NEW light has been thrown on a 19th century project which it was claimed would turn the West Somerset coast into Britain’s oil capital and a vast industrial complex.

Through the years, the failure of the project has been regarded largely as bad luck, but research sparked by a large and faded document recently acquired by the West Somerset Railway’s Steam Trust has revealed a different story.

The 94-year-old file of plans for a West Somerset Light Railway were drawn up as part of a fraudulent scheme on a grand scale by a man described in later years by an Old Bailey judge as “a dangerous and plausible criminal”.

The 13 highly detailed drawings, based on the 1905 Ordnance Survey map, show the route of a line stretching just over 11 miles from Bridgwater docks to its destination – Kilve.

The track would have passed mainly through meadows and orchards as it snaked from the River Parret past Wembdon, Cannington, and Combwich before reaching a site just south of Kilve church and ruined chantry.

The scheme was given extensive press coverage in the hope that it would attract local investment.

The line was designed to carry the huge quantity of oil which was it claimed would be produced from extensive beds of shale along the coast, and refined at a facility to be built at Kilve.

The total cost was estimated at £200,000 but, although the plans and sections were presented in May 1924 to the Ministry of Transport, they never went before Parliament, whose approval was needed to allow construction to begin.

However, the latest research shows it was all the unrealistic and fraudulent pipe-dream of a man named William Forbes Leslie, born in Scotland in 1865, who trained in medicine but was, in fact, a criminal fantasist.

Full feature in the Free Press.