https://www.therailwayhub.co.uk/72471/tunbridge-wells-west-as-a-railway-centre-january-1956/
Braked goods wagons were surprisingly slow to proliferate - not really until after WW2 did they start to become common, and even then they were vacuum braked, which wasn’t wildly efficient for obvious reasons, so the use of brake vans as ‘force multipliers’ continued well into the 1980s! They were also there to try to take-up some of the slack in long trains of wagons - you commonly had 30 to 50 wagons in a train during peak goods-by-rail, and they were all loose-coupled, so stopping and starting could cause an enormous amount of wear-and-tear on both the linkages, the rolling stock, and the goods carried, so a good guard would use the brake strategically to reduce the effect.
The guard himself was essential on these trains because most of the goods rolling stock was pretty ancient - at the start of the 1960s there were still some wagons in circulation that had been built in the 1870s, and plenty dated from the 1920s and 1930s - all were built as cheaply as possible, and so most featured plain wheel bearings running in grease-boxes. Since we’d killed-off a significant percentage of our workforce in two World Wars, there were never enough people, or enough money, to maintain all these labour intensive antiques, so “hot box” axle fires were pretty common events. A vital part of the guards job was to watch for these and bring the train to a standstill ASAP, get the fire hazard decoupled and try to get the rest of the train reassembled and moving again before the entire line came to a standstill!
The guard was also the security guy for the train while loaded - no shortage of people ready to pilfer during the often lengthy waits in sidings. The vans were glazed and heated inside with a small coal stove, and an official bucket was usually carried, plumber’s Transit style, but they were heavy (typically 20-30 tons), leaf-sprung, and unless the guard worked the brake constantly, the ride was hellish as starting and stopping would have a very jerky whiplash effect as all the wagons in the train responded to the slack between them. Once diesels proliferated, most with two cabs, guards mostly became second-men inside those instead.
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