The Subterranean Railway

by Christian Wolmar

  While the bus and tram operators soon withdrew, the various Underground operators decided to form a joint committee to discuss fares and related issues; they realized that there was more to gain through coordination than through cut-throat competition, given the growing threat from motor buses. A meeting of all the underground line owners, including the Metropolitan and others not controlled by the UERL created a joint booking system allowing through journeys without having to buy a second ticket, and this was gradually introduced throughout the system and parts of the main line railways. The underground line owners also agreed to install illuminated signs outside each station with the word ‘UndergrounD’, with the familiar capital first and last letters replacing the rather more prosaic but handy word ‘Tube’, favoured by the Central.

  This branding was the brainchild of Albert Stanley who was already working behind the scenes in bringing together the disparate transport methods in the capital. The beginnings of an integrated London Transport system were being created, fittingly, by the man who would eventually lead it. Stanley was first appointed at the instigation of the US investors who wanted to prevent the merger of the management of the lines in order to protect their investment but, ironically, was soon to recommend the same strategy. Born into a humble Derbyshire family, Stanley5 had gone to America with his family as a small child and worked on the railways from the age of fourteen, starting as a messenger boy with the Detroit tramways company. His obvious administrative and strategic talents must have been immediately apparent, as by the age of eighteen he was made a divisional superintendent and two years later overall superintendent responsible for the opening of many new lines. He moved to New Jersey where again promotion was rapid, and he was given responsibility for the state’s tramways in 1904 and for all its transport operations three years later. But he spent little time in that job as in 1907 Gibb, who had become aware of Stanley’s talent on his 1901 visit to the USA, invited him to return to Britain as the general manager of the UERL.

  Stanley, who of all the Underground pioneers probably achieved the most simply because he was to work for the organization for over thirty years, said later that he had been reluctant to leave New Jersey, in view of his recent promotion, and only came on the understanding that he could return within a year. Stanley is also reported6 to have told his senior managers that the UERL was bankrupt and he wanted resignation letters from all of them post-dated six months ahead. He then borrowed £50,000 from the banks to pay for publicity but soon found that the local London press was amenable to publishing news about improvements to the system. In that sense, Stanley, amongst all his other talents, was a pioneer of PR techniques, as well as a brilliant operator of railway systems.

  For instance, until Stanley’s intervention, the Yerkes tube lines had each produced their own promotional literature, a wasteful duplication.7 Now, a huge publicity campaign was launched, involving the production of 6 million free leaflet-sized maps of the system, showing each line in a different colour, which could be picked up at stations or hotels, restaurants and even ocean liners. It was a breakthrough in showing integrated information, although it was still fairly confusing compared with the simple brilliance of the version Harry Beck designed in the 1930s.8 Large enamelled copies of the map were displayed at stations and outside there were illuminated versions under the slogan ‘Anywhere Quickest Way Cheapest Fare’. This slogan was the idea of a fourteen-year-old boy who had entered a competition organized by the Evening News on the instigation of Stanley, another example of his talent at dealing with the press. There was even a game called ‘How to get there?’, based on Ludo, with various penalties and obstacles for lost tickets or signal stops, which the Railway Gazette ribbed mercilessly by suggesting further forfeits such as ‘Breakdown on District, proceed on foot’, ‘City & South London closed for cleaning, retire from game’ and, best of all, ‘polite conductor on Hampstead Tube – miss eight moves through shock’.

  Most importantly, this was the period when the roundel, the bar and circle sign, one of the world’s most famous corporate symbols, was developed for station names. There is confusion about the precise origin (although a similar device had been used by General Buses from around 1905). The elegant tiles of the stations were becoming messy as advertisements proliferated, and the printed strips bearing the station names were difficult to distinguish from the other displays. To deal with this, from 1913 the names started being shown on signs with a bar across a red circle. The Metropolitan used a diamond instead of a circle and several other versions of the basic idea were tried until Pick, after a lot of experimentation, chose the current design.

  Again, Stanley was behind the idea and he introduced several other innovations to improve what would now be known as ‘the passenger experience’. These were simple, such as ‘next lift’ indicators; ensuring that line diagrams were placed inside trains; coordinating lift departures with train arrivals; and timetabling the trains to run at regular intervals. Stanley realized that however good the marketing, to attract and retain passengers, services had to improve; and he devoted a lot of energy to reducing journey times and delays, and increasing frequencies. On the overcrowded District, for example, he managed to increase the number of trains from a maximum of twenty-four per hour in 1907 to an amazing forty per hour – i.e. just ninety seconds apart – by the end of 1911, rather more than today’s maximum of thirty per hour, albeit today’s trains are longer.

  On the tubes, too, there were improvements, with the time between Hammersmith and Finsbury Park on the Piccadilly cut from thirty-eight to thirty-three minutes. Express trains were introduced on the Hampstead branch, with some trains not stopping between Golders Green and Euston, and although this could hardly have pleased the residents near intermediate stations, the experiment was judged a success. A system of alternate trains stopping at every other station was introduced on parts of both the Hampstead line and the Piccadilly, which meant the fastest trains on the latter covered the distance between the two termini in just twenty-eight minutes. Frequencies on the tubes were increased with the Bakerloo running thirty-four per hour and the Hampstead, south of the junction at Camden Town, by September 1909 reaching forty-two per hour, with the claim that it was ‘the most frequent train service in the world’. Hours of running were extended, too, with the last trains leaving central London at 1 a.m., again rather better than today’s service.

  The rival Metropolitan also got in on the act of making improvements, by running more trains on the Hammersmith & City after it was electrified in 1907, increasing frequency from six to eight per hour and cutting the journey time between Hammersmith and Aldgate from thirty-nine to thirty-two minutes. The Metropolitan’s most luxurious innovation, though, was the introduction in 1910 of a Pullman service on its Aylesbury to Liverpool Street service. Two coaches, Mayflower and Galatea (named after the two yachts which competed in the 1886 America’s Cup), were each fitted with nineteen upholstered armchairs at which meals were served. The 8.30 a.m. from Aylesbury reached Liverpool Street at 9.57, suggesting that those who could afford such luxury did not have to be in the office as early as their underlings, who would have started at least an hour before that. People who had been to see a play in London could enjoy a late dinner on the theatre special which left Baker Street at 11.35 p.m.

  Another development on the UERL lines which made passengers’ lives slightly easier was the introduction of strip tickets (now called carnets), which were later dropped and not revived until the late 1990s. This allowed regular passengers to buy a strip of half a dozen tickets at a small discount, enabling them to avoid the rush hour queues at booking offices. These were an instant hit. The Times9 reported that 100,000 such tickets had been sold in the first week ‘and they were increasing in popularity every week’. The tickets were transferable and meant that three people travelling together could buy a strip of six and save a bit of money, and avoid having to queue. In fact, the tickets were not an entirely new idea, having been tried out for a while on
the Piccadilly, as mentioned in Chapter 8. Therefore, the coverage in The Times is again testimony to Stanley’s PR skills, as the article is little more than a puff culminating in the very complimentary statement that ‘The object of the Underground is expressed in the words “no waiting”. The lifts work in conjunction with the trains, and the trains run at such frequent intervals that a passenger never has to wait above a few seconds, therefore the object of the strip tickets is to eliminate the only other possibility of delay – namely, that of waiting behind a queue at the booking office for the issue of tickets.’

  All these measures, together with a growth spurt in the economy up to 1909, led to a significant rise in the number of passengers. On the Bakerloo, for example, by 1909 there were frequent complaints about overcrowding. There were irate letters in The Times during the first two months of that year – but, to put matters in perspective, one correspondent was shocked at finding twenty-five straphangers standing in his carriage.10 One passenger even wrote in to say that he had been unable to alight at Regent’s Park and had been carried on to Oxford Circus, and when he complained the guard merely told him that he had no right to stand so far down the carriage if he expected to get off at the next stop. As a result of the increased traffic, the three UERL tube lines managed to pay modest dividends of between 0.75 to 1.25 per cent to their shareholders by 1910. This was nowhere near a decent rate of return as investors could get far more by simply lending to the government, but it was better than nothing, which had been their lot for several years. Despite the shareholders’ initial misgivings, Stanley managed to push through the merger of the three tube lines so that they all came under his management, which saved costs; but the District remained, for the time being, separately run.

  Stanley’s agenda was always to unify and integrate all of London’s transport and in early 1912 he took a giant step towards that goal by gaining control of the largest bus company, the London General Omnibus Company, which had, after a series of mergers, become the capital’s dominant operator and thus created what became known as the Combine. This acquisition not only allowed Stanley to integrate the services in such a way that direct competition against his own underground lines was reduced, but also ensured he could weaken the remaining three lines outside his control by using buses to run against them. It was a clever move:

  By this shrewd and far-sighted manoeuvre, the Underground Company had neatly removed a most dangerous source of competition and brought into its family a lusty profit earner which could support the poorer relations; it had avoided the otherwise inevitable establishment of its own bus fleet and could now contemplate the prospect of a vast integrated transport system based on through bookings and connected services.11

  The bus company had paid dividends of 18 per cent the previous year, as it exploited the attraction of motor buses which, together with its monopoly position, created a period of super-profits. After the merger of the two companies, the hidden subsidy from buses underpinned the economics of London’s transport system and protected the much weaker finances of the Underground network.

  Not surprisingly, the various other underground lines in London were struggling too. The Central, for example, which had boasted 45 million passengers in 1903, carried just under 36 million in 1912 as a result of bus competition. Its ridership had been boosted in 1908 by the Franco-British Exhibition, but it was now declining and the company could only muster a 3 per cent dividend for its shareholders. The City & South London was now over twenty years old, and in need of major investment. The parlous state of these two companies left them ripe for takeover, especially now that the Underground Company could run buses against them. In November 1912, after a series of secret talks, plans to acquire the two lines were announced by Stanley. Neither was in a position to demand a big price for acquisition by the Underground Company. The shareholders of the Central, which was in a healthier state, got a much better deal, receiving the equivalent value of stock in the new company, while the owners of the City & South London had to settle for a mere two thirds of the value for theirs. The Underground Company’s own weakness meant it had to offer shares rather than cash but nevertheless both deals went through on New Year’s Day 1913, the shareholders presumably realizing that it was the best they were going to get. At the same time, the full gauge Great Northern & City was bought by the Metropolitan with the intention of integrating it into its system, but various attempts to link up with other railways, notably the Waterloo & City, failed. It remained a white elephant, although passengers numbers increased marginally as a result of the introduction by the Metropolitan of faster and more frequent trains. The one curiosity of the line was that in 1915 the Metropolitan introduced first-class accommodation on the Great Northern & City trains, making it the only tube railway ever to offer more than one class, a provision which remained until 1934. Meanwhile the Waterloo & City itself had an uneventful time, remaining in the ownership of the London & South Western Railway and enjoying a separate but successful existence.

  The Central was immediately tarted up, stations were cleaned and equipped with the standard roundels. The maximum fare on the Central was reduced from threepence halfpenny to threepence and more through tickets to connect with other transport routes were made available. Other minor improvements included converting lift gates to compressed air and speeding up services through resignalling. Escalators were already becoming the norm. The Central, which had extended to Liverpool Street in 1912, used escalators at the new station and they were also installed when the Bakerloo was pushed out to Paddington in 1914. Indeed, from 1913, all new deep-level stations were fitted with escalators rather than lifts. These extensions to Liverpool Street and Paddington were good for business by making up for the original failure of the tube lines to connect with main line stations, unlike the original Metropolitan and District railways which had been built with the specific aim of creating such links.

  During this pre-war period, there were several other improvements and brief extensions to improve connections on the system, with the main line railways as well as with other underground lines. Both Gibb and, particularly, Stanley understood that there was a great need for better interchanges, which would improve the service for passengers and boost revenue for operators. This was to be the start of a long process of knitting together the disparate lines, which often ran over and underneath each other without connection or were linked only at the surface level so that passengers had to leave the system, walk to the other station and probably buy another ticket. Oxford Circus, for example, was served by two different stations on the Bakerloo and Central, which, as one history puts it, ‘frowned at each other across Argyll Street’.12 No longer. In November 1912, work began on a new concourse and subway connection between the two lines. On the Central, a new interchange with the Piccadilly was planned to be built at Holborn, replacing the old British Museum station, although the scheme was delayed by the war. The most chaotic situation was at Charing Cross and Embankment, where the Bakerloo, Hampstead and District lines all had separate stations within a couple of hundred yards of each other despite being owned by the same company. In 1914, the Hampstead line was extended underneath the District and the two lines were connected by escalators. A further set of escalators was built to link the District with the Bakerloo, reducing the time to make a connection from three minutes and fifteen seconds to one minute and forty-five seconds. A new station – then called Charing Cross but now Embankment – was built on the surface; John Betjeman described it as ‘the most charming of all the Edwardian and neo-Georgian Renaissance stations’.13 The Hampstead line retained a station underneath Charing Cross station, and over the decades the various stations around Charing Cross have been called Embankment, Strand, Charing Cross and Trafalgar Square, with the same name on occasion being transferred from one station to another in a way that has confused many Londoners.

  The other major pre-war change was on the Bakerloo which, after reaching Paddington, was extended further outwards. Thi
s is the first example of a tube line expanding far out into the open air in order to generate traffic and was to become a model that was later widely adopted, creating a dual role for London’s tube railways as an underground system in the centre and a suburban one outside. Outside the centre, construction, which was mostly on the surface, was, of course, much cheaper and the tube lines were in many respects following in the path of their sub-surface predecessors.

  The District in particular made good use of its extensions by running a variety of innovative services, especially excursions which proved popular – not least because journeys on the electrified lines were comfortable and smooth. The longest service went all the way from Ealing to Southend and included a stop at Barking to change from an electric to a steam locomotive. These day trips to the seaside stimulated the opening of resort cafés which were entirely dependent on this trade. During the summer, Ealing, Ruislip and Osterley were popular destinations for school trips and families to get out of the polluted capital. The wildlife, however, was rather taken by surprise by the quiet electrified trains. According to a history of the line, ‘so many birds and beasts were killed by District trains on the countrified South Harrow branch that the District set up a natural history collection of stuffed creatures in glass cases, which was displayed at Charing Cross’,14 including an otter killed in April 1911.

  Stanley’s policy of expanding the tube lines outward did not really get under way until after the First World War, with the exception of the Bakerloo’s incursion into the countryside. Once the Bakerloo had reached Paddington, it was always envisaged that the line would break out of the tunnels into the suburbs. However, that extension required a joint project with the country’s most profitable and dynamic railway, the London & North Western, alongside whose lines it was planned to run. The North Western had been disdainful of suburban services because its main line traffic to Birmingham and the industrial towns of the north-west, together with highly lucrative freight business, were profitable enough to satisfy the shareholders. The company felt it did not need the complication of running a lot of stopping trains which would clog up the lines at the entrance to Euston. Therefore, unlike on the other main London railways, particularly those south of the river, there were few stations on the North Western in the outskirts of London, a mere eight between Willesden and Tring, twenty-six miles away – more like the pattern on a meandering country railway. To its credit, the North Western provided an excellent service from those stations, which all quickly became the hubs of growing developments stimulated by the railways’ policy of cheap season tickets. Watford, notably, was the biggest of these new towns and grew rapidly.