The failure of the government to compensate the railways fully for their war effort meant the four companies started out with one hand behind their backs. To some extent the 1921 grouping was ‘a disguised nationalization’33 because the railway companies – artificial constructs formed by legislation – were forced to charge fares set by the government. They had to start rebuilding their railways, and could do so only slowly thanks to the lack of cash, rather than devoting all their energies to preparing the railways for the threat they faced from lorries and cars. That legacy of underinvestment was to hold them back for the next two decades until they faced a second world war that was to prove even more damaging.
TWELVE
COMPROMISE – THE BIG FOUR
So then there were four. The era of the ‘Big Four’ companies that was to last precisely a quarter of a century is often portrayed as a golden age thanks to the exploits of the record-breaking expresses on the East and West Coast Main Lines. In truth, that reputation owes more to the skill and originality of the advertising departments of the Big Four than to the experience of train travel for most passengers. The vast majority of services were far more mundane than these posters suggested. From the CJ) outset, the amalgamated companies suffered from a number of handicaps including the shabby treatment of the railways at the hands of government in the aftermath of the war and the growing threat of competition from motor vehicles. Just before the mergers, the rail companies had fought unsuccessfully to be allowed to become road hauliers, but the nascent road transport industry successfully lobbied against the idea, arguing that the railways would kill off private initiative and keep costs high. As a result, the government barred them in the interests of competition, allowing them to offer road services only to feed freight into their rail heads. Worse, in the run-up to the war, the government had introduced subsidies for the purchase of petrol-powered lorries in return for allowing them to be called up in wartime: before that, there had been virtually no long-distance transport of goods by road. Moreover, thousands of former soldiers, who had learnt to drive in the services, were able to turn themselves into one-man freight haulage businesses by buying cheap ex-army vehicles with their demob money and greatly undercutting the railways. The post-war era saw the rapid development of a new road haulage industry based on small and highly competitive firms, largely consisting of very flexible owner-drivers helped by the low cost of petrol. Indeed, road users were lightly taxed and unlike the railways paid little towards the cost of the construction of their infrastructure. Within a few years, road transport had wiped out many local freight services on the railways, though rail still retained an advantage for longer distance traffic.
For their part, the railways suffered the additional disadvantage of being common carriers, a remnant of the Victorian rules that obliged them to transport everything from small packets and perishable fruit to whole farms and circuses. Road hauliers were not bound by such regulations and could not only pick and choose whatever load they reckoned might be profitable but also set their own prices. It was not until the 1930s that the railways began to be aware of the extent of the threat they faced and started to lobby against the unfair terms of competition set by the government. Amalgamation was undoubtedly a sensible idea given the wastefulness of the old system, but the railways were still burdened with a network that was clearly too large for such a small country. Surprisingly, the division into four groups, which was designed to bring about coordination rather than competition, still left several main traffic arteries with two routes served by rival companies. For example, from London, there were alternative routes to cities such as Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield, Exeter, Edinburgh and even far-off Aberdeen, while conversely there was only one company covering Bristol, Cardiff, Liverpool and Newcastle. In some cases this continued duplication appeared quite deliberate. The Great Eastern and the London, Tilbury & Southend both offered pretty similar timetables to Southend from Liverpool Street and Fenchurch Street stations respectively but while the former was incorporated into the London & North Eastern, the latter, bought by the Midland in 1912, became a virtually self-contained fiefdom within the London, Midland & Scottish. In other words, many of the nineteenth-century rivalries were perpetuated rather than ended by the regrouping and would continue for the quarter of a century that this system survived.
To compound the difficulties for the companies to establish themselves, passenger numbers were in decline and, as we shall see below, would fall by 8 per cent in the inter-war period. While this was not catastrophic, such a decline was a disincentive for investors and a sign that the heyday of the railways was finally over. On the whole, the service provided by the railways in terms of timing, punctuality and passenger comfort was not much to boast about except on certain key routes. The Big Four tended to concentrate on a few show trains, whose shorter timetabled journey and comfort were widely publicized, but which were in sharp contrast to the rest of the services. This was not unlike the situation in France today where there is a great difference between the much-lauded high-speed lines and the often decrepit and infrequent provincial services. This was particularly true on the Great Western where a few fast through trains offered the fastest timings in the world while the rest provided the lackadaisical ‘take it or leave it’ service typical of monopolies. The exception was the Southern which, throughout the inter-war period, concentrated on improving a large proportion of its services through electrification.
The railways were thus hamstrung by their past and by the onerous government regulation. Moreover, the two northern companies faced tremendous difficulties in assimilating their disparate empires, while the Great Western was parsimonious to a fault. Only the Southern showed the kind of enterprise needed to retain, and indeed increase, passenger numbers. The apparent hostility to the railways by the government was, in part, left over from the distrust felt towards them in the days when they were monopolists needing to be controlled and also a failure to recognize the extent of the revolution created by the advent of the internal combustion engine. The amalgamations had been designed to give the railways receipts from freight equivalent to 1913 levels, but that was never achieved, which weakened their financial situation and, in any case, constituted unnecessary state interference. Freight was crucial to the profitability of the companies but the amount being carried began to decline as the economy became less reliant on the heavy industries of the north, such as coal and steel. A lengthy coal strike in 1921 had, too, dented the railways’ profits and was a portent of the further decline in freight revenue that was to come.
There was more to this bias against the railways than fear of the old monopolies. The railways may not have been nationalized but they were perceived as a quasi arm of the state. They were a mature industry, with little scope for expansion and frequently seen as old-fashioned. Unlike the motor industry, they were perceived as neither innovative nor entrepreneurial. Cars and roads were exciting, young, aggressive and ‘became the flagship of those opposed to state intervention’.1 They supported an individualized method of transport in contrast to the railways which were public and inherently more socialistic.
The Big Four, then, were born at a difficult time when the industry faced an increased need for investment and renewal just as traffic was beginning to decline. They each had different characteristics and different styles. The largest was the London, Midland & Scottish with a network of close to 7,000 miles, nearly two thirds of today’s total, stretching from Southend to north-west Scotland and taking in parts of Wales as well as most of the west side of England north of London. It employed 275,000 people, owned 10,000 steam locomotives,2 20,000 passenger carriages and 207,000 freight wagons – and 9,000 horses (astonishingly, 7,000 were bequeathed to British Railways a quarter of a century later). Given the rivalry between two of its main constituents, the London & North Western and the Midland, with their longstanding differences in policy, it was hardly surprising that it took some time for the railway to be melded into anything li
ke a coherent unit. It was not until the arrival of Sir (later Lord) Joshua Stamp as president3 three years after amalgamation that there was any attempt to create a unified business. Stamp, who soon became chairman, was an economist rather than a railwayman and his focus was very much on the bottom line: his ‘economics were those of the tax inspector’.4 He ran the company in an autocratic way that gradually blended together its component parts into an effective, yet largely unexciting, railway.
Early on, Stamp wondered why the LMS5 expresses out of Euston required ‘double-heading’ (two locomotives) while those operated by the Great Western and the London & North Eastern were invariably headed by just a single engine. The answer was that various attempts before the war to design a locomotive that could have done the job alone had failed for a variety of reasons. Stamp then commissioned his locomotive engineer, Sir Henry Fowler, to produce a new class of locomotives, the Royal Scots, which eventually did the trick, though they took some time and several modifications to attain the right level of performance.
The LMS excelled at the backroom tasks, like repairing locomotives and building carriages, but was not so good at what is known today as the ‘customer-facing’ role. Stamp was parsimonious to a fault, which meant that there was an effective moratorium on many types of expenditure, big and small. The letter paper was famously thin and staff were encouraged to use both sides of every sheet; on a larger scale, only one major station – Leeds – was fully refurbished during the twenty-five-year existence of the company. Stations tended to be cleaned infrequently, and most lacked a lick of paint, giving the railway a rundown feel. Carriages, too, were dirty, and in terms of services the LMS was the worst of the Big Four at speeding up its timetables back to prewar levels. Alone of the four companies, the LMS had no planned modernization programme, although on paper its officers delighted in producing grandiose schemes that they knew would never meet with the parsimonious Stamp’s approval. The company was also ‘surprisingly unprogressive’6 and showed scant interest in electrification or in modernizing its freight wagon fleet.
The LNER, the second largest of the Big Four, was another mishmash, incorporating the three railways that made up the East Coast Main Line (Great Northern, North Eastern and North British), and also bringing together the disparate three lines that went into London and which, ironically, had been refused permission to amalgamate five years before the war: the Great Northern, the southern end of that East Coast line, was principally a main line railway that did not serve its London suburbs well; the Great Eastern, with its monopoly of East Anglia and covering that swathe of suburbs in north-east London which it had helped create; and the relatively new Great Central, a railway without a clear purpose. The LNER’s inaugural chairman was William Whitelaw, who had gained prominence in Scotland as chairman of the North British railway and was the grandfather of the politician of the same name under Mrs Thatcher. Whitelaw’s policy was far more liberal than that of the LMS, encouraging the various railways to retain their own identity in a loose federation. The overall ethos was to retain existing policies rather than go for standardization, providing they were not detrimental to the overall interests of the company (in sharp contrast to the autocratic rule from the centre of the LMS). The LNER, with its strong network in the northern heartlands, was essentially a freight railway. In 1924, 61 per cent of its receipts came from freight, compared with 58 per cent and 56 per cent respectively on the LMS and Great Western; the Southern, with its strong commuter base, earned barely a quarter of its revenue from carrying goods.
Given the decline in freight, particularly from the heavy industries of the north, the LNER always struggled financially, and was much the weakest of the four. Out of necessity, then, the LNER was more entrepreneurial than the LMS, making much play of its fast trains such as the Flying Scotsman and creating popular specials such as the ‘Garden Cities and Cambridge Buffet Expresses’, known rather more prosaically by Cambridge students as ‘Beer Trains’. They linked King’s Cross with the two garden cities, Letchworth and Welwyn, as well as Cambridge, affording plenty of drinking opportunities for the undergraduates at a time when pub opening hours were short and fixed. Even the hotels on these two big railways differed in character and style. According to Michael Bonavia, with a few exceptions, the LNER hotel ‘tended to be less pretentious but to offer more solid bourgeois comfort and perhaps a friendlier atmosphere’.7
Given that the Great Western consisted of the eponymous pre-war company with a few, largely Welsh, additions, it had little difficulty in maintaining its image and its traditions. The Great Western also had the advantage of having by far the best engines, designed by George Churchward, the engineer who had built the 100 mph City of Truro. His ‘Star’ and ‘Saint’ classes, introduced before the war, were years ahead of any of their rivals and the ‘Star’ derivatives, the ‘Kings’ and ‘Castles’ built by his successors in the mid-1920s, were made to far higher standards of workmanship than their equivalents on other railways and survived until the end of the steam era. Consequently, the Great Western recovered its pre-war timetable much more rapidly than the others and by 1925 was running faster and more frequent expresses than in 1914. The company not only had a highly stable workforce and a paternally minded management – which had both advantages (good welfare funds) and disadvantages (relatively low wages) for the workforce – but between amalgamation and nationalization there were only two general managers, Sir Felix Pole for the first six years and then Sir James Milne. All of this was good for profits too, and the company paid healthy dividends of 7–8 per cent throughout most of the 1920s and not all the profits were disbursed to shareholders. The Great Western invested heavily in station refurbishment and was the pioneer in terms of safety, having developed an automatic warning system that alerted drivers to a red signal ahead. The initial version, Automatic Train Control, first introduced on some important signals in 1906, used a system of magnets to alert the footplate crew with a siren and, from 1912, to apply the brakes automatically as well, unless the driver cancelled it. The Great Western was the only one of the four railways to fit this safety device, which, although not installed throughout its network, must have saved countless lives. Yet amazingly, its successor, the Automatic Warning System and its more sophisticated offshoot, the Train Protection and Warning System (TPWS), were not made mandatory on the British rail network until after the Southall accident of 1997.
The Southern was a completely different animal from the other three because of its dependence on the suburban commuter traffic – its lifeblood. It was blessed, too, by having the most illustrious and competent railwayman of the age at its head, Sir Herbert Walker, who set about melding its three main constituents into one railway and, crucially, speeding up the electrification programme which proved to be by far the cheapest and most efficient form of traction for a railway that ran high-frequency services on short routes. Walker was a tall imposing figure, with the type of powerful presence that ensured colleagues would leap to their feet as soon as he entered the room, but he lacked the common touch of some of his peers who were able to talk to managers and footplatemen alike. Nevertheless, he was the outstanding figure of the railways during the inter-war period.
The task of blending the three sections of the Southern into a coherent railway was made easier by the fact that they had blunted their competitive instincts and had moved more towards cooperation during the run-up to the war. The Southern rejoiced in having a shiny new station, too, the vast Waterloo, which had taken twenty-two years to build, replacing the ramshackle mess that had built up over the years. It was opened finally by the King and Queen in March 1922, boasting twenty-one platforms, its own telephone exchange and no fewer than 240 synchronized clocks.
While the three Southern railways knew each other well, their operating methods and styles were different, and old jealousies and rivalries persisted; for example, it took a year to open up passageways between the Brighton and South Eastern sides of Victoria station, and half a dec
ade for similar improvements to be made at London Bridge. At first, the three general managers were supposed to run the new unified outfit jointly, but that was clearly unworkable. Walker, by far the most gifted as well as the youngest, assumed control as general manager in 1924, and over the next thirteen years was responsible for steering through the electrification programme.
Like today, the railways of the Southern were always in the spotlight, rarely in the limelight. The suburban services were used by the great and good, the bowler-hatted commuters from the leafy villages of Surrey and Kent, and the prosperous suburbs of outer London, and they knew how to make a fuss when things went wrong. While there had been carping coverage of the Southern’s predecessors in the press, a particularly vehement campaign was launched in the latter part of 1924 as a result of a series of obscure timetable changes designed to reduce wasteful competition between London and Portsmouth. Places that suffered a reduced frequency in service, such as Chichester and Arundel, might have had few inhabitants, but they included a duke and a bishop, both of whom protested loudly. The outcry increased in intensity during the winter, and every little breakdown – a hot axle box here, a signal failure there – seemed to find itself highlighted in the newspapers. As Hamilton Ellis put it eloquently, ‘hitherto patient season-ticket holders began to bay at the winter moon of their discontent’.8
There were indeed grounds for genuine complaint. Many of the old Brighton & South Coast and South Eastern carriages were shabby and decrepit, and the little tank engines used on these services were constantly breaking down as any available money was channelled away from routine maintenance of near-redundant stock towards the electrification programme. There was, too, the equivalent of the famous ‘wrong kind of snow’ incident that was to plague the railways for much of the 1990s: a train full of returning Orpington commuters was mistakenly routed on a different line and the furious passengers could only be brought back home after a long detour through Tonbridge. The subsequent cartoon in Punch, the Private Eye of its day, captioned ‘the train that took the wrong turning’, brought universal derision on the railway.
Fire and Steam Page 29