The Railways Page 18
‘Total isolation’, indeed; for all that Ruskin works to keep our sympathies, there are too many detailed imputations of motive and deductions of character on his journey, too many projected personal discontents, for all his conclusions to ring true. An earlier number of Fors Clavigera displays the habit of overstatement more blatantly. In it, Ruskin laments the condition of an imagined Coniston peasant who used to walk the twelve miles to market at Ulverston, but who now goes by train, via a branch line opened in 1859. That this new route took the long way round, making a big south-west swerve before returning east-north-east, only added to its offence against the natural order in Ruskin’s eyes; and he proceeds to invent a narrative of ‘absolute loss and demoralisation’ for his puppet-victim, from his ‘idle, dusty, stupid’ state on the journey, to the waste of a shilling getting drunk on beer at the stations along the way, on top of the two shillings eaten up by the return fare.
No suggestion here that the railway might have liberated the man by allowing him to carry more goods to market, or to come back with more; or that the fatigue and exposure of walking in all weathers might not be morally good in themselves. Nor did Ruskin admit to his readers in 1876 that he had just commissioned his very own road coach, a real old-fashioned brougham made by a London firm, lined out in green and painted with his shield of arms. A happy month was spent dawdling up to Ruskin’s Lakeland seat in the new vehicle, using the old coaching highways and arranging horses and a postilion to drive them by telegraphing in advance. It was in this unlikely vehicle that Ruskin arrived on 27 April at Sheffield, to press forward his plan to set up a museum for the benefit of working men. It was probably the same carriage that took him on his drive down to Ulverston station later that year, saving the walk which he so commended to the imaginary Coniston peasant. Sheffield was Ruskin’s choice for his museum, incidentally, in part because the noble medieval churches at Lincoln, York, Durham, Selby, Fountains, Bolton and Furness were all within easy reach; the only feasible means of transport there and back may be guessed.
So there is plenty of ammunition with which to shoot down Ruskin as a nostalgic old hypocrite, framing rules for the guidance of lower orders while indulging the caprices of the rich (a month’s journey by personal coach) and availing himself of the easy comforts of the age of steam (first-class trains to Wales). Yet Fors Clavigera makes some direct hits too. The habit of reading on the move brought into focus a broader sense that the railway passenger had become estranged from the passing landscape. Ruskin was not alone in raising this lament. R. S. Surtees set aside his professional interest as a novelist to grumble that ‘a book to prevent people seeing the country [is] quite as essential as a bun to prevent their being hungry’ (Plain or Ringlets, 1860). Even an artist with Pre-Raphaelite affinities, whose works were championed by Ruskin for their close observation of nature, might succumb to the habit: Ford Madox Brown’s diary records a journey to Liverpool in 1856, spent entirely in reading Ralph Waldo Emerson’s English Traits, hot off the press.
More broadly, rapid travel helped to make banal what had once been intensely felt. Speed itself, so thrilling when the railways were new, became routine, at least as far as the articulate and well-off class of traveller was concerned. As early as 1841, a London journalist referred wearily to ‘the dull, monotonous railway’. Uniformity and passivity in travel went together: as Surtees put it in Mr Facey Romford’s Hounds (1865), ‘One journey is very much like another, save that the diagonal shoots across country are distinguished by a greater number of changes.’ For The Magazine of Art in 1880, the average traveller now ignored the ‘hurrygraphs’ of the windows, ‘framing picture after picture’, and turned to them only for ventilation. The irresistible parallel is with air travel: at first glamorously exclusive and dizzyingly fast, but losing its sense of occasion or excitement with repetition, and subject to a similar standardisation of routines and physical settings. Any contemporary account by a Westerner that dwelt on the marvels and novelties of take-off, cruising speed and landing, not to mention the amazing littleness of the world as seen below, would seem merely naïve. Likewise, the breathless accounts of pioneering railway passengers quickly gave way to a sense of passive surrender and efficient despatch; as in Samuel Sidney’s Rides on Railways (1851), where Coventry is reached in ‘a whiz, a whirl, and a whistle’.
By the year 1851, a high level of literary skill was required if the railway experience was to be recreated with any freshness. Dickens knew this better than anyone, and his account in Household Words of a trip on the South Eastern Railway’s new boat train service for Paris in the same year pulls out all the stops accordingly. Just give in to it all, he suggests: ride the wave of modernity, and you will be none the worse for having your ideas shaken up a bit. The loss of detail and clarity from the passing show, the new man-made landscape of cuttings and tunnels, stations and bridges, telegraph poles and wires – all these should be celebrated, not deplored. It is the sort of writing that once led Ruskin to describe Dickens privately as ‘a leader of the steam-whistle party par excellence’:
Whizz! Dustheaps, market-gardens, and waste grounds. Rattle! New Cross Station. Shock! There we were at Croydon. Bur-r-r-r! The tunnel … Bang, bang! A double-barrelled station! Now a wood, now a bridge, now a landscape, now a cutting, now a – Bang! a single-barrelled station – there was a cricket match somewhere with two white tents, and then four flying cows, then turnips – now, the wires of the electric telegraph are all alive, and spin, and blur their edges, and go up and down, and make the intervals between each other most irregular: contracting and expanding in the strangest manner.
These were the same wires that began to transmit the Greenwich time signal to Dover a year later, as described in Chapter 1; another shock to the sense of life lived according to the rhythms of nature. This world of railways and telegraphs was the only one that Ruskin’s rail-borne fop, drawling of his yachts and regattas, had ever known; but Ruskin would have remembered how travellers from Lakeland used to make their way south, not via the Furness Railway’s iron viaducts across the Kent and Leven estuaries, but by the ancient foot crossing of the shifting sands of Morecambe Bay; waiting not on the columns of Bradshaw’s timetable, but on the ever-changing cycles of the tides.
The implications of such changes were immense. If nature was good for you – a view to which most people, then as now, would generally have subscribed in a fuzzy way – then it was hard to escape the suspicion that the railways’ challenge to nature came at a price. Ruskin’s journey into Wales presents the case chiefly in terms of moral and cultural damage or loss, within a broader critique of the assumptions of progressive capitalism. The majority learned to live with such things, making their own compromises with modernity and its conveniences. But what if railways were also bad for you physically – either from the cumulative effects of travel on body or mind or both, or from the brutal facts of injury or death?
Kill passengers directly the railways certainly did, in accidents galore; and any exploration of the impact on health of travel by rail must start here. Death on the rails came in many forms. Trains ran into one another, especially before effective signalling existed to keep a safe interval between them. They ran away down inclines when their brakes or couplings failed. They were derailed by collisions with landslips, fallen objects, stray wagons or livestock, or as a result of a hundred different defects in locomotive, carriages or track. They flew off the rails when going too fast; they were mistakenly switched at high speed into sidings; they toppled from collapsing bridges. Locomotive boilers sometimes exploded like bombs.
As if that were not enough, passengers enlisted the railways in their own unmeaning self-destruction. Some slipped on the platform and fell under moving trains. Others bashed in their skulls against the sides of bridges, tunnels or telegraph poles by leaning too far out from the carriage windows, like the sailor on leave who was found dead and alone in the second-class compartment of a Plymouth mail train in 1862. Some jumped fatally from the ca
rriage in pursuit of dropped parcels or blown-off hats. Others could not resist the same impulse when passing through some conveniently placed station, like the old man on the Norfolk Railway in 1854, who made a mortal leap as a returning excursion train sped past his home platforms at Brundall.
As more trains ran and their speeds increased, the number of significant accidents rose too. Eleven years elapsed between Huskisson’s solitary death in 1830 and the disaster at Sonning on the Great Western. By contrast, the worst accident in our representative year 1862 – fifteen dead in a head-on collision in the cutting at Winchburgh, on the Edinburgh & Glasgow Railway – would have evoked responses of dismaying familiarity. The standard history of British railway accidents, L. T. C. Rolt’s Red for Danger (1955), passes over the Winchburgh smash in a single sentence, reserving full descriptions for two operationally more interesting disasters from the year before: a pile-up and fire in Clayton Tunnel, just outside Brighton (twenty-one dead), and a collision and derailment at Kentish Town in the week following (seventeen dead). According to the Penny Illustrated Paper’s summary, seventy passengers altogether met accidental deaths in 1861, thirty-eight in collisions, four in derailments, four because of axle failures or similar mishaps and eighteen getting on or off moving trains.
Passenger fatalities were only part of the story. The Penny Illustrated Paper also recorded that seventy-one members of the public were fatally cut down by trains in 1861, of whom seventeen were on level crossings and the rest were trespassing – to say nothing of the railway workers who met similar fates. The popular appetite for affecting circumstances and horrible details ensured that many such deaths received full press attention. A young woman killed at the crossing at Whittlesford in 1847 had her memorial in the Cambridge Independent Press: she and a companion stepped across too quickly after a train had passed on the nearer line, failing to notice that another was bearing down in the opposite direction on the line beyond. After the impact, her companion set off down the line, accompanied by some of the station staff. ‘The first object that attracted attention was a bonnet, and one of the porters lifting it the head of the poor girl fell out …’
Matters got worse. The Parliamentary Papers for 1860–64 reported an annual average of fifty-three accidents to trains, freight and goods included. For 1870–74, that figure stood at 145 per annum. By the years 1867–71, the industry was paying compensation for passenger deaths and injuries at an annual average of £324,474, close to 1.8 per cent of the entire revenue from the same traffic.
An accident at Warrington on 29 June 1867, from the Illustrated Police News. Anxieties about railway travel were both mirrored and exploited by the press, here merging collision and aftermath in a single image
In a century coming painfully to terms with the causes and consequences of epidemic disease, insanitary living conditions and dangerous working practices, the risk of accidental death while travelling on the railway was statistically trivial. A passenger’s odds against being killed on any single journey were calculated with nice exactitude at 6,998,885 to 1 by W. F. Mills, who analysed the Board of Trade figures for 1841–65 in The Railway Service (1867). In terms of mishaps per passenger-mile, the railways also became safer with each passing decade, as the rising frequency of accidents lagged behind the growth in traffic on the ever-expanding network. Thus the train-mileage travelled on the network grew by 180 per cent between 1861 and 1888, an increase far larger than that for accidents incurred.
But statistics are one thing, perceptions quite another, and the diminishing intervals between serious mishaps inevitably surrounded the railways with an aura of peril. Lesser incidents were widely reported too, often in multiple; The Times for 27 September 1873 rounded up five together, under the weary heading ‘Friday’s railway accidents’. To this drip-feed of bad news should be added the sense of uneasy self-surrender to a technology of immense and unpredictable power; for the railway passenger was required to submit to a condition of passivity and powerlessness unknown to the pedestrian or equestrian. Even a passenger on a steamship could expect some warning of danger, and could cling to the hope of escape or rescue from a foundering vessel. Things were different for those boxed helplessly within a railway compartment. For many, it was impossible to shake off the unpleasant idea that a trivial equipment failure or a momentary mistake on the part of a distracted or overworked railwayman could bring about violent extinction in a matter of seconds. Any exceptional noise or jolt while travelling triggered its own pulse of fear. For the author of a report published by The Lancet in 1862, unease was the prevailing condition of the average railway traveller: ‘… everyone knows how, if by chance a train stops at some unusual place, or if the pace be slackened, or the whistle sounds its shrill alarm, a head is projected from almost every window, and anxious eyes are on the look-out for signs of danger’.
Sanguine travellers found such alarmism easy to mock. The Penny Illustrated Paper’s joky investigation of a second-class compartment in the same year included a representative Old Lady, for whom the buffeting from a train whizzing in the opposite direction is an agony, ‘and some time elapses before she can be persuaded that a dreadful accident has not happened and everybody is crushed’. The humorists of Punch took a less blasé view, consistently exaggerating the dangers of railway travel and watching keenly for evidence of carelessness or indifference on behalf of the companies and their staff. From the magazine’s cartoons, an impressionable reader in a remote, rail-less land might have concluded that a railway journey safely ended was the exception rather than the norm. Two examples: complacent passengers queue at the ticket-office window, manned by a grinning skeleton in a railway uniform cap; no dialogue (‘There And (Not) Back!’, 1878). A grimly smiling undertaker accosts a passenger on the platform: ‘Going by this train, sir? … Allow me, then, to give you one of my cards’ (‘Railway Undertaking’, 1852).
Another favourite theme was the alleged link between the frequency of accidents and the lack of personal liability of the railway directorate for the resulting losses, injuries or deaths. Punch cartoons of 1853 and 1857 (‘The Patent Safety Railway Buffer’) depicted railway directors strapped to their own locomotives, as if anything less would be insufficient to ruffle their complacency. This attitude reflected the magazine’s own radical edge in its early years, under the editorship of Douglas Jerrold, whose boisterous politics and rejection of deference were closer in spirit to the early Private Eye than to the later stereotype of middle-aged, pipe-and-slippers humour. The demand that senior figures should accept greater individual responsibility is also a reminder that the separation of ownership, management and everyday operation on the railways was something new (more on this in Chapter 14). Like the method of travel itself, these structures of power and control introduced by the railways were an affront to time-honoured ideas of what was normal and natural.
Punch’s cartoons provide a sort of satirical correlative to the steel-engraved depictions of collisions and derailments in the rest of the press, such as the Illustrated London News. Accounts of accidents and disasters thus became caught up in the wider circulation of information and imagery which the railways themselves fostered. For the spectacle of a railway disaster had its own unique power. Ships foundered all the time – the Shipping and Mercantile Gazette counted 2,029 wrecks for 1861 – but the worse the wreck, the greater the chance that no living soul would remain to tell the tale. Train crashes almost always delivered scenes of stunning disorder, as well as plenty of witnesses and survivors.
It was as well to be prepared, then, and the innovative culture of Victorian capitalism was ready to help. First, the legal position in England and Wales was transformed by the Fatal Accidents Act of 1846, which established the right to claim damages by relatives of those killed as a consequence of the failings of others. The Act opened the way for the Railway Passengers Assurance Company, established in 1849. There was a touch of genius in the way its policies were sold: they could be had at railway booking offices, exactly li
ke any other ticket, which they resembled in shape and size. An element of commission on sales kept the railways happy, and the assurance company also reached an agreement with the Exchequer that tax would be levied only on its premiums – to spare the booking-office clerks the complexities of stamp duty every time an insurance ticket was sold. These were priced at 3d for a first-class journey, initially paying a £3,000 life premium, 2d for second class, paying £500, and a penny for third class, paying £200. (Thus the maximum return per penny was much higher in first class, where the risks of injury or death were substantially less than on the cramped benches of the cheaper carriages.) Lesser premiums were paid for injuries. Charges were the same regardless of distance travelled, leaving the passenger to decide whether a particular trip was long enough to justify the outlay.
Travel insurance as an unwelcome reminder of risk, from Punch, 1850. The handbell, right, rings to announce an imminent departure
Success was immediate; in the first nine months of 1850, over 113,000 insurance tickets and policies were sold. Compensation was paid to the first beneficiary a little earlier, on 10 November 1849, when William Good of Dunstable received 7s 6d in respect of an accident north of Preston. Within a few years the company had acquired powers to issue general accident insurance, followed by liability insurance for employers and public bodies. Its advertisements appeared in Bradshaw’s pages well into the twentieth century, under the proud boast ‘The oldest Accident Assurance Company in the World’. Which was true enough: all of these policy types were quite new.* So Britain’s railways were the midwife at the birth of the entire modern system of insurance against accident and liability. The very concept of insurance must also have been popularised and demystified by the availability of short-term, fuss-free policies that could be had for a few pence.