At Finsbury Park the Great Northern tried its best to keep secret the presence of its subterranean lodger, like someone who has an embarrassing relative living in the basement. So there were no signs pointing towards the Big Tube platforms, and indeed the platforms of the line remain hard to find today, as already mentioned. But anyone who did find the trains was in for a treat: great mahogany wardrobes of carriages with comfortable transverse seats, clocks and cigarette machines.
The fare for the end-to-end trip was 2d., so it was another ‘Tuppenny Tube’ of sorts. About 15 million passengers were carried in the first year, a third below expectations. In Rails through the Clay (1962), Alan A. Jackson and Desmond F. Croome describe the line’s commercial history as ‘a sad story’. After an initial contractual dividend was paid, the ordinary shareholders received nothing. The line was a failure, and would be further stifled by the network of electric trams that would grow up around Finsbury Park.
In 1912 it was bought by the Metropolitan, which wanted to extend the line south from Moorgate to Lothbury, and to revive the direct connection to the Great Northern, but these plans met with objections from competitors, and so the Met did its best with the line as it was. The service was improved, and in 1916 the only multi-class seats to be offered on the Tube railways were introduced. Both first and third classes were available, and they lasted until 1934, after London Transport had inherited the line.
In 1939 LT added to the complexity of the Northern Line by making the Big Tube its ‘Northern City’ branch, with ordinary Tube trains looking too small in the baggy tunnels. As part of the New Works plan of the late 1930s, it was proposed to use the Big Tube as a link between Moorgate and above-ground stations at the north end of the Northern Line. For the Big Tube to be freed from its underground prison in this way, the direct link to the main line at Finsbury Park would have to be finally created, but this plan would be shelved after the war, as we shall see. What happened instead was that the line would be banished altogether from Finsbury Park in 1964, in order that one of its tunnels there could be given to the new Victoria Line. In the general re-adjustment the other was given to the Piccadilly Line, which had first arrived at Finsbury Park in 1906.
Today, if you wait for a southbound Victoria Line train or a westbound Piccadilly Line train at Finsbury Park, you are standing on the old platforms of the Big Tube. In the early Nineties I rented a room in a flat at Finsbury Park, and I would use one or other of those platforms every day. I didn’t notice they were too big for the trains that ran in them, even though there’s about two feet between the carriage and the tunnel wall there, as against a foot or so in a normal Tube tunnel, but I think I did have a sense of expansiveness and possibility when heading south on the Vic or West on the Picc. Admittedly that could have been because both led to the exciting West End, or it may just have been youth.
Having been kicked out of Finsbury Park, the Big Tube’s northern terminus was now Drayton Park. It was in this phase of its existence that the event occurred that has made the history of the line not just baleful and bizarre but also tragic: the Moorgate disaster. On the morning of Friday 28 February 1975 the 8.39 a.m. train from Drayton Park, driven by Leslie Newson, stopped normally at Highbury & Islington, Essex Road and Old Street, but as it approached Platform 9 at Moorgate, the train, which ought to have been going at 15 miles an hour, was travelling at 35 m.p.h., and apparently accelerating. It smashed into the head wall of the 60-foot dead-end tunnel because, as we have seen, the Metropolitan’s plans to extend the line south had come to nothing. The tunnel being much bigger than the train, there was room for more mangling to occur than would have happened on a normal Tube. The second carriage was driven under the first, and the third one hit the back of the first. Forty-three people died. At the last moment, driver Newson was seen sitting upright, looking directly ahead, his hands on the controls. He had not lifted his hand from the dead man’s handle, an action that would have stopped the train. When his body was retrieved, it was apparent that he had not raised his hands to cover his face. Had he suffered some sort of fit or seizure? The coroner’s verdict was accidental death. Laurence Marks, the comedy writer, whose father died in the crash, conducted a journalistic investigation and concluded that the driver had committed suicide, which was emphatically denied by Newson’s wife. In 2010 Marks wrote in the Daily Mail, ‘Newson didn’t want to stop the train. I don’t know why. No one ever will.’ It was the worst peacetime disaster on the Underground.
A friend of mine boarded that train at Drayton Park. She was a regular on the run to Moorgate, where she was taking a secretarial course. ‘I knew something was going to happen, and I got off at Highbury & Islington. I then got on a Victoria Line train, which took me miles out of my way. I had a sense of physical danger. I don’t know how or why – I’m probably a witch.’ She knew Newson by sight. ‘I’d see him at Drayton Park, walking from one end of the train he’d just brought in to the other end to take it out again. I’d nod to him. He was a cheery, friendly-looking sort of man.’ After the accident she stopped travelling on the Tube for about fifteen years. She then would venture onto it, but only with the aid of ‘The Way Out’ Tube map, which showed the carriages to board if you wanted to arrive near the exits at any given station. (A recently published little booklet called TubeWhizzard is a refinement of the ‘The Way Out’ map.) ‘I had to minimise my time on the platforms,’ she told me. ‘I used to see your column on the Underground in the Standard, but I would immediately turn over the page. I couldn’t bear to read a word of it.’
On 4 October 1975 London Transport transferred the Big Tube to British Rail. Today the trains of First Capital Connect withdraw their pantographs from the overhead wires at Drayton Park and proceed into the tunnel by means of third-rail electrification, which is a method more suitable for tunnel transit. It’s a squalid business really, symptomatic of the blinkered vision, the make-and-mend, that characterises our railway planning, and I’m sure it’s of little interest to the football fans who crowd bi-weekly into the Emirates Stadium that now overshadows Drayton Park, but the fact is that the Big Tube has finally reached out to Hertfordshire with a through connection at Finsbury Park, which is all it had ever wanted to do.
CHAPTER SEVEN
ENTER YERKES
CHARLES TYSON YERKES: A GOOD DEAL OF A DREAMER
How to justify naming a chapter after this man? How about this: within the space of five years he electrified the Metropolitan and the District, built the lines that would become the Charing Cross branch of the Northern and the central section of the Piccadilly, and completed what would become the central part of the Bakerloo, a project already under way when he stepped in. He also acquired London United Tramways and fused all the elements together in his Underground Electric Railways of London, the forerunner of London Transport.
Yerkes introduces a welcome note of loucheness to our story, and the only mentions of sex you’ll find in most Underground histories are associated with his name. He was twice married and had many affairs. We learn from Robber Baron (2006), John Franch’s biography of the man, that two sculptures of female nudes flanked the grand staircase of his Fifth Avenue mansion. In the Louis XV room an ornate bed was decorated with ‘the likeness of a voluptuous nymph, nude and provocatively posed’. In their History of London Transport Barker and Robbins have a fine line in hauteur. When it comes to Yerkes, they introduce him as follows: ‘Charles Tyson Yerkes, born 1837, was a stockbroker and banker (once imprisoned) in Philadelphia before he moved to Chicago and became interested in street railways.’
Yerkes, then, was an American, and that ought not to surprise us. American tourists on the Tube seem rather gauche sorts, delightedly photographing each other in front of any old station roundel, but really it’s their Tube. We have seen that Americans were the pioneers of electric traction, and most of the unfortunate investors in Yerkes schemes would be American. At the turn of the century the balance of trade between Britain and America was shifting in Americ
a’s favour. There was spare capital in the States, and the cultural and economic colonisation that has been continuing ever since was getting under way. Yerkes had made his first fortune in the purchase and manipulation of municipal franchises for electric trams and elevated railways. In Philadelphia, his repertoire included bribery of officials, blackmail and artificial leverage of stock values. In about 1895 Yerkes said, ‘The short-hauls and the people who hang on the straps are the people we make money out of’, which usually appears as ‘It is the strap-hangers who pay the dividends.’ But it was generally the case with Yerkes that nobody received any dividends.
In 1872 there was a fire in Chicago. According to Rails through the Clay,
The ensuing financial panic caught Yerkes with his funds spread very thinly in a scheme to enlarge his Philadelphia tramway holdings, and he was forced into bankruptcy. Worse, he was indicted for technical embezzlement because he could not immediately deliver to the city the money he had received from the sale of municipal bonds.
He did nine months in the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. He then moved to Chicago, where he built street railways, but the Illinois state legislature was so alarmed by his money-raising schemes that it took over operation of the lines. Refining their disdain, Barker and Robbins note, ‘In the end … bribery and corruption failed, even in Chicago.’
So Yerkes came to London in 1898, together with his 24-year-old mistress, the interestingly named Emilie Busbey Grigsby. She was the daughter of a prosperous Kentuckian family which became less prosperous when her father died. Her mother then began running a brothel in Cincinnati, but the young Grigsby would become a coquette of international significance. She liked writers and had made a pitch at Henry James, who unfortunately (for her) was probably gay, insofar as he was anything in that line. Grigsby had written a novel herself, dauntingly entitled I, with the subtitle In Which a Woman Tells the Truth about Herself.
Yerkes also brought the twentieth century to London. The city, he told the New York Herald in July 1900, ‘is in crying need of modern transport facilities’. There were plenty of steam trains, but they didn’t serve the centre. There were the three Tuppenny Tubes, but two of them were City specialists, and the middle of the largest and fastest-growing city in the world was still full of horses, and full of slums. There was a need, said Yerkes, for the ‘labouring classes to get away from densely populated parts into uncrowded localities’. With proper transport, ‘People will think nothing of living twenty miles from town.’ He sounds like another Charles Pearson, albeit more worldly, and, as with Pearson, the surviving image of Yerkes shows a burly man sitting at an untidy desk. With Yerkes the picture is usually captioned something like ‘Yerkes, the cad’, and he does have a caddish moustache, but he was apparently softly spoken, with hypnotic eyes and a subtle magnetism. The main difference is that, whereas for Pearson trains were a means to an end – a better life for the masses – Yerkes was keen on trains per se. He liked speed – driving cars, riding horses – and he was ‘a bicycle crank’. He said, ‘I hope when I leave the world I shall leave an impress on it, something accomplished, something lasting done’, and he chose the building of electric underground railways as his method of achieving it. In 2012, when people tend to make their mark by less laborious means, there is something heroic in this, and soon after he arrived in London, a journalist who knew Yerkes observed that ‘although he is a very shrewd man … he is a good deal of a dreamer’.
Yerkes’s first move in London was to engage with the promoters of a Tube whose route is evident from the title: the Charing Cross, Euston & Hampstead Railway. Contracts had been drawn up for its construction in 1897, but the promoters lacked the capital to go ahead. In August 1900 Yerkes and his private secretary, a former member of the volunteer Cavalry Regiment, the Rough Riders, were given a tour of the route by members of the syndicate. The legend has it that, high on Hampstead Heath, while his companions looked south pondering the connection to the city 400 feet below, Yerkes looked north, towards the further unspoilt fields. ‘This settles it,’ he is reputed to have said, the implication being that he planned to build houses on those fields in conjunction with his railway. But there are other versions of what was said on Hampstead Heath on that summer’s day. In one, Yerkes asks – rather naively, I would have thought – ‘Where’s London?’ On being shown the town smoking away below, he pronounced, ‘I’ll make this railway.’ On 28 September, in a signing ceremony at the Charing Cross Hotel, Yerkes became chairman of the Charing Cross, Euston & Hampstead Railway, having subscribed for one quarter of the capital required to build the line. It is hard to think of that hotel without a Tube line running below it. Well, it soon would be.
In February 1901 Yerkes bought up $3 million worth of District Railway stock. By the end of 1901 he had, via his Metropolitan District Electric Traction Company, acquired total control of the District and the Charing Cross, Euston & Hampstead, and also the powers granted to the Great Northern & Strand Railway, which – it will be recalled from the sad story of the Big Tube – was the Great Northern Railway’s first favoured method of easing commuter blockages at Finsbury Park. Yerkes would join this to the Piccadilly & Brompton Railway to create the Great Northern Piccadilly and Brompton Railway, and you can still see those proud if unwieldy initials, ‘GNP & B’, written in gilt letters on the front of Holloway Road station. (That’s on the Piccadilly Line, which is what the GNP & B would become.)
In 1902 Yerkes also bought from liquidators control of the half-completed Baker Street & Waterloo Railway (which had been authorised between Elephant & Castle and Paddington, and which would become the Bakerloo); progress on which was halted by the crash of a paper edifice called the London and Globe Finance Corporation. At the head of that was an extravagant individual who makes Yerkes seem almost demure, and who triggers (for reasons that will be explained) the following eye-catching index entry in Stephen Smith’s book Underground London: ‘Underwater billiard table’.
James Whitaker Wright was not exactly American, but he learned his creative financing there. He had been born in Cheshire and moved to the States at a young age where a made a fortune in gold-mining and acquired a famously beautiful wife, even though he looked like Billy Bunter. On his return to Britain he bought a yacht called Sybarita and a Park Lane mansion, and created a vast estate in Surrey: Park Lea. That connoisseur of British mavericks, David McKie, has written of Park Lea:
Hills were levelled and new hills created … A vast lake, complete with a boathouse commissioned from Lutyens, was designed as a centrepiece. Beneath it, reached by tunnels, was a smoking room in the form of a subterranean conservatory, so that as they smoked his guests could watch fish, or sometimes even swimmers, disporting themselves overhead.
Or they could play billiards: hence that index entry.
Wright’s London Globe & Finance Corporation invested heavily in the Baker Street & Waterloo Railway, enabling tunnelling to begin from a staging in the Thames in 1898. The staging was a platform upstream of Charing Cross Bridge, and from it two shafts were sunk into the riverbed. It sounds bizarre to use the middle of the Thames as a base of operations, but both the City & South London and the Waterloo & City had done the same because it was cheaper to remove spoil by barge than by road. The under-river digging required the use of compressed air, and some workers succumbed to the diver’s condition the bends (decompression sickness), requiring a decompression chamber to be built on the works platform. In his pamphlet Early Tube Railways (1984) Nigel Pennick takes up the story:
On August 20th and 21st, blows [or blowouts] occurred which produced waterspouts two and a half feet above the river surface … A competitor in the London Waterman’s traditional race for Doggett’s Coat and Badge got into difficulties in the whirl of water, and complained bitterly that it had caused him to lose.
As that poor chap (I imagine him as an irate Mr Kipps) was floundering in the Thames in consequence of the infant Bakerloo’s great fart, Whitaker Wright was flounde
ring in a wider sense. Having made a fortune in American gold-mining, he was now losing one in Australian gold-mining, and juggling the shares in his network of holding companies to conceal the shortfall. In late 1900 the London & Globe and twenty-seven other Wright companies went bust, and in 1902 work stopped on the line. Wright’s shareholders lobbied for his prosecution, and in January 1904 he was convicted under the Larceny Act. He got seven years.
Wright was shown into an ante-room before being conveyed to prison. Here he handed his watch and chain to a friend who waited with him, saying he wouldn’t be needing it where he was going. He was right about that, because he then fell over and died. Wright had taken prussic acid on a visit to the Gentlemen’s after sentencing. A fully loaded revolver – his back-up plan – was also found in his pocket.
But now back to Yerkes …
In 1902 he formed the Underground Electric Railways of London company, and the initials UERL were to become familiar to all Londoners. Shares were issued around the world – dodgy shares. In Underground to Everywhere (2004) Stephen Halliday writes, ‘The capital structure of the company involved a complex hierarchy of shares, certificates, huge commissions to the bankers and other instruments which aroused the suspicion of the financial community.’ It also prompted the best sentence in the Barker and Robbins book: ‘All this rustling of commercial paper was received rather coolly in London.’ A Royal Commission on London Traffic of July 1903 could not understand the detail of the arrangements, and, let’s face it, nor can I. At the same time as he was ensnaring investors with what have been called his ‘exotic securities’, Yerkes was outwitting an even bigger beast in the financial jungle than himself …
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