An immediate reaction came not from the railway companies but the government, terrified of the economic consequences of a national rail strike. The Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, tried to see off the men, meeting them personally the following day and offering a Royal Commission – but the prospect of another ‘talking shop’ after the failure of the conciliation boards was never going to satisfy the unions in their militant mood. Telegrams were sent out calling for a national strike and on 18 August the railways ground to a halt.
The railway companies had also met the government, declaring that they would rather face a strike than negotiate with the unions, the only major group of employers to remain so obdurate in the face of changing times. Winston Churchill, at the time temporarily ensconced with the Liberals as Home Secretary, was convinced that the strike was part of a revolutionary plot by syndicalists, who believed social change could be brought about by united industrial action, and he instantly mobilized 58,0 troops to provide support for the rail companies. In Llanelli, there was a riot after strikers stopped a train and two innocent bystanders were shot dead after the order was given to fire. This tragic event, which only reinforced the solidarity of the strikers, ensured the action came to a swift end.
That very day, the unions and the companies were brought together in the same room – a historic first – by the new President of the Board of Trade, Sidney Buxton. He cajoled the companies into conceding a small pay rise in return for relaxing the price controls on the industry contained in the 1894 Railway and Canal Traffic Act, and a Royal Commission was established to examine the failings of the conciliation boards. The companies had also promised that there would be no victimization, but several broke that commitment, notably the Great Western which marked the service records of prominent strikers with a ‘D’ for disloyal and kept records showing who had made speeches during the action. The railways, and the country, returned to normal after just five days, but the railway companies seemed not to have learnt that their disdain for their workforce could not survive in the modern world. When the Royal Commission report appeared in October, parts of it were unacceptable to the unions and it took a further threat of strike and an unprecedented resolution in the House of Commons calling for a meeting of employers and unions to persuade the companies to come back to the negotiating table. A deal was eventually thrashed out with modest wage increases and reduced hours, and the creation of a Byzantine structure of grades which would ultimately be to the disadvantage of many workers as it would entrench the system of playing off one grade against the other.
Three of the unions – the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, the General Railway Workers’ Union and the United Pointsmen and Signalmen – realizing there was strength in unity, merged after lengthy negotiations in 1913, creating the National Union of Railwaymen (NUR). However, the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen (ASLEF), the locomotive drivers, remained aloof.
The old industrial order had been upset by these events and the change was to prove irreversible. The railways, too, were talking of amalgamation and consolidation rather than competition, which had for the most part dried up: one company emerged as dominant on nearly every route, with revenues being pooled through the Railway Clearing House. The London & South Western, for example, gave up competing on the Plymouth route in 1910 and revenues were pooled with its former rival, the Great Western.
The Railways Act of 1912 allowed the companies to offset higher wages through increased charges, but they were hard pressed to pay decent dividends. The railway in the Edwardian years had been at its most dominant, its apogee at the heart of the nation’s transport system, and yet the companies still struggled to make sufficient profits in the face of an increasingly demanding public, competition from one another and the demands for better conditions from their workforces. The war, when the railway companies would reach the peak of their usefulness in meeting the nation’s transport needs, would also be their undoing, unfairly treated by government and, despite their brilliant performance, still not sufficiently recognized by the public.
ELEVEN
FIGHTING TOGETHER – RELUCTANTLY
The strategic importance of the railways in wartime had been realized as early as 1855 in the Crimean War when the army shipped out 900 navvies to build the Balaklava Railway, which ultimately played a key role in the fall of Sebastopol by providing a supply line that was far more efficient than the roads. Plans to create a circular railway around London to enable armoured trains with artillery to protect the capital were even mooted in response to invasion fears CJ) and later the railways also played a significant part during the Boer War in South Africa at the turn of the century. It was inevitable, therefore, that in the event of a major war the government would want to control the railways. Provision for such a takeover had been made as early as 1871 through the Regulation of the Forces Act and, as the situation in Europe deteriorated, in 1912 the government formed the Railway Executive Committee, consisting of nine (later eleven) managers of the biggest railway companies, to run the railways in the event of war.
As soon as war against Germany was declared on 4 August 1914, the government exercised this power and the Railway Executive Committee took immediate charge of the railways.1 The committee was immediately confronted with a huge military task: the despatch through Southampton Docks to the European mainland of the thousands of troops making up the British Expeditionary Force. The difficulties of this massive undertaking – which was supposed to be kept secret from the public – were exacerbated because the war had rather inconveniently been declared on the Tuesday of a Bank Holiday week when Territorial Army reservists were being sent to train at their annual camps and enormous numbers of holidaymakers were also cluttering up the railway system. Eight trainloads of reservists had already arrived that weekend at Wareham in Dorset and a further ten were about to be sent there when the order came for the operation to be reversed so that troops could be sent to France.
Fortunately, as part of the government’s preparations for the long-anticipated war, emergency timetables for major troop movements had already been drawn up and the operation passed off remarkably smoothly. The British Expeditionary Force timetable was an amazingly detailed document, envisaging that special trains would arrive at Southampton every twelve minutes, for sixteen hours per day. Any train not keeping to its allotted arrival time would lose its place, but in the event all were on schedule. Remarkably, by the end of August, 670 trains had carried 118,000 men, along with 37,650 horses, 314 large guns, 1,800 bicycles, as well as thousands of tons of baggage2 to Southampton for boarding ships to the Continent, and all these trains had arrived on time or early.3 Apart from the cancellation of a few special holiday trains, this huge movement of men and matériel was undertaken without disruption to the normal traffic.
This first military task for the railways was achieved with such remarkable efficiency that it transformed the status of the railways overnight. No longer were they Aunt Sallys but national heroes. The commander of the Expeditionary Force, Sir John French, praised the railways for having performed the task without any delays, saying ‘each unit arrived at its destination [in France] on schedule’.4 Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War, and the man on the famous ‘Your country needs you’ posters, went further by telling the House of Lords that the railway companies had more than justified the confidence placed in them by the government and that all grades had worked with ‘untiring energy and patience’.5 Indeed, the unions, for their part, had instantly declared peace. The new National Union of Railwaymen had been planning a further round of action, threatening the companies with a strike in December 1914, but as soon as war was declared the leaders agreed to an industrial truce that was to last throughout the war, with the exception of a few local disputes and, in 1917, a major standoff which nearly led to a national strike.
Similar large troop movements continued throughout the conflict and the London & South Western, which served Southampton, bore t
he brunt of this part of the war effort. The South Western had already long been the pre-eminent ‘military line’, serving no fewer than ‘176 barracks or camps’6 including Aldershot and Salisbury Plain as well as the naval bases at Portsmouth and Plymouth. Moreover, since 1892 the railway had owned Southampton Docks, which remained the main transit point for forces and matériel throughout the war, with seven million soldiers passing through them. The South Western alone carried 20 million soldiers in the four-year period, an average of 13,000 per day, and ‘no single railway company, large or small, made a greater contribution to winning the war than the London & South Western’.7
The pressure on Southampton was intense. Here the duplication created by competition between the railways bore fruit as it gave Southampton an exceptional position in the British railway network. In addition to the busy London line, the port could be reached by five separate routes, giving access to south Wales, the north and the Midlands and avoiding the congested railways around the capital. Two of those lines, from Salisbury and Basingstoke, were double-tracked while the other three were single lines but nevertheless they were used intensively during the war and stretched the resources of the company to the limit. Moreover, the South Western had to cope throughout this period without its two principal directors, since its general manager, Herbert Walker, and his assistant, Gilbert S. Szlumper, were respectively the chairman and secretary of the Railway Executive Committee. Walker was one of the great railway managers of the period and, as we see in the next chapter, was instrumental in melding the Southern Railway into a coherent network.
The railway credited with playing the second most important role in the war could not have been more different in every respect from the South Western. The Highland Railway was at the opposite end of the country and served an area with the lowest, as opposed to the highest, density of population in the UK. Two of the three main navy bases were located in northern Scotland at Cromarty Firth and Scapa Flow in Orkney, and the sleepy railway was virtually the sole conduit for all the supplies needed by the fleet. The Highland stretched from its two northernmost points, Wick and Thurso, twenty miles from John O’Groats, down to Stanley Junction, just north of Perth, where it joined the Caledonian. The line ran over the tough mountain range of the Grampians, where the tracks climbed up from Perth, 1,484 feet above sea level on the Druimachdar Pass, where trains could be snowed up for days in winter, eventually descending to sea level again at Inverness. Given the sparse population served by the railway, three quarters of the 273-mile line from Perth to Thurso – virtually the same distance as London to Newcastle – was a single-track line with few passing points or sidings. ‘No railway could have been less well adapted to the performance of this vital military function.’8
The tiny tortuous line, which even today takes three hours and forty minutes from Inverness to Wick or Thurso, twice the time in which the distance can be driven9 – and which, as we saw in Chapter 7, had only been built on the whim of a laird, became a vital supply line for the war effort. Normally it was busy only during the tourist and hunting season but now it needed to become a key transport artery. From February 1917 there was even a daily train to and from Euston, largely for military personnel, which took twenty-one and a half hours10 to cover the 717 miles, earning it the nickname of ‘misery special’. A huge ammunition dump for the fleet was created at Inverness where the line was extended to the harbour, and Invergordon, a little village on Cromarty Firth, also served by the Highland Railway, became a massive encampment for 7,000 men as well as an engineering and repair base for the navy. Thurso, a small port at the end of the line, was the staging post for Scapa Flow.
Essentially, all the supplies for the ships had to be carried on the railway as well as, later in the war, the thousands of mines that constituted the Northern Barrage, stretching from the Orkneys to the coast of Norway, designed to protect British shores from attack. The outbreak of the war came at a bad time of the year for the Highland as normally its services would have been winding down in the autumn, its heavily used engines in need of an overhaul after the busy tourist season; instead the little railway faced four continuous years of intensive working. Not surprisingly, a third of its locomotives had broken down within a few months and the overstretched railway suffered from a shortage of locomotive power throughout the war. The Highland’s locomotive fleet of 150 had to be boosted by the loan of twenty others through the Railway Executive.
Fortunately, coal, which was still the principal fuel for most fighting ships, did not have to be carried on the Highland Railway. Before the war, it had been shipped direct from south Wales but the threat of U-boats made this impossible. Instead, it was taken by rail on lengthy trains called ‘Jellicoe Specials’ from south Wales to Grangemouth in the Firth of Forth, from where it was shipped north which created considerable extra traffic for the railway south of the border. There were, on average, nine of these large slow trains every day throughout the war, sometimes as many as a hundred per week, all additional to the normal routine of the already heavily used south Wales railways and, as we see below, one of them played a minor role in the run-up to the terrible Quintinshill railway disaster of 1915.
Other railways, too, supplied the military. The South Eastern & Chatham served the Channel ports of Folkestone and Dover which, despite being closed to civilian traffic, were still overstretched. To accommodate the military traffic, a secret new port had to be built at Richborough, near Sandwich, which quickly grew into a large military railway with sixty miles of sidings and branches that could handle 30,000 tons weekly, all of which had to be brought in on the South Eastern & Chatham. A train ferry berth was built at Richborough11 to accommodate three new ships which were capable of gobbling up whole trains: each had four tracks on their lower decks that could carry a total of fifty-four fully loaded wagons. Quantities of railway equipment were sent over to France in that way, including 675 locomotives, 30,000 wagons and 30 ambulance trains to be used on the network of lines that had been built hastily to serve the Front.
Ambulance trains were heavily used in the UK, too. The sick and wounded dominated the traffic in the ferries and ships back across the Channel and initially they were all taken to Dover. Soon, however, the Kent port, far smaller than it is today, was unable to cope and reception centres were opened at several other ports, stretching from Plymouth to Thurso, and the casualties were taken to large military hospitals by train. These ambulance trains, many converted from existing coaches, were well fitted out and modern, with special carriages for doctors, nurses and even a pharmacy, and they could accommodate up to 500 patients, 200 in beds in the special ward carriages and 300 walking wounded. The sheer scale of the conflict and the role of the railways is demonstrated graphically by the simple statistic that 2,680,000 sick and wounded soldiers12 were carried on the railways during the war.
Even some of those impoverished railways that had been poorly engineered and were loss-making suddenly came into their own, becoming vital arteries for the war effort. One was the ailing Stratford-on-Avon & Midland Junction, formed by the amalgamation of four railways in 1908 and well described by its nickname, the ‘Slow, Moulding and Jolting’. It had been built largely to carry ironstone but had fallen into decline as a result of cheap imports, then flourished again as the war cut off the shipping trade: ‘a heavy traffic in iron ore, iron and steel ran over this serpentine byway to and from south Wales and the Midlands’13 on track that was completely unsuitable for such dense traffic.
Surprisingly, the London Underground also played a significant part in the war. The system offered a route through London on what were called the City-widened lines, a link built soon after the first line opened in the 1860s to allow trains to reach the rail network south of the Thames. This was one of only four rail connections across the capital and was the most direct. Consequently it was used intensively by troop and other special military services with an average of sixteen military trains every day throughout the conflict, in addition to the n
ormal Underground services. At the peak, during one fortnight in the build-up to the offensive early in 1915, there were an overwhelming 210 trains on those tracks daily, one every seven minutes around the clock.
Every railway in the land was called up in some measure to the service of the war effort, but it did not all run smoothly. Adrian Vaughan documents the fact that fifty-four loaded railway wagons stood immobile from August 1914 until the end of June 1916 at Harwich’s Parkeston Quay.14 There was much pilfering and delay because of overcrowding and the scarcity of basic items like ropes and tarpaulins to cover wagons. Trains became mobile warehouses as sidings and yards were full and factories needed to get stock out of the door. There were shortages of wagons and even the crucial Jellicoe Specials were frequently held up by overheating of the axles on their Victorian wagons. The railway had to carry whatever the military threw at it and that included very dangerous loads. The most hazardous was nitroglycerine, made at a plant near Pembrey in Carmarthenshire which employed 5,000 people, who themselves had to travel there principally by rail. The highly volatile explosive had to be taken by rail to factories in Kent and Surrey in hermetically sealed vans. With typical gallows’ humour, the railway’s official telegraphic code for these trains was ‘Ignite’, though fortunately ‘none of them ever did’.15
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