Millennium

by Ian Mortimer

  Stephenson’s Rocket set off a railway craze in England. Thousands of people flocked to buy shares in projects to bring the railway to their part of the world. It was a massively expensive business. A railway company had to obtain a parliamentary charter for setting up a new line – and that alone could cost thousands of pounds. It had to purchase the land over which the track was to be laid, sometimes from hundreds of separate owners. It had to build the rolling stock, engines, engine sheds and station buildings, and to employ suitable engineers and administrative staff to run the enterprise. Yet the idea inspired people. When railways were finally constructed they did not deliver the vast profits that had been expected but they did provide fast, long-distance, low-cost transportation. By 1840 there were 1,498 miles of railway in the British Isles; by 1850 there were 6,621 miles; by 1860 10,433 miles; and by 1900 21,863 miles. Or to put it in terms of usage, the railways carried 5.5 million passengers in 1838, 24.5 million in 1842, 30 million in 1845 – and then things really took off. The Railways Act of 1844 forced railway operators to make at least one train a day on every line available to third-class passengers at a price of no more than 1d per mile. In 1855 there were 111 million passengers every year; by 1900 the number had increased to 1.11 billion.3

  It is no exaggeration to say that railways changed the world. The first passenger railway in America opened in 1830. Belgium and Germany saw their first lines open in 1835; Canada in 1836; Austria, Russia, France and Cuba in 1837; and Italy, the Netherlands and Poland in 1839. In 1841 the first international railway opened, linking Strasbourg and Basel. By 1850 Paris had six central stations: the Gare Saint-Lazare (1837), Gare Montparnasse (1840), Gare d’Austerlitz (1846), Gare du Nord (1846), Gare de l’Est (1849) and Gare de Lyon (1849). Those living in the vast expanses of North America had the most to gain from the new technology. By 1835 the Americans had laid down twice as much track as the British – the Pony Express was not long for this world – and the east and west coasts were finally linked in 1869. By 1900 more than 220,000 miles of track had been constructed in America: as much as in Great Britain, Germany, Russia, France and the Austro-Hungarian Empire put together. But Europe competed in style. From 1883 you could catch the Orient Express from Paris to Constantinople. Railways had joined up the world’s dots.

  1840 1860 1880 1900

  France 496 9,167 23,089 38,109

  Germany 469 11,089 33,838 51,678

  Belgium 334 1,730 4,112 4,591

  Austria-Hungary 144 4,543 18,507 36,330

  Russia 27 1,626 22,865 53,234

  Italy 20 2,404 9,290 16,429

  Netherlands 17 335 1,846 2,776

  Spain 0 1,917 7,490 13,214

  Sweden 0 527 5,876 11,303

  Miles of European railway track in use 1840–19004

  The consequences of this massive expansion went way beyond mere convenience. The railways brought a degree of homogeneity to society Previously there had been no reason for all the clocks in a country to be set to the same time; it did not matter that 5 p.m. in Liverpool was not exactly the same as 5 p.m. in Manchester. But once trains connected the two towns and ran to a single timetable, the nation’s clocks had to agree. Similarly, before the railways there had been no standardised way of spelling many place names: train stations’ signs now established a de facto official spelling. Homogeneity extended to building too. Before the advent of railways, houses had been constructed with local materials. In Moreton and the Dartmoor area that was granite, in the Cotswolds limestone, in Sussex flint, and in Kent timber. The railways made it possible to transport cheap, durable brick to every town in the country, and the traditional building materials were increasingly set aside. So too were the local styles of building as standard ‘modern’ designs began to be employed. The railways destroyed localism in other ways too. Once upon a time the roads to a town were filled on market day with farmers driving their cattle and sheep on the hoof, ready to be sold to local slaughtermen. After the railway had reached Moretonhampstead in 1866 farmers sent their animals to a new livestock market, close to the station, for sale to middlemen who transported them by rail to the much larger town of Newton Abbot. Eventually the farmers cut out the middlemen and sent their animals direct to the slaughterhouse by rail; the local market closed down. The county of Devon, which had once had about 70 small market towns, now saw its trade concentrated in 20 large and medium-sized towns all linked by trains.

  Today we view the coming of the railways in a very positive light – as a magnificent achievement – but we should also remember that ‘modern life’ was a traumatic experience for many hundreds of thousands of people at the time. Dislodged from the villages where they had been raised, many were unprepared for life in the cities because the culture they knew was heavily based on the complex set of reassuring relationships in a rural community. Thousands simply lost the ability to function as members of society. In England in 1845 every county was required to open a lunatic asylum where families could send those of their kin who were unable to cope. Reading through the admission registers of such asylums you come across hundreds of sad cases of women just staring blankly into the corners of rooms, or tearing off their clothes and ranting about their religious insights; and of men who had fantastic notions of how to make their fortunes in the cities, or who passionately wanted to have sex with Queen Victoria.5 Even those who retained their sanity experienced the distress of seeing their communities dwindle and friends and family move away. Church attendances dropped after 1850 from about 40 per cent to 20 per cent by 1900. Some rural churches closed, and communities died with them. The cities and larger towns sucked the life blood out of rural England and the railways were the straws by which they did it.

  For many, however, the trains opened up a world of opportunities. Young men and women could easily move all over the country, and thousands of hotels and boarding houses sprang up to cater for them. Before 1850 the vast majority of English people married someone from their own community or from the next parish. Afterwards, the numbers of people marrying someone from another county, or even another country, increased massively. Looking at my own family, my great-grandmother, Catherine Terry, is a good example of the new generation created by the railways. Her mother had been born in 1832 in Stowmarket, in Suffolk; she herself had been born in 1863 in her father’s parish of Woodchurch in Kent. In 1883 she came to Plymouth with her father, met and married my great-grandfather, John Frank Mortimer, and thus came to live permanently in Devon. People of moderate means found that for the first time in their lives, they could travel long distances for business, for pleasure, for recreation and for love. Moreover, they could go back to their place of birth whenever they felt like it. That 215-mile journey from Plymouth to London – which had taken a week in the seventeenth century and still took 32 hours by stagecoach in 1822 – could be completed in just over six hours by rail in 1883. A brief note in my great-grandmother’s hand relating to a trip not long after she was married reads: Travelled from Plymouth to Waterloo by train leaving 4.14 p.m. Arrived at Waterloo about 10.30 p.m.’

  Railways were not the only way in which steam power improved travel. Although William Symington is widely credited with the first steamboat in 1803, and the American Clermont hauled people along the Hudson in the next decade, it was not until Isambard Kingdom Brunel built the SS Great Western in 1838 that a steamship was designed with regular ocean-going transport in mind. Up until then, ships crossing the Atlantic had had to rely on the wind. If there was no wind, or if it was against them, they could not move. If the wind was not quite in the right direction, the captain could tack but progress would be painfully slow. Steam engines changed all this. In 1843 Brunel’s SS Great Britain was launched: the first iron-hulled, screw-propeller-driven steamship and the largest boat in the world at the time. Although the Great Britain herself eventually ended up on the Australia run, such innovations in ship design brought the time it took to cross the Atlantic down from the 14.5 days that the SS Great Western took in 1838 to 9.5
days in 1855 and 5.5 days by 1900. Millions of emigrants from Europe found their way to new continents and new lives, their journeys made affordable by the short duration of the voyage and the size of the ships that could transport them. In 1869 the passage from Europe to India and East Africa also became considerably quicker, safer and cheaper with the opening of the Suez Canal. Such advances in travel spurred the imagination of Jules Verne, the author of Around the World in Eighty Days (1873). The book’s protagonist, Phileas Fogg, bets with friends at the Reform Club in London that he can circumnavigate the globe and return to the club within the said 80 days; he manages to do so by the skin of his teeth. But by the time the story was published such a journey was feasible in real life, due to the linking of the Indian railways and steamship lines. In 1889 an American journalist, Nellie Bly, performed the feat in just 72 days. It was a far cry from the three-year circumnavigations of previous eras.

  The nineteenth century saw a revolution in road transport too. A steam car had been invented by a Frenchman, Nicholas-Joseph Cugnot, in 1769, but it had failed to catch on. In the early nineteenth century there were further attempts to produce steam-driven road vehicles to rival the railways, but there was always the dirty business of fuelling the machine: people wealthy enough to buy a steam carriage of their own did not want to be shovelling coal. From about 1860, however, a number of innovations put practical steam vehicles into the public eye. Steamrollers allowed better, smoother roads to be built. Traction engines could haul great weights along those roads, such as supplies of timber. And steam tractors and ploughing engines allowed farmers to dispense with horses.

  The real revolution on the roads was not due to steam but human muscle. In the early 1860s the first bicycles – velocipedes – made their appearance. To start with, they were made entirely from wood, but soon they acquired metal frames and rubber tyres. By 1869 the pennyfarthing was in production. Seen as rather dangerous, it was ousted from the market by the invention of the safety bicycle, pioneered by John Kemp Starley in 1885. By 1890 the geared chain drive had arrived, as had the chain guard, brake levers and pneumatic tyres. For hundreds of thousands of people, the bicycle meant freedom. Without the cost of maintaining a horse and stable, they could pedal 30 or 40 miles in a day, going to places that the train did not reach. Or they could take their bicycle on a train and ride from the nearest station to their destination. In this way a man or woman could set off alone and visit a place hundreds of miles away at no great expense. In terms of the freedom to travel, it wasn’t the twentieth century that saw the greatest change but the nineteenth.

  Communications

  We have seen how closely communications and transport were linked in the previous century. The person sending a message might not have been galloping along to deliver it in person but someone had to carry it physically. In the nineteenth century that link was broken. But before we launch into the world of telecommunications it is necessary to look at an innovation in old-style message-sending.

  In January 1837 Rowland Hill, a failed schoolmaster and low-ranking civil servant, submitted his pamphlet Post Office Reform: Its Importance and Practicability to the British government. In it he attacked the nation’s inefficient and costly postal service. The Post Office charged double for two pieces of paper rather than one, increased the price for longer distances, and made the recipient liable for the payment. And as recipients frequently refused to pay, the cost of delivering a letter was forced on to other users. Hill proposed instead a uniform system: a 1d cost for letters of up to half an ounce sent anywhere in the kingdom, with the cost of the postage being paid by the sender. Proof of the payment was to be the display of a postage stamp. Great idea, you might have thought. Who could possibly object to such a system? The principal opponent was one William Leader Maberly, Secretary to the Post Office. He was more concerned that the Post Office should remain profitable than that people should send messages easily and cheaply. Hill won the first round of their battle, being given the job of introducing the Penny Post. He was vindicated when the Penny Black, the world’s first postage stamp, went on sale in 1840 and hundreds of thousands of people used it. Whereas in 1839 three letters were sent every year per head of the population, in 1860 the figure had risen to nineteen.6 But Maberly hit back. Despite the increase in the number of letters carried, the Post Office started to lose money, so in 1843, Hill lost his job. That same year, by a stroke of luck, Zurich and Brazil adopted his invention of adhesive postage stamps. Eventually, after a change of government in 1846, Hill was restored to his position – and became a national hero.

  At the same time as Hill was working out how to communicate more efficiently by post, various inventors were developing a scheme to transmit long-distance messages instantly. The first successful electric-telegraph messaging system was invented by Francis Ronalds in 1816. In the back garden of his house in Hammersmith he strung eight miles of wire between two poles and successfully passed electrical impulses along it; these impulses turned the receiver’s dial to a letter of the alphabet. Due to its effectiveness only in dry weather, Ronalds built an underground version encased in glass tubes. Realising the importance of instant messaging over long distances, he wrote to the Admiralty offering to demonstrate it. The reply, signed by the Secretary to the Admiralty, John Barrow, was possibly the biggest blunder in the history of technology. Barrow declared that ‘telegraphs of any kind are now wholly unnecessary’.7 Incredible though it seems, the Admiralty believed that the semaphore system they had then recently adopted – that is, men waving flags at each other – was superior. Impressively, Ronalds rose above this setback. He published an account of his experiments in 1823 and went on to invent the means by which one could automatically record the readings of scientific instruments. Many years later, when the telegraph had become well established, he submitted a petition for recognition as its inventor. It fell on deaf ears until 1870, when the prime minister, William Gladstone, acknowledged the injustice and gave Ronalds a knighthood for his efforts.

  The first practical applications of electric telegraphy did not take place until the late 1830s. In America, Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail developed a telegraphic system, sending their first telegram in 1838. By 1861 the US telegraphic system linked the east and west coasts. Independently, English inventors were bringing about the same revolution. Charles Wheatstone and William Fothergill Cooke patented a telegraph system and constructed it in tandem with a railway track owned by the Great Western Railway. In 1843 a telegraph wire connected Paddington and Slough. Two years later, Sarah Hart, a mother of two young children, was poisoned with prussic acid at Salt Hill, near Slough. The murderer calmly walked to the station and boarded a train to London. A neighbour who had heard screaming found Mrs Hart dying and called for help. The Revd E. T. Champnes followed the assailant to the station; he observed him boarding the train and promptly instructed the superintendent to send the following message to Paddington by way of the telegraph:

  A murder has just been committed at Salt Hill, and the suspected murderer was seen to take a first-class ticket for London by the train which left Slough at 7.42 p.m. He is in the garb of a Quaker, with a brown great coat on, which reaches nearly down to his feet; he is in the last compartment of the second first-class carriage.

  The murderer was spotted at Paddington and followed on to a bus. He was arrested shortly afterwards. Eventually he was hanged for his crime. The newspapers gave extensive coverage to the event, highlighting the role played by the telegraph in the apprehension of the murderer. Suddenly people were aware that a new age had dawned. The military might have semaphore signalling but no waving of flags could compare with this revolutionary invention. For the first time in history, ordinary people could transmit messages over long distances faster than they themselves could travel. Murderers might well take a boat from Liverpool to New York to escape the long arm of the law, but from 1866, when a permanent submarine cable had been laid on the ocean floor, there was a good chance that the long arm of the
law would be there to pick them up on arrival. From 1872 you could send a telegram to Australia, and from 1876 to New Zealand.

  With the proliferation of telegraph lines, information could now be conveyed almost instantly to almost any city or town in the world. The last few miles from the telegraph office to someone’s house might still require a post boy to make the journey in person, but that was a small delay in the scheme of things. The advantages to individuals, businesses and police forces of being able to send information so cheaply and quickly are obvious. It was even more important for governments. Think back to the previous century, when Turgot reduced the length of time it took to travel between Paris and Toulouse from fifteen days to eight. Now the transfer of information over that distance was instantaneous. If a crisis occurred in Toulouse, local administrators could refer the matter back to Paris and await the government’s response. Moreover, they could now be expected to liaise with central government; if they did not, they could be held accountable. This was particularly important for the British, who controlled a worldwide empire: London could now give direct orders to the Viceroy of India, the High Commissioner of Canada, or the Agent-General in South Australia. As governments became more vulnerable to criticism from their parliamentary opponents, newspapers and the public, they saw the necessity of governing directly rather than trusting appointees to make decisions on their behalf.