Fire and Steam

by Christian Wolmar

  Yet the 1896 Act, which attempted to boost the construction of these lines, largely failed. Agricultural decline accelerated in the 1880s, by which time most of the country was already well served by the railways. Moreover, the large companies rather turned their noses up at building rickety little lines for single-carriage trains to chunter up and down at 25 mph. While applications to authorize light railways poured in, few were actually built and even then the companies tended to revert to type by constructing them to conventional high standards.

  Light railways had a strange and persistent advocate, one Colonel Holman Fred Stephens, who did the most to promote these toytown railways – still known today as Colonel Stephens’s railways. Stephens was an enigmatic character about whose personal life little is known apart from the fact that he never married. He was tall, with a neat moustache, and always with a bowler hat and cane, and his whole life was devoted to creating seemingly impossible railways on the cheap, ‘the more rural the surroundings, the greater the challenge’.14 Is there a railway with a better name than one of Stephens’s early efforts, the Hundred of Manhood & Selsey Tramway, a seven-mile line from Chichester to Selsey in West Sussex, built for just £19,000 and so called, apparently, to avoid conforming to the normal standards of branch line railways? Stephens’s lifetime work was making use of the Light Railways Act to construct or adapt a couple of dozen railways around the country, most of them, remarkably, standard gauge. He managed or funded several himself, ensuring everything was done on the cheap, creating a railway that Heath Robinson would have appreciated: ‘all [were] truly lines of character on which no new piece of equipment was ever purchased if anything secondhand would do’.15 They ranged from the clay-carrying North Devon & Cornwall Junction Light Railway, which became a branch of the Southern Railway, to the Snailbeach District Railway in Shropshire, built to half the standard gauge, which he rescued and made profitable for a while. Few survive, the most notable being a branch stretching out to Gunnislake, near Plymouth, originally built to a smaller gauge, and the Kent & East Sussex, which is a heritage line. Stephens was in the habit of turning up unannounced at his railways, ordering a special train and handing cigars around if everything was functioning well – but brickbats and coruscating memos if not.

  It was not only the railway companies that turned their noses up at the notion of these ramshackle railways. The public had become accustomed to receiving a decent service and was reluctant to use them. In The Country Railway, David St John Thomas is critical of this attitude, which bumped up the costs of what might have been viable railways if they had been built without the usual bells and whistles: ‘Britain wasted every opportunity to develop basic, integrated country transport services at economic prices.’16 He cites the Kelvedon & Tollesbury Light Railway, known locally in Essex as the ‘Crab and Winkle’, opened in 1904 and costing £50,000, as an example that should have been more widely followed. It joined the main line just forty miles away from London’s Liverpool Street: ‘The contrast between London’s busiest terminus and a slow mixed train wandering over the Essex marshes a mere hour and a half later was as keen as anything experienced by air travellers even in the jet age.’17 So what, he argues, if there were no signals because ‘the solitary engine had not acquired the art of running into itself’ and why should passengers ‘be amazed when the fireman climbed down to open the gates at a crossing over the main road’. It was a railway that served its district well, carrying up to 1,000 people per day as well as huge amounts of jam from the nearby Tiptree factory, and was one of the successes of the 1896 Act. The jam kept the railway going for over half a century, but it closed to passengers in 1951, long before the Beeching cuts, and to freight a decade later.

  With so many marginal lines built since the 1860s, it is hardly surprising that there were some early closures. By 1914, about 200 miles had permanently closed for passengers, including half a dozen railways of ten miles or more that did not even see out the nineteenth century. Most had been built principally to carry freight and some continued to do so after closing for passengers. Overall they represented a tiny proportion of the total mileage. But that does not mean all the surviving railways were solvent – quite the opposite. Many were bankrupt almost as soon as they opened. The Bishop’s Castle Railway Company on the Welsh border, for example, was insolvent as early as 1866, five years after it opened, but ‘its trains toddled to and fro between Bishop’s Castle and Craven Arms’18 until its closure in 1935.

  The reason for the small number of closures was simple. In the rush to build railways, no legislative provision had been made to allow for their closure, so there was no legal way to close a railway. Indeed, Parliament felt that as landowners had been forced, sometimes very reluctantly, to release their land with the expectation of creating a useful and permanent service, it was incumbent upon the railway to keep lines open. A parliamentary procedure was required, even for the abandonment of a scheme authorized by an Act but not actually built.

  While assessing the profitability of building and running a branch line would appear to be a simple matter of subtracting the cost of maintenance and operation from the income from ticket sales and carriage of freight, the issue is far more complex in reality. As we will see in the debate over the Beeching cuts (in Chapter 14), the kernel of the problem was to determine what proportion of that revenue would be permanently lost, as many people using a branch line travel on it at the start or end of a far longer journey. As regards maintenance too, determining the precise cost of keeping a small section of track in good fettle is more art than science given how difficult it is to identify the costs attributed, for example, to a gang of trackworkers who spend only part of their time on the branch. Since most branch lines soon became incorporated into a large company’s portfolio, such minutiae were of little concern. Was it worth antagonizing a local community, or possibly breaking the law, to save a few bob when it was impossible to know how much revenue the branch contributed to the main line network? Clearly, with so few closures occurring before the First World War, the companies’ implicit answer until then was a resounding ‘no’.

  The Light Railways Act had also come too late for another reason, as demonstrated by the failure to build a long-proposed extension of the eight-mile-long Helston branch in west Cornwall. The Great Western had expressed strong support for the idea put forward by local people to extend the little Helston line – itself only completed in 1887 – to serve several villages in the Lizard, but negotiations dragged on for several years. Eventually the Great Western lost interest and in August 1902 began to operate a service with a petrol-driven motor bus instead, the first such service ever offered by a railway in Britain. The bus had arrived, stymying any further growth of the railway in rural areas, where its flexibility and the fact that, unlike the railway, it did not pay its track costs, would ensure it was cheaper than building little-used lines. However, initially buses were confined to feeding the railway by serving the nearest station, rather than competing over longer routes, since neither the roads nor the buses were good enough to cover substantial distances.

  The railways, though, missed a trick here. They were in a strong position to extend their monopoly from the track to the road by creating bus networks specifically tailored to serve their interests by linking with train services. While several railway companies did begin to run quite extensive bus networks, they were slow to exploit their advantage or to invest quickly enough to establish a monopoly. Mostly, railway companies did not want to demean themselves by operating road vehicles, but it was a mistake for which ‘they paid heavily in the twenties and thirties’.19

  There was also the aeroplane, but it had only just been invented and the notion that it would ever challenge the train seemed far-fetched. War, too, seemed for much of the Edwardian period a distant prospect, and little did the railway companies realize that the coming conflict, more than anything else, would change the structure of the industry for ever. However, there was one threat which the railways d
id face before the war: their own workforces – ‘the enemy within’ as Mrs Thatcher would later call them – who, as living standards rose, became more militant and ready to challenge the hegemony of the railway owners.

  As we saw in Chapter 8, labour on the railways had been slowly becoming more organized but attempts at industrial action were met forcefully by the railway companies which remained reluctant to recognize any workers’ rights. The worst labour conflict of the nineteenth century on the railways had been in Scotland in 1890. The North British Railway had traditionally overworked its men, with twenty-five-hour shifts not uncommon at holiday times. Its ‘express’ trains were slow, taking up to three and a half hours for the under-fifty-mile journey between Edinburgh and Glasgow, and the company struggled even to keep to this undemanding schedule because of overcrowding on the tracks and lack of both platform capacity and passing loops. The opening of the Forth Bridge had merely made congestion worse and the men were angry that they were paid only for the scheduled time of the train, with no extra for overtime caused by delays, which meant they frequently worked ninety hours in a week while being paid for just sixty.

  The other large Scottish railways, the Caledonian and the Glasgow & South Western, were little better and the exasperated men from all three companies went on strike on 22 December 1890, timed to cause maximum disruption in the holiday season. The union, the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants for Scotland, had organized effectively for several months behind the scenes and 9,000 drivers, firemen and guards walked out, stopping both passenger and freight trains. Many English people hoping to return home for Christmas were stranded because there had been no forewarning of the industrial action, and many factories ground to a halt as the coal trains, the lifeblood of the economy, stopped running. Apart from the Clyde and a few lochs, there was no alternative form of transport since the horse and cart had mostly been put out of business by the intense network of railways in Scotland. Food began to rot in the warehouses, which, stuffed with carcasses and vegetables in those days before cold storage was widespread, could be smelt for miles around.

  The railway workers’ demands were hardly revolutionary – a ten-hour day and recognition of overtime – and consequently the strike attracted widespread public sympathy at first, but as shortages became more acute, criticism of their action mounted. The men became more desperate, putting boulders on the line to stop a ‘scab’ express that they heard was running between Perth and Inverness. Early in the New Year, the Caledonian, needing to accommodate blacklegs who had come from England, evicted railway families from tenements at Motherwell, sparking a riot that led to the local station being wrecked. After a fortnight the strike began to weaken, with the return of the Glasgow & South Western men, but many others held out for a further four weeks, costing the companies an estimated £300,000 in lost revenue. The strikers gained little, except to show the potential of solidarity and to confirm their ability to disrupt not just the railway but the economy as a whole. However, their action did attract the attention of Parliament, which held its first-ever debate into railway workers’ long hours.

  As the Scottish strike showed, the underlying issues were really the profitability and modernization of the railways. The railway companies did not want to take on more staff, which they would have to do if the men’s hours were limited. Most railways had a policy of one crew per locomotive and therefore any delays simply resulted in unpaid overtime for the driver and fireman. If hours were limited, the railway companies would have to carry out costly improvements, such as adding passing loops or doubling sections of track in order to improve punctuality.

  But it was a losing battle. The unions were strengthened as a result of the Scottish workers’ action and membership of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants (ASRS), which had been just a few thousand in the 1880s, leapt to 86,000 in 1897, when the long-standing General Secretary, Edward Harford, was pensioned off. Indeed, not only that, but the railway – or rather its unions – can lay claim to the birth of the Labour Party. The ASRS had long realized the importance of political, rather than industrial, action and had sponsored the resolution at the Trades Union Congress conference in 1899 that was to lead to the creation of the Labour Representation Committee, the precursor of the Labour Party.

  The railway workers’ union, too, was involved in a landmark strike on the Taff Vale railway that would help establish the legal footing of the trades unions, even though initially it was a terrible defeat for the workers. The Taff Vale railway was one of several based in the Welsh coalfields that became highly successful and profitable by transporting coal from the valleys to the docks. The intensity of traffic on these railways is shown by the neat statistic that the Taff Vale carried nearly as much coal on its 124 miles of track as the Great Western did on its 3,000 miles. The union had negotiated a sixty-hour week following a brief strike in 1890 but then the company employed a general manager, Ammon Beasley, who would have no truck with organized labour. It was a highly prosperous railway, paying double-figure dividends every year, partly thanks to sweating the labour of men who were overworked and underpaid. After years of bullying by Beasley, the workers finally went on strike for ten days in August 1900, demanding union recognition. They quickly found themselves in the courts and the strike was called off, resulting in a kind of score-draw, with the company agreeing not to victimize the strikers and accepting the establishment of an independent conciliation board. However, the legal issues rumbled on and in a devastating decision that ensured Taff Vale’s prominent place in the annals of union history, a High Court judge ruled that the union was liable for any losses by the company resulting from the strike. The decision was eventually upheld by the House of Lords and the ASRS had to pay the company £42,000 in damages and costs. More importantly, the judgment made any industrial action all but impossible.

  Beasley was rewarded with £2,000, a pair of candelabra and a brooch for his wife, but while the battle was won, the war was soon lost. The injustice of the case stimulated not only a rapid increase in trade union membership but contributed to the massive defeat of the Conservatives in the 1906 General Election. For the first time, Labour established a strong presence with twenty-nine MPs, confirming the party as a new political force. Parliament that year passed the Trade Disputes Act, which gave British trade unions immunity from legal proceedings in respect of damages committed in pursuance of legal action – effectively the right to withdraw labour.

  It was not long before the unions sought to use their new industrial muscle. The ASRS immediately demanded an eight-hour day for drivers and a ten-hour day for the rest and a wage increase. The Railway Companies Association – as mentioned previously, they, of course, had been allowed to form a ‘combine’ long before the trade unions – refused even to discuss the claim. In consequence, the ASRS, along with the General Railway Workers Union which represented unskilled grades, balloted its members and called what could be seen as the first general rail strike for November 1907.

  The companies’ obduracy in the face of this increased militancy was partly traditional: they had always resisted dealing with organizations purporting to represent their workforce on the basis that trade unionism was not compatible with the military-style discipline required to run a railway and was therefore akin to mutiny. But, their resistance was also born of necessity. The companies, while still the largest businesses in the land, with more capital employed than any other industry,20 were being squeezed by having to pay for better services as well as by the intense competition between one another. The railways were also paying the price for being the first in the world, mostly having been built at least fifty years previously. Equipment desperately needed renewing and this investment had to be paid for out of current profits.

  On the workers’ side, their wages were being squeezed by the grim economic situation. Almost for the first time since the creation of the railways, the economy was barely growing, while prices were rising. The railway workers were one of the groups m
ost affected by this phenomenon – now known as ‘stagflation’ – because the companies were not at liberty to increase fares in response to rising costs. Following pressure from traders and merchants, a series of Acts had been passed in the 1880s and 1890s to control the charges for carrying freight because the railways were essentially monopoly providers. Many fares, too, remained controlled and therefore the railway companies were unable to respond to their workers’ demands by increasing wages paid for out of selling their product at a higher price. Conflict in this situation, given that the unions now had legal protection, was inevitable.

  The 1907 strike was warded off by David Lloyd George, then the President of the Board of Trade in the Liberal government, who managed to bang heads together, forcing the employers to agree to the formation of a conciliation scheme, even though, stuck in their nineteenth-century time-warp, they still refused to recognize the unions. The unprecedented intervention of the government into this industrial dispute highlighted the vital role of the railways in the economy. It is difficult to exaggerate the extent to which the economy was dependent on the continued running of the railways, given its dominance as the main mode of transport but also as one of the country’s half dozen biggest industries, employing 643,000 by the outbreak of the war.21

  In 1911, however, the government was unable to stop the railway workers from downing tools. The conciliation boards had seemed to work against the interests of the unions and their members, who called them ‘confiscation boards’. Thanks to the machinations of the board, the average weekly wage had stagnated at around 25s 9d between 1906 and 1910. Walk-outs in other industries were becoming commonplace and the railwaymen were becoming increasingly frustrated as their fellow workers in jobs outside the rail industry seemed to manage to increase their wages while they could not. In 1910 the economic situation had improved, with rail company dividends increasing, and yet still the railway workers did not get any extra money. It set the scene for a classic battle of capital v. labour. Matters came to a head the following summer when there was a walk-out of men on the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway, the worst paid in the area, and unofficial action quickly spread with 50,000 railway workers going on strike. The executives of the four rail unions22 met on 15 August and sent an ultimatum to the railway companies, demanding recognition or talks, with the threat that their members would go on strike within twenty-four hours.