The Subterranean Railway

by Christian Wolmar

  From 1910, the far-sighted London & North Western, which never did things by half, decided to step up the level of services in order to boost its income and embarked on an ambitious plan of development. An entirely new two-track line was to be built solely for the suburban services, with extra intermediate stations and electrification installed. Stanley saw this as an unprecedented opportunity to take part in a scheme that was to play a key role in the development of north-west London. The Underground Company negotiated an alliance with the North Western to adopt the same electrification technology as the Yerkes tubes and to allow Bakerloo trains to operate out to Watford after emerging from the tunnel at Queen’s Park to join the main line railway three and a half miles out of Euston. The North Western reckoned it would benefit from being able to offer services that ran right through to Elephant & Castle from Watford. Work on the scheme was already well under way when war broke out in August 1914, by which time the new suburban line between Willesden and Watford had opened, and, amazingly, was seen as such a priority that construction continued with virtually unimpaired progress during the hostilities. By May 1915 Bakerloo trains were running to Willesden and two years later through to Watford.

  There is still something incongruous about seeing tube trains, with their flat fronts designed to push the air through the dark tunnels, out in the open. Those on the Bakerloo must have been a particularly strange sight when running alongside the huge steam locomotives operating the main line services out of Euston. However, these tube trains were going to become an increasingly common sight in London’s suburbs. But first there was the Great War to endure, which halted most development on the Underground and, importantly, led to a hiatus in the planning process.

  TEN

  THE UNDERGROUND

  IN THE

  FIRST WORLD WAR

  While the story of the Underground as air raid shelter during the Second World War is part of British folklore, it is much less well known that, briefly, thousands took refuge there during the First World War. The number of passengers using the system also went up sharply and the war marked the point at which both government and Londoners recognized the vital role of the Underground in moving people around the capital.

  London suffered its first aerial bombardment on 31 May 1915 when a Zeppelin airship suddenly appeared over north-east London and dropped a ton of bombs, killing seven people and wounding thirty-five. A succession of raids continued through that summer. The orders of the Kaiser were that attacks should be targeted only at naval military installations, but dropping ordnance out of Zeppelins or primitive aircraft was a crude business and most of the damage was caused to civilian targets and population.

  It was, perhaps, unsurprising that people assumed the Underground system was the safest place to be during such raids. The irony was that at the onset of the war, in August 1914, there had been a scare prompted by G.A. Nokes, the critic of ‘Bakerloo’ and by then the editor of the Railway and Travel Monthly, suggesting that the system was being used as a store for German armaments.1 Nokes was such an eminent railway journalist and author that his ridiculous allegation resulted in a fruitless search by the police of the disused section of tunnel on the City & South London. Once the raids started, people began flocking to the Underground, either riding around on the trains or sitting at stations.

  Unlike at the outset of the Second World War, both the Underground Company and the authorities were happy for people to use the system as a shelter. Antwerp had been bombed from Zeppelins as early as August 1914 and this had raised the notion that London could be attacked in a similar way. Even before the first attack, the Underground Company had responded with publicity deliberately designed to encourage people to seek protection in its system from the bombing. In October 1914, one advertisement read: ‘It is bomb proof down below. Underground for safety; plenty of bright trains, business as usual’. Another said:

  Never mind the dark and dangerous streets

  Underground

  It is warm and bright

  Be comfortable in well-lit trains and read the latest war news.

  The Zeppelin raids were very sporadic and though, for a while, people sought shelter in the Underground, the attacks ceased and the issue did not become a problem. During those first raids, there were as many as 12,000 shelterers at Finsbury Park and 9,000 at King’s Cross, many of whom had simply been held up when train services stopped, as initially all trains were halted until the ‘all clear’ was sounded, although this was later relaxed. The bloodiest raids by the Zeppelins were on two nights in September 1915 when forty people were killed, but aeroplanes attacks proved more destructive. It was not until a concentrated bombing by aeroplanes in September 1917 that the masses began to use the Underground system to shelter regularly. On hearing of a raid, the police, some on bicycles, would carry round ‘Take Cover’ signs and encourage people to head for the Underground. The Underground Company allowed its station passages and platforms to be used and was compensated by the Home Office with a mere £130 per week to pay for the extra personnel and lighting required. The company provided eighty-six stations for the shelterers, with an estimated capacity of 250,000. When there were successive raids on the 24th and 25th, which suggested that the attacks might be nightly, an estimated 100,000 people started sheltering and the authorities became concerned about the problem.

  The original idea had been that only people caught inadvertently in the streets should shelter in the Underground there, but instead the system began to fill up with frightened crowds even before any warning had been sounded. And they brought everything with them. They ignored the posters which stressed that ‘people sheltering are not allowed to take birds, dogs, cats and other animals on to the Company’s premises’ and came ready to spend the whole night with bedding and food as well as their pets. Some started travelling round in trains, the Circle being a favourite, ‘partaking of refreshments’ they had brought with them, according to the Railway Gazette,2 because it was less boring than staying in the same place and the trains continued running as long as a warning had not been sounded. It was, the Gazette stressed, principally ‘people of the poorer classes, mostly aliens, women and children’ who used the system during raids. As a result, travellers going about their normal business were allegedly being inconvenienced, especially since, as we see below, record numbers of passengers had started using the system. In many ways it was a prelude to what was to happen a quarter of a century later during the Second World War, and indeed set the tone for the authorities’ opposition in 1939 to the use of the system as a shelter. In fact, according to a police memorandum3 little inconvenience had been caused to passenger traffic by the shelterers, who remained ‘orderly and obedient’ throughout.

  Concerned that people would expect nightly raids and therefore block the system by heading down there every night, the authorities decided that only ticket-holders should be able to go down into the system except when an air raid warning had been sounded. Yet on the very night these restrictions were imposed, on 28 September, a Russian woman was killed in the crush at Liverpool Street station, again a portent to much more serious incidents in the Second World War.

  The report into the use of the Underground as a shelter during the First World War estimated that in response to the thirty-one attacks, some 4,250,000 people had used the system. That would suggest around 140,000 every night of a raid, though fewer if the figures included nights in which there were no attacks. The peak was on 17 February 1918 with 300,000 crowding into the system, well above its official capacity. This prompted enquiries in Parliament about hygiene and disease, but the Home Secretary, Sir George Cave, allayed fears by announcing that the stations were in every case thoroughly cleansed and disinfected by the management before traffic was resumed – a claim that was probably more propaganda than substance considering the task faced by the Underground Company, which had lost many of its staff to the war effort.

  Indeed, the greatest social impact of the war on the Underground wa
s the employment of women for the first time in the history of the system. They took over the men’s jobs in large numbers and were essential in keeping the network running. At the height of the war, half the 3,000 District’s employees were women, and a third of the 4,000-strong Metropolitan workforce. Whole stations came under the control of women, with the newly opened Maida Vale leading the way, though it shared a male stationmaster with three neighbouring stations. The Railway Gazette grudgingly recognized this as ‘preferable to employing hobbledehoys’ and women continued to take on new tasks, replacing gatemen on trains in 1917, but the roles of guard and driver remained the preserve of men. Women received the same wages as men, which, given the gender inequalities in other industries between the two, was a remarkably enlightened policy, forced on the management by the trade unions. However, the women were displaced by men returning from the war and the system reverted to being entirely male-operated.

  It was not only people who found shelter in the Underground during the Great War. Sections of the tube system were used for the storage of museum treasures and paintings, clearly a sign that the authorities were concerned about widespread bombing, even though, in the event, the threat never materialized. The disused platform at Aldwych was sealed off, and in September 1917 over 300 pictures from the National Gallery, about one tenth of the collection, were housed there until December 1918. The miniature post office railway, being built to transport mail between sorting offices using automatic trains, was used to store parts of the collection of the Tate, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Public Record Office.4 The Victoria & Albert used a nearby spare station tunnel at South Kensington, shared with cases of china from Buckingham Palace. All these precautions were carried out too late in the war to be useful and proved unnecessary since, after that damaging raid on 17 February 1918, there were only two further attacks, London had strengthened its air defences and the Germans had largely lost faith in their ability to win the war.

  When the attacks ended, the Daily Mail published a map of where bombs had fallen; there was a clear pattern of attacks along main arterial routes and in the centre of London. The final toll was 670 deaths and nearly 2,000 wounded. The Underground was not a specific target but the railways had been and several stations and lines were attacked, though damage was fairly minimal. Indeed, more disruption was caused by the authorities’ decision to suspend all underground and main line railway traffic during raids than by the consequent damage. As mentioned before, this rule was later relaxed and trains were allowed to proceed slowly during attacks, which was a sensible compromise between safety and the need to keep transport links functioning in wartime.

  The war highlighted the vulnerability of the system to attack. Indeed, to protect the system itself, the Underground Company had wanted to install flood doors in case bombs caused a breach. In response to the outbreak of war, four temporary barriers were created. They consisted of steel framework supports in which heavy timber baulks could be dropped to seal the twin tunnel mouths at the south end of Charing Cross station and the north end of Waterloo on the Bakerloo. Each barrier would take almost an hour to install and they were only designed to check immediate flooding. Nevertheless, this rather crude system required the constant allocation of 100 men on stand-by in case of a breach. A more permanent solution of steel doors was suggested by the Underground Company but as this would have required 170 tons of steel that could otherwise be used for ammunition, the Ministry of War rejected the idea. Even when it was pointed out that sixty-five miles of tunnel could be flooded, with massive loss of life, the Ministry only relented enough to discuss the issue more urgently; and it was not until after the war that a lining of armour plate was installed on the Bakerloo Line either side of the river. To this day, flooding remains probably the greatest risk of a major catastrophe in the tube system, although much stronger defences have been built.

  Apart from the use of the Underground as a massive air raid shelter, the Great War had two long-term effects on the Underground: a move towards integration which became irreversible and a massive rise in usage which was to create both problems and opportunities.

  Although the Underground Company controlled most of the lines, each one still had separate accounts and shareholders, resulting in complex calculations to allocate revenue. To make matters even more complicated, the District line had been taken under direct control of the government, along with most of the main line railways, while management of the tube lines had been left with the company. This meant that District staff would receive a war bonus, but their counterparts on the tube lines would not. A strange consequence of this anomaly was that Stanley devised a plan to establish a common fund for receipts from the various lines, which convinced the government to pay the bonus to all the company’s staff, including those working for the London General Omnibus Company. More importantly, this was the beginning of the kind of pooling arrangement which was essential to create an integrated transport system for the capital, towards which Stanley seemed always to be working. The arrangement protected the less profitable parts of the Combine, the rather Orwellian name increasingly used for Stanley’s ever-growing empire, and meant that the shareholders’ rates of return were equalized. Consequently, the owners of the bus company received less than under the previous arrangement, and the Underground stockholders more.

  The overcrowding was also to have long-term consequences. At the beginning of the war, as mobilization resulted in hundreds of thousands of new recruits heading to training camps and to southern ports for transfer to France, the Underground Company allowed all uniformed men to travel free until 1 October 1914. But even after the soldiers had to pay, the Underground system had to cope with vastly increased traffic – in contrast with the Second World War when numbers were to go down. There were a variety of causes: the massive troop movements, leave travel, cutbacks in road services as vehicles were used for war and their drivers sent to the front, and the greater affluence that accompanied the high employment levels resulting from the conflict. The major history of the tube network suggests another reason: ‘Another contributory factor [to the growth] was the dim-out enforced after dark as a precaution against air attack – people naturally preferred travel in the well-lit tube cars to slow bus and train journeys through darkened streets.’5 Clearly the Underground Company saw the war as an opportunity, too. For Easter 1915 the company issued a poster using the war in a ironic way to boost passenger numbers: ‘Why bother about the Germans invading the country – invade it yourself by underground and the motor bus’, a testimony to the confidence and courage of those running the company who were not scared of making light of a very sensitive subject.

  The growth continued throughout the war and by 1917 was causing such overcrowding on the tube system that it engendered widespread criticism in the press and even Parliament. The limitations of the technology as originally designed were beginning to be felt. The attendant-operated lifts were slow and there was a shortage of rolling stock, exacerbated by the difficulty of getting spares during the war, which meant many trains were shorter than normal. Although some improvements were being made, such as controlling the lifts from landings (which was faster as well as saving labour), and replacing hydraulic operation with electric lifts or escalators, these were long-term investment programmes which would take decades to complete and had little short-term impact. The overcrowding problem was exacerbated when in May 1918 the government, through the Board of Trade (whose president was now none other than Sir Albert Stanley)6, ordered a cutback in services because of concern over coal shortages, and several stations had to be closed early or on Sundays. Despite all the problems, overall use of the Underground increased by two thirds during the course of the war, and by the end of the conflict half of all passenger journeys in the capital were on the Underground system.

  In terms of the numbers of trains, the busiest section was the Metropolitan’s City widened lines, the link built fifty years previously to allow trains to go from Farringdon acr
oss the river and into the overground rail network. This was still one of only three rail connections through London, and the most direct. Therefore it had carried an extraordinary number of troop and other special military trains, a total of 26,000 during the war, an average of sixteen trains per day. At peak periods, in a build-up to an offensive, the traffic was much greater than that, reaching, for example, 210 trains daily for the first fortnight of 1915.

  To cope with the crowds on the tube lines, various short-term measures were introduced, including barriers at platforms which slid open once the alighting passengers had left and queuing systems at the busier stations, but in reality little could be done to improve the situation except to increase the overall capacity. It is no exaggeration to suggest that the war made both government and the population realize the extent to which the Underground system was a vital part of the infrastructure of the capital – and even of the nation. The increased usage was so great that, together with a rise in fares of one third, it enabled modest dividends to be paid to all the various shareholders of the companies making up the Combine – with the exception of the District which was still unable to provide its owners with any return whatsoever. The Underground system came of age in the Great War, and now, with Stanley back at the helm after his stint in government, the stage was set for expanding and consolidating the network.