Eleven Minutes Late

by Matthew Engel

  ELEVEN MINUTES LATE

  MATTHEW ENGEL wrote for the Guardian for a quarter of a century on everything from terrorism to tiddlywinks, and is now the least fiscally aware columnist on the Financial Times. For twelve years he was also editor of Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack. Together with his wife Hilary, he founded the Teenage Cancer Trust Laurie Engel Fund, in memory of their son who died in 2005, aged thirteen. His other books include Extracts from the Red Notebooks, published to raise money for the fund. They live in Herefordshire with their daughter Vika.

  Also by Matthew Engel

  available from Pan Macmillan

  Extracts from the Red Notebooks

  MATTHEW ENGEL

  ELEVEN MINUTES LATE

  A Train Journey to the Soul of Britain

  PAN BOOKS

  First published 2009 by Macmillan

  This edition first published 2010 by Pan Books

  This electronic edition published 2010 by Pan Books

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

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  ISBN 978-0-230-74042-6 in Adobe Reader format

  ISBN 978-0-230-74041-9 in Adobe Digital Editions format

  ISBN 978-0-230-74043-3 in Mobipocket format

  Copyright © Matthew Engel 2009

  The right of Matthew Engel to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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  TO GEOFFREY MOORHOUSE

  (1931–2009)

  friend, mentor, uncomplaining traveller

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE GOBOWEN

  ONE NEWTON-LE-WILLOWS

  The Death of a Dithering Politician . . .

  And the Birth of a Very Strange Relationship

  TWO PENZANCE

  First-class, Second-class, 143rd class

  The Slow Train North

  The Even Slower Train Further North

  In Breach of Regulations

  THREE BLISWORTH

  Spoiling the Shires, Ruining the Squires

  The Great Wall of China? A Doddle!

  And the Dust Gathered on the Tables

  FOUR MONKWEARMOUTH

  The King and the Crash

  Even the French Pay Homage

  Casson’s Alternative Universe

  Fear and Loving

  So Excessively Improper

  Every Fool in Buxton

  A Note on Sex

  FIVE THE BRIDGES

  It’s Safer with Jesse James

  ‘I’m Afraid I’ve Wrecked the Scotch Express’

  What if Somebody Speaks?

  Blood-stained Hands, Cold Feet

  The Arrogance of Power

  SIX NORBITON AND SURBITON

  Faster, Cheaper, Plusher

  The Absurdity! The Impertinence!

  The Knights were Still Bold

  It’s Cheaper via New York

  SEVEN CARNFORTH

  ‘Your Majesty, It Cannot Be Done’

  Aunt Sally’s Triumph

  Fur Coat, No Knickers

  Better Never than Late

  To Milford Junction, via Blood and Tears

  EIGHT MELTON CONSTABLE

  It’s A Disgrace. Let’s Buy It!

  The Billion Pound Hotchpotch

  A Drug-like Fascination

  The End of Civilization

  No More Will I Go to Blandford Forum . . .

  Last of the Cast-Iron Bastards

  A Strange Enchantment

  NINE PENTONVILLE ROAD

  The Slim Controller

  Not Even a Choc-Ice

  Oh, no, he wouldn’t

  TEN THURSO

  Splendour, Splendour Almost Everywhere

  Reality Bites

  As I Was Going to St Ives

  Umerji

  Paddington

  AFTERWORD

  The author regrets to announce

  The author is pleased to add

  A note on abbreviations

  A note on sources

  Index

  PROLOGUE

  GOBOWEN

  Like so many of its nineteenth-century counterparts, the old railway town of Oswestry, on the Shropshire-Welsh border, no longer has a railway.

  Since 1966 the stopping-off place has been the little village station of Gobowen, about three miles away, conveniently placed mainly for an indifferent-looking pub called the Hart and Trumpet, whose local nickname is easy enough to guess. If your mind works that way.

  The station at Oswestry was and still is, in its sad, redundant way, rather grand. Along with many others, it is described in Gordon Biddle’s guide, Britain’s Historic Railway Buildings, as ‘Italianate’; in most cases the Italian influence must have been clearer to the architect than to the average passenger. Gobowen is different. ‘Incomparable,’ Biddle calls it. ‘A delightfully detailed Florentine villa.’

  The buildings are in white stucco, very nicely restored. On a spring morning it is easy to imagine the signora emerging on to the platform into the strengthening Tuscan sun, perhaps to pluck a lemon to pep up her husband’s evening scallopine. She is played – in my fancy – by Juliette Binoche: raven-haired, sleepy-eyed, an unpretentious floral print dress drawn tight at the bodice in a manner that would also enliven his dinner.

  Gobowen acquired its own modest celebrity in railway circles because, in the 1990s, a group of girls from nearby Moreton Hall School took over the ticket office under the aegis of their geography teacher, David Lloyd, and yanked the place out of its decaying torpor. David Lloyd is dead now; the schoolgirls have dispersed where schoolgirls go; and there is no sign of Juliette Binoche either. Instead, a slightly disdainful-looking woman presides over the ticket office, which would have the atmosphere of a public library were it not for the presence of what must be the loudest digital clock in Shropshire, clunking away the seconds until the arrival of the 0744 to Marylebone.

  But what an arrival! For this is no ordinary train. It is a new enterprise, as striking as the revival of the station, operated not by schoolgirls but by the Wrexham, Shropshire and Marylebone Railway. This splendid Victorian-sounding name disguises what should be the height of modernity, a train that specifically owes its existence to the privatization of the railways, a process completed by John Major’s Conservative government in 1997, months before the voters ejected it from office with overwhelming force.

  So, there we were in 2008, a mere eleven years later, awaiting one of the fruits of that most contentious legislation: an ‘open access’ train, one that neither British Rail, in its dying fall, nor its successor franchisees could or would contemplate – a direct link from Wrexham, through Gobowen and the Marches, to London, something that had not existed for more than forty years.

  The train has been provided not by the official franchisees but by outside entrepreneur
s, who had negotiated the thorn-plagued thickets that constitute the privatized British railway business and gained permission to run up to five trains a day in each direction. Here was capitalism at its most beautiful. Anyone can run their own train: I can do it, you can do it. In this case, Deutsche Bahn, the nationalized German railway, was at the head of the consortium doing it.

  This was only the third example of open access to emerge since 1997. One of the others, Hull Trains, was run by the ubiquitous First Group; the other, Grand Central, operating out of Sunderland, already looked troubled. But still it was a fine notion. Open access!

  There was perhaps a good reason why the organizations that already had access had not thought of putting on such a train. This was because it was taking four and a half hours from Wrexham to London. Even if you spent the night alongside Juliette Binoche amid the lemon groves of Gobowen, it would still be quicker to get to London by driving to Liverpool and catching the Virgin train from there. Deutsche Bahn, which is not entirely stupid, was said to be interested in ‘positioning’.

  So not many people were waiting for the 0744. But what a treat everyone else missed. It came out of Wrexham General, the last station in the country still to be known as ‘General’, which makes it sound more bustling than it actually is and gives it a hint of the 1950s. Like the train itself.

  The engine was a Class 67 diesel, the locomotive entrusted with those other survivors, the Royal Train and the Fort William sleeper. It was pulling old inter-city stock, slightly shop-soiled, offering a sense of spaciousness in an era filled with hurry and rush. It felt too as though we were traversing a more spacious railway network through a more spacious country. I waited for wisps of smoke to pass the window, and a shrill steam-engine whistle. All the carriages were inviting but I sat in first-class to relish all the possibilities. The Times and the Guardian were both offered free. It should have been the Manchester Guardian. Perhaps they had news of Sputnik? Had there been a good hanging lately? That Gilbert Harding’s not been getting himself in trouble again, has he?

  And there was food, something regarded as an absurd frippery by most modern railway companies. ‘Our menus are especially designed to bring you the finest fresh produce, all sourced from the Wrexham and Shropshire route,’ said the blurb. I chose the Arbroath lemon kipper, in Ms Binoche’s honour. It was a bit soapy but, one way and another, I was too enchanted to care.

  Our course was so circuitous that it’s entirely possible that Arbroath really was on the Wrexham and Shropshire route. We certainly stopped at Tame Bridge Parkway, though it wasn’t clear to me whether we were crossing the Tame near Birmingham, the one in Manchester or the one that flows into the Tees. Or maybe it was the Tamar? We could rule out the Thames: we were still a heck of a way from London.

  The company had not got permission to pick up passengers at Wolverhampton, or even to stop officially at Birmingham New Street or Birmingham International, the most substantial stations on the way. To avoid temptation at New Street, we took a most extraordinary set of back-doubles round the city, the sort of passage you might expect from an expert taxi driver rather than a railway train. These lines must previously have been known only unto God and the most zealous of experts. We saw Birmingham’s limited supply of great tourist attractions, passing both football grounds: Villa Park and St Andrews. Gosh, is that Spaghetti Junction over there? Oh, look, there’s an old fridge by the track. Shall I nip off, pick it up and clamber back aboard? There was time enough at this pace.

  We did stop at Birmingham International, though the doors remained shut. Bewildered passengers on the platform asked who and what we were, as they do when the Orient Express or a steam special comes through. At Banbury we stopped but again could not pick up, merely put down anyone who chose this method of getting from Wrexham and Shropshire to Banbury, instead of using a cock horse. Hereabouts we picked up a little speed and, if I hadn’t been paying attention, I might easily have missed the graffiti just south of Haddenham and Thame Parkway (which I don’t think is the same as Tame Bridge Parkway): BRING BACK STEAM, it said.

  I almost thought we had.

  It was only the WS&M’s fourth week of operation, and it was just getting started. By now the staff should be putting less soap in the kippers. The 2009 timetable was somewhat more urgent.1 Wi-fi was said to be imminent, though I still think a telex machine might have been more appropriate; maybe some facility for the guard to telegraph ahead. This was the kind of train Prince Albert could have appreciated. As he said, after one of his earliest journeys on the Great Western, barrelling through the Berkshire countryside at more than 40mph: ‘Not so fast next time, Mr Conductor, please.’ This company does have a genuine sense of history too: it has named an engine after David Lloyd.

  It was the sort of journey John Major ought to have been envisaging when he dickered with bringing back some version of the ‘Big Four’, the pre-war regionally based companies that he felt constituted the apogee of the British railway experience. Do I mock? Yes, but I feel very very mean about it. On its home ground Deutsche Bahn is, in my experience, magnificent. Its British subsidiary, Chiltern Railways, through whose territory we were now passing, has shown ever since privatization a remarkable, indeed matchless, commitment to making its train service better for its passengers. And in truth I cannot remember when I felt quite as relaxed and contented on a British train. I didn’t want the journey to end. All my life I have loved travelling on trains, at least in theory. I was never a trainspotter (good heavens, no, not me, the very idea), and later on I’ll prove it. But I have always been with Edna St Vincent Millay on this:

  My heart is warm with friends I make,

  And better friends I’ll not be knowing;

  Yet there isn’t a train I’d rather take,

  No matter where it’s going.

  She was a woman and an American, and could get away with sentiments like that. It’s harder when you’re a British male and have to deal with the psychological baggage connected with trains that has been lurking in the national subconscious ever since the railway was invented. I think I’ll prove that later too.

  But whenever I have had the chance or the choice I have taken the train. Lucky enough to have found newspapers daft enough to employ me and send me round the world, I have always quietly sneaked away on days off and found the railway station. I have even occasionally persuaded employers to send me abroad to take trains. I rode one of the last regular Canadian Pacific trains from Montreal over the Rockies to Vancouver before they closed the route: three days of pure bliss in a womb-like compartment amid the most extraordinary company, all lovely, all a little batty.

  Later, the photographer Sean Smith and I became the first people, I’m convinced of it, to go from London to Berlin entirely by train: the Channel Tunnel was not open officially and everyone else being offered freebies was just going to Paris, having a long lunch and wandering round the shops. We went via Berlin to Hel (in Poland). And back, for the hel of it.2

  Sitting in quiet, comfortable railway carriages I have felt the cares of the world melt away in the most careworn places – in the Karoo Desert of South Africa in the 1970s, with the smuts from the funnel of a great Garratt loco snowing through the open window (the past lingered there, with a steam engine at the front and non-whites confined to the back).

  In Cairo I remember being overwhelmed by black-clad Moslem women so desperate to grab a seat that they ignored the doors and swallow-dived through the windows. In total contrast, I rode another segregated train in a country with the initials SA – from Riyadh to Dammam, on the eve of the first Gulf War, with unaccompanied women barred, and accompanied women confined to special compartments. Husbands, brothers, fathers and sons were their only acceptable companions under Rule 1 of the Saudi Government Railroad Organization. This rule was in place, my neighbour explained, not because the Saudis did not respect women. ‘Maybe we respect them too much,’ he said.

  I did meet a girl on the little diesel that winds its way from
the Indian plains up to the cool of Simla. And I spent a most blissful day on the toy train that used to jog amiably through the achingly beautiful Jamaican hills from the slums of Kingston to the lapping waters of Montego Bay, picking up hawkers and trying to avoid goats, until too much of it was washed away by Hurricane Gilbert in 1988, and the line was abandoned for ever.

  The ride doesn’t even have to be scenically spectacular. All I have ever wanted has been calm, outer and inner. My happiest journey of all was a Sunday morning ride from Amsterdam to Paris. Six hours, I think. Damn-all to see, unless you count Belgium. An empty compartment; a guard occasionally offering coffee; an engaging novel. But one country always seemed to be absent from the list of happy journeys. In Britain I’m usually rushing to get somewhere. That didn’t apply that springtime morning in Gobowen. All I was doing was writing a book.

  I decided to write it one frosty morning in early 2007. I was travelling, as I often do, from Newport to Paddington – an hour earlier than strictly necessary because defensive travel has become an important shield against the vagaries of Britain’s railways. That day, a prime spot on the Radio 4 Today programme, the first prize in the lottery of British lobbying, had been given over to a man with the unmemorable name of Anthony Smith, the chief executive of something called Passenger Focus, which purports to represent railway passengers.

  Smith is appointed by the board of Passenger Focus which in turn is appointed by the government. This book will look in some detail at the role of successive British governments in the history of rail travel. At this stage, let’s just say this puts Smith roughly in the position of a court-appointed defence lawyer in a Soviet show trial. He is allowed to put in the odd word on behalf of his clients – and indeed is frequently quoted in the news media – provided he does not do so too vigorously. In the Soviet Union that would have got him shot. This being Britain, it would merely endanger his OBE. Smith means well and is a cogent analyst of railway problems. But he is not exactly Mr Forceful and, on this occasion, he seemed to have forgotten which side he was on, and spent one of the most coveted slots in British broadcasting criticizing the train operators for not collecting fares with sufficient vigour.