The main line of the SMJ originated with the authorisation of the East & West Junction Railway on 23 June 1864. This was to connect the Northampton & Banbury line with the Great Western Railway at Stratford-upon-Avon via a junction at Towcester, a distance of just over thirty-three miles. The first sod was cut by Lady Palmerston at Towcester on 3 August 1864, using an elegant silver spade to shovel the earth into a mahogany wheelbarrow. In a grim omen of what was to turn out to be a cash-starved future, the initial capital of £300,000 quickly ran out and another £300,000 had to be raised to complete the line. Plans to extend the route eastwards to connect with the Great Northern Railway at Hitchin were swiftly quashed when that railway’s accountants sensibly refused to stump up the money for what they perceived to be a total loser.
Still, by 1871 track had been laid over more than two thirds of the route as far as the Warwickshire village of Kineton, and on 1 July 1873 the first trains made their tentative way between there and Stratford, where the railway had built its own spanking new station – well, that’s how the directors liked to view it. The Stratford Herald announced it in rather modest terms as ‘a small but substantially erected brick building standing on land formerly known as Church Farm’. Naturally all the dignitaries of the surrounding area wanted to be seen on the first train, which would, they hoped, propel their communities into the modern world after slumbering in a life virtually unchanged since medieval times. According to the newspaper, the ‘ladies and gentlemen’ alighted at Kineton station; banners and garlands were festooned around the platforms and the church bells pealed out. Messrs Crampton and Sons, the contractors for the line, headed by T. R. Crampton ‘well-known locomotive engineer’, entertained the guests to ‘a most recherché luncheon to celebrate the completion of the line’.
Colonel Yelland, the government’s inspector, offered his compliments on the ‘completeness of the permanent way’, and the Herald went on to report that the contractors ‘by their courteous conduct and rare business requirement, won for themselves the respect and esteem of all those who in the course of business were brought into contact with them’. But joy was neither unrestrained nor universal. There was less good news in the local press about the navvies – itinerant workers, many from an Irish background – who had laboured to build the line. Like many railway construction workers across the land at this time, these hard-living men had spread anxiety in sedate local communities with their high-spirited behaviour, mostly occasioned by long working hours and being away from their families for long periods. Strong drink, which brought generous profits to local publicans, played not a little part.
High jinks and worse on the part of the navvies led to ‘alarm’ among the local magistrates, who appointed special constables ‘occasioned by the behaviour and reasonable apprehension of the persons who have been for some months past and are now being employed upon a certain railway in said parish of Ettington, called the East & West Junction Railway’. The magistrates charged for the wages of five constables, but the railway sensibly refused to pay up without evidence of lawlessness. So the local justices posted their list of allegations in April 1872. The tally ran to:
One case of assault of a violent nature upon a female.
One charge of feloniously and violently assaulting a gamekeeper with intent to do him grievous bodily harm.
One case of burglary.
Five cases of felony.
Two cases of malicious injury to property.
Several cases of drunkenness in the borough.
The most audacious accusation was against Joseph Lee, a subcontractor for the railway, who was accused of ‘exercising his worldly calling on Sunday December 10 1872, the same not being a work of necessity or charity’. All Lee had been doing was shoring up a collapsing culvert, and his case was dismissed. Peace reigned henceforth.
Unfortunately, financial stability didn’t. The directors promoted another line westwards, to be called the Evesham, Redditch & Stratford-upon-Avon Railway, to meet the Midland Railway at isolated Broom Junction. But the mean-minded spirits of the Great Western would not permit an easy connection into their own tracks at Stratford, so another had to be found elsewhere. Meanwhile receipts on the original line were dismal, and in 1874 the directors tried to raise money with some fresh debentures. But the company’s credit was shot and it fell into the hands of the receiver. All passenger traffic was suspended on 31 July 1877 and none was carried for the next eight years.
But never underestimate the optimism of the Victorian railway speculator. Despite much of their property being in hock, the directors rolled the Monopoly dice yet again with a view to extending eastwards, this time to a couple of even more lonely junctions – at Roade in Northamptonshire, on the London & North Western line to the north, and to Olney in Buckinghamshire, connecting ultimately with the main line of the Midland Railway – creating a third company to share the crumbs on this meagre route, the snappily named Easton Neston Mineral & Towcester, Roade & Olney Junction Railway. Reckoning correctly that ENMTR&OJR might be too much of a mouthful, the name was soon changed to the (hardly more memorable) Stratford-upon-Avon, Towcester & Midland Junction Railway.
Predictably another set of financial disasters followed, including the bankruptcy of one of the line’s main contractors. It wasn’t until 1891 that the full route from Olney to the west started to function, with a contract for coal trains from the goods depot at London’s St Pancras to run all the way west to Bristol. But the curse of the East & West was to strike again. The Midland Railway engines proved too heavy for the track, and by 1898 the entire ramshackle concern had collapsed into bankruptcy.
Luckily, the line’s ruinous finances and calamitous operations proved to be its saviour, since nobody in the land was foolish enough to make a bid for it. Not surprising, since by this time the track was overgrown with weeds and half the locomotive stock was broken down and out of use. In desperation, a bill was passed in Parliament bundling all the bits and pieces into one company – and so on 1 January 1909 the mighty Stratford-upon-Avon & Midland Junction Railway was born.
Its new chairman, the dynamic Harry Willmott, who had for fifteen years been the London goods manager of the Great Eastern Railway, set about a programme of reform – an uphill task (literally, since the cheaply built line was full of nasty gradients and sharp curves). The total population served by the fourteen stations between Broom and Blisworth was only 18,000. All the stations were villages except for Towcester (2,775) and Stratford (8,500) – and here the rival GWR cherry-picked the best passengers for its direct line to London. The railway was so short of cash that it sold the grass clippings from its embankments as hay to local farmers to pay for uniforms, while one of its directors admitted to a staff dinner that their line was ‘the worst-paying per mile of any railway in the United Kingdom’. Latterly, it was claimed that the railway’s receipts were directly dependent on the quantity of produce grown on its allotments and embankments.
But Harry, who installed his son Russell as traffic manager at the tender age of twenty-nine, was undeterred. His newly formed company boldly adopted the telegraphic address of Regularity, Stratford-upon-Avon – completely failing to see the irony. Special coaches were attached to London trains, first via Blisworth into Euston and then after 1902, by way of a connection with the newly built Great Central Railway, into London’s Marylebone – nine and a half miles shorter than the established Great Western route into Paddington. The Shakespeare Route was shamelessly plugged everywhere, with a special scarlet promotion wraparound for the timetable. But ‘fortune’s fickle wheel’ – to use the Shakespearean parlance that the railway was so fond of – intervened once again when the railway’s special Shakespeare Festival in 1910 had to be cancelled midway because of the death of King Edward VII. The traffic manager had to report a loss of £500 – a disastrously large sum in those days, which the railway could ill afford.
Despite chairman Harry’s new broom, the management of the railway was highly eccentric, with
Willmott Senior living a hundred miles away in Guildford. At ten o’clock prompt each morning he would ring his son for a brief chat. In return, Russell sent a memo each evening reporting on the events of the day. Sometimes these would be returned with sardonic comments scrawled in the margins. One such comment read, ‘Fish make brains … eat a bloody whale!’ The hapless Russell, meanwhile, doubled up as part-time engineer and locomotive superintendent, a job he retained even after he moved on to take the job of general manager of the Isle of Wight Central Railway. Staff dreaded his visits. He always travelled on the London train on Monday mornings, connecting with the 08.35 from Blisworth. He would ride on the locomotive, ticking off staff for letting the safety valves blow and wasting coal. He also had a habit of riding up and down the track on a platelayers’ trolley.
But the Willmotts were not entirely barmy; in fact they saw themselves as progress personified. In this spirit they pioneered a contraption called a Rail-o-phone. The device allowed communication between a moving train and a fixed point, and was inaugurated on 20 April 1911 by the mayor of Stratford (aboard a train) and Marie Corelli, a famous novelist of the day (in the town). We may not recall much about her now, but at that time her novels – which outsold Kipling, Wells and Conan Doyle put together – made her Britain’s most-read fiction author as well as Stratford’s most notable celebrity resident. Later it was claimed that the Rail-o-phone could actually bring trains to a halt by pressing a device in a signal box. An experiment was arranged whereby two trains would race towards each other on a single track and the Rail-o-phone would avert a collision. It may not have been as daring as it sounded, since the Stratford Herald reported, ‘A liberal margin for safety was allowed, so there were no thrills.’ Unsurprisingly, the Rail-o-phone was never heard of again.
Later, in the 1930s, LMS managers used the SMJ as a test bed for another avant-garde if even more Heath Robinson machine, known as the Ro-Railer. This was a single-deck bus built by Karrier Motors of Huddersfield, fitted with both flanged steel wheels and rubber tyres, allowing it in theory to work equally well on road and rail. It started off as a train from Blisworth and ran over the rails as far as Stratford goods yard, where it pulled into the cattle dock and the rail wheels were raised, allowing the tyres to take the weight of the vehicle. From there the bus pottered merrily around the streets of Stratford, taking passengers to the new and luxurious Welcombe Hotel, recently opened by the London Midland & Scottish Railway. At least that was the theory. But far from impressing its upmarket passengers, the Ro-Railer proved to be hard riding, noisy and smelly, and to vibrate horribly. The wheel-change mechanism, which boasted a five-minute switchover time, was in reality prone to frequent breakdowns.
To be fair, the normal motive power along the line was even less reliable – mostly a jumble sale of clapped-out machines acquired as cheaply as possible from remnant auctions. The East & West Junction Railway’s first locomotive – an 0-6-0 saddle tank, built by Manning Wardle in 1866 – is shown in the official pictures of the inaugural train in 1871 with no cab and a section of stovepipe perched on top of the chimney to take the fumes away from the carriages. The next engines, numbered 1 to 6, were acquired on hire purchase from Beyer Peacock in Manchester, but the SMJ reneged on the payments and they were repossessed before being sold on to the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway. Their replacements included a couple of second-hand French locomotives – a 2-4-0 named Ceres and an 0-6-0 called Savoie. The first could only manage a boiler pressure of eighty pounds and was scrapped, while the second had such a rotten tender that the locomotive had to be rebuilt as a tank engine.
The company went bargain hunting again and bought a couple of highly unusual Fairlie double-boiler locomotives which had been destined for a railway in Mexico. One of these was the first in the UK to have the Walschaerts valve gear – a means of transferring power to the wheels that became standard for all modern steam locomotives. (The Fairlie type can be seen in operation even today on the preserved Ffestiniog Railway in Wales.) But the railway was hardly in the business of technical innovation and, in any case, the locomotives had to be sold off after traffic was suspended in 1877. Various elderly contraptions subsequently came and went in what was to become a permanent bring-and-buy sale. In 1903 the line acquired its first and only express engine, a handsome 2-4-0 from Beyer Peacock, but this must have been a mistake, since the company ran no express passenger trains – nor was it ever likely to, given the state of the track. Not for nothing was the locomotive given the inauspicious number 13, since the directors had once again missed the boat of progress, it being the last locomotive of this obsolete type ever to be built for a British railway. Other disastrous purchases included a locomotive from which a wheel dropped off and another whose water tank was too small for the train to get from one end of the line to the other.
It was no wonder the trains broke down so often. In his history of the line Arthur Jordan, a one-time employee, reports that the engine staff, who had mostly left school at twelve and worked on farms before becoming railwaymen, had little technical knowledge. There was no equipment to coal the trains, and each knob of coal had to be thrown up individually by hand into the tender. Working conditions were primitive, and Jordan describes how ‘I have seen those labourers at their meal break with only bread and jam to eat, and although desperately thirsty in hot weather, unable to afford the cheapest beer. There were no washbasins, only the use of hot water from an engine and soft soap, to which sand might be added if grease proved difficult to remove.’ None of the engines was fitted with seats, and the crew was forced to stand for all the eight back-breaking hours of their shifts.
Still, the engine liveries were nice and the paintwork always seemed to gleam. The shed overseer – one Inspector Matthews – was fond of removing his white breast-pocket handkerchief and wiping it along a locomotive’s coupling rod. If it picked up even a smidgeon of grease, the cleaner would get a sound ticking-off. At first the locomotives were painted in ‘crimson lake’ with panels lined out in black and edged both sides in yellow. When No. 13 arrived, it was turned out in a lovely dark blue – and once the SMJ had taken over full control, the engines were painted black with green and yellow lining and gold lettering. But none of them was destined to last long. Of the thirteen engines that passed into the ownership of the London, Midland and Scottish Railway when it absorbed the SMJ in 1923, all had been sent to the scrapyard by 1930.
Not that any of the locomotives ever had to work very hard since the railway never had much of a service – certainly not for passengers. The best that could be mustered for most of its life were three trains each way a day between Blisworth and Stratford, and four between Blisworth and Broom. So slow and unreliable were the trains that if one ran to time it was regarded as something of a miracle. But one day the impossible happened and one of the morning trains rolled into the station on time to the second. Moved by this unusual circumstance, a passenger is said to have gone up to the driver to pay a personal tribute. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘I’ve been travelling on this line for many years and this is the first time I’ve known this train to be on time. I tender you my heartiest congratulations. Have a cigar!’ Regretfully and solemnly, the driver pushed away the proffered gift. ‘As a conscientious person and an honest man I can’t take it. The fact is we were due in at this time yesterday morning.’
Perhaps there never was such a thing as a heyday for the beleaguered SMJ, but if there was, it would have been in the period between 1890 and 1923. So let’s take a fictitious journey along the main line, aided by the memories of Arthur Jordan, who started his working life in the booking office at Stratford, where his mother also worked as the manageress of the station refreshment room.
Boarding at Blisworth, you might have already heard many of the derogatory nicknames summing up the reputation of the line – not just Slow, Mouldy and Jolting, but Slow, Mournful Journey and, in the case of the original East & West Junction, the Erratic and Wandering. You certainly won’t be expecting much com
fort from the carriages. If you were particularly unlucky, you might find yourself in the company’s four-wheel coach. This ran from 1850 to 1909, when it was the oldest vehicle in existence in Britain to employ the Westinghouse brake system. Until 1900 lighting was by oil lamps dropped into ‘pots’ in the carriage, but it wasn’t until 1910 that the train had any heating, relying on foot warmers placed in the compartments by porters. Arriving from Euston, we must hope we haven’t missed our connection, since there is a four-hour gap between trains. No wonder the Blisworth Station Hotel across the way (still to be seen from the main line today as the Walnut Tree Hotel) is doing a roaring trade.
Chuffing away onto the single track, we pass a bleak landscape of iron-ore quarries before arriving at Towcester. In later years you might be jostled by 8,000 or so passengers travelling to the local racecourse. Founded in 1928 in the grounds of Easton Neston Hall, the races drew punters to the track’s sharp bends and uphill finish, which would provide thrills and very often spills. Thrillingly too, a special through train would sometimes come all the way from St Pancras. Heading westwards through Blakesley, you might spot a wisp of steam over a hedge and perform a double-take as a miniature steam locomotive passes by in a field. But this fifteen-inch-gauge line was no toy – it was used to transport coal and other supplies to the local Blakesley Hall.
The Trains Now Departed Page 14