There are, I think, three reasons for the film’s success. First, it was exquisitely acted, written (by Noel Coward) and directed (by David Lean), leaving aside the unfortunate lapse with the destination boards. Second, it is a love story in which the couple never get round to doing anything at all beyond the odd embrace, speaking directly to the British national difficulty with this area of life. (Brève Rencontre was apparently a complete flop in France, where audiences could not understand the point of a romance that was never consummated.)
And third, it is a love story with trains, and steam trains at that. It has the nostalgic appeal of the Second World War, which remains the fundamental reference point of British life, when the priorities were straightforward and obvious, without the messy compromises and doubts of peacetime. All wartime trains are a symbolic representation of that aspect of the English imagination. And there are expresses, rushing through, packed with sexual symbolism.
Nostalgia for the benighted trains of both world wars is rather absurd. Indeed the same might be said of the trains between the wars as well. However, this false-memory syndrome, probably helped by the images of Brief Encounter, did play an important role in much later political events.
Carnforth station did not thrive after the film crew left. Lancaster took over its role as a junction, and main-line trains no longer stopped there. The clock disappeared, and the place fell into sorry decay before a major rejuvenation effort in 2003. Now there is a visitor centre, a railway model shop and scope for hospitality way beyond that offered in the fictional buffet (you can ‘Have your Brief Encounter at Carnforth station … We offer facilities for Business Meetings, Corporate Events and Private Functions’). The clock was rediscovered, repaired and re-hung and, though the main-line platforms are railed off, to make it clear this is not a serious station, the railings are attractive and painted a fetching green. There is a nasty concrete wall on the remaining northbound platform, behind which British Rail’s last steam depot still awaits restoration. To balance that, there is still an amazing Furness Railway signal box (built c. 1870), looking vaguely like a miniature fairy-tale castle.
There is also the Brief Encounter Tearoom. Trudging in wearily at 4.15 one afternoon, I discovered Andrew, the owner, clearing up, having closed at four. I won’t hear a word said against the Brief Encounter Tearoom: he recognized an emergency when he saw one, served me a pot of tea and lemon drizzle cake and did everything possible to make me feel comfortable short of removing grit from my eye.
And, sitting on the platform, I met a character called Jim Walker who told me of his own role in another piece of railway history: he was the fireman on the Stanier 8F engine that did the Blackburn-Carnforth run on the last actual working day of steam in 1968. He is not an admirer of the modern-day railway.
‘We were watching The Alamo on TV,’ he was saying, ‘and I said to the wife “If that were the English, they wouldn’t have fired a shot”. They’ll put up with owt. The whole transport system is a shambles. Get Deutsche Bahn to run this lot, they’d sort it out. What makes this nation go down is that we’re apathetic people, I’m afraid it’s the truth.’
Well, I nodded of course. You could say he has hit upon one theme of this book. But Carnforth is not the worst place to consider the matter of German railways, and the forgotten stories that helped Britain win both wars.
‘Your Majesty, It Cannot Be Done’
The bald statement is associated mainly with the historian A. J. P. Taylor: The First World War ‘came about mainly because of railway timetables’.
The basis for his argument lies in the Schlieffen Plan, which had long laid down, in intricate detail, the precise orchestration for Der Tag – the day when Germany could start the European war that large elements in its military structure desperately craved. Taylor explained:
The railway timetables which in other countries brought men to their mobilising centres, in the Schlieffen Plan continued and brought the troops not to their barracks, but into Belgium and Northern France. The German mobilisation plan actually laid down the first forty days of the German invasion of France and none of it could be altered because if it did all the timetables would go wrong. Thus the decision for mobilisation … was a decision for a general European war.
Taylor was a somewhat individualistic historian, not a plodding defensive player but a purveyor of flashy strokes aimed at the boundary, sometimes off the edge. But on this subject his position is not so different from that of more consensual scholars. Yes, it was a war partly caused by railway timetables. But perhaps it would be more accurate to say not that they could not be altered, but that the high command believed they could not be altered.
The plan was based on the theory that it was necessary to see off France and Britain before concentrating on the eastern front. The story, as told by Barbara Tuchman, is that at the last moment – 1 August – the Kaiser got cold feet and belatedly tried to press upon the chief of the general staff, Helmuth von Moltke the younger, the less arrogant and more intuitive idea of merely defending the Western Front and fighting one war at a time. Moltke replied: ‘Your Majesty, it cannot be done.’
The arrangements were indeed almost ineffable in their scale: one army corps alone – out of the total of forty in the German forces – required 6,010 railway carriages grouped in 140 trains for humans and the same number again for their supplies. The timetable was fixed: there were 11,000 trains, scheduled at ten-minute intervals. But if that could be achieved, it could also have been changed. Or so General von Staab, chief of von Moltke’s railway division, insisted after the war when he learned of what he considered this slur on his department. And he wrote a book showing, in elaborate detail, how he could have moved four of Germany’s seven armies to the Eastern Front in a fortnight, and left three to defend the west.
Germany had been using its railway system to prepare for war since the first tracks were laid. There was no unified national system – until 1871 there was no unified nation – but most of the trains were run by Prussia, and Prussian military values and requirements imbued the whole network. From the earliest days, discussions about the desirability of a new line always reflected its military potential. This policy proved extremely successful against the French in 1870, and it continued thereafter. There was a staff officer assigned to each line, and every year railway officials took part in war games. The best brains produced by the War College, it was said, went into the railway section and ended up in lunatic asylums. Before 1914 the Germans even sweetly helped Belgium construct a new light railway across the frontier; the Belgians probably thought it might bring in German tourists. And so it did, but they were wearing uniforms.
German railways always preferred punctuality to raw speed (they still do) but in 1903 two experimental electric coaches reached 130mph on a special military stretch. However, the high command rejected the idea of electrification as a strategy, partly on the grounds that having some lines electrified and not others would endanger the timetable of mobilization, and partly because it would render the whole railway more vulnerable to attack.
The difference between this elaborate planning and the genesis of the British system hardly needs repeating. In Britain the government as a whole had hardly had a say where railways were built, never mind the War Office. Totally uneconomic lines like the Stratford & Midland Junction, the Golden Valley Line in Herefordshire and the Potts line out of Shrewsbury had been built out of local pride and hope, not because they would ever save the country. But in 1914 and 1939, the nation was called upon to muddle through, as the railways had always done. And the combination proved curiously well-adapted to the task.
Aunt Sally’s Triumph
On August Bank Holiday 1914, as war broke out, there were strange scenes at the London stations as the last boat trains made it back from the coast. When the Folkestone train arrived at Victoria, a sign said: ‘Passengers: 603. Pieces of luggage: 223.’ It might have been the Test score.
There was no indication when the
missing bags might arrive, though it was assumed this would be a short war. At Charing Cross, the Manchester Guardian reported, passengers from Ostend arrived with breathless stories of catching the last boat. ‘They said the other foreigners had left days before, but a great many of the English visitors refused to budge. They would stay, they had said, until they were pushed off, or until an English boat went to fetch them.’
This nation was not going to be panicked. In April parliament had discussed the Northern Junction Railway, one of the few proposed lines which, though the idea had been around for about fifty years, had never been built. It was to run round London from Palmers Green to Brentford; the War Office said it was ‘a national necessity’ as a means of transporting its forces and avoiding the London termini. Parliament was not impressed. ‘If you suggested a railway to the moon,’ snorted the Earl of Ronaldshay, ‘the War Office would say it was a splendid thing, and would afford them additional facilities for the movement of troops.’ The existing railway companies objected and so did the residents of Hampstead Garden Suburb. The bill was thrown out.
But Britain was not entirely unprepared. Victoria’s angry telegram to Gladstone at Carnforth had been the start of some dynamic action. When Kitchener set out to reconquer Sudan in 1896, the sappers built railways to use as supply lines, and the War Office had become, as the Earl of Ronaldshay hinted, rather keen on trains – although still nothing had been done to build the kind of strategic coastal route that armchair strategists had been advocating for decades.
And there were emergency plans. A railway executive committee was rapidly formed in 1914, comprising the general managers of the largest companies acting under the government’s aegis. The first job was to get 118,000 members of the British Expeditionary Force to Southampton Docks. This was accomplished in a fortnight and, in the words of Christian Wolmar, ‘with such remarkable efficiency that it transformed the status of the railways overnight. No longer were they Aunt Sallys but national heroes.’ The operation would have been easier had the Northern Junction existed.
The railway unions declared a truce for the duration, and huge numbers went on active service, putting further strain on the system and forcing the recruitment of women for some jobs, although they were kept well away from the footplate. In July 1915 six women were being trained as ticket collectors at Manchester Victoria, an unthinkable idea a year earlier. ‘The company seem to have no doubt that the women will prove able to perform their new duties,’ the Manchester Guardian reported, adding churlishly, ‘which to an outsider appear quite light’.
But as the war developed – or, more precisely, failed to develop – with the opposing armies fighting each other to a standstill, the haphazard British system found itself strangely suited to the job in hand. Routes like the Stratford and Midland Junction, for instance, played a vital role in shifting raw materials without clogging up the main lines.
Also crucial was the Far North line, which served two of the biggest naval bases, at Cromarty and Scapa Flow. To get sailors north, there was a Daily Naval Special from February 1917: fourteen coaches (no buffet) from Euston to Thurso, taking about twenty-two hours to do the 717 miles on a good day. There was a bad day in January 1918 when the train got stuck in snow ten miles short of Thurso, and 300 men, Wrens and nurses had to walk the rest of the way through a blizzard. Railway nostalgia was not an overwhelmingly obvious feature of the zeitgeist in the years after this war.
By the start of 1917, almost all the restaurant cars had gone and the old non-corridor carriages had re-appeared. Then the government imposed draconian cutbacks on non-essential travel to help divert resources towards the war: fares rose by fifty per cent; expresses were replaced by slow trains; and slow trains were replaced by no trains at all. Furthermore, it became a requirement that season tickets had to be shown, which apparently had not been the case. (No wonder the ticket collectors had little to do.) And dozens of stations were closed for the duration.
The immediate response was a brief rally in railway shares, in the hope that the companies would be allowed to keep the price rises when the war was over. But the more pertinent question was whether they would be allowed to keep anything at all.
Fur Coat, No Knickers
The soldiers who did make it back from the trenches, leaving so many fallen comrades, left behind any enthusiasm they might have had for fighting. They also left behind much of their traditional working-class deference. In September 1919, less than a year after the armistice, there was another full-scale and highly effective national railway strike.
In the immediate aftermath of war, the government was still effectively the employer while ministers worked out what to do with the railways. They had quickly conceded the principle of the eight-hour day. And the footplatemen, now organized into the Amalgamated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen (ASLEF, initials that would henceforth strike intermittent terror into the hearts of commuters), got a deal protecting their wages and conditions. But with the economy under severe deflationary pressure, the other grades (seemingly less well-organized in the sprawling National Union of Railwaymen) were selected for pay cuts.
Morally and intellectually, the government’s position was pretty weak: Lloyd George, the prime minister, can hardly have believed his own ears when he called the strike ‘an anarchist conspiracy’ and sent the railwaymen’s old military comrades to patrol the stations. With ASLEF supporting its colleagues (which did not set a precedent), the NUR secured what appeared to be victory after a single week of national panic. ‘The strike came because the Government were living in the atmosphere of the old industrial system,’ the socialist J. L. Hammond proclaimed triumphantly, ‘under which the employer gives orders and the worker takes them.’ The only question, it seemed, was exactly how and when this new Eden would come into being.
There was a more mundane reality for the railway industry. With the help of management, blacklegs and volunteers, some kind of train service had been maintained during the strike. And the railways’ customers found their own way round the situation. One party of holidaymakers stranded in Blackpool had walked home to Tipton near Wolverhampton: 113 miles in three days. But Victorian endurance was out of fashion; new technology and ingenuity were in. The new-fangled motor omnibuses kept running. For the wealthy, Daimler Hire Services started running daily private car services out of London. And in Paris, just ten years after Louis Blériot, crowds besieged the parcels office to have their goods air-freighted to London. The real victor of the strike was accurately proclaimed in a Times headline on 1 October, with the strike in full cry: THE TRIUMPH OF THE MOTOR LORRY.
Of all the ill-timed decisions to have bedevilled Britain’s railways over the years, this strike was the killer. The workers, who played lickspittle for decades while their owners grew richer, had chosen the worst possible moment to get off their knees. It is hard to imagine events unfolding in any other way, given the greater historic context. But the new militancy was just one of the problems now besetting the industry.
Tens of thousands of railwaymen came back from the forces to their old jobs determined not to spend the rest of their lives offering unquestioning obedience to absurd instructions, as they had done during the war. However, a good many did not return to the railways: they took their gratuities and the mechanical skills they had acquired in the army, put together some bits and pieces, gave them a lick of paint, and – da-dum – they had something resembling a lorry.
Almost no regulations governed this infant industry, no incomprehensible table with thirty million different rates, no legal requirement to take anything and everything, no hanging around in the sidings, no mucking about getting the goods from road to rail and back again. Might Mr Jones the draper like me to take the latest fashions ordered by Lady so-and-so twenty miles down the road, this moment, and at a very favourable price? Even when there was no railway strike, you bet Mr Jones would. ‘That motor lorry services of some kind will be run as a permanent feature of our means of communicatio
n, particularly for light goods traffic, may be regarded as certain,’ The Times concluded.
The old railway companies were no longer in a position to even think of responding because they had lost control of their own businesses. The political debate concerned how the railways would be transformed, not whether. The Labour Party was now the official opposition, and nationalization was a serious option. The government instead chose compromise, lumping the old companies together into four regional groupings. ‘A bastard nationalization,’ complained Sir Frederick Banbury, Tory MP and former chairman of the Great Northern.
But the minister of transport was Sir Eric Geddes, the Great Northern’s former general manager, who knew whereof he spoke. And his speech introducing the new bill in 1921 was a forensic denunciation of his old industry’s practices: the US got twenty-five tons of freight into the average wagon, and Britain five, for instance. Geddes was above all a cost-cutter, remembered for the ‘Geddes Axe’ on public expenditure (more of a bastard than a nationalizer, some thought). He had no intention of investing the kind of money that would have put the new companies on a firm footing: ‘In the view of the Government there was no obligation on the state … to put the railways back in any pre-war position,’ he told the Commons.
The new companies started in 1923 and slowly they swallowed almost everything else that moved. The London, Midland & Scottish was a monster, with the Midland Railway stripped of its independence and dignity and added to the old London & North Western and the western Scottish routes; the London & North Eastern had the King’s Cross and Liverpool Street empires and just about everything feeding off them, plus the Great Central out of Marylebone; and the Southern Railway controlled everything going south of the river. Alone, the Great Western survived intact, gaining the Welsh coal lines and other minor routes.1
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