High Minds

by Simon Heffer

  Even he, however, lacked the resources to keep his competitors at bay for ever, and he was marginalised by his failure to secure a line from the north to London. He was threatened, and he knew it, by the proposal in 1844 (which won parliamentary support) to run a line from King’s Cross to York via Huntingdon and Peterborough, roughly along the line of the Great North Road. On 17 December 1847 the opening of the line between Oxenholme and Carlisle linked Glasgow and Edinburgh with London, the trains coming in to Euston. The Great Northern, which sought to operate the line from King’s Cross, was also in dire straits: in the four months from March to July 1848 its revenues were £2,502 19s, yet it had spent £2.5 million.62 Seeing their distress, and thinking of a way out of his, Hudson did a deal with the GNR to allow it to use his lines north of York. Shareholders in his Midland company were outraged, because the deal with the GNR created a shorter route to the north from London than that via Rugby.

  In August 1848 the banks called in £400,000 of Hudson’s debt. When word spread his share price fell. Standards of accounting at the time were primitive, and Hudson took full advantage. He took a huge personal dividend out of his enterprises, to buy estates in Yorkshire and a house in Knightsbridge. As shareholders in his various companies smelt something unpleasant, inquiries were launched. It was discovered he had been rigging share prices, to his own benefit, and paying dividends out of capital rather than out of profits. He had lied about almost all his enterprises. It was proved that company money had been diverted into his bank account when it had been intended to pay contractors.

  He attempted to defend himself by saying that it was commercially more sensible to do a deal with the GNR than to seek to fight it – which he had long tried to do, with little success. He was forced from the chairmanship of the Midland railway, and the other investigations of the byzantine accounts of his other companies – notably the Eastern Counties – showed he had rigged figures to alter the share price. To make matters worse, it turned out that some of his managers had also been behaving fraudulently and cheating shareholders. Hudson also had the stupidity to sue a newspaper for libel, and lost. By mid-1849 he had been forced to resign all his chairmanships, though he had been elected to Parliament for Sunderland in 1847 and was, indeed, re-elected in 1852 and 1857. This gave him immunity from arrest for debt when Parliament was sitting. When it was not he fled abroad. However, his election also made him a target, for both radicals and for the press, and Punch (which had been launched in 1843) started to make him a regular object of caricature. His political prominence had also invited scrutiny of his business dealings, which led to his downfall.

  He lost his seat in 1859 and stayed abroad. Although he had acted criminally, it was widely perceived that the loose company law exploited during railway mania had given him the means to do so: the State had woefully failed to protect the public. Eventually, his creditors had him arrested for debt in 1865 when he returned to England to seek election at Whitby. He was jailed for three months before his creditors, recognising they would never get their money, gave up pursuing him. He managed something of a rehabilitation – a feat that says much of his personal charm – and was even elected as chairman of the Smoking Room at the Carlton Club shortly before his death in 1871.

  To Carlyle, who always sought new examples of the wickedness of capitalism and the cash nexus, Hudson presented an irresistible target. He was the subject of the seventh of The Latter Day Pamphlets, published in July 1850, and written at a time of his life Carlyle later described as one of ‘deep gloom and bottomless dubitation’.63 This may explain the extra ferocity of the attack on Hudson, to whom Carlyle suggested, given his embodiment of the modern British way, someone should erect a statue. It would enable the country to say ‘there is one God, you see, in England; and this is his Prophet.’64 He despised the recent reverence of the ‘divine Hudson’. He bellowed that ‘Hudson the railway king, if Popular Election be the rule, seems to me by far the most authentic king extant in the world. Hudson has been ‘elected by the people’ . . . his votes were silent voluntary ones, not liable to be false; he did a thing which men found, in their inarticulate hearts, to be worthy of paying money for; and they paid it. What the desire of every heart was, Hudson had or seemed to have produced: Scrip out of which profit could be made.’65

  Carlyle’s other objection was that the change, and modernisation, that the railways accomplished wrecked for ever the basis of the feudal England to which he had sought a return. No longer were people moored in their communities, a journey of even a few miles being difficult for them. ‘Railways are shifting all Towns of Britain into new places; no town will stand where it did, and nobody can tell for a long while yet where it will stand. This is an unexpected, and indeed most disastrous result . . . Reading is coming up to London, Basingstoke is going down to Gosport or Southampton, Dumfries to Liverpool and Glasgow; while at Crewe, and other points, I see new ganglions of human population establishing themselves, and the prophecy of metallurgic cities which were not heard of before.’66 He felt that towns that had subscribed to have railways built had been ‘cutting their own throats. Their business has gone elsewhither’. Shops and houses in those places, he argued, were now ‘silently bleeding to death’.

  The Industrial Revolution had been nothing compared with the railway revolution. The former had shifted populations and had altered the economic basis of British power: but had not had the true revolutionary impact that comes with mobility. That, in particular, was what had unhinged Carlyle. Much of England was, to him, still recognisable after the Industrial Revolution: now it would be permanently moving, shifting, changing, and disconnecting itself day after day from its historical roots.

  For all his crookery, Hudson had a massive ambition that fitted in exactly with the tenor of the age. The Midland and the Great Northern railways flourished until their amalgamations in the London Midland and Scottish Railway and the London and North Eastern Railway respectively in 1923. Meanwhile, King’s Cross Station – then the largest in the land – was finished in 1852, the first train out of it to York leaving at dawn on 14 October. The communications system on which the advance of Victorian Britain would be based – the rapid movement over long distances of goods, people and mails – was established.

  VII

  The railway business, because of its vital strategic importance, remained under political scrutiny long after the initial burst of expansion had finished. The government launched an inquiry in 1865 into the prices being charged by railways for the conveyance of people and goods: because in many areas they were an effective monopoly, and were restricting economic growth. Gladstone explained that ‘the object of the Commission on Railways is to ascertain, by careful inquiry, not only how to meet particular evils or inconveniences now suffered by portions of the public, but how to increase in the greatest degree, of which they may be found susceptible, the already vast advantages which the introduction of railways has conferred upon the subjects of HM’, it stated.

  ‘Now that the protective system has been broken down, the great work of the liberation of industry and capital, on which the comfort and material well-being of the people principally depend, can in no way be more effectually promoted, than by improving and cheapening the conveyance both of persons and of commodities from place to place.’67 Gladstone added that the revenue of the railways now exceeded one-half of the total revenue of the country. It had one-fifteenth of the property of the nation. He wanted the cost of fares to drop by a quarter, to the advantage mainly of the ‘labouring classes’, but also to help agriculture, by making the shipping of goods cheaper. The commission would have the power to ‘enforce the rendering of information’ from railway companies, such was the economic importance that Gladstone attached to this.

  As a prelude to this Douglas Galton, the secretary of the Railway Department at the Board of Trade and yet another cousin by marriage of Florence Nightingale, had written to Gladstone on 31 December 1864 about ‘the difficulty of the Railway question
’.68 He had sounded out various leaders of the railway industry. One, George Bidder, ‘civil engineer largely interested in the management of the Great Eastern Railway’ and president of the Institution of Civil Engineers was, he said, ‘the only one of the railway men who would transfer the railways to the state – the others would mend the present system.’ There was one exception, Mr Hawkshaw, another civil engineer who had been communicating with Rowland Hill about the movement of post, who said things would be best left as they were.

  Galton said that the provision of railways by the private sector and not by the State had created more permanent way in a shorter time ‘than could probably have been obtained under any other system’. This did not mean, however, that this was the best system for the future. Cartelisation and avoidance of competition, to the detriment of the customer, were creeping in. Managers of rival companies were forming agreements ‘known only to the officials’. He argued that ‘the rapid development of wealth which has taken place in the country during the last few years has been rendered possible principally by the existence of railways – there is coal enough under parts of the country yet untouched to enable that development to continue for generations. This will require a continued extension of the Railways, but the more the railway system approaches to a protected interest the less room will there be for those appeals to competition by new companies which have hitherto aided the progress of the system. A period may arise therefore when the progress of the country may require some new arrangements to prevent the industry of the country from being fettered.’

  Galton felt five points especially needed to be addressed: uniformity of fares and rates; the scale of fares and rates ‘to be the lowest compatible with a fair profit – third class trains to be cheaper and more numerous’; the obligation on companies to charge passengers travelling through from the lines of other companies the same rates as charged to their own; the development of new classes of traffic; and the coordination of timetables to avoid long delays at junctions. The question was, he said, whether the companies would do these things left to themselves, or whether it would have to be taken over and done by the State. Galton himself was not sure: ‘Much could be obtained for the public either way.’

  The railways had their grievances. They were taxed too much; local rates were too high; and compensation in case of accidents was unlimited and possibly bankrupting. Galton suggested to Gladstone that he try to redress these grievances in return for the companies’ cooperation. Galton saw dangers in nationalisation that would be proved right when it happened over eighty years later: ‘my experience of a large government executive department is that the universal tendency is to increase the salaries and diminish the work of individuals.’ He argued that ‘it would be more economical to bring in the aid of private enterprise – and the advantages of further improvements might be obtained for the public by leasing the lines to private companies for limited periods of 7, 10 or 14 years.’ Galton said it was clear the system was not yet complete, but also that ‘the state could not undertake the construction of new lines without risk of political jobbing.’ He concluded that the cartelisation was detrimental to the national interest, and might require intervention. ‘Railway companies have come into existence by putting in force the principle that property may be purchased compulsorily when such purchase is for the benefit of the community; they cannot therefore reasonably object to the same principle being applied to them.’

  Gladstone wanted ‘a good arrangement for allowing new companies to come into the field: and to prevent their being opposed by either future Lessors or Lessees of existing lines.’69 Galton sent back word later in January 1865 that the railway companies would happily consider lower fares for third-class passengers in return for certain favours, notably lending money to those companies who wished to expand but who had exhausted their capital.70 There would be no repeat of railway mania, but new lines would be added, faster and more reliable locomotives would be designed, and, for a time, the experience for the passenger would consistently improve. As a symbol of progress and modernity, and indeed of the creation of a whole new sort of society, the railways stood out alone.

  CHAPTER 18

  A GLIMPSE OF THE GOTHIC: FOUNDING A NATIONAL STYLE

  I

  THE MOST VISIBLE legacy of the Victorians is their architecture, the representation of the ambition to improve, and to make works of art that would endure. Theirs was an era that determined to use its new prosperity to leave its mark upon the world, and to make buildings worthy of the greatest imperial power. In the buildings of the mid-nineteenth century, as in the paintings of the period, are seen the consequences not just of the social and technological changes of the time, but also of the intellectual and spiritual currents. The link with God, and an idea of Christianity, that drove some to build, and others to interpret building in a specific way, infuses much of the period’s work. Now, when one looks at Victorian buildings as speaking of an age, it is their solidity and self-conscious mock-medievalism that loom large. Victorians built with an equally self-conscious idea of the divine informing their purpose.

  Most Victorians forswore the classicism popular since the era of Inigo Jones more than two centuries earlier and, as in politics and in the Oxford movement, reached back to a Europe before the Reformation. In 1836 Charles Barry had won the competition to rebuild the Palace of Westminster – which had burnt down two years earlier – and was asked to build the Gothic palace that stands on the Thames today. What most of all give the buildings their status as a masterpiece are, however, their interiors, notably the House of Lords, which Barry deputed to the leading Gothic artist of the time, Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, and the clock tower – housing Big Ben – which was the last thing Pugin designed before he died in 1852. The Middle Ages were Pugin’s visiting card. At the Great Exhibition there was, apart from the progressive, forward-looking machines and products, a Medieval Court that he had designed, showing an aesthete’s determination to root Britain in a glorious, godly past at a moment when it seemed concerned only about its future. However much the visitors raved about the new machines they could witness in action, and see changing their futures, they still had an urge to dwell in the past.

  It was the supposedly glorious past of Carlyle’s ‘perfect feudal times’ and of the Eglinton Tournament and Young England. Pugin had a strong influence on public taste at a time when sudden prosperity, as it so often does, provided a temptation towards ostentation. However, his lessons for other architects cannot be understated, especially upon those such as Butterfield who built ornately decorated churches in keeping with the Anglo-Catholic aesthetic of the Oxford Movement. The Gothic to which they returned had never entirely gone away, and had been revived (as Gothick) in the eighteenth century. The romantic medievalism it evoked was almost a comfort-blanket in a time of rapid change and social upheaval: there is a link here with the mentality that drove Carlyle to embrace and celebrate feudalism. Until his untimely death in 1852 Pugin was designer-in-chief of the feudal fantasy. The Gothic novel was popular at the beginning of Victoria’s reign for similar reasons, and antiquarianism of the sort that infuses the writing of Sir Walter Scott was another strong social current. When the florin, or 2-shilling piece, was redesigned in 1851 (it had been introduced just two years earlier as a possible prelude to decimalisation, 2 shillings being one-tenth of a pound) the design and lettering were Gothic. In buildings, literature, culture and even in the coinage, the Gothic seemed to have become the national style.

  Great though the early dominance of Pugin was as a guide of taste, it was John Ruskin’s idea of the Gothic as the godly way of building that soon became the most hugely influential after Pugin’s untimely death. Ruskin had not inspired the Gothic Revival, but his propaganda on behalf of it kept it going far longer than might otherwise have been the case. His voice was so strong, in the 1850s and 1860s, that it shaped taste and began to inform opinion about what a country that wished to consider itself advanced, progressive, civili
sed and Christian should do when building. While the burden of the argument in The Stones of Venice is about the superiority of the Gothic over the Renaissance style also so prevalent in Venice, the path had been made clear in The Seven Lamps of Architecture. Both works aimed to foster an aesthetic climate in which the Gothic Revival could prosper, with arguments presented about the moral superiority of the style. A country steeped in the Classics looked back to the Middle Ages not least because the Middle Ages, unlike antiquity and unlike the mid-nineteenth century, were unequivocally Christian.

  Ruskin’s travels had been extensive and his research diligent, so there were few who had seen or examined so much who could gainsay him. He also, though, spoke with such an egotistical authority that he crushed all except those with an opinion formed out of equal erudition. His casual attack on St Paul’s Cathedral in The Seven Lamps is typical. Having written at length on the appropriate ornament for Gothic buildings, and on how floral decorations seemed completely unnatural for Renaissance ones, Ruskin asks: ‘Who among the crowds that gaze upon the building ever pause to admire the flowerwork of St Paul’s? It is as careful and as rich as it can be, yet it adds no delightfulness to the edifice. It is no part of it. It is an ugly excrescence. We always conceive the building without it, and should be happier if our conception were not disturbed by its presence. It makes the rest of the architecture look poverty-stricken, instead of sublime.’1