As early as 1938 the British government had formulated an evacuation plan that would swing into action in the event of war. In fact, the majority of children and mothers with babies from inner-city areas began the evacuation procedure before the declaration of hostilities. In September 1939, in just one week, 3,000 trains were used to evacuate 1.5 million children as part of Operation Pied Piper. By the end of the war, more than 3.5 million children had been relocated.
To reduce the pressure on overburdened stations in London, towns such as Watford were used as departure points. School-aged children were unaccompanied, except for siblings, and had no idea where they were going to live. For some of the younger children it was an exciting day, as they were herded aboard the packed trains heading out to the country, though none of them had any idea of just how long they’d be away. Some managed only a few weeks, others stayed away from their home for years.
Children wearing name tags around their necks arrive in Wales from Birmingham on one of many trains used in operation pied piper, designed to safeguard inner city children and mothers with babies by moving them to the countryside before the outbreak of the second world war.
Getty Images
The success of the evacuation often depended on the kindness of the host families. Some of the pairings were disastrous. Country families sometimes complained of lice-ridden, ill-mannered children being foisted on them. Meanwhile some city children felt they were treated like slaves. But for others there was kindness and empathy – and a carefree childhood that would otherwise not have been available to them.
By 1867 the foundations of St Pancras railway station included storage space for countless thousands of beer barrels from Burton.
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As Britain became a safer place, children went back to their homes, often meeting a father they didn’t remember and a mother they might have seen occasionally but whose wartime experience was completely different from their own. It’s impossible to say how many lives were saved by the railways transporting children to safety, but it must have been thousands.
WHEN ST PANCRAS WAS BUILT IN 1868, WITH ITS SPIRES AND MOCK-GOTHIC STYLE, IT WAS DESIGNED ENTIRELY TO OVERSHADOW ITS NEIGHBOUR KING’S CROSS
The last stage of the journey took us into London’s St Pancras station, gateway to what in Bradshaw’s time was the most powerful city in the world, at the heart of an ever-expanding empire. St Pancras is described by Bradshaw as ‘the vast and magnificent terminus of the Midland Company eclipsing every other, having a roof 240 feet in span and 150 feet high and faced by a splendid hotel’.
Such was the rivalry between the different railway companies that when St Pancras was built in 1868, with its spires and mock-Gothic style, it was designed entirely to overshadow its neighbour King’s Cross, the terminus for the Great Northern Railway, which had been built 16 years earlier. This southern terminus for the Midland main line was not only bigger and bolder than King’s Cross, it was the largest enclosed space in the world. Like many London termini, it was also designed around what the railway was transporting, which was beer from Burton. The station was built on 800 columns, each spaced so that barrels could be stored underneath.
Looking at St Pancras today in all its restored glory and with its shiny glass extension stretching the quarter-mile length of a Eurostar train, it is difficult to believe that once, back in the 1960s, this magnificent station was scheduled for demolition. Thanks to a campaign led by the poet John Betjeman it was saved – just ten days before the wrecking balls were due to begin their work – and the station and hotel were both made listed buildings.
The redevelopment of the station cost £800 million, and now, after 75 years of neglect, the hotel is undergoing its own £170 million facelift. Royden Stock, responsible for looking after the hotel before work started, became something of an expert on the building.
Royden revealed to us how the drawings for the hotel had been produced by renowned architect George Gilbert Scott in just three weeks. His design won a competition that attracted 11 distinguished entrants – although his was by far the most expensive. Like all railway companies, the Midland Railway wanted to show off by building the most impressive railway hotel in the country, to be called the Midland Grand. Scott’s extravagant Gothic style seemed perfect.
In a revamped St Pancras Michael portillo is pictured with a bronze sculpture of poet Sir John Betjeman, who fought twentieth-century proposals to pull down the station.
© Steve Peskett
Today, as the restoration work continues, more of the original building is uncovered from behind false walls and ceilings. The most impressive feature of all, though, is a stunning cantilevered staircase that seems to float in mid-air as it leads up towards a ceiling painted with stars.
When it opened in 1873, the hotel catered for the wealthiest travellers. Its rooms were amongst the most expensive in London, costing 14 shillings a night. Time caught up, though, and the lack of en suite bathrooms eventually drove guests to other, newer hotels. Hopefully, when its 245 rooms open again for business in 2011, the guests will return.
People often wonder why St Pancras, King’s Cross and Euston were all built so close to one another. The reason is that in 1846 Parliament had decreed that all new stations in London had to be built on the edge of the city. A box was drawn around the city’s heart, protecting it from railway development. It reflected the views of a powerful lobby that wanted to protect the capital’s historic buildings from ‘railway vandalism’. It was time, that lobby decided, to stop the railway marching forward at the expense of everything in its path. The result gave the railway companies the perfect opportunity to build ever grander stations. It also led to a revolutionary new transport system to fill in the gaps, called the London Underground.
The world’s first underground line, the Metropolitan, was built in 1863 and ran between Paddington and Farringdon, bringing passengers from the railway termini and commuters into the city. Two special trains were run each day for the poorest workers, on which tickets cost only a third of the normal fare. When the line was built, the carriages were pulled by steam trains, so the tunnels had to have openings allowing steam to escape.
For the final part of our journey, we left the trains behind and followed in Bradshaw’s footsteps, taking his walking tour of the capital that starts with St Paul’s Cathedral, one of London’s most impressive buildings and considered by many to be Sir Christopher Wren’s masterpiece.
WREN STARTED WORKING ON ST PAUL’S WHEN HE WAS IN HIS THIRTIES AND WAS 78 BY THE TIME IT WAS FINISHED
The original cathedral was destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666. It fell to Christopher Wren, Commissioner for Rebuilding the City of London, to design and build a replacement, one of 52 churches he was charged with creating. It took Wren 10 years and a number of attempts to come up with the successful design, based on the Latin cross and incorporating a large dome. Wren started working on St Paul’s when he was in his thirties and was 78 by the time it was finished, but there is no denying it was certainly well worth the wait. As Bradshaw states, ‘It’s extreme beauty and colossal proportions are worthy of the highest admiration.’ Even today, St Paul’s Cathedral has a dramatic and romantic impact on the city skyline.
‘The most conspicuous object is the river,’ says Bradshaw, ‘winding its way like a huge artery, beautiful and picturesque bridges spanning the stream.’ He recommends standing in the middle of Waterloo Bridge, from where, today as then, you can see St Paul’s Cathedral, Somerset House and the Houses of Parliament. Despite 150 years of development, those three buildings still rate amongst the finest the city has to offer.
In 1862 selected dignitaries trialled the metropolitan line, travelling at close quarters aboard Smith & Knight Wagons into tunnels that would quickly fill with steam and soot.
© Transport for London Collection of London Transport Museum
JOURNEY 4
OPENING UP VICTORIAN BRITAIN
From Preston to Edinburg
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Our next journey took us north on the first rail link between England and Scotland. Until the railways came, the communities of north-west England were almost impenetrable, as the hilly terrain kept road building to a minimum. For better or worse, this route helped open up remote areas of Britain, notably the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales.
Our first stop was Preston, which is described by Bradshaw as ‘One of the principal manufacturing towns of the country. There are upwards of 50 cotton mills in this town.’ He goes on to say: ‘The commercial annals of this town are memorable for two long continued disputes between the employers and employed.’
Presumably he is alluding to the 1842 riot by cotton workers protesting about the conditions in the mills that ended in four deaths after armed troops opened fire. Twelve years later there was a strike by cotton workers that lasted for more than 25 weeks. Clearly Preston was notorious for its poor industrial relations record.
In Bradshaw’s day, Preston’s residents also had a reputation for hard drinking, which may explain why it became the home of the British Temperance Movement in 1832, founded by former weaver and cheese entrepreneur Joseph Livesey (1794–1884). The Liverpool-born Livesey believed that alcohol was the root of all social ills, seeing it as a cause rather than a symptom of the abject poverty suffered throughout industrial heartlands.
Cheap travel helped the teetotal movement to mushroom, as trains transported hundreds and eventually tens of thousands of people to Temperance rallies to hear the charismatic Livesey speak. Although Britain stopped short of outright prohibition of alcohol, as was introduced throughout the United States in the early twentieth century, it was estimated that during Livesey’s day one in 10 people chose to abstain from drink, a figure that peaked during the First World War when new licensing laws reduced pub opening times.
The next part of our journey took us 20 miles west from Temperance Preston to the coast, and we travelled on the Blackpool Belle, better known to countless young lovers as the passion wagon. Blackpool and its bright lights was such a popular destination with young people that the railways ran special services every weekend from other northern towns, operating late into the night.
Families made the most of Blackpool’s extensive sands after the railway opened there as early as 1846.
Keasbury-Gordon Photograph Archive
After Blackpool tower opened in 1894, the resort – unrivalled for attractions – was a firm favourite with everyone in the north west.
Keasbury-Gordon Photograph Archive
Norman and Norma Watkins began their romance on the Blackpool Belle in the 1950s. Norman remembers how, at the end of a night as the trains slipped out of Blackpool station, the light bulbs would be unscrewed to cast the carriages into a romantic blackout. There was darkness until the train approached their home town of Chorley, when all the light fitments would be returned to their rightful places.
The Blackpool of today is not so different from the one Norman and Norma remember. In Bradshaw’s day, however, it was just starting life as a seaside resort and looked nothing like the Las Vegas of Lancashire that it is now. The guidebook describes it as a ‘pretty bathing place on the Irish Sea … much frequented by visitors … in 1863 a new pier was opened which forms a most pleasant promenade’.
Bradshaw’s Blackpool had a permanent population of about 3,500, but that was soon to change. With the railways that reached Blackpool in 1846 came thousands of holidaymakers, and within a matter of a few years, theatres, the winter gardens and three piers had been built. In 1879 almost 80,000 people came to see the first illuminations. They were marketed as ‘artificial sunlight’ and have been attracting visitors ever since.
In 1894 another great Blackpool attraction opened, at a cost of £42,000. Early visitors to Blackpool Tower, a half-sized replica of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, were charged sixpence to travel more than 500 feet to the top. Terrifyingly, the last stretches had to be done on ladders. Today the maintenance team, known as stick men, still use ladders daily. From the top it is possible on a clear day to see a panorama that encompasses swathes of Lancashire, the Isle of Man, North Wales and the lower ground of Cumbria. Even at today’s peak summer prices it’s still well worth the entry fee.
From Blackpool we headed north on another branch line towards Morecambe Bay and a station with the most splendid view out across the sands. In the nineteenth century Morecambe Bay was an isolated area comprising small shellfishing villages. As the trains made it more accessible, the fresh cockles, prawns, shrimps and lobsters were soon being whisked to Manchester fish market.
Bradshaw is very clear about the dangers of the bay: ‘Morecambe is a fine sheet of water, eight or 10 miles wide, when the tide is up: but at low tide its quick sands are extremely treacherous and must on no account be crossed without the guide who is paid by Government and carries you over in a cart.’
Incredibly, 160 years on, there is still an official guide, paid by the state, who lives near the remote station of Kent’s Bank watching over the enormous mudflats. Cedric Robinson is the current incumbent of a job that dates back to the sixteenth century and is held for life. It became a royal appointment after scores of lives were lost at a time when local people had no choice but to brave the ever-changing sands on foot or by cart. For the annual salary of £15 and the cottage he lives in, every fortnight or so Cedric conducts tours across the treacherous sands for walkers, sometimes taking more than 100 people, and marking the route with laurel branches.
Morecambe Bay hit the news in 2004 when at least 21 Chinese cockle pickers tragically drowned in a racing tide. Cedric knows well that the 200 square miles of sands are perpetually shifting and are licked by a tide that comes in so quickly that you can’t outrun it. The tide never tires, Cedric warns. There’s also the threat of quicksand, which he has seen swallow tractors and horses. The trick, he says, is not to stop moving and, if you get into trouble, to lie on the sands and roll rather than walk.
The next leg of our journey took us on a detour inland to Settle, starting point of the famous line to Carlisle via Ribblehead, Dent and Garsdale. This line hadn’t even been built when our guidebook was written, but it was supposed to be one of the prettiest rail journeys in Britain, scything through northern Britain’s limestone and black marble landscape. It was also a journey that we could only take because in 1989 Michael convinced Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher not to approve its closure. At the time Settle was at the centre of a campaign to save the threatened line. Now Michael was returning for the first time in 20 years.
This spectacular Midland Railway line was opened in 1876. Stretching 72 miles, and passing nine tiny stations and through some of the most rugged countryside in Britain, it is a magnificent piece of railway architecture with stunning viaducts and bridges.
It is a pleasure to travel this way through the Yorkshire Dales but, passing through its tunnels and over its viaducts, one wonders how the Victorians ever came to build it. The reason was that the Midland Railway Company was driven by the desire to have a high-speed line that would compete successfully with its rivals. The company’s solution was to build straight across the Dales, with little thought for some of the details, such as the safety of construction workers. It took 6,000 men six years, working in miserable conditions, to complete the job.
Guided tours for hundreds of walkers are conducted over The Hazardous Sands of Morecambe Bay.
© Michelle Waller/Cumbria Wildlife Trust
The building of the striking Ribblehead Viaduct caused misery for hundreds of labourers who risked disease, starvation and exposure to complete the job.
© grough.co.uk/Alamy
A hundred years later, in the early 1980s, the Settle & Carlisle line was carrying just a few trains each day; passenger numbers were low; stations along the way had already closed and the route was losing money. What’s more, the line was falling into disrepair and British Rail argued that it would now cost too much to maintain. Crucially, the magnificent Ribblehead Via
duct was in danger of crumbling, and British Rail estimated it would cost between £7 and £9 million to repair. It was a major plank in their argument for closing the line.
FOR MICHAEL, KEEPING THE LINE OPEN REMAINS THE ACHIEVEMENT THAT HE IS MOST PROUD OF FROM HIS TIME IN GOVERNMENT
Tony Feschini, a former British Rail engineer, was employed to inspect the structure. After carrying out trial repairs, Tony was convinced that the viaduct could be saved for a fraction of the price, estimating it would only cost between £2,750,000 and £3,250,000.
Still British Rail mooted closure, but the idea was met with a storm of protest and a lively six-year campaign got underway to increase the numbers using the line, so making it more profitable.
As the crusade generated publicity, more people became rail travellers and the case for keeping it open strengthened. By the time a decision was needed some 300,000 people were buying tickets annually. As Transport Minister, Michael was able to show Margaret Thatcher that it was not only an important line in terms of history and heritage, but also a viable economic proposition. She agreed and, in April 1989, British Rail’s request for closure was turned down. Since then, yet more people have started using the line and it now carries upwards of 750,000 passengers a year. For Michael, keeping the line open remains the achievement that he is most proud of from his time in Government.
Two thousand men, a third of the workforce for the whole line, took four years to complete the enormous structure at Ribblehead, with its 24 arches spanning 440 yards across the valley. The tops of the arches are 104 feet from the valley bottom and, despite some limestone cladding, the viaduct is vulnerable to some of England’s worst weather.
Great British Railway Journeys Page 7