The following year, yet another committee, this time a joint select committee of the Lords and Commons, examined all these proposals and found in favour of the one put forward by Fowler. As all the preliminary work had already been done, three Bills were quickly drawn up and were on the statute books by July. Two of these covered the extensions for the Metropolitan and the third was for the Metropolitan District (referred to below as the District to avoid confusion) route from Tower Hill, along the Thames through to South Kensington.
Work on the extension from Paddington to South Kensington began soon after the passage of the Bill. It proved to be a more difficult railway to build than the original section of the Metropolitan because it went across the street pattern, and consequently under houses, rather than being dug under a road as with the Paddington to King’s Cross. Landowners thus affected had to be bought off, requiring large compensation payments to property owners on the way. The effect of the Underground in this section of west London must, indeed, have been much more noticeable to local residents than on the initial part of the Metropolitan. At times, as mentioned in the introduction, this line runs in short open-air sections, hidden between the backs of houses, and several property owners must have felt much as the benighted residents of Richmond do today about the aircraft flying over their heads. The ‘cut and cover’ method used for most of the line was enormously disruptive and while there was only one sizeable tunnel, under Campden Hill between Kensington and Notting Hill, there were several short sections left uncovered, where noise and smoke affected the local neighbourhood. Resistance was strong: ‘Once the disruption along the route of the original Metropolitan railway had been seen, owners of properties all over London fought vigorously against the introduction of the underground railway in their area. The “not in my back yard” brigade were just as forceful in Victorian times as they are today.’1 Quick to resort to the law, local residents feared that there would be severe damage to their property from the crude digging methods then employed.
By the end of 1868, the Metropolitan was operating to South Kensington, the site of the planned connection with the District which had also began to make slow progress. Unlike the huge fanfare that had accompanied the start of work on the Metropolitan, there was no ceremony in 1865 when the first sod was turned, nor, in fact, when the line opened on Christmas Eve 1868, a date chosen because revenue on Christmas Day was expected to be high – rather different from today when the whole Underground system is closed for the holiday.
Like the Metropolitan, the District was building on expensive land, through Kensington to Sloane Square, Victoria and Westminster; and by the middle of 1866, according to The Times,2 2,000 navvies were carving out the tunnels assisted by 200 horses and fifty-eight engines. At Earls Court, huge kilns were at work producing the 140 million bricks needed for the tunnels and embankments. The stretch from South Kensington to Westminster was completed in three years but the effort had brought the company to its knees because it had cost £3m – three times as much as the Metropolitan had paid five years earlier for its longer line from Paddington to Farringdon. The progress of the District line had been obstructed at every turn, especially by the big landowners who disliked the idea of underground railways traversing their land and, where possible, extracted large compensation payments from the railway. Lord Harrington banned ventilation shafts from his South Kensington estate; a pipe containing the River Westbourne had to be channelled over the platform at Sloane Square;3 and the company had to pay for the widening of Tothill Street and avoid the precincts of Westminster altogether. Several new sections of streets had to be provided and many others improved. There were many petty restrictions too: to avoid disturbing the barristers, the steam whistle of any locomotive engine could not be sounded near the Temple except in an emergency.4
The Westbourne was not the only problem with water for the new railway. Pumps had to work all day extracting it at the rate of 4,000 gallons per minute and, moreover, a large sewer near Victoria had to be reconstructed, putting the effluent into a cast-iron cylinder eleven feet high and fourteen feet in width. The complexity of the task of digging under London, even in those days, before the advent of electricity and telecommunications, was nevertheless daunting: ‘Water pipes, gas mains, sewers and monster beams of timber presented themselves in all directions overhead while workmen, as numerous as bees in a hive, were excavating, getting bricks and fixing arches with as much dexterity as if they had served their apprenticeship in underground railways.’5
Construction of the Underground lines was used as the catalyst for reshaping large swathes of London. A Times journalist, who went on a site visit with directors of both the Metropolitan and the District during construction of the latter in Victoria and Westminster, wrote: ‘The “slums” of Westminster will be very much improved by the construction of the line. In Broadway6 a number of dilapidated houses have been pulled down and many more are “ticketed” [scheduled for demolition].’7 Further towards Victoria, a brewery owned by Eliot, Watney and Co. (Watney was to survive as the name of an awful beer until the end of the twentieth century) was being rebuilt using the roofing of the tunnel as the foundations. The company had been forced out of its old premises by the building of the line and, to ensure its cooperation, the District offered the brewery a new site. At Victoria itself, there was to be what The Times called a large ‘exchange station’ with the new terminus being built by the London, Chatham & Dover. All the scepticism about the viability of underground railways had disappeared. The reporter was enthusiastic, and was aware of the fact that the Metropolitan was only the start of a much bigger system: ‘Judging from the results already shown by the working of the Metropolitan line, even in its imperfect state as only a partial system, a traffic such as never has been known on any line is expected to be secured by this circular scheme.’8 Indeed, that was to be true – but not until the circle was complete which meant that in the meantime the District struggled financially, as it would for most of its forty-year independent existence.
Moreover, there was a problem in beginning work on the District’s section along the Thames as ideally it should have been combined with the construction of the Embankment, to which the Metropolitan Board of Works was now, after years of prevarication, finally committed. The works had, in effect, to be integrated but the District’s shortage of cash precluded further major expenditure, especially as the climate for investment in such projects had worsened as investors saw that the substantial early dividends paid by the Metropolitan had been too generous and such rates of return could not be expected in the long term. The District wanted a period of running its trains between South Kensington and Westminster to ensure that some revenue was coming in, but the Board of Works was pushing hard to get the railway to press on with the building of the line rather than opening sections of it. Eventually, work on the Embankment started in 1869 but it was not until the following year that the District obtained powers to raise a further £1.5m to continue its progress eastwards. The line reached Blackfriars at the end of May 1870 but there were few early users. A historian of the District postulates: ‘Although it was expected that traffic levels would match those of the Metropolitan on the north side of the city, they were comparatively light, perhaps due to the variety of main line termini, any of which could be reached easily from south London and which removed the need to travel between them once reaching London.’9 Indeed, the various termini north of the Thames had comparatively small suburban networks and each area tended to be connected with a single station, whereas in south London the rivalry between the London, Chatham & Dover and the South Eastern had resulted in much duplication with many outlying towns and suburbs being connected to two major termini, thereby giving local travellers a choice of their destination in London, reducing the need to take an onward journey by the Underground.
Six weeks after the District’s extension to Blackfriars had started operating, the Embankment along the Thames opened and according to contemporary report
s, following the departure of the royal guests who had performed the ceremony, ‘a great mob of roughs tried to push westwards along the Embankment but their progress was arrested “in a masterly manner” by the police’.10 The East and West Ends were very different worlds and it would be another fifteen years before the underground line linked them as well.
Once the District had reached Mansion House, effectively three quarters of the way around the circle, it started running trains all the way round to the Metropolitan’s new terminus at Moorgate, providing half the services on the line. This sort of joint service pointed the way to the solution to the operational difficulties – a merger with the Metropolitan. However, that obvious move was made more difficult by the appointment of two men who were intense rivals to lead the respective underground railway companies. Both companies were ailing financially and turned to major figures in the railway industry to help them out of their difficulties. Unfortunately, the two men chosen, James Staats Forbes and Edward Watkin, had a history that meant they would never be able to cooperate.
Forbes and Watkin were very different characters who had headed rival railways. James Staats Forbes had worked for Brunel on the construction of the Great Western and had gone on to save the London, Chatham & Dover Railway – which had been on a path of almost suicidal expansion and cut-throat competition with the South Eastern – from bankruptcy. He started there as general manager in 1862, taking the railway out of receivership and then going on to stay nearly four decades, the last twenty-five years as chairman and managing director. He was an early exponent of spin doctoring, being described as ‘a past master in the art of bunkum’,11 and was, on the surface, an easygoing and cultured character who built up an extensive art collection with the money he made from the railways. He also had a steely backbone that was to help fuel the thirty-year feud with Watkin, who had an even more aggressive and domineering personality. The District’s directors were so desperate to obtain Forbes’s services that they reduced their own allowance by £1,250 in order to pay him a salary of £2,500 without imposing a further financial burden on the shareholders. Forbes became managing director of the District in 1870 and chairman when he ousted the Earl of Devon a couple of years later, a position he held until 1904.
While Forbes was in the mould of a company doctor, trying to sort out a legacy of unrealistic expansion, Watkin, who took over as chairman of the Metropolitan in August 1872, within a month of Forbes assuming the same post at the District, was a great visionary, ever espousing grand plans. He came from a more affluent background than Forbes since as the son of a prominent cotton merchant, he was not only born into wealth but had immediate access to the rich who could help promote his considerable railway ambitions. Like that other underground pioneer, Charles Pearson, he was also something of a campaigner, having written a book pleading for public parks and helped start the half-day Saturday movement, campaigning to allow workers to have Saturday afternoons off. He was, as many prominent people of the time were, an MP for a while; but it was the railways which were to become Watkin’s lifelong obsession, inspired, perhaps, by the fact that his father took him to the opening of the Liverpool & Manchester in 1830.12 At one time or another during his long career he was a director of most of the major main line railway companies in England, and he was involved in many railway projects abroad, notably in Greece, and in Canada where his efforts to save the Grand Trunk Railway ensured that the country eventually obtained a transcontinental line.
He had, as one historian puts it, ‘business acumen, superb negotiating skills with tremendous flexibility to manipulate several options to achieve a personal objective’.13 Other descriptions are even less kind: ‘He could be fairly described as a nervous and aggressive workaholic who from his twenties onwards suffered from anxiety, depression and nervous breakdown.’14 There is no doubt he was a difficult man to work with. Although he was, at times, extremely affable, he was ruthless and enjoyed nothing more than a good fight, including public disputes with the directors of companies he chaired. His belligerence resulted in a battle with Forbes that lasted for over three decades, but fortunately for Londoners, most of the conflict between the pair was fought out in the Kent countryside. Even today, the pattern of the railway network and the existence of two stations in many modest-sized towns such as Maidstone, Sevenoaks and Margate, serving different London termini, is a reflection of the long battle between the two railways when they were led, respectively, by Forbes and Watkin. Watkin was secretive and abrasive in negotiations, while Forbes, possibly disingenuously, presented himself as more amenable. Forbes refused to bow to pressure from his rival and set out to expand to survive.15 The ruinous competition, which was to the detriment of both passengers and shareholders of the two railways, only ended when Watkin retired in 1894; within five years, the two companies had effectively merged.
In London, the battle was less wasteful but still damaging to the long-term interests of the capital. After the District reached Mansion House, at last the Metropolitan started its journey east, with an extension opened in February 1875 into Great Eastern’s huge new Liverpool Street terminus. Later that year trains were rerouted to a nearby station at Bishopsgate. A further extension to Aldgate was completed in 1876, largely because of pressure from the Corporation of London, but by then the Metropolitan realized that building cut and cover lines through expensive City property was not viable and stopped its expansion.
Even before the arrival of Forbes and Watkin, relations between the District and the Metropolitan railways had been fraught. The idea of having two railways was already creating conflicts which made life harder for passengers. At Kensington, for example, the ownership pattern was confusing. While the track from Moorgate round to South Kensington via Paddington belonged to the Metropolitan, the two companies jointly owned the stations at Gloucester Road and Kensington High Street where the eastern platform belonged to the Metropolitan and the western was in the hands of the District. At South Kensington there was another silly situation: the entire station was owned by the Metropolitan, and the District, unwilling to share it, started building an entirely new one which required the demolition of thirty recently built houses in Pelham Street.16
Usage increased when the District reached Mansion House in July 1871 but the money problems continued. Indeed, it was rather ironic that the District had been created as a separate company from the Metropolitan in order to raise money and yet throughout its history it struggled to do so. At first the District trains were run by the Metropolitan, but inevitably squabbles arose over the precise level of payments. The two companies had signed an operating agreement in 1866 by which the Metropolitan was supposed to get 55 per cent of the receipts for providing the trains, but it actually got 62 per cent since it ran additional services beyond those in the contract. This forced the District to provide its own trains and it bought the same Beyer, Peacock locomotives which had proved so effective for the Metropolitan. That did not stop the constant bickering over the amounts each should receive from the fare box and it was only in 1878, several years after the completion of the initial stages of the District, that the money was shared equally.
There were all kinds of other disputes. For example, the District had rather cheekily built two extra tracks parallel to the Metropolitan’s between Gloucester Road and High Street Kensington, the Cromwell curve (named after Cromwell Road under which it runs), without either Parliamentary authority or an agreement with the Metropolitan. This allowed the District to avoid running over part of the Metropolitan’s tracks, for which it had to pay a usage charge, but did much to sour relations between the two companies, and arguments over the use of the curve carried on into the next century until, in a court case in 1903, the Metropolitan prevented the District from using it.
Even before the completion of the circle, the public were beginning to get a genuine underground service that covered much of London north of the Thames. The District’s rapidly built extension to Mansion House was opened by the Prime
Minister, William Gladstone, and brought the line tantalizingly near to Tower Hill, just three quarters of a mile away, where eventually it was to meet the Met. By July 1871, when the District started running its own trains, there was a ten-minute frequency, half operated by each company, from Mansion House to Moorgate and a five-minute frequency between Mansion House and Gloucester Road. The trains were not luxurious but were relatively comfortable. They were painted green on the District and consisted of eight carriages: two first, two second (later a third second-class carriage was added) and four third. The first class only had four compartments per carriage, upholstered and roomy, while the others had five, and whereas the second class had a modicum of comfort the third’s furnishings were confined to a strip of carpet on the wooden seats and a padded back strip at shoulder height. Once the ninth carriage was added, there was space for 430 people on each train, impressive given the frequency of service. As with the Metropolitan, the District started out as non-smoking but was forced to allow it from 1874, adding to what was already an unpleasant atmosphere.
The Subterranean Railway Page 9
