The Subterranean Railway

by Christian Wolmar

  Initially, the Central had hoped that the piston action of the trains as they sped through the tunnels would be sufficient to keep the system ventilated, but this proved wildly optimistic because it was the same air that was simply being shunted around a virtually closed system. One suggestion, from a botany professor, George Henson, was that the smell could be alleviated by placing evergreen shrubs such as holly and rhododendron on the station platforms. The line’s manager, Granville Cunningham, was enthusiastic, but seems not to have pursued the idea, which presumably would have resulted in a lot of dead foliage. The Railway was forced into more concerted action when London County Council chemists, alerted by a series of complaints about the malodorous fetid air – including one from a civil servant in the Sudan Political Service who likened the atmosphere to a crocodile’s breath – were called in to investigate pollution underground. They found that the evil-smelling atmosphere was caused by excessive dryness, with an average humidity of 45 per cent, compared with the normal street level of 76 per cent,22 and an excess of sulphur and nitrogen oxides. The answer was to install fans, one at Bond Street in 1902 and another larger one at Wood Lane, but complaints persisted. It was not really until filtered and ozonized air was injected into the Tube system, a process that started in 1911 but was not completed until the 1930s, that the atmosphere really started to improve. Nowadays, the air in the tunnels is controlled by 130 fans which are supposed to keep the temperature at around 21°C (73°F), rather warmer than the 13°C (55°F) which prevailed in Edwardian days and which actually was perceived as fairly reasonable. People in those days tended to dress warmly to go out, which meant that 55°F never felt cold and, in the hot weather, was reckoned to be pleasantly cool – especially during that first summer when there was a heatwave with temperatures regularly hitting 90°F.

  The Daily Mail, led by its proprietor Alfred Harmsworth, an enthusiast for all newfangled gadgets, gave much more positive coverage. The paper was founded in 1896, after the opening of the City & South London, which therefore missed out on having such a strong supporter in the press. By 1900, the paper was already selling half a million copies daily and Harmsworth used it to promote inventions such as the telephone, motorcycles and, in particular, motor cars. Mail reporters were therefore expected to be enthusiastic about a new development such as the Tube, but this means that their reporting has to be viewed somewhat circumspectly today. At the opening, the Mail front page read ‘if this kind of thing goes on, London will come to be quite a nice place to travel in’. The staff were commended for their coyness and the conductor was singled out for being ‘all of a quiver of joy and pride. But there was no indecorous exhibition of emotion; every man was resolutely British’.23 It was the Daily Mail, as early as 4 August 1900, just five days after the opening to the public, which first dubbed the line the ‘Twopenny Tube’. The Railway Times made the outlandish claim that motorists and cyclists were calmer as a result of the opening of the line and even suggested that an anorexic, who had not eaten for eighteen months, suddenly developed a ravenous attitude as a result of a journey on the line.24 As O.S. Nock accurately points out, this favourable coverage was rare indeed among newspapers: ‘The “Twopenny Tube” got a most enthusiastic reception in the English press, which has never in its history been very well disposed towards railways of any kind.’25 Perhaps this positive coverage was a counterpoint to all the bad news in the papers, which were full of harrowing tales about the casualties in the Boer War and, on the day after the opening, news of the death of the Prince of Wales’s younger brother, Alfred.

  Unlike the poor gloomy City & South London, the Twopenny Tube caught the public imagination. People flocked to the line. Within weeks, 100,000 were travelling on the railway daily. On the day of the triumphal return from the Boer War of the City Imperial Volunteers, who made a state entry into the capital, a staggering 229,000 travelled on the Central. During the early 1900s, the annual total was around 45 million annually, nearly 125,000 daily.26

  There were several reasons for this success. First, the line was on a transport artery and took a lot of existing business off both buses and the underground lines. According to one newspaper report, ‘The busmen are in despair. “Six of my regulars went by it today” growled a Bayswater conductor’.27 As its directors had feared when they objected to the building of the Central, the Metropolitan, still steam-hauled, lost out heavily to the new line with its modern electric trains. Secondly, the Central had been built to a high standard. Even the Board of Trade inspector reckoned the stations and passageways were ‘commodious’. Access to the trains was by lift and the bigger stations had three or four – there were forty-eight in the whole system. Thirdly, the line benefited from the growing economy which boosted not only employment but travel to the growing number of shops in Oxford Street; when, in 1908, Harry Gordon Selfridge was building his eponymous store, he wanted Bond Street station to be renamed Selfridges and tried to connect it with a passage under Oxford Street, but in the end was unsuccessful in both enterprises. And finally, the supportive press coverage provided free advertising for the line.

  Unlike on the City & South London, the carriage manufacturers had anticipated that there would be standing passengers and fitted straps to the carriage roof for them to grab, thereby creating ‘straphanging’, the long-suffering Londoners’ expression for commuting. The railway was rather more stylish and comfortable than its predecessor, yet still kept the same cheap fares with everyone travelling in one class, a real bargain for such a long line. Originally the promoters, put off by the bad publicity engendered by the cheap and nasty City & South London, had inserted in the Bill that there would be two classes – first and third – costing twopence and a penny respectively per mile. But the manager, Granville Cunningham, suggested the uniform fare that was to be important in creating the popular image of the line as a ‘people’s railway’. Moreover, workmen could get cheap early morning tickets, allowing them a return journey for the normal single fare of twopence. As a result, the name of Twopenny Tube quickly became widely adopted, and began to appear in songs. Gilbert & Sullivan hastily changed their reference for the 1900 revival of Patience from a man travelling on a threepenny bus to ‘the very delectable, highly respectable, Twopenny Tube young man’. A more substantial recognition came in a song in a musical, San Toy, then playing in the West End, which contained a verse about the fears of a Chinaman travelling on the line, expressed in the racially stereotyped language of the time:

  Me goes out, come on to rain

  Me tink me go by low down train,

  Climbee in bus seem too much fuss

  Me hearee talk ’bout tupn’y drain

  Me getee in, me takee seat

  Lift go miles down underee street,

  Me very frightee where me go

  Me hearee place much hot below

  Me tink maybe me meet Old Nick –

  Me hopee out dam quick, quick, quick!28

  Blessed with such good patronage, the Central, uniquely of the major underground lines, paid good dividends right from the start. There were such large numbers travelling on the line that the operating expenses only represented just over half the revenue, even with the large crew on each train. Consequently the company managed to pay a healthy 4 per cent dividend in each of its first five years, and 3 per cent until its merger into the Underground Group shortly before the outbreak of the First World War.

  This was in spite of the cost of rectifying a very major mistake which attracted unfavourable coverage in the newspapers: rather than following the successful example of the Waterloo & City and using motor coaches, the trains were hauled by locomotives, which, though bigger than those on the City & South London, were still an unsuitable form of traction for an underground line. Greathead had originally intended to have a locomotive at each end, which would have avoided the complication of having to shunt the locomotive round at the termini, but this would have required connecting the two with a large electrical cable running under the tra
in, an idea vetoed by the Board of Trade because of the fire risk. Consequently, the single locomotive, using a relatively new and untried technology,29 had to be very heavy to haul the train and the vibration caused by the forty-three-ton locomotives with only a rudimentary suspension had a devastating effect on buildings on the surface. There were so many complaints from proprietors fearing a collapse that the Board of Trade was forced to appoint a committee of three scientific experts to examine the issue. They were told that when the trains passed, buildings shook so that it became impossible for draughtsmen in Cheapside to draw straight lines. To alleviate the problem, some of the locomotives were modified and fitted with gears which made their passage a bit smoother; but the Central’s management had the wit to realize quickly that the only long-term solution would be the use of motor coaches.

  The change was effected quickly, pre-empting the inquiry report which did not appear until February 1902. By August 1901, only a year after the opening, the company had already introduced two experimental six-car motor coach trains on the line and this trial proved successful. As a result, a whole set of motor coaches, built in Britain but using American motors, was ordered. They began to be phased in from April 1904, and by 8 June that year the remarkably swift and successful changeover was complete. The move to motor coaches had the added advantage of reducing the time needed at the termini from five to just two minutes, alleviating the other great problem facing the line in its early days: overcrowding. One daft wag suggested in The Times30 that the solution would be to run trains on both tracks eastwards in the morning to take people into the City and in the opposite direction in the evenings. Subsequent correspondents sensibly pointed out that there would be no way of bringing the rolling stock back to carry more passengers. Another correspondent, Janet Hogarth, who had been forced to resort to using an omnibus because the rain had brought a surfeit of people onto the Central, made a plea for ladies’ coaches, as she was at a loss to know how to deal with the issue of mixed travel because of the chivalry of her fellow gentlemen travellers: ‘The man travelling habitually to the City between 9 and 10 a.m. naturally wishes to keep the seat he has secured; the woman, also travelling habitually, is most loath to deprive him of it. But what is she to do? She cannot always see if a car is full before entering, she feels it ungracious to refuse his chivalrous offers, and she is made painfully conscious of the inconvenience she has unwittingly caused.’ Her suggestion for a ladies-only coach, like those segregated compartments which survived on British Rail suburban trains into the 1970s, was not taken up by the Central.

  Other suggestions to tackle the overcrowding included raising the fares by using ‘the old fashioned rules of political economy’ in order to ‘stop killing with kindness this boon for Londoners’.31 In fact, the single fare was to survive until 1907 when competition from motor buses and the opening of other Tube lines reduced the numbers travelling on the Central. Fares of threepence were introduced for longer journeys and, two years later, the fare for shorter trips was reduced to a penny.

  Having achieved such immediate success, the owners of the line quickly put forward plans for expansion. Their big idea was to create a loop, essentially a kind of circle line, that would have included stations at Mansion House, Hyde Park Corner, High Street Kensington and Hammersmith, but this was only one of a plethora of ideas for new tube lines which the success of the Central had stimulated. So yet again, as happened virtually every time there was a major new underground development, Parliament took over, creating a joint committee which had the task of evaluating the various proposals and assessing which best met present and future traffic requirements. The Parliamentarians were not to know it, but this was an incredibly small window of opportunity. Within a few short years, the competition from motor buses, trams and, soon, motor cars, would make any privately funded line impossible to finance. The Parliamentary joint committee rejected the Central’s scheme, in favour of the rival plan to build a railway from Hammersmith to Palmers Green which had been partly approved as far back as 1897.

  The Central was therefore left with tacking on short extensions at either end but was not able to do so until several years later. Spotting that an exhibition site was being developed at a huge site at Wood Lane, just north-west of Shepherd’s Bush, the Central’s directors obtained permission to extend the line and create a loop at the western end. The opening of the extension in May 1908 coincided with the start of the exhibition, a celebration of Franco-British achievements intended to cement the four-year-old Entente Cordiale. The site took over from Earls Court as London’s main exhibition centre and large shows were held there every year until 1914. The Olympic Games of 1908 (and, incidentally, those of 1948) were held in the adjoining stadium and the area acquired the unofficial name of ‘White City’ because the concrete buildings, which supposedly included ‘twenty palaces’ for the inaugural exhibition, scattered among miles of artificial lakes and canals, were covered with white stucco.32

  One slightly desperate attempt to boost revenue by the Central at that time was the introduction of a parcels service. A ‘Lightning Parcels Express’ service was started in 1911, using men on tricycles to carry packets between stations and nearby offices, but like the similar one on the District (Chapter 6) it was short-lived. It closed down in 1917 through shortage of manpower, never to be resumed.

  At the east end of the Central, the line was eventually extended to its initial intended terminus at Liverpool Street. This had been part of the original plans but powers to carry out the work had lapsed because the Central’s directors had concentrated on other investments, such as replacing the original locomotive fleet. The station, which also covered the adjoining main-line terminus of Broad Street, was opened in July 1912 but plans for further extensions westwards were shelved with the outbreak of the war. As a history of the line puts it, ‘the opening to Liverpool Street was the swan song of the Central London as an independent enterprise’.33

  While both these extensions and the various exhibitions provided a welcome boost to the Central’s traffic, the line was facing increased competition and numbers of passengers were on a downward curve. This was partly the result of an economic recession and increased competition from motor buses, but, most importantly, because no fewer than three other tube lines had been taking shape under London, all supported by the mysterious American, Charles Yerkes.

  EIGHT

  THE DODGY

  AMERICAN

  London had no strategic plan to create a coherent network of underground railways, and yet today has a reasonably integrated system. There are obvious deficiencies and lacunae, such as the lack of a connection between the Circle and the Northern Line at Euston, but in many ways it is impossible to detect the haphazard way in which the system was developed. This has been more the result of luck than design. And it is also thanks to the efforts of Charles Tyson Yerkes, the American who quickly gained control of much of the underground network, both existing and under construction, in the first few years of the 1900s. Few Londoners realize, however, that the very shape and extent of the underground network in London was not determined by planners, or even Parliamentarians, but – as this chapter shows – as the result of a battle between two American magnates.

  Of the pantheon of Underground heroes, the people who created and ran it, from Charles Pearson to Lord Ashfield, Yerkes is the most controversial and, arguably, the man who had the most influence in ensuring London obtained a large network of lines. Yerkes only showed an interest in London in the final decade of his sixty-eight years and his earlier life was, to say the least, colourful; so much so, indeed, that many of the stories about him have been told and retold so often that there are considerable discrepancies between the various accounts. Accuracy is further confounded by the three-volume epic1 based on Yerkes’s life by an American novelist, Theodore Dreiser, who liberally mixed reality with fantasy.

  Yerkes was born in Philadelphia in 1837, into a banking family of Welsh ancestry and Quaker beliefs,
not a creed to which Charles ever seems to have subscribed. He set up a brokerage office at the age of twenty-two thanks to a legacy, and made a fortune through his ability to read the bond market better than his peers. He created a bank but soon lost all his money: a fire in the commercial heart of Chicago in 1871 caused waves of losses throughout the Eastern United States, and the collapse caught out Yerkes who was unable to pay interest on money he held for the City of Philadelphia. He was sentenced to thirty-three months’ imprisonment for embezzlement and larceny of $400,000 and spent seven months in jail, during which he showed his self-belief by telling a reporter: ‘I have made up my mind to keep my mental strength unimpaired and think my chances [of] regaining my former position financially are as good as they ever were.’2

  Pardoned by the state governor, apparently for political reasons because he knew where too many bodies were buried, he set about making a second fortune. After helping to finance, very profitably, the Continental Passenger Railway Company which, despite its grand-sounding name, was Philadelphia’s local streetcar network, in 1882 he moved to Chicago where he hoped to set up another bank but instead took an interest in the horse-drawn tramways springing up throughout the city.