Papers of Oswald Stevens 'Ossie' Nock

Printed materials collected by O. S. 'Ossie' Nock and primarily relating to his involvement with Toc H Mark I in London between 1927 and 1930.

Ossie Nock was born on 21 January 1905 in Sutton Coldfield, the son of a bank employee, Samuel James Nock, and a schoolteacher, Rose Amy nee Stevens. The family moved south and Ossie was educated at Marlborough House and Reading School. They moved to Barrow in Furness in 1916 and Ossie became a border at Giggleswick School. He obtained an engineering degree in 1924 from the City and Guilds Engineering College in London.

Between 1921 and 1929 he was a resident at Toc H and wrote a diary concerning his life at Toc H Mark I in London. He was House Secretary between 1927 and 1928.

The recession during the 1930s led Nock to seek other forms of income and he completed a correspondence course in journalism. He submitted numerous articles to magazines and would have many works accepted for publication. He published under pseudonyms including 'C.K.S.', 'C. K. Stevens', and 'Railway Engineer'.

Ossie married Olivia Hattie Ravenall (c1913-1987) in 1937.

Following the Second World War he became chief brake draughtsman at the Westinghouse organisation; and he managed British Rail's modernisation plan and expansion of the company's drawing office during the mid-1950s. Nock's first published book was Locomotives of Sir Nigel Gresley published 1945, and based on an earlier series of ten articles in The Railway Magazine.

In 1969 Ossie became president of the Institution of Railway Signal Engineers. He retired in 1970 and died on 29 September 1994.

Source: papers of O. S. 'Ossie' Nock; information supplied by the depositor; Wikipedia entry accessed 19 July 2019 via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O._S._Nock

Open, access to all registered researchers.

Presented, July 2019

Please see full catalogue for more information.

Papers arranged and described by Mark Eccleston, July 2019, in compliance with General International Standard Archival Description (ISAD(G), second edition, 2000; and in-house cataloguing guidelines.

Permission to make any published use of any material from the collection must be sought in advance in writing from the Director of Special Collections (email: special-collections@contacts.bham.ac.uk). Identification of copyright holders of unpublished material is often difficult. Special Collections will assist where possible with identifying copyright owners, but responsibility for ensuring copyright clearance rests with the user of the material

Papers inherited by the donor through the Estate of his deceased father, O. S. 'Ossie' Nock

The Cadbury Research Library holds the papers of Toc H (reference: TOCH)