The Railways Page 14
In practice, discharges of firearms inside trains were mostly limited to suicides. They include the Woolwich linen-draper who shot himself as his train passed through the Blackheath Tunnel of the South Eastern Railway in 1862; a fatal act in one small railway space, in transit through a larger one. A similar fate overtook Silvanus Trevail, premier architect of Victorian Cornwall, in Brownqueen Tunnel in 1903, although he retired to a ladies’ lavatory before pulling the trigger – a sign that he was travelling in a newer sort of carriage, with a side corridor. Trevail was among eight railway-carriage suicides reported that year, including one instance of murder-and-suicide and two deaths in which poison was used. Self-inflicted deaths by throat-cutting are also recorded, and the failed suicide by home-made bomb of a nineteen-year-old billiard-marker named Harry Medina, crossed in love, who tried to put an end to himself in a North London Railway compartment between Barnsbury and Highbury in 1899. He escaped with burns and shock, damage to the carriage valued at £6 and a sentence of one month’s hard labour. More recently, the cases of Medina and Trevail were echoed by the bizarre suicide in 2011 of a woman passenger who took a gas canister into a lavatory on a train from Northampton to London and ignited it there.
Suicide of a passenger, from the Illustrated Police News, 1884
One qualified exception should be made to the list of solitary and decent activities allowed in the carriage: the smoking of tobacco. The correlation between the railways’ attitude to the weed and the customs of wider society is striking. When railways were new, smoking was in decline among the higher ranks. The habit was widely considered eccentric, rather foreign and mildly disgusting, so that a smoker who was a house-guest might have to retreat to the servants’ hall or stables. Tobacco was also regarded as a bachelor habit, which men were expected to renounce on marriage – hence its rather ‘fast’ associations of clubroom and officers’ mess, and the air of consolatory or forgivable naughtiness that hovers around the practice in much nineteenth-century writing. No surprise, then, that the Liverpool & Manchester Railway in 1831 used its first bylaw to ban smoking in first-class carriages, ‘even with the general consent of the Passengers present’, on the grounds that the lingering effects would annoy those using the vehicle afterwards. Other lines made similar rules; the minutes of the Newcastle & North Shields Railway for 1839 record the prohibition, describing tobacco smoke as ‘an evil that had caused injury to the best carriages’.
Regulations became stricter as open carriages gave way to closed ones, and bare boards to fabric finishes. In the absence of anyone to keep an eye on passengers between stations, however, it was not difficult to break these rules with impunity. A letter of 1841 from Thomas Carlyle to his wife gloats over the cigars he had just enjoyed on a run up to Derby, in company with the eminent (and presumably complaisant) editor Richard Monckton Milnes MP. The sporty Mr Bouncer, in Cuthbert Bede’s The Adventures of Mr Verdant Green, an Oxford Undergraduate (1853–7), chooses to forsake the rest of his travelling party and go second class, ‘where he could more conveniently indulge in the furtive pleasures of the Virginian weed’. Time was on Bouncer’s side: from a historic low point, smoking steadily became more popular from the 1830s onwards, as tobacco was presented in tempting, even fashionable new forms. The cigar was joined by the che-root, the favoured smoke of East India Company men, and by the cigarette, which came via the troops from the Crimean war, where Russian and Turkish forces alike puffed away on them, and which could be bought in the form of ‘Patent Crystal Cigarettes’ by 1858. For pipe men there was the briar, an innovation of the 1850s, when it was discovered that the root of the tree-heath or bruyère bush of Corsica could be carved into a robust smoking apparatus. The briar also delivered a cooler smoke than the fragile clay pipe of the working man. Tobacconists even sold ‘railway pipes’, described as ‘adapted for instantaneous concealment’. Matches, including the safety match (invented in 1855), helped the fires along; the ceilings of London & South Western carriages were described in 1866 as covered in scratches where they had been struck.
The railways’ response was mixed. Some tried to stand firm, including the Great Western – a little ungratefully, given that nearly £30,000 of share capital in the line and its constituents had been placed by Bristol’s tobacco barons, the brothers W. D. and H. O. Wills. Other lines experimented with special carriages, such as the Eastern Counties Railway’s first-class saloon of 1846, with its plate-glass-windowed compartment complete with mahogany table and table-lamps. But it was easier simply to designate existing compartments for the habit, as the Eastern Counties began to do in 1854.
The standard penalty for a breach of the smoking ban was a stiff forty shillings, with the additional risk of ejection from the train without refund of fare for those who persisted in the offence. Costs might be added if the matter came to court: in 1862 a magistrate found against two unchivalrous male passengers on the London & South Western who had refused to stop smoking after a polite request from some ladies in their carriage. But in practice a blind eye might be turned, especially if a little inducement changed hands. A Punch cartoon of 1858 shows a guard looking into a compartment occupied by three smart travellers, all visibly in breach of regulations: ‘There are two things not allowed on this line, gentlemen: smoking, and the servants of the company receiving money.’ The pay-off may be guessed. As Robert Audley mused in Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), ‘The Company may make as many bye-laws as they please … but I shall take the liberty of enjoying my cheroot as long as I’ve half-a-crown left to give the guard.’ Or you could take the rap and pay up: another Punch cartoon from these years has a ‘fast Etonian’ rebuked by a stove-pipe-hatted figure who reveals himself to be the manager of the line, only to receive the cool reply, ‘Well, old boy, I must have my smoke, so you may as well take your forty shillings now.’ The young Prince of Wales himself was detected in the offence, according to society gossip in the 1860s. Senior personnel did not always escape the suspicion of double standards: an errant passenger brought before Huddersfield magistrates in 1861 was let off partly on the grounds that the companies’ officials and directors were habitual and hypocritical smokers on their own trains.
Consistency in the treatment of smoking passengers came with the Railway Regulation Act of 1868. Henceforth, smoking compartments were to be designated on any train comprising more than one carriage of each class – not quite a green light to smoke on every journey, but enough to cover most. Speaking in favour of a less generous provision for smokers was the Radical philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806–73), at that time MP for Westminster, in one of his last interventions in the House of Commons. His best-known work, On Liberty (1859), famously makes the case for the freedom of the individual in all actions that are primarily self-regarding, but for Mill there was already so much smouldering tobacco in railway carriages that its consumption had become ‘a case of oppression by a majority of a minority’. By October 1868 a newspaper correspondent lamented that carpets were now a misplaced luxury in first class, where what was really needed were ash pans, and that third-class smokers should be equipped with spittoons and sawdust, the latter to be changed four times a day (a reminder that tobacco was chewed as well as burnt). The humorists had a new angle on an old favourite, too. Judy magazine, a short-lived competitor to Punch, showed a full compartment with just one non-smoker present: ‘Passenger (to Guard) “I say, look here, you know, here’s somebody not smoking!”’. Even the underground lines of London let in smokers eventually, after some tobacco-free years in which the management invoked an exemption under the 1868 Act.
A crowded smoking compartment was no place for the abstainer. In late March 1875, Francis Kilvert saw his brother Teddy off to London in a Great Western smoking compartment, ‘the atmosphere of which I could not have endured for a minute and could hardly bear to stand near the door even’. But there were more smokers all the time: tobacco consumption in Britain rose by some 5 per cent in every year from the 1860s to the end of the century. So the ra
ilways were now saddled with increased fire risks, dirt and burns to carriage carpets and upholstery. The companies could at least console themselves with the income from licensing the sale of tobacco at stations, especially after the Wills brothers introduced the ‘Bonsack’ vending machine from the United States in 1883. Three years later, Wills contracted with Spiers and Pond for exclusive rights of display and sale in its branches, railway refreshment rooms included. Other tobacco companies made similar arrangements. Cheap, universally available, ubiquitously advertised, familiar in every social class, and latterly adopted even by growing numbers of women, the cigarette conquered the railway network as it did the world outside. And so the fumes from millions of Wills’s ‘Autumn Gold’, considered to have been the first brand generally sold by vending machine, made their little contributions to the atmospheric products of combusted coal, coke, oil and gas flavouring the British railway station – the old prohibition of smoking on railway premises, as well as trains, ultimately proving impossible to enforce.
One telling alteration followed, concerning how the carriages were marked. Victorian smoking compartments were indicated as such. The absence of a sign – such as a frosted inscription on the window glass, or the Great Western’s big ‘S’ inside the carriage door – indicated that tobacco should not be consumed there. The 1920s began to reverse this convention, so that it was non-smoking spaces that were labelled. The GWR adopted this policy in 1930, when red triangular stickers began to appear on the windows of its non-smokers. Britain’s railways thus came into line with the Continental system (by 1899 already ‘a smoker’s paradise’, according to that year’s Railway Magazine). There were markedly fewer of these refuges, too; Compton Mackenzie’s Sublime Tobacco, published in 1957 in the author’s seventy-fourth year, noted that smoke-free compartments had become as hard to find as the other sort had been in his youth.
By the 1950s 80 per cent of British men and 40 per cent of women had the habit, but the Doll report demonstrating the statistical connection with lung cancer had already been published, and the rest everybody knows. As the habit dwindled, so too did smoking accommodation on trains. Beryl Bainbridge, starting her writer’s tour of England at Waterloo station in 1983, found the tables already turned:
… I had to walk miles, carrying two suitcases, my handbag, typewriter, notebook and Sunday papers, before finding a carriage which allowed smoking. There’s something wrong with British Rail. Anyone with an ounce of sense would put the ciggie coaches nearest to the barrier to avoid passengers pegging out on the platform. After such exertion I was too ill to wrench open the door – the train was about to leave at any moment – so I banged my head against the window and shouted. Several people stared out at me sympathetically before glancing away.
London Underground banned smoking throughout its lines a few years later, spurred on by the disastrous conflagration caused by a discarded cigarette on the escalators at King’s Cross in 1987, when thirty-one passengers died. Selected main-line trains lost their smoking sections from around the same time, coming into step with restrictions already in place on many local services. Bridget Jones’s Diary, a decade later, drew the lesson: ‘Realize it is no longer possible for smokers to live in dignity, instead of being forced to sulk in the slimy underbelly of existence … Maybe privatized rail firms will start running Smoking Trains and villagers will shake their fists and throw stones at them as they pass.’
No such luck: the last service on which smoking was permitted, the King’s Cross–Aberdeen sleeper, ran in October 2005. Now, even the most lovingly accurate re-creation on the country’s preserved railways cannot bring back the sour smell of wet tobacco ash, smeared thinly in solution with other dirt over the linoleum flooring of a crowded second-class carriage on a rainy winter’s day; nor the grey-black deposit of carbonised tobacco particulates inadvertently picked up when the shoulders of coats and jackets rubbed against the tainted condensation on single-glazed carriage windows. These are losses for which few travellers will not be thankful.
One other long-lasting restriction deserves mention here. Dogs did not travel with passengers. Their proper place was the guard’s accommodation. The Highland Railway, with its clientele of lairds, sportsmen and shepherds, was among the lines in which a ‘boot’ for the purpose was provided there. A ticket was required for each dog journey, and in due course dog season tickets were introduced too, in parallel with those devised for humans. Now that there are few guards’ compartments on the old model, the practice is easily forgotten. As with smoking, the rule was doubtless waived now and again, especially on lines where staff and regular passengers were on good terms. Or an illicit tip may have changed hands, as anticipated by the complaisant guard of Mr Bouncer’s train in Mr Verdant Green, after unmistakable sounds are heard coming from a ventilated box on the carriage floor, which the owner professes to be a container for rabbits (‘Oh come, sir! What makes rabbits bark?’ ‘Why, because they’ve got the pip, poor beggars!’).
Behind these restrictions on smoking and on dogs was the idea that behaviour within the railway compartment should be ruled by consideration for fellow passengers. Be that as it may, close confinement with strangers on trains seems to have cast a sort of chill over social relations. In particular, the railway compartment was widely reported to have killed off the convention on the roads by which conversation between passengers was normal and expected. This transformation deserves a closer look.
Coaches on the roads were of two types, mail and stage. As instituted in the 1780s, mail-coaches carried all their passengers inside, usually to a limit of four. After 1803 some extras were permitted to travel outside too. The mails ran to strict timetables and represented the elite of the road. Stagecoaches likewise carried usually just four passengers inside, but on the outside up to ten or eleven, one of whom sat on the ‘box’ next to the coachman. Spoken exchanges between the coachman and his guard or guards were both usual and essential; conversation between these men and their passengers, and among the passengers themselves, came naturally too. Inside passengers could swap words with those outside by lowering the windows, which were of the same drop-light kind as those adopted for railway carriages. Further exchanges accompanied departures or arrivals of passengers when the coach stopped. At the most basic, simple information, pleasantries and requests went back and forth. For those wanting more, the weather, the state of the passing crops, keeping to time, the mysteries of horse-flesh and the pleasures (or otherwise) of lunching, dining and overnight accommodation were subjects to hand. By these conversations, the communal experience of travel was reinforced. Readers of the Pickwick Papers (1836–7) will remember the glamour that hung about the coachman; boys dreamed of taking up the whip, and the seat on the box was coveted.
The railway compartment was different. No longer could the passenger hail the crew from anywhere on board. Driver and fireman were in a world of their own, separated physically from the carriages by the tender of their locomotive and cut off from audible contact by the noise of its working. The guard too was likely to be in another vehicle altogether. The porters who had helped the passengers on to the train were not the same as those who helped them off at the point of arrival. The train moved too fast and too noisily for any bandying of words with traffic passing in the opposite direction, as the coachmen were wont to do, or for calling out to people on foot, on horseback, or working in the fields alongside. Landmarks and other objects of remark slipped by much quicker, and might be barely visible from the further side of the compartment – unlike the broad, slow-moving panoramas shared by the outside passengers on the roads, or those on deck when travelling by water. Conversation was restricted to the occupants of the compartment itself, and the range of subjects within common view diminished too.
What was left? Certainly, the routine exchanges required by courtesy or utility, especially the sometimes delicate consultations on opening or closing the window. ‘Don’t you think you’d be less liable to cold with that window closed?’ a
n old lady asks Mary Masters, heroine of Trollope’s The American Senator (1877): a diplomatic way of conveying her own preference. Mary’s male companion could hardly refuse to shut the window after that (etiquette required that the opening or closing of windows in mixed company should be done by the male of the party). Open windows were also a trigger for action when the train entered a tunnel. E. Nesbit explains to the young readers of The Railway Children (1906) the grown-up custom of standing to hold up the window strap each time the train entered one, so that the engine smoke would not billow in. This too was an action no gentleman could lounge back and leave a member of the opposite sex to perform. A lady’s cough was enough to prompt the young F. L. Olmsted, later famous as the co-designer of Central Park in New York, to shut the window of his second-class compartment as the visitor’s train headed out of Liverpool Lime Street into rainy Lancashire in 1850. As to the geography of power within the compartment, The Traveller’s Guide to Great Britain and Ireland (1930) records conventions already generations old: the right to decide whether the window is open or shut ‘is vested by custom in the passenger seated next to it, facing the engine’, but also that this passenger ‘generally takes the sense of the company on the question’. Good form also required that the departing passenger should not leave the door open, and that the window should be pulled up again if it had been lowered in order to reach the outside door-handle (Baedeker’s Great Britain, 1887).