The novel was first published, in serial form, in 1901–02, but is presumed to have been set in the early 1870s, and learned Sherlockians have since spent a great deal of time worrying about the precise details of this trip. The 2006 annotated edition of the Holmes novels contains the following note:
In The Railways of Dartmoor in the Days of Sherlock Holmes, B. J. D. Walsh concludes that Watson and company would have taken the 10.30 or the 10.35 to Exeter, arriving at 2.28 pm, where they would have had to change for Coombe Tracey which Walsh identifies with Bovey Tracey on the Moretonhampstead Branch. Although there was a slower train at 11.45, only by taking the 10.30 or 10.35 could they have had the chance of obtaining lunch at Exeter. Neither the 10.30 nor the 10.35 train had yet acquired a restaurant car, and they did not do so until July 1899 and October 1899 respectively. From Exeter, Walsh concludes, Watson and his friends would have caught the 4.12 pm train and, after changing at Newton Abbot, would have reached Bovey Tracey at 5.40.
This may perhaps represent more detail than the average reader wishes to hear, and Holmes himself once described the brain as an attic, which ought to be kept clear of unnecessary clutter. Conan Doyle certainly abided by that rule: he was a notoriously slapdash writer, and Mr Walsh seems to me rather lucky that the author sent Watson to the right station and failed to give the Exeter train an intermediate stop at, say, Stoke-on-Trent. The fact that there really was a 10.30 train must have been a remarkable coincidence (and the 10.35 a red herring). The Hound of the Baskervilles is not Bradshaw’s Monthly Railway Guide; it is a work of fiction, and Conan Doyle is entitled to send Watson to Devon however and whenever he wants.
But Walsh’s researches are not useless. For the travels of Holmes and Watson are, more than anything else, the embodiment of our image of Victorian train travel, filtered not just by Conan Doyle but by the various TV and film versions which sometimes take even more liberties with his writing than he took with the facts. The hansom to the station, the cheery porter, a first-class compartment . . . what could be more agreeable? Actually, almost anything could have been more agreeable, barring a return to the stagecoach. Until the closing years of the century, train travel was not merely unnecessarily dangerous – thanks to the obstinacy of the companies and the indifference of the politicians – it was also very unpleasant.
For the Englishman’s privacy came at a price. The side corridor, allowing both individual compartments and free movement between them (an invention credited to the German engineer Edmund Heusinger von Waldegg) had not yet appeared. Nor had the gangway connection between carriages. The choice was between Fischer’s ‘isolation cell’ and the open American carriage. The second option was specifically rejected at a meeting of company general managers in 1853: ‘It is obvious that it is so opposed to the social habits of the English, and would interfere so much with the privacy and comfort they now enjoy that these considerations . . . would forbid its adoption in this country.’ Gangways did not appear until 1882, and the first through-corridor train in 1892.
This ruled out any question of food on the train, hence Walsh’s obsession with lunch at Exeter. While American passengers were already dining luxuriously on board and French stations were offering some of the best food in town, British stations were building the reputation for culinary vileness that they have never lost. In his story Mugby Junction Dickens sends ‘Our Missis’ from the refreshment room (said to have been inspired by Wolverton) with its ‘sawdust sandwiches’ to France, and she is horrified by what she sees: ‘roast fowls, hot and cold . . . smoking roast veal surrounded with browned potatoes . . . hot soup . . . FRESH pastry, and that of a light construction . . . a luscious show of fruit . . . bottles and decanters of sound small wine . . .’
‘The baseness of the French,’ says Our Missis, ‘as displayed in the fawning nature of their Refreshmenting, equals, if not surpasses, anythink as was ever heard of the baseness of the celebrated Bonaparte.’
In Britain, certain stations, such as York, specialized in victualling passengers in a mad scramble; the emphasis was on speed. Swindon (aka Swindleum), had a particularly bad reputation but the buffet still cashed in: until 1895 nearly all Great Western trains to Bristol were obliged to stop for ten minutes owing to a contractual deal signed by Brunel when he was strapped for cash. It was 1879 before the first restaurant car appeared on a British train and, since there were no corridors, it was only open to the first-class passengers who were already in that carriage.
There was another more delicate consequence of longdistance, non-corridor trains, that difficult Victorian question – ‘Where do you go?’ The answer was down your trousers. According to Philip Unwin: ‘There were to be found at the approaches to many terminal stations certain shops which sold curious rubber appliances known as “secret travelling lavatories” which gentlemen could strap to the leg.’ Ladies, as usual, were expected to have more fortitude.
Much later, some first-class compartments had their own private lavatories, though even these could be daunting, for in normal circumstances it was considered indelicate simply to be seen making the journey to the ‘excuse-me’. And for the unprepared there was still a horror to come. ‘The simple apparatus just “gave” straight on to the track,’ Unwin recalled, ‘and when the seat lid was raised you heard an exciting plonkety-plonkety sound from the rail joints below.’ The problem could not be solved for other travellers until corridors became general.2
But there were also fears in a non-corridor train that, even for the English, were greater than lavatorial ones. There was a sensational murder in France in 1860 when the body of one of the judges of the imperial court, Monsieur Poinsot, was found in a pool of blood in a train from Troyes when it arrived in Paris, which is the sort of news the British expected to hear from abroad. Then, in July 1863, an Irish schoolteacher on the London & North Western’s Liverpool to London express suddenly stabbed two fellow-passengers for no apparent reason (there is no record that they had insisted on opening the window).
If it was madness, it was well-calculated madness, because the attacker waited until after the train had just left Bletchley, knowing there was no further stop until Camden Town, forty-five miles away. And the victims and the only other occupant of the carriage (an elderly lady who had in any case fainted) had no means of making the train stop, or raising the alarm. The managers, meeting in conclave, had already considered the idea of a primitive communication cord – a continuous rope attached to a bell in the driver’s cabin – but shied away because they were less concerned about its use than its misuse. And the legislature, as usual, had declined to legislate.
The following year there was worse. Thomas Briggs, chief clerk of the Lombard Street bankers Robarts, Lubbock & Co, was found with his skull bashed in by the side of the line between Bow and Hackney Wick. He died without regaining consciousness, having evidently been robbed and thrown out of the train window. An eminently suitable foreign suspect, Franz Müller, was identified, traced to a ship bound for New York, arrested on arrival, extradited, tried and hanged – all on rather dubious evidence, rounded off by an even more dubious reported confession beside the gallows. (Inspector Lestrade would have had the sense to call in Mr Holmes.)
A huge crowd gathered at Newgate for the execution, four months after the murder, chanting ‘Müller, Müller, he’s the man!’ and ‘Oh, my! Think I’ve got to die!’ These scenes helped bring about the end of public executions four years later. More to the point, the murder finally forced the government to do something about railway safety, and an 1868 Act obliged companies to install bells on all trains that went more than twenty miles without stopping. Unfortunately, the bells failed to work, and the government gave up trying to enforce the law.
Even for those passengers who prepared their own sandwiches, went to the toilet beforehand and did not find themselves sitting opposite a murderous maniac (or someone who looked foreign and so might be a murderous maniac), Victorian train journeys were rarely comfortable.
U
ntil the 1870s carriages only had four or six wheels and a rigid under-frame. Philip Unwin recalled that it was quite normal to find oneself on a four-wheeler, even on expresses from King’s Cross and Liverpool Street, into the twentieth century: ‘Its rhythm on the short 30-foot lengths of rail was a reverberating ‘boom-boom, boom-boom’ and the short body was apt to work up an uncomfortable waggle at any speed.’ The newer six-wheelers with bogies (‘boom-boom-boom, boom-boom-boom’) were not as bumpy but still oscillated enough to make passengers feel sick – which was another reason to need the toilet.
Lighting on trains – from oil to gas to electricity – improved only sluggishly, especially in the downmarket carriages, and a suggestion in 1859 that there should be a light in every carriage at night was rejected. The heating situation was far worse: all through those frigid Victorian winters, British trains were almost entirely unheated. Instead, passengers were expected to make do with coats, travelling rugs and an extraordinary contraption called a footwarmer. This was a metal container filled with hot water (or, later, a chemical solution) on the platform, and rented out for a small charge, though it was late in the century before third-class passengers were allowed to use them. Even in 1905, by which time there were several well-tested heating systems available, the Midland Railway owned 27,000 footwarmers. In Devon the struggling Lynton & Barnstaple Railway only got rid of them in 1933, two years before it closed down.
Punch, that repository of often laboured railway humour, summed up public feelings on this subject.
To a Railway Foot-warmer
At first I loved thee – thou wast warm –
The porter called thee “’ot’, nay, bilin’.”
I tipped him as thy welcome form
He carried, with a grateful smile in.
Alas! Thou art a faithless friend,
Thy warmth was but dissimulation;
Thy tepid glow is at an end,
And I am nowhere near my station!
I shiver, cold in feet and hands,
It is a legal form of slaughter,
They don’t warm (!) trains in other lands
With half a pint of tepid water.
I spurn thy coldness with a kick,
And pile on rugs as my protectors,
I’d send – to warm them – to Old Nick,
Thy parsimonious directors!
Queen Victoria had been granted an oil-burning boiler in the Royal Train as early as 1843, and in 1872 she delightedly wrote in her journal about her traditional summer pilgrimage from the Isle of Wight to Edinburgh:
We had our own usual large travelling railway carriages, which are indeed charming. It was a splendid night . . . I had a good deal of rest.
For everyone else, sleeping cars did not come in until the following year. However, even Her Majesty was not wholly immune from the sort of nonsense her subjects endured more regularly. In 1867 the journey had been rather more vexing:
I had been much annoyed to hear just before dinner that our saloon carriage could not go under some tunnel or arch beyond Carlisle and that I must get out and change carriages there. The railway carriage swung a good deal, and it was very hot, so that I did not get much sleep. At half-past seven I was woke up to dress and hurry out at Carlisle, . . . we had some breakfast and waited an hour till our carriage was taken off and another put on (which they have since found out was quite unnecessary!).
Welcome to our world, ma’am.
The Arrogance of Power
The trains were not even getting that much faster. In 1852 the Great Western was running trains to Bristol in just over two and a half hours. A year later they were taking three and a quarter hours. Financial cutbacks were presumed to be the cause. ‘Having demonstrated their effortless superiority,’ Professor Jack Simmons wrote of the company’s directors, ‘they sat back and dozed off.’ Dr Watson’s train to Exeter would not have done the journey much quicker than in the earliest days of the railways.
Yet these were the great years for the railway companies. In the third quarter of the nineteenth century they formed the most powerful industry in the world’s most powerful country, a situation that began to change as Britain’s economic position became more difficult. For most of that time the Conservative Party was split because of the repeal of the Corn Laws, and governmental control over parliament was weaker than it would ever be again. That made it hard for government to thwart the railways’ wishes even if ministers were inclined to do so.
There was a brief wobble after the financial crisis of 1866 when the contractor Samuel Peto was ruined, and share prices collapsed so much that the railway titans went to Downing Street and begged to be nationalized. The shares soon recovered their value, and the directors their nerve. Governments could never form a consistent policy as to whether they considered amalgamations a boon or a menace, but by now the big companies were very big indeed. Early in the 1860s the number of route-miles in Great Britain passed 10,000, almost the same as in 2008, but it was not yet halfway to its peak figure. The railways were still expanding rapidly.
By 1870 only the furthest reaches of the country and the most inconsequential of towns did not have a railway, but the pace hardly slackened. The Forth and Tay still had to be spanned, and so did the equally daunting barrier of the Severn Estuary – finally conquered when the Great Western opened the Severn Tunnel in 1886.
In 1868 the Midland Railway, determined to compete with its rivals to the east and west, pushed through a new line south from Bedford into its awesome new cathedral at St Pancras. Then it marched north to conquer Scotland by building the Settle and Carlisle line through some of the bleakest landscape in the kingdom at a terrifying cost of men and treasure.
No more did the railways plead and wheedle for the right to cross private property. They cheerfully bulldozed the homes of the poor, especially in north and east London, and called it slum clearance. At least 120,000 people were displaced in London alone after 1850, according to Professor Simmons; some received inadequate compensation, some didn’t even get that, and they all had to trudge off and find somewhere else to live. To build St Pancras, the Midland removed an estimated 20,000 living bodies from the rookeries of Agar Town and a good many dead ones from Old St Pancras churchyard, which was also in the way.
The railway pioneers – the Stephensons, Brunel, Hudson – were all gone by 1860, either to churchyards or disgrace. They were replaced by hard-driving managers like Mark Huish of the London & North Western, an instinctive monopolist, and Brunel’s former assistant Sir Daniel Gooch, as rigid a cost-cutter as his old boss had been expansive. The leading contractors now were globetrotters like Peto (before his fall) and the ubiquitous Thomas Brassey, who is said to have built one-sixth of the British network, and worked together with Peto on such exotica as the Grand Trunk Railway of Canada and the Grand Crimean Central.
The benefits of the railway system began to flow into the homes of ordinary Britons, at least those who still had homes to live in. London’s winter comfort had been at the mercy of the Tyne coalowners, who offered high prices and an uncertain supply whenever the winds blew unfavourably for their coasters. Now the coalfields of Britain competed for Londoners’ custom. The urban working-class had the chance to enjoy a much greater supply of fresh meat, fresh fish, fresh fruit and fresh milk from the countryside, the dairy farmers of Derbyshire and Berkshire eventually driving out of business the sad and stunted old moos who were kept in city-dwellers’ backyards and cellars. And people could travel.
The companies ran genuinely cheap excursions to the countryside and seaside from London and the great cities of the north, often charging only a farthing or ha’penny a mile instead of the normal penny-a-mile third-class fare. But travel on Sunday, the one complete day of leisure available to most working men, was sometimes impeded by the opposition of sabbatarians (this was before the railways lost interest in running Sunday trains at all), and the more fastidious were regularly discouraged by the contemptuous attitude of the companies towards the
ir customers. And though conditions had improved since Hardy’s description of travel to the Great Exhibition, they were still grim. ‘Excursion trains meant all that was horrible,’ wrote John Pimlott in his history of English holidays, ‘long and unearthly hours, packed carriages, queer company, continual shunting aside and waiting for regular trains to go by, and worst of all the contempt of decent travellers’. Thus it would be in the football specials of a century later, at least for the rare passenger who happened to be sober.
This was not wholly different from the experience of travellers on ordinary third-class trains, even though third-class receipts had begun to outweigh those from the other two classes combined. The railway companies had not yet discovered that self-interest could be enlightened self-interest. Nor had they yet begun to contemplate the limits of their own seemingly boundless strength.
CHAPTER SIX
NORBITON AND SURBITON
There are few suburbs anywhere in the world that inspire quite the same instant comic recognition as Surbiton. (Neasden, maybe, New Rochelle, Moonee Ponds, but it’s a short list.) Here is the epitome of south London commuterdom, the refuge of the introverted middle class, the epitome of dull respectability.
It was the obvious place to set The Good Life, the 1970s BBC comedy in which Richard Briers and Felicity Kendal opt out of rat-racing and attempt self-sufficiency, with pigs and a goat instead. They could more sensibly have done this by moving to Herefordshire or Devon and doing B&B as well, but the comic potential for upsetting the snooty neighbours would have been far more limited.
Eleven Minutes Late Page 13
