Barbara Mitchell

Thursday October 01, 2015 by Cass Morgan

28th May 1935 to 22nd September 2015

Middleton Press lost its co-founder when Barbara Mitchell died on 22nd September 2015. She had typeset around 400 titles, which had emerged from the pencil of Vic Mitchell, her husband for 57 years.

They had become engaged during the formative years of the Festiniog Railway Society of which he was a founder. On becoming a director, he suggested that its public launch should be at the Model Railway Club's annual show in Westminster in April 1955 and that she should dress as its pre-war station mistress at Tan-y-Bwlch.

This was so successful that she appeared in all three Welsh daily newspapers the next day. Thus began the first railway revival, the Talyllyn not having closed. She later had practical involvements, notably running the buffet car, when trains terminated at Tan-y-Bwlch.

Picture: Barbara wore Welsh costume for the second time to mark the 50th anniversary of her launch of the F.R.S. It was organised by its Hants & Sussex Area Group on the Exbury Gardens Railway, in the New Forest.