The Railways Read online

  All this constituted the usual lot of the less well-off when they took the train. Yet the written record of the period is skewed so far towards the elite that there is surprisingly little first-hand record of how people experienced these spaces, or of how they behaved in them. Even the works of Dickens, so curious about the railways, contain no description of a third-class journey; the nearest he came is a ‘noises off’ reference in 1857, noting third-class excursionists’ habit of singing en masse.

  Some of the most vivid accounts we do have are in the diaries of the Rev. Francis Kilvert (1840–79). As a rural curate in the Welsh borders, Kilvert lacked the tidy income enjoyed by many Anglican clerics; besides, many of his natural sympathies and much of his sense of mission seem to have lain with the common people. Certainly, his railway journeys are often described with a sort of captivated generosity concerning other travellers and their quirks. On a trip from Neath to Brecon on 18 October 1871, he records the singing of some Breconshire people on the way back from the market (group singing, again), reaching him from the next carriage: ‘a rich treat … in perfect time and tune, altogether, the trebles of the women blending exquisitely with the tenors and basses of the men.’ In the meantime,

  A strange wild-looking woman was sitting opposite to me with light blue eyes almost starting from her head. She had conceived a mortal dislike to a man who sat in another corner of the carriage and she kept on glancing round over her shoulder at him [i.e., over the backs of the seats] … ‘Do you know him?’, she whispered looking stealthily round at her enemy, at the same time pushing me and poking at my leg till I was bruised and sore. ‘Do you know him?’ she repeated. ‘No’, I said extremely amused. ‘Who is he?’ ‘He’s wicked man’ she said making a horrible face …

  Or on an excursion train to Bath on 18 May 1870, when popular action overcame the lack of lighting:

  In the Box tunnel as there was no lamp, the people began to strike foul brimstone matches and hand them to each other all down the carriage … The carriage was chock full of brimstone fumes, the windows both nearly shut, and by the time we got out of the tunnel I was almost suffocated. Then a gentleman tore a lady’s pocket handkerchief in two, seized one fragment, blew his nose with it, and put the rag in his pocket. She then seized his hat from his head, while another lady said that the dogs of Wootton Bassett were much more sociable than the people.

  This is the free-and-easy world recalled in 1894 by John Pendleton, who described how the low bench backs ‘left the entire vehicle a roaming-place to all the passengers, and fostered indulgence in the game of leap-frog, men climbing over the partitions to get more comfortable seats or gossip with their friends’. Sometimes buskers tried their luck in the carriages too: an east Londoner in 1854 complained of encountering them three times in one week (accordionist, fiddler and singer).

  Had Kilvert lived longer, he would have witnessed the eclipse of this type of third-class carriage by the full-compartment version – with upholstered seats into the bargain. The prime mover in this process was no longer the Inspectorate, which by that time was preoccupied with operational safety. Rather, it was the product of competition within the network, on which a choice of routes was increasingly common. One early instance dates from 1858, when the London & North Western began to compete with the Great Northern Railway and its allies for excursion traffic from Manchester to London, cutting fares and ‘giving them 15-inch seats, stuffed cushions and backs to lean against’ – as an indignant Great Northern shareholder reported. But the crucial decade was the 1870s, the protagonist the Midland Railway.

  Under its chairman Sir James Allport, the Midland had opened new main lines to London and Manchester in the 1860s, in each case seeking a share of traffic from well-established rivals, followed in 1876 by a new route to Carlisle. Its trains were not necessarily faster than those of the competition, but they could at least be made more comfortable. The company therefore abolished second class as from 1 January 1875, and did so by effectively upgrading its thirds to a similar standard, with upholstered seats as the most obvious improvement. First-class fares were cut to the former second-class level. That was not all: the Midland had already startled its competitors by decreeing in 1872 that third-class carriages would henceforth run as part of every service, a body blow to the familiar division between the cheap, slow, unsociably timetabled Parliamentary trains and the rest.

  Looking back on his term of office, Allport stressed his pride in having opened the full timetable to third class, with what sounds like genuine social concern: ‘I felt saddened to see third-class passengers shunted on a siding in cold and bitter weather – a train containing amongst others many lightly clad women and children – for the convenience of allowing the more comfortable and warmly clad passengers to pass them.’ Allport’s belief that the future of passenger traffic lay with a single, improved class for all but the elite was hardly disinterested: his reforms were enough to win the Midland an extra 4 million passenger journeys a year, although the ultimate consequences for profitability have been questioned by economic historians. His contribution to the public good – comparable in its way to Pasley’s – was recognised in 1884 with one of the few knighthoods bestowed on any senior Victorian railwayman. Other lines eventually and grudgingly followed Allport’s lead in getting rid of second class, many in 1893, some as late as 1923; the last three-class services lingered on boat trains into the 1950s. But even where three classes were retained, the tendency was for third class to become part of every train, and for standards of accommodation to rise accordingly.

  Pressure for improvement often proved irresistible when other lines were at hand for comparison. The Midland provided a service northward from Carlisle to Edinburgh via the lines of its ally the North British Railway, but the carriages supplied by that company were dingy and spartan. Reluctantly, the North British ordered thirty new third-class carriages with cushioned seats and backs in 1879, specifically ‘for competitive traffic’. The phrase might have caused some head-shaking among third-class passengers in the company’s monopoly areas such as Fife and Kinross, who had to wait rather longer for anything so sybaritic. Even the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway – slow in providing footwarmers and lamps, slow in upholstering even its second class – finally equipped its third class with cushions from 1880, covering them in a slippery horsehair cloth to guard against factory grease and lint from the cotton mills on its passengers’ clothing. The fabric was remembered without fondness by the younger male generations of York and Lancaster, as the fashion for short trousers spread down the social scale from around 1900. Some things really were tougher Up North.

  Wooden seating lingered in certain trains reserved for working men, miners especially. Upholstery was a mixed blessing on services dedicated to carrying men home each day imbued from head to foot with coal dust, as was the case until pithead baths were provided. Most collieries were equipped with these between the 1920s and early 1950s, so that miners no longer had to bathe on arrival at home. Latterly only a few battered trains of uncushioned four-wheelers remained in operation, up and down the Welsh valleys – the last working descendants of Pasley’s improved Parliamentary carriage.

  Another hangover from nineteenth-century practice that disappeared around the same time was the very name of third class, which was redesignated as second class on 3 June 1956. So things remained until 1987, when the label ‘standard class’ took its place. The first change recognised an existing reality, the second – like the widely resented decision in the early 1990s that passengers should be called ‘customers’ – was merely intended to make things sound better. The proportion of lines on which first-class accommodation was provided fell considerably in the meantime, especially on cross-country and suburban lines. In that sense, we are now a little closer to the egalitarian ideal of a single undifferentiated class, an idea that was seriously discussed in the aftermath of the Second World War (the Daily Mirror was all in favour), but which never looked likely to prevail.

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bsp; Other changes were in store for the Victorian passenger. Mirrors were increasingly provided, a valuable resource in a culture of respectable self-presentation. The straightness of ties, hats and partings could be checked, and facial smuts and streaks bestowed by the engine could be eliminated. The mirrors were almost invariably fixed to the partition in the zone between seat and luggage rack, so that they could be looked into directly only by standing up. That was often to invite a curious sliding sensation, familiar to anyone who has journeyed in a compartment of the older type, as the gaze is drawn irresistibly away towards the bright looking-glass landscape unrolling in reverse outside.

  In the absence of a mirror, it might be possible to check one’s reflection using the glazed pictures that began to appear in carriages in 1884. The Great Eastern Railway set the fashion, with the help of the landscape photographer John Payne Jennings (1843–1926). The images Jennings supplied were relatively small, of various arresting shapes including ovals and rounded-off rectangles, and were typically grouped symmetrically in rows with the titles hand-written below, as on an album page. The subjects included modest places of resort or excursion on the railway’s own territory, represented in the artistic-pictorial manner of the day: village streets, lakes amid woods, a hedgerow with a distant figure at a stile.

  The next step was into colour: not true colour photography, the early forms of which were not commercially viable, but the Photochrom technique by which a negative image was overlaid with coloured tints from a sequence of lithographic stones. This was a Swiss invention, and was licensed to a London company in the mid 1890s. With their muted greens and tawny browns, glassy-smooth lakes and seas, and skies fading predictably from azure to colourless horizons, these images look hopelessly faked today; but when new they represented a decided advance. The Great Western took the bait almost immediately, becoming the largest single customer for the Photochrom company. Eight men were employed for the sole purpose of taking subjects for its various railway clients (not just for carriages: there was a demand for waiting rooms too), to a total of some 12,000 different subjects. Mounts and frames were supplied as well, and the Photochrom works at Tunbridge Wells cut up twenty-four miles of mouldings annually to make them. Some railways used other methods; the North Eastern used photographs printed directly on to oblong pieces of board, which were varnished for protection and slotted into the panelling of the carriage.

  Framed advertisements and notices of other kinds proliferated too, especially in the lower classes of carriage. In the railways’ own advertisements, the resort, the hotel or the tempting prospect were all stock themes. Early in the new century, maps of the railways’ systems began to appear among them, sometimes compressed or distorted to fit the space.* The mid-Victorian passenger was exposed to texts; the late-Victorian and Edwardian passenger journeyed within a little cabinet of images and representations.

  It is strange that the pictorial fashion should have started on the Great Eastern, a notoriously hard-up railway with no great reputation for comfort or superfluous display. It may simply have been a personal enthusiasm of the locomotive superintendent, Thomas William Worsdell (after all, this was the line that chose to put pictorial transparencies in the clerestory glazing). But a broader explanation must be sought in the domestic settings of late-Victorian Britain, in which superfluity signified security of possession, a visual vacuum was something to be abhorred, and fringes, knick-knacks and framed images proliferated wherever space allowed. It was as if the enclosure, heating and lighting of the compartment had made it an extension of domestic space, rather than an interior equivalent of the bill-sticker’s wall. In some first-class carriages of the North Eastern the photographs were even double-hung, one row of frames above another, as if in an art gallery. Royalty was not immune: the Great Western’s royal carriages of 1897 included the usual Photochrom prints, made especially honorific by fluted and gilded frames of sycamore and walnut.

  Exempt from the commercial advertisement’s cycle of replacement, these pictures might linger for decades, their poised figures ever more obsolete in dress, the odd stain from a cleaner’s wet cloth or a luggage-rack mishap gradually darkening in one corner – a metonym for the obsolescence of the carriage itself. This drawback came to the attention of the railways in the mid 1930s, a period of fresh self-consciousness concerning their public image. Thanks to the Grouping of 1923, each of the four new super-companies had a greater territory to celebrate, which the Southern Railway and the London & North Eastern Railway chose to do by means of colour reproductions of views commissioned from professional artists. When the railways were nationalised, this policy became general, with new prints of standardised sizes and coherent themes. It was discovered around this time that the photographs still on display in working carriages included images of Liverpool with horse trams going about their business, the last of which had run in 1903. So here is another instance of the continuities and traditions of the railway, as bewitching to historically minded observers of the mid-twentieth-century scene as they were disgraceful to those charged with its modernisation.

  Crucial to the levelling-up of standards was the steady rise in the proportion of travellers who took third-class tickets. The early railway decades showed that it was possible to upgrade the experience of travel for the lowest class considerably without discarding the principle of three-way classification. Yet there was quite a difference between shivering in an open pen and sitting in a glazed compartment, however cramped, with the consolation of a lamp somewhere overhead. Second-class traffic therefore tended to leak away to the improved thirds. By 1874, the last year before the Midland’s dual-class service began, 77 per cent of railway journeys were already by third class. Nor was first class immune; on the Great Northern its share fell from 7 per cent to 3.5 per cent of travel between 1872 and 1884, while second class slipped from 25 per cent to 6.5 per cent. By 1913, 96 per cent of all journeys were third-class, accounting for 85 per cent of passenger revenue. It should be stressed too that the ordinary British third-class carriage of the time was greatly superior to the Continental equivalent, where wooden seats were still standard. Baedeker’s guide thus assured overseas visitors that it was acceptable for ‘a superior class’ to go third, especially on longer journeys.

  This converging experience of travel is one of the greatest instances of social levelling in our history. It is hard to think of any parallel during the period. Living conditions improved, but housing and areas of residence were still organised and perceived overwhelmingly in class terms. Free and universal education was introduced, but schools remained acutely stratified by type and by cost. Mass literacy was promulgated, but it fostered a market for cheap reading that had little to do with the values of high culture. Class differences in dress became subtler, but could still be read easily enough. The differently priced seats in theatres carried connotations of class, as did the saloon and public bars in pubs. And yet on the trains, all but a shrinking proportion of the well-off sat down together in third class.

  Sometimes the point is explicitly made. Here is Rupert Brooke (1887–1915), poet, golden boy, Cambridge graduate and socialist, recording his joyful contemplation of a fellow passenger in a letter of September 1910:

  I roam about places – yesterday I did it even in Birmingham! – and sit in trains and see the essential glory and beauty of all the people I meet. I can watch a dirty middle-aged tradesman in a railway-carriage for hours, and love every dirty greasy sulky wrinkle in his weak chin and every button on his spotted unclean waistcoat.

  Yet within four years, during the months between his commission in the Royal Naval Division and his departure to death in the Dardanelles, Brooke would be entitled and expected to take a first-class ticket, like any other officer of His Majesty.

  The enduring fascination of the system of classes of travel lies in just this kind of relationship to broader social attitudes. By 1900 or 1914, Britain was ordered perhaps more consciously than ever before into a hierarchy of classes in the Ma
rxian or economic sense, and yet its people were much readier than their grandparents had been to set these divisions aside when the time came to travel. Things were somewhat different in 1830, when it was not yet customary to talk of social difference specifically in terms of class rather than of order, rank or degree. It has even been argued that the divisions used by the railways helped to establish the concept of class in the broader, social sense. The railway historian Jack Simmons noted that the word had never applied to travel by road or by water, for which the various options were identified by name (inside or outside, cabin or deck and so on); also, that the terminology of first- and second-class began to extend to passengers as well as trains from as early as 1837. Nine years later, Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal observed that John Bull was learning to make more rigid the ‘humiliating distinctions’ of class by taking cues from the railway, ‘at once his slave and his master’. By that date, with the Parliamentary third class recently added, the suggestion of social self-assessment at the booking-office window was hard to escape.

  Responses to this challenge of self-classification were sometimes contradictory. When a review of volunteer regiments was held at Brighton in 1862, for example, the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway announced that any non-officers would not be permitted to travel there first class. In general, however, the companies were as anxious as any theatre manager that their better-paying customers should not desert the expensive seats. The wrangles after 1844 over carriage design are in part a reflection of this. There were lines such as the Liverpool & Manchester which had refused to run third-class trains at all, until compelled by Gladstone’s Act, on the grounds that too many of its second-class passengers would defect to them. The Manchester & Leeds reportedly paid sweeps to dump soot in some of its third-class carriages, to teach a lesson to better-off economisers. This was an extreme case, but the basic dilemma remained. Later in the century it was admitted by Sir Edward Watkin, chairman of more than one major railway, that his third-class carriages on the South Eastern were made deliberately uninviting so that passengers would take second-class tickets instead; as late as 1883 he lamented as ‘a great public injustice’ the Midland’s first-and-third model, ‘driving together classes who do not naturally wish to associate’.