The grandest survivor of the original Metropolitan is Baker Street, which would become the headquarters of the Railway, its spiritual home. But here it is my duty to address an anomaly that must have been vexing the brighter sort of tourist since the late 1980s. Then, an administrative change at London Underground brought the Metropolitan Line under the control of the department running the Hammersmith & City Line. As a result, the purple of the Metropolitan Line ceased to appear on the Tube map west of Baker Street, and the line from there to Paddington was shown as belonging to the Hammersmith & City and the Circle Line only. The operational change this reflects means that today all Metropolitan trains approaching the historical platform at Baker Street from the east are whisked north at the last moment, to proceed along the Metropolitan’s north-pointing ‘country’ branch. There is no longer anything Metropolitan – neither ‘Railway’ nor ‘Line’ – running through the beautiful brick-vaulted station that is so liberally decorated with illustrated panels proclaiming ‘Metropolitan Railway 1863’ and ‘The world’s first Underground Railway’.
Then again, most people don’t notice.
We’re not quite done with nitpicking, because I ought also to mention that the first Metropolitan station at Paddington – Paddington (Bishop’s Road) – now serves only the Hammersmith & City Line. A new stop – Paddington (Praed Street) – was opened in a cutting under Praed Street when the Metropolitan extended south towards Bayswater in 1868. This now serves the Circle and the District but no longer the Met because, to repeat, the Met no longer runs west of Baker Street.
In London Underground Stations (1994) David Leboff mentions (with approval, I might add) the ‘dull yellow lighting’ of the old Met platforms at Baker Street, and the whole of the line seems to have had an ochre-ish tone when opened. The platforms were lit by gas flames in glass globes, and gas burns yellow if there are impurities in the atmosphere. The atmosphere of the Met contained plenty of impurities – very little but, as we will see. Today the lights are still in glass globes. They are sodium bulbs, and these too have a tendency to burn yellow with age. And, the electric lighting of today reflects off the same yellowish bricks as the gas lighting of 1863. (Those bricks are made of the London clay excavated when the line was built.)
A romantic friend told me that in 1863 the pendant globes would have swayed as the trains came in. I liked the detail – shadows swaying to left or right as the train approached – but surely the globes would hang from a rigid gas pipe? I consulted Christopher Sugg, a historian of gas, whose great-great-great-grandfather prepared – in 1907 – the first demonstration of street gas lighting in London. He replied: ‘The installation was quite rigid, but at some stage the pendant fixtures were provided with a cup-and-ball joint at ceiling or roof level to allow for movement and simplify cleaning by rotating the lamp.’ (Result!)
The formerly Metropolitan platforms at Baker Street are the most atmospheric on the Underground, and whereas the Bakerloo and Jubilee Line platforms at Baker Street are decorated with tiles showing motifs related to Sherlock Holmes, they are not needed on the old platforms, whose ambience puts you straight into a Holmes story. When walking in the off-peak over the small wood-panelled footbridge that connects the two original platforms – which itself resembles an old-fashioned railway carriage hoisted above the tracks – I would not be surprised to see a top-hatted man approaching me.
Met carriages were like the main-line carriages of the time. The doors swung open. People could, and did, open them in tunnels, and therefore the tops of the doors were rounded to prevent snagging. The carriages were lit by gas, a relative innovation on trains at the time, which were usually lit either by oil or – in third class – by nothing. Second- or third-class Met compartments had one gas lamp; first class had two. This was, as we will see, a most class-conscious railway, and signs hung along the platforms reading ‘Wait Here For First/Second/Third Class’. There were no waiting rooms. They would have been an indictment of the service frequency, of which more in a second; there are still very few waiting rooms on the Underground, and the ones that do exist are usually on the stations inherited from the main-line railways. But there were licensed refreshment rooms, provided by those pioneers of station dining Messrs Spiers and Pond. Lee Jackson, who wrote an absorbing thriller set on the early Metropolitan, A Metropolitan Murder (2004), alerted me to a book of 1899 called Inquiries Concerning Female Labour in the Metropolis, which is written by ‘Anon’ and describes the conditions in which bar girls worked on the Met. They stood for eleven hours a day, and slept in subterranean rooms. They were allowed to consume 10d. a day in spirits, or teetotal girls could have ginger beer or lemonade. Most of the girls spent the money on stout, ‘which is sustaining’. The girls were sometimes followed home to their company lodgings by ‘hangers-on’ who used the bars as clubs. ‘Some of them are “horsey” individuals; not a few are flash mobs men, who go there to discuss business.’
The bar at Baker Street is now a snack shop, part of a chain called Treats. A man working on the ticket gate at Baker Street told me he remembered it as a bar, ‘from when I was a kid. There was a sort of narrow ledge all around the walls for you to put your drink on. There were no seats.’
‘So it was like a betting shop,’ I suggested, ‘in that you weren’t encouraged to hang around?’ ‘That’s right,’ he said, ‘but people did.’
In 1933 Spiers and Pond would still be operating fifteen bars at Metropolitan stations. In his book Underground London (2005) Stephen Smith mentions two late surviving station bars: ‘Pac-Mac’s Drinking Den, on the eastbound Metropolitan Line platform of Liverpool Street station, was open for business until 1978, when it became a café called The Piece of Cake. The other bar, The Hole in the Wall, was on the westbound platform at Sloane Square.’ That closed in 1985, and is today another Treats. In 1985 smoking was banned – by the chain-smoking Transport Secretary, Nicholas Ridley – on all partly or wholly subterranean stations, the ban on smoking on trains having been introduced the year before, after a fire at Oxford Circus. And smoking goes with drinking. One woman told me she worked in the City in the early Eighties, and all the hard-drinking traders in her office would stop off at the Sloane Square bar on their way back to the west London suburbs. ‘It was like a little community. The barmaid knew all their drinks, and where they lived. I remember her calling out as a train came in, “Tel, it’s your Wimbledon!”’
Those not drinking could read the advertising posters. Here is the gloomy novelist George Gissing, from his novel In the Year of Jubilee. Jessica Morgan and Samuel Barmby are waiting for a train at King’s Cross:
They stood together upon the platform, among hurrying crowds, in black fumes that poisoned the palate with sulphur. This way and that sped the demon engines, whirling lighted wagons full of people. Shrill whistles, the hiss and roar of steam, the bang, clap, bang of carriage doors, the clatter of feet on wood and stone – all echoed and reverberated from a huge cloudy vault above them. High and low, on every available yard of wall, advertisements clamoured to the eye: theatres, journals, soaps, medicines, concerts, furniture, wines, prayer-meetings – all the produce and refuse of civilisation announced in staring letters, in daubed effigies, base, paltry, grotesque.
The novel was set in 1887, when the Met had fallen from fashion, and written six years later, when it had fallen still further.
It was the start of 120 years and counting of complaining about Underground advertising. In Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying the impoverished poet and former advertising copywriter Gordon Comstock, reflects: ‘all modern commerce is a swindle. Curiously enough, it was the advertisements in the Underground stations that first brought it home to him.’ By then the posters in the stations had all been marshalled within borders of standard sizes, which didn’t deter the Daily Mail from complaining, on 26 November 1957, that ‘Out of 200 advertisements running alongside the Piccadilly escalators, 48 show women in underwear.’ When I was writing my ‘Tube Talk’ column, a man se
nt me a letter complaining about the advertisement of cars on the Underground. Why would the Underground masochistically promote a rival transport mode? The answer, I discovered, was that the adverts on the network must not ‘harm the brand’, and a car advert per se was not deemed to do that. However, a car advert that said, ‘Why are you using this horrible Tube when you could be driving one of our lovely cars?’ would not be allowed.
Station stops on the early Met were supposed to last a minute, but would often take less. The trains were going at something less than 20 miles an hour. It doesn’t sound much to us, and there is a story of a guard who was on the platform at Paddington when his train pulled away, and so he rushed ‘at street level’ to catch it up at Edgware Road. But a fast horse-drawn carriage at the time moved at only 10 miles an hour. There was a two-minute train frequency in the rush hour, which is better than the current frequency on the line. Signalling was by the standard ‘block’ system of the time, which prevents any two trains being on the same track section at once, but this was operated with boldness, with margins shaved. The Metropolitan would prove to have an excellent safety record nonetheless.
BUT COULD YOU BREATHE?
A conventional steam engine emits smoke and steam from its chimney. Smoke is always – and steam can be – detrimental to health and comfort. So Chief Engineer Fowler proposed to build an unconventional engine. Before the opening of the line, he airily told a Commons Select Committee, ‘What we propose to do is have no fire.’ Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Chief Engineer of the Great Western, languidly backed him up, and I imagine him exhaling smoke from his habitual cheroot as he said, ‘If you are going on a short journey, you do not take your dinner with you.’
Fowler designed a locomotive with a small fire that would heat firebricks. These in turn would keep the boiler hot. The engine was nicknamed ‘Fowler’s Ghost’ because of the secrecy surrounding it. In 1861 Fowler tested it on the Great Western main line. It went 7½ miles; then it stopped. It seemed they would have to take their dinner with them after all. Sir Daniel Gooch, Locomotive Superintendent of the Great Western, then designed a tank engine that could consume its own steam and smoke, this being diverted into the water tanks at the operation of a lever. Or the exhaust gases could be directed through the chimney in the normal way when the engine came to any suitable aperture.
It says something about the Metropolitan’s lack of confidence about these condensing engines that smoking – by human beings – was banned on the line from the outset, whereas it had been allowed on all prior railways. Given that it was happy to run gas-lit steam trains alongside wooden platforms, the Met couldn’t say this was on the grounds of the fire risk. No, they knew they had an air quality issue. (The smoking ban was overturned in 1874, as a belated result of an amendment to the Railway Regulation Bill of 1868, which required all railways to provide a smoking carriage. In his last speech in the house John Stuart Mill spoke in favour of the amendment.)
Smoke and steam did leak from the engines into the tunnels, both because condensing mechanisms didn’t work and because the temptation to fire the engines in the normal way – which immediately creates chimney emissions – was overwhelming. Why? Because sending the steam into the water tanks eventually made the engine water boil, and the locomotives couldn’t work in that case. Secondly, the engine fires needed the draught created by the normal operation of the chimney in order to burn properly – and you need a good fire to keep up the steam pressure.
Soon after opening, trains were shortened so as to put less strain on the engine, and thereby reduce the emissions. In rush hours the passengers left behind on the platforms as a result of this foreshortening were collected by ‘expresses’ that dashed through the tunnels like men holding their breath, and took fourteen minutes for the 3½ mile end-to-end trip, as against eighteen for the ordinary service. Then the Great Western fell out with the Metropolitan, mainly over the lack of any provision at that point for freight. In August 1863 it quit as train operator and took away its toys (its engines and carriages), although it would continue to send its own trains – badged GWR, rather than Metropolitan – over the line. The Great Northern – connected to the Metropolitan by tunnels under King’s Cross, it will be recalled – stepped in and provided carriages and engines that boasted absolutely no condensing facilities, causing an access of the sulphurous fumes that burning coal gives off. In July 1864 the Metropolitan took delivery of some more condensing locomotives: beautiful green, brass-bound tank engines from Beyer, Peacock & Co. of Manchester. These were painted dark green, later ‘chocolate’ (romantic railway-speak for ‘brown’). They carried large headlamps that would bear down on the gloomy platforms. When, sitting in a ‘down’ carriage, you passed one of these engines on the ‘up’, you’d have seen the fire glow sliding past in the dark tunnel, since there was no cab.
Those Euston Road ventilation grilles were fitted in 1872, but the Met became increasingly smoky as the Circle service came into operation in the 1880s. In 1896 Mark Twain wrote that:
The engine goes blustering and squittering along, puking smoke cinders in at the window, which someone has opened in pursuance of his right to make the whole cigar box uncomfortable if his comfort requires it; the fog of black smoke smothers the lamp and dims its light, and the double row of jammed people sit there and bark at each other, and the righteous and the unrighteous pray, each after his own fashion.
In 1897 a Board of Trade inquiry looked into the matter. Levels of carbon dioxide and sulphur were found to be high; a chemist of Gower Street testified that he had for years been dispensing ‘Metropolitan Mixture’ to soothe the coughing fits of regular passengers. On the other hand, a certain John Bell described how his own health problem – quinsy – had been eased by the disinfectant effect of the ‘sulphurous acid gas’ so freely available on the platforms. John Bell was the General Manager of the Metropolitan Railway. A doctor testified to the effect that the atmosphere on the Metropolitan was ‘concentrated fog’. But there was plenty of polluted fog above ground as well. (In the 1920s the Underground Group issued a series of wordy posters entitled ‘A Guide to the British Weather’. The first was headed ‘No. 1: Fog’. It explained that fog included soot, ashes and sulphur impurities before proceeding to the triumphant punchline: ‘There is no fog on the Underground.’)
Further air shafts were installed, but ‘electrivisation’ was coming, and in 1897 everyone knew it. Perhaps there was something in the company’s persistent contention that the atmosphere could be beneficial, however. At the London Transport Museum a tape loop plays an interview with George Spiller, a fireman on the steam-powered District Railway in the early days: ‘We worked ten hour days, eight times around the Circle. In the summer you could hardly breathe going through the tunnels.’ He lived to be 102.
Steam engines survived on the cut-and-cover lines until 1971, pulling maintenance wagons at night after the electricity had been switched off. This was three years after the abolition of main-line steam, and people would write letters to the newspapers saying they’d seen, or heard, a ghost train. A recent post on the excellent ‘District Dave’s London Underground Site’ ran as follows:
In 1968/9 as a callow youth, I moved into digs … in a house with a long garden that backed onto the Met between West Harrow and Rayners Lane. Strange noises woke me in the wee hours of my first night there. Looked out of the window, and saw a ghostly silhouette of a steam loco standing there, complete with eerie glow from the cab. Scared the cr**p out of me, since I had lived in Cornwall for years, and had no idea there was still steam on LT.
The railway author John Scott-Morgan is in regular touch with a man who drove those trains. He, like George Spiller, said the atmosphere was beneficial, and at the time of writing he is ninety-six.
A CLASS-CONSCIOUS RAILWAY
At the time of his death Charles Pearson was campaigning for a workmen’s estate to be built a few miles west of Paddington. That didn’t happen. He also campaigned for cheap workmen’s fares o
n the Metropolitan, and that did come about. At first, the Metropolitan provided cheap trains voluntarily. Later, a legal requirement to provide workmen’s fares would be laid upon the company in return for the right to extend its lines. The early workman’s fare was a 3d. return ticket usable in third class on trains departing at 5.30 and 5.40 in the morning. The usual third fare was 5d. return, so the saving was a shilling a week, or a pint of beer every day of the six-day working week. (A first-class return was 9d.)
In a pamphlet of 1865 called The Shops and Companies of London and the Trades and Manufactories of Great Britain Henry Mayhew interviewed workmen who had availed themselves of the fare. He presages his account with a eulogy of the Met: ‘This subterranean method of locomotion had always struck as being the most thoroughly cockney element of all within the wide region of Cockaigne’, which is humour (albeit not of a funny sort), and which reminds us that the tireless chronicler of the London poor had also once been the editor of Punch. Early one morning he stood on the platform at Paddington, which was ‘a bustle with men, a large number of whom had bass-baskets [wicker baskets] in their hands, or tin flagons, or basins done up in red handkerchiefs. Some few carried large saws under their arms.’ It was widely agreed that the ‘cheap and early trains’ were ‘a great benefit to the operative classes’. One man told Mayhew that he lived ‘almost in the open country’ – in Notting Hill – where he was able to afford two rooms for what one cost in the middle of London. And the railway saved him a 6-mile walk to work.
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