Eleven Minutes Late

by Matthew Engel

  By the end of May there was so much railway business in the Commons that committees had to meet elsewhere. On 1 July the word ‘mania’ appeared in The Times. In August the mood was such that in Leeds the police had to be called to keep the pavement clear outside the stock exchange, and the exchange’s chairman, Mr Ridsdale, was cautioning his colleagues to ‘repress rather than foster the speculative spirit of the times’.

  And then it changed. The technical term for this stage of a mania is ‘revulsion’. It did not happen in an instant: as late as September 27 the Railway Times, one of scores of publications that had sprung up to meet the hysterical demand, carried eighty pages of advertisements for new companies. But in October the word ‘ruin’ was also mentioned. However, the promoters were in too deep. Those of them who wanted their enabling law enacted in the next parliamentary session had to lodge their documents by the end of November and were in a panic to make at least a pretence of surveying their routes: ‘Young gentlemen with theodolites and chains marched about the fields; long white sticks with bits of paper attached were carried ruthlessly through fields, gardens, and sometimes even through houses.’ Lists of new proposals appeared daily now, though some seemed like pairs of towns, grouped together at random, for euphony rather than sensible communication: the Didcot and Andover Railway; York and Lancaster; Bristol and Dover; Tring and Reigate.

  The deadline was 30 November, a Sunday. The plans had to be deposited before midnight in the clerk of the peace’s office in each county through which the proposed railway would pass. Parties of lawyers raced round the country, hiring special trains where the railways already existed, and where the companies would actually accommodate a potential rival. One group was refused tickets and had to disguise itself as a funeral party instead. A solicitor with the plan for the ‘Great West of England Railway’ arrived at the Golden Ball turnpike gate at Sherborne in a post-chaise and four in an attempt to reach the Dorset office just before the clock struck twelve. The gatekeeper was asleep, and stayed that way. The solicitor took the plans and ran – but was five minutes late.

  The Great West of England Railway got as far as informing one gentleman, without a by-your-leave or may-we, that the line would pass through his garden twenty yards from his windows, on an embankment twenty-two feet high. Other than that, no more was heard of the Great West of England, except when it appeared on a list of 879 schemes that had failed to deposit their plans and were presumed defunct – a list of glorious poetic melancholy, stretching from the Abergavenny and Monmouth, and the Alrewas and Ashby-de-la-Zouch, to the Youghall, Cork and Port Valentin. Including Pilbrow’s Atmospheric.

  The crash was dramatic, according to John Francis, a Victorian railway writer with a flair for melodrama. ‘It reached every hearth, it saddened every heart in the metropolis. Entire families were ruined. There was scarcely an important town in England but what beheld some wretched suicide. Daughters delicately nurtured went out to seek their bread. Sons were recalled from academies. Households were separated; homes were desecrated by the emissaries of the law . . .’

  There is some dispute among academics as to what extent this really happened. And the crash might just have been a passing embarrassment, other than for those stupid and greedy enough to have courted financial ruin, except for one thing. Like the public, the existing railways (or those that were close to existing or had some chance of existing) did not know precisely which of these schemes were completely phoney and which might have been a genuine competitive threat to their business. Quite often, the safest response seemed to be to take them over, with a guaranteed dividend. Thus the railway companies, who had already paid the lawyers to get their bills through parliament and the landowners to get their rails across the ground, landed themselves with another financial impediment instead of getting the licence to print money that might have been expected.

  While all this was going on, real people were building real railways. The year 1845 also saw the end of the brutal struggle to build the Woodhead Tunnel through the Pennines. Thirty-two men were reported killed in the process and 140 maimed. Though these figures are almost certainly underestimates, the social reformer Edwin Chadwick said that they made Woodhead, proportionate to the numbers involved, a bloodier battle than Talavera, Salamanca, Vittoria or Waterloo. A year later, the assistant engineer Wellington Purdon faced a Commons select committee and was asked if patent fuses were used in the blasting. Here is Terry Coleman’s account:

  ‘No,’ he said. The committee persisted. Wasn’t this sort of fuse safer? Purdon made his celebrated reply. ‘Perhaps it is; but it is attended with such a loss of time, and the difference is so very small, I would not recommend the loss of time for the sake of all the extra lives it would save.’

  Hard bastards like Purdon made railways happen. And through the late 1840s the tentacles spread and spread. In 1848 alone, more than 1,000 miles of track were opened, taking the network to over 5,000. And enough genuine companies emerged from the mania to ensure that by 1854, within nine years of it ending – nine years! – just about every town or city of substance in Britain had a railway connection. And amidst all the dross thrown up by the mania, one line stood out: the London & York Railway. This was the basis of what became the Great Northern and is now the East Coast Main Line from King’s Cross.

  In financial terms, Leeds was the city that supposedly lost most from the mania. Francis claimed that, while the police were clearing the hordes from the streets, shares selling in London for £21 sold in Leeds for more than £25. So much for the canny Tykes. But one Tyke came through the first phase unbroken. George Hudson correctly foresaw what was to prove an inexorable trend in British railway history for the next hundred years: a continual process of amalgamation into larger and larger units, a process that Victorian governments could never quite decide if they were for or against. However, Hudson incorrectly imagined this would be happening under his aegis and control.

  In August 1845, when madness was endemic, he was involved in an epic by-election in Sunderland, where he fought off a high-profile free trade candidate and then sent a special train to London so the news of his victory could spread as fast as possible. As a politician, Hudson was as big a windbag as any other Victorian, with an extra coating of humbug: ‘They tell you, gentlemen, that I want to rob and injure the poor. God forbid I should do any such thing!’

  As a railway magnate, he was soon staring at trouble, not from the excesses of the mania, but from his own relentless ambition. He seemed to have it all now: several estates in Yorkshire, one of the best town houses in London, and a portfolio of companies that mutated into the Midland Railway. But he didn’t have a route into London, and the inexorable progress of the Great Northern, which was beyond his grasp, threatened to block his way. Then he had what appeared to be a lucky break.

  The inchoate line into East Anglia, the Eastern Counties Railway, had been a basket case since it opened and lacked the money to expand. Hudson saw this as his way from York to London, taking an easterly path through Lincoln and Cambridge. He took over as chairman of the Eastern Counties, where he followed his instincts and started ruthlessly cutting costs. But in 1846 a fatal crash at Stratford caused by an inexperienced driver led to Hudson’s methods being exposed. And his other habits were also starting to attract attention.

  The previous year a letter-writer to The Times, using the modest pseudonym A London Trader, had denounced Hudson’s ‘villainous juggling’ with figures, using formidable statistical evidence to back him up. Whatever sort of trader this was, he probably wasn’t a Seven Dials barrow boy. Then, in 1848, a pamphleteer called Arthur Smith accused Hudson of paying dividends out of capital rather than revenue, dubious then, illegal now. The allegations mounted, and it became clear that his kingdom was built on manipulation and embezzlement. With railway shares now languishing, Hudson had no chance of even beginning to buy his way out of trouble. He lost control of his companies and retired to one of his estates, saved only from arrest for debt by h
is parliamentary immunity; understandably, he took to drink, a fact that was obvious on the rare occasions he appeared in the Commons.

  But Hudson had promised Sunderland a dock, and that he delivered, which was enough to keep him an MP until 1859. After that, he had to go into exile, a shabby figure hanging pathetically round the docks at Boulogne, hoping to meet old friends. ‘Surely I know that man,’ said Charles Dickens to a companion as he returned from a trip to Paris. ‘I should think you did,’ whispered the other. ‘Hudson!’

  The passage of time made the establishment not merely forgetful but forgiving. In 1865 Hudson dared to come back and was duly arrested. But his creditors relented (he couldn’t pay them, anyway), his admirers raised a small annuity, he rented a modest house in London with his wife and was readmitted to the Carlton Club, eventually becoming chairman of the smoking room. The bell tolled at York Minster when his coffin passed by.

  Railway historians mostly err on the side of kindness towards the old rascal, because they like the railways and he built them. But the most pertinent comment came in a leader in The Times on Hudson’s death in 1871:

  Looking back to the 1840s and Sir Robert Peel’s then distant premiership, it noted:

  He [Peel] decided on free trade in railway enterprise . . . unlimited competition . . . fierce parliamentary battles, useless branches, suicidal rivalry in traffic, and all that chiefly marks the railway system up to the present time.

  Undoubtedly the non-interference allowed the activity of speculators full play, and England obtained a complete series of railways at an earlier period than would otherwise have been the case . . . But at what a cost all this was done! Consider the sums wasted in British railways, and judge whether it can be said that the system adds to our reputation as a prudent and business-like people. George Hudson was the creature of such a system.

  Even the French Pay Homage

  In 1834 Peel had been summoned back from holiday in Rome to form a new Conservative government. His administration (120 days) lasted longer than his journey (34 days), but not by much. Europe by then was just trying to work out its response to the British invention that would make it possible to get from Rome to London in a couple of days, and start to give future politicians the first inkling of the modern delusion that they are indispensable.

  Britain’s achievement was the talk of Europe. And governments were trying to work out how to adapt this remarkable British innovation to their countries. You can see the effect of Britain’s initial lead more clearly than ever these days. When Eurostar trains cross the Channel, they do not have to switch sides like cars; in a discreet act of homage, both the French and the Belgians made an early decision that their trains, unlike their road vehicles, would follow the British example and take the left-hand track.2 And virtually every country in Europe chose its gauge to match Stephenson’s.

  Belgium was the quickest to respond. The country had only formally come into existence in 1831, after a rebellion against Dutch rule and – then as now – it had no real unity or obvious purpose. Its first king, Leopold I, saw railways as the means of making sense of his quirky little country, which was also desperately in need of a reliable means of exporting its coal. In 1834 its parliament voted unanimously to draw up a national plan of where the railways should go. Ten years later it was more or less achieved. And the consequences of this are still in place. The country seethes with suppressed hatred, and the residents of prosperous Flemish-speaking Antwerp have almost nothing to say to the French-speaking citizens of rundown Charleroi. But you can still get from one to the other by fast, direct trains every half-hour.

  France also had a national railway programme, though in the early years the network of relationships involved – between central government, local authorities and private companies – was more complex than the actual system itself. Not surprisingly, development was slow. It was the 1850s before a proper spider’s web of lines took shape, with Paris at the centre. Douai in northern France acquired a station in 1846 but it was so quiet for the first few years that it was used for ball games. Again, the consequences are there today. France has great trains from Paris, but the service between, for instance, Bordeaux and Lyons is non-existent.

  Germany was not even a country as such at the time. But it built its system quickly and cheaply, with a mixture of state and private capital, at about a quarter of the cost of Britain’s. Prussia took the lead, and trains played a crucial role in economic development: there were few roads in the countryside in 1840. Prussian obsessions pervaded the railways, for good and ill. Both the postal and railway service were run like a peacetime army: ‘three-quarters of a million men who stood stiff at attention when their superior spoke to them’. Company directors were often generals. Of course, the trains were efficient and punctual and, underlying the construction of the lines, there was the thought of potential military use. And the effects of the nineteenth century have not disappeared there either. German railway employees slouch around like anyone else these days, and no longer take their orders from the Imperial General Staff. But their trains are still magnificent.

  Nineteenth-century British travellers found that funny foreign railways had their peculiarities. At the start of the journey, the French forced passengers to hand over their luggage, which then had to be carefully examined before it would be given back. ‘The examination of luggage is necessarily tedious and annoying,’ advised The Railway Traveller’s Handy Book of Hints, Suggestions and Advice in 1862, ‘and a person wishing to escape it should leave the matter in the hands of his servant’.

  Second-class on German railways, it went on, was so comfortable that there was no point in travelling first-class except to avoid the universal habit of smoking. Luggage regulations there, not surprisingly, were rigidly enforced. Accommodation in Austria was ‘indifferent’, Dutch trains were ‘liberally conducted’ (which presumably did not mean the use of marijuana was permitted), while Belgian first-class was ‘luxurious’. However, the author did not recommend Belgian second-class to ladies because of a shortage of doors: ‘The seats . . . have to be clambered over in the most awkward and indelicate fashion’.

  Having adopted the gauge and in some cases the left-hand rule of the road, none of these countries sought to emulate Britain’s let-a-hundred-flowers-bloom approach to building the system. Sweden briefly got itself entangled with John Sadleir, a fraudster-MP like Hudson who, as chairman of the Royal Swedish Railway Company, issued himself with 20,000 extra shares. On discovery in 1856, he poisoned himself on Hampstead Heath. And the Swedish government then decided to build and operate its main lines on its own, thank you very much.

  The only other country that proceeded in anything like the British manner was the United States, where federalism, size and the national culture made government control improbable. Often American railroads really were cheap and cheerful: rickety lines thrown across the prairies where there were no snotty aristocrats to try to out-greed the railroad barons (which would have been some feat), merely the Indians and buffalo whose role was to be shot at and stay dead.

  The cheerfulness was a necessity because the distances were so vast and the trains so slow that the cold comforts of early European trains would have been beyond human endurance. No American was going to travel hundreds of miles without access to food and a toilet. American luxury – epitomized by the Pullman car – eventually spread across the world. But the infrastructure rotted, producing a railway that became the reverse of the British one: vital for shifting bulk freight across the continent, but almost wholly useless for passengers.

  The Americans are credited with beating even the Germans to the first use of a train for transporting troops. In 1831 Brigadier-General Steuart and a hundred volunteers left Baltimore to quell a riot by railroad workers. Meanwhile, in Germany and indeed France, the generals busily involved themselves with railway planning. In Britain, the government did not bother to give itself the right to commandeer trains for troops until 1844.

  The mi
litary possibilities offered by railways were obvious. Less obvious, perhaps, was the potential for total fiasco. In 1850 the Austrians moved 75,000 troops, 1,000 carriages and 8,000 horses to the Silesian frontier. ‘Due to shortage of rolling-stock and staff, bad weather and lack of previous arrangement, the 150-mile journey took twenty-six days,’ according to Ernest F. Carter, author of Railways in Wartime. Not merely could they have marched the distance quicker, the men could have had a fortnight’s leave as well. Britain’s approach may have been crazy, but no one should imagine every other country was getting things exactly right.

  Casson’s Alternative Universe

  So what if? What if Gladstone had triumphed over Hudson in 1844? What if Britain had constructed a logical and efficient railway system, to the specifications of a professor of economics, say, and not one that depended on, for example, whether the keeper of the turnpike-gate at Sherborne was awake or not?

  There was one last chance for something like this to happen. Lord Dalhousie, first as Gladstone’s deputy at the Board of Trade and then as his successor as board president, tried to establish a system of that sort, based on detailed regional investigations of the competing mania schemes. MPs, more spirited then than now, saw him off, preferring to do battle for their own local interests.

  It would be more than 160 years before anyone dared make the attempt again. In his capacity as professor of economics at Reading University and a business historian, Mark Casson has recently considered conventional academic wisdom about the issue. This holds that the problems of Britain’s railways can be traced back to the initial lack of planning and the inefficiencies that resulted, especially in the duplication of main lines. He concluded that ‘the inefficiencies were not only large, but larger than anyone has ever suggested before’.