But organised group travel by train on a grander scale began with the celebrated Thomas Cook (1808-92), who started life as a carpenter’s apprentice, then became a printer in Market Harborough and leader of the temperance movement. In the 1830s Cook covered some 2,000 miles a year, mostly on foot, addressing anyone who cared to listen to his teetotal message in towns and villages around Britain. After many tiring and tedious journeys, it was only a small step from preaching the evils of the devil’s brew to setting up his own commercial enterprise specialising in railway travel. He organised his first trip on 5 July 1841 for 570 temperance believers and their families, a day excursion from Leicester to Loughborough with tea, cricket and sandwiches – all for a shilling a person.
Another pioneer of the day trip by train was the eminent Victorian Rowland Hill, founder of the Penny Post and a director of the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway. Hill introduced the first excursion train from London to Brighton in 1844. Four locomotives were needed to haul the forty-five carriages, which departed from Norwood Junction in south London. By the time the train got to Croydon, twelve more had been added, together with two more locomotives. The 800 passengers reached Brighton at 1.30, four and a half hours after setting out, and despite the length of the journey, a good time was reckoned to have been had by all.
In the industrial north of England whole trains were booked by companies to enable their workers to have a day beside the sea. In 1844 a factory manager in Lancashire arranged a day trip by train to Fleetwood for 650 of his employees, most of whom had never been on a train before, nor visited the seaside. Initial fears of the iron monster were soon overcome, and the delights of a day by the sea were shared with friends and neighbours, who came along on the next excursions. During the August Bank Holiday week in 1850 a total of 202,543 passengers left Manchester and nearby towns by rail for holidays in Blackpool.
In the decade from 1863 the number of visitors to Blackpool at least quadrupled. In 1873 about 850,000 passengers arrived at the town’s two termini during the season. According to the 1881 census, however, the town still had fewer than 13,000 residents, making it only the twentieth-biggest holiday resort, but the growth in visitor numbers was phenomenal. By 1883 the number of arrivals had increased by half a million, and in the early 1890s was approaching two million. By the start of the new century, numbers were hitting almost three million, zooming up to four million on the eve of World War I.
The new breed of holidaymakers brought with them their families, including young children, turning the seaside holiday into something which it had not been in its aristocratic heyday – a family affair. Horizons were expanding too. Before the advent of the railways most resorts, whether spas or sea bathing places, had drawn their visitors primarily from their own regions, with a few exceptions such as Bath, Cheltenham and Brighton. But the railways offered a new freedom of choice, helping to shape the holiday habits of the nation. The northern resorts tended to remain regional, whereas resorts such as Bournemouth had a more national appeal. As Jack Simmons puts it in his book The Railways in Town and Country, 1830–1914, ‘It was perhaps one of the differences between north and south, with the northerner more tenacious of tradition, of the manners they were accustomed to, the food and drink.’
Each of the manufacturing districts had one or two favourite resorts. The West Riding visited mainly Bridlington and Scarborough; Sheffield patronised Cleethorpes; Nottingham and Leicester went to Skegness and Great Yarmouth; Lancashire favoured Blackpool, Morecambe and Southport; while Birmingham decamped to Weston-super-Mare and Welsh resorts such as Barmouth and Pwllheli. The first requisite for all these places was a good train service, not just in the summer but also all year round. By 1914 the residents of every large manufacturing city except Coventry could reach the seaside in less than three hours, even in winter.
But it wasn’t all a smooth ride. There were frequent conflicts of interest. The genteel burghers of Weston-super-Mare saw the railway as an invader and forced the Bristol & Exeter to bypass their town. Excursionists were unpopular at smaller resorts. The residents of Sidmouth in Devon protested about their rowdiness in 1874, and it was fear of the riff-raff that kept the railway out of Cromer until the same year. Yet in Ilfracombe on the north Devon coast the citizens had to beg for a new railway. When in 1863 a line was opposed by the powerful landlord William Williams and rejected in the House of Lords, the locals became so agitated that the Riot Act had to be read. Other resorts were almost entirely manufactured by the railway companies, such as the genteel resort of Hunstanton in Norfolk, created jointly by the L’Estrange family, the local landowners, and the Great Eastern Railway.
Eventually the main seaside resorts of Victorian England settled down into four groups, according to Simmons. First, the leading resorts that tried to remain ‘select’, attracting their clientele mainly from the middle classes. These were, pre-eminently, Bournemouth, Eastbourne, Folkestone, Torquay and Worthing. Then there were the ten big ones, catering mainly for the masses: Blackpool, Brighton, Cleethorpes, Hastings, Margate, Ramsgate, Scarborough, Southend, Southport and Weston-super-Mare. In a special category of their own were the fishing ports that became holiday resorts, such as Weymouth, Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft. Then there were smaller places that owed their existence to their particular attraction to one social group, whether to the working class, as at Clacton or Skegness, or posher folk, as at Cromer or Sidmouth.
Spurred on by the railways, development was phenomenal. In 1871 there were forty-eight seaside resorts listed in the official census of Britain, but by 1900 there were over 200. By the end of the nineteenth century the idea of a railway holiday at the seaside was embedded not just in the popular imagination but in the literary one too. ‘He’s always splendid,’ one of Henry James’s characters observes in Complete Tales in 1892, ‘as your morning bath is splendid, or a sirloin of beef, or the railway service to Brighton.’ The popular novelist R. S. Surtees proclaimed on the first page of his humorous work Plain or Ringlets, which featured a seaside resort as part of the setting, ‘Thanks to George Stephenson, George Hudson and many other Georges who invested their talents and valuable money in the undertakings, railways have brought wealth and salubrity to everyone’s door. It is no longer the class distribution that used to exist, this place for that set, that for another; but a sort of grand quadrille of gaiety in which people change places continually, and whirl about until they finally settle down, finding out beauties that none can see but themselves.’
It couldn’t have been more perfect. The railways enjoyed the business the seaside resorts brought in – from first-class passengers and excursionists alike – and the resorts, with tills ringing, acknowledged their dependence on the railways. Among the biggest money-spinners were the trains laid on for the unique Wakes Week holidays in northern England. Originating as church festivals, these were adapted for a secular purpose after the Industrial Revolution, when most of the factories in a town would close at the same time. The workers would take their annual holiday, and essential maintenance would be carried out.
Industrial Lancashire once had the densest network of railways and the biggest concentration of factory workers outside London, which offered a potent economic combination. In the days before cheap package holidays from Manchester Airport, a week in Blackpool was the aspiration of workers in almost every northern industrial town, and they saved for it all year from often meagre wages in ‘going off’ clubs where they worked. ‘The Wakes Week excursions provided a social safety valve for the toiling masses,’ says Barry McLoughlin in his book Railway Heritage: Blackpool & the Fylde. ‘Marx and Engels could never have predicted that the enlightened self-interest of the employers would find such an ingenious method of maintaining the health – and morale – of their workforce.’ The leading Blackpool architect Thomas Mawson quotes from a chat with a visitor on the promenade: ‘If it wasn’t for Blackpool, there’d be revolution in Lancashire. Men stick it as long as they can in the mill towns and once a y
ear they must either burst or go to Blackpool.’
The frenetic mood of Wakes Week in Blackpool is caught by the crime writer Andrew Martin in his novel The Blackpool HighFlyer, about an attempt to derail an excursion train from Hind’s Mill in Halifax in 1905.
In Central you could hardly breathe from the greenhouse heat burning through the canopies and the press of people and the nosebag smell, for the cab horses were at their dinner as we came in at just after eleven. A porter was standing on a stepladder, trying to put the excursionists into the right channels by a lot of shouting and waving of arms. This was the busiest station in Europe … And you had never seen a day so full: tribes of excursionists going both ways on the Prom (they should have had an ‘up’ and a ‘down’ as on the railways) … The crowds went on for ever, like the sea. These people had all aimed for the bull’s eye, and they had all hit the bull’s eye. There was no point in thinking about the future or the past.
In the early years of the twentieth century the railway companies found ever more inventive ways of promoting their seaside trains. The LNER introduced a summertime day excursion train from Liverpool Street, which ran from the end of May to the end of September, with Pullman coaches for which a supplement had to be paid – 10s. 6d. for first class and 6s. 6d. for third class. Known as the Eastern Belle, it was unique in that it ran to a different seaside resort each day of the week, selected from a list that included Felixstowe, Lowestoft, Great Yarmouth, Cromer, Sheringham, Frinton, Walton-on-the-Naze, Hunstanton, Heacham, Aldeburgh, Thorpeness and Harwich. What fun it must have been to arrive in such style. The most popular destination was Clacton, since this was closer to London and made for a longer day out. The Great Western had its own Hikers’ Mystery Express from Paddington, where walkers were invited to join ‘the great adventure’. The trains were hugely popular and had a match-making reputation: the potent combination of a cheap ticket and a day out hiking over the cliffs could end up with wedding bells.
Potent too in promoting the happy holiday to the coast was the railway seaside poster. From the 1920s onwards, railway companies commissioned hundreds of designs from the best artists of the day, advertising travel to their resorts and the joys of a sojourn on the coast. With colourful images of sandy beaches, endless golden sunshine and families paddling in the surf, they combined fantasy with reality and enthusiasm with nostalgia. Who could fail to be charmed by the Southern Railway’s heart-tugging ‘South for Sunshine’ campaign, or the LNER’s ‘Filey for the Family’ or ‘Skegness is so Bracing’ – perhaps the most famous English holiday poster of all, originally drawn by John Hassall for the Great Northern Railway in 1908.
Sometimes publicity departments got carried away – the Great Western Railway issued a poster advocating ‘Bathing in February in the Cornish Riviera’ featuring what was popularly known at the time as a bathing belle frolicking in the sea off St Agnes. (Whether the goose pimples achieved their purpose of filling seats in the off season seems open to doubt.)
Travel by railway to the seaside reached its peak in the 1950s, when stations during the summer school holidays were thronged with crowds surging towards departure platforms, children with buckets and spades, strawberry jam and Marmite sandwiches, beach balls and cricket bats, and parents staggering along with brown leatherette suitcases. This was an innocent era, with father possibly in his best Sunday togs, boys in short trousers and girls in ankle socks. When the platform announcement came and the tickets were clipped, there would be a rush along the platform to find the seats on the seaward side for the best views on arrival at the coast.
The 1950s and 1960s offered a variety of crack trains dedicated to the institution of the seaside holiday. Just imagine it – the thrill of arriving at Paddington to find the Torbay Express waiting behind the locomotive Caerphilly Castle, freshly polished for the occasion, to whisk you off to Torquay, Paignton and Kingswear – a distance of 199.6 miles in three hours twenty-eight minutes – speeding non-stop through Exeter to get to those golden sands in double-quick time. On Saturday 27 July 1957, a peak day of travel that year for summer passenger trains, over half a million passenger journeys were made on the Western Region alone. According to British Railways statistics, in one hour around midday at Exeter St David’s station twenty-six trains heading to resorts in Devon and Cornwall were counted, while further west at Newton Abbot, eighty trains passed through the station between 08.24 and 21.37 on their way to and from the seaside.
It’s all very different now, when the few passengers taking the train for a holiday in British seaside resorts often have to endure changing from the comfort of a main-line train onto ancient wheezing diesel multiple units on forgotten secondary lines. There’s not much special about travel by train to the sea any longer, where it can be an uncomfortable marathon to get to Scarborough, Skegness, Great Yarmouth, Morecambe, Bridlington, Pwllheli or Whitby aboard superannuated trains on often meagre timetables. Meanwhile, in a parallel universe, services to seaside towns such as Brighton, Southend, Bournemouth, Clacton and Southport are filled not with the bucket and spade brigade but perspiring commuters on their way to and from the office, condemned to long commutes by high central London house prices.
Worse, many of our most charming and beautiful seaside lines are gone for ever. No more the coastal delights of Whitby to Scarborough, the toy train to Southwold, the rickety wooden causeway on the ‘Hayling Billy’ line to Hayling Island, and Betjeman’s favourite, the slow train alongside the wash from King’s Lynn to Hunstanton, used by generations of the royal family on their way to Sandringham. Gone also are the tracks from Axminster to Lyme Regis, only operable almost up to closure in the 1960s by elderly Victorian engines because of the twisting curves which defeated modern locomotives. Disappeared also have most of the tracks on the Isle of Wight – the quintessential seaside railway – where vintage tank engines survived until Beeching. Who can now remember the delightfully named Tilleynaught to Banff branch in Aberdeenshire, where the last trains ran in 1964? Yet, with its route alongside silvery Scottish coastal sands, it was one of the most beautiful seaside railways in Europe.
Goodbye too to the main-line seaside specials, such as the Devon Belle and the Cornishman. Farewell, the Sunny South Express. The Broadsman and the Man of Kent are no more. Oh joy when you could load your suitcases onto the Brighton Belle and the Bournemouth Belle in anticipation of a glorious fortnight of freedom on the sunny south coast. These days seaside railway stations are mostly sad, truncated places, mournful with the cries of seagulls and the long empty intervals between trains.
Today’s Blackpool is no exception, although the north station has at least been included in a plan to electrify the lines around Preston and Manchester. But most of the day there is scarcely a soul at unstaffed Blackpool South, with its melancholy wind-blown single platform and bus shelter. The place is so miserable that even the Tommy Cooper Joke Shop next door has closed down.
Acres of redundant sidings rust unused at Blackpool North, where an ugly concrete ticket hall has replaced the magnificent double-arched iron roof, demolished in 1974. So diminished is the station that it occupies only the area of the excursion platforms of the old one – the rest has been given over to a bleak retail development now occupied by Wilko, a store flogging cheap homeware to the masses. All that remains of the glory days – though you must search to find them – are two cast-iron plaques set in the wall, bearing the elaborate monograms of the London & North Western and Lancashire & Yorkshire Railways, which jointly ran the station before their merger in 1922.
How could the fall have happened? Even after all these years conspiracy theories still abound among the regulars at the vast Albert and Lion pub on the seafront, a handful of shingle’s throw from where the entrance to Blackpool Central once stood. For once you can’t blame Dr Beeching, since the station did not figure on his infamous closure list. So whodunnit? How can it be that the site of one of the world’s most famous termini remains mostly a wasteland more than fifty years later? An
d what lobbying went on in high places that led to the heart being cut out of one of Britain’s most famous towns?
One culprit whose name is often muttered darkly is Sir James Drake, founder of Britain’s motorway network, who back in the 1940s called for the station to be moved, deploring that the centre of Blackpool had been allowed to develop into a ‘characterless mass’ with railways, tram sheds, houses, gas and electricity works all vying for space. (It is hardly characterful now!) Another villain is Ernest Marples, the transport minister who overrode Beeching and gave permission for the closure, himself the controversial director of a national road-building firm. We shall probably never know the truth now.
Back at Blackpool North to catch my train home, it is drizzling. Before the afternoon light finally goes, there’s a last chance to photograph the old semaphore signals, soon to be swept away in the new electrification works. Suddenly I feel a hand on my shoulder and a surreal conversation ensues with a peak-capped man who turns out to be the station’s jobsworth-in-chief.
J-i-C: ‘Oi! You can’t take a picture without a ticket.’
Me: ‘But, I’ve got a ticket. Here it is … And look, that’s my train over there.’
J-i-C: ‘Well, you’re too far down the platform.’
Me: [Very politely] ‘Not sure that’s right.’ [I gesture at the DON’T PASS BEYOND THIS POINT notice, which is a good thirty yards away.]
J-i-C: [Fuming by now, jowls as red as the signals] ‘Well, it’s your fault, anyway. Look what you’ve done, making me come out in the rain and getting wet.’
As my train pulls away from the platform I think how sad that the railways, which brought so much gaiety to Blackpool over the years, should now be playing their part in dampening the spirits of this once great town. But what’s that overtaking us on the parallel track? A Lancashire & Yorkshire Highflyer locomotive, polished like a blackberry, at the head of an excursion train, lights ablaze, bearing home a happy seaside crowd to the Lancashire valleys, folk who have had the time of their lives. Could it just be my imagination? One thing is certain – the queen of seaside towns doesn’t discard her memories so easily.
The Trains Now Departed Page 28
