The Railways

by Simon Bradley

  Other cities exported their ordure too. Stable manure from Leeds and Hull was gratefully received by the potato farmers of the Derwent Valley near York, carried via an independent light railway that opened in 1913. The railway’s enterprising management then entered into a contract for the output of three entire cavalry regiments based at Catterick Camp, top-quality stuff which it sold on to the farmers at a profit. This happy relationship continued until the regiments abandoned horses in favour of armoured cars.

  Even the rotted-down leftovers from making shoddy – cheap recycled cloth – found a profitable path across the network, from the mills of Batley in the west of Yorkshire to the hop fields of Surrey and Kent. The hops thus fertilised were in turn distributed to brewers throughout the country, including those of Burton-on-Trent, where the sulphate-rich water allowed the production of clear and strongly flavoured ales with a reputation that extended far beyond the town’s hinterland. Burton ale is recorded as on sale in London as early as 1738, but the arrival of the railway a century later transformed the scale of operations. So lucrative was the traffic that the Midland Railway set aside the entire basement of its huge new London terminus at St Pancras, opened in 1868, for barrels from Burton’s breweries. This in turn was merely overspill from the 3.6-million-gallon capacity beer warehouse the Midland had already erected nearby. By 1888 Burton’s production of beer was already more than twice that of the capital, home of Watneys, Youngs, Whitbread, Charrington and all the rest; by 1900 Burton was producing fifty times as much beer as it had been in 1840. Much of its area by that date was given over to breweries large and small, linked by a bewildering tangle of railway lines that ran ungated across the streets.

  Baedeker’s guide for 1887 notes that brewery tours at Burton could be had for a shilling, but leisure travel at this drab and reeking town was mostly concerned with getting away. The largest brewery was that of Messrs Bass, builders also of the monster maltings at Sleaford. The Bass works outing to Great Yarmouth in 1893 took fifteen trains to carry the 10,000 workers and their families, together with foremen, clerks, customers, estate workers and so on. A repeat of the trip twenty years later required the first train to depart in darkness at 3.45 a.m., the others following at ten-minute intervals over the next two and a quarter hours.

  Thus agriculture and industry, town and country, fell into mutually advantageous roles, with the railway as go-between. Artificial, processed and imported fertilisers – guano, bone meal, nitrates, phosphates – joined or superseded the natural kinds that could be collected at the station yard, allowing marginal land to be brought into cultivation. In certain districts, the railways’ ability to deliver produce to distant markets increased the agricultural population, against the general trend. The naturally fertile peat and silt soils of the Isle of Ely, increasingly given over to bulk cultivation of fruit and potatoes, are a case in point. Ruskin might bewail the loss of the age-old face-to-face relationship between buyer and seller in the market square, but that was no use to a farmer trying to shift half a ton of strawberries before they turned to mush – nor to the city dweller with a yearning for seasonal varieties from beyond the daily range of a horse and cart. The rising levels of market-garden traffic of this kind encouraged the Great Eastern to build a tramway-type line in the 1880s along the flat canalside route between Wisbech and Upwell, which was operated by odd-looking steam engines encased in boxy wooden housings. This farm-gate branch was well known to a local clergyman, the Rev. W. Awdry, who represented one of its locomotives in Toby the Tram Engine (1952), the seventh book in his Thomas the Tank Engine series – with the curious result that Chinese factories now turn out model versions of the long-lost engines of this railway backwater to keep the world’s toyshops stocked.

  Many crops and foodstuffs increasingly became identified with specific parts of the kingdom. Plums and apples in Georgian Britain were locally sourced, but the Edwardians would have expected much of the fruit in the marketplace to have grown in Kent or the Vale of Evesham. Broccoli came from Cornwall, narcissi from the Scilly Isles, rhubarb from Yorkshire. These were true commercial crops: the best in terms of financial return that the soil, climate and logistics of transport allowed the farmer to produce. Even the omnipresent wild rabbit became a dish with a regional bias, thanks to the traffic extracted by the Great Western from Devon and Cornwall. The main artery of supply was the line through the heart of north Devon, between Taunton and Barnstaple. On this bucolic route the nightly ‘rabbit special’ might convey 400 hampers or twenty tons, comprising up to 15,000 individuals.

  Flows of imports established themselves too, and not just of frozen meat: the British taste for Danish bacon and butter began in the railway era, and before 1914 there was a now-forgotten trade in German and Russian eggs via London and the east coast ports. The Empire contributed bananas, especially after Fyffes’ rail-served ripening warehouses were established in 1901–2. The banana thereby became the first fruit to join the apple as part of the normal diet of the urban poor. Special trains of heatable vans met each banana boat at the docks, a traffic that lasted into the early 1960s. By that time there were 3,500 such vans, of which some 500 might be required to carry away each fresh boatload from the banana ports of Avonmouth, Barry or Southampton.

  Other docks contributed fish, which could now be supplied fresh to inland markets, rather than dried, salted or pickled. Again, railway economies of scale encouraged specialisation: fishing villages might carry on as before, but the heavy traffic came through a few busy ports. Grimsby, a historic town of modest size on the Lincolnshire coast, received shock therapy at the hands of the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway; its investments there included a six-acre fish dock opened in 1856, complete with a railway-owned fleet of steam trawlers. By 1900 Grimsby was handling a quarter of the rail-borne fish in England and Wales. A good deal of the rest was carried away by the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway from Fleetwood on the Lancashire coast, giving fresh purpose to a port that was originally established as a passenger interchange between rail and sea. The sale of fried fish and chips is thought to have originated in the industrial Pennines of Lancashire around 1863. As part of the working-class culture in such inland areas, the dish was dependent on the railways, which reduced the price of fresh cod by two-thirds as soon as they began carrying it in the 1840s.

  For those who could afford it, the national diet became more varied, but also more processed and more standardised. Modern laments at the loss of the regional traditions of British cuisine tend to overlook the extent to which these had already broken down as urbanisation and industry took hold. Custard powder, shredded suet, jellies, margarine, beef extract, bottled sauces, biscuits, jam, chocolate – all these processed foodstuffs served to diversify a diet that, for the poorest, had shrunk by early-Victorian times to little more than potatoes, bread, sugar and tea, with oats as a staple in Scotland and Ireland. Biscuits were one commodity that came from nowhere to become an everyday indulgence, piggybacking on the national habit of tea-drinking. The greatest producers were Huntley & Palmer, whose enormous factory burgeoned alongside the Great Western’s main line on the London side of Reading, just downwind of Oscar Wilde’s prison. Adopting factory methods in the 1840s, the firm became the world’s largest biscuit maker within thirty years. The railway delivered ingredients and fuel, and carried away its products in their standard 7lb or 10lb tins. For mustard, the market leaders were Colmans of Norwich, who opened a new works at Carrow in the city in 1856, in order to be better connected to the railway. Its bulls-head emblem, still in use, dates from around the same time. Before the biblical dead lion humming with bees was adopted, early tins of Lyle’s golden syrup, first marketed in 1885, illustrated its Thameside refinery instead, with the railway connection clearly indicated.

  To describe these businesses is not to demonstrate that they would have been unviable in the absence of railways. However, without active use of a railway connection to despatch goods as well as to receive them, it would have been
extremely hard for any one company to establish its brands in the national consumer market. Brewing illustrates the point. At the top of the tree was the Bass mega-brewery, with its red-triangle trademark. Much further down were some 150 local brewers who had managed to connect to the railway for their coal, malt and other supplies, but which generated no outward traffic in return. What they produced went out as it had always done – by horse and cart.

  Footnotes

  * This knowledge should be salted away for use when racing for a train at a double-platformed station: the correct side can be identified by thinking of the intended direction of travel, using the course of the sun for reference if needed.

  ** More prosaically, Nesbit was fingered for plagiarism in 2011 when parallels were noted with a forgotten novel, Ada J. Graves’s The House by the Railway (1896): some middle-class children who have moved to the country save a train from hitting a fallen tree by using red clothing as a danger signal, and are presented with engraved watches as rewards. ‘The Red Flag’ (the song) was written earlier still, in 1889.

  – 12 –

  RAILWAYS AND THE LAND II

  Horses have featured a good deal so far in these pages. This might have surprised some early railway promoters, who argued that the tireless power of steam would cause the demand for equine muscle to dwindle. In 1834 it was even claimed that a million horses would shortly be heading for the knacker’s yard. What happened instead was that the making of railways and the keeping of horses flourished interdependently.

  This story was outlined by the historian F. M. L. Thompson in 1976 in a celebrated article called ‘Nineteenth-century horse sense’. Thompson stressed the ways in which railways promoted all-round mobility, of people and goods alike, and the degree to which this movement still depended on iron-shod hooves. The commercial use of horses actually increased more than fourfold over the period, much faster than the human population. One instance was the explosion in demand for London cabs: around 1,265 just before the first railway opened in the capital, some 11,000 by 1888. Each cab in turn required two horses to stay fully operational. A great deal of their traffic must have come from taking railway fares, including trips to and from the stations of the expanding suburbs.

  Then there were the equine establishments of the railways themselves. Heavy draught horses were employed for shunting and marshalling wagons, in places where locomotives would have been too costly, noisy, dirty or dangerous to use. At Newmarket, where steam-powered shunting was prone to cause unacceptable restiveness to the precious thorough-breds coming to the racecourse, the animals were pulled up and down the sidings in horseboxes by their shire-horse cousins. (This practice lingered until 1967, by which time Newmarket’s horses were the last of their kind: mascots of obsolescence, who featured as curiosities in cinema newsreels.) An even larger complement was needed for the collection and delivery of goods. Railway-owned carts carrying general consignments were ubiquitous in cities. Horses pulled the coal merchant’s cart that delivered the fuel that was burnt in most inhabited buildings in Britain. Nor did private horse carriers disappear. Thomas Hardy’s ‘Tranter [carter] Reuben’ in Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) was no rural fossil: he had the chance of a good working life ahead of him, provided that he could adapt his rounds to the railway timetable. Altogether, it was a fair bet that any rail-borne inland cargo had also been hauled behind a horse at some stage in its passage between producer and consumer, at least until motor vehicles came along.

  By 1893 the number of railway-owned horses in Great Britain was calculated at 27,826. Stabling on a prodigious scale was required to accommodate all this horseflesh, like the Mint Stables developed by the Great Western near Paddington station between 1876 and 1911. In its final form this accommodated 665 horses on four storeys, the animals making their way up and down by ramps as in a multistorey car park. Suitably adapted, the building is now part of the adjacent St Mary’s Hospital. When the Great Western centralised its resources of fodder in a single depot the outcome was a huge brick edifice, tall as a Lancashire cotton mill, that towered over the sidings at Didcot until the 1970s.

  Meanwhile the practice of keeping a horse for personal use became more widespread than ever. The numbers maintained by gentlefolk more than doubled between 1851 and 1901. The overlapping demands of locomotion (a word older than the railways, which effectively pinched it), of exercise and of prestige – all these kept domestic stables occupied in town and country. Riding was considered healthy, and for young men also a distraction from the temptations of vice. The greatest social cachet belonged to racing and fox hunting, both of which did magnificently in the nineteenth century. How racecourses and railways achieved symbiosis has already been described. Fox hunting earns a place here because of the unique way it brought into focus the relationships between railways, the land and those who owned the land.

  The hold of fox hunting on the world of the nineteenth-century landed classes is difficult to exaggerate. In consequence the impact of railways on hunting, real and anticipated, is unusually well recorded. At first devotees of the hunt expected nothing but disaster. The railway brought legally enforced violation of ancestral ownership, as England’s broad acres were carved up by impassable barriers at the behest of cliques of speculative investors. Worse, these linear tracts of prohibited land were traversed by fast, lethal, horse-frightening machines. The earliest documented response from the hunting side came from ‘Nimrod’ (Charles James Apperley, 1777–1843), a journalist with the Sporting Magazine. In County Durham in 1827, he had encountered ‘something, which I could only compare to a moving hell’ – a pioneer steam locomotive on the Stockton & Darlington – which had unnerved his horse so much that he had to dismount. To the diehard Tory F. P. Delmé Radcliffe (1804–75), Master of the Hertfordshire Hunt Club in 1839, the new technology was ‘a monster, which will rend the vitals of those by whom it has been fostered … the most oppressive monopoly ever inflicted on a free country’. What Radcliffe meant was that anything which tended to weaken the bonds between landowners and their estates was a gift to the forces of subversion. Gloom overtook R. S. Surtees, too: ‘in a few years hunting will be a matter of history’, he wrote in 1834. Even the coming of cheap rail-borne coal caused him to fret that brushwood would no longer be cut for fuel, so that fox coverts would become tangled and overgrown.

  Yet the sport proved much more adaptable than was feared, and not in spite of the railways, but in partnership with them. As with racing, the crucial point was that train travel allowed horses to arrive at the meet fresh and untired. The same was true of the hounds. The railways did not fence the hunts in, so much as set them free. For a growing number of Victorians, hunting the fox now became something that was done at the end of a railway journey.

  The first hunt to use railways in this way was the Holderness, in Lincolnshire in 1846. Surtees soon perked up, noting with approval how the railways could also convey orchestras and splendid cakes to enhance hunt balls. Hounds perished beneath locomotive wheels every now and again, it is true. In 1862 this happened at least twice, including the loss of some of Lord Galway’s pack to one of the Great Northern’s Parliamentary trains, at East Markham in Nottinghamshire. (On the forelock-tugging Great Western, the inside cover of every working timetable even had a notice enjoining employees to watch for ‘PACKS OF HOUNDS’ in the season.) But such mishaps were a small price to pay.

  It was also clear to some landowners from the outset that the broader rewards to be had from the railways – inflated compensation payments for loss of land and amenities, enhanced prices for agricultural produce, the prospect of exploiting coal or mineral deposits – could enhance their preferred way of life. Sometimes these railway-derived premiums went directly to the sport: the landowner and spendthrift George Lane-Fox MP (1793–1848), Master of the Bramham Moor Hunt in Yorkshire, kept afloat partly by selling slices of his land to fourteen different railway companies across England and Ireland. Opposition to new railways from the hunting fraternity gradu
ally dwindled to site-specific skirmishes concerning the choice of route. One well-known case pitted the 5th Earl Fitzwilliam against the Great Northern Railway: the Earl got his surveyor to plot a revised route for its line near Peterborough, where it crossed his estate at Milton Park, ‘to prevent the separation of some woods which in a hunting point of view are inseparable’. The aristocracy likewise woke up to the considerable rewards to be had from company chairmanships and directorships, which also allowed them to steer the railways’ development to their own advantage. So the same Earl Fitzwilliam who had squared up to the Great Northern in Huntingdonshire duly became chairman of the South Yorkshire Railway. His son and heir later had a private station built on one of its goods lines to allow private parties from the Fitzwilliam estate at Wentworth Woodhouse to travel to Doncaster for the St Leger race meeting.

  A parallel change saw the rise of the subscription pack, which released hunts from dependence on the largesse of a single master. Hunts increasingly resembled members’ clubs, whose meets were something like paying attractions. Jorrocks, the canny London grocer of Surtees’s fictions, takes advantage of the opening of each new line to hunt over fresh country, while carrying on his everyday business: ‘hunting one day and selling teas another’. There is much about Jorrocks that is to be taken satirically, but it was certainly true that railway travel allowed wealthy or socially ambitious Londoners to ride with ease alongside the county elites. By the standards of shooting game, a sport that was tightly controlled and dependent on land ownership or invitation for entry, the gates of the hunting field stood wide open. Women began riding to hounds as well, in growing numbers. Hunting became less like mountaineering, the province of the tough and the devil-may-care, and more like skiing, where true devotees mingled with those who had come for the sake of the company, the fashion and the chance of moderate exercise.