London Underground's Strangest Tales

by Iain Spragg

  The proposed tower would stand at 358 metres, some 45.8 metres taller than its Parisian counterpart. It was to feature two observation decks, restaurants, theatres, dancing halls and even Turkish baths, and although the great Gustave Eiffel himself declined Watkin’s invitation to design his grand plan on the grounds it would be disloyal to the mother country, work on the foundations began in 1892.

  The following year Wembley Park Station was opened and in 1896 the park itself was ready for business; sadly, work on the tower was not keeping pace with the rest of the developments and the first visitors to the complex were greeted by the distinctly underwhelming sight of a structure that stood just 47 metres tall.

  The bad news just kept coming. Watkin was forced to retire through ill health, engineers discovered the tower’s foundations were suffering from subsidence and in 1899 the construction company charged with making Watkin’s plan into an imposing reality went into voluntary liquidation.

  Watkin joined the choir invisible in 1901 and three years later it was agreed his big idea had definitely been folly and the demolition experts were called to dynamite the whole thing.

  The sniggering across the Channel lasted for weeks.

  A footnote to this sorry tale came in 1923 when the original Wembley Stadium was built for the British Empire Exhibition on the site of the doomed tower, covering its foundations. When Wembley was rebuilt in 2000, the lowering of the new pitch led builders to uncover the century-old concrete foundations, a poignant reminder of a dream reduced to little more than rubble.

  MURDER ON THE DISTRICT LINE

  1897

  The pen is mightier than the sword and the power of the written word was certainly in evidence on the London Underground at the end of the nineteenth century when William Arthur Dunkerley decided to use the Tube as the setting for a rather macabre tale of revenge and murder.

  Writing under his pen name of John Oxenham, Dunkerley’s A Mystery of the Underground was published in 1897 as a series in the weekly Victorian periodical magazine To-day and was so compelling that terrified readers struggled to separate reality from fiction.

  The story told of a disgruntled mechanical engineer, known only as The Hood, who bore a grudge against the District Railway Company (based on the Metropolitan District Railway – MDR) and exacted a bloody revenge by travelling on the District Line every Tuesday night, murdering innocent commuters. The series also featured what Dunkerley presented as ‘real’ newspaper extracts detailing the Hood’s gruesome exploits.

  The problem was A Mystery of the Underground was just too convincing and District Line passenger numbers, particularly on Tuesday nights, plummeted as the fictional body count mounted. MDR complained to Jerome K. Jerome, the editor of To-day, that the story was affecting business.

  Dunkerley was hauled before his boss and, after a heated exchange of views, he was ‘persuaded’ to switch his murderous plot to a cruise liner heading down under. The Australian Tourist Board were livid but the MDR, not to mention their anxious passengers, breathed a huge sigh of relief.

  William Arthur Dunkerley wrote more than 40 novels in his career before retiring to become the Mayor of Worthing but A Mystery of the Underground remained his most successful short story. In 1997 the bloody tale was revived in a radio play entitled Death on the District Line.

  ‘Each Tuesday evening on consecutive weeks the District Line is the location for a brilliant and outrageous murder,’ read the PR release. ‘Journalist Charles Lester must turn detective or risk becoming the next victim.’ Sadly for the passenger commuters on the overcrowded carriages, this time the murderous tale failed to have any negative impact on passenger numbers.

  THE FINAL JOURNEY

  1898

  The London Underground really is a marvellous way of getting around the capital – even if you do happen to be dead and en route to your own funeral. Squeamish passengers, however, tend to frown on sharing a carriage with a corpse, which is why in the long history of the network just two people have made their final journey courtesy of the Tube.

  The first was the great Liberal prime minister William Gladstone, who shuffled off this mortal coil in 1898 at the ripe old age of 88. Gladstone spent a lifetime in British politics, serving as prime minister on four separate occasions, and to mark his years of long service he was honoured with a state funeral at Westminster Abbey.

  The problem, to borrow a phrase, was getting him to the church on time, so it was decided to transport the coffin on the Underground to Westminster Station. The funeral was certainly a star-studded affair with the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York acting as pallbearers and – after his unusual means of arrival – Gladstone was laid to rest with considerable pomp and ceremony.

  Ironically, the great statesman had been one of the guests at the private opening of the Metropolitan Line in 1863, making him one of the very first people to travel on the Tube. Little did he know then that he would be bowing out by the same means of transport.

  The second person to be conveyed on the network at the end was Dr Thomas Barnado, the man famous for setting up a series of charitable children’s homes. The good doctor died in 1905 aged 60 and spent five days laid out in his coffin in the People’s Mission Church in the East End so that thousands of people whose lives he had touched could pay their last respects.

  Barnardo, however, had lived much of his life in Barkingside in northeast London and it was there he was to be buried, so a special train was arranged to carry the coffin under the streets of the bustling capital on the Central Line from Liverpool Street to Barkingside Station, which had conveniently opened two years earlier.

  At the time of his death, his charity was caring for over 8,500 children in 96 homes and many of them were on hand to see him off. A memorial on top of his final resting place was unveiled in 1908 and, rather thoughtfully, Barnardo had written his own epitaph for it. ‘If I had to live over again,’ it reads, ‘I would do exactly the same thing, only better, I hope, and wiser and with fewer mistakes.’

  It remains to be seen whether anyone else will join Gladstone and Barnardo and make use of the Tube on their way to the grave. It may not quite boast the same sense of ceremony as a horse-drawn hearse but it would at least avoid the Congestion Charge.

  SHAKE, RATTLE AND ROLL

  1900

  The early Underground trains were relatively puny machines with about as much power as Nick Clegg in a coalition government, but all that changed in 1900 when the shiny new Central Line was opened and a new breed of bigger, more powerful and altogether more muscular engines were unveiled.

  As one of the network’s deep lines, the Central needed trains capable of taking the strain so far below the surface and the engineers duly obliged with engines strong enough to take anything the Underground could throw at it.

  But big isn’t always beautiful and although the new trains did the job they also caused problems, and it wasn’t long before the draughtsmen in offices in Cheapside near Bank Station were complaining they could no longer draw straight lines, thanks to the rumble of the testosterone-fuelled trains.

  Something had to be done – or at least appear to be done – and a ‘Vibration Committee’ was set up to look at the problem.

  ‘I beg to ask the President of the Board of Trade whether he will take any steps to secure compliance by the Central London Railway Company with the recommendations of the Committee to inquire into the vibration produced by the working of the traffic on the Central London Railway,’ enquired the MP for Paddington South, Sir Thomas George Fardell. ‘And whether the Board of Trade will endeavour to prevent the passing of any Railway Bills unless they contain provisions adequately protecting frontagers and others from injury by vibration caused by working of electric traction in Tube railways.’

  The President asked in reply whether the draughtsmen couldn’t just hold their rulers a bit more tightly and the beefy Central Line trains continued to hurtle through the tunnels.

  CENTRAL LINE DÉJÀ-VU FOR TWAIN


  1900

  Nineteen hundred was an interesting year. As the long Victorian Era drew ever closer to its inevitable end, it was (as all pedants know) also the final year of the old century, while a surprisingly slim Winston Churchill was elected to Parliament for the very first time, the modern Labour Party was founded and in the United States railwayman Casey Jones became a hero when he died trying to prevent a train crash.

  It was also the year of the maiden journey made on the Central Line from Bank to Shepherd’s Bush, the first phase of a line that is now 46 miles in length, making it the longest on the network.

  There was great fanfare when the line was opened on 27 June 1900 and the guest of honour was none other than the Prince of Wales.

  ‘There was voracious curiosity, astonished satisfaction and solid merit,’ the Daily Mail breathlessly reported. ‘If this kind of thing goes on, London will come to be quite a nice place to travel in. The conductor was all of a quiver of joy and pride. But there was no indecorous exhibition of emotion. Every man was solidly British.’

  Every man, that is, except the famous novelist Mark Twain, who was ‘most solidly’ an American the last time he had looked, yet still found himself on the inaugural Central Line trip.

  How the author of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the critically acclaimed follow-up, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ended up 40 feet beneath the streets of London sharing a carriage with royalty is a story as interesting as any of the fiction he wrote.

  Twain published Huckleberry Finn in 1885 but despite its success and good sales for Tom Sawyer before it, he was terrible with money and a series of bad investments forced him to flee the States in 1891 to escape his creditors.

  He spent many years travelling the world and lecturing but by 1900 he found himself living in Dollis Hill in northwest London. Despite his financial embarrassment, his reputation preceded him and an invitation for the Central Line party popped through his letterbox.

  The twist in the tale comes from a closer look at Twain’s early life. Before he became a full-time writer, he served an apprenticeship as a steamboat pilot on the Illinois Central Line back home in America. It’s doubtful the organisers of the Underground Central Line bash were aware of the odd connection, but Twain probably had a chuckle to himself as that first train pulled out of Bank Station.

  WRIGHT GETS IT ALL WRONG

  1904

  The early history of the London Underground is littered with colourful and controversial characters and perhaps one of the most notorious was engineer Whitaker Wright, the man who dreamed of constructing a rail link between Waterloo and Baker Street but eventually paid the ultimate price for his grand designs.

  In 1897 Wright approached the owners of the fledgling Bakerloo Line and offered to raise the money needed to start work on the new link. They accepted, Wright began trading as the London and Globe Finance Corporation and within weeks he had persuaded investors to part with £700,000 to fund the scheme.

  In August 1898 contractors began work and over the next 18 months tunnelling continued at a cost of £650,000.

  But behind the scenes all was not well with Wright’s other business interests, and in a desperate effort to balance the books and keep himself in caviar and champagne, he issued bonds to raise some cash. When the move failed and was shunned by City investors, Wright illegally began loaning himself other people’s money from his other companies.

  It was to prove a fatal mistake and in December 1900 the London and Globe Finance Corporation was declared bankrupt. Wright fled to France and excavation work on the Waterloo and Baker Street link ground to a halt.

  That might have been the end of the story had it not been for the tenacity of one creditor who had been left out of pocket by Wright. The individual persuaded a judge to issue an arrest warrant for the AWOL engineer and, although he was by now keeping a low profile in New York, Wright was arrested and charged with fraud.

  In January 1904 he finally stood trial for his financial misdemeanours at the Royal Courts of Justice. The prosecution was led by Rufus Isaacs, a former broker and City expert, and despite Wright repeatedly insisting they’d got the wrong man, the jury wasn’t fooled and he was convicted of fraud and sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment.

  The real drama however was yet to occur. Proclaiming his innocence and his intention to appeal as he was bundled away, Wright handed his watch to his solicitor (explaining, ‘I will need not this where I am going’), reached into his pocket for a capsule of cyanide he had hidden and swallowed it. Wright duly shuffled off this mortal coil, perhaps leaving some investors to consider justice had been done.

  The subsequent inquest into his death revealed he had also smuggled a silver-plated revolver into the Royal Courts of Justice, but evidently he had favoured cyanide over a bullet. Wright was buried in the grounds of his sprawling home at Lea Park in Surrey.

  ‘His abilities as a public speaker were turned to good account at shareholders’ meetings,’ reads his entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, ‘and inspired confidence in his most disastrous undertakings.’

  THE STADIUM THE PICCADILLY LINE BUILT

  1905

  As the plucky British POWs in the 1963 classic The Great Escape discovered, the big problem with digging a tunnel is disposing of all the earth and rubble the excavation creates. It doesn’t just disappear magically, you know, and the more you dig, the more unwanted material you generate.

  It was a dilemma faced by the early Underground engineers, who were frightfully good at getting their tunnels built but not quite so adept at finding practical uses for the tons of waste their grand plans generated.

  That changed in 1905 when a businessman by the name of Gus Mears bought the Stamford Bridge Athletics Ground in southwest London. Mears planned to transform the stadium into one of the greatest football grounds in the country. When nearby Fulham declined to take up residency he decided to form his own team, and Chelsea FC was born.

  There was, however, the small matter of the stadium. Stamford Bridge was a modest, ramshackle affair but Mears was desperate to be big and bold, so he approached renowned football architect Archibald Leitch to design him a new ground.

  Leitch was happy to oblige for a fee and his plan was to create a vast open bowl around three-quarters of the pitch for terracing, with just one stand with a capacity of 5,000. It was simple and effective, but it needed thousands of tons of building material to create the steep banks that were needed.

  Help was at hand in the shape of the nascent Piccadilly Line, which was still under construction and could supply all the cheap rubble and soil Mears and Leitch needed. The deal was done and Stamford Bridge slowly but surely ‘rose to the occasion’.

  Mears died in 1912, long before his new team were to become a force in English football, but his family continued to own the club until the early 1980s. Stamford Bridge, which originally boasted a capacity of almost 100,000, certainly lived up to his vision as a top-class venue and was chosen to host the FA Cup final between 1920 and 1922. It staged a rugby union match between Middlesex and the touring All Blacks in 1905 and was also the stadium chosen for a unique baseball clash between the New York Giants and the Chicago White Sox.

  The stadium was extensively redeveloped again in the 1990s but this time the builders did not need London Underground’s overspill to get the work finished.

  THE STATION THAT NEVER WAS

  1906

  There’s an old saying, ‘He who fails to plan, plans to fail,’ and that was definitely the case when short-sighted American financier Charles Yerkes decided it was high time to extend the Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway (a.k.a. the Northern Line) between Hampstead and Golders Green.

  Despite fierce local opposition to the proposal, Yerkes won the parliamentary permission he needed for his ambitious scheme in 1903 and, once he’d raised the cash to pay for it all, work began on digging the tunnels and the construction of a new station that was a condition of the government�
��s green light.

  The key to Yerkes’ cunning plan was the farmland that lay above his Northern Line extension, which he planned to develop. The American envisaged street after street of new, gleaming houses – all built by him, of course – with the wealthy residents using his new ‘North End’ station to commute to work.

  And he might have made a success of it had it not been for Henrietta Octavia Weston Barnett, the famous English social reformer, activist and educationalist, who really didn’t want Yerkes’ ghastly new homes on her patch. Henrietta wasn’t short of a few quid and while Yerkes was busying himself with underground excavations, she bought up the land around ‘North End’ and incorporated it into Hampstead Heath.

  It was a strategic fait accompli. Yerkes could continue to tunnel until he was blue in the face but without permission to develop above ground, his grand scheme suddenly became a white elephant and in 1906 work on the new station stopped.

  Services on the Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway did begin a year later, but ‘North End’ had already been bricked up to spare everyone’s blushes. The new trains rattled past, oblivious to the abandoned platforms, and while there are 43 other ‘ghost’ or disused stations on the Underground network, ‘North End’ holds the dubious distinction of being the only one built that never actually saw active service. Or a single passenger.

  It does, however, boast one tenuous claim to fame.

  At 221 feet below ground, poor old ‘North End’ would have been the Tube’s deepest station but for Barnett’s intervention, rather than a vast underground storage cupboard.