The Subterranean Railway

by Christian Wolmar

  The other social factor which affected the Underground was a tremendous labour shortage caused by the huge upsurge of jobs in the peripheral areas of the capital, notably on the Great West Road and the North Circular, as well as Heathrow Airport. Demand for the largely semi-skilled employment on the Underground and buses is highly dependent on the availability of jobs elsewhere which, since they require a higher level of skills, are usually better paid and therefore attract more potential employees at times of economic boom.

  London Transport’s solution was to attract labour from overseas. Employing immigrants from the Commonwealth was encouraged by the Tory government in the 1950s – a fact which seems extraordinary in these days of obsession with the problems caused by ‘asylum seekers’ – and London Transport was to play a key role in attracting immigrants, leading the way by opening an office in Barbados. LT’s motives were hardly altruistic. With the post-war boom in full flow there was full employment, which meant that bus and Underground staff were in desperately short supply because of the low wages. This had been partly alleviated by the employment of women, who had started being taken on as bus conductors – but not drivers – at equal wages from 1951, but there was still a shortage and London Transport begun to cast widely for staff first within Britain, then Ireland and eventually the West Indies. There was a deliberate initiative by the Barbadian government to encourage its citizens to work for London Transport and it set up a Barbados Migrants Liaison service in 1955. The following year, LT’s personnel director, Charles Gomm, went to Barbados and recruited seventy station men and seventy bus conductors, twenty of whom were women. It was the start of a huge influx. Between 1956 and 1965, LT recruited 4,000 Barbadians. Direct recruitment from Jamaica and Trinidad did not start until 1966 and numbers were much smaller.

  Many West Indians only intended to stay a short time but remained for the rest of their working lives, often returning on retirement. The Barbadians were given an interest-free loan from their government to pay the fare to London.6 Many of the new arrivals, though, found life difficult. They tended to come from the more affluent groups in their society and were often well educated people seeking higher wages in the ‘mother country’. They were not, though, treated in keeping with this status and were given menial jobs for which they were overqualified. Some were housed in LT hostels but others had to cram into overcrowded accommodation where they had to share rooms, something they were not used to back home. But their experience was by no means all bad. Many reported not finding Britain racist, and although rising up the career ladder was harder for black people than their white equivalents, many did eventually get promoted. By recruiting so many West Indians, LT made a considerable contribution to the creation of a multi-cultural society; and while LT was by no means a perfect employer in terms of race relations, it was a lot better than many others. One recruit, Lloyd Ellis, who later became a high court judge back in Jamaica, said that while it was made harder for black people to climb the ladder, ‘on the other hand, I must give credit to London Transport because it was one of the first corporate bodies in England to reduce the barrier. People eventually became supervisors and all sorts of thing in London Transport.’7

  In the twenty years between the takeover by the BTC and the opening of the first section of the Victoria line, the Underground had lost its cachet as a pioneering organization. It was still setting high standards in technical and engineering development, but was clearly in decline. Even Ashfield and Pick would have struggled to have maintained standards in the face of its new structure. Indeed, they would have tendered their resignations long before rather than work in such a constrained context.

  In terms of investment, the 1950s were the leanest years in the history of the Underground, causing long-term damage from which, arguably, the system has never been able to recover. The levels of spending on re-equipping the system were quite remarkably low. The modest pocket-sized London Transport annual reviews of that period show the extent to which the system was being run down. Most tellingly, none of the reports of this period contains any sign of planned maintenance programmes or assessments of future needs. The 1953 report, for example, records that ‘capital expenditure on the railways, on station reconstruction and other works including signalling, modernization amounted to £0.3m during the year’, a staggeringly low sum. The following year mentions £276,000 spent ‘on the provision of passing loops at Wembley Park, to improve the running of the Metropolitan and Bakerloo services and to improvements in signalling’ and ‘other capital expenditure on stations, tracks and other non-depreciated assets’ amounted to just £126,000. These were minor works; clearly major overhauls or replacements of big assets such as lifts or escalators were simply not on the agenda.8

  Part of the reason why the Underground had less money available for investment was because it could no longer rely on cross-subsidizing from the profitable bus services. LT’s bus services had been something of a cash cow for the Underground ever since the First World War when Ashfield created the Common Fund, pooling the resources of the Combine. Now buses were becoming less profitable because of the growing number of cars, a damaging bus strike in 1958 and the resulting congestion. The business sense of the management at the time also seems questionable. In 1957, the little-used extension from Epping to Ongar, operated as a shuttle by steam trains, was electrified at a cost of £100,000, a large proportion of the investment funds available that year. Not only did few people live in these wilder parts of Essex, but even after electrification the service was still run as a shuttle, necessitating a change at Epping, and a journey into central London would normally take over an hour. Not surprisingly, there were few regular users.9

  The 1960s were something of an improvement but still little was spent on the existing network. There were more funds but few went on refurbishing the system of tunnels and track, parts of which were now entering their second century. Instead, the purchase of much-needed new rolling stock took up most of the available cash. The rest went into preparations for the first new tube line under central London since the opening of the Yerkes tubes – the Victoria line – which was originally known as Route C. The historians of London’s transport sum up the decision-making process over the new line with well-merited sarcasm:

  The story of the development of the Victoria from its appearance as Route C in the London Plan Working Party’s report of 1948 to the opening of the main stem from Walthamstow to Victoria in March 1969, shows characteristic features of public handling of investment projects in mid-twentieth century Britain: general acceptance of the intention as desirable; delay for argument on constantly changing bases; final approval under temporary pressures which were largely irrelevant to the arguments.10

  They could have added: constant rows over financing and cost overruns during construction.

  But here again, London Underground was breaking new ground in that this was the first time that cost–benefit analysis methods were used. This is a methodology which attempts to assess the wider costs and benefits of a project, rather than merely examining the costs and making a crude judgement about whether these are likely to be paid back by the profits from the scheme in the long term. It is, in short, a way of trying to calculate the overall benefit to society of a project by including factors such as time saved by passengers (and even road users) and the savings from reduced bus services in the overall equation. The notion, then, is that the government should put money into schemes for these social benefits, because they are not paid for through the fare box. If such a method had been available to the Underground pioneers, it would have ensured that London had a much bigger system – except, of course, Victorian governments were not ready to step in to pay for these non-monetary benefits. Even now governments are reluctant to pursue the logic of this methodology and fund such projects, as witnessed by the number of highly beneficial schemes which were decades in gestation, such as Crossrail, the tunnel connection between Liverpool Street and Paddington which was started in 2011. It wa
s only through using the cost–benefit analysis method, now standard on all major transport infrastructure schemes, that the project was given the go-ahead in 1962.

  Bizarrely, the fear of growing unemployment was the other spur that persuaded the government to give the final go-ahead to the building of the Victoria line, even though by the time work started in earnest a severe labour shortage was developing. The main purpose of the line was to relieve congestion on the underground system in central London, which had been recognized as far back as the 1930s. The line which was extended to Brixton in 1971 took twenty-three years to build, from its acceptance as a worthwhile project to the opening of the full line at a cost of £90m, rather than the £38m first estimated for a railway that would have gone four miles further south to Croydon.

  The Victoria line was pioneering in one key respect: the trains are driven automatically under supervision from a control centre. The person at the front is really a guard with the ability to make emergency stops and take over driving if there is an equipment failure. This major technological advance was made possible by one of the little-known heroes of the development of London Underground, Robert Dell.11 He had first joined the Metropolitan District in 1916 at the age of sixteen and his career was a glittering, albeit unsung one. He was a signal engineer who invented a host of devices to make installation easier and to automate more and more parts of the process. Gradually, thanks to Dell’s work, signal boxes were dispensed with, to be replaced by control centres, one or two per line. But the height of his achievement was, as chief signal engineer, to introduce automatically operated trains onto the Victoria line, run remotely from a control centre. Not only did this do away with half the staff of the train but it made operation far more reliable.12 Dell’s achievement has not been built upon as quickly as it could have been. Despite the introduction of Automatic Train Operation on the Victoria in the 1960s, no other lines were converted until the late 1990s when the system was adopted for the new trains on the Central Line. The Jubilee Line Extension was intended to be fitted with ATO by the time it opened at the end of 1999 but due to technical difficulties its implementation was delayed by a decade. The Docklands Light Railway is also run by ATO and there are plans to convert the Northern and the sub-surface lines to what have been misleadingly referred to as ‘driverless trains’ but nevertheless there will be drivers on the system for many decades to come.

  Under the new regime of direct control by the Ministry, which started when the BTC was abolished in 1963, there was still little money available for refurbishment. That year, for example, a paltry £1.1m was made available for improving stations, track, signalling and depots as most of the £17.6m in the budget went on preparations for the Victoria line and new rolling stock. The level of capital spending available for refurbishing the existing system improved little during the construction of the Victoria line and no attention was being paid to the gradually declining system. The answer to the mystery of why the Underground collapsed into such a dilapidated state by the 1980s gradually becomes apparent.

  In 1970 there was another change of structure for London Transport, which for the first time became part of the local authority: the Greater London Council, the expanded version of the LCC. It was the realization of Morrison’s original dream of having the transport system under the direct control of local politicians. Given that nothing much had been spent since the New Works Programme of the late 1930s, by then the Underground had suffered from a full three decades of neglect. Over that time, LT had become burdened by a massive debt – £270m – much of it the legacy of the 1930s investment programme. Therefore, in 1970 the Tory leader of the GLC, Desmond Plummer, successfully insisted that the debt should be written off before he would take on the burden of running the system.

  Local control brought some immediate benefits. With the annual burden of having to service the debt lifted from the GLC, and grants available from central government under the new legislation to pay for capital expenditure, LT faced a rosier future than it had under its two previous regimes. Indeed, the recognition by the GLC that there was an enormous backlog of investment led to the drawing-up of a plan to spend £275m over the following twenty years – representing more than a tenfold increase in annual spending on essential renewal – to bring the system back to a reasonable physical state. It was basic stuff with most of the money going on trains – as ever – escalators and lifts rather than the total refurbishment which many stations, now well into middle age, needed. The public did get a few improvements, as the 1972 annual report said: ‘The importance of station lighting as a means of updating the appearance of stations is fully recognized and authority has been given for a major increase in expenditure on lighting improvements in 1972 and in subsequent years.’13 The plan was largely although not very coherently implemented, and investment expenditure increased steadily but patchily over the fourteen years of GLC control. Again much was absorbed in expansion: the Heathrow extension, and the creation of the Jubilee line hewn out of one branch of the Bakerloo.

  The GLC was often ruled by the opposite party to the one in control at Westminster, and, moreover, swung between Tory and Labour at virtually every election.14 With the rapid succession of changes in political control at both national and local level, the decade and a half of GLC control over London Transport was a volatile one characterized by rapid shifts in policy. The merger of London Transport into the Greater London Council had, however, made the capital’s local government too strong for the liking of central government. There was always a difficult relationship between the government and County Hall, just across the Thames from Parliament, and this came to the fore over a radical attempt to reverse the long-term decline of Underground usage. The annual number of passengers had fallen below half a billion a year for the first time since the aftermath of the war, a result of the outflow of jobs from central London (a government body seeking to encourage office relocation outside London advertised prominently on the Underground in the sixties and seventies, not a clever tactic by the advertising department of London Transport had it thought through the consequences!), greater use of the car, the rundown of the system, the economic recession and a policy of increasing fares above the rate of inflation. The Underground was at its lowest ebb, being no longer perceived as the backbone of the capital. The motor car was king.

  That was the mitigating factor for this lack of investment. The contemporary view of most transport and planning ‘experts’ was that the use of public transport would continue to decline in the face of competition from the car. It was only with the rejection of the proposed motorway rings by Londoners who elected Labour (which had stood on an explicit platform of abandoning plans for the new roads) at the 1973 GLC elections that policy-makers began to recognize that cars had to be restrained and not encouraged in city centres.

  Nevertheless, it is on the whole inexcusable that the system was neglected for so long. Once the decline in passenger numbers was reversed in the mid 1980s, and the limitations of road transport became clear, it should have been obvious to London’s planners and to its politicians, both local and national, that a thriving city was dependent on its lifeblood, the Underground. It should not have been difficult to predict that the usage of the system would increase as London attracted more and more jobs and office blocks sprouted up like mushrooms on a rotting log.

  The new Labour administration at the GLC intended to reverse the decline. In May 1981, Labour won the GLC election and the Labour councillors quickly ousted the right-wing leader, Andrew McIntosh, and replaced him with the charismatic left-winger, Ken Livingstone. After flirting with the notion of abolishing fares entirely, the councillors imposed a cut of a third and gave their policy the catchy slogan of ‘Fares Fair’. The long-mooted zonal system of fares was introduced, a move that was to prove more significant in the long term because it allowed for Travelcards, now the routine way for Londoners to travel around the capital. The concept had first been proposed by Yerkes but rejected by successive L
T managements on the basis that it would lose revenue, but in fact it was to help generate substantial increases in usage.

  The ‘Fares Fair’ policy led to an incredible three-way tussle between the government, the GLC and London Transport (which was often at odds with its political masters – even, at one point, being on the opposite side of a court case with the GLC), with regular interventions from the judiciary, which saw fares yo-yo and ended, through an astonishing act of vindictiveness by the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, in the abolition of the GLC. Fares Fair may have been controversial, but it revitalized the Underground, turning it into a popular political cause as well as increasing passenger numbers. The fall in fares, which covered both buses and the Underground, had an immediate impact, boosting the number of passengers using London Transport each day from 5.5 million to 6 million and reducing the number of cars coming into central London. It was too good to last.

  Bromley, a Conservative-controlled outer south London borough with no Underground station, challenged the GLC’s right to impose such a dramatic cut in fares because the move had increased the level of subsidy raised from London ratepayers by £125m per year. Why, Bromley asked, should our residents be forced to subsidize a system which they do not use? This omitted two key arguments: that many Bromley residents did travel into central London and use the facilities, and that even those who did not were likely to benefit from the reduction in traffic congestion. Judges, not noted their regular use of public transport, ruled against the GLC both at the Appeal Court and in the House of Lords.