The Trains Now Departed

by Michael Williams

  Could he work the same trick with the London–Paris night train? The idea was to use the VSOE rake from Victoria to Dover Western Docks, transferring there to luxury sleepers operated by SNCF. The sleepers would be winched with jacks onto one of the newest of the cross-Channel train ferries – the Vortigern, built in 1969 – an operation that would be totally silent. Aboard ship, the cabins would be air-conditioned, and the sleeping cars would be transferred to the rails at Dunkerque for a fast run up to Paris. But alas it was all a dream. The Vortigern ended her days as a rust bucket flogging round the Greek islands before being scrapped in India in 2005, and the British train ferry is no more.

  Today’s VSOE passengers have to alight from their cocoon of 1920s luxury at Folkestone and climb aboard buses which transfer them to a shuttle train for their journey through the Channel Tunnel because fire regulations do not permit the through running of vintage carriages. Although the process is smoothed by an excellent glass or two of Orient Express wine, it is an understatement to say that essential elements of the romance have been lost.

  But the ghosts of the past are not quite laid to rest. Sometimes on a clear night at Victoria’s Platform 2 you can half-close your eyes, stare up at the Edwardian roof and imagine. Is that the moon winking at you through the glass? Or is it a ghostly glimmer of that famous neon lunar sign that for many years greeted arriving Night Ferry passengers? No matter, perhaps. The frisson of excitement surrounding the Night Ferry’s departure on its glamorous journey to Paris and beyond will haunt evenings at Victoria for as long as the memory of Britain’s first international train stays alive.

  But there’s a postscript to this story. After putting the Eurostar through its paces thirty-five years after the very last Night Ferry departed on its final journey, I pause for a rest in a delightful square near the Place de Clichy – a timeless area of the City of Light, evoking the spirit of the old Paris of boat-train days. Could the high-tech modern equivalent in any way compare?

  The warmth of this early-March day is drawing out the cherrry blossom while the propriétaire of a corner épicerie is putting out his wares after a lunchtime siesta. Down the street I spot an old-fashioned model train shop of the kind that is almost extinct in Britain, and there in the window – as if by way of temptation – is a 1950s tinplate model of the Night Ferry, resplendent in blue and gold, made by that oh-so-Gallic firm of Jouef, beloved of post-war French schoolboys.

  Tearing off the brown-paper wrapping after I arrive back home in London, this miniature Night Ferry turns out to be powered by clockwork, but sadly does not exactly run like clockwork. Watching it wobble around my kitchen table, it makes me think. Perhaps it is kindest to this grand old icon to leave it where it belongs – in the past. Heresy though it may be, should we just admit that the Eurostar has left it behind?

  Chapter Three

  Kippers and champagne on the Tube

  A saunter through Metro-land to the London Underground’s farthest outpost. It’s buried under weeds today, but once the Pullman trains ran from here, serving the most splendid of breakfasts to commuters up to Baker Street.

  ‘JUNCTION, MATE? DON’T make me laugh. It might call itself a junction, but there ain’t been no junction there for years. I can tell you – it’s a thirty-minute walk after you get off my bus and there ain’t another one back for hours. OK, if you insist … But don’t say I didn’t warn yer …’

  Charming chap, the driver of the number 60 Arriva Shires and Essex bus from Aylesbury, heading for the deliciously named destination of Maids Moreton. Sadly, I shall never get there since I have pressing business beforehand. The engine hums with irritation as I haul myself down from the step to the roadside in the seeming middle of nowhere in the undulating countryside of the Vale of Aylesbury – which despite its proximity to the M25 still exudes the ancient tranquillity of timeless rural England.

  It is the hottest day of the year so far and getting hotter. The late-spring breeze after a diesel-filled hour grinding through the hamlets of Buckinghamshire smells especially fragrant. An armada of cabbage white butterflies follows me as I set off, OS Map 192 for Buckingham in hand, heading for one of the most mythical railway junctions in British railway history.

  Mythical? Well, listen to this. Here is ‘a country with elastic boundaries which each visitor can draw for himself, as Stevenson drew his map of Treasure Island. It lies mainly in Bucks; but choice fragments of Middlesex and Hertfordshire may be annexed at pleasure. As much of the countryside as you can comfortably cover on foot from one … station to another you may add to your private and individual map.’

  The words are not mine but from the publicity of the Metropolitan Railway, famously celebrated for building the world’s first underground line, and which also, uniquely, created an image of a country railway that was an advertising man’s dream of bucolic bliss. It even had its own name – Metro-land. This fantasy of idyllic arcadian living, cooked up in the early years of the twentieth century, was one of the world’s earliest brand images. (As with all good brands, the hyphen is important, and ‘Metroland’ as a single word only came later on.)

  What an extravagant dream! This prototype of marketing packages extended to more than just promoting the countryside on the fringe of London around the Chiltern Hills where the railway was busy underwriting the development of new housing estates. This was a vision of a suburban utopia surrounded by green fields and woods, with quiet well-ordered avenues of houses with grass verges, art deco sunshine patterns in glass doors and rosy-cheeked children played in gardens, eternally guarded from the reality of modern life by genial gnomes and pixies.

  If there was ever a Shangri-La pertaining to this Metro-land paradise, it was Verney Junction, an obscure railway platform in the middle of nowhere, created by dreamers. In its heyday Verney was the furthest-flung destination of the Tube, served not by plodding stopping trains but by comfortable expresses hauled by powerful steam locomotives conveying well-heeled commuters dining in style aboard Pullman cars down from the City and West End.

  Grand indeed. But not much evidence of it today, or of Pullman-style luxury, as I arrive sweating at a nondescript cluster of a dozen houses where all is drowsy and shuttered. The hissing of the tea urn in the station buffet here is long gone. But after the weary trudge from the bus, how about a modest glass of water? The old railway hotel, the Verney Arms, once the hub of this tiny community, where important chaps from the City might down a large nightcap before heading home to the wife and kids, has seemingly been turned into an Italian restaurant. And is closed – not even the most modest of small espressos to be had here. Pressing my nose against a dusty window, not a sign of when it might open again. As for shops, I might as well be on another planet.

  Maybe there’s salvation to be found in a riffle through Google on my iPhone. Oops! Top hit for local entertainment is the ‘Verney Junction swingers’. Swingers? What could this mean? Anthropologists of twenty-first-century Britain might claim this tells you everything about outer-suburban life in modern Bucks. But fortunately there’s not much swinging apparent here so early on a weekday morning. I think I’ll leave it for another day.

  Maybe Verney was just a dream, like Alice’s train from Through the Looking Glass. Tempting to think so. Yet buried under the foot-high grass can be discerned the remains of a platform. And the solid-looking architecture of that building over there? Could that have been the stationmaster’s house? Otherwise little remains of what was once an important terminus with three platforms and all the paraphernalia of a commodious country junction – waiting rooms, ticket and parcels office and signal box. So no dream this – the name lives on today in maps and bus timetables, even though the last train departed nearly half a century ago.

  A clue as to how this surreal rural outpost of the world’s first urban railway could ever have come into existence lies in the blind and almost suicidal panic with which new railways were promoted in the railway mania of the middle of the nineteenth century. Like every econo
mic bubble since, investors scrambled to put their money into rival schemes vying often to connect the same places no matter how economically or socially viable they might be. It was a boom in which the reputations and fortunes of promoters were either transformed beyond dreams or cruelly shattered.

  With the economy booming and interest rates low, the new-fangled railways seemed to many like an ideal way to get rich quick. There was a stampede of railway schemes, some quite unsustainable and preposterous. In 1845 and the following two parliamentary sessions no fewer than 650 Railway Acts were passed, authorising the construction of nearly 9,000 miles of track – today’s system is 10,072 miles by comparison. If all had been built, the capital required would have been more than one and a half times the country’s gross national product – putting into perspective the current controversy over HS2, the proposed high-speed line to the north of England, which even on wildest projections would consume only a fraction of today’s GNP.

  By 1910 railways criss-crossed every part of the land, with not even the smallest agricultural hamlet in England beyond walking distance of a station. The madness is summed up by David St John Thomas in his classic book The Country Railway: ‘Given the financial crises, inefficient and overworked engineers and malpractices, combined with the total lack of experience, local jealousies and quarrels between neighbouring companies trying to defend their territories rather than open up the region, and occasionally prepared to resort even to sabotage, the wonder is that the system developed at the lightning pace it did.’

  In their own way, all these factors played their part in the spectacular rise and tragic fall of Verney Junction. But the directors of the Metropolitan Railway were not entirely crazy. After all they had managed to create the first and the greatest of the urban railways that transformed the emerging cities of the world in the nineteenth century. So what were they doing planning a terminus some fifty miles from London in the middle of nowhere? At first the Met’s ambitions were small, born out of the desire of the Great Western Railway, which had built its London terminus at a rather inaccessible spot called Paddington, to get its passengers into the City as swiftly as possible. The result was a railway tunnel to Farringdon, the world’s first undergound railway. Despite the fug, filth, noise and steam, the new line was a huge success, and almost ten million passengers were carried in the first year.

  Buoyed with confidence, the railway rapidly drove west to Hammersmith – no flyovers and traffic congestion there in those days, rather a kind of arcadia of orchards and strawberry fields. The nascent railway forged east too, to Moorgate Street in the heart of the City. But it was another extension, to St John’s Wood in the smart suburbs of north-west London in 1868, that offered a glimpse of an empire that might just be possible one day, the ultimate railway promoter’s dream.

  Enter Sir Edward Watkin, one of the greatest visionaries of the Victorian railway world, who became chairman of the Metropolitan Railway in 1872. After a humble start in the goods office of the London & North Western Railway, Watkin become chairman of both the South Eastern Railway and the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway, and one day had a dream. What if you could link these powerful passenger and goods undertakings with a line through London, creating a mighty transport spine that could even, one day, pass from Dover under the English Channel to the Continent?

  The Met pushed Watkin’s dream forward, as its engineers drove ever harder into the suburbs. Soon the single-track line from Baker Street to St John’s Wood was doubled, and by 1879 commuter trains were speeding to Kilburn, Willesden and out into Middlesex, urbanising the landscape as they went. Goodbye to the countryside and the olden days of bucolic bliss. Poignantly, as one commentator noted, until the railway came, the charms of Kilburn were linked to its ‘proximity to the country … Within half an hour’s walk the pedestrian is among trees and fields and pleasant places.’ Some contrast to the gritty and ugly urban landscape that Kilburn eventually became.

  A year later the line had reached Harrow-on-the-Hill, one of London’s loveliest old villages with its ancient public school and church spire, landmarks for miles around. A few years previously the country around here had been noted for ‘high yields of wheat and bean crops’. The world was moving on too at Kingsbury and Neasden down the new line, which had once been ‘intersected by green lanes and field paths bordered by flowering hawthorn hedges while the River Brent meanders through’. From Harrow the new line drove on to Pinner in 1885 and Rickmansworth in 1887, arriving in Chesham, almost thirty miles from Baker Street, in 1889. In 1892 the Metro-land semis were starting to besiege Aylesbury.

  By now the Metropolitan’s image-makers were busy turning what many saw as the despoliation of pristine rural England into an asset. ‘The extension of the Metropolitan Railway from London to Pinner, Northwood and Chesham has opened up a new and delightful countryside to the advantage of picturesque seekers; ancient houses and old-world ways,’ enthused one publicity handout. ‘Within 50 minutes from Baker Street and for the cost of less than a florin [10p], if the visitor be economically disposed, he can enjoy a feast of good things, fresh air, noble parks, stately houses, magnificent trees and sylvan streets.’

  With the sylvan theme never far away, the Edwardian spin doctors up at HQ in Baker Street went on over the next decades to deploy every modern trick in creating one of the great advertising myths – even today the word Metro-land is shorthand for a social world that can be summoned up in an instant. A pity that its inventor, James Garland, the chief copywriter in the Met’s marketing department, has vanished into obscurity, unlike other heroes of the London Tube such as Frank Pick, who pioneered the house style, and Harry Beck, who designed the famous Tube map. Legend has it that Garland was ill in bed with flu when ‘Metro-land’ came to mind. Lazarus-like apparently, he leaped out of bed and rushed into the office to convey the good news.

  Garland’s mission statement was unashamedly elitist. Never mind the thousands of low-income clerks who might have benefited from the new trains and the housing estates that were springing up around the new stations as the railway pushed through Middlesex into Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire; the Met’s eyes were turned firmly upmarket. It was the managerial class and bowler-hat brigade of the City that the railway had in mind: ‘The strains which the London business or professional man has to endure,’ soothed the Met’s publicity, ‘can only be counterbalanced by the quiet restfulness and comfort of a residence of pure air and rural surroundings.’

  Soon Metro-land imagery was everywhere. By World War I the songwriter George R. Sims, author of the popular ballad ‘It was Christmas Day in the Workhouse’, had written it up in verse: ‘I know a land where the wild flowers grow/ Near, near at hand if by train you go/ Metroland, Metroland.’ Another music publisher brought out a ‘Vocal One-Step’ called ‘My Little Metroland Home’, with words by Boyle Lawrence and music by Henry Thrale. By the 1920s the word was so ingrained in the British psyche that it featured in Evelyn Waugh’s famous novel Decline and Fall (1928), in which the Honourable Margot Beste-Chetwynd takes Viscount Metroland as her second husband – his ‘funny name’ deriving from his fiefdom on the Metropolitan Railway. The idea was still being celebrated in late-twentieth-century fiction. In Julian Barnes’s first novel Metroland (1980), which opens in the 1960s, the clever-clever sixth-former who says things like ‘J’habite Metroland’ in his orals is riding lawlessly in first class when he becomes the captive audience of an ‘old sod … dead bourgeois’ who gives him a rundown of the distinguished history of the line.

  Reinforcing the notion with its own magazine, Metro-land (available for a penny at booking offices), the Baker Street spin doctors under the leadership of Robert H. Selbie, the Met’s brilliant general manager, effectively manufactured a magic land – the stuff of dreams. Who could resist this nostalgic paradise of harmonious living and sylvan pleasures available to everyone – provided they had the money? Not only could the ideal mock-Tudor home be yours (bought, of course, from the Metro
politan Railway Estates company), but for the weary commuter here too were long Sundays that offered an opportunity to stroll in hay fields and beech woods and the sight of vast sunny skies reaching down to the soft grass of the Chiltern Hills. To make sure the message was never missed, the legend ‘Live in Metroland’ was even etched in the brass door handles of the trains.

  Although it was born out of instantly manufactured nostalgia, Metro-land went on in later years to be surrounded by a genuine nostalgia of its own, most famously celebrated by Sir John Betjeman, the poet laureate from 1972, whom The Times once described as the ‘Hymnologist of Metroland’. The mood of the railway was famously captured in his poems from 1954 in the collection A Few Late Chrysanthemums. ‘Middlesex’ perhaps catches it best:

  Gentle Brent, I used to know you

  Wandering Wembley-wards at will,

  Now what change your waters show you

  In the meadowlands you fill!

  Recollect the elm-trees misty

  And the footpaths climbing twisty

  Under cedar-shaded palings,

  Low laburnum-leaned-on railings

  Out of Northolt on and upward

  To the heights of Harrow hill.

  Even this was outpaced in gushing nostalgia by Betjeman’s later eulogistic television documentary Metro-land, made by the BBC in 1973. The poet, by this time a national institution, makes it as far as the ruins of Verney Junction, although with slightly more to discover than there is today, and concludes, ‘The houses of Metro-land never got as far as Verney. Grass triumphs, and I’m rather glad.’ He was right. By this time the mythology had soured and it was all too late; as Dennis Edwards and Ron Pilgrim put it in their book The Golden Years of Metroland, ‘The Metropolitan Railway created a whole new world, but in doing so destroyed acres of beautiful countryside and a way of life that was quiet, peaceful and essentially English.’