Eleven Minutes Late

by Matthew Engel

  Queen Victoria died in the first month of 1901, and the years between then and the outbreak of war in 1914 are often seen as the most golden of golden ages: an endless summer’s afternoon when life in Britain reached a pitch of perfection, after the drains and before the trenches. Of course they were seen that way in retrospect, given the horrors that would be unleashed. This was not how they were generally seen at the time. The failure to subdue the Afrikaaner farmers in the Boer War was a national humiliation somewhat greater than the comparative speeds of American locomotives. This was followed by a succession of German invasion scares, political crises, economic crises, the loss of the Titanic and near-insurrection in Ireland. An obscure Frenchman, of all things, was even first to fly across the Channel, not a heroic British aviator.

  For some people at some moments, the perfection felt real enough. The lovely summer of 1911 left ‘a consistent impression of commingled happiness’ for the poet Siegfried Sassoon. ‘Sitting under the Irish yew,’ he wrote, ‘we seemed to have forgotten that there was such a thing as the future.’ In her account of that summer, Juliet Nicholson conjured up life for the young Sassoon:

  Walking at dawn in a garden filled with tea roses, tree peonies and lavender he would hear the distant sound of the early morning milk train leaving Paddock Wood station where the stationmaster wore a top hat and a baggy black frock coat to greet the arriving London trains. He would hear the sound of pigeons cooing monotonously in their dovecot, awake too early with the rising sun and already bored. He would watch the old white pony pull the mowing machine up and down the lawn, as he always had.

  But the station master of Paddock Wood in 1911 would have seen things rather differently because, for two days in August, the unthinkable happened – there was a national rail strike.

  The companies were well used to coping with grumbles from shareholders, passengers and traders who had to endure their monopoly of goods traffic. Their methods of dealing with their own staff had always been brisker. Thirty years earlier, they had known how to cope with meetings of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, whose very name spoke of cringe – they would have a spy outside the door taking names. But a new generation had grown up, and the folk-memory of rural serfdom was growing dimmer.

  In 1901 the House of Lords had ruled, in the Taff Vale case, that trade unions could be sued for going on strike. At the time, this was seen as a huge blow to the labour movement. In practice, it caused a galvanizing surge of anger. The 1906 Liberal government reversed the decision, and now there was an avowed socialist, John Burns, in the government and twenty-nine Labour MPs in the Commons.

  Servitude was no longer on the agenda. In 1907 the ASRS was bought off with the promise of ‘conciliation boards’. Four years later, the railwaymen – convinced that more aggressively unionized workers were doing better than they were – finally walked out to demand recognition. The absurdity! The impertinence! A strike!

  Presumably Sassoon did not attempt to go up to London on the third weekend in August. Had he done so, he would have found the Grenadier Guards, with bayonets fixed, at Charing Cross. In Llanelly, South Wales, there was far worse: troops shot dead two young men, one of whom had just come into his garden to see what the fuss was about. But within two days it was over: David Lloyd George, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, cajoled the employers into negotiating, and the balance of power in the industry changed for ever.

  The Knights were Still Bold

  Yet seen from other perspectives, there was no hint of alarm about the future of Britain’s trains. On a good day, even Charles Rous-Marten could get enthusiastic: ‘Mr G. Whale’s new express engines on the London and North Western Railway not only are very handsome and attractive-looking machines, but what is much better, are doing excellent work.’

  In 1904, Rous-Marten travelled from Crewe to London behind No. 1419 Tamerlane – ‘two hours, fifty minutes, forty-three seconds for the 158 miles, with a load of 360 tons . . . Bravo, Mr Whale.’

  That same year the Great Western introduced the Cornish Riviera Limited, non-stop from Paddington to Plymouth, the longest non-stop journey in the world, at an average 55mph. That joined their other crack expresses: the Cornishman, the Flying Dutchman, the Afghan (to Chester rather than Kabul), the Jubilee, the Zulu (to Plymouth not Pietermaritzburg), the Flying Welshman and the North Star.

  And, oh, the colours! The engines on the Brighton line were ‘gamboge’ – tropical yellow – with brass fittings, until they were toned down to chocolate. The London and South Western had olive green engines and salmon-coloured coaches. Everything about the Midland was crimson. The Great Western’s chocolate-and-cream coaches were pulled by bright green engines. The Caledonian Railway was Prussian blue. The London and North Western engines were a boring black, but they gleamed.

  No longer forced to stop to feed its passengers, the LNWR in 1906 offered lunch of ‘Soup, Poached Salmon, Roast Sirloin, Roast Chicken and Salad, Asparagus, Diplomat Pudding, Cheese and Dessert’. There was no mention of either/or in that menu.6

  And still the railways were expanding. The GWR introduced various cut-offs that helped counter its alternative nickname of the Great Way Round. It also joined forces with the Great Central to open a new line through the undiscovered countryside of Beaconsfield and Gerrards Cross. This line still functions today, complete with the pagoda-style, corrugated-iron waiting rooms (now listed) at Denham Golf Club station. By 1914 the largest town in Britain more than three miles from a station was Painswick in Gloucestershire, which had fewer than 3,000 people. However, the vast majority of these late additions were both charming and – on the face of it – useless, the daydreams of over-optimistic local landowners made flesh, offering trains that went nowhere. Slowly.

  There was the Invergarry and Fort Augustus Railway, pushed north for twenty-four miles from Spean Bridge to the southern edge of Loch Ness, which, The Times reported, ‘will be a great boon to the West Highlands’. It was not. C. Hamilton Ellis called this route ‘A child of sorrow’.

  Many of the new lines were operated under the Light Railways Act of 1896 which, forty years too late, reduced the inappropriately onerous standards – high platforms, complex signalling, gated crossings, elaborate fencing – as long as they stuck to a 25mph speed limit. Further south in Scotland there was the Campbeltown & Machrihanish Light Railway, running across the six miles of plain that constitute the southern tip of Kintyre. It was so remote from the rest of the system that the nearest connecting station was in Ireland. The Campbeltown Courier’s resident poet ‘C.M.’ greeted its arrival, in 1909, with a flush of pride:

  A railway a’oor ain, nae less,

  A railway a’oor ain;

  Gin ye’ve yer doots, jist come an’ see’t;

  This railway o’ oor ain.

  There was no poem to mark its demise. In fact, even the Courier failed to report this event (c. 1931), and the line’s historian, A. D. Farr, was unable to date it exactly.

  In Sussex there was the gloriously named Hundred of Manhood & Selsey Tramway, from Chichester to Selsey Beach, built by Colonel H. F. Stephens, a businessman for whom the word ‘eccentric’ is wholly inadequate. Before the end, in 1935, it was operating what appeared to be Model T Fords mounted on railway axles.

  Stephens also reopened what may well be, despite much competition, the most economically hopeless of all Britain’s railways, ‘the Potts line’, which ran trains from an inconvenient station in Shrewsbury – having been denied access to Shrewsbury General – across the Welsh border to the well-known megalopolis of Llanymynech or, alternatively, to the skyscrapers and shopping malls of Criggion. Originally opened in August 1866, it closed in December 1866.

  The Potts line opened and went bust twice more (on one occasion the bailiff very conspicuously boarded the train, so he was shunted into a siding and left there) before Stephens rode to the rescue in 1911. He brought in locomotives called Pyramus, Thisbe, Daphne and Dido (Stephens was a great classicist) and one officially known
as Gazelle, but more usually as the Coffee-Pot, said to be the smallest engine ever used on a British standard-gauge railway. He acquired an old London horse tram as a carriage, ripped out the top deck and used the seats on station platforms. With few costs but even fewer passengers, the line (finally closed to the public 1933) just about outlasted Stephens (who died 1931). Hilarious? I think so. Mad? Yes, but . . . The notion that Britain had built too many railways, which was already current in Edwardian times, turned out not to be the whole truth, as we will discover later.

  Everyone still wanted ‘a railway a’oor ain’ because the railway was not merely the predominant means of transport but, for many purposes, the only practical one. Only in the suburbs, where electric trams were spreading, was there any serious competitive nuisance. To take one small but staggering example, on one October Sunday in 1911, the London & North Western alone transported 112 theatrical companies from one town to another: 30 special trains (some companies took scheduled services), 2,374 passengers, 182 scenery trucks and 8 horseboxes.

  Just one of those specials, from Manchester to Carlisle, carried the following cast which – like the railways themselves – covered everything from historical drama to farce:

  The Florodora Company – Eccles to Preston

  Miss Glossop Harris’ Company – Birkenhead to Carlisle

  The Master of the Mill Company – Leeds to Lancaster

  When Knights Were Bold Company – Bradford to Glasgow

  A Royal Divorce Company – Hyde to Glasgow

  For Wife and Kingdom Company – Barrow to Leith

  And train travel did not even end with death. Brookwood in Surrey, the largest cemetery in Britain, had not one station but two: one for Church of England funerals, one for everyone else. The Necropolis Company also kept its own private station in a quiet corner of Waterloo and transported both mourners and the deceased to the graveyard. Naturally, class distinctions were maintained on the journey: there were first-class, second-class and third-class funerals and even three classes of coffin tickets. (Yes, yes, singles not returns.) All this lasted until the Necropolis station at Waterloo was bombed in 1941.

  The railways still had no sense of their own mortality. In 1906 an officer of the Great Western, believed to be the revered chief mechanical engineer G. J. Churchward, threw out the Lord of the Isles, the most famous of the company’s now obsolete broad-gauge locomotives, and had it broken up for scrap. He needed the space in the engine shed. From our perspective, that sounds crass but it does at least suggest an industry thrusting towards the future rather than one lost in its own historical drama. Or indeed, farce.

  It’s Cheaper via New York

  The Edwardian era was also a time when collectivist ideas were gaining in intellectual credibility. Victorian certainties were under siege, and the railways were far from immune.

  The companies were under consistent pressure to cooperate more with their rivals. By September 1907 (with London & North Western stock now down to 137) Lord Brassey, the politician son of the engineer, was getting a thoughtful hearing from the Associated Chambers of Commerce for an extraordinary idea: ‘Competition is carried to excess,’ he said. ‘An immense amount of capital is wasted on duplicate lines not called for by the public … In and out of parliament there is a growing demand that railways should be managed with a single eye to the service of the public, not for the benefit of the shareholders.’

  This demand increased as the unions’ victory in 1911 obliged the government to let the companies increase their fares and charges to pay for the extra wages. (This would become a very familiar story.) Furthermore, a Commons committee under Russell Rea MP concluded that prices were no higher in areas where different rail companies were cooperating with each other than when they were in full competition. This led to the setting-up of a Royal Commission under Lord Loreburn to consider the possibility of nationalization. It started to do this, without quite using the word (preferring ‘state control’ or ‘administrative interference’) before the war put a stop to the discussions.

  As the commission deliberated, there emerged a brilliant tract, written by Emil Davies, a writer associated with the infant New Statesman and chairman of the Railway Nationalization Society. Davies might have made a more effective advocate had he shaved off his goatee and made himself look a little less like an anarchist bomb-thrower. But in print he made a devastating case against the massive pile of ramps, rip-offs, complexities and complications built up by the railway companies over the years.

  He skewered the labyrinthine list of illogical charges and fares offered by the 217 different surviving companies. He quoted the assistant goods manager of the Great Western as saying that his company had thirty million different freight rates. He cited the ‘celebrated case’ of the hundred tons of potatoes sent from Dundee to New York, which were not landed because of high duties and were shipped back to Liverpool, all of which cost less than sending them from Dundee to Liverpool by rail.

  In 1911, he said, a trader inquired about the rate for goods from Wokingham to Charlton goods siding and was quoted eleven shillings and eightpence (58p) per ton. He also asked for a price from the same place to Angerstein’s Wharf, Charlton – same companies involved, but a quarter of a mile further on. The answer was five shillings (25p) per ton.

  Davies explained, just as the sainted Barry Doe does nowadays in Rail magazine, how passengers could save themselves money by taking advantage of the anomalies, and buying tickets for longer journeys. He then offered a tour d’horizon of the Continent, a bountiful place of comfortable carriages, cheap and logical fares, magnificent food, happy well-paid workers and safe trains.

  There were just two problems with this argument. First, since confiscation was not an option, the state would have had to buy out the companies at a fair price. At that point LNWR shares were down to 132, much cheaper than they had been but far more expensive than they would be in 1918, when they were down to 93, or about half their 1901 value, the assets having been completely clapped out by four years of wartime usage. In other words, nationalization in 1913 would have been a terrible deal for the taxpayer. In the context of British railway history, it is surprising that the government did not choose this least propitious moment to buy out the shareholders at a generous price.

  The most terrible and whimsical of wars might not have been easily foreseeable. The evidence for the other problem was becoming clearer. After the 1911 strike, the Railway Servants mutated into the National Union of Railwaymen, and strikes increased. With each hint of disruption, businesses – if not yet passengers – began to explore other possibilities.

  In September 1913 The Times reported that mail was once again travelling regularly by road, after three-quarters of a century on the rails. And it cited a large Edinburgh store that was using motor vans to deliver over a far wider area than was ever possible with horses. ‘The present state of unrest in the railway and transport world is acting as a wonderful stimulus to the increasing use of the highway,’ said the report.

  Country roads had been almost forgotten for seventy years: they had been given a little life by the fashion for bicycling, but not much. Some of the old highways were sprouting grass from lack of use. The few railwayless towns, like Shaftesbury in Dorset, were now deathly quiet. ‘The only sound that would disturb the nocturnal slumbers of a citizen,’ Sir Charles Petrie later recalled, ‘would be the faltering footsteps of a late reveller, or the hooves of a horse when his master rode in to fetch the doctor to some urgent case at an outlying farm or cottage.’

  The world was about to turn upside down.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CARNFORTH

  Carnforth station, in North Lancashire, was once the setting for a dramatic moment in political history. Gladstone, as prime minister, was staying with the Duke of Devonshire at Holker Hall, near Cartmel, in February 1885 when word came through of the massacre of Khartoum, and the death of General Gordon, Queen Victoria’s favourite warrior.

  Gladstone
immediately left for London via Carnforth, where the stationmaster handed him a telegram from his monarch, so furious that she had abandoned her customary code, constitutional restraint and regard for grammar: ‘These news from Khartoum are frightful and to think that all this might have been prevented and many precious lives saved by earlier action is too fearful.’ This was potential political dynamite – the sovereign blaming her prime minister – and, according to one version, Gladstone’s first reaction was to try to ascertain the stationmaster’s politics and thus the chances of the telegram being leaked to the press.

  And now Carnforth is perhaps the only station in Britain that is a genuine tourist attraction in its own right, a place which people come to see rather than just catch trains. It would be nice to report that the place was crawling with Gladstone buffs, anxious to see the stationmaster’s office and a glass case containing his electric telegraph. But of course hardly anyone remembers this story.

  People come here because Carnforth refreshment room is thought to be the place where Trevor Howard once removed a piece of grit from the doe-like eye of Celia Johnson, a routine kindness that was the starting point of Brief Encounter, perhaps the most enduring film in the entire history of the British cinema.

  In fact, the refreshment room was built in the studio. But Carnforth station, thinly disguised as ‘Milford Junction’, and its clock were used for all the platform shots. The accents and attitudes of Brief Encounter make it clear that it was set in the Home Counties, though careful viewers may have noted the quick shot of destination boards showing such imaginary destinations as Barrow and Leeds rather than the far more vivid ones of Ketchworth and Churley. The film was made in the winter of 1945, with the war still on, but Carnforth was far enough north to be immune from V2 rockets and could be exempted from the blackout.