In their twenty-five years of existence these new initials, LMS, LNER and SR, never did attract much loyalty from either staff or customers. A quarter-century was no time at all to get established. (To this day, the old railway bridge over the Ribble at Preston is known as the North Union Bridge, although the North Union Railway was taken over in 1846.)
The rates and fares set by the new companies were heavily regulated, with maximums that were now meaningless given falling prices, and an inherent inflexibility that made it almost impossible for them to compete. Strapped for cash for investment, facing obstreperous workers and a rapidly deteriorating competitive position, they were indeed born with all the disadvantages that attended bastard children in that era.
The coal and mineral traffic, the bedrock of railway freight, could not switch to road – but these industries were now stagnating. And soon passenger numbers began to be hit by the growth of buses and long-distance coaches and the first shiny new motors that began to appear, to the envy of the neighbours, on streets all over the country. The ‘Big Four’, their prices constrained by government controls, were like tethered giants, perpetually being taunted by the Lilliputian upstarts who had the freedom of the open road.
What a miserable life they led. The 1926 General Strike again chipped away at the notion of the railways’ indispen-sability. And in 1931, at the LMS’s annual meeting, the chairman, Sir Josiah Stamp, issued an even gloomier report than usual (‘heavy decline in receipts’) then took a sideswipe at the tormenters. ’In my opinion, road transport should be made liable for the whole of the costs it involves,’ he said, ‘and not be placed in a more favourable position than the railways.’ It has been the cry of the beleaguered railway manager ever since.
Geddes had blithely predicted huge savings from the mergers, but the new companies were barely profitable. What no one in the government ever did, or ever had done, was to consider what the railways were for.
All the new companies were good at something. Sir Josiah, despite his uncompromisingly Victorian name, was an enthusiast for modern American business practices and management accounting, precisely the kind of cost control the LMS’s predecessor company, the London & North Western, had contemptuously rejected thirty years earlier. The LNER and the Southern avoided paying dividends, but the one invested heavily in faster trains on its main line to the north, and the other embarked on a huge campaign of third-rail electrification that was the salvation of the London commuter belt: by 1933 London to Brighton took only an hour.
The Great Western was the most adept of all at selling not just itself, but its region. In the twentieth century, the west country became seen as the most uniformly desirable part of Britain – soft airs, soft climate, soft countryside, soft accents. That had not been true in the early days of railways. In 1857, even Bradshaw’s Monthly Descriptive Guide could not bring itself to sell the product:
Cornwall, from its soil, appearance and climate, is one of the least inviting of the English counties. A ridge of bare and rugged hills, intermixed with bleak moors, runs through the midst of its whole length, and exhibits the appearance of a dreary waste.
Fishermen’s cottages in Padstow were pretty cheap in the 1850s. And it’s still true that Cornwall looks dull from the main line, but that is not how it is perceived. ‘The GWR set out to develop this image of the West Country as a desirable place, using luxurious images in its advertising,’ explained Professor Colin Divall. ‘In the 1920s and 30s, they realized that if they didn’t do that they would go under against road competition.’
‘The car had a cachet but the real competitor was the coach. Once you get pneumatic tyres and improved suspension you start to get some fairly serious long-distance road services. So the rail companies really did start marketing. All the companies used the word “customer” in the 1920s.’
The Big Four also showed some skill at putting their best face forward. Every self-respecting schoolboy used to know that Sir Nigel Gresley’s streamlined LNER Class A4 4468 Mallard broke the world record for a steam locomotive by reaching 126mph south of Grantham in 1938. They were probably not aware that it travelled at that speed for just a single second, going downhill, that it was a deliberate record run milked by the publicity department, and that the engine never even made it back to King’s Cross because the big end went long before Peterborough.
And that remains the world record, which is a pretty good indication of the limitations of steam in the modern world. Ten years after the war, even the expresses were slower than they had been before it. The frontline trains from Euston and King’s Cross did eventually get faster, averaging just over half the speed of Mallard (which could have gone much faster, just as meaningfully, over a cliff).
The Flying Scotsman acquired the ability to run non-stop from King’s Cross to Edinburgh thanks to the invention by Gresley, the LNER’s chief mechanical engineer, of the corridor tender to allow a relief crew to nip through into the locomotive. By 1935 he was able to run the Silver Jubilee the 270 miles to Newcastle in four hours, and eventually the more lumbering LMS brought in the Coronation Scot. The chief mechanical engineers – Gresley, Stanier, Collett, Bulleid – became almost as well-known as the contractors had been in Victorian times. And the companies did offer both new luxury and new ideas.
There were trains with audio in the headrest, offering a selection of gramophone records; a cocktail bar (‘thirty-two different cocktails’) on the Flying Scotsman; and, on some King’s Cross to Leeds services, a Pathé cinema van showing ‘topical and other films’. The 1930s was also the era when all the companies followed the Great Western, and produced the Art Deco posters, much cherished today, advertising the charms of, for instance, a Southport lido full of improbably gorgeous bathing belles.
‘It was a golden age for the railway,’ said an auctioneer, trying to flog one of the posters in 2006. No, it was not. It was a golden age for the railway poster. And it was this classic misjudgment that still distorts the folk-memory of the railway before nationalization in 1948 and which led John Major towards his fateful decision to break up British Rail. The elite expresses sped past thousands of slow, dirty trains carrying disgruntled commuters dreaming of a new motor car. This was especially true outside London, where passengers got little benefit from the ‘sparks effect’ which bumped up business on the newly electrified lines. The Manchester Guardian letters column was full of complaints along these lines. To use an old Lancastrianism, what Britain had was a fur-coat-and-no-knickers railway, the opulence of the show disguising the threadbare reality underneath.
What the railways had was the worst of both worlds: bastard nationalization, as Banbury had said. The companies were too large and too regulated to be nimble, with the government preventing them making cutbacks (e.g. the closure of engine sheds) that might have improved profitability but increased unemployment. Yet there was no clear commitment to the maintenance of services or a coherent investment policy. In 1931 a government committee, under the industrialist Lord Weir, proposed that this programme of electrification should be extended nationally. It was received politely, and given the traditional response used by British governments when faced with the possibility of long-term investment projects. The Times said the idea was ‘premature, to say the least’.
Well, quite so. As everyone in Whitehall knows, it is extremely important not to rush to judgment in these matters, as those excitable foreigners, the Swiss and the Swedes, had done by electrifying their lines. ‘There is very good reason to suppose that for the purposes of ordinary main-line traffic the coal-burning locomotive is still the cheapest for Great Britain,’ the Establishment’s newspaper went on. It was the British way: when in doubt, do nothing.
Better Never than Late
And yet, in spite of everything, there were still railway optimists in the years between the wars. ‘A NEW RAILWAY’ said a headline in 1922.
The plan was to build a line from Halwill Junction north through the uncharted territory of west Devon to link u
p with the branch line from Barnstaple to Torrington. It would open up the area for tourism, and help both the farmers and the china clay industry. That was the theory; the government was so impressed that it chipped in half the cost.
The North Devon & Cornwall Junction Light Railway – a name full of Victorian exuberance rather than the knowing weariness of the 1920s – duly opened for business three years later2 and the small market town of Hatherleigh became the last in Britain to acquire its own railway station.
Better never than late, perhaps. Hatherleigh Station was a good mile out of town. In 1880, when the line was first discussed, the townspeople might have been content to put up with that familiar West Country inconvenience; in 1925 attitudes were somewhat different, especially as most townspeople wanted to get to Okehampton, which was seven miles away by road, and twenty by the new railway. ‘It turned up too late, in the wrong place and going to the wrong places,’ according to the local historian Brian Abell. ‘Within a few years of it opening there were Austin Sevens flying round all over the place.’
There was a certain amount of china clay traffic winding along the north of the route; and a single passenger coach, with maybe a little luggage and some dead rabbits, stopped at Hatherleigh twice daily. But, according to the Devonian railway bard David St John Thomas, passengers caused astonishment:
‘We had two people on Monday, Mr and Mrs X going to see their daughter in Bude,’ I remember the guard telling me by way of justifying his existence. Finding various excuses to visit this living but empty museum over the years, I once caught the evening train from Halwill and arrived at Petrockstowe so early (partly because the timetable allowed for unwanted shunting at Hole and Hatherleigh) that the crew played cards for half an hour in the station and still reached Torrington ahead of schedule.
The most serious of many level-crossing accidents on the line, Thomas went on, was between a full excursion bus and an empty passenger train. He theorized that perhaps the authorities were embarrassed to close a railway they had so recently opened, or perhaps they had simply forgotten about it.
I favour the second explanation myself.
Railways did close in the inter-war years, especially after 1930: 1,240 route miles, six per cent of the total. It is a surprisingly tiny amount given that the whole rationale of the groupings was ‘competition, bad; co-operation, good’, and that many rural routes had clearly been losers even before road traffic came along.
Some of the lines – as at Campbeltown – hardly even got local obsequies. The Brill tram in Buckinghamshire, the furthermost expression of the Metropolitan Railway’s former national ambitions, was closed in 1935 by the newly formed London Passenger Transport Board, sitting in judgment more than fifty miles away. In his 1973 TV film Metro-land, John Betjeman sat at the preserved old junction at Quainton Road and reminisced as only he could:
I can remember sitting here on a warm autumn evening in 1929 and seeing the Brill tram from the platform on the other side with steam up, ready to take two or three passengers through oil-lit halts and over level crossings, a rather bumpy journey to a station not far from the remote hill-top village of Brill.
The news from Brill rated one paragraph in The Times. Other lines attracted more attention. There was the Devil’s Dyke Railway, from Hove up the airy downs above the shimmering sea (on a good day), to The Dyke station. But it is a hard climb up there, and the railway stopped half a mile from the summit, while the omnibuses and charabancs could go right up to the Devil’s Dyke Hotel. People gave up using the train except on the final day, New Year’s Eve 1938, when five hundred clambered aboard, including pub landlord Bob Pitt, who had been on the first train fifty-one years earlier.
Mostly, the victims were taken out quietly, piecemeal. There was the Basingstoke and Alton Light Railway, built in 1901 and closed in the First World War so that the rails could be reused in France. Local pressure got the line reopened in 1924: ‘There was so much excitement at Cliddesden station that the Union Jack was hoisted upside down, and the ex-stationmaster, Mr Bushnell, stood on the platform wildly waving a stick,’ said The Times. It was shut again eight years later, this time for ever, although Cliddesden later attained far greater celebrity when it was used as Buggles-kelly station in the filming of the 1937 Will Hay comedy Oh, Mr Porter!. Somehow that has never quite given it the cachet of Carnforth.
Poetic station names started to disappear along with the eccentric lines: Bala Lake Halt, Banavie Pier, Botanic Gardens (Glasgow), Checker House, Defiance Platform, Denver (Norfolk not Colorado) … and Parracombe, Snapper and Woody Bay, along with the rest of the old Lumpy & Bumpy, the Lynton & Barnstaple.
Lynton, the clifftop town on the edge of Exmoor, had been one of the first places in the country to get electric light, thanks to a hydro plant, and in 1888 got a water-powered cliff lift (still in operation) down to the sea at Lynmouth. Ten years later, it belatedly had a railway: a narrow-gauge line from Barnstaple built to the splendidly precise gauge of 1ft 11 5/8 in. The history of the line contains the sentence which in different forms is contained in just about every one of the hundreds and hundreds of books on rural railways: ‘Traffic did not develop to the extent which the promoters had optimistically assumed.’
Yet the line bumbled along, never losing that much money. Then in 1935, having just taken the momentous decision to get rid of its footwarmers and install heating, the Southern Railway suddenly decided it would be more sensible to get rid of the trains. The local roads had been improved with predictable consequences and now there was a need for £2,000 worth of track repairs. Management at Waterloo let the decision be known in response to a request for an extra halt at Barbrook. There was a furious protest, enough to persuade the Southern Railway managers to come down and hold a conference on the issue at Barnstaple. The protestors from Lynton were so anxious to be there that they decided to travel by the most modern, efficient and convenient means available. They went by car.
The line closed after the summer season, on 29 September 1935. There was Auld Lang Syne at Lynton, and a wreath of bronze crysanthemums at Barnstaple Town from a Captain Woolf, with the words ‘Perchance it is not dead, but sleep-eth’. Just as lavish celebratory dinners were the traditional accompaniment to railway openings, the wreaths and songs, along with the occasional brass band and the setting-off of detonators, would become the familiar trappings of closures. The following day the LNER’s new Silver Jubilee to Newcastle began, and did the 268 miles southbound in just under four hours at an average speed of 67mph. This compared to the nineteen miles in ninety minutes, or just under 13mph, achieved by the Lynton & Barnstaple.
Its demise did produce what I think is perhaps the most affecting elegy ever to be written on such an occasion. Credited to A. Fletcher, it was published in the North Devon Journal in September 1935.
Oh, little train to Lynton,
No more we see you glide,
Among the glades and valleys
And by the steep hillside.
The fairest sights in Devon
Were from your windows seen
The moorland’s purple heather,
Blue sea and woodland green.
And onward like a river
In motion winding slow
Through fairylands enchanted
Thy course was wont to go.
Where still the hills and valleys
In sunshine and in rain
Will seem to wait for ever
The coming of the train.
An anachronism? Only in the sense that the Lynton & Barnstaple was ahead of its time rather than behind it. There probably was no better route in the country – with its quaint gauge, lovely countryside, and tourist market – better suited for the bonanza business of preserved steam trains that was to come. Diesel railcars, a technique tried by the Great Western on several of their branches, might have kept the line staggering along until the 1950s, and then there might have been a chance of keeping it going. But the Southern was interested in electricity rath
er than diesel and, for the Lynton & Barnstaple, the future was too far away.3
What no one saw was that the real anachronism was the Silver Jubilee: a huge investment in fast steam engines, a technology going nowhere …
To Milford Junction, via Blood and Tears
… Except that once again war overturned the logic of running a peacetime railway. In 1939 Britain still had coal but not oil. Every drop of petrol was needed for operational purposes, and it was certainly lucky that British trains did not depend on diesel. And, as the Germans sensed before 1914, electricity supplies would have been more vulnerable to aerial bombardment.
No one blamed this war on the timetable and, in principle, both sides were far less dependent on trains. In practice, the railways were crucial from the start for transporting troops and, even more significantly, supplies and, in the case of the concentration camps, the victims. Even before the war formally began, Britain’s major stations – and some of the most benighted rural branch lines – were filled with tagged, scrubbed and bewildered children being evacuated from the cities into the countryside to avoid the supposedly imminent German air raids. More than 1.3 million children and vulnerable adults were moved on 3,800 special trains inside a fortnight. Unnecessarily, as it turned out.
And before September 1939, the first month of war, was over, severe petrol rationing was imposed, forcing anyone who did insist on travelling (‘Is your journey really necessary?’ as the slogan went) back onto the trains, which were already more unpleasant than they had been a month earlier.
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