong fascination for steam trains, who acquired it and back it came to its home country, via the Panama Canal. ‘It was my patriotic duty,’ he said.
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Sadly, the Flying Scotsman never made to Fawley Hill, McAlpine’s Buckinghamshire estate where it might have joined, if some impracticalities had been overcome, the mile-long private railway line that meanders through Fawley’s parkland, next to the monumental iron crest, formerly of Blackfriars Bridge Station, the Victorian taxi arch from Waterloo, the original and equally huge Eurostar sign decommissioned from its original terminal, and an entire railway station, which once stood proudly in the fenland village of Somersham, part of the Great Eastern Railway Line and, dismantled piece by piece, reassembled at Fawley. For completion’s sake a Midland Railway signal box came from Burton upon Trent, and a footbridge from the Isle of Wight. And when St Pancras was redesigned at the turn of the century, Sir William agreed to take a half dozen of its cast-iron white columns but 42 arrived. ‘Ironhenge’, his wife Lady (Judy) McAlpine christened it. There is also a private menagerie home to animals surplus to requirement at other zoos, 24 or so species, including at one point a zebra. A lemur once mounted an escape to the nearby river at Henley, using as cover a primary school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream staged in the gardens. Country Life called Fawley, admiringly, ‘the most bonkers estate in Britain’.
Sir William died in 2018 and now much of the collection that he and Lady McAlpine amassed over many years, both indoors at their Georgian-style redbrick house and out, is coming up for sale at Dreweatts in Newbury . ‘Don’t give stuff to museums to hide in their storerooms,’ Sir William would say, ‘sell to people who want to own a bit of history and will care for it’. Lady McAlpine concurs. A bonkers estate, who’s to say, but there is certainly a joi-de-vivre on view here underpinned by a rare connoisseurship, a testament to wit, verve and imagination, and ‘a serious and purposeful philosophy of collecting,’ says Dreweatt’s Joe Robinson. With one eye on the future, this is a first stab at rationalisation. ‘Naturally there is an awful lot still to cause the children a headache…’ says Lady McAlpine.
So here we go. Against salvaged 18th-century pine panelling and theatrical backdrops by Oliver Messel, a fine collection of maritime pictures by Claude Muncaster, chiefly of ‘boats and angry seas’, as Lady MacAlpine puts it. Fittingly there is Terence Cuneo’s celebrated painting of the Flying Scotsman – the one that launched a thousand postcards and jigsaws (sadly Sir William had to let the train go in the late 1990s. It’s now housed in the National Railway Museum in York) – and a magnificent elephant painting by David Shepherd, a family friend, who was himself, who knew it, an expert restorer of steam locomotives.
Among the curios, a Victorian leather clip holding a lock of the Duke of Wellington’s hair (1833) and a dried flower from Napoleon’s grave in St Helena (1860) and around 20 ceramic pugs: ‘Bill was NUTS about pugs!’ Most strikingly, the flagpoles from the east and west towers of Wembley Stadium, dating from 1923 – the London landmark was built by the family firm for the British Empire Exhibition of 1924 – salvaged when the original was earmarked for demolition. ‘A ridiculous decision,’ Lady McAlpine tells us. ‘My husband felt he should take care of them. However, with him gone and my tenure of this world and this estate unpredictable, I feel it is time for them to have a new custodian. Maybe someone who prefers football to trains…’
‘Gus’ is a 12-and-a-half-foot-long model rhino on wheels with curious provenance. It was thought to have been made for a putative film of Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros (1959), which true to its Absurdist roots was all set to pair lugubrious comedian Tony Hancock with Cockney ‘sparrer’ and later Carry On dependable Barbara Windsor, but shelved when the leading man checked himself into a drying-out clinic.
Readers of long-standing of WoI will, of course, recognise the McAlpine name. William’s younger brother, Alistair, himself a collector of great distinction (and in great quantity) was, with his ‘Journal of a Collector’, a much-loved columnist for many years. ‘My life was a helter-skelter of discovery; my imagination ran riot,’ he once wrote. Family traits come no more obvious nor more enviable. Floreat McAlpine!
‘Constructing a Legacy: The Collection of Sir William & Lady McAlpine’ goes under the hammer on 12 August 2026 at Dreweatts, Donnington Priory, Newbury, Berkshire RG14 2JE. Visit auctions.dreweatts.com
