The Railways Read online

  Most of these were permanently touring repertoire companies, but a West End hit such as Dion Boucicault’s bigamy-and-murder shocker The Colleen Bawn (1860) might also be sent around the country. Tours of this kind were sometimes undertaken by companies set up for no other purpose, which would be dissolved after the last journey back to the capital. Even Dickens got in on the act – how could he resist? – using the newly opened Great Northern Railway to take his own company of amateurs up to Knebworth, the Hertfordshire mansion of his fellow novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, in 1850. Half a century later, professional theatre trains in England and Wales alone amounted to 142 each Sunday, carrying hundreds of hard-working performers to new digs in time for the curtain to rise on the following Monday night. Henry Irving’s famous company was early in the game, venturing on to the rails for a sixteen-week tour in 1882: fifty-four members, with scenery, clothes, musical instruments and lighting sufficient for nine productions. The itinerary proved highly profitable, to the credit of its organiser, one Bram Stoker. (Perhaps the railway logistics recurred to mind when he came to write Dracula, the pages of which include the text of a very plausible legal document covering the nocturnal despatch by Great Northern Railway goods train of fifty boxes of vampiric soil.) Irving’s rail-borne tours ended only with the great actor’s death in 1905, sitting on a chair in the hall of the Midland Railway’s hotel at Bradford, after being taken ill at his final curtain.

  Among the earliest railway film footage to have survived is a clip of a theatrical train leaving Leeds station in 1896, its carriages followed by flat wagons bearing the mysterious lumpy shapes of tarpaulined sets, the platforms busy with people waving the human cargo on its way. Each train might carry several companies, at least for part of the way. The Railway Magazine recorded that the London & North Western alone managed to convey 112 companies on a single Sunday, 22 October 1911, by means of just nineteen main-line special trains and eleven more on branch routes, as well as ordinary timetabled services. The splitting and shunting involved must have been considerable: one train was composed of six companies, including ‘Florodora’ on the short hop from Eccles to Preston and ‘A Royal Divorce’ on the long haul from Hyde to Glasgow.

  Railways changed the rules of the game for the established London theatres too. Successful plays stood a better chance of enjoying long runs now that the potential audience included the population of outer suburbia, who could stay until curtain-call and still catch a late train home. With the hope of full houses in mind, producers became readier to invest in expensive sets and effects. Other cities witnessed similar changes. After their suburban lines were electrified in 1904, theatre-goers from well-heeled coastal suburbs could travel into Newcastle on fast early evening trains that hurried through plebeian Byker and Wallsend without stopping, returning no less quickly after the show was over. From a series of local or regional cultures, British theatrical life thus became more national in character, as well as more genteel, under the influence of the railways.

  Musical life was also transformed. The National Eisteddfod of Wales was a creature of the railways, without which the Welsh tradition of choral singing could not have developed as it did. For Londoners the lodestar was the reconstructed Crystal Palace, as reopened in 1854 in the southern suburbs. In its newly enlarged form, with the former railway engineer George Grove (he of the monumental Dictionary of Music and Musicians) as company secretary, the Crystal Palace hosted orchestral concerts and vast oratorio festivals, fuelled by a national craze for public singing classes: 2,700 people sang at the concert in 1859 that marked the centenary of Handel’s death, to a reported audience of 81,000. Some orchestras were thousands strong – the nearest Victorian equivalent to stadium rock. Transporting these throngs to and from London required two stations at the palace, both originally at the ends of branch lines, and both exceptionally large by suburban standards (one is now defunct). The Musical Times recorded a morning in 1859 when the trains were delivering passengers at an hourly rate of 12,000, ‘for some hours’. Concert-goers who bought programmes discovered the timetables of return services printed helpfully at the back.

  The huge gatherings made possible by the railways were not all secular in character. On 7 October 1857, a crowd of 23,654 listened to a sermon at the Crystal Palace by the Baptists’ star preacher Charles Spurgeon, who implored divine favour for efforts to suppress the Indian Mutiny. Travelling in north-east Scotland in the 1860s, the French critic Hippolyte Taine encountered an excursion train crammed with workers, farmers and shopkeepers, on their way to a similar revival meeting. So great were the crowds – 20,000 were predicted – that the company had to telegraph for extra carriages. While they waited, the women sang hymns ‘with an air of great conviction and serious purpose’. It is fair to say that these mass gatherings were not of the type most feared by the anti-railway reactionaries of the 1830s.

  Even the business of death was modified by the railways. The Duke of Wellington himself did not escape. His end came in 1852, at Walmer Castle in Kent. That he should receive a state funeral at St Paul’s Cathedral had long been understood. Had Wellington died twenty years earlier his last journey might well have begun by sea, into the mouth of the Thames. Instead, the South Eastern Railway brought up the coffin. Even in death Wellington was a magnet for crowds, so his funeral train was despatched in the middle of the night in order to avoid stirring up too much excitement.

  Coffins of less eminent persons were a regular railway cargo. Many main-line stations kept a trolley dedicated to the purpose, and most long-distance travellers, knowingly or not, would have shared a journey with a cadaver at one time or another. When the wife of the Cumbrian merchant and philanthropist George Moore died in London in 1858, the London & North Western took husband and deceased spouse to Carlisle, where Moore slept in the recently built Station Hotel. ‘It seemed strange to him, that while lying in his comfortable bed, his dead wife should be lying cold in the railway truck outside, within sight of the hotel windows.’ Some lines had special vehicles for the purpose, bluntly titled ‘corpse vans’. One of those belonging to the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway, with occupant, was smashed to bits in a derailment at Hebden Bridge in 1912 (four passengers also died, which ought to be more horrible than the fate of the corpse but somehow isn’t, after so many years). The little Festiniog Railway in Snowdonia kept its own black-painted hearse van, adapted from a quarryman’s coach and adorned with a cast-iron urn at each corner – this for a line just over fourteen miles long, running on narrow-gauge tracks set at well under half the width of standard gauge.

  More discreetly, the railways helped to supply medical schools with bodies for dissection, an increasingly important part of a Victorian doctor’s training. These were pauper corpses from the workhouse, available under the notorious rule by which the right to a normal burial was forfeited by those who died in destitution. Trains arriving at Cambridge regularly included these unmentionable consignments, destined for the Anatomy School in the town, whose own pauper mortality was unequal to the demand.

  Then there was the wonderfully titled Necropolis Railway, which operated from 1854 to 1945 from a private station alongside the terminus at Waterloo. Trains comprising hearse wagons and mourners’ carriages ran daily to Brookwood cemetery near Woking, the railway operation and the cemetery being parts of the same limited company. A similar but cheaper service started at King’s Cross not long afterwards, travelling only to the outer suburbs. Both achieved less custom than was hoped, but the Necropolis company survived into the new century. Its strange neo-Romanesque station was rebuilt in 1902, when two platforms were provided: one for the mourners, the other for loading coffins, discreetly out of view. From 1885 the senior company also helped to foster the exotic novelty of cremation, some of the earliest facilities for which were at Brookwood. This, too, was a symbiotic relationship with the railway. Cremation cost an additional £6, on top of the company’s standard charge of £8 10s. At that rate, the investment in furnaces and handling fac
ilities stood no chance of making a decent return without an efficient and dignified method of bringing custom from further afield.

  This post-mortem traffic, which ceased officially on British Rail as late as 28 March 1988, reflected differences in wealth no less firmly than the conveyance of living ones. The last journey of Matthew Arnold offers a detailed example of long-distance funereal travel among the upper-middle classes. The poet died suddenly in the street in Liverpool on 15 April 1888, on his way to take a horse-tram to meet some new arrivals at the docks. Two days later Arnold’s coffin was driven to Lime Street station, where a clergyman, the unfortunately named J. T. Slugg, was in attendance to receive it. Four porters carried the coffin to the brake van, described as being placed behind a saloon attached to the London train; presumably a family saloon had been engaged to preserve the mourners’ privacy. Next day a special train took mourners and coffin from Waterloo to Staines, from where the final stage to Laleham church was, as usual for funerals, by road.

  A working-class funeral on such lines was out of the question, for the railways’ rates of carriage for an occupied coffin were exacting. When a young actor named William Ryder died of pneumonia while on tour at Middlesbrough in 1899, his friends therefore returned the body to his bereaved family in London by encasing the coffin within a simple crate, scrawled in black chalk with the words ‘theatrical properties’ and ‘this side up’. Carried at the standard goods rate, the cost was 16s 2d; as an acknowledged cadaver, even without the extra weight of the packing case, it would have been around £11. (The ruse was detected, but the Great Northern Railway generously waived the difference.)

  We can conclude the examination of class differences by tracing the decline of the Wellingtonian habit of travelling within the rail-borne coach. The last edition of the Great Western’s Time Book to give details of the procedure appeared on 12 July 1913, although it seems effectively to have died out before then. One late exponent was Mrs Caroline Prodgers (died 1890), who was famous in her day for obsessively taking London cabmen to court for any suspected infringements of the regulations. Hamilton Ellis recorded that her occupied carriage was observed en route at Chesterfield in the 1880s; he claimed that she was the last person to travel in this manner.

  For the aristocracy, to travel in one’s own vehicle was a tradition centuries old, and difficult for some to forsake. The biographer Samuel Smiles claimed that certain grand families continued to use their own coaches even after they began sending the servants and luggage ahead by train – but never for long. ‘Railways have taken the starch out of country magnificence’, Surtees wrote in 1858; arrival in one’s own coach was no longer assumed, and a socially confident visitor might even be dropped off at the gate by the station omnibus. Any diehard who attempted to go long distances on the roads found that chains of coaching inns with fresh horses no longer existed. That meant the gradual acceptance of the railway compartment as a social space common to anyone who could afford to pay, with all the challenges and compromises that came of close confinement with strangers.

  Footnotes

  * A convention taken to its logical end by the individual line-plans between window and roof in the trains of the London Underground, strings pulled from the diagrammatic tangle of the famous map first codified by Harry Beck in 1931.

  ** In 1906 the Great Northern Railway built a saloon with a full-sized bath, but the idea failed to catch on.

  *** The idea perhaps seems slightly less strange to British travellers now that the Eurotunnel shuttle trains have adopted the concept for road vehicles, although their occupants line up within double-deck carriage trucks of the covered kind, with the option of getting out en route.

  – 4 –

  JOURNEYING TOGETHER

  No one much under the age of fifty will have adult memories of travelling on Britain’s railways in separate, non-communicating compartments. To recover a sense of what it was like to share that confined space with strangers, it is best to imagine entering a London-type taxi in which all but one seat has already been taken. The railway compartment was, of course, taller, with full seating on both sides. But in other respects – the rapid, half-involuntary assessment of fellow travellers, the forced intimacy expressed in closeness of gaze, ease of overhearing and exposure to personal odours, the sharing of a limited volume of air (and the control of access to the fresh variety by the passengers closest to the windows), the need to negotiate with the personal space of others when entering or leaving, the psychological advantage enjoyed by those already seated – the cab and the railway compartment have a decided affinity.

  For those with an aversion to such circumstances, and the funds to indulge it, the railway companies allowed the reservation of an entire compartment, which then would be kept locked until needed. This was expensive, in inverse proportion to the number of people travelling. Most people with a taste for privacy – which is to say, most people – sought out an empty compartment and hoped that no one would join them there.

  Ways of keeping undisturbed possession of a compartment were the occasion for humour. R. S. Surtees advised that a baby (subject to availability) should be held up at the window, it being well established that there was nothing like it for keeping grown men away. Punch advised trying the same dodge with a doll, breathing on the glass first for verisimilitude. The magazine was still having fun with the dilemma in the 1930s, when its cartoonist ‘Pont’, alias Graham Laidler, included ‘Love of travelling alone’ in his series on The British Character (1937–8): a frowning businessman has placed his hat, umbrella, gloves, briefcase, parcels etc. across every free seat of the compartment. The Bishop of Woolwich, in a sermon to undergraduates in the same decade, recommended the combination of a clerical collar (to deter men) and an unlit cigar (to ward off women). More extreme measures are recorded on the part of Gerald Tyrwhitt-Wilson (1883–1950), 14th Lord Berners, composer, author and playful avant-gardist: by masking his eyes behind black glasses and beckoning invitingly from the carriage window at every stop, he was able to secure the pleasures of solitude.

  ‘The British Character: Love of Travelling Alone’, cartoon by ‘Pont’ from Punch, 1937

  Undisturbed or not, at least one could hope to get a good seat – forward-facing and next to the window was the popular choice (cannier travellers, then as now, might also allow for the quality of the views and the position and transit of the sun during the journey). To stake a claim, some personal object might be placed on the seat, leaving the traveller free to oversee the loading of luggage, to exchange farewells, or any other activity on the platform. Surtees’s guide of 1851 advised that a book or a glove would do the job, but The Railway Traveller’s Handy Book noted that such light articles were often disregarded by passengers in second and third class, proposing instead the use of a heavy piece of luggage, ‘which some persons would be too timid, and others too idle, to remove’.

  This seat-marking convention was already current by the end of the 1830s. We know this from the case of Captain Connop’s handkerchief, which came to the Old Bailey for trial. Like many petty legal cases, it captures details of custom and circumstance that would otherwise have escaped record. Connop, an army officer on half-pay, was travelling from Paddington station on Boxing Day 1839. Selecting a seat in first class, he placed a silk handkerchief on it before attending to other matters. On his return ten minutes later the place-marker was gone. The nearest person to hand, a carriage cleaner called James Mayhew, denied all knowledge of its fate. Mayhew had been with the Great Western Railway for fourteen of its nineteen months of operational existence, and no complaints had been lodged against him in that time. Things looked rather different after the handkerchief was spotted two hours later, placed high up in the timbers of the roof ‘in the urinal of the second class booking office’. A railway policeman was set to watch, hiding in a lavatory cubicle ready to spring out should anyone come to fetch it down. Mayhew then entered. As soon as the policeman emerged, the cleaner dashed into one of the other cubic
les and refused to open the door; but the policeman found he could look in ‘at the top where there had been glass, but it was broken’, and the game was up. (The detail of the broken glass may incidentally be one of the first records of vandalism to a railway station wc.) So ended one early career on the railways.

  For many, the best journeys were when others kept away, when no handkerchiefs or seat-markers were necessary, and a whole compartment could be had to oneself. As Hilaire Belloc wrote in 1908, ‘The railway gives you seclusion … in the corner of a third-class going north or west you can be sure of your own company; the best, the most sympathetic, the most brilliant in the world.’ With control over the entry of daylight by means of curtains or blinds, and with ventilation also under individual command by means of the window strap, the little sliding grilles set into the carriage sides, and the adjustable dish-shaped vents in the carriage roof, the solitary traveller could fine-tune the railway compartment according to personal inclination. Here were all the privileges of solitary motoring without any of the responsibilities. Humming, scratching, muttering, fiddling, whistling, napping could all be indulged at whim. Nor could any disapproving stare or official reprimand deter the resting of feet on the seat opposite.

  This habit was rife by the 1860s, to judge from the experience of the North British Railway. Debating the pros and cons of upholstered seating, the line’s locomotive superintendent William Hurst lamented the difficulties of keeping even first-class carriages in decent order when ‘the padding is torn to pieces by passengers placing their feet upon it’. (As for a practical floor covering for lower-class carriages, he reluctantly concluded, ‘To use sand is out of the question or even straw.’) Those susceptible to seat abuse included the very man who – it may be argued – had set in motion the process of upgrading by which third class came to travel on cushions. William Gladstone himself was spotted at Swindon around 1887 by the young writer Ford Madox Ford, who looked across from the carriage alongside to discover the Grand Old Man in a compartment all his own: ‘He was sitting reading a memorandum with his feet on the cushions of the opposite seat. His face was expressionless, or rather morose. He was quite alone. He was wearing a black woollen cap with earflaps tied under the chin.’ Ford added, ‘It struck me that anyone could easily have assassinated him if they had wanted to.’