In 1865 there was nearly a far more famous victim than Huskisson. Trackwork was being carried out near Staplehurst in Kent, and the foreman misunderstood the timing of the boat train from Folkestone. The rails were not replaced in time, and part of the train fell into the river below. Among those technically unhurt was Charles Dickens who had the almost-complete manuscript of Our Mutual Friend with him.
Dickens received a commemorative plate from the railway company for his work in succouring the wounded with brandy and water. He was also granted his wish not to give evidence at the inquest; he was particularly insistent on this point, which was not surprising since he was travelling with his mistress, Ellen Ternan, and very anxious to avoid mentioning this. But, according to his son Henry, Dickens himself did not recover: he was a very anxious train traveller ever after, thrown into panic by the slightest jolt. ‘Was it as if some terror from his own imagination had now come alive?’ asked his biographer, Peter Ackroyd. Our Mutual Friend was his last completed novel and he died five years to the day after the crash.
But Dickens, who inspired reform of so many nineteenth-century evils, could have no impact on railway safety. The crashes kept happening; the companies and government remained indifferent.
In 1873, on the first Friday in August, the ‘Tourist Special’ carrying twenty-two carriages from Euston to Scotland derailed at Wigan, one of many stations on the network where investment had not kept up with the volume of traffic. Expresses had to navigate an obstacle course of different kinds of points and crossings, of slow trains and shunting wagons. This express was going too fast, and it started a mysterious spate of crashes, so much so that by September The Times had a column headed ‘Friday’s Railway Accidents’, along the lines of ‘Court and Social’ or ‘Today’s Racecards’.
‘It is a national scandal,’ the paper fulminated, ‘after a collision or other accident that has numbered its victims by the score, to have to proclaim that the whole was due to the want of a continuous brake, or of a locked connecting rod, or of some other mechanical contrivance as well known and as effectual as the lock on a street door.’ It added that the railway interest in parliament should be countered by a ‘passenger interest’.
Even the Americans began mocking the British indifference to railway safety. ‘If the choice lay between going safely and at a moderate speed, or going fast with a good chance of being killed, most Englishmen would unhesitatingly pronounce for the latter,’ said the London correspondent of the New York Times. And this in the year when American trains were at the mercy of Jesse James and his gang.
There is something very curious here, since the Americans always appeared to take these issues very lightly. Thirty years later, the crash at Danville, Virginia (nine dead), was turned into a rollicking ballad, The Wreck of the Ole ’97, still sung today, and the subject of a remarkably jolly painting by Thomas Hart Benton. In the 1890s, simulated collisions between locomotives became a regular American fairground attraction. In a twelve-month period spanning 1911–12, 5,284 people were reportedly run down by unfenced American trains. And even now the phrase ‘train-wreck’ is part of the American language to describe a minor cock-up or a dysfunctional celebrity. (British newspapers have now, in their intellectually sloppy way, begun adopting the phrase.) It was hard to imagine that Wigan really was more dangerous than the Wild West in 1873 but, in many aspects of rail safety, Britain was definitely behind the US where the Westinghouse brake system was already in use.
The train derailed at Wigan contained a substantial cross-section of the upper classes, copying Queen Victoria by taking their summer holidays in the Highlands. Many of them hardly knew what had happened: the train was so long that most of it continued its journey after a remarkably brief delay. Thirteen died, including Sir John Anson Bt and three children of the Wark family of Highgate. Lady Florence Leveson-Gower, daughter of the train-loving Duke of Sutherland, had a particularly remarkable escape since her carriage was the first to leave the track. But there were hundreds aboard the train. Unlike plane crashes, it was and is very rare to have a passenger train crash in which everyone or even most passengers are killed (Tay Bridge being an obvious exception). So most of the prominenti just dined out on their near miss when they got to Scotland. And very little was done for the next sixteen years.
The catalyst for change, when it finally came, did not involve the privileged classes at all, or even what is now regarded as the British railway system. On an Ulster summer’s morning in 1889 an excursion special carrying a huge number of people on a Sunday school outing from Armagh to the seaside resort of Warrenpoint became decoupled on a steep incline close to Armagh station. Ten carriages fell back down the hill to meet the full force of an ordinary passenger train behind them. About eighty-eight people were killed, most of them children. Despite Sydney Smith’s campaign nearly fifty years earlier, they were locked in and could not escape. The inspectors reported that continuous brakes would probably have prevented the disaster. The railway interest fell silent and within three months lock, block and brake were all enshrined in statute.
It was a turning-point: you could argue that laissez-faire also died that day. The number of fatalities started to fall: in both 1901 and 1908 there were more than a billion passenger journeys on the British railway system, and yet not a single paying customer was killed through the railways’ fault.
‘I’m Afraid I’ve Wrecked the Scotch Express’
It never has been and never will be possible to eliminate human error. The worst disaster of all in Britain came at Quintinshill on the Scottish border in 1915, when two feckless signalmen, Meakin and Tinsley, caused a pile-up of five separate trains, one of them carrying the Seventh Battalion of the Royal Scots in obsolete, death-trap, gas-lit wooden coaches, brought out of retirement because of the war.
Burning coals ignited the gas, which destroyed all fifteen coaches of the troop train. Out of 500 soldiers, only 60 were at roll call the following morning. The exact death toll was never known because the military records were destroyed, but 227 is a commonly quoted figure – more than double the 112 killed at Harrow and Wealdstone, its nearest rival for fatalities, in a triple pile-up in 1952. Quintinshill was also exceptional because the signalmen, who were jailed under Scottish law for culpable homicide, were almost wholly to blame. Most accidents revealed a story of conscientious but overworked railwaymen doing their best to adhere to the company’s rule book.
Right from the start, the railways offered an attractive form of employment: much better-paid than farm work, more interesting than a factory, and secure above all. The companies knew this well, and enforced their will through rigid hierarchy and iron discipline. ‘The countrymen of England worked within squirearchies which had altered little since feudal times,’ noted the labour historian Frank McKenna. ‘Slipping from one type of feudal power to another caused little difficulty.’ And, in contrast to the traditional rural class system, this one offered promotion prospects.
The drawback was that the company owned their staff, body and soul. ‘The railwaymen were from the beginning ruled by instructions as detailed as those of the Koran,’ said McKenna. ‘They were the first “organization men”, stitched firmly into the fabric of their company, noted for punctuality, cleanliness and the smart execution of orders.’ And the slightest breach of those obligations – real or fancied – could lead to instant dismissal.
Employees had no right of redress against unscrupulous owners. The North British Railway recruited staff by offering sixpence more per day than its rival, the Edinburgh and Glasgow. When they had signed up, the company withdrew the sixpence. A driver and fireman who quit without notice on this line in 1850 were jailed for three months. There was a similar case on the London & South Western. Always notably high-handed, the Great Western transferred a man it considered a troublemaker to a punishment-job working twelve hours a day on a guillotine papercutter for £1 a week. And that was in the 1930s.
These were extremes. But many railway manager
s had a military background, and the principles of military discipline ran through the industry, mostly to its benefit. Rigid adherence to regulations must have prevented thousands of other Quintinshills. However, saving human life is not the main function of an army and the Victorian companies’ casual disregard for their passengers’ lives was magnified at least tenfold when it came to their own employees. In the mid-1870s an average of 750 railway workers were being killed every year. Over the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the figure still averaged 500. Who cared? That same Times leader of 1873 which so eloquently condemned the ‘national scandal’ of passenger safety also referred contemptuously to ‘the injuries to which railway servants so recklessly expose themselves’.
Many railway jobs were inherently nasty and dangerous. Before corridor trains, guards had to get from carriage to carriage by clambering along the outside. The companies rejected the idea of running boards because passengers might use them to get to better-class compartments. There were the men in the engine shed amid the hissing boilers and, above all, those in the ashpit, clearing out the allegedly cold clinker, which was not always cold. There were the shunters, constantly at the mercy of the combination of rogue couplings and a train of goods wagons.
And then there were the number takers, an obscure group – barely 500 strong – who had to stand at junctions across the country noting the movements of every wagon and carriage, reporting back to the Railway Clearing House in London so that the clerks could balance the companies’ competing claims. Paid trainspotters, if you like.
But they were not paid much, they were out in all weathers and their thirteen-hour night shift persisted until 1919. They were run down or crushed, quite regularly, especially in the dark. ‘When number taker Casey was squeezed between the buffers and severely injured in March 1865,’ wrote Philip Bagwell, the historian of the Clearing House, ‘the superintending committee decided to make up his pay, less the 7s 6d obtained from the Passenger Assurance Company, for a period of one month.’ Such a job would have seemed entirely quaint to modern readers, until the 1990s when similar staff had to be employed, now sitting behind computers, to cope with the effects of re-Balkanization after the abolition of British Rail.
Men whose sleepiness could endanger passengers also worked long hours. One story concerns a guard who had worked for eighteen hours and was then told to go out again. When he protested, he was told: ‘You’ve got twenty-four hours in the day like every other man and they are all ours if we want them.’ Twelve-hour shifts were normal, but a foreman could insist on double or treble that if he felt like it. Drivers were always on call, and twenty-six-hour turns were not unheard of.
The growth of trade unionism did not change the essentials until after the First World War. The driver responsible for the Salisbury train crash in 1906 (twenty-eight dead) had been on duty for nearly ten hours with another two to go before Waterloo. The same applied to other workers. Signalman Sutton was a weary man alone in the remote box at Hawes Junction in Yorkshire on a wild winter’s night when he momentarily forgot the presence of two light engines on the Midland main line. He let the midnight express from St Pancras into the section. The normally celebratory writer Philip Unwin put it this way: ‘When Signalman Sutton saw the low-hanging clouds to his north turn to an angry red in the distance, he realised his terrible mistake.’ When his relief arrived at 6am Sutton uttered perhaps the most desolate sentence in the history of Britain’s railways: ‘Will you go to Stationmaster Bunce and say I am afraid I have wrecked the Scotch express.’ He had. Twelve people were dead, some burnt beyond all recognition.
Unwin added that the Midland Railway, Sutton’s employer, did not use the lever collar, a red object slipped over the signal lever to remind the signalman not to pull it if the line was occupied. The Midland said it could ‘foster carelessness in the signalmen’.
What if Somebody Speaks?
The Victorian traveller had a far greater fear than the outside possibility of crashing: the terror of other people. The traditional British railway carriage contained a succession of private compartments, usually with six or eight seats facing each other. Given a reasonably empty train, good fortune and a sufficiently repulsive expression to use on potential interlopers, it might therefore be possible to avert the presence of strangers entirely.
This reproduced the pattern not so much of the often disagreeably communal stagecoach but of the smaller and more intimate post-chaise. It also faithfully replicated the familiar patterns of British life: the stratified taverns, walled off into different saloons and snugs; the locked London squares; the gardens guarded by dense privet; the private family pews.
On trains – if not in daily life – the British way became the continental way in this respect too. The Prussians even trumped the three-class system, and opted for five, including a special military class. And the Europeans also compartmentalized their carriages, so that they too escaped the community life of an American train, on which, even in the 1870s, you were in danger of meeting a travelling salesman from Minneapolis and hearing his entire life story.
The British instinctively preferred silence. But many early train travellers found it difficult just to look at the landscape: the speed caused what Wolfgang Schivelbusch called ‘the dissolution of reality and its resurrection as panorama’, which travellers found disorientating. They thus took refuge in reading. The railways provided an enormous stimulus to the sale of books, by no means all of them mindless – the third and fourth volumes of Macaulay’s History of England were ‘cried up and down the platform at York’ – or even readable: in 1854 Matthew Arnold said he had seen a copy of his dramatic poem Empedocles on Etna on sale at Derby station, though it is hard to imagine any train journey being quite long and boring enough for that.
The unwritten rules of British train travel were well understood. ‘Fellow passengers could converse lightly,’ said one student of Victorian manners, ‘so long as they did not interrupt or force their attentions on one another.’ That much has not changed. ‘It was permissible to smoke,’ said another authority, ‘after obtaining the consent of everyone present – but never if ladies were among the occupants.’ The first part of that applied even in non-smoking carriages until at least the 1960s, when the balance of power between smokers and non-smokers started to change.
The greatest bone of contention – the mobile phone question of its day – concerned the windows, which could waft in not merely fresh air but all the smoke and smuts from the engine. It was understood that the person facing forward and next to the window had the right to control it. This did not diminish the subject’s ability to give rise to the most ferocious disputes. The following letter appeared in the Daily Mail in 1906:
Sir, – I think it would be a popular move on the part of our railway companies if they would label some of the carriages ‘Fresh Air Compartments’. Some passengers seem to love an atmosphere composed of used-up, mixed-up human breath; they take corner seats facing the engine and then claim a right to keep the windows closed. The selfishness of travellers upon this point is beyond belief and growing worse every year . . . FRESH AIR
The riposte appeared just twenty-four hours later.
Sir, – Had your correspondent ‘Fresh Air’ added the word ‘Fanatic’ to his nom de plume, it would probably have more accurately described him and his truculent class. Every one is agreed that fresh air is desirable – if taken rationally; but to be compelled to sit in a railway carriage for an hour with an icy blast concentrated on one’s head through a small aperture in the side of a train travelling at 50 miles an hour is desirable only from a faddist’s point of view . . . We are better off without ‘Fresh Air’s’ miniature tornado and its consequent evils. RATIONAL
This dispute lasted about 150 years and was ended only by the introduction of air conditioning, and the near-total abolition of windows that opened.
Third-class carriages were more public and noisier. And, on the Continent, there was a certain shabby chic among
writers in professing to admire the happy camaraderie of the cheap seats. ‘How often I have . . . envied the travellers of the third and fourth class,’ wrote P. D. Fischer, a German traveller, in 1895, ‘from whose heavily populated carriages merry conversation and laughter rang all the way into the boredom of my isolation cell.’
Unlike Fischer, the novelist Alphonse Daudet – ‘the French Dickens’ – actually plucked up the courage one day to travel with the merry throng. ‘I’ll never forget my trip to Paris in a third-class carriage,’ he wrote, ‘in the midst of drunken sailors singing, big fat peasants sleeping with their mouths open like those of dead fish, little old ladies with their baskets, children, fleas, wet-nurses, the whole paraphernalia of the carriage of the poor with its odour of pipe smoke, brandy, garlic sausage and wet straw. I think I’m still there.’
That presumably means he did not make a habit of travelling that way. Still, I have not found a report of a nineteenth-century English writer doing anything similar. It might have smacked of enthusiasm.
Blood-stained Hands, Cold Feet
Early in The Hound of the Baskervilles, Sherlock Holmes sends Dr Watson down to Devon to keep an eye on the strange goings-on. At Holmes’s instruction, Watson meets his companions for the journey, Sir Henry Baskerville and Dr Mortimer, at Paddington in time for the 10.30 train, and he later reports brightly: ‘The journey was a swift and pleasant one, and I spent it in making the more intimate acquaintance of my two companions, and in playing with Dr Mortimer’s spaniel.’ (The spaniel was not the hound essential to the plot.)
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