Technically, Mr Barlow, the ‘eminent engineer’ of the Midland Railway, helped Joseph Paxton with his plans for the Crystal Palace19 in which the Exhibition was held, and ‘calculated the strength of the columns and girders.’ Paxton secured the support of Robert Stephenson, chance-met on a train, who admired his plans and presented them to the exhibition commissioners, a powerful recommendation for a revolutionary design. And in due course the locomotives and rolling stock were an important part of the show. But the railways really came into their own after the exhibition actually opened by transporting most of the six million visitors it attracted. On one day alone, 16th June, twenty excursion trains arrived at Euston alone, many organised by the ubiquitous Thomas Cook.
The railway companies did more to encourage holiday traffic than merely selling cheap seats on Sunday trains which would otherwise have been half-empty. Even in the 1830s a number of railways issued tourist guides, which steadily expanded in number and coverage. In 1859 W. H. Smith published a 384-page official guide to a number of Scottish lines, the most systematic of a number of volumes devoted to British railways. And in the United States the opening of the Transcontinental railroad set off a veritable gold rush of guides. ‘Bill Dadd the Scribe’, author of The Great Trans-Continental Railroad Guide, was the best-seller; issued by Crufitt’s, a publisher which claimed it had sold over half a million guidebooks during the 1870s.
In 1887 the Cambrian Railway, which already published a book called Picturesque Wales, broke new ground with a specialist pamphlet for tourists, What to See and Where to Stay in Wild Wales, an idea followed by a score of other companies. By the end of the century, the North Eastern, ‘who have the exclusive run of the most romantic coast and inland scenery in the North of England’ was issuing not only a ‘unique Tourist Programme and a smaller illustrated pamphlet’ but also ‘a capital series of pocket-guides’. (S. Kirkwood, Railway Magazine vol. vi).
Apart from the Belgians and the Swiss – always ready to publicise the Alps – Continental railways were slow to exploit the tourist potential, but virtually every line in the United States had its own guides. The leader was the New York Central, which published a dozen or more. It almost certainly held the world record with its ambitious Health and Pleasure on America’s Greatest Railroad, which weighed in at over 2 lb and contained 532 pages, 400 pictures and 12 maps.
It took several generations to harness artistic talent to help the sales efforts, but by the last decades of the century any newly-built railway would advertise its charms as soon as (or even before) it was built.
Railway companies created excursions deliberately. Resorts sometimes took them by surprise. The promoters of the Stockton & Darlington never imagined that the little town of Saltburn would be transformed into a seaside resort. Seventy years later the Quebec and Lake St John Railroad tried to attract settlers, but soon became best-known as the route to the Laurentian National Park, 4,000 square miles of wilderness much favoured by sportsmen canoeing and fishing in its rivers.
Resorts had originally developed from ports, but once the railway arrived the smallest seaside village could aspire to tourist-led prosperity, and the most remote fishing villages could add a ‘tourist element’ to their usually precarious economic base. The little villages offered peace in a picturesque setting: elsewhere attractions varied according to the social class of the visitors. Resorts like Blackpool and Southend developed exciting funfairs and seaside shows for their working-class visitors, while Eastbourne, Bournemouth and Torquay worked equally hard to preserve their reputation for exclusiveness.
The developers were a varied bunch. Sir Samuel Morton Peto exploited his dominance in East Anglia with the encouragement of Lowestoft, and he saw the tourist potential of the little North Wales town of Llandudno, although neither was a ‘pure’ resort. The pattern varied, however. At Folkestone and Eastbourne a great local landowner created a resort, while in other cases the crowds the railways brought dictated the pattern of development. But none of the resorts were large. By 1881 only Brighton had more than 100,000 inhabitants.20 The next biggest pure resort was Hastings with 42,000 and only a handful of others had more than 20,000 permanent residents. And, like Brighton, largely a resort for Londoners, most of the others remained regional in their appeal, especially in the North of England. So they did in the United States, with Atlantic City playing Brighton’s role for New Yorkers. Both had excellent rail services. Indeed at the end of the nineteenth century, the trains between New York and Atlantic City were the fastest regular services in the world.
The resorts which benefited most obviously from the railways were on the Côte d’Azur. The select group of pioneering English travellers were naturally less than enchanted at the arrival of the railway in Cannes – even less so when they found that the line was to go through the grounds of their villas, though it was eventually rerouted, costing the railway company an additional £20,000.
The first trains arrived in Cannes in 1863, bringing with them the usual trail of land speculation, hotel-building, horse races and other amusements. The next year the track reached the bigger town of Nice, newly acquired from Italy. A week later the arrival of the Tsar and Tsarina set the social seal of approval on the town and led to the establishment of a veritable Russian colony in the city.
Even more spectacular were the development of Menton and Monte Carlo. Menton remained true to its earlier role as a small, select, health resort. In the words of a certain Dr Bennett, before the railway Menton was ‘a quiet little Italian town on the sunny shore of the Riviera with two or three small hotels, principally used by passing travellers, and half a dozen recently-erected villas.’21 Fourteen years later it had become ‘a well-known and frequented winter resort, with thirty hotels, four times the number of villas, and a mixed foreign population of about sixteen hundred’ – as at Nice, invalid foreigners would settle for the winter.
Across the sea: from Miami to Key West.
The rise of Monte Carlo was even more spectacular. In 1861 Prince Charles III of Monaco had signed a treaty with the French government which provided him with more independence than funds. The railway, in Howarth’s words, was destined to be ‘almost literally his lifeline’. The Prince had already tried to exploit his freedom from the ban on casinos on French soil, but the first concessionaires were forced to abandon their franchises for lack of customers. In 1863, however, a far-sighted operator called François Blanc acquired the concession, confident that the railway would reach Monte Carlo within a few years. He was duly rewarded. Between 1868 and 1914 Monte Carlo was synonymous with high-stakes gambling. In the February following the railway’s arrival ‘the Prince announced that rates and taxes in the Principality had been abolished … in 1868 there were two hotels in the Principality; thirty years later there were forty-eight. In 1878 there were three jewellers; twenty years later there were fifteen.’22
In the United States one man, Henry Flagler (see note on page 290), did more than Blanc and the Prince of Monaco combined. He built railways which opened up a whole string of resorts along the east coast of Florida, from Georgia south through what became Miami to the island chain ending at Key West. Not all resorts were at the seaside. In hot climates (including many parts of the United States) they were in the hills. The most famous, like Poona and Simla, had existed before the trains somehow managed to climb the heights to bring even more sahibs escaping from the torrid Indian plains. Other resorts were simply watering-places. A dozen or more, like Baden-Baden and Marienbad, became the summer retreats of an international ‘railway set’ which gossiped, took the waters, and discussed the fate of nations. At Saratoga Springs, the American equivalent, they discussed money rather than politics. This resort, up the Hudson from New York, was already such a favourite that the railway arrived as early as 1833, replacing the tiresome journey up river and then by stage-coach. By the mid-century most of Wall Street’s finest could be observed on the long verandah of the Grand Union Hotel.
Railways not only br
oadened the geographical range of holidays, they also widened the sports played on them. Yet, ironically, the sport initially most fundamentally affected by the railways was that most traditional of English pastimes, fox-hunting. It was already being professionalised, with ‘subscription packs’ taking over from older, more casual arrangements, but railways completed the revolution. ‘Railways have made sportsmen very ubiquitous,’ wrote Surtees in Mr Facey Romford’s Hounds: an author who instantly grasped the transformation the railways were effecting. The historians agree. ‘The first-class carriage and the rail horsebox with the stud groom in his miniature compartment … transformed hunting by extending its range both socially and geographically,’ wrote Raymond Carr23 – so far, indeed, that the Royal buckhounds once made a kill in the goods yard at Paddington.
At first fox hunters were firmly convinced that the railways would be the death of the English countryside, and thus of all country sports, especially fox hunting, which demanded large stretches of fields unencumbered by railway lines. But the ever-adaptable British aristocracy soon grasped the opportunities the railways offered to hunt with a wide variety of packs. Railways virtually created a new hunting centre in the New Forest in Hampshire, while it became quite the done thing to return from a day out in the prime hunting country of Leicestershire to vote in the House of Commons that night. (In the House Lord George Bentinck would conceal his riding habit with a ‘light coloured zephyr paletot’). Later in the century blending hunting and politics became a fine art. One junior Minister, Squire Chaplin, says Raymond Carr, would ‘hire a private train and draw up on the track at a point near the meet where his stud groom would have his horses waiting for him’.
In Britain the sport most affected was soccer. Obviously the very idea of a national league in any sport anywhere depended on a proper rail network. But there were closer connections. London football clubs had an incestuous relationship with railway companies anxious for special excursions on a Saturday. Similarly, eight racecourses within thirty miles of London were served by special stations. The railways even mounted special excursions to prize fights, and when these were banned the promoters merely sold tickets marked, simply and mysteriously, ‘there and back’.
Later in the century the Scottish railway companies, in particular, ensured that their tourist guides contained a full description of all the golf courses on their lines, but every company with trains running to thinly-populated coastal regions off season had an interest in encouraging the sport – a regular train took golfers over a hundred miles to Hunstanton on the Norfolk coast every Sunday. The list could be indefinitely prolonged, as games and their supporters multiplied the world over.
Thomas Cook the Social Revolutionary
Thomas Cook’s first excursion in 1840 was for a temperance organisation. As he himself wrote, he carried his customers:
the enormous distance of eleven miles and back for a shilling, children half price. We carried music with us, and music met us at the Loughborough station. The people crowded the streets, filled windows, covered housetops and cheered us all along the line with the heartiest welcome … All went off in the best style and in perfect safety we returned to Leicester; and thus was struck the keynote of my excursions, and the social idea grew on me.24
He had already found his formula: plenty of publicity in the form of handbills; added attractions – he induced a rich patron of temperance causes, one Mr Paget, to open his park; and a good commercial deal – the Midland Railway needed additional traffic on a newly-completed line and sold him the seats cheaply enough for Cook to charge a mere one shilling for the whole outing.
It was this same railway which forced him to expand his business. In 1851 everyone in the travel business saw the Great Exhibition as a golden opportunity. Cook, still based in Leicester (he opened his first London office only in 1865) had already agreed a price with the Midland railway when the Great Northern slashed its fares to London. The Midland wouldn’t budge, so Cook had to increase business vastly to survive. He did, conveying 165,000 visitors, and from then on could survive the periodical assaults of the railway companies, who, like the airlines today, went into direct competition with specialist tour operators. (The railways were particularly active in competing for the business generated by the 1862 Great Exhibition which attracted more visitors than its more famous predecessor.)
The pressure from British railway companies was one of the factors which drove him abroad, where their writ did not run. He took thousands of visitors to the 1855 Paris Exhibition. By 1863 he had initiated tours to Geneva and Mont Blanc, and in 1878, at the height of his powers, he transported 75,000 British visitors to the Paris Exhibition – so many that he had to provide special hostel accommodation for many of them.
Cook clearly expected his tourists to be a good deal more adventurous than their modern equivalents. At a time when there was sporadic warfare and endemic banditry throughout the Ottoman Empire he thought nothing of offering a tour ‘With Constantinople for a centre may be visited the principal battlefields of the Russo-Turkish War, the Dardanelles, and the reputed site of Troy’.
Inevitably the customers attracted by the first and greatest of package tour operators became a target for ferocious social scorn and condescension from those who had hoped for exclusivity. One Charles Lever, who wrote under the name of Cornelius O’Dowd, initiated a style of criticism which has been familiar ever since. ‘These people, from the hour they set out, regard all foreign countries and their inhabitants as something in which they have a vested right … they have paid for the Continent … and they will have the worth of their money. They mean to eat it, drink it and junket it to the uttermost farthing … Europe in their eyes, is a great spectacle, like a show piece at Covent Garden; it is theirs to criticise the performance and laugh at the performers at will.’
Cook shrewdly noted that the author was no aristocrat but ‘of the precise class who honoured me by accepting my escort to Italy last year’. Cook asked another critic why his ‘susceptibilities should be outraged, and his refinement trampled on, because thirty or forty Englishmen and Englishwomen find it convenient to travel in the same train, to coalesce for mutual benefit, to sojurn for a like time in the same cities?’
Arcachon
The British were enthusiastic sea-bathers long before other races, so it is not surprising that the first enthusiasts for the then-deserted beaches round the Bassin d’Arcachon, thirty miles west of Bordeaux, should have been the Chartronnais, the Anglo-Saxon merchants of the Quai des Chartrons who dominated the Bordeaux wine world from the eighteenth century until the wine crisis of the mid-1970s.
However, it took a railway and two Franco-Jewish financiers, helped by an eccentric priest and an ambitious architect, to transform the whole area into a major seaside resort. The financiers were Emile and Isaac Pereire, working, as they often did, as the indirect instruments of the Emperor Napoleon III. He had insisted that the railway to the Spanish frontier should serve the then-deserted Landes by going directly from Bordeaux to Bayonne, and encouraged attempts to harness the shifting sands of the Landes by planting massive pine forests. Moreover an initially unsuccessful railway had been built from Bordeaux to la Teste on the Bassin d’Arcachon, as the only means of transport over the bogs and marshes which separated Bordeaux from the ocean. That railway link remained the key to the success of Arcachon; a resort which could not be reached by road.
An ambitious, worldly, witty curé, Xavier Mouls, persuaded Emile Pereire that the soft piney air of the Bassin d’Arcachon would bring relief for the bronchial problems of asthmatics like himself. He fell in love with the site, which, like the whole Atlantic coast, combines pure sand and the peculiarly seductive aromas emanating from sand and pine. The site was blessed by a visit by the Pereires’ Imperial friend, unfortunately in appalling weather, and the brothers set about developing it at a time when the sort of cures Arcachon could offer were growing increasingly fashionable. But Emile Pereire was determined to lengthen the season
by building a ‘ville d’hiver’ for invalids like himself.
To realise his dream he hired Paul Regnauld, who had already designed the splendid Gare St Jean and the railway bridge across the Garonne at Bordeaux. They decided that the key to the new resort should be curves, so different from the straight lines practised by other Imperial favourites like Haussmann. The result was a whole area of winding streets dotted with an original architectural form, the Arcachon villa, the sort of Victorian monstrosity decried for generations and now cherished as a deeply human and charming architectural style. His young assistant, Gustave Eiffel, designed a steel footbridge linking two of the dunes.
Inevitably the splendid new resort irritated earlier visitors, like Gounod, who had loved Arcachon as a haven of tranquillity. As he wrote to a friend,25 ‘You told me I would see only gulls, larks, squirrels, nightingales and pine cones, and here I am with Parisians who are going to talk about the Opera, the Conservatory, the Academy, politics.’ But he stayed – he even conducted Masses and composed a canticle for the church and a tune for its carillon.
Flagler Beach
He could have been as famous and as rich as John D. Rockefeller. Instead he chose to build a railway – and Florida. He was Henry Flagler, Rockefeller’s partner in the creation of Standard Oil. Flagler’s biographer, David Chandler states that Rockefeller himself always admitted that Flagler ‘was an inspiration to me’.26 He had contributed more than Rockefeller to the organisation of ‘The Standard’, and was wholly responsible for its brilliant legal structure, but a combination of restlessness and unfulfilled creativity took him away from its management after the death of his first wife. Flagler’s Floridan adventure sprang partly from a feeling of guilt that her health would have improved had he been prepared to spend more time with her in the sunny south. But it was also an outlet for his colossal creative and intellectual energies.
The World the Railways Made Page 33