The Subterranean Railway

by Christian Wolmar

  Like the Metropolitan, the District realized that there was money to be made by feeding trains from suburban lines onto the underground section. It first started operating services from West Brompton, on the West London line, through to Kensington High Street; but there was no station at Earls Court, between the two termini.

  Earls Court is an early example of how quickly the arrival of the underground railway could transform an area. At the time, Earls Court was fertile market garden land with few houses. The residents petitioned for a station and this was eventually completed in October 1871. The early building, a modest affair with a wooden booking office, lasted only four years before being burnt down, an event which enabled the company to provide a much grander station to meet the demands of the population, as the surrounding area had developed rapidly in the intervening period.17

  The Earls Court and West Brompton connection was to be the start of the District’s drive westwards, just as the little spur from Baker Street to St John’s Wood would be the basis of the Metropolitan’s great expansion, both described in the next chapter. Meanwhile, though, the Circle needed to be completed and work was stalled. The antagonism between Watkin and Forbes delayed the completion of the Circle line, both being more concerned with doing each other down than ensuring the completion of the project.

  There was, as ever in this story, a shortage of capital; and the state of the Metropolitan’s finances, which had been the main reason for employing Watkin, was, he discovered, worse than originally thought. The handsome returns paid by the Metropolitan in the mid 1860s were partly coming out of capital raised for future projects,18 forcing the company to cut dividends, which in turn prompted a shareholders’ revolt and a boardroom coup. The new board discovered that the books had not been properly kept and, according to one account, there was the suggestion of widespread corruption: ‘there was a considerable amount of slackness and waste in the stores and engineering departments’.19

  Indeed, Watkin was incensed at what he found when he took over the chairmanship of the Metropolitan. He was scathing about John Fowler, the engineer, who had been paid the enormous sum of £152,00020 and who also received a further £157,000 from the District. While obviously part of that had to be passed on to his own employees and contractors, it represented a staggering amount given that the whole of the original section of the Metropolitan had been built for £1m. As Watkin pointed out in an indignant letter to the engineer at a shareholders’ meeting, it was a poor example to other professionals involved in the construction: ‘No engineer in the world was so highly paid. Taking it any way you like – time, speciality, risk, quantity, value or all combined, you have set an example of charges which seems to me to have largely aided in demoralization of professional men of all sorts who have lived upon the suffering shareholders for the past ten years.’21 Watkin went on to lambast contractors generally: ‘At the opera, if we look at the lady occupants of the best boxes, who are glittering with the best diamonds, and ask who they are, we are told that they are the wife and daughters of Clodd, the great railway contractor. In the park whose carriages, horses and equipages are the most fashionable? Why, those belonging to Plausible, the great railway engineer. And if we hear of some poor nobleman’s estate being in the market, who buys it? Why, Vampire, the great railway lawyer.’22 It is interesting that Watkin, the son of a merchant, felt impelled to side with the landed gentry, rather than the ranks of the new entrepreneurs to which he belonged, in the great class battle which had been raging since the start of the Industrial Revolution nearly a century before.

  The need for the completion of the Circle was apparent from the high usage of the sections that were already built. By 1875 the Metropolitan was carrying 48 million passengers per year, and the District, though continuing to struggle, managed to carry around half that number, still a substantial achievement. Three quarters of these passengers used third class, suggesting they were manual workers and low-paid clerks attracted by the low fares, but interestingly, as it expanded, the Underground managed to attract a substantial body of first-class passengers who were vociferous in their complaints about travelling on the slow and uncomfortable services. But where had these new travellers come from? Without the railway would they simply not have undertaken their journey, or were they transferring from other modes?

  The steamboats, which were first introduced in 1815, had once been the mainstay of travel from south-east London but were in decline, hastened by a disaster in 1878 when the overcrowded Princess Alice capsized, drowning over 600 people, mostly day-trippers. New forms of transport undoubtedly generate journeys, as witnessed by the rapid filling of any new motorway, and it was the same here: rather than the Underground eating into the traffic of its main rival the horse-drawn omnibus, usage of both modes of travel increased after the creation of the Metropolitan. The number of omnibus users rose from 40 million in the year of the Metropolitan’s opening to nearly 50 million in 1875. Partly this was the result of clever strategies by the omnibus owners: they reduced fares to cope with the competition, which, along with the fact that the average journey was now shorter, resulted in a fall in revenue in this period, despite the upsurge in passenger numbers; and they also provided, with encouragement from both the District and the Metropolitan, feeder services to the Underground, an early recognition of the importance of integrated transport. In some cases, the Underground companies had to subsidize these feeder services in order to boost passenger numbers on their trains. When the District first opened, there was no public transport between Regent Street and Church Lane (now High Street) Kensington, or anything along Park Lane or Palace Road. The reason was that in this affluent area of Central and West London people could afford their own carriages and therefore the District had to guarantee the revenue for the first omnibuses between Victoria and Paddington along Park Lane. Similarly, the Metropolitan paid for services from Piccadilly along Regent Street to what is now Great Portland Street station.

  With suburban railways springing up – especially in south London – as well as the growing Underground in central London, it was the end of the half-century-long dominance of horse-drawn public transport and one estimate suggests that by 1875 there were three times more train passengers than omnibus riders.23 The omnibus still had a niche market for shorter journeys and those for which there was no rail alternative, but the train services, both underground and suburban, were becoming the main way for Londoners to get about, not least because they were so much faster for any journey of more than a mile, despite the problems of access up and down often quite difficult stairs. And interestingly, the London General Omnibus Company managed to pay much more handsome dividends to its shareholders during this period than did the train companies, because of external changes such as the reduction in the cost of horse feed and various savings in tolls and taxes. The Underground companies, moreover, were burdened with a huge capital base, together with continual pressure to raise more in order to expand.

  With both the Metropolitan and the District ailing, others tried to fill the gap in getting the Underground circle completed. In June 1873, a group of City financiers, who later called themselves the Metropolitan Inner Circle Completion Company, published a plan to build a link between Mansion House and Bow, not only completing the circle but linking with the North London, Great Eastern and East London railways. This scheme, which obtained Parliamentary powers in 1874, prompted a couple of years of wheeling and dealing with Watkin, as ever, behaving badly. He tried to block the Completion Company’s scheme by starting work on the Metropolitan’s extension and introducing another bill for the completion of the inner Circle by a shorter line from Aldgate to Cannon Street, but that was rejected by Parliament. Watkin kept on trying delaying tactics against the Completion Company as well as pushing the Metropolitan on as far as he could, but when the line reached Aldgate in November 1876 there was neither money nor permission to go any further. As with its westward extensions, constructing the line was a much more difficult task than
the original section because not only did its path take it under buildings, but as the line was now heading for the heart of the old City, the property was increasingly expensive. For example, the Roman Catholic chapel at Moorfields needed thirty feet of costly underpinning and even then part of the building collapsed.

  One example of Watkin’s skulduggery was that he opposed the 1878 extension of time bill for the Completion Company, claiming it contained a clause about the underpinning of buildings that was ‘unusual and onerous’. Yet, according to one historian, ‘the same clause appeared in the Metropolitan and Regent Circus Bill he was promoting in the same Parliament’.24 The District, on the other hand, realizing it could never raise the money to complete the circle, supported the Completion Company’s efforts.

  But to no avail. Despite being offered £370,000 from the Metropolitan Board of Works (MBW) to support the building of a new street linking Fenchurch Street and another £130,000 by the Commission of Sewers, the Completion Company could not raise the cash to build the link. So at last, after several wasted years, the only realistic outcome emerged – the Metropolitan and the District decided to cooperate. After the failure of the Completion Company scheme, a contractor, Charles Lucas, persuaded the two enemies, Forbes and Watkin, to meet and agree a short-term peace agreement in order at last to complete the Circle. They managed to persuade the Commissioners of Sewers to raise their offer to £250,000 and the MBW’s to £500,000. Even then, it took an outsider to knock the heads of the two companies together. With several other schemes being put forward by promoters, there was an inquiry chaired by Sir John Hawkshaw who, arbitrating, recommended that the joint scheme by the two existing railways should be selected, presumably on the basis that the involvement of a third party would have led to chaos. As we see below, it was bad enough trying to run an integrated service like the inner Circle line with two players, let alone three.

  At last, in August 1879 a joint act was passed granting powers to the two railways to complete not only the Circle but also a spur to Whitechapel and a connection with the East London which ran between Whitechapel and New Cross. For its part, the Metropolitan, which was more affluent than the District, started work on the Aldgate–Trinity Square (now Tower Hill) extension which opened in September 1882. At this stage, the line ended abruptly at Tower of London station, then a rickety wooden construction which had been jerry-built in just three days but which lasted until it was bombed in 1940.

  After yet more bickering between the District and the Metropolitan, the two started working together almost immediately on the last section of the circle, between Tower Hill and Mansion House. The Metropolitan initially financed the work, with the proviso that the District would become a financial partner at a later date. The cost was a severe burden for the Metropolitan. As the engineer and railway writer O.S. Nock put it, ‘all constructional difficulties experienced in earlier underground lines in London were accentuated on this extraordinary 2¼ miles of railway and the ultimate cost worked out at a million pounds a mile’. The main cost was labour: to build the circle extension, 850 men were employed by day and 500 at night for two years. Of course, even if translated in to 2012 money, making say £80m per mile, that is very cheap compared with the cost of the Crossrail scheme under construction between Paddington and Liverpool Street which is reckoned to cost £15bn for a tunnel of less than four miles (but which also includes extensive works on the surface beyond the two main line stations). An estimate soon after construction25 reckoned that the thirteen-mile-long circular railway cost about £11m, including almost another five miles of spurs and early extensions. London had got a bargain but the expected financial bonanza for the two underground companies never materialized.

  Any hopes that operating a line together would finally make the two companies, and, in particular, their bosses, behave in a grown-up way were quickly dashed. But first there was the opening ceremony, on 17 September 1884, to be got over with. Forbes and Watkin reportedly sat in the same train as it ran round the Circle, but unfortunately there is no photograph to record their discomfiture. At the inevitable banquet, Forbes rose at the end of the meal to tell the assembled VIPs that differences between himself and Watkin were slight and only on the surface. It was pure cant. There was an immediate series of disputes which continued until the end of the century. Far from peace breaking out, it was the lawyers who enjoyed a field day as innumerable suits and countersuits were filed by the two rivals.

  Public services started on October 6 and there was turmoil, caused partly by the two companies’ mistrust of one another. They had agreed that the Metropolitan trains should run clockwise around the outer track, while the District operated in the opposite direction on the inside line.26 Of the fifteen route miles (which included a few spurs and sections of four-track which counted double) of the Circle, seven were owned by the Metropolitan, just under six miles by the District, and slightly more than two were jointly owned. While this could, with goodwill and sensible management, have been an effective way of operating the seventy or eighty-minute round trip covering twenty-seven stations, the hostility and antipathy between the two ensured that it was a recipe for chaos.

  According to the initial timetable, the companies attempted to run eight trains per hour in each direction but underestimated the difference between operating on a horseshoe, with a terminus at each end, and a continuous circle. The locomotives had to be watered which took place during a two-minute stop at Aldgate where a special drain had to be fitted to run the hot water, a colossal 218,000 gallons daily, into the Thames. The longer servicing and inspection involved taking the locomotive off the train and replacing it at one of the Kensington stations – High Street for the District, South for the Metropolitan. Spare engines were left wherever there was space in odd corners of the railway, of which there was little, putting extra pressure on running a punctual service.

  In addition to the 140 trains scheduled on the inner Circle in each direction, a further 684 were timetabled to use part of the line, entering at Cromwell Road from the west, Praed Street (near Paddington) from the north-west and Whitechapel from the east. That meant a total of 964, around a hundred more than the line could cope with. The financial arrangements between the Metropolitan and the District were at the root of this attempt to run too many trains as the District essentially paid a fixed fee irrespective of the number of trains it operated.27

  Oddly, the very first day seems to have passed off without trouble, at least according to the man from The Times. The reporter describes28 how the first morning service which left New Cross for Mansion House was a workmen’s train soon after 5 a.m. and that the first westward Circle service was at 5.35 a.m., revealing a service pattern which is not much different from that of the early twenty-first century: ‘The trains run at frequent intervals from before 6 o’clock in the morning until about midnight’. He also offers a possible explanation for some of the higher costs of the new section, as he mentions that ‘the new tunnel and the new stations are great improvements upon the tunnels and stations of the older underground railways. The platforms are wide and the stations are airy.’ But the rolling stock and its lighting was no better than when the Metropolitan first opened two decades previously. The reporter, too, was a bit grumpy about the prospect of the cost of fares: ‘The joint companies promise a reduction of fares, but these have not been issued.’ Nevertheless, he concluded that ‘the traffic worked smoothly yesterday, and many of the public made a trial trip of a run around London’.

  But the service soon deteriorated. According to one ‘young man’, writing to the paper ten days after the start of the service,29 his job was at risk because he could ‘never feel safe as to what time we shall arrive at our destination. As a daily traveller between Turnham Green and Sloane Square, I can assure you that the best time our morning train has kept since the opening of the Inner Circle completion has been 9 min late and the general time 15 min and 20 min late, and before this our train used to keep admirable time.’ His prob
lem was that his train was often held at Earls Court to allow the Circle line trains from Kensington High Street to pass. No wonder, as mentioned previously, that control over this section of line, the Cromwell curve, was to be the subject of a legal dispute between the two companies for so long.

  The disruption was so bad that several trains came to a standstill for many hours and on at least one occasion, near Kensington High Street on 16 October, the passengers abandoned the carriages to walk along the track to escape by the nearest station.30 Even without such outright failures – which were eventually rectified by cutting services back to six per hour on the inner Circle – passengers were much put upon, largely because of the silly rivalry. For instance, they were supposed to be encouraged to travel by the shortest route, their tickets bearing either the letter I for the inner, largely District, services, or O for the outer Metropolitan-run trains. Each company had its own booking office at joint stations and inevitably there were disputes about what route should be recommended between two stations that were broadly opposite each other on the Circle. Worse, however, was that when relations between the two companies went through one of the regular bad patches in 1886, both companies began issuing tickets for their own trains to hapless passengers irrespective of the fact that it might involve a journey of, say, twenty-two stops instead of five. Tickets bearing the wrong letter were not accepted for travel by the rival company and they ran fierce advertising campaigns against each other. ‘Metropolitan Railway, the best cheapest most convenient and expeditious route’ boasted one, listing fares to various stations, ‘note the fares and time occupied … save your time’.