The Trains Now Departed

by Michael Williams

  The writers, clearly in awe, continue: ‘Cereals and fruit juices were available, and baskets of hot toast, croissants, brioches and of fresh fruit were brought round. There was no air conditioning or sound-proofing, and the vestibules made a roar like a thousand waterfalls, while the ‘thrump’ over crossings and the piercing screech of the whistle created that sense of urgent elation which was Le Meat Breakfast …’

  With the waiters bobbing along, swaying with the motion of the train and brandishing steaming silver-plated pots of coffee and hot milk, regular passengers would play the game of spotting the nationality of the diners. The man looking with disgust at the fried eggs drowning in HP sauce was almost certainly French – perhaps one of the many government couriers who used the train regularly. You could bet that the bleary-eyed young couple staring with incredulity at a glass pot containing an orange substance marked ‘Olde English Marmelade (Made in France)’ were from England – possibly one of the many honeymoon couples who took their first journey into married life aboard the Night Ferry. At the end of the meal the serveur-receveur (leading attendant) made out the bill, with the chef de brigade trotting along behind, with his tin tray of monies and his exchange-rate card.

  Behrend and Buchanan recount a delightfully Gallic restaurant car scene aboard the train one day:

  There was a large man (past middle age now) who protected his then anonymous but still substantial shirtfront with his napkin as he sat drinking chocolate. He seemed to know all about Wagons-Lits, for by fiddling a ring behind the brise-bise, and pulling on the top handle at the same time, he let in some fresh air – and smuts – into the saloon. An elderly Frenchman opposite at once drew down the blind and there was an altercation during which the chef de brigade slammed the window shut again. The large man looked quizzically at the little oblong box on the wall with ‘Reclamations, Complaints, Reclami’ on it, for nobody had ever been known to put a thing in it.

  Soon the French customs inspectors would tiptoe along the corridor and ever-so-politely inspect passports and baggage. In the days when the train first ran, Paris had no sprawling suburbs and the countryside ran right up to the city, so the first sign of arrival would be the city’s ancient open-deck green buses. And in a trice passengers would be there – with all the thrill of arrival in a great foreign terminus – joining travellers from the other Wagons-Lits night trains from northern Europe. Oh joy to be an Englishman abroad, as monsieur le conducteur performed the ritual of electrically lowering the carriage steps to let passengers alight on the low French platforms of the Gare du Nord.

  And so it was, throughout the life of the train, although services were suspended during the war, not running again until December 1947. In many respects the immediate post-war years were the heyday of the Night Ferry. Jetliners were in their infancy, and most cross-Channel travel was still by train and sea. The Night Ferry became more popular but never lost its aura of exclusivity. Among the little luxuries of the post-war era were the small wrapped parcels of Palmolive soap, complete with the train’s monogram, which were supplied to passengers even though soap was rationed to the general British public.

  The train also boasted a treasure trove of multilingual staff. According to the Railway Gazette, the management hired fluent speakers of French, Flemish, Dutch, German, Italian, Spanish and English ‘as well as eastern dialects’. Whether there were Japanese speakers is not recorded, but the train often carried large parties of Japanese, apparently because they preferred railway travel to planes when they came to Europe. From the beginning of June 1957 a London–Brussels sleeping car was added to the complement and shunted onto a Belgian local express for the run up to the capital via Lille. By its twenty-first birthday in October 1957 the train had carried half a million passengers in its sleeping cars.

  In line with its exotic character, the Night Ferry had many idiosyncrasies – not least the number of international celebrities (though they may not have been called that at the time) who valued the attentions of the staff and the privacy. One of the train’s special charms was that, in addition to the eight compartments in each coach, there was an odd and somewhat mysterious ninth compartment, slightly smaller than the others and with no intercommunicating door to the compartment next door. The entrance door opened at an angle and had a lock with a chain fastening that allowed it to be secured slightly ajar. This ninth compartment was much in demand from diplomats, king’s and queen’s messengers and anyone else whose business required them to be wary of strangers knocking at the door. And it was popular with those on Her Majesty’s Secret Service …

  The train was not just fit for queen’s messengers but the ultimate royal presence. Travelling privately in 1948, the young Princess Elizabeth, who would become queen four years later, made her very first trip to France aboard the Night Ferry. Exiled in France after his 1936 abdication, her uncle the Duke of Windsor was a frequent Night Ferry passenger, making private visits to see his mother Queen Mary back in the UK. Returning to France in the winter of 1949, he was among a group of passengers obliged to get up in their pyjamas and change trains at the unearthly royal hour of 4 a.m., when the Night Ferry derailed as the coaches were docking in Dunkerque. The procedures for disembarking the coaches from the ship were quite sophisticated, with the linkspan that connected the train to the dockside able to accept a seven-degree list to accommodate the swell of choppy water. Even so, the bogies jumped the grooved rails in the roadway alongside Mole No. 4 and wobbled along the road on their flanges before being brought to a halt. The comments of His Royal Highness on that freezing night were not recorded.

  Rather like the London theatres, which have traditionally kept a couple of seats empty in case of an impromptu visit from a member of the royal family, a reserve car stood by for VIPs who wanted quick access to the train. One evening Lord Rothermere, the multi-millionaire tycoon proprietor of the Daily Mail newspaper empire, demanded from Thomas Cook a sleeper berth even when the train was full. Such was his perceived importance that the reserve car was brought specially out of the depot to accommodate him, along with supplies of crisp, starched sheets and pillowcases and soft, fluffy towels appropriate to the press mogul’s mighty status.

  A similar honour was accorded to Prime Minister Winston Churchill in 1954. Wanting to visit Paris, he pronounced that he would join the train at Sevenoaks Tubs Hill station, close to his Chartwell home in Kent. Customs officials were horrified and insisted the entire station was closed by the police to all but Churchill’s party while the Night Ferry pulled up specially to let him get on board.

  The staff of the train was organised according to a strict hierarchy. Each conductor answered to the conductor of Car No. 1, who was the chef du train and carried a forty-eight-page aide-memoire outlining what to do in almost any circumstance – including the sending of a telegram to the director general personally in case anybody died en route, an eventuality that never happened despite the Agatha Christie-like atmosphere aboard. However, there was a serious accident involving the train on 26 July 1963, when electric locomotive No. E5021 crashed through the buffer stops at Victoria on arrival, showering the two ladies in the Fullers confectionery kiosk immediately behind the buffers with sweets and cigarettes. Many of the forty-six people in the sleeping cars were thrown to the floor, and the Brussels car was lifted right up in the air, although nobody, fortunately, was killed.

  On one occasion in 1939 Lord Chief Justice Hewitt arrived in London on the Night Ferry and was escorted through customs by Donald White, Thomas Cook’s senior interpreter, who was a well-known figure. The customs man was being somewhat officious in examining suitcases, and Donald White hissed in his ear, ‘That is the lord chief justice.’ His Lordship looked him sternly in the eye and remarked sternly, ‘Do not think that will save you when you come before me.’

  The magic and aura of the Night Ferry even captivated Germany’s wartime high command. In 1940, after the Dunkerque evacuation, Hitler gave orders not to damage the linkspan because he intended to use
the Night Ferry in the invasion of Britain. Even in 1944, when it was clear the Nazis had no hope of ever invading, local commanders did not dare go against the Führer’s orders, and the linkspan remained intact while Dunkerque’s other docks and quays were wrecked.

  For all its life the Night Ferry was an enclosed world of its own, characterised by the charming Gallic argot used by the staff. Thus the bellows connection between the carriages was known as a soufflet, the trolley for light refreshments as a vente ambulante and the conductor’s hat as a képi. More poetically still, the steam pipe used to heat the carriages was a conduite blanche. However, French translations did not always evoke magic – particularly the prosaic Ferry du Nuit, as the train was described in French timetables.

  As with most things associated with the loss of glamour from train travel at the end of the post-war era, the first sign of the lights dimming for the Night Ferry came with the arrival in the early 1960s of Richard Beeching as chairman of British Railways, and rationalisation became the order of the day. There was less freight for the rail-equipped ferries, and certainly less sentiment for the great romantic days of the past. The train had already lost some of its cachet. In the winter of 1961 the prime minister Harold Macmillan and a large official party used the Night Ferry to make an official visit to Paris. But much to their irritation they got there half an hour late, due to thick fog at Dunkerque. Never again was the train used for official visits. Henceforth, these were made by air, and under Harold Wilson’s premiership even queen’s messengers took to flying in 1966.

  Paradoxically, the abandonment of its services by ministers and civil servants lent the train a new and exotic glamour. Minus the deadening presence of officialdom, its snug compartments and dining-car cubbyholes became an even more attractive haunt for the shady demi-monde of double agents, drug smugglers, money launderers, philanderers and adulterers, which had always been attracted to the train’s anonymity and pervading air of discretion. On 8 March 1953 the Reynolds News newspaper reported

  Customs men in London have uncovered a plot by international racketeers to smuggle drugs on the Night Ferry trains from Paris to Victoria. The drugs have been found in axle boxes on Continental-style coaches. Special precautions are now being taken to search the coaches. They are taken to the sidings outside Victoria, near Grosvenor Road, for inch-by-inch examination after the passengers have left. The Customs men were given the tip-off by a ‘squeaker’ that the Dope smugglers are operating somewhere between Paris and Dunkerque. Marijuana is the chief drug being smuggled. There is a big demand for this among addicts in London and other big cities, where it is made into cigarettes costing from 5s each upwards.

  The last steam-hauled train ran on 1 January 1962, but services got a boost, being taken over by powerful Class 71 electric locomotives. These had been phased in from 1959 as part of the Kent coast electrification, having been specially built for the heavy loads of the remaining non-multiple-unit trains such as the Night Ferry and the Golden Arrow. As a non-standard design, only able to work over the third-rail electrified lines of the Southern Region, these handsome locomotives were useless anywhere else in Britain.

  It was lucky that the Night Ferry had such good friends in high places, and so it was able to continue with majestic disdain. One of its most ardent supporters was the British ambassador to France. Sir Nicholas Henderson had also served in Warsaw, Copenhagen and Bonn, and was passionate about the joys of the Night Ferry. Its survival was also helped by the endless vacillation of politicians in both Britain and France over the prospects for a Channel tunnel. Announced with a fanfare by the Conservative transport minister Ernest Marples on 6 February 1964, hopes that the tunnel might open by the end of the following decade were dashed when Anthony Crosland, environment minister in a later Labour government, announced unilaterally on 20 January 1975 that all preliminary work would cease and the equipment be sold off.

  The train had another revival in the late 1960s with the introduction of a through sleeping car to Basle in Switzerland. The first coach from Victoria to Basle ran on 16 December 1967, and the press noted at the time that the price of a double sleeping berth to Paris now cost less than a single room in Victoria’s Grosvenor Hotel. But the enterprise was less successful than it might have been had there been a through coach to Chur for St Moritz or Interlaken for the Bernese Oberland. The journey of sixteen hours and twelve minutes from London was a long one, and worse, the compartments had no spaces for skis. To the disappointment of its fans, the service didn’t last long, with the very last through coach from Basle to London running on 1 March 1969. At the time of writing there is still no international train from Britain that travels beyond France and Belgium – and the Night Ferry’s status as Britain’s only truly international train remains unchallenged although a Eurostar service to Amsterdam is on the cards.

  In 1976 Wagons-Lits celebrated their centenary with a special ‘100-WL 1876–1976’ logo printed on menus, soap packets and vanity kits. But joy quickly turned sour in a row over renewal of the company’s contract, and it withdrew from involvement in the train at the end of that year, quitting British operations for good and passing it over to the state-run British Railways and SNCF of France – inevitably shedding much of its glamour in the process. By now the sleeping cars were senescent – some were more than forty years old – and it was BR policy not to run anything over thirty years old without special permission.

  In January 1980 car No. 3792, which had been withdrawn in 1974 and restored at huge expense, was presented to the National Railway Museum in York, and visitors could not believe that cars identical to this relic still ran out of Victoria every night on their way to Paris and Brussels. The regulars didn’t mind – occupancy rates for the overnight sleeping car journeys were running at 60 per cent – a figure that would be the envy of many luxury hotels.

  Meanwhile, there were other endings that were a portent of the closure to come. The very last episode of the famous BBC sitcom Steptoe and Son featured the Night Ferry. Screened on Boxing Day 1974, it shows rag-and-bone man Harold dispatching his father abroad so that he can have Christmas alone with his girlfriend – in Bognor Regis. But sharp-eyed viewers may have noticed that the coaches were showing signs of their years.

  By the end of the 1970s British Railways were no longer putting much effort into publicising the train, and some ticket offices even denied its existence. The Paris–Dunkerque breakfast car was withdrawn and replaced by a snack-vending machine, although hot meals were restored after furious protests by passengers. Another blow came when computer-aided automatic landing was introduced for planes at Heathrow Airport, diminishing another source of revenue for the train, since it was always well patronised on foggy winter nights when there were likely to be severe air delays.

  The first intimation that the end was nigh for the Night Ferry came in the underhand manner typical of the way British Railways announced closures during the period. Fearing a backlash following the abandonment of two other luxury trains – the Brighton Belle and the Golden Arrow in 1972 – the news was slipped out in an answer to a press question by BR chairman Sir Peter Parker at the opening of a new British Railways office in Paris on 4 March 1980. The train was losing £120,000 a year, he said, and there was no money to replace the life-expired sleeping cars. The Dover–Dunkerque night ship would still run, he purred reassuringly, though passengers would have to board on foot. This would not be very pleasant on a cold winter’s night.

  So efficient was the diversionary spin of BR management that when the press arrived to interview passengers on the very last train – the 21.25 London Victoria to Paris on the night of 31 October – several didn’t even know it was finishing. The departure was certainly low key, with seven sleepers headed by a humble mixed-traffic diesel locomotive No. 33 043, although depot staff had fittingly lugged out one of the old headboards carried by the steam locomotives of the 1950s to fix to the front. Seated passengers had for some time been required to travel separately on a conventi
onal electric multiple-unit train, so heavy locomotives were no longer required.

  Station staff expressed their sadness by posting a special message on the departure indicator reading, AU REVOIR, MON AMI. THE LAST NIGHT FERRY SLEEPING CAR TRAIN TO PARIS AND BRUSSELS WILL LEAVE TONIGHT AT 21.25 FROM PLATFORM 2. BON VOYAGE. The illuminated modernity of the sign provided a poignant contrast to the ancient sleeping cars at the platform, which showed streaks of rust on their blue and gold bodywork. Souvenir hunters had long stripped them of anything worth taking. The very last act in a unique rail operation that had begun more than a century previously took place when the empty sleeper cars from the inbound train were run back as a ghost train across the Channel on the Night Ferry’s timetable, where they were handed back to Wagons-Lits. Most were sold off for scrap, but a handful soldiered on for many years, before rotting away into the undergrowth in a siding at Les Ifs in Normandy.

  There was one slim hope of reviving the Night Ferry. In 1977 the American shipping tycoon James Sherwood had bought at auction some redundant Wagons-Lits coaches from the Orient Express, spotting a gap in the market for the revival of luxury international train travel. ‘The railways of the British Isles seem to have lost their way,’ he said, ‘when it comes to long-distance sleeper travel. Filthy trains with surly overpaid staff, who in some cases have been paid to look the other way while passengers are robbed.’ His vision paid off when he launched the Venice–Simplon Orient Express in 1982, which today still represents the gold standard in luxury international train travel.

  Sherwood considered the possibility of reintroducing the Night Ferry along similar lines to the VSOE.

  I am often asked why I committed £11 million of my shareholders’ funds to restore the British and continental rakes of the Venice–Simplon Orient Express. Many perceive it as a grand folly, but nothing could be further from the truth. In the 1960s passenger travel by sea was nearly extinguished by air competition, and conventional wisdom said that the day of the great luxury liner was gone. Today, there are far more luxury cruise vessels in operation than in the heyday of sea travel in the 1930s. My perception was that the affluent tourist wanted the adventure of taking the Orient Express to Paris and Venice.