Needham Market station in Suffolk, built for the Ipswich & Bury Railway in the late 1840s. It housed both stationmaster and head porter, in separate wings
Stations of similar design to Blake Hall, open or closed, can be found all over East Anglia. In 1865 the Great Eastern adopted a standardised vocabulary for its buildings. There was nothing new in this policy, for most railway companies had a reasonably consistent approach to architectural design. Sometimes their stations were designed by outside architects, sometimes by the company’s own engineers. The Newcastle & Carlisle chose a professional Newcastle architect, Benjamin Green (1813–58), for its pioneering lineside buildings. These used a simplified version of the English Tudor style, by that date already current as a fashionable alternative to classical design for country houses, and likewise for lodges, gatehouses and other small dwellings on gentlemen’s estates. So these station houses were intended to appear at home in a well-ordered landscape, considered politically and socially as well as in aesthetic terms. The same style was chosen by the Liverpool & Manchester when it bowed to the need for buildings at intermediate stations, as may still be seen at Earlestown in Newton-le-Willows. Neo-Tudor station architecture reached an early peak in the mid 1840s on the line between Northampton and Peterborough, on which the architect John Livock played a series of pretty stone-built variations on themes of clustered chimneys and shaped or decorated gables. Examples survive at Oundle and at Wansford, the latter now part of a preserved railway.
Blake Hall and its kindred stations represented an altogether different approach. By reducing the task of design to a series of permutations from a small set of elements, the Great Eastern was able to do without the costly input of a professional architect in favour of a simpler procedure within the office of the company’s chief engineer. The Ongar branch was among its earliest routes to have stations designed on the new model. There were about thirty of these in all, plain buildings of brick with hipped roofs, composed in a lopsided way: a two-storeyed residential side, attached to a single-storey section housing the public facilities. The standard provision of rooms – three bedrooms, parlour, kitchen – was the same as at the Birmingham, Wolverhampton & Dudley’s stations of the 1850s.
The humorist and broadcaster Paul Jennings (1918–89), investigating the aftermath of the Beeching cuts in the late 1960s, found a retired stationmaster named Mr Purdie still living in his 1865-built home at Linton in Cambridgeshire. The station house had 14ft-high ceilings, an ‘elegant curved staircase’, and rusting rails as yet unlifted next to the empty platform. Following the same defunct route into Suffolk, Jennings visited the boarded-up and doomed Haverhill station, with its garden of ‘straggly rosebeds and vague asters’. Here he imagined a lost world of
formal stationmaster’s teas, given every other Tuesday afternoon for the staff and friends, the stationmaster’s wife presiding, the young porters clumsy with the delicate cups and too bashful to ask for sugar, in the long sunlit Edwardian summer. There are thirty-seven minutes before the next train is due. Larks sing in the cloudless blue sky …
It is a charming picture, and the stationmaster’s garden makes a pretty backdrop. Station gardens proper – those in the public areas along the platforms, rather than in the station house’s private ground – were already well established by Edwardian times. A memorable example that has survived is the topiary display at Ropley station in Hampshire, now part of a preserved line. The Great Eastern had its own nursery from which trees and shrubs could be supplied to stations. Sometimes a station’s name was picked out in bedding plants, or (less demandingly) in whitewashed stones or gravel. Kinross station in the 1950s had an ‘impressionistic’ model of Loch Leven in its platform garden, romantically including a version of the castle in which Mary Stuart had been held captive.
Plants and seeds might be informally exchanged with railwaymen at other stations, but there was healthy rivalry too, encouraged by official rewards for the best displays. Scottish companies appear to have taken the lead in offering incentives, both for floral displays and for general neatness and tidiness, with recorded instances starting in the mid 1850s. Such prizes could be substantial; Mr Watt, stationmaster at Bannockburn, received £3 in 1861 for the all-round best station on the Scottish Central Railway. England caught up after a while: the Midland Railway, often a leader in aesthetic matters, began to award cash prizes for station gardens in 1884. Over in Wales, a one-armed stationmaster-gardener is recorded on the Cambrian Railways in the 1890s. Having made a ‘beautiful garden’ at Tylwch in Montgomeryshire, he was moved to Pontdolgoch station in the same county, where the Western Mail’s correspondent reported his creation of ‘another paradise’.
Sharp horticultural practice was not unknown. Hatfield station was reportedly once victorious in the 1940s after borrowing potted plants from a nearby nursery, burying them up to the rims in the flower beds, then taking them back as soon as the inspector had gone. Long-term champion stations included Midsomer Norton on the Somerset & Dorset Joint Railway, favoured by a long earthen bank with a south-easterly aspect behind its down platform, which scooped its regional first prize every year between 1953 and 1960. It happens that Midsomer Norton is yet another station now in the hands of preservationists. The very name conveys a sense of rural ease, a West Country idyll in which passengers and railwaymen join in unhurried fellowship; a good place to linger on a bench amid floral scents and the sound of bees, the calm ‘broken only by the crunching of a porter’s feet on the gravel, the soft country accent of the stationmaster and the crash bang of a milk can somewhere at the back of the platform’ (Betjeman again).
Yet it would be misleading to think of the average stationmaster’s life as a pretext for competitive gardening. At all but the smallest stations he was a busy man, at least until road competition and the advent of railhead goods depots began eating away the local trade that had been so carefully built up. Even in the years just after 1945, Mr Purdie at Linton had enough business to require two clerks and two porters, and a freight turnover of £80,000 a year (the present-day equivalent of close to £5 million).
With activity came responsibility. The stationmaster’s authority extended to all employees attached to his station, and to the railway-men working trains through the area within its control. Their collective task was to ensure safe and punctual operation. The stationmaster’s other duties, as enumerated in the LMS rulebook, included the security and protection of buildings and property, reporting any observations of neglect of duty, the proper distribution and exhibition of timetables, notices, rules, by-laws and staff lists, and unannounced supervisory visits to the local signal boxes. Every day, the station and other premises were to be inspected for cleanness and neatness, closets and urinals not excepted. Orders and instructions received were to be complied with and books kept up to date. Economy in the use of stores items was to be enforced. Complaints received from the public were to be notified promptly. Other rules directed the stationmaster concerning the inspection of defective rolling stock, the correct setting of clocks, the supply of detonators, the onward reporting of defective points and signals, the supervision of work to clear obstructions on the line and much else besides.
Some of these tasks would arise only rarely, or not at all; but the primacy of paperwork was a universal law. Its central role in a stationmaster’s routine was recorded in an article by J. Thornton Burge in The Railway and Travel Monthly for July 1912. Burge’s post was on the London & South Western Railway at Templecombe in Somerset, on the main line to Exeter. Templecombe was not a large station – it had just two through platforms – but it was busy, being at a junction with the Somerset & Dorset Joint Railway. Burge’s working day began at 7.45 a.m., when he would find between fifty and a hundred letters waiting for attention and response. Some came from head office, others from his own staff, others still from fellow stationmasters; the contents might cover anything from special workings and traders’ complaints to making advance arrangements to look after a child tr
avelling alone. Templecombe was kept open round the clock, so there was also the night inspector’s report to be read, as well as those from the yard foreman and the signalman. The accounts and returns for passenger and freight business required regular attention as well.
All this work had to be fitted around the running of trains and the supervision of the station’s normal routines, as well as any out-of-the-ordinary events or crises. Burge confessed that it would be helpful not to have to wear his uniform at such times, to avoid the risk of being buttonholed by passengers and traders with minor enquiries or petty grumbles. Off duty, Burge was expected to remain within range of his workplace, on call in case any serious matters came up.
Even the lower steps on the ladder to a stationmastership could be an arduous place for anyone who hoped to keep a healthy work–life balance. The memoirs of Henry Edward Hawker, one of the first railwaymen to publish an autobiography (in 1919), tell how he and his fellow clerks would work late at the Great Western’s Taunton goods depot for four or five nights a week, each evening representing half a crown of overtime. In these circumstances, going blithely home on time for day after day would not have been a good career move. On many lines the goods department offered better prospects for advancement than the passenger side, and so it turned out for Hawker, who was eventually promoted to stationmaster at the little Newent station in the Forest of Dean. Here he found himself in a tight spot on one occasion while sitting down to the task of registering the month’s issue of tickets. Heat rising from his desk lamp cracked a wall-mounted lamp immediately above it, the fuel ran down and both lamps went up in oily flames. Unassisted, Hawker managed to save his station from burning down. In the accident’s aftermath he even secured the replacement of its oil lamps with gas ones. The episode captures something of the lonely clerical procedures of the average stationmaster, a slave to the lamp, bending meticulously once again over some recurrent task.
Not everyone who took charge of a station was suited to these exacting routines. Among the early drop-outs was Branwell Brontë, brother of the famous novelist sisters, who was an unlikely recruit to the service of the Manchester & Leeds Railway in 1840. From his first posting at Sowerby Bridge, Branwell was promoted to clerk-in-charge at the nearby Luddendenfoot station, on a starting salary of £130 per annum. (‘Clerk-in-charge’ was this railway’s term for stationmaster, the counterpart of the ‘station agent’ on the Liverpool & Manchester.) But Luddendenfoot did not make Branwell happy, for he aspired to the life of an educated gentleman with artistic gifts. His lonely, boring hours on duty were diversified by making sketches of his colleagues and composing verses of a Byronic rather than Betjemanian kind:
The desk that held my Ledger book
Beneath the thundering rattle shook
Of Engines passing by;
The bustle of the approaching train
Was all I hoped to rouse the brain
Or startle apathy.
As soon as the day’s last train had gone, Branwell headed uphill to the inn, where there was a circulating library and the prospect of lively conversation. Then he began slipping away before the last train, leaving the porter to issue tickets and keep the books without supervision. When the annual audit came, the accounts at Luddendenfoot were short by £11 1s 7d, and Branwell’s ledgers were found to have been scribbled all over with his drawings and caricatures. Both clerk-in-charge and porter were promptly sacked and the missing sum deducted from the amount due in arrears on Branwell’s salary.
Writing years after his friend Branwell’s early death, the railway engineer Francis Henry Grundy recalled the station building at Luddenden-foot as ‘a rude wooden hut’. This was actually just a makeshift; construction of a permanent building started only after the sackings. As he could not live at the hut, Branwell had taken lodgings nearby during his year with the Manchester & Leeds. The practice was not unusual. Sometimes, a stationmaster with a large family was given an allowance towards renting a house rather than living at his place of work. Besides, many station buildings did not include a residence for the stationmaster, even when it would have been easy to provide one. H. E. Hawker’s Newent station was one example, being a modest, single-storeyed affair. Instead, the Great Western liked to build tied houses near its stations, sometimes (as surviving within sight of the main line at Didcot) with a clear hierarchy of size and importance. Even the little station at Adlestrop was provided with a standard Great Western house for accompaniment, as the railway author Chris Leigh discovered on a visit of inspection just before its closure in 1966.
What of Adlestrop station itself? Here Leigh found one of the familiar pagoda-type shelters on the down platform, confronting a small cabin-like building that dated back to the line’s origin as the Oxford, Worcester & Wolverhampton Railway in the 1850s. This simple weatherboarded structure, one of a now extinct sequence designed by the OW&W’s engineer John Fowler, represents the more basic end of the station architecture spectrum. It housed a booking hall with an office on one side and a waiting room on the other, all fitting into a structure barely 30ft long and without any pretensions to architectural display. An awning along the platform front provided a small area of shelter. At the back was a small projecting room for a lavatory.
A fully functioning station could get by with even less than this. The tiny two-room structure still to be seen at Damems on the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway (companion to the midget signal box there) is sometimes cited as the smallest in England; a local joke had it that the building was taken indoors when it rained. Here the little booking hall and waiting room are one and the same space. But the ensemble at Adlestrop was more representative of the average everyday functions.
The passenger of 1862 could expect to buy a ticket at a little window within the station building, at an opening in the wall or screen separating booking hall and office. It was not so everywhere in the earliest years of railway travel; for instance in the booking hall of the short-lived first station at Paddington, where the booking clerk stood behind a counter, as in a shop. The fifteen-year-old Richard ‘Dickie’ Doyle (1824–83), later a professional illustrator whose work adorned Punch and Dickens’s Christmas Books, drew himself buying a ticket here in his illustrated diary for 1840: ‘What an important thing that was, actually paying down ninepence each and taking up a piece of buff paper.’ These were the big paper tickets in use before Thomas Edmondson’s small cardboard ones established themselves. The Edmondson system was not easy to set up on a flat and open surface, with its tubes of numbered tickets, contraption for date-stamping and countertop bowls for holding cash; but these could all be fitted nicely around the ticket clerk’s window – a fact which must have encouraged the division of space between the public area and the clerk’s domain. The French term guichet was (and is) sometimes borrowed for these openings, which allowed a very limited view of the room behind – ‘that sacred inner temple behind the little window where the tickets are sold’, which so fascinated the Railway Children. Where booking hall and office remain in their original relationship, the little windows have generally been enlarged or replaced with screens of security glass, but the principle of strict and secure separation remains.
The Railway Children would no doubt have lingered at the window for a chat, but at a busy station the passenger understood that he or she was expected to submit to brisker protocols. As The Railway Traveller’s Handy Book put it, there was a right way and a wrong way to order a ticket. ‘Bath – first-class – return’ represented the right way. The reverse is exemplified by the elderly lady who wants to go to Putney. She asks what all the possible fares are, forgetting to specify single or return. The matter decided, she begins to search within her clothing for her purse, producing in succession ‘pocket-handkerchief, smelling bottle, a pair of mittens, spectacle-case, a fan, and an Abernethy biscuit’, before her fingers at last close on it. Then the long fumbling with small change, in a foredoomed attempt to avoid breaking into a sovereign – and so on. At least the old lad
y did not have to remember her PIN number.
The modern traveller expects to buy a ticket before beginning to await the train. Things were not always so straightforward in earlier times. For one thing, the booking office was not staffed continuously, but opened and closed as the timetable required. The Handy Book tells us that opening time was usually around a quarter of an hour before the train was due. The author’s advice was to find a carriage seat and get any luggage stowed first, before buying a ticket – advice that was sound only when a train began its journey at the station, rather than passing through.
Access to the platform might be intermittent too, depending on the modus operandi. At some stations in the early years of Britain’s railways, passengers were required to stay in the waiting room or booking office, or even outside the doors, until their train was imminent. This was one point on which practice soon came to diverge from certain Continental systems. By 1856, when the French engineer Auguste Perdonnet (1801–67) published the first edition of his treatise on railways, he was struck by the freedom granted to British travellers to move freely around the platforms; all the better, he thought, to allow them to become familiar with the locomotives and thus to lose their fear – ‘et c’est ainsi que les chemins de fer deviennent populaires’.* In France, as the journalist Blanchard Jerrold observed in 1865, you would be locked up in the waiting room instead, ‘with your nose against the window’, until the train came.
The Railways Page 57