The Subterranean Railway

by Christian Wolmar

  For this type of affluent commuter, there was the Pullman service still offered by the Metropolitan. It had been introduced in 1910 and continued to provide its passengers with meals served by obsequious waiters:

  For an extra charge of sixpence from Rickmansworth or a shilling from more distant stations, travellers could journey to work in morocco armchairs set in a drawing room panelled in fine fiddleback mahogany. Chaste electric lamps sat on the tables, and for privacy there were blinds of green silk damask. Nothing was spared from the carpet on which the tycoon’s feet rested to the ormolu rack with finely traced panels of brass treillage upon which he deposited his despatch case.10

  Although the Pullmans lost money and were really just a flagship service to attract publicity, they survived on the Metropolitan until the outbreak of the Second World War.

  Moor Park was turned into a full-scale station when it became the junction for the Watford branch, one of two extensions built by the Metropolitan between the wars, neither of which was particularly successful in attracting passengers. The Watford branch had been on the drawing board for a long time, having first been the subject of a petition from residents as far back as 1906. A whole swathe of land had been acquired from Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, just before the Great War, but the war’s outbreak halted progress. The Bill enabling the construction of the line was passed in 1912, and a station – used temporarily as a restaurant – had even been built in Watford High Street. Opposition from the local council meant that the Metropolitan was reluctant to revive the project after the war. Various other alternatives for new branches, some much more ambitious and drawn up with development potential in mind, were considered and rejected. Therefore it was not until 1923 that work finally started on the line, which had an intermediate station at Croxley and a terminus rather distant from the town centre at the edge of Cassiobury Park.

  The construction of the line was hampered by difficult conditions near the River Gade and the Grand Union Canal, which pushed the cost of the two and a half mile extension to more than £300,000. The usual dignitaries attended the opening on 2 November 1925 and the Watford Observer commented: ‘The Metropolitan Railway to Watford is likely to have a much greater effect on the development of the town than is at present realized. Just as trade follows the flag, so population follows the railway.’

  Not always. The Observer was wrong and the line has always been something of a white elephant. Even though the Metropolitan’s trains on the Watford branch were comfortable new electric stock with compartments – much better than the Bakerloo tube or the rival London Midland & Scottish suburban services from Watford Junction – the siting of the station on the outskirts of the town limited its usefulness. The service was initially run jointly with the London & North Eastern Railway, which operated steam trains on the line in contrast to the Metropolitan’s state-of-the-art electric trains, but the LNER pulled out after the 1926 General Strike because of the poor patronage. The line had the feel of a rural branch line leading to nowhere – and indeed still does today, with a poorly used and sleepy station. Despite the Metropolitan providing buses to the centre of town, the seventy services on weekdays attracted just 2,000 passengers daily. There were a few football specials, too, and while passenger numbers picked up gradually with development in Cassiobury, the line’s relative failure deterred the Metropolitan from pursuing other extension plans except for the four-mile-long Wembley Park to Stanmore branch. This line opened on 10 December 1932. Its construction had been made possible by cash provided by the government for capital schemes as part of attempts to recover from the Depression.

  This last incursion of the Metropolitan into the countryside was also largely unsuccessful. There was little development on the route of the line, which had three intermediate stations – Kingsbury, Queensbury (which opened later and was another name chosen by newspaper competition) and Canons Park – all designed by Clark who always incorporated a few new shops into his design. While perfectly serviceable, compared with Holden’s efforts on the Piccadilly they were banal and conservative, blending in with the red-brick environment rather than standing out as a prominent feature of the area. It was hardly surprising that the extension was not well patronized, given that, as a history of the Metropolitan puts it, ‘the 72 trains per day, 37 of which went direct to Baker Street, were a good service for the wooded fields and uninhabited building plots’.11 The line ended close to a golf course, well short of Stanmore village. There were so few potential passengers that outside peak hours the service was operated by a single-carriage electric car with cabs at each end. Oddly, the Metropolitan focused much of its early advertising of the line on the fact that its passengers could get to the greyhound racing at Wembley Stadium by taking a train to ‘Wembley Park at which point a bus service connects with the stadium’. Not really all that convenient, then.

  In the late 1930s the suburb of Queensbury, designed to provide homes for 50,000 people and some light industry, ‘became the most rapidly developed estate in the north-west [of London]. The landscape was more or less devoid of natural features. Even the few elms were cut down along Honeypot Lane’12 (the Honey was probably a reference to the stickiness of the Middlesex mud). Houses were cheaper there than in other parts of Metroland, going for as little as £600–£800, and therefore many lower-middle-class families, who had not been able to afford a home of their own, were drawn to the area. Despite the modesty of the houses, they still fulfilled the dream of Pearson and all the successive Underground pioneers by providing good homes for the masses. Each house had a hot-water boiler in the kitchen, a small garden and even space for a garage. Shopping parades around the station and cinemas soon provided residents with all they needed for a self-contained suburban life. Nevertheless, despite this rapid development along the extension to Stanmore, passenger numbers were slow to pick up, not least because fares were charged at main line rates (i.e. based on distance), rather than being cross-subsidized like those on the Edgware and Piccadilly extensions.

  The Stanmore branch was not only the Metropolitan’s swan song, but the end of the haphazard process of planning – or rather lack of it – through which the private sector had created the Underground. From then on, new lines and extensions would be designed by committees in the hope that public money would be used to build them. The reluctance of the British government to recognize the importance of the Underground ensured that such funds were rarely available to finance such schemes, and consequently there were to be only minor additions to the network until well after the Second World War.

  As well as attracting little custom, the Stanmore branch had another negative result. The extra trains on the line, created to improve development opportunities for the Metropolitan rather than to meet any transport need, worsened the bottleneck on the Finchley Road to Baker Street section, a problem that was left to London Transport to sort out. Eventually, in 1939, the Metropolitan trains out to Stanmore were replaced by much more modest tube trains and the line became part of the Bakerloo, thereby avoiding the most intensely used part of the Metropolitan.

  Perhaps the relative failure of the Metropolitan’s inter-war extensions was merely a reflection of geography. After all, there is a limit to how long most people are prepared to spend travelling to work and therefore Metroland had a natural limit. Frank Pick had long believed that this maximum was about half an hour plus a walk at either end, but this was being proved wrong as commuters seemed to be willing to take on much longer journeys, possibly up to an hour. In a paper presented in 1931,13 Pick argued that the size of the city was determined by what area could be reached within that time. As average train speeds had increased gradually from fourteen to twenty-five mph, so the potential area got larger, too. But watching the growth of Metroland and other London suburbs, he began to be concerned that this ‘natural’ limit to the size of London was, in fact, much greater, so much so in fact that the city might destroy itself by becoming too large. Hence he began to develop and support the
idea of a green girdle around London, an idea which during the 1930s gathered momentum as it was supported by the London County Council and became the basis of the Green Belt planning policies for the capital after the Second World War.

  Houses were becoming more difficult to sell. The developers offered all kinds of inducements such as free tickets on the Underground to visit the growing number of houses, some of which now had ‘fitted kitchens’ (a novel concept), or even free furniture. Taking a trip out to see the houses with their newfangled radios and bedrooms entirely fitted out by Waring & Gillow became a fun thing to do on a day off. Most builders by the mid-1930s offered ‘free’ boilers, but refrigerators were still a rarity.

  The Green Belt, the over-supply of housing and the war halted the spread of Metroland, which quickly became immortalized by John Betjeman. But there was a hint of ambivalence in his attitude towards the spread of the suburbs, an awareness that the development was killing the very England of small country churches which he loved. The first stanza of his poem ‘Middlesex’ reflects that contradiction:

  Gaily into Ruislip Gardens

  Runs the red electric train,

  With a thousand Ta’s and Pardon’s

  Daintily alights Elaine;

  Hurries down the concrete station

  With a frown of concentration,

  Out into the outskirt’s edges

  Where a few surviving hedges

  Keep alive our lost Elysium – rural Middlesex again.

  In a 1973 BBC travelogue, Betjeman said of the encroaching urbanization of the 1930s: ‘And over these mild, home county acres, soon there will be estate agent, coal merchant, post office, shops, and rows of neat dwellings; all within easy reach of charming countryside. Bucks, Herts and Middlesex yielded to Metroland, and city men for breakfast on the fast train to London town.’

  The final edition of Metroland wistfully acknowledged the profound changes which more than a decade of massive housing development had brought about. Of Rayners Lane, where housing had once been sold with the slogan that life there would be ‘all peace and quiet’, the pamphlet admitted that its ‘quiet rustic beauty’ was ‘now a thing of the past’.

  Having given a whole quadrant of London its name, the Metropolitan as a separate entity was doomed since it had only survived as an independent concern because of its profits from housing. Selbie had approached Ashfield on several occasions to bring about a merger, but the terms offered were never to his satisfaction. Emboldened by its income from development, the railway tried to resist its inclusion into the new London Transport but inevitably that battle was to be lost. If only the rules had allowed the Metropolitan to benefit fully from all the development around its stations, then it might well have survived and, indeed, flourished. However, most of the property was developed by private concerns who often made enormous profits thanks, indirectly, to the provision by the public purse of the railway.

  Frank Pick cited, for example, a developer called George Cross who bought seventy acres of farmland in Edgware for just £12,250 and had made a profit of nearly five times that amount within six years. Pick noted that if only the other lines had been able to capture some of that added value in order to pay for transport schemes, the Underground map would have many more colours and longer lines than it does today. He told the Barlow Commission, which examined the problem caused by urbanization and the possible need for new areas of development, the precursor to new towns, that in order for a public utility like London Transport to survive, it ‘should receive its appropriate share of the land values it helps to create’. It is an argument which has raged ever since, but capturing that increased value through an equitable taxation system has, so far, proved an elusive Holy Grail – though the new Crossrail line between Paddington and Liverpool Street has been partly funded by a special addition too the business rate.

  THIRTEEN

  THE PERFECT

  ORGANIZATION?

  Even after twenty years of effort by Pick and Ashfield, London’s transport system was still a haphazard mess at the end of the 1920s despite their achievements in extending the reach of the Combine. There had been a series of commissions and inquiries which recommended more coordination and cooperation between the various transport bodies in London, but little had changed apart from the steady growth in importance and dominance of the Underground Group of Companies. It was only with the advent of a Labour government, with the dynamic Herbert Morrison as transport minister, that London’s transport system would be transformed by the creation of a powerful integrated organization, the London Passenger Transport Board, which, as mentioned before, immediately became known simply as London Transport.

  The establishment of London Transport in 1933 was to mark the end of the era in which the private sector built and ran the capital’s underground railways. It had been the pursuit of profit which had hitherto governed the shape and extent of the system and, as we have seen countless times, the private companies who had persuaded optimistic or gullible shareholders to part with their money for these scheme had an impossible task in trying to make a profit out of the enterprise of building lines. However, the importance of the new organization was not simply that the arrival of LT marked the beginning of much tighter state control over the capital’s transport system, particularly its financing. It was much more than that. LT was the first example of how a public body could be invested with commercial as well as social responsibilities, and carry out both aspects successfully. It is almost impossible to exaggerate the high regard in which LT was held during its all too brief heyday, attracting official visitors from around the world eager to learn the lessons of its success and apply them in their own countries. London Transport was the right solution at the right moment, coming at a time when the Depression had alerted governments around the world to the limits of the free market. It represented the apogee of a type of confident public administration run by people imbued with a strong ethos of service to the public and with a reputation that any state organization today would envy. Its birth was a result of the vision and socialist drive of Morrison, but its success during the years leading up to the Second World War was only made possible by the brilliance of its two famous leaders, Ashfield and Pick, who became LT’s first chairman and chief executive respectively.

  It was a fortuitous and fruitful partnership whose legacy would survive well beyond both men. Ostensibly Pick was the junior of the pair, as Ashfield was technically his boss, but in many respects the latter was in awe of his colleague. Pick, the rather Spartan low-church northerner, was indeed a formidable figure, a mixture of shyness and arrogance, of self-confidence and timidity.

  Shy he may have been, eating on his own in the staff restaurant, but Pick was very clear about who was boss. While he was the backroom boy, he was nevertheless confident of his own power, favouring a regime that was a benign dictatorship. He argued that it was a waste of time trying to draw up on paper the structure of the perfect organization, because its success would ultimately be the responsibility of the particular people who happened to be in charge. Pick wanted ‘a single brain’1 – presumably his – to be responsible for running the organization, rather than a disparate group of managers. He ran a series of committees which fed responsibility up to him but he saw his role as making decisions – endless strings of them, in fact. Pick described his job as ‘day after day, [having] to find answers to a continuous stream of questions about staff, finance, traffic, engineering, publicity, supplies … In no sense am I an expert. I have and can obtain advice wherever I want it. I merely have to decide, but in deciding I become responsible for my decisions. And while they are all separate decisions, it is necessary for me to try and fit them together into a consistent whole.’2 It is, probably, as good a job description for the role of chief executive in a public body as any, a blueprint for others to follow. Pick was tireless: ‘[He] oversaw and planned every detail of his public transport empire. He travelled it frequently, taking copious notes in his unexpectedly f
lamboyant green [he used green ink for all his correspondence so that the recipient knew immediately its provenance] handwriting, ensuring that no fire bucket was left unfilled, no escalator out of service for longer than absolutely necessary. He walked each bus route.’ Remarkably, Pick met both Stalin, from whom he received a medal in 1932 for his help and advice on the Moscow Metro, and Hitler, to whom he was introduced at a major railway conference in Berlin in 1936, a measure of his peerless reputation at the time.

  It was not only the brilliance of Pick’s administrative abilities and his tremendous intellectual power which ensured that the creation of London Transport was perceived as such a success. There was also Ashfield, who ultimately was more crucial to the organization because of his political skills. Ashfield was dapper, a ladies’ man, something of a playboy tycoon who was always smartly turned out and enjoyed moving in high society, in contrast to the diffident Pick. As befitted his role as a non-executive chairman, Ashfield did not have the burdens of day-to-day management and decision-making, but could sit back and work out strategy. He was a skilled negotiator, and used that trick of feigned artlessness when unwilling to answer a difficult question. But artless Ashfield was not. ‘He always seemed to be two or three moves ahead of the ordinary able person when it came to negotiation. When this faculty was associated with every appearance of bonhomie and charm, and an unfailing sense of humour, one can begin to understand why he was so successful in promoting and carrying through the long series of transactions which culminated in the unification of London’s local transport agencies.’3