The Subterranean Railway

by Christian Wolmar

  Paddington, terminus of the first Underground line, even failed to attract the right sort of developer, let alone tenant. Its situation was always precarious because of its proximity to the foul rookeries of North Kensington and to the houses which were run up in the Harrow Road, intended for poor railway workers, smiths and labourers. Indeed, the construction of the Metropolitan Railway made matters worse for Paddington by creating a demand, albeit temporary, for cheap lodgings, prompting the departure of the ‘respectable’ working class and the decline of the area into a slum.

  Crudely, though, the arrival of the Metropolitan or the District stimulated the building of housing aimed at the affluent, even if eventually they could not be attracted there, whereas the horse tram services which simultaneously sprang up catered for poorer folk. The tram network was developed along the major highways of London, making, as Roy Porter put it, ‘inner-suburb living easier for those lower on the social ladder’.4 Trams were banned from the West End and from all but the borders of the City because they were perceived as being only for the lower orders and the local councillors feared they would bring down the tone of the area.

  Of course, the railway companies, once they had seen the high usage on the early London suburban railways and of the Underground, also began to provide an extensive network of local services whose stations stimulated massive development. Whole swathes of the Greater London area were filled in as the railways focused on local traffic. In particular, the railways made travel to the outer suburbs such as Croydon, Bromley, Harrow, Wanstead and Walthamstow possible, as no other form of transportation could have brought so many people into the capital fast enough. This was, mostly, a middle-class phenomenon. The working classes could not afford the cost of commuting added to the rents which, in most of the areas reached by the railways, were still relatively high. The exceptions were some of the districts served by the Metropolitan with its workmen’s trains and the north-east quadrant of London where places such as Leytonstone, Walthamstow and Tottenham (all now, incidentally, connected to the Underground network on the Central or Victoria lines) saw the rapid construction of large concentrations of low-rent houses in dull, serried ranks, aimed at manual workers who were served by Great Eastern services. That company had been required to provide workmen’s trains at the startlingly cheap rate of twopence for journeys as long as twenty-two miles return as a condition for having cleared a vast swathe of working-class housing to build its Liverpool Street terminus, and it continued offering these incredibly low fares until 1920. Slightly more salubrious suburbs, such as Chingford, Enfield and Wood Green, were populated mainly by clerical workers who were able to purchase half-price tickets on trains which ran slightly later than the workmen’s services.

  This process meant that more affluent residents fled further out to the likes of Epping and Barking, leaving behind houses which were often then pulled down by the rampant developers because they were too large for the rents that the working class could afford and the builders could not be bothered to adapt them. The availability or otherwise of workmen’s trains therefore created segregated suburbs, with the appropriate type of developers following the railway. The definition of ‘workmen’ was sometimes determined more by the time of their regular train than by their true position in society. In 1898, the Railway Magazine published a photograph of the arrival of a workmen’s train from which, as one historian put it, ‘the majority of the passengers passing through the barrier were wearing the silk hats and morning coats that were then de rigueur even among junior employees in city offices’.5

  The Underground played a vital role in stimulating this growth not just because of the suburban incursions made by the District and Metropolitan but also because it took people right into the heart of the City and the West End, whereas rail passengers were left on the fringes. Without the Underground to connect the various termini, the extensive development in the second half of the nineteenth century could never have taken place so quickly. London grew from a population of 2.8 million in 1861 to over 7 million fifty years later. That outward push was further accelerated by the development of a new office economy, centred around the West End which had a burgeoning number of offices and was also establishing itself as London’s premier retail centre. Employment in the City was also expanding, with many former residences being turned into offices, and resulting in more commuting. Whitehall, very convenient for Underground travellers, was filling up with civil servants, of whom there were 160,000 by the early 1900s. The ministries dealing with education, the colonies, war and the Navy all grew substantially in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods as the state increasingly adopted a more interventionist role, and the great majority of these civil servants worked in London.

  The Underground system was not only used by vast numbers of commuters, both directly and connecting in from the main line railway, but also attracted other sections of the population who travelled on it for business or leisure purposes. For example, there were the innumerable messengers who, before the invention of the telephone, were the principal way of conveying information quickly between offices.

  Even more important were the various groups of leisure travellers. The most significant in terms of numbers were the shoppers visiting the large department stores which had begun to spring up following the opening of the Army and Navy store in 1872. Surprisingly, the biggest shops were not initially sited in the centre, but were rather like today’s out-of-town developments, attracted to the fringes of the metropolis for the same reason: the cheapness of land. Thus Harrods, which had first been transformed from a small grocery into a general store in 1861, was already flourishing by 1880 and employing 100 people. The biggest success story, though, was at Bayswater where Whiteleys became the most impressive of the early department stores. The Westbourne Grove shop opened in 1863, a few weeks after the first section of the Metropolitan, which terminated a mile away in Paddington. By 1872, the store occupied ten shops and employed over 600 people and was, of course, served by Bayswater station which had opened in 1868. Others were brought in by omnibus, of which 700 per day were serving the area by 1885. The District considered the market to be so important that it even launched a parcels service to relieve shoppers of their goods on the homeward journey.6 A trip to the shops in Bayswater or Knightsbridge, and later Oxford Street, was little different from a visit today to the huge modern malls such as Bluewater or Lakeside. The popularity of shopping did much to boost the railways’ off-peak travel, which was vital for their economic well-being. Catering solely for commuters is never enough to sustain a railway, given that they make two trips per day at peak hours, leaving the expensive rolling stock unused for the rest of the time. There were also, of course, the weekend leisure travellers who came to visit London’s parks as well as the museums and exhibitions. The Underground may not have brought them all in, but it certainly smoothed their passage around the capital.

  Even from the perspective of a modern-day viewpoint, it is impossible to disentangle these various phenomena. Certainly the railways, and the Underground in particular, did enable many people to make journeys that would otherwise have been impossible. All these exhibitions, shops and shows would not have sprung up without this new ability to travel around the capital. But the extent to which each mode of travel was responsible is difficult to discern.

  The popularity of the Underground attracted unwanted attention, too – from terrorists. The first attack on the Underground took place as early as 1883 when, on 30 October, two bombs were detonated by Irish independence fighters. One went off near Praed Street Station, (now incorporated into Paddington) on a Metropolitan train heading towards Edgware Road, and the other on a District train between Westminster and Charing Cross (now Embankment).

  Neither explosion caused any fatalities, and injuries – mainly from flying glass – were slight. There was no subsequent panic in London, although, despite the efforts of the police and offers of reward, the perpetrators were never found. Bombers struck again
in February 1884, and this time their plans were more ambitious as they attempted to attack four major London stations – Victoria, Charing Cross, Ludgate Hill and Paddington – simultaneously, but only the one at Victoria actually detonated. Fortunately, the station was almost deserted and again no lives were lost, but nor was any culprit found.

  These attacks on stations and the Underground were part of a wider bombing campaign by a group known as Clan na Gael including a particularly audacious attempt to blow up Scotland Yard which caused some damage to its records on Irish republicans and, but for the failure of some of the dynamite to detonate, might have resulted in the building’s total destruction.

  This spurred police on to mount a big investigation. Security was tightened up on public buildings, but the Underground system was vulnerable. There was another bombing on 2 January 1885, in the tunnel of the Metropolitan Line between Gower Street (now Euston Square) and King’s Cross stations. This time the bomb blew up in the tunnel, rather than on the train, and again caused little damage. Indeed, it was not realized there had been an attack until the train reached King’s Cross and the investigators reckoned it was caused by a bomb from a train going in the other direction. That attack was the work of a man called James Cunningham who was arrested later that month after having been seen lighting the fuse for an attack on the Tower of London in which four people were seriously injured. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labour for both attacks and the bombing attempts by these ‘dynamitards’ as they were known petered out as several men had blown themselves up and, thanks to informers and splits in the organization, twenty-five others given penal servitude.

  Despite the Underground’s success in attracting custom, until electrification travelling on it remained an experience which ranged from broadly acceptable to downright awful, depending on the passengers’ stoicism. There was growing pressure from the passengers for better conditions. It was noticeable that the numbers using the Underground fell away in the summer because even the vagaries of the slower horse omnibuses were preferable to the unpleasantly stuffy atmosphere in the underground tunnels. While there had been some improvements, such as heaters on trains and station indicators on platforms, during the last few years of the nineteenth century there was a growing clamour for a major improvement of the system. There were suggestions of doubling the District line on its busy section between Earls Court and Mansion House, possibly through a deep tube railway, but this expensive project was never really feasible. Instead, electrification was seen as the only way of making the required modernization.

  In spite of this, and the fact that the tube railway, the City & South London (which opened in 1890), was electrically powered, the Metropolitan and District railways were slow to embrace the new technology – known variously as electrolysation and electrization – and it was not until fifteen years later that steam was finally dispensed with. While the rival companies, which were still in a puerile state of permanent dispute with each other, at least concurred over the principle that electrification was essential to their success, they could not agree over what method to use. Understandably, the boards of both companies argued that it was much harder to electrify an existing railway than to build a new one such as the City & South London. At every annual general meeting the subject would be raised and then dismissed, with supposedly insuperable technical barriers given as the reason for the lack of progress. In fact, that excuse was mostly a cover for the lack of available finance.

  The construction of the second deep tube railway, the Central, which ran parallel to the two main east–west sections of the Circle, together with increased competition from horse buses and the rising price of the high-quality coal which the Underground companies were forced to use in order to limit pollution in the tunnels, meant that by the turn of the century electrification could be put off no longer. The more affluent Metropolitan braved the issue first, installing two conductor rails as test track on a long siding in Wembley Park in 1897. More substantially, in 1898, the District and the Metropolitan made an agreement to conduct an experiment by electrifying the short section of track between High Street Kensington and Earls Court with power being supplied from a third rail. The line was opened to the public in May 1900, offering the chance to ride in the large and very heavy purpose-built six-car electric trains for a shilling. That was not a great bargain since for the past decade Londoners had been able to ride on the City & South London for a mere twopence and the following month the Central opened with the same fares. Perhaps the attraction was that the journey was in the open air, but it was unlikely there were many takers and the fares were quickly cut to the normal rates which prevailed until the service was withdrawn in November.

  The District and the Metropolitan were still in a permanent state of conflict and therefore it was hardly surprising that they differed over the choice of means of electrification. London very nearly got an overhead system of electricity supply, a system that had been used on several early electric railways on the Continent. Overhead electrification had the advantage of being easier to install on an existing busy railway compared with the extra conductor rails otherwise needed for the transmission of current. Moreover, Londoners would have been saved from the hazard of live rails which, over the years, has cost thousands of passengers and track workers their lives.

  In 1901, James Forbes, still in control of the District, announced that he had raised £500,000 from shareholders for electrification without specifying what method was to be used. (The District, in fact, spent a total of £1.7m – say around £85m in today’s money – in electrifying its lines over the following five years.) The Metropolitan, also cash-strapped but a little better-off, had the funds to proceed, and had selected a Hungarian system using overhead equipment. However, the Metropolitan was to be prevented from ever implementing its scheme by developments at the District.

  Within weeks of Forbes announcing that he had the money for the District’s electrification, the ageing magnate was finally ousted from his position as chairman when Charles Yerkes, an American businessman of dubious reputation, took over control of the company. Yerkes, who had experience of third rail systems in the USA, announced that he would have nothing to do with the overhead method of electrification. Now, after years of being the underdog, the District, under the control of brash American financiers, was calling the shots over the Metropolitan which was still seeking to press ahead with overhead line electrification. Clearly, even though competition rather than cooperation remained the driving ethic of the railway companies, no one was daft enough to suggest that two incompatible electrification systems could be built simultaneously. As Yerkes put it in a letter to The Times, ‘Quarrelling over this matter will not build railroads.’ With the railways, as ever, more interested in bickering than solving the problem at hand, the Board of Trade had to arbitrate through a judge who, in December 1901, pronounced in favour of the District.

  So London got its electrification system using a third rail (and fourth, for the return current, allowing the track rails to be used for signalling circuits) thanks to the deliberations of the judiciary. And for once the Metropolitan got a bloody nose from its upstart rival, though the judge, Alfred Lyttleton, berated the District for the high-handed manner in which the company had treated the issue in simply announcing its intentions on electrification to the Metropolitan. In reality, overhead line equipment presented other sorts of problems that were at best costly and at worst insuperable. Principally, overhead lines were impractical for the relatively small tunnels of the District and the Metropolitan, let alone for the tiny deep tube tunnels of the City & South London, which would have been prohibitively expensive to enlarge. Moreover, there would have been the fear of overhead lines falling down on top of the trains in tunnels, a prospect so terrifying that it could well have deterred people from travelling on the system had it been used. Ultimately, the judge plumped for the third rail system because it had already proved itself on the City & South London while the over
head method was perceived as being more experimental.

  Not surprisingly, the resolution of this issue did nothing to improve relations between the two railways, which were to remain as separate concerns for another three decades. While the District used a new stretch of line between Ealing and South Harrow to test the electrification equipment, it was the Metropolitan which managed to get electric trains in use on the existing railway a few months before its rival. After a number of trial runs, there was a press trip between Baker Street and Uxbridge in an electric train on 13 December 1904, about which The Times, pompous and banal as ever, wrote: ‘Everything which took place conveyed the impression that those present were celebrating the beginning of a new era in the history of the old underground railways from which smoke, dirt and discomfort will be nearly banished.’7 ‘Nearly’ was right. The first three electric trains which went into service on New Year’s Day 1905 offered reasonable accommodation but were little different from their predecessors. Oddly, there was a first and third class but no second: the passengers in first sat upon green moquette in the non-smoking carriages but on green leather in smoking, because that was harder to damage with ash. The third class had to put up with sitting on buffalo hide, presumably because the Metropolitan had obtained a cheap consignment since this was the time when the poor beasts were being slaughtered in vast numbers in America.