Awards and Loans

Gordon Newton - Lifetime Achievement Award

Gordon Newton was the sixth and last generation of his family to own and manage Israel Newton and Sons Ltd, a old boiler-making business founded in Bradford in 1803.

From 1979, under Gordon’s direction, the company became a major player in repairing and building rivetted boilers for the steam heritage sector – rail, road and marine. By the early 2000s the company needed a new owner and a new location. No suitable candidates appeared, but preservation steam faced a severe skills shortage and a threat to its future.

Hence was formed the Boiler and Engineering Skills Trust (BESTT) of which Gordon has been Chairman since 2013, designing and delivering training to support the safe repair and maintenance of heritage steam boilers.

Since 2014 BESTT, has trained over 30 young people in boiler-smithing and mechanical repair skills, through 1 year traineeships funded by National Lottery Heritage Fund.  Many more have undertaken short courses of up to a week using the training skills of BESTT Trustees, paid staff and volunteers. Gordon has personally led training on riveting and contributed to other courses. He undertakes much of the administration of BESTT, which has included acting as Treasurer as well as Chairman. He is often the recognized face of BESTT, whether professionally in fora such as the Boiler Code of Practice Committee or in promoting the organisation across the steam heritage sector.

Managing and promoting training is often a challenge and Gordon has had to steer BESTT through many of those. At the age of 82 he remains energetically committed to the organisation.

Cecil Schumacher - Lifetime Achievement Award

91 year old Cecil Schumacher is a legend in motor racing circles.

He has worked for most of his career in the very specialist world of semi-automatic gearboxes, both maintaining and repairing early units such as the Wilson pre-selector gearbox and designing new systems for Borg-Warner and then for Cosworth, during that period when their brilliant engine dominated Formula 1 racing.

He also founded a business making radio-controlled racing cars which is still a world leader today employing 25 people and run by his son Robin.

Despite his advanced years, Cecil has been involved with many historic racers such as Sunbeam Tiger, Grand Prix Talbot-Lagos and the ERAs which all use Wilson pre-selector boxes which are fiendishly complex and made up of huge numbers of very small components.

They were designed to cope with family salon cars but racing car designers found them very useful and under loads for which they were not designed they often broke.

Cecil has continued to design and produce improvements to those gearbox designs to enable them to handle increased far more power now than they were designed to handle almost a hundred years ago.

Closer to home, one of his units is installed in the diesel shunter outside, and his delight in encountering it during a visit last year is evident.