The gains are great—yet I still remember with delight and awe the shouts of “Wonderful! Counsellor!” from the huge, sweating enthusiastic, be-sashed mass of humanity that made up the Royal Choral Society of my youth, and will be desolate if I never hear again Mozart’s strange and wonderful (though dramatically inappropriate) counterpoints to “The people that walked in darkness.”

All Souls' Day was celebrated by souling, a custom going back to pre-Reformation days: soul cakers and mummers toured the village begging for a soul cake — a plain, round, flat cake seasoned with spices.

But the beginning of the end to the rivalry came with the appointment of Sir Josiah Stamp as General Manager in 1926, and the LMS became a proper united front when William Stanier was head-hunted from the GWR in 1932 to become Chief Mechanical Engineer.

It is common to think of preborn human life as weak, dependent and helpless.