The Railways Page 11
A family saloon on the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway, from The Graphic, 1873
This operational responsiveness also favoured the wealthy invalid, for whom the railways came as a liberation. By reserving one of the better types of saloon, a long-distance journey that might have been risky or even fatal by road could now be undertaken in tolerable comfort, with medical attention close to hand. In these cases a bed might be made up on one of the bench seats, or set up in the central space (as could be done, too, for perfectly healthy passengers who were travelling overnight). There was also a specialised sort of saloon designed specifically for invalids, including one on the Great Northern that had an open platform at one end, so that an occupied stretcher or bath-chair could be handled more easily in and out.
Rarer still, and altogether a later phenomenon, were club carriages. These were provided for exclusive use by a select group in return for a supplement on top of the season ticket fee, or a guarantee by the membership to make a minimum purchase of tickets. The first club carriages began running in 1895 on the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway’s Blackpool-to-Manchester route. The carriages really were organised like a club: new members were elected by committee and agreed to abide by club rules, which included the allocation of individual armchair-type seats within the saloon and strict protocols that governed the opening of windows while the train was in motion. Another club was formed fifteen years later for businessmen travelling to Manchester from North Wales. Every day, its two dedicated saloons were attached to the same morning train from Llandudno, returning each afternoon. Tea was served on board and members had their own lockers. A third club train ran to and from Windermere. The set-up is so like the premise of a P. G. Wodehouse story that it is a surprise to learn that gritty Manchester remained the only stronghold of these club trains, which never made the leap southward to the commuterland of the Home Counties.
For those among the wealthiest class who particularly wished to keep apart from strangers, there was yet another way of travelling by train. Passengers of this elevated sort were likely to arrive at the station in their own coaches and often wished to transport these coaches with them on the journey. In such cases the railways were ready with flat wagons, known as carriage trucks, which could be attached to timetabled trains (expresses normally excepted). Horse boxes were also provided, for those wanting to take their teams with them. Suitably secured, the coaches went on their way by train, and their occupants – assuming that they did not install themselves in the railway’s own carriages – thus became railway passengers, until the time came to disengage and continue the journey by road.
Besides the extra charge, the traveller was asked to give sufficient notice of the intention to take coach and horses on the journey. Surtees in 1851 advised that a day or two would suffice for this. He had already picked up on the practice in a novel, Handley Cross (1843), in which the unstoppable Jorrocks arrives in his own open-topped vehicle, carried on an ‘open platform’ or flat wagon, together with well-muffled wife and attendants. In the railways’ early years, stagecoaches were sometimes piggybacked on flat wagons too, until the direct conveyance of mailbags and boxes by train took over.
There is something unsettling about this arrangement for journeying by carriage and by train at one and the same time, one set of springs shuddering on top of the other: a way of travel at once sequestered and absurdly exposed and conspicuous, as if on a float in a pageant.*** Connoisseurs of British eccentricity will recognise the method as among the oddities of the 5th Duke of Portland (1800–79), a pathological recluse whose exalted position allowed him to indulge his protective strategies to an extreme degree. A door with ingoing and outgoing letterboxes served as the Duke’s means of communication with the rest of the household at his seat of Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire, where he retreated into a suite of four or five rooms among hundreds. (Other rooms were kept unfurnished, except for the water closets he liked to install in the corners.) He also excavated a suite of underground chambers there, including a chapel and three libraries. To conceal his journeys to the railway station at Worksop, the Duke had another tunnel made as far as the main road. But his onward railway journeys were eccentric, if at all, only for his habit of pulling down the carriage blinds so as to escape observation. In other respects, the railway helped Portland to keep up something of the social profile which the possession of a great title entailed. This required a measure of self-display even for recluses, of which going about in a private coach emblazoned with arms was a normal and accepted component.
Private carriage traffic of this kind could make up a surprisingly large proportion of passenger business in the early years; Sir Charles Pasley’s diary for 1845 records a London-to-Birmingham train comprising thirty railway vehicles, among which were nine or ten horseboxes and sufficient flat wagons to carry eleven or twelve gentlemen’s coaches. Few readers notice it, but the first description of a railway journey in Dickens’s novels – made by the death-haunted senior subject of Dombey and Son (1848) in company with the ghastly Major Bagstock, also on the Birmingham train – has as its point of view not a railway compartment, but Mr Dombey’s own rail-borne coach.
How the system worked on the Great Western Railway was summarised in its Time Book (timetable) for 1863, with a fine sense of upholding class differences:
Passengers in Private Carriages (not being servants) are required to take first-class tickets, and such passengers may remove during the journey to the Company’s First-class carriages if there be sufficient room in them. Servants travelling on private carriages are required to take Second-class tickets and they may remove to Second-class carriages provided there be room. A groom travelling in a horse-box in charge of a horse is allowed to travel at third-class fare.
To travel in such splendid isolation was not without its hazards. The heavy swaying motion proved too much for the stomachs of some, including the Guest family, forced to abandon their carriage in favour of a normal compartment when travelling from Birmingham to Liverpool in 1837. The dust and grime could be as bad as on the roads, and hot cinders were a special hazard. The Countess of Zetland learned as much on a journey from Leeds to London with her maid on the morning of 8 December 1847. Sparks from the engine exhaust set fire to an umbrella on the outside of the countess’s coach, from which the flames spread to a trunk on the roof. Shortly after the train left Leicester, the smell of smoke alerted the occupants. The speed at the time was estimated at forty or fifty miles an hour. As the fire took hold, the pair climbed out and sought refuge on the open truck:
We clung on by the front springs of the carriage, screaming ‘fire’ incessantly, and waving our handkerchiefs. We passed several policemen [railway servants] on the road, none of whom took any notice of us. No guard appeared. A gentleman in the carriage behind mine saw us, but could render no assistance. My maid seemed in an agony of terror … I turned away for a moment to wave my handkerchief, and when I looked round again my poor maid was gone. The train went on, the fire of course increasing, and the wind blowing it towards me.
Relief came only when the train stopped at Rugby. An engine sent back to look for the maid accidentally ran her over, leaving her with a fractured skull and ‘in an almost hopeless state’.
Lady Zetland’s ordeal was related as a cautionary tale by the Irish scientific writer, statistician and busybody Dionysius Lardner in his Railway Economy (1850). The book set out to demonstrate that railways were generally safe, while tabulating recent accidents to passengers and staff in lugubrious detail in order to quantify any specific risks. Had he known of any other lethal carriage fires, Lardner would surely have catalogued them too; instead, he noted that railway carriages were much more robustly constructed than those made for the roads, so that anyone who chose to remain within the latter kind while travelling by rail exposed himself to unnecessary peril.
Such strictures were unlikely to have frightened the Duke of Wellington, another habitué of flat-truck travel. Wellington’s relationsh
ip with railways was complex and often contradictory. In some respects, the Duke was among the best informed statesmen of the time where railways were concerned. On a visit to Lord Londonderry’s colliery railway in County Durham in 1827, he was treated to a ride in a specially made rail-mounted landau behind one of George Stephenson’s early locomotives (Wellington called it a ‘steam elephant’). In those days, barely anyone outside the north-east had even seen such a thing. His term as prime minister included a journey to open the Liverpool & Manchester Railway on 15 September 1830, in an age when such ceremonial duties by a premier were still exceptional. The day was famously marred by the accidental death of William Huskisson, MP for Liverpool and a former ministerial ally of Wellington’s Tory grouping. Approaching his carriage to speak to the Duke during a halt midway along the new line, Huskisson failed to keep clear of the Rocket as it sped past on the adjacent track, was run over and succumbed to his injuries in the evening. So Huskisson became the first passenger to die in a railway accident, and even after 200 years he remains the most prominent Briton to lose his life in this way. His is also still the best documented railway fatality, falling as it did on a great public occasion, in full view, and in a great age for reportage, memoir and prolific and articulate private correspondence.
Wellington’s friend and biographer G. R. Gleig suspected that the sad end of Huskisson lay behind the Duke’s aversion to railways; but the tough-minded old soldier had in his time witnessed the deaths and maimings of tens of thousands on the battlefield, among whom were some rather better friends than the late MP for Liverpool. Rather, his enduring dislike of railways seems to have derived jointly from the eclipse of the old coaching system and from the relative lack of privacy when going by train. On the latter point, the fullest denunciation comes in a letter to Angela, Baroness Burdett-Coutts, in 1848:
It appears to me to be the Vulgarest, most indelicate, most inconvenient, most injurious to Health of any mode of conveyance that I have seen in any part of the World! Mobs of well-dressed Ladies and Gentlemen are collected at every Station, to examine and pry into every Carriage and actions of every Traveller. If an unfortunate Traveller wishes to quit His Carriage, He is followed by one of these well dressed Mobs as a Hunted animal is by the Hounds …
Less delicately, the Duke wrote elsewhere of the absence on the railway of ‘the chance of relief at short distance’ – in other words, this national celebrity was followed by gawpers even when attempting to find a lavatory at intermediate stations. As to the end of the coaching network, ‘I hope the Gentry of the Country will not allow themselves again to be cheated and bustled, as we were out of the best system and establishment for travelling that existed in any part of the world’. This from one of five letters to Mary, Marchioness of Salisbury over one month in 1850, all of which lament delays, muddles, accidents and incompetence on the railways. When a railway line came close to the Duke’s Stratfield Saye House in Hampshire, he tried to insist that any stations should be kept at a minimum of five miles’ distance, relenting only at the request of his country neighbours.
Much of this represented a private release of steam; in public life, the Duke recognised that an accommodation had to be made with the iron roads. If nothing else, his duties required him to attend upon the Queen, and when she at last took to the rails in 1843 he could hardly refuse to follow. That meant stepping aboard the luxurious carriage provided by the London & South Western Railway – to the delight of the company’s chairman, who had reported ruefully in the previous year: ‘Although a special train was always in readiness for His Grace [at Basingstoke, not far from Stratfield Saye], this has not yet been taken advantage of by him.’ As a senior soldier Wellington was also convinced of the railways’ military potential and lent his support to a plan that circulated in the 1840s by which a continuous strategic line should run along the south coast, to aid in mustering defences against invasion. This interest ran to matters of detail: awaiting a train one day, Wellington beckoned the stationmaster into a third-class carriage and quizzed him on how soldiers were carried by train, ‘every point connected with their locomotion and comfort’; fifty questions in five minutes, ‘all pertinent and to the purpose’. This happened at Dover, through which Wellington regularly travelled as Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, a ceremonial post he retained to the end of his life. Many of these journeys were made in an outlandish one-off carriage provided for him by the South Eastern Railway: a composite of first and second class, with the Duke’s compartment styled reassuringly like a stagecoach body (had he requested something like one?), and placed so that its floor came down a little below the underframe. The Duke was famously a tall man, and the dropped floor seems to have been there to give him greater headroom.
These documented interests must be set against the persistent legend that paints Wellington as the railways’ diehard foe. He is supposed to have disliked them on the grounds that the trains would ‘only encourage the lower classes to move about’. Evidence that Wellington actually said or wrote this at all is hard to come by, but the endless recirculation of the tale says something about how the times have been remembered. These were anxious years – the period from 1837 to 1842 in particular was restive and unhappy, as strikes and related violence repeatedly flared up, culminating in the rejection by Parliament of a Chartist reform petition of over 3 million signatures. Viewed from either end of the class spectrum, revolution or civil war seemed perfectly possible by the mid 1840s. It was certainly not yet clear that the freedom of popular movement promised by the railways would serve to reinforce as well as unsettle the established order.
It was the excursion train that did most to expand the possibilities for crowds on the move. The concept was not new: steamboats had already brought discounted group travel within the reach of many, especially along the Thames and the Clyde. The Liverpool & Manchester had been in business for less than two weeks before it started something similar. These first trips were organised by the company itself. Soon, trains were running by arrangement with private groups too, beginning with an excursion between the cities in 1831. Fares might be half the usual rate or less, but high passenger numbers ensured that a profit was made on rolling stock that would otherwise have lain idle.
The 1840s brought true mass transportation, by means of ‘monster’ trains. Like the lifespans of the patriarchs in the Book of Genesis, some of their statistics beggar belief. Nearly 3,000 people went in sixty-seven carriages from Nottingham to Leicester in August 1840. Four years later, 7,800 excursionists travelled from Leeds to Hull, in 250 carriages pulled by ten locomotives. That was too many for a single train, so the service ran in separate portions, snaking past the eyes of astonished Yorkshire villagers at the close intervals that the rule-of-thumb operating methods of the 1840s allowed.
The famous name associated with early railway excursions is that of Thomas Cook. In later life he even claimed to have pioneered the field, an assertion echoed on Cook’s Wikipedia entry at the time of writing. The truth is more complicated, and somewhat stranger. Cook’s first excursions were motivated not by profit – his travel business came later – but from his devotion to the Temperance movement. The railway excursion that he organised for 5 July 1841 was meant both as an alternative attraction to the alehouse and as publicity for the abstainers’ cause. It carried some 500 sober but happy travellers from Cook’s home town of Leicester as far as Loughborough, ten miles to the north. Here lunch, dancing, speeches and other diversions were provided in the private park of a wealthy supporter. Temperance delegations from other towns attended, and the day was judged a triumph – not least by Cook himself, who urged the crowd to give ‘One cheer more for Teetotalism and Railwayism!!!’ Similar excursions followed as part of a broader social and religious programme which Cook sustained on the profits of his publishing and bookselling activities. Only in 1845 did he strike out with a commercial venture, an excursion to Liverpool and Snowdonia. By that time the South Eastern Railway had already run the first day trip t
o France, on 14 June 1843. Cook’s foreign tours, when they came, were therefore also not as novel as is sometimes stated.
Cook’s clientele came from the respectable middle classes. Those whose tastes were rowdier or less moralised made use of excursion trains too. A trip from Lincoln to Thornton Abbey in 1849 ended in intoxication for some passengers, who had reportedly come equipped with ‘alcoholic pocket pistols’ even though the trip was billed as a Temperance excursion. For many, drinking en route in like-minded company was part of the holiday fun. F. S. Williams noted that the windows of excursion trains were particularly liable to emit flying bottles, to the peril of railwaymen working along the line. (A poster on the Great Western Railway reminded passengers that ‘Empty Bottles may be left in the carriages’; admonition disguised as information.)
Nor were the excursionists’ destinations always entirely wholesome. The Bodmin & Wadebridge Railway ran an excursion to the double hanging at Bodmin gaol in August 1840. Special trains brought many of the estimated 100,000 who watched the bungled execution of the multiple murderer John Gleeson Wilson outside Kirkdale gaol in Liverpool on 15 September 1849. To some extent, the railways may even be said to have contributed unwittingly to the decision in 1868 that future executions should be carried out behind prison walls, to put an end to these ghoulish and disorderly sprees.
Another category of train that disappeared in 1868, by prohibition under the Regulation of Railways Act, was the prizefight excursion. The surprise is that these ever happened at all, given that bare-knuckle fights were unlawful in the first place. That did not foil their wild popularity, among the more rackety members of the upper crust as well as with the masses. When the railways came, the sport became at once more furtive and more flagrant. Special trains could supply and whisk away the combatants and the crowds, and it was easier to set up fights in remote places at the limits of county boundaries, between the effective jurisdictions of rival magistracies. Although it was not illegal to attend these events, the readiness with which the railway companies joined in the traffic is startling – as if British Rail had laid on special trains to the ecstasy-fuelled farmland raves of the 1980s.