by Simon Heffer
An early enemy of this naked progress was John Ruskin, whose name blazed in the cultural world of the 1840s and 1850s. His highly influential treatise about the moral force of buildings, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, was published in 1849, more or less at the height of railway mania. In it he wrote that ‘another of the strange and evil tendencies of the present day is to the decoration of the railroad station. Now, if there be any place in the world in which people are deprived of that portion of temper and discretion which are necessary to the contemplation of beauty, it is there. It is the very temple of discomfort, and the only charity that the builder can extend to us is to show us, plainly as may be, how soonest to escape from it.’
That was not, however, the limit of his criticism.
The whole system of railroad travelling is addressed to people who, being in a hurry, are therefore, for the time being, miserable. No-one would travel in that manner who could help it – who had time to go leisurely over hills and between hedges, instead of through tunnels and between banks: at least those who would, have no sense of beauty so acute as that we need to consult it at the station. The railroad is in all its relations a matter of earnest business, to be got through as soon as possible. It transmutes a man from a traveller into a living parcel. For the time he has parted with the nobler characteristics of his humanity for the sake of a planetary power of locomotion. Do not ask him to admire anything. You might as well ask the wind.49
The problem with these ‘miserable things’, as Ruskin called them, was not just that they sought improperly to use beauty, but that they destroyed it: the landscape as nature had intended – and Ruskin was a connoisseur of landscape – was violated by the iron road. Something similar was probably said, though not written, by an ancient Briton surveying Roman road-building 1,800 years earlier. And, as he said, the railway was simply about ‘business’, and business was dehumanising: themes that, as we shall see, Ruskin the social and political commentator would revive militantly in the 1860s. For him, and for others less articulate, the railways represented a destruction of nature by the unnatural demands of capitalism, and would become a talisman of the battle between progress and the ordered, comfortable past. The freedoms and prosperity they offered would usually most directly benefit a class that did not include the likes of Ruskin and his high-minded, aesthetic followers.
In the 1840s Parliament had been overwhelmed with private bills to allow railway-building. Although some landowners had objected, and driven hard bargains, the public were generally in favour, and the social life of the nation was revolutionised. The Board of Trade was criticised for how it had overseen the expansion of the railways, not least in that it appeared to have ended up creating and endorsing monopolies. One or two politicians fought against the railways per se – notably Colonel Sibthorp – but most saw the inevitability of their rise and sought to harness them to the country’s good. The imperative was to ensure as much competition as possible within the system so that poorer people, and their goods, could be conveyed as cheaply as possible, in the interests of economic growth. Even Sibthorp, whose loathing of the railways was based on what he considered to be their danger to public safety and their temptation to investors who were then ruined financially, travelled to his election at Lincoln in 1847 by train.50
By 1844 Parliament was seeking ways in which bills could be consolidated – passed several at a time – to ease the pressure on the machine; it was said that 248 possible bills might come before the Commons in the foreseeable future.51 This inevitably meant scrutiny was reduced, and some landlords and localities felt they had suffered injustices. In the 1845 session alone the five MPs on one of the committees considering railway bills had to consider twenty-three new lines; and the total in that year of all railways considered required decisions about £100 million worth of property, and new lines totalling 4,000 miles. In that session, 240 bills were presented to the Commons and 119 of them had received approval from the Board of Trade. Scrutiny could not be complete. Companies often broke agreements about fares and freight charges, to the anger of the public; anger with political consequences, or so many MPs feared. Also, the government wanted the mail to be moved by rail, and to have the railways in times of emergency to move troops and police. The political stakes became high, and shareholders became annoyed at the prospect of State interference. By the end of 1848 12,000 miles of railway had been authorised by Parliament: it was not until the late 1860s, however, that the network actually reached that size.
Meanwhile, some shareholders made a fortune. There were allegations of conflicts of interest for certain MPs who sat on railway boards; and complaints about the fortunes being made by the inevitable beneficiaries of such a massive construction and property development project, the lawyers. The question of MPs having an interest – not just as shareholders, but as landowners – was highly likely, given, for example, that the 186 miles of the proposed railroad from London to York passed through 300 parishes. Speculation could, however, be ruinous, especially if the capital raised for a scheme were expended on the legal and parliamentary preparations for it, and it failed. Lord Brougham told the House of Lords in 1845 about legal actions failing because of the vested interests of jurors, and about a clergyman who had invested £5,000 in railway shares to raise money for his family and, having been promised he would quadruple his money, found his investment plummeting instead.52 Others had borrowed to buy shares in the expectation of their rising, only to find that they fell, and they could not pay their debts. Sibthorp told the Commons that the inevitable consequences of railway speculation were ‘ruin, crime, madness and suicides’.53
The railways greatly facilitated, and cheapened, the transport of coal and manufactured goods. They helped cities grow. They also made certain foods available in places where they had been scarce before, and at affordable prices. By 1845 the price of cod in Manchester had fallen to between 1½d and 2d a pound; it had previously been between 8d and 1s a pound, because of the difficulty in transporting sufficient supplies from the east coast while keeping it fresh. There had been a correspondingly beneficent effect on the east coast fishing fleet.54 The cost of laying railway had also dropped: in the early days it had cost £50,000 a mile to lay the Great Western, but the cost had now dropped to between £10,000 and £12,000 a mile.55 As the railway extended its range, stagecoach companies collapsed, and the canals, which had previously transported so many goods, went into decline after a brief prosperity.
However, by 1846 Peel felt he had to say to the Commons that ‘I think every person in this House witnessed the extent of railway speculation which took place last winter and the preceding autumn with great regret’.56 He observed that ‘we then saw railroads proposed not for any legitimate purpose of speculation, and not for the purpose of constructing works of public utility in the vicinity of those who were engaged in the speculation, but in a fit of one of those speculative fevers, from which the country has in many instances suffered so severely.’ There had been a huge transfer of money from capitalists to landowners; the latter, along with lawyers, were the great winners of railway mania. No fewer than 1,400 schemes had been registered by 31 December 1845. When, in the early 1840s, some of the main lines out of London had been built, and had given a handsome return to their investors, the desire to build more took off in a fashion that did not even appear limited by the availability of capital.
By 1846 it was clear to all, except to some investors, that many of the proposed schemes could not come to fruition or, if they did, would never make money. More and more were ruined by subscribing to shares they hoped to sell at a profit before ever having to pay for them, only to find they had to pay before registering their profit – a profit that only rarely came in any case. Sometimes the names of subscribers were fictitious, in order to make a speculative scheme look more attractive than it was. It would ratchet up share prices to where insiders could sell and transfer their gains into sound stocks, leaving those holding railway shares to lose all when the c
rash came. It should have been obvious to any sensible investor that plans to link for the second or third time two unprepossessing provincial towns could not possibly work, even if Parliament allowed its development.
In August 1845 the Marquess of Clanricarde told the Lords of a case concerning ‘two brothers named Guernsey, sons of a charwoman living in a garret, in Angel-court, one of whom had signed for £12,500, and the other for £25,000, the latter being a porter to a wine merchant named Hitchcock.’57 The two men earned around ‘a guinea and a half a week’ between them. One, ‘Charles Guernsey, stated that he never applied for any shares, but that a stockbroker brought him letters of allotment to the above amount. When he signed the deed, the broker took the scrip, and he never received one farthing; that he was only nineteen years of age, and in the receipt of only 12s a week.’ The following May Clanricarde complained that railway speculation had simply fuelled ‘the gambling operations of the Stock Exchange’.58 It was beyond doubt that many whose names had been put down for shares had no means of paying.
This speculative building was only the start of great expansion, which continued throughout the 1850s to the 1880s. After the great boom years of 1845 and 1846 development slowed, but remained steady. In 1846 around 4,540 miles of route were built; in 1847, the bubble having burst, just 1,295 miles.59 The railway from Doncaster to London was opened in time for the Great Exhibition, with a return fare of 5s. The line from London to Salisbury was finished by 1857: it reached Exeter in 1860. By the 1880s the great main lines to the north and west from London were established, as were the railways to Norwich and the line to Holyhead that took the mail (and British officialdom) to and from Ireland. If rail travel had originally been the preserve of the rich, the railway operators soon saw the benefits of coupling third-class carriages to the end of the train, with fares as little as 1d a mile, above and beyond what Parliament had enforced. Gladstone was determined that such regulation as was necessary did not inhibit the spread of the network. In 1850 a total of 67.4 million passengers were carried. By 1875 the number had reached 490.1 million, with the freight carried trebling over the same period.60
One essential regulation was standardising the gauge of the tracks. What had started out as a series of local systems would soon join up and form a national network. This meant, when engineers were making rapid advances developing locomotives to pull the trains, those locomotives might work only on a limited part of that network, and therefore could become obsolete quickly. The lack of uniformity also impeded the railways’ economic contribution. Freight had to be unloaded and reloaded where two different gauges met, which increased the cost of the shipment, delayed it, and often caused avoidable damage to the goods. Stephenson had used a gauge of 4 feet 8 ½ inches on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, and this gauge – which became known as standard gauge – had caught on. It met firm resistance, however, from Brunel, building the Great Western at a gauge of 7 feet 0 ¼ inch. Brunel believed broad gauge trains would be more stable and capable of higher, safer speeds. Brunel’s difficulty was that, at the end of 1844, he had only 223 miles of broad gauge line whereas the Stephenson gauge already had 2,013 miles.
The Eastern Counties Railway, begun in 1843, used a gauge of 5 feet exactly. It soon realised the difficulties of an incompatible gauge and changed to Stephenson’s within two years. Brunel, however, stood firm, even when a Royal Commission in 1845–6 recommended the universal adoption of Stephenson’s gauge. Parliament’s will to enforce a standard gauge had been fed by a group of MPs witnessing the performance of unloading and reloading at Gloucester, where goods from Bristol to Birmingham had to change gauges. An Act later in 1846 compelled all new railways to be built to the standard gauge. Brunel held out, and his gauge long survived him: but in 1892 the Great Western at last admitted defeat, and converted to the standard gauge after all.
For all the horror that the Sibthorps felt about progress as represented by the railways, those who built them sought at least to keep them consonant with the highest standards of building of the period. Ruskin’s injunction not to waste money or effort making railway stations attractive was widely ignored. As many surviving stations testify, the railway estate contained some of the finest examples of mid-Victorian architecture. The combined work of Scott and Barlow at St Pancras in London remains the best known: but countless provincial and rural stations boasted decorative ironwork, ornate canopies and handsome red brick or stone. Viaducts evoked the aqueducts of ancient Rome; and the largest termini echoed cathedrals. Peace, quiet and isolation might have gone in some places for ever: but the railway system became the prime example of the attempt by the Victorians to combine functionality with craftsmanship and beauty. It was something of a reaction against the great wave of factory building of the 1810s and 1820s which, with certain distinguished exceptions, Blake was justified in describing as ‘dark, satanic mills’.
The growth of the railways also allowed the growth of the imagination. The line that became the Great Central Railway, from Manchester across the Pennines to Sheffield and then to London, was intended to carry on to the Kent coast, where it would submerge into a Channel Tunnel and come out in northern France: a vision that took until the early 1990s to realise. A line was, though, opened from London to Dover via Croydon, Tonbridge and Ashford that could speed travellers from the Channel steamer up to the capital, with Dover being reached in 1844. From July 1841 trippers could go to Brighton from London for the day, and during the 1840s the rest of the Sussex coast was brought into easy reach by branch lines.
By the 1860s railway companies owned around a third of the canal system. By 1870 the railways had largely destroyed the turnpike system of roads, and as turnpikes went bankrupt local authorities, financed by hard-pressed ratepayers, had had to take over the upkeep of roads that, for forty or fifty years until the coming of the motor car, would be quiet except for local journeys by pony and trap. Throughout the 1850s and 1860s, however, roads became marked out as the locations of telegraph wires.
Railways, in the 1840s, came to embody the unacceptable face of capitalism. The evils of the doctrine were well depicted by both Trollope – the odious Melmotte in The Way We Live Now – and before him Dickens, through Merdle in Little Dorrit. The filth of speculation, manifested in real life by the likes of George Hudson, the railway king, is well described in the epitaph Dickens writes for Merdle:
The late Mr Merdle’s complaint had been, simply, Forgery and Robbery. He, the uncouth object of such wide-spread adulation, the sitter at great men’s feasts, the roc’s egg of great ladies’ assemblies, the subduer of exclusiveness, the leveller of pride, the patron of patrons, the bargain-driver with a Minister for Lordships of the Circumlocution Office, the recipient of more acknowledgement within some ten or fifteen years, at most, than had been bestowed in England upon all peaceful public benefactors, and upon all the leaders of all the Arts and Sciences, with all their works to testify for them, during two centuries at least – he, the shining wonder, the new constellation to be followed by the wise men bringing gifts, until it stopped over certain carrion at the bottom of a bath and disappeared – was simply the greatest Forger and greatest Thief that ever cheated the gallows.61
George Hudson himself had a life beyond the imagination of even the finest fiction writer. Born in 1800, he was a farmer’s son who left school at fifteen and became apprenticed to a draper in York. He was given a share in the business after his apprenticeship, and then married the daughter of another partner. At twenty-seven he inherited the then massive sum of £30,000 from a great-uncle. Like many rich men since, he felt this entitled him to enter politics. He became a Tory activist and, in 1837, Lord Mayor of York. Four years before that he had made his first investment in railways, in a line linking York with one from Leeds to Selby. He became the largest shareholder and, in 1837, the chairman. His company – the York and North Midland Railway – hired George Stephenson as its engineer.
Hudson built lines elsewhere in Yorkshire, the north and
the Midlands. Even at the depths of the depression in 1842 he was still finding money to expand, and doing so with a confidence that betokened better times. By 1844 he had 1,000 miles of railway from Birmingham in the south to Newcastle in the north, and began to be called ‘The Railway King’: it was not an appellation he resisted. In June 1844 a through train ran from Euston, where it began on the tracks of the London and North Western Railway, moving on to Hudson’s track at Rugby and continuing north to Gateshead, covering 303 miles in nine hours twenty-one minutes (eight hours eleven minutes excluding stops, or an average speed of 37 miles an hour). To cover such a stretch of England well within a working day was regarded at the time rather as space travel would be in the 1950s. It was proof, were it needed, that Britain was a small country, and becoming smaller. The following month Hudson opened a railway from Edinburgh to Berwick, and secured an Act of Parliament the following year to link Berwick to his existing track at Newcastle, creating what would become the North British Railway. Thanks to amalgamations he controlled a network that started at Bristol, ran up to Rugby, and thence north to Edinburgh.
He also resisted Gladstone’s attempts to regulate the railways. His methods were seldom ethical. He bought land to prevent competitors driving rival lines through them. He tried, unsuccessfully, to derail the Great Northern’s attempts to build a line from London to York – a link to London was the jewel missing from the Railway King’s crown. Elsewhere his kingdom grew, almost to the size of an empire. As well as going west to Bristol, he owned the Eastern Counties railway that took him into East Anglia. One of his trains took the Queen to Cambridge when Albert was installed as Chancellor of the university in 1847.
