The Railways

  The Capel case aroused considerable press interest, partly because of the accused’s clerical status, partly because his surname raised aristocratic echoes. There was confusion about this: ‘Capel’ was misspelled as ‘Keppel’ in some early reports, whereupon letters appeared in The Times from the (Capell) Earl of Essex at Cassiobury Park, to say that the accused was no connection of his, and from the (Keppel) Earl of Albemarle at Quiddenham Hall, to say that the suspect had nothing to do with him either. In the end Capel was found not guilty after witnesses on both sides failed to agree on the sequence of events, the words spoken, or the exact positions and postures of the parties.

  That relations between the sexes were more diverse and unpredictable than the simple polarity of assault-versus-blackmail might imply is suggested by the Tremlett case of 1875. James Tremlett, a young Royal Marines officer, left London for Chatham, travelling alone. At Woolwich Dockyard station his first-class compartment was entered by a Miss Seraphina Higinbotham, described in the deadpanning newspaper report as ‘a lady somewhat over the middle age, and at present walking the London hospitals, with a view to practising as a surgeon and doctor of medicine’. Tremlett sat silently reading. Miss Higinbotham then made her move. Taking off her spectacles, she moved to sit opposite him, looking him full in the face, with the words ‘You are a very nice young man!’ Snatching his magazine away, she knelt before him and proclaimed that she had surely seen him before. When Tremlett tried to move seats she shuffled after him, holding on to his coat-tails and demanding that he kiss her ‘for his mother’s sake’. He reluctantly allowed her to kiss him, just the once, but confessed to being alarmed by her advances (the train was passing through a tunnel at the time). Then Miss Higinbotham’s tune changed: grabbing at his whiskers, she declared herself a ‘lone unprotected female’, and warned that he should take care – rather as if she were preparing to lay an accusation against him. Only when she seized his collar did he begin to struggle and cry for help, which duly came from a porter at the train’s next stop.

  Brought before the magistrates, Miss Higinbotham did not deny the incident; she merely wished (she said) to show her admiration of a handsome young man. She escaped with a warning, but the chairman of the bench made it clear that he took the matter seriously: there were ‘many young and inexperienced men travelling by rail, totally unprotected’, and army officers in particular might be the subject of blandishments and worse. He therefore requested that the railway companies would designate men-only carriages – a plea that was often echoed whenever the subject of entrapment and blackmail on the rails came round. In view of the near-complete reversal of the usual relations of power between the sexes in Tremlett’s compartment, it is also piquant to record what he was reading when Miss Higinbotham snatched his magazine away: an article on the railway misdemeanours of the uncontrollably masculine Colonel Baker.

  Somewhere behind all these cases is an obvious truth: that close confinement with another is a matchless incubator of desire. Anyone could guess the drift of one of the music-hall hits of 1863, ‘The Charming Young Widow I Met on the Train’.*** There was critical disapproval in 1854 when the painter Abraham Solomon showed his canvas First Class: The Meeting … and at First Meeting Loved: a smart young man (travelling with a suggestive rod and line) is getting on rather well with the expensively dressed young lady, while her middle-aged male companion – guardian, uncle or papa – dozes obliviously in the corner seat. Stung, the painter came up with a new version the following year. Now, the young lady is in the corner. From this safer distance she looks on demurely as the young man, reassuringly transformed from free-range angler to army officer, talks earnestly with her sprightly and fully awake guardian. (The painting’s title was unchanged, raising the distracting idea that it is the old man with whom the soldier is falling in love, or vice versa.)

  Solomon’s lapse was a matter of taste as much as of morals, but the two were not easily disentangled in an age when art was expected to have moral force. Artists, dual citizens of polite society and of bohemia, were themselves potentially suspect, especially when it came to their dealings with female models. A railway episode in the diary of Ford Madox Brown illustrates the point. The context is a journey to Tilbury for the Gravesend ferry, also in 1854:

  Found in the carriage an old acquaintance a certain Miss or Mrs Ashley, who used to sit to me, did not know her at first nor wish to appear to know her … I was sorry afterwards I was not more civil to her. An awful looking snob in the same carriage went off with her arm in arm & took a boat to some ship – coming back with Lucy [the artist’s daughter] in the steamboat to Tilbury my snob sidles up to me, with a considerable smirk on his face he wishes to know who the Lady is, having found her ‘very agreeable sort of person’. O ho said I, was you not with her then, no he merely met her in the carriage & saw her speak to me.

  In other words, Miss Ashley had drawn attention to her own boldness by addressing Brown, thus encouraging a later approach from the ‘snob’ (a term then implying social pretension rather than snootiness). For the artist’s model, a member of the demi-monde almost by definition, with – so Brown tells us – two children born out of wedlock, the opportunity to meet a new gentleman and potential protector may not have been unwelcome; but no respectable woman from the higher classes would have taken a train with such a purpose frankly in mind.

  What could not be acknowledged in public, in polite print, or in mixed society circulated in the nether world of pornography. The summit of Victorian literary smut is My Secret Life by ‘Walter’, published in eleven volumes in 1888–94. Opinion remains divided on the authorship of the million-plus words of this obsessive narrative of frigging, whoring and seduction, as well as on the question of how much of it, if any, may be truly autobiographical. The book includes several pick-ups or consummations in railway carriages, from the old flame encountered on a Great Western express (a first-class journey for the narrator in more than one sense) to the comely costermonger’s girl who gets into a Metropolitan first-class compartment by mistake. Comfortably seated, secure in his wealth and social class, ‘Walter’ can assess his quarry at close quarters, undressing female passengers by eye and weighing up the chances of their availability, before finding some pretext to open conversation. The impulse that censorious critics detected behind Abraham Solomon’s painting is here made shamelessly explicit.

  Another of his tales uses the opening circumstances of the Baker case – by then well over a decade past, but clearly well remembered – and reworks them as a fantasy of mutual gratification. On the platform at Aldershot station he assists a young lady – ‘tall, dark-eyed, handsome, and elegantly dressed’ – by supplying a stamp for the urgent letter she must post. To follow her into a first-class compartment, with a wink to the guard, is the obvious next step. From the lady’s implausibly indiscreet conversation it is soon clear that she is the kept woman of a major, a man temporarily off the scene. Flirtation and chat about theatres turn steadily more physical: ‘I got as close to her as the arm between the seats (a fixture) allowed. – My leg met hers, and she didn’t move it away. Carelessly I laid my hand on her knee, and, pinching up a bit of the silk dress, admired it.’ After which the four-letter words start to kick in; and so on, over many a filthy page, all the way to Waterloo.

  The desires ‘Walter’ gloatingly indulged were treated more decorously in the new medium of cinema. A short film made in 1899, The Kiss in the Tunnel, showed the pioneer cinematographer George Albert Smith (1864–1959) and his wife Laura, against a rather terrible painted representation of a railway compartment. We first see them seated, he with his newspaper, she with her book. He looks up, chucks her under the chin a few times, then removes his cigar and hat in order to lean over and kiss her on the cheek. Then he sits down, only to rise again almost at once and kiss her on both cheeks. He knocks his hat back into shape, having sat on it by accident, and both parties resume their reading. The action is topped and tailed by sequences by another film-maker taken
from the front of a moving train, first slowly entering a tunnel, then emerging at the other end – an example of the ‘phantom ride’ genre, popular in the earliest years of moving pictures. The running time is one minute and five seconds.

  Not much of a story, then; but at the time, this sequence was sophisticated stuff – to the extent that The Kiss in the Tunnel is counted among the earliest narrative edits in the history of moving pictures. It seems a good match: the revolutionary transport technology of the nineteenth century, captured in the first instalment of the supreme story-telling medium of the century about to commence. The film deserves to be better known, especially now that the Institut Lumière’s researches have conclusively spiked the old claim that footage of a moving train featured at the first ever public film show, in Paris on 28 December 1895. That celebrated fifty seconds of footage, made by the brothers Lumière on the platform of La Ciotat station near Marseille, was actually not screened in public until January of the following year (it turns out that the story of panic spreading through its audience as the locomotive loomed ever closer is probably a myth too). Smith’s enterprise also anticipated by sixty years the flagrant innuendo in the last frames of Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, which cut from Cary Grant’s embrace of Eva Marie Saint in a sleeping-car berth to the final, masterful entry of train into tunnel.

  The decisive moment from The Kiss in the Tunnel, 1899

  As far as Britain’s railways are concerned, the sleeping car in its maturity belongs to a later time than the high Victorian decades. The same applies to other innovations that permitted movement and communication within and between the vehicles of passenger trains. All these belong in the next chapters. Before that, here is one last encounter in a railway compartment, representing another sort of hidden history. It comes from the life of Edward Carpenter (1844–1929), free-thinker, socialist and advocate for toleration and understanding of what he called ‘the intermediate sex’. A practitioner of the simple life, Carpenter set himself up on a smallholding in the Peak District, near Dore and Totley station. On the train one day in spring 1891, his attention was caught by a smartly dressed working man called George Merrill, twenty-two years his junior. Both men were with groups of friends, but the two managed to exchange ‘a few words and a look of recognition’. It was enough: Merrill slipped away from his friends when the train stopped, then followed Carpenter’s party until a chance came to speak further. Thus Carpenter met the great love of his life, and his companion for the next thirty years. Let their meeting on the Midland Railway stand as a counterweight to Oscar Wilde’s exposure at Clapham Junction a few years later, as a reminder of the opportunities and freedoms the railways made possible.

  Footnotes

  * Properly Redhill and Reigate station.

  ** On the railways of India, where ladies’ compartments remain, the limit is a more generous twelve years.

  *** Apparently a British version of an American song, adapted with a macabre twist: she leaves her admirer in charge of her child, who turns out to be dead.

  – 7 –

  THE IMPROVED BRITISH RAILWAY TRAIN

  The first chapter attempted to recover the experience of a railway traveller in 1862, so unlike that of today. Leap forward fifty years and the gulf is much less wide. Imagine a passenger arriving at Euston station in 1912 and taking a third-class seat on the afternoon express for Glasgow. The seats are now decently upholstered, the compartment adequately lit and heated according to the season – as already described. Nor is the compartment any longer an isolated cell: a corridor runs along one side, at each end of which is a narrow gangway, corrugated like a giant bellows or concertina, that links the carriage to its neighbour. Within the vestibules next to these gangways are narrow doors, behind which are cubicles each with lavatory and washbasin. The train now requires fewer individual carriages, for they have grown much longer – often with six compartments each. Two or three fixed axles no longer suffice to carry them; instead, their wheels are placed at each end, mounted on pivoting bogies for a smoother ride. Standards of finish and craftsmanship have not slipped: if anything, the materials, liveries and trimmings are still costlier and more substantial. The best Edwardian railway carriages express the spirit of their age just as much as its ocean liners, motor cars and smart hotels.

  There is more. Following the corridor from carriage to carriage leads in one direction to a well-appointed saloon in which tables laid with cloths and place-settings await the diner. In the other direction, at the far end of the train, is the much less decorative compartment for the guard, in which is the train’s heavy luggage, labelled for correct extraction at the appointed places. Other platforms or sidings outside the station offer glimpses of long-bodied sleeping carriages, amid any number of carriages of the older, corridor-less type that are increasingly restricted to suburban and short-distance services. Thanks to the through corridor, tickets can now be checked en route and the extra stop for their collection just short of the journey’s end has been eliminated. The provision of lavatories and dining cars has also put an end to the protracted stops to allow passengers to take refreshments and find physical relief. Everything has speeded up.

  Other innovations are not so obvious. Once the train is on its way, the guard no longer has to await a signal from the driver to apply the brakes. Instead, a continuous brake pipe runs through the train, controlled from the locomotive footplate. Should a coupling fail and the train split in two, rupturing the pipe, the brakes will automatically engage in both the stranded and the hauled portions. If the passenger notices some imminent danger, is suddenly taken ill or is menaced by a fellow traveller, the compartment is equipped with a chain to pull, which will ensure an emergency stop.

  In truth, the risk of accident would not have pressed heavily on the mind of the average British railway traveller of 1912. By that time, entire years had passed without a single passenger fatality anywhere on the network. The railways of 1912 were safer, better run and altogether more comfortable and reassuring than ever before. But it was not always the companies themselves that forced the pace: many key improvements were pioneered abroad and adopted in Britain only reluctantly, even under duress. The country that had given railways to the world often proved surprisingly unproductive as a breeding-ground for further innovation.

  This story can be taken back to Mr Briggs, battered and thrown fatally from his carriage in 1864. Could passengers not be provided with some means of raising the alarm from within their compartments? The question was suddenly urgent. It reopened a wider debate concerning the value and practicality of communication through the whole train.

  Twice in the 1850s the railways had been instructed to look into the matter. In 1852 the Board of Trade explored the potential of continuous footboards, rather than the shorter steps then commonly provided along the carriage sides, so that the guard could make his way to every part of the train while it was in motion. This was the current practice in Belgium, but British companies were already dispensing with such external excursions. Some pointed out the risk to their men of colliding with bridges and tunnels. Other objections were that easier access would expose single women to the threat of intruders; also, more prosaically, that bold second-class passengers might use the footboards to sneak into first class once the train was in motion. (Despite all of which, the continuous footboard did later become widespread, helping to give access for cleaning and maintenance, as well as serving passengers with a step up to the door.)

  Next, a sub-committee of railway general managers investigated systems of passing signals along the train, including methods already in force abroad. The most common of these involved running a cord all the way from the guard’s van to the locomotive, where it was linked to a bell, or sometimes to the engine’s whistle. The cord might also operate a bell at the guard’s end, so that signals could be sent both ways. To permit passengers to sound the alarm by tugging on the cord through the carriage window might seem an obvious step. But there was a serious obj
ection: with effective signalling still at an embryonic stage, any emergency stop sharply increased the risk of a rear-end collision with a following train. The sub-committee therefore allowed its use by passengers only on condition that its misuse by ‘the timid or the reckless’ was made a penal offence.

  Everything rather fizzled out after that. In 1858 a Parliamentary Select Committee on Railway Accidents urged once more that communication between guard and driver be given the highest priority; but the companies were getting better at deflecting interference from Westminster, and nothing much was done until 1863. In that year, another general managers’ sub-committee recommended that the link be made by running the cord under the doors on the right-hand side – that is, the side commonly kept locked – where passengers’ chances of grabbing at it were slim indeed.

  The Briggs affair brought other responses. On the London & South Western, glazed circular openings were cut through the bulkheads between compartments, providing a limited view right through the carriage. This was not a new idea, for similar sight-holes were provided in some French carriages after a comparably shocking murder there in 1860. Although they must have deterred a certain amount of misbehaviour, these ‘Muller’s lights’, as they were grimly nicknamed in England, did not find general favour. Nor did they make it any easier for passengers to pass an alarm to driver or guard. That was what the public urgently wanted, and the Board of Trade spoke for many in July 1864 when it instructed the companies to come up with something.