In France the choice widened in the fifty years after the late 1830s. Bread consumption rose by only a fifth, while that of potatoes and root vegetables rose by a half, meat by over three quarters, fruit and fresh vegetables doubled and the consumption of sugar quadrupled. Thanks to reduced prices bread accounted for only two fifths of the total cost of food – itself relatively stable as a proportion of average wages – against nearly three fifths before the arrival of the railways. By the end of the century protein in the form of meat, eggs and fish, formed nearly a third of the average Frenchman’s food intake, against a mere fifth fifty years earlier.13
In Paris these trends could be seen in extreme form. By the end of the century Parisian consumption of such basic commodities as wine and wheat was static and expenditure was increasingly concentrated on relatively optional ‘secondary’ foods, like meat and vegetables, fruit and fish. By the end of the century, even the poor of Paris could afford butter and apples from Normandy, oranges from the South of France, and vegetables from all over France. By then the French were eating far more meat than ever before, half a century after the American working classes had been able to increase their consumption of railway-hauled meat.
The diet of even poor New Yorkers in the 1860s included tomatoes, string beans and turnip greens in addition to the potatoes which had been the only vegetable they could afford as late as 1851. Urban workers often spent more on food once a better variety became available, a little-mentioned factor in the relative fall in alcoholism in the late nineteenth century – although precisely the opposite happened in France, because wine was one of the agricultural products whose production and consumption was most increased by the spread of the railways.
Even in France the flow was not confined to the capital. Inland provinces learnt to savour for the first time the joys of eating fish, and such previously exotic products as coffee. Everywhere rustics ceased to be entirely self-sufficient, preferring to buy basic foods like bread rather than bake their own, to the chagrin of self-appointed custodians of rural values but to the great relief of overburdened rural housewives.
*
The food the railways carried was not only physical. It was also spiritual, enabling pilgrims to travel far more easily. But there were natural hesitations before God-fearing folk were prepared to use such an obviously secular phenomenon. The Russian bishops, for instance, were afraid that ‘pilgrims would come to the monastery [Sergiev Posad (now Zagorsk), site of the sacred Troitsk monastery] in railway cars, in which all sorts of tales can be heard, and often dirty stories, whereas now they come on foot and each step is a feat pleasing to God’. Despite this reluctance the Metropolitan himself opened the line from Moscow to the holy spot, and by the time the Trans-Siberian was opened, the church was happy to commission a splendid ‘church car’ to minister to the congregations en route.14
The pattern was repeated with different religions throughout the world. The first railway in what was then called Persia was a narrow-gauge line which ran six miles from Tehran to a shrine in the village of Shah Abdul Azim. In Japan at least two railways served important shrines, at Ise and a special line from Oji to the temples at Nara. By the 1890s there was a convenient stop for pilgrims to pay their homage to Mount Fuji.
Some of the promoters of the first railways in India had hoped to spread Christianity, others were afraid that pilgrims would not use them to travel to their sacred shrines. According to Herbert Spencer, Robert Stephenson referred the matter ‘to the Dhurma Subha of Calcutta, the great sanhedrin of orthodox Hindoos, who, after consulting the sacred texts and the learned pundits, delivered it as their opinion that the devotee might ride in a railway carriage to the various shrines without diminishing the merit of the pilgrimage.’ The result was an amazing growth in pilgrimages, to the mutual advantage of the ‘Hindoos’ and the railway companies. (Quarterly Review, 1868).
Railways could also be used for secular worhsip. As late as 1968 the pious Chinese built a railway sixty miles from Hangsha, the capital of Hunan province, to Shao-sha, the birthplace of Mao-Tse-Tung. Over the next decade, before the cult of Mao’s personality waned, three million passengers took the leisurely four-hour journey every year.
Railways were obviously most suitable for mass religious movements and so concentrated attention on a small number of famous shrines, leading to the neglect of older sites. The most obvious beneficiary was Lourdes, which can truthfully be described as The Shrine the Railway Made.
Bernadette Soubirous’ visions had started in the late 1850s, before the route of the line from Bayonne to Toulouse had been decided. So the town council seized with both hands the opportunity to ensure that the line passed by Lourdes.
In October 1862, the council agreed to compensate any landowners who suffered, even from the railways’ surveys. In May 1863 councillors asked the railway to site its station as close as possible to the centre of town and complied with every one of the company’s requests. They admitted the navvies and railway workers to the local hospital and ignored their riotous behaviour.
Their reward came in 1866 with the simultaneous opening of the grotto and the railway from Tarbes, which connected with trains to Bordeaux and far-off Paris. Between 1870 and 1878 a total of 958 pilgrimages to Bernadette’s shrine brought 661,000 pilgrims to Lourdes, 100,000 of them on a single day, 3rd July, 1876, to rejoice in the newly-proclaimed doctrine of the Immaculate Conception and affirm the idea of la France Catholique.
At much the same time similar ideas were being spread throughout France by another railway-based religious order, the Assumptionists, who exploited the railways to assemble mass rallies, largely of the most humble of folk. The Assumptionists were a strange, and in their time highly important, sect, founded by the scion of a rich land-owning family, who acquired considerable political influence through their ability to mount mass rallies.
*
But the railway’s most dramatic influence was not on Christianity, but on Islam. Throughout the 19th century increasing numbers of pilgrims had made the difficult and dangerous journey to Mecca. In September, 1900, Sultan Abdul Hamid proposed to build a railway to Mecca as a pious gesture on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his accession to the Ottoman throne. The idea was immediately greeted as an important affirmation of Muslim values.
The Sultan naturally insisted on building a purely Muslim railway. He decreed that15, ‘only Muslim workers and Muslim materials ought to be employed; timber from the vast forests of Anatolia and Macedonia; ballast from the country being crossed, rails and wagons from the Imperial workshops; engineering regiments would provide the workforce, the schools of Constantinople the engineers and the foremen.’
In the event much of the material had to be bought in Europe, together with some skilled labour, supervised by the German engineer who had built most of the railways in the Levant. The combination of ferocious piety, the Sultan’s will-power and German organising ability ensured that this railway, nearly a thousand miles in length, was built within eight years.
Meissner Pasha, the German chief engineer, was simply given the two terminals, Damascus and Mecca, and told to connect them by rail as best he could. He was a genius. He had to handle a huge construction force composed of a dozen nationalities. The line was built across some of the bleakest, hottest, most implacable terrain in the world, without natural resources of any kind. His worst problem was with the Bedouin, furious at being deprived of the pilgrims who had been their prey, ruffians eventually hunted down by an implacably efficient Turkish general, Kaisim Pasha.
Meissner was not allowed to complete his work. Neither he, nor any other infidel, was allowed to venture beyond Medina Saleh, the 587th mile-post on the line. Fortunately he had trained up a highly-accomplished Turkish engineer, Muktar Bey, who brought the line into Medina in August, 1908. But then the Bedouin took their revenge, wiping out a whole construction camp, and thus scotching any idea of building the railway the final 300 miles to Mecca itself. Unfortunately the line ran for a me
re eight years until T. E. Lawrence blew it up. Since then it has lain abandoned, the break-up of the Ottoman Empire signalling the end of any hope of cooperation between the peoples along the lines.
In Anglo-Saxon countries deep religious faith produced, not railways, but strong hostility to the very idea of running them on the Sabbath, as a serious challenge to the fundamental Sabbatarianism which was as much a feature of the age as the railways themselves. The famous Versailles accident of 1842 was naturally exploited by the Sabbatarians as an awful lesson meted out to the Godless foreign travellers who had dared desecrate the day. After an equally appalling accident in Clayton tunnel just outside Brighton twenty years later16 ‘plenty of people rushed about proclaiming the accidents as a judgment of God.’ In between times the railways’ Sunday excursions were denounced as ‘trips to Hell at 7s 6d.’
Versailles, 1842: 52 people perished in the worst rail disaster in the world at the time.
But it was not the excursionists (who included such devout souls as Thomas Cook) who forced the railway companies to break the Sabbath. According to Michael Robbins in The Railway Age it was the absolute need for mail trains to run on a Sunday which broke the resistance of the Sabbatarians in both Scotland and Wales. They were never as powerful as was made out, and most clerics probably reacted like Dr Grantley in Trollope’s Barchester Towers: ‘If you can withdraw all the passengers the company I dare say will withdraw the trains. It is merely a question of dividends.’
Nevertheless the argument rumbled on. In 1883 the inhabitants of a small Highland village managed to prevent a load of fish from leaving on the Sabbath and were greeted as heroes when they returned from serving the jail sentence to which they were sentenced. Six years later ‘the anti-Sunday Travel Union’ had 58 branches with some 8,000 adherents. Partly owing to its activities, trains on suburban lines normally ceased running on Sundays during the hours of Divine service.
Similar battles were fought in the United States. In Galesburg, the railroad was the blunt instrument which broke the power of the Sabbatarians. The first Sunday train was boarded by the impressive figure of President Blanchard of Knox College, who was told to go to Hell when he ordered the engineer to take the engine back to the roundhouse. And that, wrote Ernest Elmo Calkins,17 was the end of the power of ‘the little group of pious men who had founded Galesburg to be a Christian town after their own ideal’.
In South Africa the Reverend Van Lingen managed to prevent any Sunday trains from desecrating the Sabbath at the settlement of Paarl. After denouncing the railway from the pulpit he founded a Sunday stage coach service for passengers from Cape Town which successfully kept the railway at bay for half a century.
There was, and remains, a strong counter-current, a positive railway-worship among clergymen of the Church of England. Bishop Eric Treacy and Canon Roger Lloyd were famous railway writers; Canon Reginald Fellows wrote a history of Bradshaw, founding father of railway timetables (which Archbishop William Temple was reputed to know by heart); and more recently the Reverend Wilbert Awdry made a fortune by recounting the adventures of Thomas the Tank Engine and his friends.
* The Modernisation of Rural France.
3
The Leisure the Railways Stretched
Railways could not create leisure time. Deeper social forces gradually reduced the working day and the working week, thus creating the ‘English weekend’ and giving many workers Saturday afternoon off. Longer holidays for the mass of the working class depended on legislation, like the 1871 Bank Holidays Act in Britain and the work of the Popular Front in France in the 1930s.
However, railways could enable everyone to take far fuller advantage of such leisure time as they had. Indeed, the mere idea of ‘leisure’ was new. In J. A. R. Pimlott’s words in The Englishman’s Holiday, ‘The idea that a holiday was a waste of time meant by God or natural law to be devoted to the increase of wealth died hard; but, as The Times said in 1871, with reference to the Bank Holiday Act, there has been “an increasing tendency of late years among all classes to find excuses for Holy Days”.’
Railways provided a means of escape at a time when towns were expanding at an unprecedented rate. At first the novelty of rail travel was enough; the destination mattered less than the mere fact of travel. But soon the railways became bolder, went further, created and defined mass tourism: the workers enjoyed their Sunday excursions, the middle classes longer holidays at far-flung seaside resorts, or in the hills, or, in the case of the British, abroad as well. They spread such tastes downward: a mass of middle-class tourists could visit the Alps, or Italy, delights previously confined to a tiny upper-class minority. By the end of the century the middle-class family, in particular, cemented its solidarity through the annual seaside holiday, almost invariably by train, holidays which became increasingly child-centred.
The combination of railways and holidays is indissolubly associated with one man: Thomas Cook (see note here). He enticed the British middle classes abroad; and he made it safe and respectable for women to travel by themselves to dangerous foreign parts. He was helped by ‘his almost infinite capacity for taking pains, his acute sense of the needs of his clients, and the powers of invention and the bold imagination which made him the greatest of all travel agents. But he was also an idealist: before he began to campaign for cheaper holidays he had been active in the fight for cheaper food. He was a ‘natural missionary … the cheap bread missionary’,18 and a temperance enthusiast who edited a magazine devoted to the cause and owned a temperance hotel run by his wife.
At the same time he (and the railways) created the biggest single dilemma of modern travel: by increasing the accessibility of desirable destinations and thus the sheer numbers visiting them, they destroyed, not only the character of the places themselves, overrun by gaping hordes, but also the effect on the sensibility of the individual visitor for whom the experience becomes just another item in an impersonal itinerary.
Paddington Station, as seen by William Powell Frith.
Despite Cook’s efforts railways could not entirely democratise holidays: once the railways had popularised a resort, the upper classes simply abandoned it. Queen Victoria never went near the former royal resort of Brighton, partly because she found its inhabitants ‘very indiscreet and troublesome’. Thanks to the railways, ‘persons of distinction’ could flee to remote, sporting regions – by 1865 the great eye-surgeon Sir William Wilde could suggest to his London patients the recreational value of a jaunt across the Irish Sea for a weekend’s fishing in Connemara.
The railways provided the average worker with his first ever opportunity for travelling outside his home town. As a Board of Trade report put it, the ‘benefits to the operative classes’ included those ‘for keeping up family ties by visits to parents and relatives … for moving in search of employment … excursions for innocent and healthy recreation on Sundays.’ And an 1849 guide book rejoiced that the excursion ticket was ‘a boon to those whose duties confine them during the greater part of the year to the close atmosphere of our overgrown city.’
Middle-class reformers approved of these jaunts because they removed the working classes from the temptations, and above all the drunkenness, associated with the traditional urban holiday entertainments, the fairs and the race meetings – although in the event the railways merely transferred the rowdiness to the seaside.
Excursion trains originated, not in London, but in the industrial areas of the north, where communal organisations were strong – even the manufacturers themselves organised works outings. The tickets were much cheaper, often a mere quarter of the price of ordinary trains, so excursions immediately acquired the same reputation as charter planes have today, and for the same reasons. As M. Vivian Hughes put it in A London Child of the ’Seventies, they meant ‘all that was horrible: long and unearthly hours, packed carriages, queer company, continual shunting aside and waiting for regular trains to go by, and worst of all the contempt of decent travellers’.
The discom
fort was common to all ‘tourist’ travel. ‘On Sundays, during the holiday season, passengers sweat blood and water to acquire their tickets’ warned one journalist to intending excursionists between Bordeaux and the new resort of Arcachon. On the train itself ‘The coaches are packed like prison cells.’ Unlucky passengers unable to find a place clung precariously to the running-boards hoping to find room inside once passengers got off at an intermediate station.
The tickets needed to be cheap.* Ordinary tickets were out of the reach of most working men and longer holidays did not necessarily imply higher pay. Indeed it was often ill-paid clerks rather than manual workers who were best able to take advantage of the days off provided by the 1871 Bank Holidays Act.
Railway outings were not confined to the seaside. London was ringed by favourite picnic spots, in woods or by the Thames, and by 1880, ‘there was no sizeable riverside place that was not served by train,’ wrote Jack Simmons in Railway in Town and Country. In South Africa the Wynberg line out of Cape Town was famous for the Sunday outings and picnickers it carried. And the railway was ideal for special occasions – in 1848, a crowd of 15,000 people travelled to Coventry to see a revival of Lady Godiva’s ride through the streets.
Three years later the railways transported millions of excursionists to see the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park. This proved a magnificent tribute to the railways’ universal power and influence, technical and financial, as well as in their capacity to transport millions of passengers. Henry Cole, secretary to the exhibition’s commissioners, had been unable to find a financier who would provide a first guarantee for the investment required. Then he happened to meet Sir Samuel Morton Peto, the great railway promoter. Peto marched Cole into the Reform Club and signed his personal note for the first £50,000. He was followed by other contractors and the exhibition was on its triumphal way.
The World the Railways Made Page 32
