For a while we hugged the coast. Near Brora three seals were sufficiently alarmed by our approach to bodysurf off a rock into the frigid North Sea. Then came Helmsdale where Charles and Diana spent a holiday just before their marriage and where, it is said, she first began to get the idea that she might actually be in love. Such a small mistake, so many tears.
The line cuts inland here, to avoid the impossibly high ground of the Ord of Caithness, so there is another huge meander, past the ruined crofts of Kildonan and the mist-shrouded hills of Kinbrace. Very little of this line is what you might call pretty in the Highland chocolate box sense, but almost everything about it is numinous, brooding, with a sense of life on the edge.
At Kinbrace Frank got out, knowing the southbound would soon be there to take him home again because Forsinard, the next stop along, is the only available passing place. I was impressed by his organizational skills. Then I noticed he had left his empty mug behind.
The line grew ever wilder as we approached the mysterious Flow Country. The old snow fences that the linemen used to maintain are now in ruins, which is an impressive gesture of faith in global warming. In the old days trains were regularly detained for long periods on these exposed moors by snowdrifts. As recently as 1978, seventy passengers had to be airlifted out in a blizzard by an RAF helicopter.
The Flow Country does not fit the popular taste for Scottish scenery at all, being bleached of colour and seemingly devoid of life. In the 1980s it was considered so useless that substantial tax concessions were offered to anyone sticking conifer plantations up here, with mild damage to the reputation of Terry Wogan, Cliff Richard and Phil Collins, once their investments became known, and rather more disastrous effects on the ecology of the peat bogs.
At Georgemas Junction Dennis the conductor began fiddling with a complex digital radio contraption. ‘Is that something to do with the signalling?’ I asked. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m trying to get the Rangers score.’
We were bang on time at Thurso, which meant I had completed the journey from Penzance in 29 hours and 57 minutes, including a very pleasant Thai meal and reasonable night’s sleep in Perth.
In Breach of Regulations
On the way back south, I requested a stop at Rogart in order to give Frank his mug back.
CHAPTER THREE
BLISWORTH
In the 1950s and 1960s, Andy Newbery and I grew up in adjoining villages just south of Northampton. He was in Blisworth and I was a mile away in Milton, which has now been poshed up and renamed Milton Malsor.
Milton was enveloped by a triangle of historic railway lines: there was what is now called the West Coast Main Line, passing over a massive arch built by Robert Stephenson between the two villages; there was the original branch line to Northampton and Peterborough, in a cutting just beyond the gravel pits; and on the far side of the village, towards Collingtree, was the much later loop line that finally linked Northampton directly, if never conveniently, to London in the 1870s.
That was the route which Stephenson – son of George and chief engineer of the London & Birmingham Railway – would have taken into Northampton if the stupid townspeople hadn’t refused to allow the railway into town. Or so the story goes. Instead, the main line trains went close to our house and through the station at Blisworth, bypassing the town, as they still do. In the last days of steam, there could have been no better time or place for a railway childhood.
Except that I didn’t have one. In fact, despite being a rather insomniac child, I don’t even have a clear memory of ever hearing the trains. We could see them all right. I remember walking a couple of miles up Barn Lane (more than once but not much more) to the farm crossing over the tracks in the last days of steam. One day I saw the Royal Scot power awesomely north. Mum would take me to London from Northampton station to see my grandmother and the aunties. I can just recall the wonderful old Great Hall at Euston. Far more vividly, I remember the sit-down tea served on the 4.30 back home, with little individual glass pots of jam.
On a whim, I did take the train from Castle Station in Northampton to Peterborough one afternoon because I’d read that the line was closing. I must have been twelve, I now discover from looking at the closure date. That was not untypical in a sense: we were a self-reliant, unsupervised generation. It was untypical in suggesting I cared. Shortly afterwards, I swapped my Tri-ang train set for a Dansette transistor radio.
Andy Newbery spent his days off from school at Blisworth station with his friend Wilf. ‘Apart from Camden Bank and a bit of a climb up to Tring,’ Andy explained, ‘Stephenson built the line very level, so by the time they got to Blisworth, through trains would thunder through at 80–90mph. Big exciting expresses through these narrow platforms. Enthusiasts would come from miles around.
‘Time used to stand still. I used to leave home at eight in the morning and take my sandwiches. We never got up to any mischief.’ I can’t vouch for this: I never joined them, I didn’t know them. It was 2008 before I met Andy Newbery. I suppose I would have thought him uncool. I regret the half-century delay.
Andy heard the trains all the time: ‘I remember lying awake on a winter’s night and hearing all those iron-ore trains going clang-clang-clang-clang-clang. And the tank engines chuffing in and out of the quarry. You could recognize an engine by the exhaust note, especially if it was coming up the hill from Northampton. Those big goods engines, the 8Fs and 9Fs, they would almost be going walking pace by the time they came up from Milton.’ He was warming to his theme now, was Andy. ‘You’d hear the Jubilee engines with a three-cylinder beat. One of those would be like a rocket roar. And the Staniers had a hooter instead of a whistle. And oh, the beautiful smells. Hot oil, steam and smoke, that’s the mixture, isn’t it?’
Is it?
‘That smell would permeate the air. You ask any steam fan, it’s the smell that hooks you. You’d look at the drivers, they were like fighter pilots.’
Andy’s dad worked on the railway: I don’t think time stood still for him. ‘My father was a permanent way man, a lengthsman. One of his jobs was fog duty. Ted Monk would come round at about 3am on a freezing January morning and throw something at the window. Dad had to do two things. He’d have to check the signal poles to make sure the lamps were clean. And he’d sit in the fog box, like an old portable toilet, and as the train went past, double-check for the signalman that he’d seen the tail-lamp and that the train hadn’t split. He might also have to climb and check the Long Tom signal.’
We were standing by what was Blisworth station, closed in 1960. There is nothing left now, just a nasty metal fence between the road and the rails. I have the vaguest recollection of the old place, its signs painted in London Midland maroon and its awnings painted in London Midland dirt ‘n’ cream. Andy remembers it all: ‘There was a mysterious opening in the ticket hall, and you’d go into this sulphurous-smelling subway only just about wide enough to walk through, and you’d hear the trains rushing overhead.’ Then he took me to what was once the start of the Stratford & Midland Junction, the Slow, Mouldy and Jolting. I had never even heard of it when I was a child. My dad was a solicitor. I didn’t go into his office and watch the writs and conveyances thundering through either. I wish I’d seen the Jubilees and Staniers with Andy and Wilf.
But I went away to boarding school, and enthusiasm about anything got you teased. When I was teased, though, it was for supporting Northamptonshire cricket and Northampton Town Football Club (The Cobblers) instead of predictable teams like Middlesex and Arsenal. No one teased me because the people of Northampton were so stupid that they stopped the railway coming in.
Spoiling the Shires, Ruining the Squires
In any case, they weren’t that stupid. This calumny has been repeated in countless railway histories1 and the 1931 report of the Railway Commission on Transport and was recounted to me by several interviewees while researching this book. Critics have referred to Northampton’s ‘idiocy’ and ‘barbarous fury’.
It is appar
ently true that the townspeople now have more bling per head than anywhere else in Britain. That may be a sign that it is not these days the most over-intellectual municipality in the kingdom. It is not true that Northampton was daft enough to try to keep out the railway.
The myth persists despite being convincingly despatched by the local historian Joan Wake in 1935. It is correct that there was some opposition from the unelected corporation, which was then on the brink of abolition, but the townspeople as a whole pressed Stephenson unsuccessfully to bring the line through the town.
On 17 September 1830, just two days after the triumphant (begging Mr Huskisson’s pardon) opening of the Liverpool & Manchester, the London & Birmingham Company was formed from two rival groupings to link the capital with what was fast becoming the country’s second city. Urban Britain grasped the significance of events very quickly. And so did the countryside.
Such a line could not possibly avoid Northamptonshire (no one ever goes there, but everyone passes through) and, before the year was out, a protest meeting of county landowners was held in the White Horse, Towcester, presided over by Sir William Wake of Courteenhall. It voted unanimously that the railway would do ‘great injury’, adding: ‘There is already conveyance for travellers between London and Birmingham every day at the rate of ten miles an hour, and water carriages for heavy goods, to a greater extent than has ever been required . . . no necessity has been shewn for accelerated communication.’
The railway, someone said at the meeting, ‘would spoil our Shires and ruin our Squires’. And indeed Stephenson eventually did put massive earthworks through the Wake estates, which may have rather spoiled things – though Courteenhall was not rendered intolerable until the arrival of the M1 130 years later. Presumably Sir William was bought off, as were all the other magnates whose land was vital to the project except Mr Thornton of Brockhall, who was so implacable that Stephenson had to avoid him and face instead the Kilsby Ridge, where, as Joan Wake put it, ‘millions of tons of Northamptonshire clay proved less impervious than the stubborn opposition of Squire Thornton.’
There is no record of the Stephensons trying to deflect Northampton Corporation’s opposition. Robert and his father George were now not without influence. If they had wanted to go through Northampton, they would surely have made their feelings known: they never did. It seems overwhelmingly likely that the 120ft difference in gradient in the four miles between Blisworth and Northampton, on the valley floor, put the Stephensons off from the start, given the primitive locomotives of the time. It was estimated in 1833 that even a gradient of 1 in 300, an incline imperceptible to the naked eye, required nearly twice as much pulling power as a level railway, and Robert Stephenson reputedly said that he could easily get the trains into the town, but couldn’t get them out again. And, as Andy Newbery said, he constructed the entire line with the overriding aim of keeping it as level as possible, having learned that lesson from the crawl uphill on the Liverpool & Manchester near Rainhill. So that surely has to be true.
Northampton undoubtedly lost out as a centre of commerce in the nineteenth century because of its poor transport links. It was increasingly overtaken as a boot and shoe centre by Leicester, and its situation may not have been helped by the people’s railway-derived reputation as clodhoppers as well as cobblers. For places that actually resisted the railway, look at ‘vehement’ Maidstone or Windsor or Oxford, which tried to keep this intrusion as far as possible from the colleges. To this day, they all – like Northampton – have inferior train services, and Oxford is perhaps the only city where the coach to London is competitive on convenience as well as price.
The other great rail route of the late 1830s, the Grand Junction north from Birmingham to link up with the Liverpool & Manchester, was built through the plains of Staffordshire and Cheshire with a minimum of fuss. For the first six years the London & Birmingham had to get its trains up the hill out of Euston by cable, like a tugboat pulling an ocean liner. Stephenson had enough problems without worrying about Northampton. So lay off my home town please. It’s bad enough when you make sniggering remarks about a load of cobblers.
The Great Wall of China? A Doddle!
The construction of the London & Birmingham line was one of the great adventures of the nineteenth century. Peter Lecount, one of Stephenson’s assistants, called it the greatest public work ever executed. He dismissed the claims of the Great Wall of China, as requiring less capital and engineering skill, and thought only the Great Pyramid might compare. And it was on this line that the traditions of railway building took shape that spread across the century and throughout the world: the traditions of hard slog, abandon, riot and callousness.
However intrusive the railways proved to be, the arrival of the trains came as a blessed relief to much of rural England compared to having the company of the men who built them. Around Blisworth, three thousand navvies worked on a five-mile stretch of line, according to Terry Coleman’s classic history, The Railway Navvies:
They lodged, when they could, in the villages, and when there were no villages they herded into turf shanties thrown up by the contractors. A few brought their wives. Others lived, nineteen to a hut, with one shared woman. They were paid once a month – sometimes not so frequently – and usually in a public house, and then for days after, they drank their pay, sold their shovels for beer, rioted and went on a randy . . . The Irish marched to fight the Scots, the English fought among themselves, and no work was done until all the money was gone.
They were entitled to let their hair down a little. The railways were built with ‘picks, shovels and gunpowder’, by men not machines. And the men, in huge numbers, died in the attempt. No record was kept of the number of fatalities or injuries on the London & Birmingham, and Stephenson was not unusually inhumane. Most were killed by the arduous-ness of the task. Shown a list of 131 workers taken to Bath Hospital alone (minor injuries excluded) in less than two years during the construction of the Great Western, Brunel responded: ‘I think it is a small list, considering the very heavy works, and the immense amount of powder used.’ Some died by their own mad folly. Just north of Blisworth, in the Kilsby Tunnel, three men were killed ‘as they tried to jump, one after the other over the mouth of a shaft in a game of follow my leader’.
Everywhere the navvies struck terror into the hearts of respectable Englishmen and, of course, Englishwomen. The Times reported in 1836:
Great alarm has existed in the neighbourhood of Acton, Ealing, Hanwell, Southall, &c., in consequence of the outrageous conduct of the labourers employed on the works of the Great Western Railways . . . burglaries, highway robberies, and depredations of every description, have become so much on the increase, that it has become dangerous for individuals to be out alone after dark.
But even the navvies moved on eventually. By 1859 George Measom, the author of a succession of Victorian railway guides, was able to refer quite matter-of-factly to what was achieved at Blisworth. ‘The Blisworth excavation contains 1,200,000 cubic yards, averaging 50 feet deep for 2 miles in length.’ This was ‘by far the most expensive and arduous work’ on the entire line.
I feel ashamed: had I grown up a mile from the Great Wall of China, I expect I would have had some consciousness of what had been achieved. I lived a mile away from Blisworth, and never knew. And now, when I travel out of Euston, I struggle to spot the site of Blisworth Station. And no one else on the train looks up from their Sudoku or their BlackBerry.
As Coleman put it: ‘There is hardly a branch line in Britain whose earthworks would not be marvelled at if they were those of a new road or an ancient fort.’ And we never notice.
And the Dust Gathered on the Tables
The new railway opened fully on 17 September 1838, connecting with the Grand Junction and providing a direct link between what were becoming the four major cities of England: London, Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester. The country now had the beginnings of a railway network and it would grow like some rampant exotic plant, checked
occasionally by outbreaks of financial turmoil, but never for long.
The first train from London, containing the company’s directors, arrived in Birmingham in four and a half hours, compared to the fourteen hours of the old Union stagecoach. The first public train, which left at 8.10am, was a little more leisurely and arrived at 1.50pm according to the Birmingham station clocks, and 1.58pm by the watches of the passengers, suddenly drawing attention to a problem the world had never previously considered.
Each town, living its own life, used to have its own time, according to its own reckoning of sunrise and sunset, without having to worry what time it was anywhere else. It was a new world, although the most obvious means of dealing with it – synchronizing all railway clocks – did not become universal until 1851 when the entire network adopted Greenwich time or, as it was generally known, ‘railway time’.
The advantages of the train also became clear on Day 1: the London newspapers were available in Birmingham by two o’clock. ‘Shortly we expect to see them some hours sooner,’ said The Times correspondent. And the effect was felt in the stagecoach offices.
Before the Liverpool & Manchester opened, even the directors expected its business to come primarily from the carriage of freight, as on earlier prototypes like the Stockton & Darlington. The canal companies fought like fury against these upstart rivals; the stagecoach companies observed the process with what must have been either equanimity or fatalism. In the 1820s the canals were clogged with piled-up merchandise, and their owners reviled as monopolistic overchargers. But the roads were better than ever before: ‘the finest public-transport system the world had ever seen’. The new system of turnpike trusts ensured that the highways were maintained, and the new methods of constructing roads, pioneered by Telford and McAdam, enormously improved them. New coach designs also made the ride faster and more comfortable (or less uncomfortable). The new coaches shared their names with the growing number of daily newspapers. So far as most people were concerned in the early nineteenth century, these coaches had the same sense of urgency as the papers. They seemed like the future. There was some rationale behind the squeal of pain by the Northamptonshire landowners against the coming of the railway.
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