Great British Railway Journeys

by Charlie Bunce

  A new Act of Parliament was sought that would allow the use of ‘loco-motive or moveable engines’, which caused some concern among the uninitiated. It also permitted the transport of passengers, although no one believed that would be anything other than a distraction from the real business of hauling coal.

  Although it was expensive, steam traction was reliable, and the idea attracted interest from numerous investors. At first the Stockton & Darlington Railway was open to anyone who paid to use the line. It meant trains ran on a whim on the same tracks used by horse-drawn loads. Fights often broke out when rival operators argued over rights of way. In 1833 horses and rival operators were evicted when the S&DR became sole operator. Parallel tracks were laid so trains could travel in opposite directions, and a signalling system of sorts was installed.

  BEYOND SHEER HEIGHTS AND GOTHIC HORROR, WHITBY IS ALSO KNOWN FOR A GEMSTONE

  Its smooth running became a model for other railways to mimic. Among the early companies to follow suit was the Whitby & Pickering Railway, which began in 1836. It was to Whitby, over to the east on the Yorkshire coast, that our journey took us next.

  Whitby was once an important port – in 1828 it ranked seventh in England. It was here that Captain James Cook (1728–79) was born, and it was in a former Whitby collier, the Endeavour, that he explored Australia and the South Seas. Bradshaw clearly liked it in Whitby, writing: ‘There are, among the watering places of England, few that have been more greatly benefited than Whitby from railway communication or that have become better adapted for the reception of visitors.’

  For Bradshaw roles are reversed in Whitby. Here, instead of him quoting others, it is his book that is mentioned in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, albeit years after his death. ‘Dracula consults his Bradshaw guide before the 9.30 goods train to King’s Cross from Whitby station, in one of his 50 coffins ...’

  As well as the station, there are numerous other Dracula-linked landmarks to spot in Whitby, including Dracula’s Seat, with its stunning view across Whitby Bay, the Tate Sands, where Dracula jumped from ship to shore as a black dog, and the Royal Hotel, where Dracula spent his first night in England.

  Author Bram Stoker (1847–1912) visited Whitby during a career spent writing, reviewing and acting as agent for actor Henry Irving. It’s said he was told a grisly tale about a shipwreck which took place some years previously and resulted in a cargo of coffins being loosed into the sea. The following day, apparently, horrified Whitby folk were confronted with the sight of decomposing bodies scattered along the beach. The drama of the east Yorkshire coast combined with Stoker’s fertile imagination to create the rest of a story which was published in 1897 but remained relatively unknown until it attracted the attention of early Hollywood film-makers.

  Jet workshops were big business during victorian times in Whitby, where the gemstone is found.

  Stoker clearly shared Bradshaw’s affection for the ancient town with its romantic abbey ruins. According to Bradshaw, ‘Whitby has long been admired for the peculiarity of its position and the grandeur of its coast scenery. To the eastward the cliffs rise abruptly, nearly 200 ft above the sea, and towards the south present a succession of bold headlands. To the north the views along the coast are not less imposing.’

  Beyond sheer heights and Gothic horror, Whitby is also known for a gemstone which was immensely popular in Victorian times. Jet is one of two British gemstones and it is found only in a seven-mile stretch of coastline around Whitby. It comes from fossilised monkey puzzle trees.

  Jet came into fashion after the death of Prince Albert in 1861, after which Queen Victoria would only countenance the wearing of black jewellery at court. Jet became so popular that there were more than 200 workshops spread throughout Whitby in the 1870s, with a combined turnover of £3 million. One firm alone employed 1,700 people. Craftsmen from all over Europe arrived to cash in on the trend for coal-coloured artefacts. The largest piece of jet ever found in Whitby is about 12 feet long.

  Mysterious Whitby famously featured in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula.

  The Sutcliffe Gallery

  From Whitby we turned back inland and travelled past the Cleveland Hills on our way to Harrogate which, like Whitby, has retained much of its Victorian flavour.

  Another Victorian trend emerges at Harrogate, for it was here that the first Turkish bath in Britain was built – and it’s still in marvellous order. A Turkish bath usually has three rooms, each with air heated to different temperatures, and a plunge pool. It was opened to the public at a time when cleanliness was not high on many people’s agenda.

  The man usually credited with bringing the Turkish bath to Britain is David Urquhart (1805–77), a Scottish diplomat, MP for Stafford and public opponent of Russia’s political ambitions, including its threat to the Ottoman Empire. To counter this, Urquhart sought to popularise Turkish culture. He was briefly secretary at the British consulate in Constantinople (now Istanbul), and he describes the baths he saw there in his book The Pillars of Hercules, published in 1850. They were the kind of baths the Romans would recognise.

  Having suffered periods of ill health which were alleviated by different forms of hydrotherapy, Urquhart was in no doubt that people would benefit from use of the baths. There was, he said, ‘a chapter [in his book] which, if the reader will peruse it with diligence and apply with care, may prolong his life, fortify his body, diminish his ailments, augment his enjoyments, and improve his temper: then having found something beneficial to himself, he may be prompted to do something to secure the like for his fellow-creatures.’

  It was his firm belief that baths like this should be freely available to the public. Victorians embraced the principle of Turkish baths, but many built during the era closed down in the twentieth century and of those that remain several are at risk of closure.

  Our journey through northern Britain then took us to the forerunner of today’s recycling businesses at Batley, between Leeds and Huddersfield in West Yorkshire.

  Benjamin Law (1773–1837) first began using discarded wool for blankets, coats, carpets and fertiliser back in 1813. He blended it with new wool at a time when the Napoleonic Wars had left the country short of raw materials. Before long, wool waste was being brought to Batley from all over the world to be ground up into a gritty, fibrous dust known as ‘shoddy’. Shoddy was particularly sought after for the making of military uniforms. Later Law’s nephews worked out how to incorporate tailor’s clippings, and the by-product was called ‘mungo’. By 1860 Batley was producing around 7,000 tons of shoddy and mungo per year.

  Britain’s first Turkish bath, built in Harrogate, was believed to alleviate numerous ailments.

  Harrogate Borough Council

  Making the most of the leftovers: Batley became a centre for recycling wool that went on to be made into military uniforms, among other items.

  E. Oldroyd and Sons

  Batley’s railway station, which opened in 1848, serving the main line to Leeds and Huddersfield and several branch lines, was ideally suited to this industry, as in those days it had eight platforms upon which wool and textiles could be off-loaded.

  Law’s contribution to the local economy is recalled on his gravestone, which reads: ‘[his] invention of shoddy converted Batley from an industrial village into a busy manufacturing town’. And in the Yorkshire tradition of ‘waste not, want not’ the mills that once produced material across the region are now themselves being recycled, into offices and shopping centres.

  Another commercial interest that boomed with the railways is the rhubarb-growing industry at nearby Woodlesford, south-east of Leeds on the River Aire. The railway reached here in 1840 as trains forged through on the North Midland Line between Derby and Leeds. Rhubarb crops were loaded on for distribution across the country.

  After Woodlesford became an unmanned halt in 1970 the station was demolished. By then the ‘rhubarb specials’ that once took the morning crop down the line, destination London, were already a distant memory. When p
roduction was at its peak before 1939, incredibly, 200 tons of rhubarb would be carried daily on the railways.

  Rhubarb was grown in heated sheds in the dark, ‘forcing’ an early and tender crop. A business that started in 1877, it used shoddy as fertiliser and coal to heat the growing sheds, and both were transported there by train. But the nation’s love for rhubarb declined with the introduction of an increasing variety of succulent foreign fruits. Only a handful of farms remain in business.

  Our journey then took us through the coal-mining areas of Wakefield and Barnsley and on to the southern tip of Yorkshire and to Sheffield. Strangely, this vibrant city appears to have once been unusually class-ridden. One of the first things we learnt on arrival was that when the station was built in 1845 it had separate entrances for different classes of traveller.

  Recognised by Bradshaw as the ‘great seat of the cutlery trade’, Sheffield had been famous for cutlery making since the fourteenth century. Following the invention of the steel-making process in the eighteenth century, Sheffield became Britain’s steel capital – and soon it wasn’t just cutlery. Bradshaw lists the products that emerged from Sheffield in Victorian times. ‘Knives, forks, razors, Britannia metal, Sheffield plate, scythes, garden implements, files, screws, other tools, stoves, fenders as well as engines, railway springs and buffers – steel being the basis of nearly all.’

  WHAT SHEFFIELD WAS FOR STEEL, NOTTINGHAM WAS FOR STOCKINGS AND LACE

  On the strength of its steel industry, at the beginning of the twentieth century Sheffield was the world’s tenth largest city. ‘Made in Sheffield’ was seen on cutlery used all over the world and, in the arms race that preceded the First World War, the armour plating for Britain’s new Dreadnoughts was mostly made in Sheffield.

  From Sheffield it’s a short train journey south to Nottingham, whose main product could not be more different. What Sheffield was for steel, Nottingham was for stockings and lace. For centuries ‘the Queen of the Midlands’ had been a hosiery town, and in 1589 a local man, the Rev. William Lee, invented the stocking-frame, which enabled stockings to be made far more quickly than they could be knitted by hand. Even so it remained a cottage industry, until the Industrial Revolution.

  Bradshaw said of Nottingham, ‘Silk, cotton stockings and bobbin-net lace are the staple manufactures. Until recently the bobbins were usually worked upon frames rented from the employers but this to a great extent has been altered since the introduction of the round frames, which are now generally confined to factories.’

  With the Industrial Revolution came the power-loom and the flying shuttle, and crafts like weaving and lace-making moved into factories, to be done mechanically. The stocking-frame was also adapted, so that lace-making too was mechanised. It was now that Nottingham came to be closely associated with cotton-spinning.

  The move into factories meant low pay and terrible conditions for working people, whose resentment ultimately boiled over. Nottingham became the birthplace of the movement that tried to stop the Industrial Revolution in its tracks.

  In 1811, while Britain was still suffering the privations caused by the Napoleonic Wars, a radical group known as the Luddites was formed. Taking their name from the probably fictional Ned Ludd, or King Ludd, they set out to destroy the technology that they believed was threatening their livelihoods. Groups of men burst into factories and smashed up the machinery, in particular the ‘wide frames’, which could make stockings in large quantities and far more cheaply than could a skilled craftsman. The Luddite movement spread from Nottingham throughout the north, attracting such enormous levels of support that the army was at times called in to quell unrest. Frustrated by this secretive but effective army of the poor, the government resorted to making machine breaking a capital offence, and men were consequently hanged or transported for Luddite activity. By 1817, as the wealth of the nation improved, the movement had died out.

  From Nottingham we headed south-east on the last leg of the journey. The end of the line is Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire, a town solidly rural and traditional in character. Bradshaw described Melton Mowbray as ‘the centre of a famous hunting country. Horses are bred here; its pork pies and Stilton cheese are also valuable productions.’ Today Melton Mowbray remains the headquarters of hunting, the Quorn, Cottesmore and Belvoir all hunting in the vicinity, while the cheese made there includes both Stilton and Red Leicester.

  Stilton cheese is a delicacy made only in Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, and has European Union Protected Designation of Origin status, like Parma ham. It means that cheese made anywhere else can’t be called Stilton. The local cheese industry had a notable spin-off. The excess whey from cheese production led to the keeping of pigs on a large scale – and the development of the pork pie industry.

  There is also a link between pork pies and hunting. Pigs were slaughtered in the autumn and winter, the hunting seasons. And the pies that were produced afterwards were popular with the hunt servant, who would pop one into his pocket before trekking around the countryside in the wake of the hunt. The tasty snacks soon came to the notice of the huntsmen, who began taking pork pies of their own.

  As early as 1831 the Leeds to London stagecoach was being used to take Melton Mowbray pork pies to London for sale. The arrival of the railways took production to another level, with new bakehouses springing up close to the station. With the age of refrigeration, the brand went global.

  It’s another example of how railway innovation boosted everyday business in city, town and village. Since the railway’s inception, some associated trades have come and gone. Others, like the humble pork pie, have been robust enough to stand the test of time.

  JOURNEY 8

  COAST TO COAST

  From Brighton to Cromer

  Britain’s railways were revolutionary. They gave power to ordinary people who at last had a chance to, quite literally, broaden their horizons. Rather than being confined to a single neighbourhood people could visit, or even move to and commute from, coast and countryside. This was especially true of the new middle classes, created by the Industrial Revolution.

  For example, the line between Brighton and London was mostly used by passenger trains transporting commuters, shoppers, workers and sports enthusiasts. As technology improved, the journey times were slashed, enticing still more people on to the train. In Bradshaw’s day the journey took one and a half hours. By 1865 that had reduced to 75 minutes and today it can be close to 50 minutes.

  Bradshaw was acutely aware of the changes afoot. ‘Merchants who formerly made Dulwich or Dalston the boundaries of their suburban residences now have got their mansion on the south coast, and still get in less time, by a less expensive conveyance, to their counting houses in the city.’

  There was a flipside to the railways that led to financial ruin for many. Although most of these stories are in the shadow of history, this route shines a light on a few.

  Brighton was in many ways defined by the Royal Pavilion, a former farmhouse refashioned in 1822 by John Nash (1752–1835), the designer of London’s Regent Street. He was acting at the behest of the future George IV (1762–1830), whose patronage made Brighton popular. He first rented the farmouse, in 1783, then bought it and had it transformed.

  The Pavilion’s onion domes and exotic spires were a nod to India, a country whose importance in terms of trade was escalating. Inside it was sumptuous, a measure of George’s extraordinary self-indulgence that ultimately led him into ill health and terrible debt. The planned gardens which were to be in similarly elaborate style were never built.

  On the face of it George came to Brighton to take advantage of the benefits of sea bathing, made popular after 1750 by prescription of local doctor Richard Russell. In fact, he was shadowing his mistress Maria Fitzherbert, who had a house there. Fitzherbert was a Catholic, so marriage was out of the question for the heir to the British throne. He later married Caroline of Brunswick and they honeymooned in Brighton. But he so loathed her that she was barred fro
m his coronation in 1821 and afterwards the marriage was dissolved by Parliament.

  Brighton’s Royal Pavilion, George IV’s folly, is overpoweringly ostentatious, although it helped to change the town’s fortunes for the better.

  Getty Images

  George’s death in 1830 came on the cusp of the railway revolution. Within 20 years the trains transformed Brighton from a royal playground to a busy resort. Queen Victoria had no love for the place or the Pavilion, and in 1850 she sold the bloated palace to Brighton’s municipal authority for a fraction of its cost. Later, during the First World War, it was used as a military hospital. Hundreds of Indian soldiers who had been wounded on the Western Front were brought there. It was hoped that the décor and ambience would make them feel at home and aid their recovery.

  Bradshaw seems to have shared Queen Victoria’s view of the building. ‘The Pavilion which rises with domes and minarets, and is fretted with greater variety than taste … erected for George IV after a fanciful oriental model, which, despite its supposed resemblance to the Moscow Kremlin, has had no precedent before or since.’

  With his description of the Brighton sea-front he also gives us a few more clues about why Queen Victoria so disliked the town, referring to ‘scores of laughing, chubby, thoughtless children, skilled manifestly in the art of ingeniously tormenting maids, tutors, governesses, and mammas; prawn sellers and shellfish hawkers a few, and flymen a multitude, all idly vociferating, whilst intent upon their customary constitutional walk, the morning habitués of the promenade swing lustily past. Let us mingle with the throng and obtain a closer intimacy with the principal features of the place … for amusements, there is no provincial town in the kingdom that can offer such a variety of assembly and concert-rooms, libraries, bazaars, and other expedients for slaughtering our common enemy – time.’