Eleven Minutes Late

by Matthew Engel

  Even after 1830 there was no absolute certainty that the railways would supplant the road. One of Sir Goldsworthy Gurney’s steam carriages carried 13,000 passengers between London and Brighton in 1836, and was said to touch speeds of 20mph. Gurney was not the only inventor working along these lines: Walter Hancock had versions called the Infant, ‘a great snorting vehicle’, and the Autopsy. Which was very apt. Burst boilers were a major problem on the early railway locomotives, but they were a far more alarming possibility on these carriages because the passengers were sitting directly above the boiler. The road vehicles were noisy and dirty. And the turnpike trusts imposed penal toll rates on them claiming they chewed up the roads. And so, nearly two centuries later, George Stephenson was commemorated on the five-pound note; and Goldsworthy Gurney wasn’t.

  Either way – Stephenson’s or Gurney’s – the horse-drawn coaches were now doomed. Some of the stalwarts of the coaching business, like Pickford’s, managed to jump on the gravy train, as it were, before it left the station. And some of their employees shifted nimbly across. But the aristocrats of the trade, the coachmen, could not forsake their air of command to start afresh. There is said to be no known case of a coachman becoming an engine driver. ‘Hang up my old whip over the fireplace’, Harry Littler, who held the reins of the Southampton Telegraph, allegedly cried after the London & Southampton Railway was opened in 1838, ‘I shan’t want it never no more.’ Then he fell ill, turned his face to the wall, and died.

  Yet there was very little nostalgia on the part of the public. The government paid no compensation, as they had done to the slaveowners. There was almost no attempt to preserve any of the lovingly painted and lacquered coaches. ‘Up and down the country,’ wrote David Mountfield, ‘the coaching yards fell silent, and dust gathered on the tables at the roadside inns.’ Ten years after the first train from Euston pulled into Birmingham, the last long-distance stagecoach in England, the Bedford Times, was withdrawn. The slogan inscribed on its door panels had long been Tempus Fugit. And now time really had flown.

  Those who feared the railways would spell the end of the horse were entirely mistaken though. The need for horses actually increased, both because of the needs of railway construction and for the short-haul journeys for both goods and passengers to and from the stations. Hence the late nineteenth-century prediction that by 1950 the streets of London would be six feet deep in dung.

  In Vanity Fair, Thackeray wrote a wonderful elegy for the coaching era:

  Where is the road now, and its merry incidents of life? Is old Weller alive or dead? And the waiters, yea, and the inns at which they waited, and the cold rounds of beef inside, and the stunted ostler, with his blue nose and clinking pail, where is he, and where is his generation? . . . These men and things will be as much legend and history as Nineveh, or Coeur de Lion . . . stage-coaches will have become romances.

  Actually, except for a brief nostalgic revival in the late 1860s, stagecoaches were almost totally forgotten except in the corners of the kingdom so remote that the railways never penetrated. But the names of the main stagecoaches were preserved, almost in their entirety, in a manner that became so familiar that soon no one knew how they had originated.

  These were the names of some of the leading stagecoaches leaving London in 1836:

  The Express to Hertford

  The Despatch to Aylesbury

  The Courier to Birmingham

  The Telegraph to Bishops Stortford

  The Economist to Birmingham

  The Times to Brighton

  The Star to Cambridge

  The Independent to Chichester

  The Herald to Exeter

  The Morning Star to Tunbridge Wells

  The notion of the Morning Star, now Britain’s Communist paper, heading daily to Tunbridge Wells in four and a half hours with a team of four bays, is a particularly delicious one. But in the 1820s newspapers and stagecoaches were both the height of modernity and speed. It has just taken rather longer for newspapers to be superseded, that’s all.

  I met Andy Newbery at Blisworth on a warm July evening. After I left him, I went back to Milton and drove up Barn Lane until the road peters out. Then I tramped past fields high with ripening barley to find the old farm crossing. Now there is a huge steel footbridge complete with graffiti that would not look out of place in The Bronx. The wires sway in the summer breeze and, with only momentary warnings, the Virgin Pendolinos sweep through.

  They are faster than the Royal Scot, just as the first trains were faster than the stagecoaches. We mourn our lost steam engines, and our lost childhood. Except in the memories of writers like Thackeray and a few disgruntled coachmen, the coaching age vanished without trace. It’s all very puzzling.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  MONKWEARMOUTH

  Monkwearmouth is an area of Sunderland of – how can one put it? – limited appeal to the visitor. It has the city’s improbably named new football ground, the Stadium of Light, and not a great deal else. St Peter’s Church was founded in AD 674; unfortunately the Vikings destroyed most of the building.

  But there is something quite exceptional and striking: here in the midst of this hard city is an extraordinary classical building in russet-coloured stone with a huge four-column Ionic portico that would not look out of place in Pall Mall. Indeed, Pevsner compares it to ‘a provincial Athenaeum’. This was the railway station, built in 1848 by the local MP, George Hudson, who happened to control this particular railway and much of the rest of the infant network besides. He was anxious to keep his constituents sweet, his passengers happy, and his vanity massaged.

  The building is now a museum and, inside the ticket hall, Hudson – as painted by the fashionable portraitist Sir Francis Grant – looks down with both the air and the sideburns of Harry Secombe playing Mr Bumble. Hudson never did get the knighthood or, indeed, the dukedom to which he might once have aspired. In the popular reckoning, he was more than that: he was The Railway King.

  Hudson is a largely forgotten figure now, yet he bestrode the narrow world of the 1840s. This brand new industry was transforming the country, and he was its dominant, and certainly most dynamic, figure. One almost fancies one can hear him speaking, since he was a familiar type: an up-by-his-bootstraps Yorkshireman – short, stocky, pugnacious, abrasive, arrogant, domineering, chippy, ostentatious, uncouth. He was crooked too. Or as Lord Macaulay put it: ‘a bloated, vulgar, insolent, purse-proud, greedy, drunken, blackguard’.

  Hudson was an exemplar of a theory of mine that for a charlatan to storm the British establishment, it helps (as with Robert Maxwell or Jeffrey Archer) to be an outrageously obvious one. His reign was brief: he rose to power in 1841 when he knocked heads together, persuading eight separate companies to forget their differences and build a crucial section of line from Darlington to Newcastle. He was deposed in 1849 when his financial chicanery was exposed. In the meantime he had been powerful enough to lead the successful opposition to William Gladstone who, as a young president of the Board of Trade, had contemplated nationalizing the railways. And he was able to substitute his own charisma and instincts for even a semblance of normal business practice. ‘I will have no statistics on my railway!’ he is said to have roared at one meeting.

  The question that divides biographers is whether Hudson was a rogue, or just a scamp. Were his machinations a mere detail compared to the energy and determination so crucial to linking the unconnected strands of Britain’s early railways into something vaguely approaching a coherent whole?

  The more important question is why it should ever have been left to the likes of Hudson to create the network. The railways were the most powerful invention the world had yet seen. They were already transforming the countryside, the economy and the lives of the people. The British government – alone in Europe, almost alone in the world – concluded that, in such circumstances, it was its solemn duty to stand and watch.

  It happened that the initial growth of the railways coincided with the peak of the po
litical and intellectual power of laissez-faire, the belief that everyone is better off if capitalists are left alone to get on with making money. As seen from Britain, excessive government had been a catastrophic failure in the late eighteenth century: British official idiocy had caused the American revolution, while the French revolution had produced tyranny and terror. That was one factor.

  And by now the notion of economic individualism had been given intellectual coherence by David Ricardo and mutated into what is often called ‘classical economics’. Ricardo’s first political disciple was William Huskisson, but his ideas found their clearest political expression in the Anti-Corn Law League, the campaign against tariffs on imported corn led from Manchester by Richard Cobden and John Bright.

  The Corn Laws were gradually abolished in the late 1840s, but only after about one million people had starved to death in the Irish famine, unable to afford any other food when the potato crop failed. The restraint on free trade was seen to be the mass murderer, although the truly lethal combination was the tariff on one side and non-intervention on the other.

  This is a confusing era for modern students, since Cobden and Bright were called ‘radicals’. Yet their supporters – the increasingly powerful northern industrial bourgeoisie – were the least likely to support the kind of reforms that might stop children being sent up chimneys or railway navvies being continually blown to bits.

  They also financed and pioneered the railways (even some of the southern companies relied on northern brass). And they were the last people to want the government meddling in their business. Yet building a railway was an inherently political activity. Until 1856, a parliamentary act was required to form any limited liability company. Some plans were approved; some weren’t – the process was whimsical, depending more on shifting parliamentary alliances than intrinsic merit.

  There were voices raised in favour of greater government control, but these also tended to be confusing and improbable ones, such as the Marquis of Londonderry, given the credit for first suggesting, in 1836, that railways should revert to the public after twenty years. Londonderry particularly opposed those railways that were ‘most prejudicial to the landed interest’. And the Duke of Wellington argued that ‘the public should be secured in deriving those advantages from these speculations which it had the right to expect’, which sounds suspiciously socialistic coming from the leading reactionary of the day. But then Wellington loathed the railways: he had seen enough blood shed in his life before witnessing Huskisson’s fatal accident.

  The chief supporter in the Commons of greater control was James Morrison, a liberal but mega-rich industrialist who sat for Ipswich. In 1836 he tried to introduce a bill giving parliament the power to regulate the companies’ fares and charges every twenty or thirty years, which hardly sounds draconian. Yet, complained the Leeds Whig Edward Baines: ‘there never was a measure more obnoxious to the majority of the House.’ The other voice in favour of railway nationalization was that of the splendidly eccentric Colonel Sibthorp, MP for Lincoln, who was in favour of taking over railways the better to annihilate them and bring back the stagecoach.

  The King and the Crash

  William Gladstone would also have nationalized the railways if he could. And at the Board of Trade he fathered the 1844 Regulation of Railways Act which brought in various measures to curtail the new industry’s abuses. It included a near-exact copy of Londonderry’s suggestion, allowing companies to pass into public ownership after twenty-one years.

  But it was never invoked: even Sir Robert Peel, the prime minister, seemed to regard the idea as rather unsporting. And the thundering profits made in the early years (the Stockton & Darlington actually paid fifteen per cent dividends) soon declined, which reduced the pressure. In any case, the law only applied to future lines and by then many of England’s main lines had already been built and were therefore exempt.

  The 1844 act emerged in the same haphazard way as everything else, even the most fundamental decision underlying railway construction: the gauge. Brunel, mastermind of the Great Western Railway, rejected George Stephenson’s gauge of 4ft 8½ in, arguing that his preferred width-measure of 7ft permitted faster, more stable and more comfortable trains, which was probably true. It also helped lock in freight customers to using his system, and no one else’s. But from a national perspective, the significant point about the gauge – and this is hardly an abstruse technicality – is that it does not matter that much which one you choose as long as the whole network has the same one. This fact seems to have struck surprisingly few people, until the inevitable day, in 1844, when the two systems met at Gloucester and everyone and everything had to change trains. With the memories of stagecoach travel still fresh, passengers were stoical about the inconvenience. But merchants were less stoical about the extra costs caused by the need for trans-shipment. And the live animals, now being transported in large numbers, were often very unstoical indeed when forced out of one wagon into another in some strange siding.

  Gladstone’s Act failed to impose a decision, leading to half a century of mess until the broad gauge was finally scrapped. But the act was not a complete waste of time. It placed the first silken bonds of government regulation round the necks of the companies, and these would be tightened with exquisite slowness over the decades to come. The railways were forced to stop running open-top wagons for third-class passengers (the pampered darlings), to which some responded by briefly introducing fourth class. They were also forced to run at least one comparatively cheap, daily third-class service that became known, throughout the Victorian era, as the ‘parliamentary train’, a phrase that hadn’t entirely disappeared in the 1930s.

  This was a highly significant act in establishing that the government had some kind of say in how the railways were run, even if the how, why and where they were built was to be left largely to the likes of Hudson. But, as part of the general give-and-take of the legislative process, the act also abolished a rule forcing railway promoters to deposit part of the capital before they could introduce an enabling bill into parliament. This had been a serious curb on their idlest fancies, and its abolition must be regarded as an immediate cause of what happened next. What happened next was that railway capitalism was not merely rampant, but rampaging.

  Mass hysteria can be dated back at least to Exodus chapter 32 when Aaron persuaded the children of Israel to hand over their earrings to be melted down into a worshipable golden calf. Actual speculative frenzy is generally held to have started with the Dutch tulip mania of the 1630s when whole estates were allegedly mortgaged to buy the paper ownership of a rare bulb. And in 1720, ‘the year of the Bubbles’, the French went berserk over the Mississippi Company and the British over the South Sea Company, which was going to revolutionize trade between Britain and the Americas and might have done, had the company actually possessed a boat.

  The railway mania of the mid-1840s was different from these, in that it was founded on fact: a new, successful and transformational technology. The best analogy is with the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, to which the same applies.1 After the millennium, people lost huge sums having invested in schemes to sell on-line dog food and the like. In the 1840s investors were duped into railway schemes that were quite simply dogs.

  The railways were real and potentially lucrative, for which there was a pent-up demand. This did not mean that every half-baked scheme cooked up by con-men, chancers and shysters had a future. But the history of humanity shows that, when this mood takes hold, there is no stopping it. Did any of the children of Israel have the wit to hide their jewellery?

  Britain wanted a railway network, and wanted it fast. The government had opted out of the process. Someone had to step into the breach. That someone, for a few short months in 1845, was just about everyone.

  By late 1845 those someones included: Pilbrow’s Atmospheric Railway and Canal Propulsion Company; the Great Kent Atmospheric Railway; the Wakefield, Ossett and Dews-bury Direct and Atmospheric; the Gloucester, A
berystwyth and Central Wales (‘the Committee regret that in view of the unprecedented number of applications they have been obliged to reject many of respectable character’); the Alton, Farnham and South Western Junction; the Hull and Holyhead

  Direct; the Pontop and South Shields Railway; the Direct Western Railway; the Lynn and Dereham; the Wellhouse Bay Somersetshire Midland; the Clonmel and Kilkenny; the Direct Manchester Railway; the Thames Embankment and Atmospheric Railway . . . not to mention the Jamaica, Kingston and North Midland; the Great Central Sardinian Railway; the Callao and Lima and Pacific Coast Railway; and the Great Western Railway of Bengal.

  There was also the company which placed a long and expensive announcement on the front page of The Times:

  THE GREAT EUROPEAN RAILWAYS COMPANY

  The text consisted entirely of blather (‘Most truly has it been observed that the philosophy of railroads is only now beginning to be comprehended by the universal world . . .’) unadorned by fact, such as where these railways might actually be built. The implication was that they would fill the entire continent.

  The Times was not actually fooled by this advertisement, but decided that (a) the advert was probably some kind of laboured satire – Punch had just been founded and was very fashionable – and that (b) it didn’t matter what it was as long as the cash was paid up front. The notice did not even contain the by now customary and enticing list of distinguished supporters, some of whom would know their names were included and some of whom might not.