London Underground's Strangest Tales
Page 5
1923
Graduating from designing graveyards to become one of the most influential architects in the history of the London Underground may not be the most traditional of career paths but it is nonetheless the unusual story of Charles Henry Holden, the man responsible for 33 of the network’s 270 stations from Acton Town to Wood Green, Arnos Grove to Westminster.
Born in Bolton in 1875, Holden studied at the Manchester School of Art but at the outbreak of the First World War became an army lieutenant and served with the Directorate of Graves and Registration and Enquiries, planning new cemeteries in France and expanding the existing ones. The following year he transferred to the Imperial War Graves Commission as a major and between 1918 and 1928 he helped design 69 new cemeteries.
It was after the end of hostilities when he met Frank Pick, by now the general manager of the UERL, that Holden really made his architectural mark.
Pick initially commissioned Holden to design a façade for a side entrance at Westminster Station in 1923 and was so impressed by the work that the following year he asked him to draw up plans for seven gleaming new stations for the extension of the City and South London Railway, or the Northern Line to you and me.
During the rest of the 1920s and 1930s, Holden was top dog, the man to whom London Underground turned to create the new termini they needed as the network expanded. In 1930, he made a tour of Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden to see the latest developments in modern architecture; the Continental influence – the cylinders, curves and rectangles – can clearly be seen in his work on stations on the Piccadilly Line extension.
His last Tube work was for three new stations for the Central Line extension (work delayed by the Second World War), but Holden was no one-trick pony and worked on many other projects across London including Senate House, a design which earned him a rather unpleasant claim to fame.
An Art Deco building commissioned by the University of London and built between 1932 and 1937, Senate House is said to have inspired George Orwell’s Ministry of Information in his classic Nineteen Eighty-Four, but it was the admiration of a certain Adolf Hitler that Holden could really have done without.
The Führer was apparently a big fan of Senate House. He ordered the Luftwaffe to give the building a wide berth during the Blitz, or else, and he also planned to use it as his London HQ after a successful invasion of Britain.
While Hitler’s plans didn’t go quite according to plan, Holden was said to be far from impressed when the identity of his biggest fan was revealed.
BABIES ON BOARD
1924
Offering your seat to a pregnant woman on the Underground is an act fraught with danger and what is often intended as an act of chivalry can quickly result in acute social embarrassment when you realise the lady in question is probably on her way to WeightWatchers rather than with child.
The danger for pregnant women, however, is actually giving birth while on the Tube, and the first recorded incident of a new life arriving on the network was in May 1924 at the Elephant & Castle Station when a certain Marie Cordery just couldn’t hold on.
Details of the happy if unusual occasion are sketchy. The newspapers of the day reported the baby girl had been named Thelma Ursula Beatrice Eleanor, which was a nice story because her initials spelled out ‘Tube’. It wasn’t until 2000 when she was traced for a television interview that it emerged she was in fact called Mary Ashfield Eleanor and took her second name from her godfather Lord Ashfield, who was the chairman of the London Passenger Transport Board at the time of her impromptu delivery.
The second recorded birth on the London Underground came 84 years later in 2008 when Julia Kowalska didn’t quite make it to the hospital in time and went into labour at Kingsbury Station on the Jubilee Line.
‘At 9 p.m. the station supervisor received a message from the control room that a woman on a northbound train was complaining of stomach pains,’ explained a Transport for London spokesman. ‘A few minutes later the supervisor went to the platform and found the pregnant woman having contractions and called an ambulance.
‘The woman, accompanied by her sister, was wrapped in a foil blanket to keep warm and taken to the supervisor’s office where the ambulance crew delivered a healthy baby girl.’
Two births and two girls, but a baby boy finally made an appearance in May 2009 when 32-year-old Michelle Jenkins was travelling on the Jubilee Line and realised the puddle in front of her was her waters breaking rather than a stray bottle of Evian. She was rushed to the office at London Bridge Station and gave birth with the usual gnashing and wailing but thankfully no complications.
There is another story of a birth on the network in 1944, but whether American talkshow host Jerry Springer really did come into this world on the platform of East Finchley Station is a moot point.
‘I was born during the Second World War [in London] and women in their ninth month would spend the nights in the subway stations because those were the shelters,’ Springer once claimed in an interview. ‘Hitler was bombing every night. So I was born at 11.45 at night and every time I hear a train go by I still jump.’
The only problem with the story is the fact that East Finchley is an overground station. It certainly wouldn’t have provided much protection from the Luftwaffe during the Blitz and was never an official wartime shelter.
It would have made far more sense had Mrs Springer gone into labour just up the Northern Line at Highgate, a nice, deep station that offered plenty of cover from Hitler’s bombs. Perhaps she got confused as the air-raid sirens sounded or maybe little Jerry simply didn’t listen properly when his mum told him the story of his unusual birth.
THE TEENAGER IN THE DRIVER’S CAB
1924
London Underground drivers usually have to undergo years of meticulous training before they are finally let loose on a real train, but regulations on the network were obviously a little more relaxed back in the 1920s judging by the strange story of Anthony Bull.
A public transport enthusiast from an early age, Bull just happened to be the third son of the well-known MP for Hampstead and when the new section of the Northern Line between Highgate and Moorgate was opened in 1924, Daddy pulled a few strings and the 16-year-old Anthony was invited to drive the first train down the tracks via the Camden Town loops.
The Daily Mail described him as ‘this lucky London boy’ while his passengers perhaps opted for more descriptive four-letter words when they discovered an unqualified teenager had been allowed to drive their train.
To be fair to Bull, his experience was wasted on him and after graduating from Cambridge University in 1929, he returned to the scene of the crime and joined the London Underground Company as a clerk on an annual salary of £120.
He quickly rose through the ranks, becoming assistant secretary to Lord Ashfield, the chairman of the London Passenger Transport Board (LTB), and then assistant to Frank Pick, the vice-chairman. By 1965 he had become vice-chairman of the LTB in his own right and played a major role in the planning and construction of the Victoria Line.
It was at the opening of the new line in 1968 that Bull met the Queen and Her Majesty decided to have a quick chat with the Underground grand fromage. ‘You must be glad now that it is open,’ she politely asked. ‘Yes,’ said Bull as he bowed, ‘but what pleases me most is that it has opened on time and within the cost estimate.’ To which, quick as a flash, Liz replied, ‘That makes a change.’
A frustrated comedian obviously, Her Majesty.
PARKING AT MORDEN FAILS TO IMPRESS
1926
Driving to an Underground station and parking your car before jumping on a train is either a prohibitively expensive or physically impossible task in London, depending on where you live. Tube stations either charge a small fortune for the privilege of parking or there simply isn’t a car park in sight.
It wasn’t always meant to be like this and in the embryonic days of the network, there were grand plans for the Tube and cars to enjoy
a far more symbiotic relationship.
A shining example of such a tie-up was Morden, the southern extreme of the Northern Line, which was opened in 1926 as a new extension of the City & South London Railway from Clapham Common.
Located in a then rural area, the idea was to encourage commuters to bring their vehicles to the station before taking the train; to incentivise them, there were 500 parking spaces for season-ticket holders. There were also petrol pumps, workshop facilities and mechanics on site to lovingly tend to their prized motors.
The innovative approach to marrying the two forms of transport was the first of its kind in the country, but problems were just around the corner and as London’s urban sprawl spread inexorably outwards to swallow up places like Morden, property values shot up. Landowners and businessmen realised there was far more money to be made from building houses than car parks and garages and the copycat stations, modelling themselves on Morden, failed to materialise.
The legacy of Morden’s failure can still be felt today as Londoners are forced to take out second mortgages merely to pay for parking in the same postcode as their nearest Tube.
HARRY POTTER, HARRY BECK AND THE TUBE MAP
1933
From Tottenham Hale to Timbuktu and Fulham Broadway to Fiji, the iconic map of the London Underground is as famous as the network itself and every year millions of bemused passengers rely on its clean, coloured lines to navigate their way through the maze that is the Tube.
It’s so famous, in fact, that it even gets a mention in the series of Harry Potter books. ‘Scars can come in handy,’ says Hogwarts’ headmaster Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. ‘I have one myself above my left knee that is a perfect map of the London Underground.’
The real map was the brainchild of Harry Beck, an engineering draughtsman from Finchley who worked for the London Underground Signals Office but spent his spare time drawing up transport system diagrams and whose passion to simplify the Tube map resulted in today’s classic design.
The early, pre-Beck Tube maps were a real mess. Although they were geographically accurate, reflecting where the various lines ran under the capital and how far the journey was between each station, the end result looked more like someone had inadvertently dropped a can of Heinz Spaghetti on a piece of A4 paper, and commuters were often none the wiser how to complete their journey.
Beck had a better idea and reasoned that what passengers really wanted was a nice, simple design that clearly showed how to get from A to B. He also argued that since commuters were pretty much stuck in their carriages between stations, it really didn’t matter how far it was between stops.
‘Looking at an old map of the Underground railways,’ he said, ‘it occurred to me that it might be possible to tidy it up by straightening the lines, experimenting with diagonals and evening out the distance between stations.’
The result was his easy-to-use, virtually idiot-proof Tube map; he submitted his radical new design in 1931. London Underground were initially sceptical and it wasn’t until the following year that they finally agreed to a trial production of 500 copies to test the water. Beck’s map was an instant hit and in 1933 700,000 copies were issued. A month later, the order went out for an ever larger reprint.
‘The genius of Beck was that he realised that the exact geographical or topographical course of the line is not necessarily essential to the Underground passenger,’ said Claire Dobbin, senior curator at the London Transport Museum in 2012, during an exhibition to celebrate Beck’s creation.
‘The London Tube map is one of the most widely recognised maps in the world. It has inspired artists and cartographers, been the subject of academic debate and has been printed on more products than Beck could have thought imaginable.
‘It has certainly become part of popular visual culture and even a symbol of London itself, but none of these things provide a more appropriate measure of the diagrammatic map’s success than the fact that it is still in use, fulfilling the function it set out to do 80 years ago.’
Over the years other people have tweaked Beck’s original design but the modern map remains essentially his baby and in 2006 viewers of BBC’s Culture Show and visitors to London’s Design Museum voted it the second greatest British design of the twentieth century behind Concorde. In 2009 the map featured on a Royal Mail stamp, and one of his original maps is still preserved on the southbound platform at Finchley Central Station.
Beck, who died in 1974, never found fame or fortune as a result of his work. He was paid a miserly five guineas – around £230 in today’s money – by London Underground for his design and it is only in the last 20 years that he has received the posthumous recognition his efforts surely deserved.
THE CURSE OF THE EGYPTIAN PRINCESS
1933
The ancient Egyptians were an innovative bunch. They invented the pyramids, eye make-up, paper, calendars and even toothpaste, but arguably their most enduring legacy has been their fondness for mummifying their dead and the slew of ghost stories that have sprung up as a result.
The London Underground, of course, has its own spooky Egyptian legend.
It centres on the long since blocked-up British Museum Station which, as the name suggests, was close to the British Museum. The station was opened in 1900 by the Central Railway Company and, soon after, reports of anguished screams in the tunnels began to emerge.
The popular theory was that the blood-curdling noise that travelled all the way to neighbouring stations was being made by the ghost of the daughter of Egyptian pharaoh Amen-Ra. Her coffin lid – or ‘mummy board – was on display at the nearby museum and erroneously dubbed the ‘Unlucky Mummy’; the artefact had already been linked to a series of mysterious deaths and disasters.
The story of the wailing Egyptian princess spread like wildfire and although the British Museum Station closed in 1933, the rumours persisted and The Times offered a reward to anyone willing to spend a whole night on the deserted platform. No one was brave enough to take on the challenge.
Things got even stranger in 1935 when Gaumont International released a film called Bulldog Jack. The movie used the Amen-Ra curse as its central plot device and climaxed with a dramatic chase through a secret tunnel that connected the British Museum’s Egyptian Room with the station. On the same night as the film premiered in London, two women were said to have disappeared from nearby Holborn; the next day, supposedly, two unexplained marks had appeared on the walls of the station.
Ever since the release of the film, London Underground has adamantly denied the existence of any clandestine tunnel between the station and the museum … but they would say that, wouldn’t they?
ANYONE FOR CRICKET?
1939
The English love of cricket is world famous and legend has it that part of the modern Bakerloo Line owes its existence to our national obsession with the thwack of leather on willow, cream teas and unfathomable fielding positions.
The story focuses on Lord’s Cricket Ground, which was originally served by the imaginatively named Lord’s Station on the Metropolitan Line. By the mid-1930s, however, the strain on the line between Baker Street and Finchley Road was beginning to take its toll and the obvious solution seemed to be extending the Bakerloo Line northwards to relieve the pressure.
The expensive scheme hung in the balance but rumour has it the proposal finally got the green light when a number of wealthy businessmen realised the extension could help them get to the home of cricket with the minimum of fuss.
And so it (allegedly) came to pass that the Bakerloo extension was made a reality and in 1939 the new St John’s Wood Station – a mere straight drive from Lord’s – was opened, while dear old Lord’s Station was deemed surplus to requirements and consigned to the dustbin of history.
The fact that any self-respecting millionaire would only arrive at the famous ground in a chauffeur-driven Rolls these days is neither here nor there.
UNDERGROUND GETS ROYAL SEAL OF APPROVAL
The Queen has a fleet of classic cars, priceless horse-drawn carriages and even private helicopters at her disposal whenever she needs to get about town, which probably explains why Her Majesty HRH has only ever jumped on an Underground train three times in her life.
Her first experience of the Tube came in 1939 when HRH was just 13 years old and yet to ascend to the throne. She was joined on her journey by sister Margaret, nanny Marion Crawford and a rather conspicuous minder who failed to grasp the whole concept of covert mission.
‘One day, as we passed Hyde Park Corner, there were people streaming out of the Underground station,’ Crawford remembered in her book The Little Princesses: The Story of the Queen’s Childhood by her Nanny, which was published in 1950 and caused quite a stir in royal circles. ‘Lilibet said wistfully, “Oh dear, what fun it must be to ride in those trains.” I thought why not?
‘The Duke [the future King George VI] agreed we could go, provided we were accompanied by the house detective. As part of the fun, the girls bought their tickets themselves. The whole business was as solemn as an investiture. They took an immense time getting the money out of their little embroidered purses and then collecting their change.
‘On the escalator, Margaret’s hand tightened on mine and she swallowed apprehensively. Once we’d boarded a train, both girls sat there, wide-eyed and enchanted until they became aware of a small commotion.
‘Their detective, who was standing at the far end of the carriage, looked so very obvious that people were looking round to see what he was detecting. Mercifully, we arrived at Tottenham Court Road and got out before anyone had spotted the Princesses.’
The Queen’s next foray below the surface was not until 1968, when the opening ceremony for the Victoria Line was held, the first time a reigning monarch had travelled on the Tube.