Читать книгу Great Victorian Railway Journeys: How Modern Britain was Built by Victorian Steam Power - Karen Farrington - Страница 12

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n Victorian times Great Yarmouth was fabled for two commodities: herring and holidays. The fishing industry was established long before the era began, peopled in part by Scottish fishermen who had sailed down with their families to live on the sandy promontory and exploit the shimmering shoals of the North Sea. Fish were then salted, barrelled and sent across the country.

Initially, the town was bounded by walls and fishermen lived cheek by jowl with one another, crammed into streets known as The Rows. For decades it was The Rows that gave Yarmouth its defining features, and they expanded to fill every available inch. Several wider roads ran roughly parallel with the waterfront. Narrower passages extended from those roads at right angles, creating a medieval grid that incorporated housing for rich and poor alike.

The Rows were so narrow that a law was passed to ensure doors opened inwards rather than outwards, to avoid injury to passers-by. Daylight and privacy were at a premium for the inhabitants. Drains that acted as open sewers ran down The Rows, with good community health dependent on prevailing winds and driving rain to drive the steady outpouring of sewage into the sea.

Author Charles Dickens was struck by the bunched-up quaintness:

A Row is a long, narrow lane or alley quite straight, or as nearly as maybe, with houses on each side, both of which you can sometimes touch at once with the fingertips of each hand, by stretching out your arms to their full extent.

Now and then the houses overhang and even join above your head, converting the row so far into a sort of tunnel or tubular passage. Many picturesque old bits of domestic architecture are to be found among the rows. In some rows there is little more than a blank wall for the double boundary. In others the houses retreat into tiny square courts where washing and clear starching was done.

Eventually Yarmouth’s population outgrew the confines of the thirteenth-century town walls and, led by the example of wealthy merchants, spilled over on to nearby land formed when the seaways silted up.

Bradshaw’s guidebook mentions to the town’s fishing industry, also making reference to The Rows:

Great Yarmouth, Row Number 60, 1908.

A steam train passes Weybourne windmill on the North Norfolk Railway connecting Sheringham with Holt.

The Jetty, Great Yarmouth

The old town contains about 150 streets or passages, locally called rows, extending from east to west, in which many remains of antiquity may still be traced … the inhabitants are chiefly engaged in the mackerel, herring or deep sea fisheries which are here prosecuted to a very great extent with much success.

Yet it makes little reference to the holiday trade which was by then beginning to boom. Great Yarmouth had long been a destination for a few well-heeled tourists who enjoyed the fresh air and the perceived benefits of sea water.

It was the arrival of trains that fired up the holiday trade, with trippers coming from London and other cities to sample the delights of the east coast. Without the onset of train travel, it’s doubtful that the national passion for a trip to the seaside would ever have taken root, for travel by coach was slow and expensive by comparison. The town’s first station, known as Yarmouth Vauxhall, opened in 1844, and so popular was Great Yarmouth as a destination that one estimate insists more than 80,000 people visited the resort just two years after that station opened.

Great Yarmouth was once served by four separate train lines, and a clutch of town centre stations and no fewer than 17 other stations were spread around the borough. It was such a popular destination that the Great Eastern Railway produced postcards featuring views of Great Yarmouth to sell to its passengers.

When a suspension bridge collapsed on 2 May 1845, killing 79, the dead surely included some of the new influx of tourists. People had gathered on the bridge to watch a clown in a barrel being towed down the River Bure by a team of geese. As the barrel passed under the bridge they rushed for the other side to catch more of the spectacle, causing supporting chains to snap. Scores of people, mostly women and children, were hurled into the river and local men took to their boats to save them.

According to an account in the Norwich Gazette, tragedy on a far greater scale was averted:

It can be easily imagined that a mass of people thus precipitated into water, five feet deep, would have but a small chance of saving themselves; and but for the prompt assistance which was afforded, few, very few, would have escaped. Boats and wherries were immediately in motion and from 20 to 30 with gallant crews, were soon among the drowning people, picking them up with wonderful rapidity. Many were put on the shore in their wet clothes who went directly home, and no account was taken of the number thus saved.

The tombstone of nine-year-old bridge disaster victim Thomas Beloe, in nearby St Nicholas’ Churchyard, depicts the tragedy. In fact saving lives became something of a theme for Great Yarmouth, with local boat-builder James Beeching winning the 100 guinea first prize in an 1851 competition to find the best self-righting lifeboat.

THE SELF-RIGHTING LIFEBOAT

Lifeboat design was still in its infancy in the Victorian era and the 1851 competition was launched to design a new and better boat. It had several stated aims. Lifeboats of the future needed to be lighter in construction than previous models so that they could more easily be launched from the beach. They also needed to be cheaper to make so that more could be produced. With such generous prize money on offer the competition attracted 280 entries from across Britain, Europe and even the USA.

Following adjustments, and with inspiration taken from other designs submitted for judging, the Beeching lifeboat became the basis of the longstanding Norfolk and Suffolk class of boats. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century the design was improved, but the Beeching boat’s enduring feature was its buoyancy, with air-filled cases at the bow and stern and cork cladding. It effectively discharged the seawater which frequently swamped small, open boats through valved tubes, and an iron keel acted as ballast. It was stable, self-righting, fast, robust and comparatively roomy. Boats like this saved countless hundreds of lives during the remainder of the century.

A self-righting boat like Beeching’s was popular with lifeboat men. Analysis of the number of capsizes between 1852 and 1874 showed their instincts were probably right. In that time, 35 self-righters rolled with the loss of 25 men out of a total of 401. At the same time 8 non-self-righters capsized, killing 87 men out of 140.

A lifeboat rests on its carriage, c. 1880.

However, a train from Great Yarmouth heading for Norwich was involved in a night-time collision on 10 September 1874 in which 25 people died and 50 were injured. It occurred after a signalling error had allowed a 14-coach mail train to rush headlong on a single track into the 13-coach passenger train from Yarmouth. Although the fronts of both trains were smashed to smithereens, the rear coaches were left relatively unscathed. One account of the accident ends with an odd incident that perplexed everyone who witnessed the wreckage:

George Bidder (1806–1868).

It would be difficult to conceive of a more violent collision … yet it is said that two gentlemen in the last carriage of one of the trains, finding it at a sudden standstill close to the place to which they were going, supposed it had stopped for some unimportant cause and concluded to take advantage of a happy chance which left them almost at the doors of their homes. They accordingly got out and hurried away in the rain, learning only the next morning of the catastrophe in which they had been unconscious participants.

The Great Eastern main line from Yarmouth heads to Reedham, distinguished by one of four swing bridges in the area. This bridge across the River Yare, and the one at Somerleyton – on the branch line that connects Reedham with Lowestoft – spanning the River Waveney were financed by Sir Samuel Morton Peto, entrepreneur and engineering enthusiast.

Both bridges are made from a stout collection of wrought iron, brick, cast steel and timber. When it is in place for trains, the bridge ends rest on piers by the river banks. If it is open for river traffic then the bridge pivots on a central pier using cast steel wheels with a diameter of 16 inches. The load of the open bridge is shouldered by two truss girders.

Even today the bridges are an object of wonder. The man who built the bridges, George Bidder, was equally remarkable. The son of a Devon stonemason, his natural ability with maths manifested itself before he could read or write and his father had him perform in shows around the country for money, under the title of ‘a calculating boy’. Fortunately, his potential was spotted by two benefactors, who ultimately paid for his education. In adulthood he teamed up with the great Robert Stephenson to work on major railway projects at home and abroad. Perhaps his proudest achievement was to build London’s Victoria docks.

The Reedham railway swing bridge crossing the River Yare.

The man who financed the swing bridges has a story that perhaps even exceeds that of Bidder. Sir Samuel Morton Peto was born in Woking, Surrey, to a tenant farmer. After two years at boarding school he was made an apprentice to his builder uncle, Henry Peto. In 1830 he took over the business with his cousin Thomas Grissell, and together they changed the landscape of London by building the Houses of Parliament, Trafalgar Square and Nelson’s Column, among other landmarks. The business then became involved in building railways.

After he bought Somerleyton Hall in 1844, Peto invested heavily in the area, fashioning Lowestoft into a thriving port and town. He built the railway line to it from Reedham, which opened in 1847 after some two years in construction.

Somerleyton Hall, the home of Samuel Peto.

However, his partner Grissell was becoming nervous about what he perceived as reckless risks taken by Peto in pursuit of railway contracts. The partnership was dissolved and Peto began business anew with his brother-in-law Edward Betts in 1846. They also worked with engineer Thomas Brassey, a millionaire railway builder and civil engineer credited with an enormous number of projects. Previously Brassey had worked with George Stephenson and his acolyte Joseph Locke, and by the time he died Brassey had built a sixth of the railways in Britain and half of those in France.

The trio of Peto, Betts and Brassey built numerous railways at home and abroad. Peto earned the gratitude of Prince Albert by ensuring there were suitable rail links to the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace in 1851. However, one of the most significant contributions Peto – with Betts and Brassey – made to history was to build a rail link in the Crimea, where Britain was at war with Russia.

The inauguration of the Great Industrial Exhibition of 1851.

British navvies commence work on the construction of a railway line between Balaclava and Sebastopol in the Crimea in 1855.

In a conflict ignited by Russian occupation of Turkish territories, British hopes of a swift victory were confounded by climate and disease. However, Britain and her allies got back on the front foot with the first strategic use of railways, built and paid for by Peto. A railway line to ferry men and supplies to the front line was in operation by 1855. Five months later the British target, Sebastopol, had fallen.

That same year Peto was given a baronetcy, and for 20 years he was an MP. But in 1866 his riskier ventures caught up with him as the frenzied speculation in railway building known as ‘railway mania’ reached its third crescendo and brought down a bank, Overend, Gurney & Company, to which Peto was deeply committed. With the bank entering liquidation in 1866 owing about £11 million, he was declared bankrupt. Peto moved to Budapest, hoping to spark railway building there, but he met with no success. He moved back to Britain but died in obscurity in 1889.

Peto had shouldered a lot of the small East Anglian lines into existence. In 1862 many of the small, east coast companies, including the Norfolk Railway, Eastern Union Railway, East Norfolk Railway, Newmarket & Chesterford Railway, Harwich Railway and the East Suffolk Railway, were mopped up by the Great Eastern Railway, along with the more major Eastern Counties Railway. Although they were now officially all one company, it took years for the competitive habit between lines to fall by the wayside.

The branch line to Lowestoft was not the only one to extend from the railway that linked Great Yarmouth to Ipswich. As Lowestoft’s fortunes increased, so Southwold further down the coast became the poorer. A lack of railway line was clearly a factor in any future prosperity the town might enjoy, so local people clubbed together to buy shares in the Southwold Railway Company that would join the main line at Halesworth.

After protracted negotiations, a 3-foot gauge was chosen for the route, which had a single track that ran for nearly nine miles. It opened on 24 September 1879. The locomotives that used the line were limited to a speed of 16 mph and before long it was quicker to cycle there than take the train. Coupled with a reputation for unreliability and a laissez-faire attitude among station staff, the line became something of a laughing stock and the subject of jokey postcards.

But there was plenty to recommend Southwold, including an attractive North Sea coastline and its proximity to Dunwich, the medieval city that was reclaimed by the sea after a series of violent storms. Victorian curiosity was piqued about the city, which by all accounts at one time had 52 churches, city walls, a Royal palace and a mint. In 1900 the railway carried 10,000 passengers, 90,000 tons of minerals and 600 tons of merchandise. It finally closed in 1929 in the face of fierce competition from buses.

Another branch line further south at Ipswich led to Felixstowe, today the nation’s biggest commercial port, which had its fate and fortunes defined by one man.

George Tomline was an enormously wealthy MP who made his home at nearby Orwell Park, named for the River Orwell, in Suffolk. After rebuilding the house he furnished it with fine art, an extensive library and even an observatory. He was known as ‘Colonel Tomline’ but the title was the result of a loose association with a regiment rather than distinguished military service.

Tomline conceived the plan for a railway line that would leave the main Great Eastern Railway at Westerfield and would head for Felixstowe via Orwell Park. On the face of it there was naked self-interest in having his own railway station. However, Tomline maintained his motive was to provide work for hard-pressed local people.

The odds were stacked in his favour from the outset. Following a concerted campaign of purchasing he already owned most of the land needed for the route. When it applied for parliamentary approval in 1875, his company was called the Felixstowe Railway & Pier Company. Within two years (and at a cost of £14,000) the line had opened with three locomotives, 19 passenger carriages and 15 goods wagons on the line. At Felixstowe he built a beach-side station, which was not only on land he owned but was as far away as possible from the Ordnance Hotel, owned by Ipswich brewery magnate John Chevallier Cobbold – a man Tomline apparently detested.

Within two years of its opening, the running of the line was given over to the Great Eastern Railway – but it wasn’t the end of the story as far as Tomline and Felixstowe were concerned. In 1884 his company was renamed the Felixstowe Dock & Railway Company, having secured the necessary permissions for construction work that would provide moorings, warehousing and railway sidings. Although Tomline gave up his interest in the railway three years later he maintained a link with the dock, which finally opened in 1886, three years before his death. Since then it has grown beyond all expectation.

A steam train approaching Weybourne Station on the North Norfolk Railway.

Felixstowe finally got a town-centre railway station in 1898, courtesy of the Great Eastern Railway.

Midway between Ipswich and Colchester, Suffolk gives way to Essex, although the slow pace of rural life remained the same. When the Great Eastern main line crossed the River Stour on the Essex and Suffolk border it bisected an area known today as Constable Country. It contains, of course, the vistas that inspired artist John Constable. Some of his most famous works, including The Haywain and Flatford Mill, were painted here near his boyhood home of East Bergholt in Suffolk.

Constable died in 1837, the year Victoria came to the throne. During his lifetime his paintings were more popular in France than ever they were in England. Both he and fellow artist J. M. W. Turner were lambasted by critics of the day for being safe and unadventurous in their work. But Constable insisted he would rather be a poor man in England than a rich one overseas and stayed to forge a living in the only way he knew how.

His inspiration was nature, and his pictures often betrayed the first intrusions of the Industrial Age into rural life. Although he didn’t always live there, it was Suffolk scenes he was perpetually drawn to paint. ‘I should paint my own places best,’ he wrote. ‘Painting is but another word for feeling.’ An indisputably Romantic painter, his rich use of colour arguably laid the foundations for future trends in art.

The tallest Tudor gatehouse ever built lies further down the line, marking the half-way point between Colchester and Chelmsford. Aside from its architectural glory, Layer Marney Tower has two striking claims to fame. The first is that it was owned from 1835 by Quintin Dick, an MP made notorious by his practice of buying votes. Indeed, there’s some speculation that he spent more money bribing his constituents than any other MP of the era. The son of an Irish linen merchant, Dick spent a total of 43 years as an MP, representing five different constituencies.

Layer Marney Tower, a Tudor palace damaged by the Great English Earthquake of 1884.

Southend Pier, c. 1890.

The tower’s second claim to fame is that it and surrounding buildings built during the reign of King Henry VIII were badly damaged in the Great English Earthquake of 1884, which had its epicentre near Colchester. Afterwards a report in The Builder magazine stated the author’s belief that the attractive monument was beyond repair: ‘The outlay needed to restore the tower to anything like a sound and habitable condition would be so large that the chance of the work ever being done appears remote indeed.’

However, the tower was repaired, thanks to the efforts of the then owners, brother and sister Alfred and Kezia Peache, who re-floored and re-roofed the gatehouse, and created the garden to the south of the tower. Layer Marney Tower was one of an estimated 1,200 buildings damaged by the earthquake, which struck on 22 April and measured 4.6 on the Richter scale. There were conflicting reports about a possible death toll, ranging from none to five. The earthquake sent waves crashing on to the coastline where numerous small boats were destroyed.

From the main east coast line it eventually became possible to forge across country by branch line to Southend. It wasn’t the earliest line built to the resort, however, nor would it be the busiest. Contractors Brassey, Betts and Peto built the first railway into Southend from London, although plans to site the station at the town’s pier head were vetoed on grounds of nuisance. It was the last stop on a line that went via Tilbury and Forest Gate to either Bishopsgate or Fenchurch Street. Primarily managed by the London, Tilbury & Southend Railway Company, the line was known locally as the LTS.

After the railway was opened there was extensive development in the town, providing houses large and small at Clifftown. Samuel Morton Peto was once again a moving force in the plans. The homes were completed in 1870 and, a decade later, a newly designed tank engine went into operation on the LTS which could haul more people at faster speeds than ever before. For the first time people could live in Southend while working in London with ease, thanks to the train. Thus Southend became an early commuter town, as well as being the closest resort to London.

But its reputation was mainly thanks to the attractions of the seaside. In 1871 the law was changed to permit Bank Holidays – days when the banks were officially shut so no trading could take place. And, thanks to its closeness to London, the train brought in hordes of trippers to Southend for days out, particularly on the popular Bank Holiday that fell on the first Monday in August – initially known as St Lubbock’s day for the Liberal political and banker Sir John Lubbock who drove the necessary Act through Parliament.

An early wooden pier in the town, dating from 1830, was now beginning to show its age. Maintenance and repair bills were high. Its original purpose had been as a landing stage for boats bringing a few tourists from London. Now there were scores more tourists and the pleasure principle was about to take precedence.

Plans drawn up for a new iron pier included an electric railway to run its length. When it opened in 1890 there was a pavilion at the shore end that hosted concerts as well as the popular pier railway to entertain the crowds. According to the National Piers Society, £10,000 of the £80,000 costs was spent on the new electric railway. Notwithstanding, there was only a single engine on the three-quarter-mile-long track. Its 13-horsepower motor was powered by the pier’s own generator. Three years later a passing loop was installed and a second three-car train went into service.

Still it wasn’t sufficient capacity for the relentless number of trippers, particularly from East London, that made their way to Southend. Although a second generator was added in 1899 to help power two more trains, it wasn’t until the Southend Corporation built its own generating station in 1902 that the four trains could be extended to cater for more passengers. The pier generators were then scrapped.

The pier was continually extended, first to provide an access point for passing steamers, and secondly to accommodate holidaymakers. The final addition in 1929 brought the length to 2,360 yards (1.34 miles or 2,158 metres), making it the longest pleasure pier in the world.

Between Southend and London the landscape was largely lush and green in Victorian times, although the capital itself was becoming a spaghetti-mess of railway lines. Along with other railway builders, Great Eastern Railways was committed to developing suburban lines around London. One of them, terminating at Ongar, led to the Royal Gunpowder Mills at Waltham Abbey. Initially a cloth mill, it is thought gunpowder was made there using saltpetre from the middle of the sixteenth century.

The site was taken under government control in 1787 to secure supply, and production stepped up from the middle of the nineteenth century to supply arms for the Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny and, later, the Boer War. It also became central to weapons science and technology. In 1865 a patent was granted for gun cotton, a new if somewhat unstable explosive, which was then produced at Waltham Abbey. It was also the focus of production for cordite, a smokeless alternative to gunpowder pioneered in 1889.

A network of railways crossed the site after a building programme escalated during the Crimean War at a time when steam could provide the necessary power for production. The rails were for wagons which were gently pushed rather than towed – a nod to the volatile cargo aboard. Initially the gauge of the rails was 2 ft 3 in.

Her Majesty's Gunpowder Mills at Waltham Abbey.

In 1862 at Crewe, John Ramsbottom, chief engineer of the London & North Western Railway, proved the versatility of an 18-inch gauge for industrial trains, which could run not only up to but into warehouses. Eventually the gauge at Waltham Abbey was changed, so when production went into overdrive during the First World War the factory was at its most efficient.

Freight across the Great Eastern Railway was for years dominated by food. In addition to fish from the east coast there were vegetables – linking the fortunes of the railway company inextricably to the wealth of the harvest. There was also milk, which first travelled in churns hoisted into ventilated vans to keep it as fresh as it could be for thirsty city folk. This way the train service made a significant contribution to the health of the nation, supplying fresh food to cities at comparatively low costs.

In the same way (but in the opposite direction), railways carried newspapers fast and efficiently into rural areas, improving education and awareness everywhere in a way that was once confined to cities.

In 1847 the Eastern Counties Railway began to build a depot at Stratford where its locomotives were made. It was extended time and again throughout its history until it became a maze of track and workshops. In 1891, when it was under the aegis of the Great Eastern Railway, a new record was set there for building a locomotive. It took just nine hours and 47 minutes to produce a tender engine from scratch, complete with coat of grey primer. As a sign of the frantic railway times, the locomotive was dispatched immediately on coal runs, and covered 36,000 miles before returning to Stratford for its final coat of paint. Its working life lasted for 40 years and it ran through 1,127,000 miles before being scrapped.

When Bradshaw’s was written in 1866, the terminus of the Great Eastern line was Bishopsgate in Shoreditch. The guidebook calls it ‘one of the handsomest (externally) in London’. It was opened in 1840 by the Eastern Counties Railway and its name was changed from Shoreditch to Bishopsgate in 1847.

When Eastern Counties Railways amalgamated with other lines to form Great Eastern Railways, the new company found its two options for terminals – Bishopsgate and Fenchurch Street Stations – were not sufficiently large and set about building Liverpool Street Station and its approach tunnel, which opened in 1874.

An engraving of Bishopsgate Street by Gustav Doré, 1872.

Railway carriages at Weybourne Station on the North Norfolk Railway.

Nowhere in Britain has the railway map changed more than in London, not least due to the Blitz in the Second World War. In 1866 it was possible to jump on a North London line train at Fenchurch Street or Bow, within moments of getting off a Great Eastern line train.

This is a route that became infamous in 1864 for being the scene of Britain’s first train murder. The victim was 69-year-old Thomas Briggs, a senior clerk at the City bank Messrs Robarts, Curtis & Co. On Saturday 9 July he had worked as he always did until 3 p.m. and then visited a niece in Peckham before making his way home by train.

No one knows just what happened in the first-class carriage of the 9.50 p.m. Fenchurch Street service. It was, in common with many other carriages, sealed off from other travellers. There were six seats, three on each side, and two doors in a design reminiscent of stagecoaches. Subsequent passengers found the empty seats covered in blood and an abandoned bag, stick and hat. Almost simultaneously, a train driver travelling in the other direction saw a body lying between the tracks. After he raised the alarm the badly injured Mr Briggs was carried to a nearby tavern but he died later from severe head injuries.

There was a public outcry at the killing, although crimes like theft and even assault had been carried out on trains almost since their inception. Now, however, a sense of peril accompanied train travel as never before.

At first there seemed little for detectives to go on. Mr Briggs’s family identified the stick and bag as his but the hat was not, and his own hat was missing. Cash was left in his pocket but his gold watch and chain were gone.

A wave of scandalised press coverage yielded the first clue. It alerted a London silversmith, appropriately called John Death, who told police he had been asked to swap Mr Briggs’s watch chain for another, and described the customer making the request. Later, a Hansom driver confirmed that a box with the name Death written on it was at his house, brought there by a German tailor, Franz Muller, who had been engaged to his daughter. The Hansom driver obligingly produced a photo of Muller and the silversmith confirmed him to be the watch-chain man.

Before a warrant could be issued for his arrest, Muller had boarded the sailing ship Victoria bound for New York in anticipation of a new life in America. Detective Inspector Richard Tanner, along with his material witnesses, soon booked tickets aboard the steamship City of Manchester, easily beating the Victoria to its destination. In fact, the Metropolitan Police party had to wait four weeks for it to catch up. When the police finally approached Muller on the dockside he asked, ‘What’s the matter?’

A report, taking the form of verse, on the murder of Thomas Briggs in a railway carriage on 9 July 1864.

A swift search established he was in possession of Mr Briggs’s watch and remodelled hat. At the time, relations between Britain and America – torn by civil war – were strained. Nonetheless, a judge agreed to extradite Muller and he was soon brought back to England.

Muller maintained his innocence throughout his Old Bailey trial and claimed he bought the watch and hat on the London dockside. He was small, mild-mannered and apparently lacked a motive. There were also witnesses to say Mr Briggs was seated with not one but two men on the night he was killed. But the jury took just 15 minutes to find Muller guilty.

Despite pleas for clemency from the Prussian King Wilhelm I, Muller was publicly hanged at Newgate Prison just four months after the crime. Later the prison chaplain claimed his final words were ‘I did it’. Still, his death nearly resulted in a riot, with many Londoners filled with doubt about the verdict.

The savage killing of Thomas Briggs resulted in new legislation, introduced in 1868, which made communication cords compulsory on trains. Although open carriages were still viewed unfavourably it was felt Mr Briggs’s life could have been saved if the train driver only knew he had been in difficulties.

In 1897 an American journalist, Stephen Crane, travelled on the Scotch Express between London and Glasgow, and revealed that, some 30 years after the death of Mr Briggs, communication cords were causing unforeseen difficulties. The problem arose when dining cars came into use and shared the same alarm system, causing confusion. He wrote:

…if one rings for tea, the guard comes to interrupt the murder and that if one is being murdered, the attendant appears with tea. At any rate, the guard was forever being called from his reports and his comfortable seat in the forward end of the luggage van by thrilling alarms. He often prowled the length of the train with hardihood and determination, merely to meet a request for a sandwich.

Moved by Mrs Briggs’s plight, spy holes were drilled in carriage partitions by some train companies, and became known as ‘Muller lights’. Bizarrely, Mr Briggs’s reshaped hat became something of a fashion item.

The North London Railway established a depot on a 10-acre site at Bow in 1853 where it built and repaired its own locomotives for the remainder of the Victorian era. At the time East London was assuming a reputation for poverty and moral decline. Most families lived in single rooms in largely insanitary conditions. Once, the area was the domain of weavers and their families. Now their cloth-making skills were largely obsolete, although a couple of silk factories remained.

Franz Muller, a German tailor found guilty of the murder of Thomas Briggs and hanged ouside Newgate prison in 1864.

ANNIE BESANT AND THE MATCH GIRLS' STRIKE

Annie Besant, a campaigning social reformer, decided to investigate claims about the ill treatment of match workers at Bryant & May’s factory, dangerous conditions and the company’s system of fines for petty misdemeanours. She reported what she found after interviewing some of the ‘match girls’ in her journal, The Link, in June 1888 under the headline ‘WHITE SLAVERY IN LONDON’.

Annie Besant (1847-1933).

The splendid salary of 4s. is subject to deductions in the shape of fines; if the feet are dirty, or the ground under the bench is left untidy, a fine of 3d. is inflicted; for putting ‘burnts’ — matches that have caught fire during the work — on the bench 1s. has been forfeited, and one unhappy girl was once fined 2s. 6d for some unknown crime. If a girl leaves four or five matches on her bench when she goes for a fresh ‘frame’ she is fined 3d., and in some departments a fine of 3d. is inflicted for talking. If a girl is late she is shut out for ‘half the day’, that is for the morning six hours, and 5d. is deducted out of her day’s 8d. One girl was fined 1s. for letting the web twist round a machine in the endeavour to save her fingers from being cut, and was sharply told to take care of the machine, ‘never mind your fingers’. Another, who carried out the instructions and lost a finger thereby, was left unsupported while she was helpless. The wage covers the duty of submitting to an occasional blow from a foreman; one, who appears to be a gentleman of variable temper, ‘clouts’ them ‘when he is mad’.

Besant was gravely concerned that working with phosphorus used at the factory – already banned in Sweden and the USA – was causing cancer. (The British government refused a ban on the grounds it would restrain free trade.)

The company’s owners, Quakers Francis May and William Bryant, were furious, branding Besant’s newspaper claims as lies and hounding those they believed were responsible for talking to her.

When the factory owners forced their employees to sign a statement saying they were happy with working conditions, 1,400 women went on strike with Besant at their head. Their campaign attracted some high-level support, including from the Pall Mall Gazette, Catherine Booth of the Salvation Army and the writer George Bernard Shaw. However, they were also lambasted by others, including The Times.

The Bryant & May match factory.

Determined to beat the bosses, the strikers organised themselves as never before. There were marches in both the east and west end of London. There was a strike fund, with each contribution listed in an accounts book. For the first time the London Trades Council – formed in 1860 to represent skilled workers – lent its support, donating £20 to the strike fund and offered to mediate in talks.

A strike headquarters set up in Bow Road to coordinate action and maintain a register of everyone involved. The Strike Register reveals many of the women and girls were of Irish extraction and lived close to one another in nearby slums. Typically, the Irish already felt under attack by the British and British attitudes, and were more inclined to confront the Establishment than many English workers at the time.

After three weeks the company agreed to end the hated fines’ system. The strikers were triumphant and infant union movements nationwide were given a boost.

On 27 July 1888 the inaugural meeting of the Union of Women Match Makers was held, with Besant elected as the first secretary. With money left over from the strike fund – as well as the profits from a benefit show held at a London theatre – the union found itself premises and enrolled 666 women. Before the year was out it became known as the Matchmakers’ Union. Its story was short-lived as it folded in 1903, but its galvanising effect on the union movement continued for years afterwards.

Moreover, the Salvation Army went on to open its own match factory in East London, using a less harmful phosphorus and paying twice as much as Bryant & May. Bad publicity continued for the company, until in 1901 it announced an end to the use of harmful yellow phosphorus in its production process.

A steam train on the North Norfolk Railway.

The strike by the match girls was not the only East End story to hit the headlines at the time. Between April 1888 and February 1891 11 women were murdered and mutilated by a man who became known as ‘Jack the Ripper’. Despite a massive operation the police failed even to arrest, let alone convict, anyone for the crime.

Staff at the Bow Infirmary Asylum, which stood opposite the Bryant & May factory, felt sure one of their patients, an East European immigrant butcher called Jacob Isenschmid, was the culprit. He had been released from the asylum in 1887, apparently cured. After the fourth murder he was seen with blood on his clothes in a pub close to the scene of the murder. Asylum staff contacted the police but, despite an interview, there was no evidence against him and he remained at large, although he does not appear on present-day lists of suspects.

Horse-drawn trams and wagons outside the City of London Infirmary.

London’s transport systems were changing dramatically. There were new terminals built, usually in grand fashion, on the outskirts of the city centre to receive trains from all corners of the country. But for a while these stood in awkward isolation, although an ever-increasing number of lines were bolted on to the company or network they served, at the expense of London housing. Congestion on London’s roads as travellers went between one railway line and the next intensified.

In writing Dombey and Son, which appeared in instalments between 1846 and 1848, Dickens described railway building in London.

Houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up; buildings that were undermined and shaking, propped up with great beams of wood … Hot springs and fiery eruptions, the usual attendance upon earthquakes, lent their contribution of confusion to the scene…

In short, the yet unfinished and unopened railroad was in progress; and, from the very core of all this dire disorder, trailed smoothly away upon its mighty course of civilization and improvement.

In 1863 the notion of one mighty central terminus for all the capital’s railways was once again rejected by a House of Lords Select Committee, anxious that no more housing in an already overcrowded city should be sacrificed for the sake of the railways. The following excerpt from Hansard reveals the extent of railway schemes laid before the Select Committee the following year.

We found that those schemes were of vast magnitude for so limited an area as the metropolitan district. The new railways proposed to be constructed within that area extended over a length of 174 miles in the aggregate, and involved the raising of capital to the amount of about £44,000,000. It was, of course, impossible all that mileage could be constructed, or all that capital expended for metropolitan railways, because many of those schemes were necessarily competing schemes. At the same time, my Lords, it must be confessed that there was sufficient cause for considerable alarm among the holders of property in the metropolis, and much reason to apprehend that, if any large number of these lines were sanctioned, the traffic of many important public thoroughfares would be seriously interfered with during the construction of those works. Those schemes, as they came before us, included the construction of no less than four new railway bridges across the Thames, two of them – and these of a very large size – being intended to cross the river below London Bridge.

Construction of the Arches of St Pancras Station's Cellars, London, by J .B. Pyne, c. 1867.

There was by now an undercurrent of public feeling against the railways as they deposited viaducts, tracks and tunnels at will, altering the complexion of the capital forever. London, perhaps more than any other city, was almost entirely remodelled by the converging transport companies.

As early as 1864 the satirical magazine Punch asked plaintively: ‘Are there no means of averting the imminent destruction of the little beauty that our capital possesses?’ The article went on to say that, given the railway frenzy existing at the time, St Paul’s Cathedral might just as well become a railway station.

The graveyard at St Pancras was removed for the sake of the railway. A coaching house that escaped the Great Fire of London in 1666 – in which about 13,500 homes and 87 parish churches were razed to the ground – lying in the shadow of St Paul’s was destroyed in 1875 to make way for lines and stations. Hundreds more buildings were flattened to make way for tracks, including Sir Paul Pindar’s house in Bishopsgate. Pindar, an ambassador to the Ottoman court for James I, owned a fine house with one of the most distinctive frontages in Victorian London that likewise escaped the Great Fire. In 1890 the house’s distinctive Jacobean façade was dismantled in favour of an extension to Liverpool Street Station. Fortunately, the wooden structure found a new home in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

London’s population was being squeezed into its outer reaches. Those houses that remained were smeared with smoke as steam trains brought dense and eerie pollution into the city. Only the very rich could resist the onward march of the railways.

CHRONOLOGY OF THE LONDON TERMINALS

1836 London Bridge Station was built in primitive form for the London & Greenwich Railway and was soon subject to a rebuild.

1837 Euston, operated by the London & North Western Railway.

1838 Paddington, still bearing the hallmarks of its designer Brunel, built to receive Great Western Railway services.

1841 Fenchurch Street, the smallest of the railway terminals in London, originally constructed for the London & Blackwall Railway, and rebuilt 13 years later in time to accommodate the London, Tilbury & Southend Railway. It was the site of the first station bookstall.

1848 Waterloo Bridge Station, as it was called, opened after being linked to the busy outer-city satellite at Nine Elms for the London & South Western Railway.

1852 King’s Cross opened for the Great Northern Railway on the site of smallpox and fever hospitals. It was designed by Lewis Cubitt along remarkably simple lines save for an Italianate clock turret. A hotel was built to accompany the station and opened two years later.

1858 Victoria, named for the nearby street, was the home of London, Brighton & South Coast Railway trains, although it was soon popular with other companies.

1864 Charing Cross, arguably the only London station to breach the West End, opened with six wooden platforms for what was initially a limited service to Greenwich and mid-Kent.

1866 Moorgate came into being in an extension to the Metropolitan Line and only became a main-line terminus in 1900.

1868 St Pancras was built by the Midland Railway after it found King’s Cross too expensive. It became remarkable for the railway hotel’s vast Gothic frontage.

1874 Liverpool Street was built to replace Bishopsgate Station, being closer to the city centre and more user friendly.

1899 Marylebone was home to the final main line to enter London, the Great Central, but plans by chairman Sir Edward Watkin to continue expansion with a channel tunnel were never realized.

Charing Cross Station, London, c. 1864, a coloured chromolithograph by the Kell brothers. The station was designed by John Hawkshaw and was the London terminus of the South Eastern Railway.

Railway company managers were powerful people but some left a more distinguished legacy than others.

Sir James Allport spent a career in railways, ending up as the boss of Midland Railways for 27 years, excepting a short spell spent at a shipyard in Jarrow. He was also instrumental in forming the Railway Clearing House, which managed payments between different companies to cover journeys spanning several networks. After his retirement as manager in 1880 he became a director of the company.

Under his leadership, Midland Railway services expanded and the grand station at St Pancras was opened. But he is best remembered for transforming the journeys of third-class passengers. He was the first to realise that, rather than being a hindrance to the railway company, third-class passengers were in fact a valuable asset.

Accordingly, he made third-class carriages much more comfortable and, from 1872, included third-class carriages on every train, charging passengers a penny per mile for a journey. When some angry passengers boycotted Midland Services he scrapped second class, at the same time lowering first-class fares. The result was better revenues for the railway company and a more equitable system of travelling.

Seats for Five Persons by Abraham Solomon (1824–1862).

For his services to cheaper travel Allport was knighted in 1884. But in his later life it wasn’t the gong at the forefront of his mind:

If there is one part of my public life on which I look back with more satisfaction than on anything else, it is with reference to the boon we conferred on third-class travellers. I have felt saddened to see third-class passengers shunted on to 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. I have even known third-class trains to be shunted into a siding to allow express goods to pass.

When the rich man travels, or if he lies in bed all day, his capital remains undiminished, and perhaps his income flows in all the same. But when the poor man travels, he has not only to pay his fare, but to sink his capital, for his time is his capital; and if he now consumes only five hours instead of ten in making a journey, he has saved five hours of time for useful labour – useful to himself, his family, and to society. And I think with even more pleasure of the comfort in travelling we have been able to confer on women and children. But it took twenty-five years to get it done.

Great Victorian Railway Journeys: How Modern Britain was Built by Victorian Steam Power

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