The Railway Children – the new Christmas show at the Tabard with a historical link to Chiswick

The Railway Children; Theatre at the Tabard; Photograph Matt Hunter

The London Pub Theatre of the Year 2025 Christmas show

By Jenny de Montfort and Bridget Osborne

Theatre at the Tabard’s Christmas production The Railway Children, based on the book by E Nesbit, opened at the weekend.

The theatre’s in-house Christmas productions are a highlight of the year in Chiswick. Last year’s production The Snow Queen won the award for Outstanding Production Values at the 2025 London Pub Theatre awards and was partly responsible for them carrying off the top prize: London Pub Theatre of the Year 2025.

READ ALSO: Tabard theatre named London Pub Theatre of the Year

All the Tabard’s Christmas productions have been memorable for their choice of classic children’s stories and the creativity of the productions: The Snow Queen, The Secret Garden and another E Nesbit story Five Children and It.

This year’s choice is already proving a winner at the box office. Produced by the same team as last year’s Christmas show, it follows the fortunes of an Edwardian mother and her children Bobbie, Peter and Phyllis, exiled from the suburban middle class when their father is unjustly imprisoned for selling state secrets.

(L) 1968 TV series; (C) 1970 film; (R) 2000 film

The Railway Children – popular for 120 years

Written in Edwardian times, at the time of the Dreyfus Affair, Edith Nesbit takes her audience into the realms of politics and what constitutes a fair society, as well as the personal tale of the family forced to downsize and go and live in the countryside, where Mother tries to earn a living selling stories to magazines and the children become entranced by the railway.

The Railway Children has always been popular – never out of print since Edith Nesbit wrote it 120 years ago in 1905, its popularity has been kept alive by a series of award-winning theatre, TV and film productions, most notably the BBC TV series in 1968 and the film which followed it in 1970, featuring Jenny Agutter as the eldest daughter Bobbie and Bernard Cribbins as the station master.

Simon Nye’s 2000 ITV adaptation brought the story to the attention of a new generation of children, with Jenny Agutter this time playing the mother.

Photographs from the dress rehearsal at Theatre at the Tabard; Photographs Matt Hunter

An historical connection with Chiswick

The story has a particular connection with Chiswick, through the character of the Russian émigré who the Railway Children help reunite with his family.

According to Edith Nesbit’s biographer Julia Briggs, it is likely she based the character on a friend of her husband’s she knew through the Fabian Society.

Hubert Bland, as well as being serially unfaithful, (they married when she was seven months pregnant; he already had one child by his mother’s companion and went on to have several more with his secretary / mistress in a ménage à trois with Edith) was the editor of the Fabian magazine ToDay and one of the journalists who wrote for it was Sergei Mikhailovich Kravchinski, also known as Stepniak (‘man of the steppes’).

Hubert and Edith were founding members of the Fabian Society, one of the  organisations behind the formation of the Labour Party. They were a sociable couple, by all accounts, whose circle of intellectual friends included HG Wells, George Bernard Shaw, William Morris and Sydney and Beatrice Webb.

Among their acquaintances were ‘proto feminists’ Annie Besant and Eleanor Marx, and Russian dissidents Sergius Stepniak and Peter Kropotkin.

(L) Hubert Bland; (C) Edith Nesbit; (R) Sergius Stepniak as a young man

Sergius Stepniak – Russian exile, assassin and ‘one of the gentlest of men’, who lived in Bedford Park

The Mother in The Railway Children is a strong and independent woman – you could say an early feminist – and in the character of Mr. Szczepansky, Julia Briggs suggests Edith gives voice to her ‘aversion against the Czarist regime in Russia’, which she developed from her friendship with Stepniak.

She wrote a line for Bobbie in the book in which she explains Mr. Szczepansky was exiled because he “had written the beautiful book about poor people and had been sent to prison and to Siberia for just that”.

Stepniak was the son of a Ukrainian aristocrat and an army doctor. According to his obituary, he was ‘one of the first men of culture and good birth who entered upon a secret propaganda of democratic teaching among the peasants and was arrested in the summer of the year 1874 on this account’, which the obituary suggests is what radicalised him.

He was ‘particularly impressed by the cases of extreme brutality in prisons, and the stern measures of repression adopted by the Russian Government drove him and his colleagues into the adoption of what has since been termed the Terrorist policy.

‘He became a prominent member of the chief revolutionary organisation, and his position becoming more and more dangerous, he was at last compelled to leave the country in 1880’.

The reason for his exile? ‘He assassinated General Nikolai Mezentov, the head of Russia’s secret police with a dagger in St Petersburg’.

Sergius Stepniak

Despite being branded a terrorist, (and despite the brooding menace evinced by this photograph), he was described by a friend in Britain as ‘one of the gentlest of men, a man of a sweet and lovable nature’.

In exile he published a book on the Russian revolutionary movement: Underground Russia (1882), in which he profiled a number of Russian revolutionaries, and he later wrote a novel: The Career of a Nihilist; or, Andrei Kozhukhov (1889).

Edith and Hubert lived in southeast London but many of their circle of acquaintances would have overlapped with the Bedford Park set.

Stepniak was popular. He certainly knew George Bernard Shaw, as he advised him on Balkan uniforms for Arms and the Man, and Shaw was a good friend of Edith’s, who helped her out financially after the death of her husband. Stepniak was also a friend of William Morris’s.

He lived at 31 Blandford Road from 1893 to 1895, when he moved to 48 Woodstock Road.

He was killed by a train on a level crossing near his house. On his way to meeting, he stepped over the stile into the path of the oncoming steam train on the North & South Western Junction Railway line at the level crossing in Woodstock Road. Apparently he didn’t hear it coming.

According to the report in the Northern Guardian on 24 December 1895:

‘M. Stepniak was noticed by some of the builders walking down the road when he passed absorbed in thought or reading.

‘A moment later the whistle of an approaching train was heard, and it was seen that at the level crossing the unfortunate man had been caught by the engine, which had knocked him down, and the whole train passed over his body, which was terribly mutilated.

‘There is no bridge over the rails, and the footpath is used mostly by persons walking from Bedford Park to Acton Vale.

‘One of the builders who had witnessed the accident, and who knew the deceased, at once ran to his house and conveyed the dreadful news to Madame Stepniak…

‘… M. Stepniak had resided in Bedford Park, with some intervals of country life, for four years, and his house was a meeting place for all sorts and conditions of unorthodox literary and artistic people, and the intellectual centre of the colony of Russian political exiles in London’.

Around a thousand mourners turned out for his funeral procession from Chiswick to Waterloo (he was buried at Brookwood cemetery near Woking).

Cast of The Railway Children; Theatre at the Tabard; Photograph Matt Hunter

The Railway Children runs until Saturday 3 January

The Railway Children, by the unorthodox and brilliant children’s writer E. Nesbit, is on at the Tabard theatre from Friday 5 December until Saturday 3 January.

Simon Reilly, the theatre’s Artistic Director, told The Chiswick Calendar:

“It has been an absolute joy to bring The Railway Children to the Tabard stage.

“E. Nesbit’s timeless story has echoed down the ages, emphasising the importance of family and community ties in whatever shape they take and helping others less fortunate.

“E. Nesbit, alongside other writers of the late 19th / early 20th century, was a great champion of communicating the need to improve the plight of others. It really feels like an ideal show for Christmas and there is plenty of fun and Tabard theatrical magic to go around too.

“Tickets are selling quickly so don’t miss out and book now’.

Tickets: The Railway Children