Fire and Steam

by Christian Wolmar

  The battle between the South Eastern and the Chatham was, for most of its near forty-year duration, something of a personal war between two major rail entrepreneurs. The companies were led respectively by a couple of equally belligerent characters: Edward Watkin, who as well as running the Metropolitan was chairman of the South Eastern for almost thirty years, and James Forbes, who had an equally long stay at the Chatham and, incidentally, also ran the Metropolitan District, which competed with the Metropolitan on the London Underground system. It was as one historian put it, ‘a great misfortune to have a couple of such aggressive personalities in charge of the transportation companies of Kent’.24 They were more intent on doing each other down, by competing on fares and building unnecessary lines which duplicated their rivals’, rather than attempting to improve the quality of the service for passengers.

  The South Eastern made a handsome profit catering for passengers using the cross-Channel ferry services at Dover, and so the Chatham quickly set about tapping into that market. Both companies reserved their best services for the boat trains which were integrated with their own ferries, fleets that included the most modern steamships. But by comparison with other railways, the coaches were still dire, and their condition must have shocked many visitors to Britain whose initial experience of the world’s most powerful nation would have been a slow and uncomfortable train ride: both the Chatham and the South Eastern became ‘bywords of poverty stricken inefficiency and dirtiness, which was a pity seeing that one or other of them was the first English railway to be sampled by millions of intelligent foreign visitors’.25 (Hamilton Ellis does point out, a tad jingoistically, that the service on the French side, provided by the Compagnie du Nord was even worse.)

  The Chatham, in particular, was a dreadful railway, bankrupted by its urge to compete with its rival. The company fell into financial difficulties in 1864 and went bust in 1866, though it continued to run thanks to special dispensation from Parliament and Forbes’s skill at brinkmanship. Its permanent state of penury meant it had precious few resources for investment and, indeed, right from the beginning it had a motley collection of locomotives, many bought second-hand from abroad or borrowed from other railways. One type, built by a designer called Crampton, had the rather unfortunate habit of damaging the track to the extent that the following fast train was derailed, a couple of times with fatal consequences. The coaches were no better, with the Chatham’s rickety four-wheeled carriages clattering around the network until the end of the century, long after most other railways used more comfortable stock with six or more wheels.

  The South Eastern, by all accounts, was little better with equally grotty coaches and slow trains. Even today, it takes at least an hour and a half to travel the seventy-seven miles from London to Dover by train, while Peterborough, the same distance away from the capital but on a far better line, can be reached by many fast services in just forty-five minutes.26 The two railways eventually did the sensible thing and merged in 1899,27 but the damage was already done and Kent was left with the legacy of an inadequate and badly laid out network.

  Given Parliament’s policy of only rarely allowing mergers, the continued development of the rail network meant there was competition on many other routes. In 1870, seven out of the ten largest provincial cities in England and Wales were linked to London with trains from at least two different companies. There were ridiculous fights between companies. Occasionally a rival railway’s engine was captured and temporarily confiscated; this happened to a Great Northern locomotive when the company first tried to run to Nottingham. And in 1884 at South Kensington on the London

  Underground, a Metropolitan District Railway locomotive was blocked in by three Metropolitan engines. Indeed, this could be seen as the second front of the long war between Forbes and Watkin given they both ran the Metropolitan District and the Metropolitan respectively for most of that same period.28

  There is no doubt that as a result of competition many unnecessary lines were built, creating an over-complex system, and thousands of shareholders lost money on investments that could never realistically have made a decent return. However, competition should not be viewed in an entirely negative light. The speed of trains increased as companies vied to provide the quickest journey and fares in general were kept down on any routes that were duplicated and actually plummeted in the course of some local battles. For example, the Great Northern and the Midland vied for the custom of visitors to the international exhibition of science and industry held in London in 1862, which resulted in daily, and at times even hourly, price cuts. The Leeds to London return fare was just five shillings, less than a farthing (¼d) a mile, and the return from Nottingham to the capital a mere 3s 3d. Standards of service began to improve too, thanks largely to the Midland’s innovation, and competition also ensured that many places were connected to the network when otherwise they might have been ignored. The feud between the Chatham and the South Eastern extended to London where the rival railways put up six termini between them, with the largest, Victoria, being shared between the Chatham and the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway with only a dividing wall separating them. As we have seen, every major railway wanted its London terminus and each one needed to be grander than the last; between 1860 and 1875 seven new terminal stations were opened in the capital. The south London railways were also keen on having both a West End terminal (Charing Cross or Victoria) and a City one (Blackfriars or Cannon Street).

  It was a silly competition, but it has given us some splendid architecture. John Betjeman was inspired to write a book on London’s termini, in which he describes Victoria as ‘London’s most conspicuous monument to commercial rivalry’.29 Even today it is clearly two stations half-heartedly melded together but it was even more of a mess when first built and, as Betjeman puts it, ‘the pleasantly muddled interior must puzzle foreigners. How easily they might find themselves on a Pullman to Brighton instead of a boat train to Dover.’30 Victoria, though, is conveniently sited and it was remarkable that the two railways managed to build their terminal on the north side of the river, bringing the railway close to the heart of Belgravia, one of the most affluent parts of London, whereas other stations were confined to either side of the riverfront or north of the Euston and Marylebone roads.

  With the exception of St Pancras, these stations mostly served the growing suburban traffic and conveniently they were all sited on the Circle Line, completed in 1884, as envisaged by the 1846 Royal Commission on Metropolis Railway Termini, a rare example of successful long-term planning of the railway network. The railways had a greater influence and effect on London than on any other part of the country, and not just because it benefited from the first ever Underground system as well as the world’s most intensive rail network, nor merely because it is the country’s largest conurbation. Rather, it is because the capital was transformed completely by the arrival and proliferation of the railways in a far more profound way than other cities, and the importance of the railways, both over and under ground, to London remains far greater than anywhere else, as evidenced by the high proportion of the capital’s workers who commute by rail today.

  Railways affected the economy of the capital in a host of unpredictable ways, wrecking some industries while stimulating the creation of others. Just as the effect of the railways touched every part of Britain, they influenced every part of life in the capital. Take industry: London was a manufacturing city in the mid-nineteenth century, the largest centre in the country, producing 15 per cent of the nation’s output. The railways increasingly came to service that sector, and at some plants vast internal railways were built, such as the seventy miles of track laid in the works of the Gas Light & Coke Company in Beckton, on the easternmost fringes of the docks area, linked to a branch from the Great Eastern.

  Yet, on the other hand, many plants moved out of London, not least the numerous locomotive builders, because improved transport for their goods, and indeed for their workers, allowed them to shift production
to anywhere that was near a railway; for example, manufacturing engines for the South Eastern moved to Ashford in Kent while the London & South Western works was at Eastleigh in Hampshire. Jobs that were lost in the heavy industries such as locomotive production were more than made up for by a host of smaller manufacturers, many of whom were suppliers to the railway industry, producing anything from signalling equipment to hand-bills for advertising train times. Oddly enough, the early railways that served London were slow to take advantage of the potentially lucrative coal trade, partly as a result of regulations and restrictive practices, and most coal continued to arrive by ship until the early 1850s. From the outset, though, the Great Northern resolved to sell South Yorkshire coal and other railways, notably the London & North Western, began to compete. By 1856 a quarter of London’s coal was arriving by train, and a decade later, over half. The price went down too, but not very dramatically, from an average of 18s in the 1850s, to 15s 7d thirty years later. However, the railways allowed a massive expansion in the quantity of coal being brought into the capital – it doubled in that period – and without them the old supply route via the Thames would have clogged up with too much shipping.

  As London grew in both size and affluence, the demand for food soared and that, too, began to be transported to the capital by rail, changing the tastes of the population. As Jack Simmons reports, ‘in the 1830s, the clerk of Billingsgate Market said that the working classes strongly dislike fish, as expensive and undependable in quality. Mayhew, twenty years later, saw it as a main ingredient of their diet.’31 London began to lose its agricultural smell: the roads into town were no longer full of animals messing and fouling the streets wherever they went as meat could be slaughtered elsewhere and brought in as carcasses by rail; and the cows that supplied milk gradually disappeared from the backyards and cellars of London (there were as many as 20,0 as late as the mid-1850s) because milk could be brought by train, principally by the aptly named Express County Milk Supply Company, the forerunner of Express Dairies. By 1870 half the milk was coming in by rail, and by the turn of the century virtually all of it. Market gardens sprang up in the Home Counties and flourished wherever there was a railhead. Special train services were run to cater for particular produce such as turkey specials from Norfolk (a local speciality long before the days of Bernard Matthews) and broccoli trains from Cornwall during the season.

  The shopping habits of Londoners were also transformed by the development of the railway, and, in particular, the Underground. Larger and larger shops established themselves, offering a huge range of goods, and the owners of these ‘department’ stores realized the advantages of being sited near a station. When William Whiteley was looking around for a suitable site, he chose Bayswater to build his store as it was near the Underground, as opposed to Islington, which at the time was not. It was no coincidence that Ponting’s, Derry & Tom’s and Barker’s all opened next to High Street Kensington station. Entertainment, too, was best sited next to a station. The London, Brighton & South Coast railway funded the removal of the Crystal Palace, once the Great Exhibition was over, to the eponymous area in south London, while Watkin promoted the construction of a bigger version of the Eiffel Tower next to the Metropolitan at Wembley, which was sadly never completed. His rival, Forbes, leased land belonging to the District Railway on which a big wheel was built at Earls Court in 1896. Every racecourse around London soon acquired a station – often equivalent in size to those serving the major towns – since on race days special services would bring in thousands of spectators as well as the racehorses themselves. The very development of professional football and the creation of a national Football League in 1888, as well as a county cricket championship, owe much to the railways. Without them the players and, crucially, the paying fans would not have been able to travel to watch their teams play.

  The railways catered for Londoners’ other pleasures, even those of the very rich. Golf courses had proliferated in the suburbs and outer districts and had deliberately been built next to railway stations – or in the case of Sandy Lodge (now Moor Park) on the Metropolitan railway, where the station was specially built to accommodate the golfers. The Great Eastern ran a golfers’ special on Sundays to Hunstanton, some 112 miles from London, timed to give the sportsmen an afternoon round. Hunters, too, were catered for, with their horses, hounds and servants if necessary, and special hunters’ tickets at cheap rates were offered by several railways including the Great Western and the Metropolitan.

  Even the dead benefited from the railway network. London’s population doubled in the first half of the nineteenth century and the lack of cemetery space meant that graves were frequently reopened, leaving disinterred bones scattered across churchyards. As burying people within the capital’s boundaries become more and more impractical because of overcrowding and the high cost of land, trains carrying bodies for burial outside London became commonplace. The cholera epidemic of 1848–9 gave the spur to this initiative, which led to the creation of a special terminal for the departed, Waterloo Necropolis, next to the main station. When a developer, Sir Richard Broun, came up with the idea of buying a large tract of land at Brookwood, in Surrey, twenty-five miles from the centre of London, to create a massive 2,000-acre cemetery, he obviously needed good transport links with the capital and the railway was the only possible solution. Broun’s company, London Necropolis, went into partnership with the London & South Western, whose passengers certainly did not want to travel in carriages used by the dead, and therefore special new rolling stock had to be bought.

  The trains not only had to be divided into three classes, both for corpses and the grieving friends and relatives, but also had to serve two different stations at Brookwood, one for Anglicans and the other for non-conformist denominations who are buried on the chillier north side of the cemetery. The logistics of dividing up the dead into six categories must have taxed the company and one just hopes that the first-class deceased appreciated the ‘greater degree of decoration’ that justified the higher fare paid by their loved ones. The first funeral train pulled out of Waterloo Necropolis in November 1854 and the service quickly built up to a train per day, carrying up to forty-eight bodies in the ‘stiffs express’, as it was known by railway workers. Rival services emerged, notably from King’s Cross to the Great Northern Cemetery at New Southgate, but the Waterloo service remained the most heavily used.

  While by the 1860s the railways were on the way to becoming ubiquitous, even for the dead, maintaining profitability was still a struggle for many companies as they expanded too rapidly. The minimania stimulated by the greater availability of capital and the renewed interest in railway promotion of the 1860s were bound to suffer a similar fate to that of the predecessor. This time the fall in 1866 was even harder, bringing down many railway contractors, including Sir Samuel Peto, and three major railway companies. The roots of the collapse were in the unregulated banking industry, compounded by the way that contractors had kept many railway companies afloat by funding the lines they built. Overend Gurney was the finance house which had staked most on the new railway bubble of the early 1860s, but the projects it funded were proving more marginal and less profitable, for example, the expensive efforts by the London & Chatham and Peto to build a terminus in the City of London and the construction of obscure railways in distant countries, such as Spain and Canada. Peto and others borrowed against these projects, and when they were unable to pay the bank went down, taking with it the whole financial system. The panic following Overend Gurney’s collapse led to creditors besieging other banking houses, prompting a near riot in the austere surroundings of Lombard Street, and the Bank of England had to suspend the Bank Act of 1844 to allow other banks to issue paper money instead of gold to creditors.

  Up to that date it was the worst banking collapse in British history, later superseded only by the 1929 crash, and its cause could definitely be laid at the door of the railways. Charles Dickens was unequivocal in his criticism of the railway companies
, and of the government which had allowed their unfettered growth, describing the events that led to the financial disaster as caused by ‘a muddle of railways, in all directions possible, and impossible, with no general public scheme, no general public supervision, enormous waste of money, no fixable responsibility’.32 The three main railways which collapsed had all been on a financial knife-edge in any case: the London & Chatham was a poor railway, always in financial difficulties; the Great Eastern was struggling with the financial burden of having built Liverpool Street station; and the London, Brighton & South Coast, once very prosperous, had overstretched itself by opening a series of branch lines to protect its territory from neighbouring rivals.

  Although the companies went bust, the railways themselves kept running, under the control of receivers, but the industry’s leaders were so concerned about their viability that they petitioned the government for nationalization. The leader of the delegation which knocked on Benjamin Disraeli’s door at Number 10 Downing Street in March 1867 was none other than Sir Daniel Gooch, Brunel’s great locomotive engineer who had recently been promoted to the chairmanship of the Great Western Railway, which was also in dire straits. What made such an arch-Tory go begging to the government was a real fear that the whole railway system would go under and would have to cease operations. The Great Western itself had only just survived the financial crash, and despite huge takings from the fare box was still struggling to pay loans taken out at the high interest rate of 9 per cent. Gooch was accompanied by two rivals, Edward Watkin of the South Eastern and Samuel Laing of the London, Brighton & South Coast, and they put forward the idea of a £1m loan, backed by the government, to rescue the Great Western, presumably with the notion that the other railways would be bailed out too. In truth this represented nationalization by the back door and Disraeli would have none of it since such an idea ran counter to the Victorian Zeitgeist. Disraeli simply replied that it was not the government’s duty to interfere with the affairs of a private company in that way.