The Railways Page 10
There was a measure of truth in Watkin’s objections. The South Eastern was moved to introduce some third-class carriages around 1873 with iron drainage funnels recessed into the floor, partly so that its cleaners could more easily swill away the spittle deposited by passengers. The clerk whose employers required him to turn up looking spick and span, and whose income stretched to a second-class season ticket, did well to keep away from the reeking and spitting workman travelling third, whose labours required him to get dirty. Punch showed a coal-black chimney-sweep appealing to a nonplussed porter concerning his brushes and sack of soot: ‘’Elp us up with my luggage, mate!’ Such collisions help to explain why second class persisted longer on certain suburban lines, especially in London. More broadly, the ad hoc mixing of the classes in response to overcrowding was a standard subject of complaint to the management and the newspapers.
An extra form of social streaming was also practised in the form of super-cheap workmen’s trains that ran very early in the morning, in London and several other urban areas. The Metropolitan Railway can claim to have inaugurated these in 1864, when it began running two trains before 6 a.m. each day at a return fare of threepence, reduced later to twopence (roughly a farthing a mile, which really was amazingly cheap). Others were stipulated by Acts of Parliament for new lines into London, and were meant to allow those displaced by demolition to stay within affordable travelling range of their workplaces. The London services also helped to rescue ordinary third-class passengers from the need to compete for carriage-space with the large pieces of timber which some early-travelling workmen habitually took with them, a custom noted in 1906 by the Chairman of the Metropolitan District Railway. By 1914, 1,966 designated trains of this kind were in service each weekday across the network: in effect, a kind of fourth class.
Early running was also meant to discourage the habit of taking the cheapest ticket regardless of the traveller’s social class, to the extent that workmen were required by some lines to show particulars of their employment when making the purchase. The practice of budget travel seems to have been particularly tempting to those making regular, short-distance urban and suburban trips. That was what happened on the London & Blackwall, the first railway to serve east London (opened 1840), and on the Glasgow, Paisley & Greenock (opened 1841). Here the merchants who had drawn up grandly at the terminus in their private carriages proved content to take cheap tickets and to travel onwards standing up.
The latter case looks like a communal decision by a particular clique not to spend any more than necessary, and not to mind each other’s economies in doing so. Other parts of Victorian Scotland could show similar behaviour. An aggrieved English shareholder of the under-performing North British Railway complained in the early 1850s that passengers north of the border who could afford better too often took third-class tickets instead: ‘It will not do for Englishmen to make railways and Scotchmen to travel on them for nothing.’ Another anomaly by English standards was the decision of the Great North of Scotland Railway and the forerunner companies of the Highland Railway, long-distance lines that opened their first instalments around the same time, not to bother with second class at all. As a contemporary source put it, in the Highlands ‘there are only two ranks of people – a higher rank and a lower rank – the former consisting of a few large tenants … and the latter consisting of a dense body of small cottars and fishermen’.
That the great lairds would travel first class was not in any question. The same applied to dukes, earls, bishops, senior military officers and sundry other members of the carriage-owning classes. So it is interesting to note that Gladstone recorded two second-class journeys in his diary for 29 January 1850. There is little superfluous detail in this unchatty chronicle, and it may be that Gladstone chose to note the trips as exceptions to his usual habit. Perhaps it is significant that he was then an opposition MP, without a ministerial salary. There may even be a whiff of status anxiety about these déclassé journeys. That an element of self-policing entered into the system is suggested by a story told of the neo-medieval architect A. W. N. Pugin (1812–52), who liked to go about in a distinctly bohemian outfit comprising a sailor’s jacket, loose trousers, jackboots and broad-brimmed hat. Entering a first-class carriage after disembarking from the Calais crossing, he was challenged by a fellow passenger: ‘Halloa, my man, you have mistaken, I think, your carriage.’ ‘By Jove, I think you are right; I thought I was in the company of gentlemen.’ An apology followed; then, ‘The remainder of the journey was most agreeably passed in examining his portfolio filled with sketches just taken in Normandy.’ (A 1960s variation on the theme: a guard on the East Coast route recalled being summoned to eject some ‘yobboes’ from first class, who turned out to be Jimi Hendrix and his entourage, their tickets all in order.)
For those who felt the need to maintain a visible position in society – which included many of the middling sort, as well as the ranks above them – anxieties of this kind were hard to avoid when choosing a ticket. This apprehension seems to have been most pronounced in long-distance journeys, which were also the most expensive. R. S. Surtees’s guide to railway travel was aimed especially at the ‘numerous and respectable class of country residents’ who might be considering a trip to London for the Great Exhibition of 1851, and were concerned to cut a decent figure on the way. So he reassures readers that a second or third may actually be preferable for a summer trip, ‘being cooler and less dust-catching’ from the absence of upholstery; besides, ‘A Tarrier coat and wideawake hat would conceal a timid economist from his best friend.’ From fiction, here is Johnny Eames, the young hero of Trollope’s The Small House at Allington (1864), a clerk in the Income Tax Office, on his way back to London after staying with Lord de Guest, ‘taking a first-class ticket, because the earl’s groom in livery was in attendance upon him. Had he been alone he would have gone in a cheaper carriage. Very weak in him, was it not? Little also, and mean? My friend, can you say that you would not have done the same …?’ Nor were Trollope’s commercial classes immune, as Mr Moulder in Orley Farm (1862) bears witness: ‘Hubbles and Grease [Moulder’s employers], he said, allowed him respectably, in order that he might go about their business respectable; and he wasn’t going to give the firm a bad name by being seen in a second-class carriage, although the difference would go into his own pocket.’
The concern to keep up appearances could weigh heavily in smaller places, where any hint of shifting foundations for apparent wealth was sure to be picked up. A character in one of George Gissing’s novels upbraids a visitor for having come innocently down on a second-class ticket: ‘“In London things don’t matter, but here I’m known, you see.”’
Single-class railway travel thus remained exceptional. The North Eastern Railway gave it a brief try after electrifying its suburban lines to Tynemouth in 1904, whereupon usage of first class dropped off so much that the facility was discontinued. But local malcontents immediately mustered a protest meeting under the chairmanship of the Duke of Northumberland – not a man easily ignored in that region – and the superior class was restored. The Tyneside electrics thus remained in conformity with the older of the London Underground lines, which finally did away with their remaining first-class services as a wartime economy in 1941. It is strange to think of the last holders of first-class season tickets stepping over the prone forms of those seeking shelter from the Blitz, as each rush hour of late 1940 faded into evening.
A similar deference to matters of class regardless of real demand appears to explain the rather ridiculous arrangements on some of the tiny, financially straitened lines of the last major phase of railway construction. All three classes could be sampled on the North Sunderland Railway (which duly received complaints in 1944 when wartime circumstances enforced the withdrawal of first class). The Easingwold Railway offered first and second class only for its two-and-a-half miles through the Vale of York, in creaky cast-off carriages bought from larger lines. In 1947, the last full year of operation, just
one passenger went first class, contributing 8d to an annual passenger revenue of £18 0s 8d; it is possible that this big spender was actually a ticket-collecting enthusiast snapping up a rarity.
So far, we have been considering the single passenger. That is to disregard what might be called the servant problem. How should Victorian domestic staff travel with their masters and mistresses? Going first class, they would cost their employers more and risk the suggestion of an improper equality of treatment. In third class they might feel themselves hard done by. So the convention arose that they should travel by second, even though this meant that their services could not be called upon between stations. One reason for the popularity of carriages of the ‘composite’ type with first- and second-class compartments side by side was to permit servants to stay close at hand during the journey (the Liverpool & Manchester discounted one compartment in each of its first-class carriages to allow this).
Another option, for those who could afford it, was to hire a private saloon. Early royal saloons have been mentioned already. These were not actually royal property, but were built by the railway companies for hire by the royal household and for other exceptional uses such as the conveyance of state visitors. Only those companies on the regular routes north to Scotland, west to Windsor and south to the Channel Ports built carriages ‘by appointment’, but these helped to set a standard for other lines to follow – a way of taking on to the iron road the privileged segregation in travel enjoyed by the owners of private road carriages.
Privately owned railway carriages, it should be added, were almost unknown. Perhaps things would have been different had Victoria and Albert set an example by keeping one, on the model of royal yachts, rather than finding the industry only too happy to come forward. The exceptions prove the rule, for they belonged to George Granville William Sutherland-Leveson-Gower, 3rd Duke of Sutherland (1828–92) and his successors. This fantastically rich duke’s seat was Dunrobin Castle in his eponymous Highland county, a partly medieval structure that his no less rich father had tripled in size in 1845–51. The nearest railway station in the latter year was at Aberdeen, some 150 miles away across land. By 1855 the rails had reached Inverness, the last Scottish city to join the network. Construction of a line from there northwards to Dunrobin and beyond, through wild territory with a high quotient of earthworks, bridges and viaducts, was not a project in which capitalists fell over themselves to invest. Nor could a large passenger traffic be expected once the line opened – a situation not helped by the 1st Duke’s vigorous clearances of the Highland peasantry in favour of the farming of sheep, whose railway journeys out of the region (in special double-deck wagons) were strictly one-way.
Yet a railway offered many advantages to an improving landowner beyond the convenience of passenger travel, quite apart from its value in this case as a route to the ports for Orkney and Shetland. On his succession in 1861, the new duke therefore set about completing a line to the far north. The new route took until 1874 to complete, by means of four separately constituted and confusingly named railway companies: the Inverness & Ross-Shire, the Sutherland Railway, the Duke of Sutherland’s Railway and the Sutherland & Caithness. The second and the last of these depended heavily on ducal investment, and the Duke of Sutherland’s Railway had to be paid for entirely by the man himself. As he already owned all the land, the Duke did not even have to wait for the necessary Act before starting work on this particular line. The completed lines were operated by the Highland Railway, with the right of personal running powers reserved to the Duke. By 1889 Sutherland’s investment in railways was calculated at £355,000, including ordinary Highland Railway shares received in exchange for transferring ownership of his personal railway.
All this to set the scene, and to make it clear that the Duke’s private station and private saloon carriage at Dunrobin were mere baubles by comparison. The next duke added to these a private locomotive (named Dunrobin) that was used for personal jaunts over the Highland Railway’s lines: a neat little thing, recently repatriated to Britain from a museum in Canada. It had a sizeable cab equipped with a comfy back seat so that the Duke could take his guests for a ride, which made Dunrobin certainly the only locomotive to have carried at various times kings Edward VII and George V, Kaiser Wilhelm II and King Alfonso XIII of Spain. Two of the three ducal saloons also still exist, both very smart vehicles, if not especially large. They are the nearest Britain could show to the private cars of the American gilded age, objects of competitive display among the Vanderbilts, Morgans, Harrimans and Fricks, which were frequently equipped to function as long-distance living quarters and mobile headquarters for the pursuit of business as well as pleasure. As well as the predictable marquetry and brocades, furnishings of the grosser sort included gold-plated bathroom plumbing, Venetian glass chandeliers (anchored against swaying by steel wires) and a green marble fireplace salvaged from a private mansion (framing electrically lit artificial logs). Cars of this type – American usage never took to ‘carriage’ for vehicles that run on rails – were commissioned well into the twentieth century; Sugar Cane, Marilyn Monroe’s character in Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot, set circa 1929, hopes to find a husband with ‘a yacht, a private railroad car, and his own toothpaste’.
Much of this elaboration would have bemused the traveller in the British saloon carriage of the 1860s. The saloon had by then established itself as a facility available for private hire, often at a surprisingly short notice. Apart from a few one-offs, the first batch was provided for the Great Western Railway at its opening in 1838. Brunel called these strange, angular designs ‘posting carriages’, hoping to evoke the glamour of post-chaises, the highest-ranking public conveyances on the roads. Their sides sloped sharply inwards below the windows to make way for huge broad-gauge wheels, except where the doorway stood upright in the middle of each long side, and their roofs were topped by the first clerestories to appear on the railways. Inside were upholstered and cushioned seats, running round each half in a U-shape, with a table placed along the middle. The intention was to establish a sort of club class, superior to first class and physically distinct from it; ‘Extra First Class’, as one London newspaper called it. As such, the service lasted barely a year, after which the carriages were kept aside for the use by appointment of private parties.
Having thrown all the volume of the carriage into a single compartment, the next step in saloon design was to subdivide it again, so that the social structure of the household could be respected within the space available. By the 1860s the type was reaching maturity and the best examples offered an enviable degree of self-sufficiency. The main saloon took up the greater part of the interior, with upholstered sofas or benches on two or three sides. A demountable table was commonly provided in the centre. The saloon was entered directly from outside, or via a cross-passage or vestibule – the railway equivalent, perhaps, of the screens passage to the great hall of a medieval house. On the far side of this vestibule, or opening directly from the saloon, was a narrower compartment equipped with facilities that placed the occupants on a level equal with royalty: lavatory and washbasin.** A second-class compartment for servants was also provided, with access either from the far end of the main saloon, or through a door in the other wall of the lavatory compartment. The sense of hierarchy in motion sharpens when one imagines a vigilant paterfamilias in the central seat of the U-shaped arrangement – often the most comfortable place, because the upholstery could be carried up higher there than on the windowed sides. Fill the rest of the seats with wife, children and a few maiden aunts or upper servants – a governess or tutor, perhaps – and we have an image like that of the formal family photograph; except that the personnel are turned inwards as if for mutual scrutiny, at just the right distance to give self-consciousness the edge over intimacy. It is an arrangement that must have made many an unhappy family even unhappier.
Happy or not, the enforced seclusion might be protracted: it was customary for family saloons to be uncoupled and transf
erred between trains, so that long journeys could be undertaken without having to decant luggage. This is what is meant by the ‘special arrangement of Mother’s with the G.N.R. [Great Northern] Company’, recorded in the diary of Florence Sitwell (1858–1930), maiden aunt of the writers Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell, by which her family party was able to pass all the way from Shalford in Surrey, through London and on to Scarborough. The practice did not make a good operational match with express working, so the saloons tended to be attached to semi-fast trains and the journeys lengthened in proportion. It was also possible to book a saloon as part of a separate private train, although this cost much more: the standard charge per mile was five shillings for a one-way journey, exactly sixty times the Parliamentary rate for a single adult. In the railways’ early years, private trains of one kind or another were sometimes rustled up at short notice. This was the salvation of Mr Isidore, coiffeur to Queen Victoria, when he missed his train for Windsor in 1843: after explaining his predicament at Paddington, a spare engine and carriage were found in time for him to fulfil his appointment. The charge was £18 for a journey of as many miles, a sacrifice worth making to save Isidore’s place, with its annual salary of £200.