The Railways Page 6
Availability of footwarmers varied from line to line and from class to class. Initially they were a first-class privilege only. In 1870–71 the Liberal MP Samuel Plimsoll (originator of the Plimsoll line for shipping) introduced a bill to establish the facility as standard for long-distance travellers in all classes. The bill failed, but individual lines began to comply anyway. Progress was halting; footwarmers were provided to third class on the Lancashire & Yorkshire – hardly the railway with the warmest territory in the British Isles – as late as 1891. Yet they were not especially costly to make: in the same period, the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway procured them at 8s each.
These personal heaters belong to the great catalogue of artefacts now obscure, but once familiar to the point of banality. The road carriages that met passengers at the station often made use of similar footwarmers, and early motorists found them useful too in their unheated cars. But whatever the host vehicle, the weakness of the method is obvious enough: each heater could store only so much energy, and it dissipated fastest in the coldest weather, just when warmth was most needed. The footwarmer the Rev. Francis Kilvert shared with an army officer from Chippenham to Bath on New Year’s Eve, 1874 – seventeen degrees of frost outside – seemed to him to be ‘filled with cold water and snow’. As Punch lamented:
Alas! thou art a faithless friend,
Thy warmth was but dissimulation;
Thy tepid glow is at an end,
And I am nowhere near my station!
To be properly cosy, a Punch cartoon suggested, get hold of five footwarmers: one for the lap, one for the seat and two tucked behind the back, as well as the one on the floor. Delays or breakdowns risked extra discomfort. Daniel Thomas Holmes’s Literary Tours in the Highlands and Islands (1909) records a wait through the night for a rescue engine to reach an express stranded at the summit of the fearsome pass of Druimuachdar in Perthshire, where the Highland Railway attained 1,484ft above sea level: ‘From end to end of the train resounded the rhythmic beat of cold-footed passengers striving to bring some warmth of blood to their toes.’
As with lighting, the answer lay in a built-in supply. The Glasgow & South Western Railway had a go with heating pipes linked to small boilers placed above the carriage lamps, where most of the heat from combustion immediately and uselessly went, but this thrifty method failed to catch on. The first self-sufficient heating for ordinary passengers came via the United States, in the Pullman cars that were imported and assembled under licence by several companies from 1874. These used an oil-fired system with a circuit of hot-water pipes beneath the carriage floor. Other experiments included a larger boiler carried in the brake van and serving all the coaches; but this simply duplicated the steam-generating function of the locomotive at the other end of the train. Finally, the solution was adopted of tapping a supply of steam at a reduced pressure from the locomotive itself. Transmission between vehicles was via a flexible hose; the radiators found a home in the spaces beneath the seats of each compartment, where the Victorians had been wont to stow their parcels (or, like Paul Bultitude in Frederick Anstey’s comic identity-swap novel Vice Versa (1882), to hide away when in a tight spot). Early radiators were often of the storage type, filled like Webb’s footwarmers with heat-retaining acetate solution through which the steam was piped; these gave way to the more responsive and faster-acting kind containing live steam, suitably shielded to prevent burns and scalds. For the chilled passenger newly entering a compartment, the result was the same: warm seats and a wonderfully soothing heat that welled out from below to suffuse the lower half of the body, where the cold was likely to have done its worst. Add to this the individual radiator controls provided for each compartment in the best Edwardian carriages, and later fitted in all classes as a matter of course, and the transition from mid-Victorian austerities was complete.
So much steam for heating was drawn from the locomotive in winter that formations of carriages on express trains were commonly shortened by one vehicle, to compensate for the loss of haulage power. It was also impossible to distribute the heat evenly through the train. Informed travellers knew that the steam was at its hottest closer to the engine. The common practice of reversing trains for the return journey also meant that the first-class carriages might not be coupled behind the engine every time, turning the tables on those in the more expensive seats. None of this mattered in the summer, during which the heating pipes and valves might be removed for servicing, as on the Great Western, where heating was generously continued until 31 May. This is enough to tell us that the steam that hisses at the platform from the unexpectedly halted train in Edward Thomas’s ‘Adlestrop’ (1914), by some distance the most famous poetic recollection of a British railway journey, can only have been issuing direct from the locomotive itself. (‘It was late June. / The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.’) For the curious, Adlestrop station was opened in 1853 by the Oxford, Worcester & Wolverhampton Railway, later absorbed by the Great Western, and was originally called Addlestrop and Stow Road, to indicate that it was the nearest station to Stow-on-the-Wold in Gloucestershire. It was closed in 1966 – the station yard is now a dump for derelict road vehicles – but the Oxford-to-Worcester route is still in use, and many who cherish Thomas’s poem as a token of a vanished England have passed through the site without realising it.
Heating of railway carriages by steam had an amazingly long life in Britain. It outlived the demise of the steam locomotive because of a less than far-sighted decision taken in the 1950s, by which new-built carriages were to be compatible both with steam haulage and with the diesel locomotives that were to succeed it on many lines. The building of carriages that could be heated solely by steam went on as late as 1964, and it was not until the winter of 1969–70 that diesel-hauled, electrically heated services began to spread beyond their first stronghold in BR’s Southern Region. Instead, the typical passenger diesel of the period used some of its fuel to fire up a hefty drum-shaped boiler weighing several tons and containing perhaps 800 gallons of water for heating. These heaters also presented the management with grounds for compromise with the railway unions over manning levels, now that a fireman was no longer required to shovel coal alongside the locomotive driver, for it was agreed that operating the boiler should be among the duties of the second man. The faintly absurd set-up of steam-heated trains behind diesel locomotives was not always understood by the travelling public, but its twilight years can be called back to mind by anyone with memories of a big station on a winter’s day in the 1970s or early 1980s: mysterious veils of white steam rising up the sides of blue-and-white carriages from beneath the platform level and a pervasive sense of dripping somewhere down below. The last steam-heated trains of this type ran in the winter of 1986–7, nearly two decades after the end of steam haulage in normal service, so it might almost be said that it was Margaret Thatcher rather than Harold Wilson who presided over the last wheezings of the railways’ age of steam.
All this was for the future in 1862, when the wise winter traveller still conserved his or her inner warmth as much as possible. That usually meant at least one ‘railway rug’. Rugs were another accessory of road travel that made perfect sense on the railway. Their popularity was remarked as early as 1851, in R. S. Surtees’ ‘Hints to Railway Travellers’ for the New Monthly Magazine (although he urged the superiority of ‘a shepherd’s plaid or maud’ – a wrap – which could double as an article of clothing; Surtees would have had in mind that big checked patterns were also à la mode just then, from women’s dress to men’s trousers and waistcoats). Passengers travelling light could choose to rent a rug; Baedeker’s Great Britain for 1910 specified sixpence as the standard charge, as also for a pillow. Those who brought their own rug might guard against its unfurling in transit by means of a soft case or by using special straps of leather, with a handle attached. Super-sized rugs could be kept in order with an apparatus comprising a rigid bar with a central handle and a strap at each end. The huge headquarters buil
ding of Messrs W. H. Smith at No. 186 Strand, London, had a room entirely given over to rentable rugs and straps, for despatch to the company’s bookstalls up and down the country.
A railway rug in its carrying case, 1882
Rugs are duly discussed in The Railway Traveller’s Handy Book, written by Edward Shelton and published anonymously in our year 1862, which addressed itself to the first principles of how to travel by train, ‘before the journey, on the journey, and after the journey’. The Handy Book makes the railway rug sound a bit like the indispensable towel in Douglas Adams’s Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: ‘Not only does it keep the legs warm, but on emergencies it may be made to perform the part of a cloak, a counterpane, a cushion to sit upon, or a wrapper for fragile articles.’
The railway rug provides a quiet running joke in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s novel Lady Audley’s Secret, one of the literary excitements of the same year. Robert Audley, the young barrister-hero increasingly obsessed with the ‘secret’ and its solution, is required to hare off from London to all points of the compass, always by train and usually against the clock. We first encounter Robert’s rug in summer as he rises from an open-air nap to walk to the station, folding it up to carry over his shoulder. As the days begin to shorten, he travels ‘comfortably in a corner of an empty first-class carriage, coiled up in a couple of huge railway rugs’. Later, with snow lying deep, he heads for Southampton on an early morning express, wrapped ‘in so many comforters and railway rugs as to appear a perambulating mass of woollen goods rather than a living member of a learned profession’.
Cold was only part of the problem. However skilfully wrought, the joinery of a wooden railway carriage warped or shrank from age, and from the stresses and shocks of motion. That meant plenty of draughts, a source of anxiety as well as mere discomfort at a time when the origins of so many common infections and indispositions were as yet imperfectly understood. The Handy Book advised the use on long voyages of a bespoke cap ‘made to fit the head, and with lappets to draw over the ears’, Sherlock Holmes-fashion. Being without a brim, the cap would support the head without pain, while protecting against earache. For those content with a less than exact fit, it was possible to buy non-bespoke travelling caps at station bookstalls. Another tip in the book was to use one’s travelling bag as a footrest to avoid the draught blowing under the carriage doorway. This was usually the worst offender against comfort, especially when the air current carried with it, according to the season, the powdery variety of snow – what might truly be called ‘the wrong kind of snow’.
The Handy Book’s travelling bag might well contain something to eat and drink, for nothing of that kind could yet be had on the train – there being neither restaurant nor buffet cars in 1862, nor any means of passing through or between carriages. On long-distance journeys, refreshment stops were made at appointed stations instead. The shortcomings of these pit stops – of which there will be more to tell later – encouraged many travellers to take matters into their own hands. R. S. Surtees in 1851 pointed out that the passenger in possession of a food parcel could dine when genuinely hungry, ‘instead of when the railway directors think you ought to be’. His recommended bill of fare reads a little like a budget version of the feasts Jorrocks and his fellow sporting men routinely consume in Surtees’s own fiction: cold chicken cuts, sliced tongue, bread, biscuits, cakes, with sherry-and-water or brandy-and-water to wash it all down (the injunction not to forget the salt is italicised). A more abstemious attitude was implied by the ‘new combination’ article displayed by W. H. Martin of the Burlington Arcade to the Great Exhibition’s visitors: ‘a walking stick, whip-stick, or umbrella-stick, containing long cylindrical bottle and wine-glass, and receptacle for biscuits or compressed meat, intended for railway travellers and others’. The Handy Book too assumed an appetite less gargantuan than Surtees: ‘a few ham and beef sandwiches, together with a little cold wine or brandy and water will answer any purpose’.
Those with no liking for alcohol had to take their own supplies of tea or coffee at ambient temperature, for the vacuum or Thermos flask was not produced commercially until after 1904. Among those who favoured cold tea was the eccentric Andrew Peterson (1813–1906), former Indian Civil Service judge, hypnotist, healer, radical and pioneer of mass-concrete construction, whose 218ft-high folly tower at Sway in the New Forest still bemuses railway travellers between London and Bournemouth. An individualist in small matters as well as large, Peterson insisted on taking his cold tea via a rubber tube from a baby’s bottle, to avoid spillages on the train.
One fair criticism of the Victorian railway companies is that they were extremely slow to cater for this market by providing substantial fare that could be carried on to the train and consumed there. Taverns near the principal stopping places along the Liverpool & Manchester route sent out trays of refreshments, including Eccles cakes, brandy and cigars, to tempt passengers in their carriages in the line’s early years; but such free-and-easy echoes of the coaching network did not last long. Sometimes there were officially sanctioned vendors on the platform, but overall the railway companies had an ambivalent attitude to these, and the story in general is one of stricter controls, confining trade to the railways’ own outlets or those of their licensees.
It took one of these licensed firms, Messrs Spiers and Pond, to show the way. Félix William Spiers and Christopher Pond were two forceful young Londoners who had joined forces out in Australia. Their first enterprise together was to lease a hotel grill-room in Melbourne. They next took over the city’s two theatre cafés, importing French waiters and generally doing things properly. An attempt at persuading Dickens to favour Australia with one of his programmes of public readings came to nothing, but the pair did arrange the first All-England cricket tour to the southern hemisphere. The tourists sailed from Liverpool in 1861 (as it happened, on the SS Great Britain, the second of Brunel’s three mammoth steamships), and proved more than equal to any side the Australians could field against them. Not long after, Spiers and Pond turned their energies back to London, where they took the contract to operate the Metropolitan Railway’s refreshment rooms at Farringdon Street station. There was no question of running this business like the take-it-or-leave-it establishments on the platforms of provincial junctions: maximum journey times on the new railway were a mere eighteen minutes, and success depended on attracting extra custom from the non-travelling London public. That meant a serious attention to quality, including the production by the company of all its own biscuits, cakes and ices. The journalist and social critic Henry Mayhew, visiting in 1865, found these better and cheaper than the offerings at other railway refreshment bars; he recorded up to 400 people choosing to dine at Farringdon each day.
By that date the partnership had also taken on the refreshment rooms at the London, Chatham & Dover Railway’s Victoria station. Later ventures included theatres and restaurants in the capital (the famous Criterion was Spiers and Pond’s), and a steady expansion of railway contracts outside London. These included management agreements with the Midland for the facilities at Leicester and at Trent, a strange junction station opened in 1862 on the floodplain midway between Derby and Nottingham. Trent – named from the river, rather than any nearby settlement – was an interchange only, without public access from outside. Passengers compelled to change trains there were literally a captive market; mention of the name Trent Junction may resurrect memories of ennui or disorientation among cross-country travellers of a certain age (the station closed in 1968). Here, in 1871, Spiers and Pond introduced luncheon baskets, priced at three shillings and containing half a chicken, ham, bread and butter, cheese and a half-pint bottle of claret or stout. The Midland Railway added a two-shilling option when it began selling its own baskets from Derby four years later. The correlation between passengers’ budgets and social class is suggested by the rather embarrassing names chosen by the London & North Western Railway for its luncheon baskets, the ‘Aristocrat’ (five shillings) and the ‘Demo
crat’ (two shillings and sixpence). The ‘Aristocrat’ offered the choice of a pint of claret or half a pint of sherry – enough to get you tolerably drunk, though it must be allowed that Victorian claret was weaker than today’s. The plebeian ‘Democrat’ had a bottle containing ale or stout.
The quality of basket fare was often questionable; jokes were made about the thinness of the sliced ham and the age of the chicken at time of death. Nevertheless, these services proliferated. The first record of baskets containing hot meals dates from 1884, again on the Midland Railway. Successful operation of the system required the orders to be telegraphed ahead, and the employment of boys to call out the passengers’ names at the platform so that their baskets could be claimed. Breakfast baskets and tea baskets (usual charge one shilling) were also available, the latter including bread and butter and a choice of cake, biscuits or chocolate. The term ‘basket’ may give the wrong picture; after the First World War, the contents increasingly came protected by decoratively printed boxes of waxed cardboard, a forerunner of today’s branded fast-food packaging. The basket trade actually peaked earlier still around 1906, after which custom began to decline in favour of the new restaurant cars. Time was finally called on the basket system in 1941, as a wartime economy. Until then, the cutlery, crockery and non-disposable baskets swelled by many tens of thousands the already gigantic miscellany of reusable or refillable objects that journeyed repeatedly back and forth across the railway network, until breakage, pilfering or obsolescence put an end to their remunerative lives.
A railway luncheon basket, photographed in 1905
Excessive intake of fluids exposed the mid-Victorian passenger to the risk of embarrassment, for the ordinary compartmented carriage did not include a lavatory. This is one subject on which contemporary sources are prudishly silent. Punch, for example, was very engaged by the subject of railways and always happy to have fun at their expense, but even in the magazine’s rowdy youth there is no equivalent in its caricatures and skits to Honoré Daumier’s lithograph of 1843. The colic-stricken old lady pleads with the guard travelling on top of her carriage, only to learn that the company forbids, but that Orléans is only two and a quarter hours away: a reminder of how inflexible the ways of the railway seemed to those who grew up with the easy-going customs of road travel.