The English: A Social History, 1066–1945 (Text Only)
Page 87
While the countryside was being transformed by the building of the railways, so were the towns, particularly London. The earlier termini, in London as elsewhere, were on the outskirts of cities; but after the building of Euston and Paddington stations in the 1830s, it was evident that more central stations would be acceptable; and these were soon provided. With the exception of St Paul’s, now Blackfriars, which was built in 1886, and Marylebone, completed in 1889, all London’s main railway termini were built in less than forty years between 1836 and 1874. And as railway companies scrambled to buy land, as bridges and viaducts were built, as cuttings and tunnels were dug, as locomotive sheds, repair shops, platforms, ticket offices and refreshment rooms were constructed, as marshalling yards, shunting areas and interminable rows of coal bunkers were laid out, houses were demolished wholesale and residential areas completely changed their character. Twenty thousand people were obliged to abandon their homes by the building of the London and Birmingham Railway, most of them, unwilling or unable to move far away, crowding into already overpopulated areas nearby, pouring in their hundreds into houses abandoned by the middle-classes who took advantage of the railway to move even further out from London’s centre. The railway companies had a legal responsibility for the people whose homes they destroyed; but it was not always observed, and the new houses which were provided were frequently offered to tenants at rents they could not afford. Nine hundred houses were demolished by the North London Railway Company for the laying of two miles of track; and it was found beyond the company’s means to rehouse their occupants adequately. In all, between 1853 and 1883, 56,000 people were displaced by railway lines in London.
Charles Dickens, who had himself witnessed the disruptive effect of railway building in the inner suburbs, described in Dombey and Son how it utterly changed the neighbourhood of Camden Town:
Houses were knocked down, streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up; buildings undermined and shaken, propped by great beams. Here, a chaos of carts, overthrown and jumbled together, lay topsy-turvy at the bottom of a steep unnatural hill; there, confused treasures of iron soaked and rusted in something that had accidently become a pond. Everywhere were bridges that led nowhere … and piles of scaffolding and wildernesses of brick.14
As it was with Camden Town, so it was with the area around York Road which, after the London and South Western Railway’s construction of Waterloo Station, finally degenerated from the pleasant, residential area it had been in the earlier decades of the century to mid-Victorian London’s most squalid and notorious red-light district.
Yet, as Dickens recognized, the railways brought benefits to the people as well as distress. They promoted the growth of new towns and virtually created others such as Crewe. They led to the decline of some small ports, but brought prosperity to others, Cardiff, Fleetwood, Barry and Southampton among them.15 They made possible the building and expansion of suburbs, like King’s Norton and Northfield outside Birmingham, in which men could live and travel every day to work. Samuel Smiles wrote in 1879 of the number of new small towns of from 10,000 to 20,000 inhabitants which had sprung up around London in the past twenty years. Guildford and Dorking were now within reach of the city; and while Clapham and Bayswater, yesterday’s suburbs, had become ‘as it were parts of the great metropolis’, Brighton and Hastings were ‘but the marine suburbs of London’. The rail journey from Watford, Barnet and Reigate was now quicker than the drive in horse-drawn vehicles from places much closer to Lombard Street and the Bank. There were 300 stations ‘in actual use’ within five miles of Charing Cross.16
Railways also made it possible for fresh food and milk to pass quickly from town to country; they carried ‘inland coal’ to householders everywhere, transporting 2.5 million tons of it from the north Midlands fields alone by 1865;17 and they widened the horizons of people who were enabled to travel beyond the confines of the enclosed communities from which they had rarely been able to escape before, who gradually discarded their suspicions of the outside world and learned both that their fellow-countrymen were much like themselves, sharing the same concerns, and that many of them lived in conditions of shocking squalor. Thus it is on the railway journey to Leamington that Mr Dombey first realizes the extent of the industrial horrors that he and men like him have allowed to remain undisturbed for so long, although it never occurs to him to reflect that ‘the monster who has brought him there has let the light of day on these things, not made or caused them’:
Everything around is blackened. There are dark pools of water, muddy lanes, and miserable habitations far below. There are jagged walls and falling houses close at hand, and through the battered roofs and broken windows, wretched rooms are seen, where want and fever hide themselves in many wretched shapes, while smoke and crowded gables, and distorted chimneys and deformity of brick and mortar penning up deformity of mind and body, choke the murky distance.
In this passage Dickens also conveys the novel excitement of railway travel:
Through the hollow, on the height, by the heath, by the orchard, by the park, by the garden, over the canal, across the river, where the sheep are feeding, where the mill is going, where the barge is floating, where the dead are lying, where the factory is smoking … away, with a shriek and a roar and a rattle, and no trace to leave behind but dust and vapour … Louder and louder yet, it shrieks and cries as it comes tearing on.18
Indeed, at first the prospect of being driven along an iron track at great speed was too much for many would-be travellers to contemplate. When it was learned that the carriages on the Woolwich to London line would travel at eighteen miles an hour a writer in the Quarterly Review protested, ‘We should as soon expect the people of Woolwich to be fired off upon one of Congreve’s ricochet rockets as trust themselves to the mercy of such a rate.’ In those days thirty miles an hour was still considered a very fast speed; and one traveller on the Manchester to Liverpool line in 1835 was ‘completely horrified’ by the train’s speed. As he told his sister:
At six o’clock we were all on our way to the much talked of railhead. On reaching this office, as soon as you have paid your fare, you are commanded to walk upstairs to the coach rooms …
Reaching the top, there you behold a range of coaches of large dimension fastened close to each other. Some are closed like our Leeds coach, and others are open on the sides – in order to have a view of the country, as I thought, and of their manner of proceeding. We all took our place in an open one … Before starting I took a survey of all around, first placing my little ones safe. The steam carriage which propels each train is something like a distilling wagon and have each a name of no inviting character, for instance, Fury, Victory, Rapid, Vulcan, Tiger and so on.
A few minutes after we started, not very fast at first, but, in less than five minutes, off we went like a shot from a gun. No sooner did we come to a field than it was a mile behind us, but this was nothing in comparison with meeting a long train of carriages from Liverpool. I was never so frightened in my life than at this moment; I shrank back completely horrified in my seat; I do not think the train was more than 2 seconds in passing, yet it was as long as Holywell Hill. We were then going at a full 34 miles an hour, consequently they passed us at double that time.
It is impossible to form any idea of the rapidity of moving. Several other trains passed us, but as I was aware of their approach they no longer alarmed me as at first. The first 17 miles we went in 32 minutes. I am much disappointed in the view of the country, the railway being cut through so many hills you have frequently for miles only clay mounds on each side of you – consequently no splendid prospect can attract your attention. Even when the railway is on a bridge or at an elevation above the usual track of land, you are not charmed by that diversity of prospect which is to be met with in ordinary stage coach travelling. That has a decided superiority over this new work of man … Previous to entering Liverpool, you go through a dark,
black, ugly, vile abominable tunnel 300 yards long, which has all the horrors of banishment from life – such a hole as I never wish to go through again.19
Many of the smaller lines did not presume to the velocity of the Manchester to Liverpool. The Eastern Counties line was one of them. So notoriously slow was it, indeed, that a robust youth of sixteen, discovered to be travelling at half price, pleaded that he had been under twelve when the ‘train started’.20 But by 1842 when Queen Victoria arrived at Paddington Station from Slough, after her first experience of railway travel, the seventeen-mile journey had taken just twenty-three minutes, at an average of forty-four miles an hour. Prince Albert thought this rather dangerous. ‘Not so fast next time, Mr Conductor, if you please,’ he is often said to have requested. Six years later, however, the Great Britain steam engine was roaring into London, carrying its carriages along at more than a mile a minute. Many passengers still found such speeds alarming. A German travelling in England in the 1840s found ‘riding in an open and shaking carriage so elevated’ most startling. It was ‘really frightening’ to be ‘dragged along backwards by the snorting engine with such rapidity, under thundering bridges, over lofty viaducts, and through long dark tunnels filled with smoke and steam!’ By and by, however, he became accustomed even to this.21 Most passengers, in fact, did soon grow accustomed to the hurtling speeds, though still astonished by them. ‘So rapid are the communications,’ wrote Dr Dionysius Lardner in 1850, ‘that it is frequently announced that this professor or artist will, on Monday evening, deliver a lecture or entertainment in Liverpool, on Tuesday in Manchester, on Wednesday in Preston, on Thursday in Halifax and so forth.’22
While speeds improved, the safety of the passengers did not. There were fifteen times as many fatal accidents in England as there were in Germany, many of them the fault of the passengers themselves who were constantly attempting to board moving trains, jumping off to pick up their hats, sitting on the tops of the carriages and falling over the sides of the open, seatless trucks which were the only form of accommodation at first provided for third-class travellers. In the railway companies’ reports there are frequent references to these accidents: ‘Injured, jumped out after his hat’; ‘fell off, riding on the side of a wagon’; ‘skull broken, riding on the top of a carriage, came into collision with a bridge’; ‘fell out of a third-class carriage while pushing and jostling’; ‘guard’s head struck against a bridge, attempting to remove a passenger who had improperly seated himself outside’. Of the serious accidents reported to the Board of Trade one year, twenty-two happened to persons who had ‘jumped off when the carriages were going at speed, generally after their hats, and five persons were run over when lying either drunk or asleep upon the line’.23
Uncomfortable as their accommodation was, passengers were at first charged at the rate of 1½d a mile.24 This rate was reduced in 1844 to 1d a mile for third-class passengers who were, by order of Parliament, provided with at least one train a day on every line. Still cheaper fares were introduced in the 1860s; and in the early 1870s the Midland Railway set the example of providing third-class carriages on every train.25
The Railway Act of 1844, as well as introducing the so-called daily ‘Parliamentary trains’ for third-class passengers, also required that they must have protected seating accommodation; and in 1870 their carriages were made a good deal less uncomfortable. They were still badly lit, though; and even in the second-class carriages passengers had to take candles with them if they wanted to read at night. Candles could be bought, together with books, newspapers and magazines, from W. H. Smith & Son who opened their first bookstall at Euston Station in 1848 and who subsequently opened 200 more bookstalls on the Great Western and London and North Western Railways. On occasions brimstone matches served the purpose of candles as Francis Kilvert discovered one day in May 1870 when travelling to the Bath Flower Show:
Found the first train going down was an Excursion train and took a ticket for it. The carriage was nearly full. In the Box tunnel as there was no lamp, the people began to strike foul brimstone matches and hand them to each other all down the carriage. All the time we were in the tunnel these lighted matches were travelling from hand to hand in the darkness. Each match lasted the length of the carriage and the red ember was thrown out of the opposite window, by which time another lighted match was seen travelling down the carriage. The carriage was chock full of brimstone fumes, the windows both nearly shut, and by the time we got out of the tunnel I was almost suffocated. Then a gentleman tore a lady’s pocket handkerchief in two, seized one fragment, blew his nose with it, and put the rag in his pocket. She then seized his hat from his head, while another lady said that the dogs of Wootton Bassett were much more sociable than the people.26
Those embarking on long journeys had to take food as well as matches with them, since until 1882 there were no restaurant cars, except for first-class passengers travelling short distances. Even then, as there were no corridors, passengers intending to eat in the restaurant car had to get out when the train stopped at a station and walk along the platform. Corridor coaches were, however, being built by the early 1890s; and sleeping-carriages, introduced on the North Eastern line soon afterwards for first-class passengers only, were also becoming general. There were no lavatories, though, except on the royal train where they were provided for Queen Victoria whose ladies, not permitted to use them, had to get out when the train stopped at secluded places on its way to Scotland.27
While passengers were being transported around the country in ever faster and more comfortable trains, journeys in cities were becoming easier too, if not always quicker or safer: an illustration in an 1864 issue of The Illustrated London News depicts a traffic jam on the corner of Brick Street and Park Lane in London in which nervous or angry pedestrians, coachmen, drovers and passengers are embroiled in a jumble of barking dogs, sheep and long-horned cattle. The horses of a carriage and pair have come face to face with a costermonger’s donkey cart, while a hansom cab, whose top-hatted occupant is arguing with its driver, attempts unsuccessfully to overtake a crowded omnibus on its way to Paddington.
The omnibus had first appeared in London prints towards the end of the eighteenth century, though the name did not come into general use until 1829 when a ‘new vehicle, called the omnibus, commenced running this morning [4 July] from Paddington to the City’. The name had originated in France where at the shop of a M. Omnès in Nantes, the terminus of a service of large-capacity passenger vehicles, a slogan was displayed advertising the service with a pun on the shopkeeper’s name – Omnes Omnibus (‘All for Everyone’). George Shillibeer, a former midshipman who had set up a small business in Paris after having trained as a coach-builder in Long Acre, was responsible for introducing the ‘new carriages on the Parisian mode’ to England. His first two carriages ran from the Yorkshire Stingo at Paddington to the Bank, the fare being is, later increased to 1s 6d for inside passengers, is remaining the price for those on top. Each omnibus, which had windows at the sides and back, was drawn by three bays, harnessed abreast, and carried up to twenty passengers. Soon Shillibeer had increased the number of his omnibuses to twelve, running in various parts of London; but, having relinquished his business in the centre of London to start a new service of omnibuses to Greenwich and Woolwich, he was ruined by the opening of the Greenwich Railway; and his enterprise was developed by others, notably the London General Omnibus Company. This was formed in 1856 and thereafter omnibuses, or buses as they were colloquially known – De Tivoli’s Patent Buses which ran between Paddington and the Bank being particularly comfortable models – became one of the principal means of passenger transport not only in London but in all the larger towns of England. Horse-drawn omnibuses did not finally disappear until the First World War; but by then motor buses were in general use, the first licence having been issued for these in 1897. And by 1913 there were 3000 motor omnibuses on the London streets. It was not until 1925, however, that the tops of some buses were enclosed and the ‘o
utside’ passengers, still known as such, were sheltered from the rain.28
The first conductors, some of whom were said to be the sons of army officers, were celebrated for their courtesy and efficiency. But by the 1850s they were better known for their dishonesty, their cockiness and for their determination to crowd as many passengers into the bus as possible. Attempts were made to check their honesty by employing women to get on to the omnibus, to count the number of fares – differentiating between ‘insides’ and ‘outs’ and short and long journeys – and then to fill in a form for the proprietor at the terminus. But the conductors, or ‘cads’ as they were commonly known, soon learned to recognize the spy whose returns could, in any case, never be reliable.