The rivalry was undoubtedly exacerbated by the financial pressures of the two railway companies. Both had promised to pay dividends of 4 per cent on their respective shares of the £2.5m capital raised to build the line and therefore there was great pressure to maximize revenue through intense usage and, when that proved impossible, by trying to screw as much as possible out of the other company. The Metropolitan was always the senior partner, able to run more through trains and generally being able to call the shots over the District. There were disputes over sharing the cost of construction, over the amounts of interest that should be paid, about an agreement over the Cromwell curve and, inevitably, about fares.
The most ridiculous row led to the chaining of a locomotive to a disputed siding at South Kensington. As the West London Advertiser reported, ‘The right to a siding is disputed by the respective companies … The District, in order to enforce their right, have run an engine and train into a siding and have actually chained it to the spot, notwithstanding the fact that the engine fires are kept alight, steam kept up and night and day, a driver and stoker are in charge. A day or two ago, the Metropolitan sent three engines to pull away the train and a tug of war ensued in which the chained train came off the victor …’31 In between these arguments, there were attempts to do the obvious and amalgamate the two railways, something both Watkin and Forbes supported, but they could never agree on the terms.
The financial problems were mostly a result of the high cost of construction but were exacerbated by the fact that the route, as we have seen, was largely chosen at the instigation of a Parliamentary commission rather than by entrepreneurs assessing the needs of the market. Though the line was fairly well patronized, it was not very useful until a broader network of Underground lines was connected with it. Whereas two decades previously, when there was only a small section of the Metropolitan line, just under 9.5 million people had travelled on the Underground, bringing in receipts of £101,000, in the first year of full operation of the Circle there were 114.5 million passengers. However, that was still not enough to pay adequate dividends given the expenditure on the Circle’s construction and the cost of operating the line.
Compounding these problems was an unexpected revival in the fortunes of the horse omnibus. Intuitively, one would have expected the omnibus to have been on a declining curve since the start of suburban train services fifty years previously. However, several factors combined to make omnibuses cheaper and, while still slower than the train, at least faster and more reliable than hitherto. Their finances had been helped by the scrapping of turnpike tolls and mileage duties. Moreover, they paid low rates for their stables and depots while the railways had to pay the full amount on their stations and yards. Ironically, the underground railways even paid more towards the upkeep of the roads than their omnibus rivals as they frequently had to pay a ransom towards improvements in the thoroughfares under which they built their lines. Interviewed just before the end of the nineteenth century, the general manager of the District, Albert Powell, complained: ‘The omnibuses are practically free from taxation; do absolutely nothing to maintain the roads over which they run; and while their expenses … are thereby kept down to the lowest figure, enabling them to charge fares out of all proportion to the service rendered, the District Railway is not only compelled to construct, at its own expense, the railways over which it runs … but is forced to contribute £32,000 per annum in rates and taxes towards the roads over which its competitors – the omnibuses – run.’32 While railway operators the world over are in the habit of making similar complaints, Powell had a point. The railways even had to pay a passenger tax (on fares above a penny a mile) for which there was no equivalent for the omnibuses.
Secondly, these road improvements were part of a London-wide project to create wider and better streets. There were several new highways such as Northumberland Avenue, Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road built in the 1870s and 1880s that did much to unblock the constant congestion on the London streets and make it easier for the clumsy omnibuses to thread their way through them.
Thirdly, the horse tram, highly successful in the suburbs, was excluded from central London, leaving the omnibus the lucrative pickings in the City and West End for journeys not covered by the Circle. Finally, the price of maize, a major factor affecting the profitability of the omnibus companies, dropped considerably in the 1880s. With all these advantages, the bus operators were able to offer much lower fares, attractive to the poorer passengers. For example, it was possible to travel from Putney to South Kensington, a distance of three and a half miles, for just a penny and from Putney to Charing Cross for twopence. While many people would have been put off by the slower journey times of the omnibuses, they nevertheless represented damaging competition to the new underground services and certainly dented the profits of the rail companies, especially as their costs were virtually fixed because of the large amount of capital required to run a railway.
The completion of the Circle had done little to improve the situation of the District. Nothing could change the inherent problem for the District that many passengers from south of the river could choose their London terminus precisely to avoid having to change onto the Underground. For example, the advantages of the through services (mentioned above by The Times reporter) from New Cross to Mansion House were not that great compared with taking a train directly on the South Eastern Railway to, say, Cannon Street or Charing Cross. Passengers from Brighton had the choice of going into either London Bridge with easy access over the Thames to the City, or to Victoria.
Moreover, the geography of the line was not helpful to the District. The Circle is really an ellipse when viewed on a conventional map, a couple of parallel lines joined at the eastern and western extremities. At the eastern end, the lines are barely a mile apart and given that progress on the trains was held up at Aldgate for watering and the various junctions for traffic heading east, it was often quicker to take a brisk walk through the City rather than brave the Underground – especially as the true heart of the City, the Bank of England, was about half a mile away from several stations but not directly served by any of them. While the northern section of the line was profitable from the start as it benefited from greater usage and lower construction costs, the southern one probably never could be. Without a joint operation, there was no hope of paying adequate dividends. In 1886 Forbes had to admit to the District’s shareholders that the venture of completing the Circle had been ‘almost disastrous’ and two years later he claimed that it was costing the company nearly £60,000 per year without any return.33
There had, indeed, been scepticism right from the beginning as to whether the Circle line was a viable railway. The Railway Times,34 far from celebrating the completion of the line, ran a highly critical editorial under the heading ‘The Inner Circle Delusion’, which questioned whether there would ever be an adequate rate of return on the cost and suggested that the whole enterprise was an example of ‘aerial castles, pleasing to the imaginative mind’ but of little practical use.
The Railway Times was, of course, guilty of a lack of imagination and failed to realize that the fundamental problem was the one that was to dog all the Underground entrepreneurs – the fact that they were building a fantastic resource for Londoners whose value could never be adequately reflected through the fare box which was their only source of income.
The line may have been a financial failure, but at least the Circle, a strange concept for a railway line as it goes nowhere in particular, was complete. And while the short-term economics may have been disastrous, along with the continued development of the suburban railway network, it was to prove a boon to London’s economy. It was to be used by both commuters and, importantly, leisure travellers and it quickly became an essential part of the capital’s infrastructure. Yet, oddly, it was to take another sixty-five years and the creation of Harry Beck’s famous diagram before the name ‘Circle Line’ appeared on the London Underground map.
FI
VE
SPREADING OUT
Neither the Metropolitan nor the District wasted the years of waiting to complete the inner circle. Both were pursuing markets further afield – in the south and west in the case of the District and to the north and west for the Met. While strictly these were not underground lines as they largely ran on the surface or on elevated viaducts, they were to become an essential part of London’s underground network. It was not until the concept of deep tube lines was developed that any new lines crossed the central area of the capital. In the meantime, suburban expansion was essential to satiate the appetite of the entrepreneurs and the various professionals – lawyers, financiers, brokers – who fed off them.
The beginnings of what was to become the extensive network of lines on the western side of the capital had started almost as soon as the first section of the Metropolitan had been completed. As noted earlier, through associated companies, the Metropolitan had already developed two extensions: the Hammersmith & City line whose trains ran into the underground tunnel at Paddington, and the initially unsuccessful branch to St John’s Wood and Swiss Cottage. However, it was to be the latter, called for a long time the ‘extension railway’, that was to prove far more significant in the history of the Underground and of London, ultimately creating a whole new area of the capital which, through its unofficial name, Metroland, encapsulated the importance of the railway in bringing about this growth.
As early as 1874, Sir Edward Watkin already had far-reaching visions for extending the Metropolitan, expressing to shareholders his desire to ‘break through the iron barriers which … larger railways have constructed around you … and connect your great terminus with Northampton and Birmingham and many other important towns’.1 There was one slight lacuna in this grandiose scheme: he had not yet worked out from which terminus these trains would operate. At first, Baker Street, with its little branch line that was gradually being extended out into north-west London, became the focus of the Metropolitan’s network but later this would shift to a new terminus at Marylebone because of the physical difficulties of expanding the older station.
Watkin’s ambitions were both grand and inconsistent. He wanted, simultaneously it seems, to create out of the Metropolitan an extensive suburban railway; a main line service – a plan to extend the line to Worcester was rejected in the early 1880s; and ultimately, even more extravagantly, a through railway from the north-west of the country via London to Kent where it would connect with a putative Channel Tunnel. Watkin, who had interests in a French railway company that could create a connection with Paris, even built a test bore for the tunnel, stretching more than a mile under the sea. He reckoned he could have the whole scheme, which included huge lifts on the shore to carry trains down to the level of the tunnel, completed within five years. It was not only the understandably sceptical shareholders of his wonderfully named Submarine Railway Company who were wary of the project, but the War Office which had fanciful visions of crack foreign troops being whisked through the tunnel to invade Britain. The fears of the military can be summed up by the views of Lieutenant General Sir Garnet Wolseley, the Adjutant General, who told a committee enquiring into the scheme that ‘the proposal to make a tunnel under the Channel … will be to place her under the unfortunate condition of having neighbours possessing great standing armies’.2 Given the disadvantage any invading troops would face in trying to overcome the entrenched positions of the defenders, such considerations were obviously nonsense in military terms and were motivated by xenophobia. Nevertheless, Watkin tried to allay these fears by saying the whole construction could be blown up at the touch of a button from London or, somewhat ridiculously, that he would build a spiral railway, rather than a lift, out of the tunnel to give the British a better chance of shelling any foreign troops attempting to invade. To no avail. The military’s objections prevailed, though lack of cash also ensured that the project never really had a chance.
Despite his failure on the Channel scheme, Watkin pressed ahead with a host of other ideas in which the Metropolitan was intended to play a central part. Given the lack of diaries or correspondence to explain Watkin’s thinking and his innate secretiveness about his long-term intentions, even to shareholders, it is unclear exactly how he reconciled all these various visions and how the growing Metropolitan was to fit into them. While some historians suggest that Watkin had a grand master plan but was keeping his cards close to his chest, others suggest that he was merely muddling through, intent on expansion and growth wherever possible. The Metropolitan, though, was key to his grand ambitions because he realized that if the through trunk line were built through London, it would be the central part of ‘a sort of backbone for the commerce and industry of the country’. Watkin’s initial power base had been the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway but as he also gained control of the South Eastern based in Kent, the obvious role for the Metropolitan was to link the two. And as a history of the Metropolitan puts it, ‘Watkin perceived that it would be politically easier for the Metropolitan to break out of London than for the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway to break in’.3 Moreover, having the direct connection into the Underground and into the heart of the City gave Watkin’s plan a leading edge in order to compete with the existing north–south railways where people had to get off at the terminus to change trains. In the event Watkin managed to complete the Grand Central Railway just before his death in 1901, but this ran on Metropolitan tracks into Marylebone rather than creating a through route to the south, and his national aspirations for the Metropolitan were never achieved.
Watkin’s ambitions therefore ensured that the line to Swiss Cottage, built as a single track railway,4 was quickly extended even though it was poorly patronized. The extension was made easier by the fact that once out of the immediate vicinity of central London, the railway was built on the surface, which of course was much cheaper. Powers were quickly obtained for the tunnel to be continued from Swiss Cottage to Finchley Road and then for the railway to run in the open air through to West Hampstead, Kilburn and Willesden Green, which were reached in 1879.
Already, the Metropolitan was aware of the potential role of the railway in opening up a whole new area of London. It is difficult nowadays to believe that one contemporary account could cite that ‘amongst the charms of Kilburn is its proximity to the country. Within half an hour’s walk, the pedestrian is among trees and fields and pleasant places’.5 An extension to Harrow6 was completed in 1880 where, although there was already some housing around the railway stations built by the London & North Western at Wealdstone and Harrow Weald, it was essentially still a natural and undeveloped environment: ‘The whole neighbourhood is more rural than any part of the country within the same distance from the interminable brick and mortar wilderness of London. The district about Kingsbury and Neasden is intersected by flowering hawthorn hedges, while the River Brent meanders through them.’7
And so it went on. Within another five years the Harrow line reached Pinner, and Rickmansworth and Chesham were added before the end of the 1880s. The Metropolitan waxed lyrical about the way these extensions created the possibility of rural trips, saying that they ‘opened up a new and delightful countryside to the advantage of picturesque seekers; ancient houses and old-world ways. Within 50 minutes from Baker Street and for the cost of less than a florin [two shillings], if the visitor can be economically disposed, he can enjoy a feast of good things, fresh air, noble parks, stately houses, magnificent trees and sylvan streams.’8 But, of course, the only way that the railway could become profitable was to ensure that developers, stimulated by the arrival of the railway, destroyed much of that bucolic splendour (as described in Chapter 12).
The extension to Rickmansworth reveals that Watkin was certainly aware of the fact that the only way the railway could make money was through attracting the developers. There was little immediate railway traffic to be had from a town of just 1,000 people and it was hardly surprising that only 561 passengers were
carried to the capital in the first month, though income was boosted by a bit of freight, principally coal and gravel, and by leisure traffic on Sundays attracted by the Metropolitan’s flowery publicity. For example, the Watford Observer reported that 450 people had used the line to go to Harrow and 250 to Northwood on a hot day in September 1887.
There were, however, sceptics about the line, a letter writer to the Financial News complaining that ‘so boring was the country passed through and so few people on the train’ that he considered the extension ‘a waste of money and doomed to failure’.9
Chesham, a larger town of 6,500 people, was connected to the Metropolitan in 1889, becoming the terminal of the railway for the next three years. Hitherto it had been an isolated self-contained community but the arrival of the Metropolitan transformed it into a focal point for excursions. Soon after the opening, the Metropolitan had one of its own, taking 3,000 employees by special trains for one shilling apiece to march behind the Harrow Town Band to the cricket ground where they saw their staff cricket team play the local Chesham side.
The station at Aylesbury, which had been on a minor railway, was rebuilt by Metropolitan and in 1892, proved to be a fantastic boon to the local traditional duck egg trade, whose ‘egglers’ were now able to collect large numbers for the London trade. While the line attracted reasonable patronage from the town of Aylesbury, the intermediate stops were pretty deserted and financially the service did not appear to make immediate sense. An early contemporary account10 in the local paper records that ‘71 people booked on the first journey which left Aylesbury at 7.15 a.m. and the great majority got out at Stoke [Mandeville] and Wendover’. The reporter reckoned that ‘for a village Stoke may be said to have one of the largest and most comfortable stations to be found anywhere. In the event of their houses being destroyed by fire or flood, the whole of the inhabitants can be found shelter in the station building.’
The Subterranean Railway Page 11
