The Subterranean Railway (21 page)

Other suggestions to tackle the overcrowding included raising the fares by using ‘the old fashioned rules of political economy’ in order to ‘stop killing with kindness this boon for Londoners’.
³¹
In fact, the single fare was to survive until 1907 when competition from motor buses and the opening of other Tube lines reduced the numbers travelling on the Central. Fares of threepence were introduced for longer journeys and, two years later, the fare for shorter trips was reduced to a penny.

Having achieved such immediate success, the owners of the line quickly put forward plans for expansion. Their big idea was to create a loop, essentially a kind of circle line, that would have included stations at Mansion House, Hyde Park Corner, High Street Kensington and Hammersmith, but this was only one of a plethora of ideas for new tube lines which the success of the Central had stimulated. So yet again, as happened virtually every time there was a major new underground development, Parliament took over, creating a joint committee which had the task of evaluating the various proposals and assessing which best met present and future traffic requirements. The Parliamentarians were not to know it, but this was an incredibly small window of opportunity. Within a few short years, the competition from motor buses, trams and, soon, motor cars, would make any privately funded line impossible to finance. The Parliamentary joint committee rejected the Central’s scheme, in favour of the rival plan to build a railway from Hammersmith to Palmers Green which had been partly approved as far back as 1897.

The Central was therefore left with tacking on short extensions at either end but was not able to do so until several years later. Spotting that an exhibition site was being developed at a huge site at Wood Lane, just north-west of Shepherd’s Bush, the Central’s directors obtained permission to extend the line and create a loop at the western end. The opening of the extension in May 1908 coincided with the start of the exhibition, a celebration of Franco-British achievements intended to cement the four-year-old Entente Cordiale. The site took over from Earls Court as London’s main exhibition centre and large shows were held there every year until 1914. The Olympic Games of 1908 (and, incidentally, those of 1948) were held in the adjoining stadium and the area acquired the unofficial name of ‘White City’ because the concrete buildings, which supposedly included ‘twenty palaces’ for the inaugural exhibition, scattered among miles of artificial lakes and canals, were covered with white stucco.
³²

One slightly desperate attempt to boost revenue by the Central at that time was the introduction of a parcels service. A ‘Lightning Parcels Express’ service was started in 1911, using men on tricycles to carry packets between stations and nearby offices, but like the similar one on the District (
Chapter 6
) it was short-lived. It closed down in 1917 through shortage of manpower, never to be resumed.

At the east end of the Central, the line was eventually extended to its initial intended terminus at Liverpool Street. This had been part of the original plans but powers to carry out the work had lapsed because the Central’s directors had concentrated on other investments, such as replacing the original locomotive fleet. The station, which also covered the adjoining main-line terminus of Broad Street, was opened in July 1912 but plans for further extensions westwards were shelved with the outbreak of the war. As a history of the line puts it, ‘the opening to Liverpool Street was the swan song of the Central London as an independent enterprise’.
³³

While both these extensions and the various exhibitions provided a welcome boost to the Central’s traffic, the line was facing increased
competition and numbers of passengers were on a downward curve. This was partly the result of an economic recession and increased competition from motor buses, but, most importantly, because no fewer than three other tube lines had been taking shape under London, all supported by the mysterious American, Charles Yerkes.

EIGHT

THE DODGY

AMERICAN

London had no strategic plan to create a coherent network of underground railways, and yet today has a reasonably integrated system. There are obvious deficiencies and lacunae, such as the lack of a connection between the Circle and the Northern Line at Euston, but in many ways it is impossible to detect the haphazard way in which the system was developed. This has been more the result of luck than design. And it is also thanks to the efforts of Charles Tyson Yerkes, the American who quickly gained control of much of the underground network, both existing and under construction, in the first few years of the 1900s. Few Londoners realize, however, that the very shape and extent of the underground network in London was not determined by planners, or even Parliamentarians, but – as this chapter shows – as the result of a battle between two American magnates.

Of the pantheon of Underground heroes, the people who created and ran it, from Charles Pearson to Lord Ashfield, Yerkes is the most controversial and, arguably, the man who had the most influence in ensuring London obtained a large network of lines. Yerkes only showed an interest in London in the final decade of his sixty-eight years and his earlier life was, to say the least, colourful; so much so, indeed, that many of the stories about him have been told and retold
so often that there are considerable discrepancies between the various accounts. Accuracy is further confounded by the three-volume epic
¹
based on Yerkes’s life by an American novelist, Theodore Dreiser, who liberally mixed reality with fantasy.

Yerkes was born in Philadelphia in 1837, into a banking family of Welsh ancestry and Quaker beliefs, not a creed to which Charles ever seems to have subscribed. He set up a brokerage office at the age of twenty-two thanks to a legacy, and made a fortune through his ability to read the bond market better than his peers. He created a bank but soon lost all his money: a fire in the commercial heart of Chicago in 1871 caused waves of losses throughout the Eastern United States, and the collapse caught out Yerkes who was unable to pay interest on money he held for the City of Philadelphia. He was sentenced to thirty-three months’ imprisonment for embezzlement and larceny of $400,000 and spent seven months in jail, during which he showed his self-belief by telling a reporter: ‘I have made up my mind to keep my mental strength unimpaired and think my chances [of] regaining my former position financially are as good as they ever were.’
²

Pardoned by the state governor, apparently for political reasons because he knew where too many bodies were buried, he set about making a second fortune. After helping to finance, very profitably, the Continental Passenger Railway Company which, despite its grand-sounding name, was Philadelphia’s local streetcar network, in 1882 he moved to Chicago where he hoped to set up another bank but instead took an interest in the horse-drawn tramways springing up throughout the city.

How he managed to gain control of this extensive network remains something of a mystery. His modus operandi was to borrow money – on dubious security – to obtain stock and gain control of companies, offering dividend guarantees which he would then have to pay out of capital – not a sustainable practice. He would then create holding and subsidiary companies, juggling the accounts in a way that ensured no one would be able to trace precisely what was happening, and
then he would issue further ‘watered down’ shares to raise more money. While similar complex arrangements are made today by big businesses in order to avoid taxes and prevent scrutiny, the difference is that Yerkes frequently strayed onto the wrong side of the law. As a business biography of Yerkes puts it, ‘his bookkeeping methods and business tactics were so complicated that a clear account of how he captured control of Chicago’s street railways can scarcely be made’.
³
The
Dictionary of American Biography
said his rail empire had become known as the ‘Chicago Traction Tangle, a network of construction companies, operating companies and holding companies, of interlocking directorships and friendly contracts, of financial manipulation and political corruption’.

Financial opaqueness characterized all his empire-building, and some of his deals stretch credulity. He electrified the Chicago tramways by awarding the contract to a company he had incorporated the day before, and then charged the tramway more than $10.7m for work which should have cost $3m. He also made money out of property speculation around transport developments which he was carrying out, a method he appears to have attempted to use in London.

In Chicago, he was also helped by the depth of the corruption of government, particularly at a local level. Between the end of the Civil War and the turn of the century, the USA was expanding rapidly and government, at all levels – federal, state and municipal – had a wide variety of favours at its disposal such as franchises for bus and tram networks or utilities. These could, generally, be bought by those businesses prepared to pay the price in bribes. Yerkes took full advantage of this system and used his dubious financial methods to gain control of a large chunk of the antiquated tramways in the windy city by the mid 1880s. Borrowing money from his former partners in Philadelphia, he acquired a majority shareholding in one of the three main tramways, the North Division, and a second, West Division, followed soon after.

It would be simplistic to suggest that Yerkes’s motivation was simply
to make money, though he accumulated enough to buy a mansion on Fifth Avenue in New York and fill it with old masters including a Rembrandt and luxurious furnishings such as a gold bed reputed to have belonged to the King of the Belgians (or mad King Otto of Bavaria according to a different account). He was also motivated by a desire to create transport networks for which he would be remembered. In fact, apart from the Tube, his most lasting memorial is the Yerkes Observatory at the University of Chicago, where he seems to have been the victim of the sort of sharp practices which were his trademark. A couple of canny academics approached him, suggesting that a large endowment would salvage his poor reputation in Chicago and they managed to persuade him into stumping up half a million dollars, leaking the news to the local papers before Yerkes could reconsider the offer.
⁴
The
Chicago Times
was not impressed: ‘The astronomical beneficence of Mr. Yerkes does not excuse his street railway’s shortcomings any more than the educational liberality of Mr. Rockefeller justifies the methods of the Standard Oil Company.’ At least Yerkes can be grateful that his generosity bought him a measure of immortality, as the Observatory still bears his name whereas few Tube users today have heard of him.

Yerkes consolidated and improved the tramways, replacing horses with electric power and bringing two abandoned tunnels under the Chicago river back into use. He disguised his substantial holdings through a complex system of nominees but the local press, which was generally hostile, pilloried him as the Mr Big of the local transport system whenever complaints were made. And there were lots of them. His trams were badly lit, dirty and unventilated, and services often ran infrequently and irregularly. They were awfully overcrowded in rush hours because there was insufficient stock, but Yerkes was unrepentant. His motto was ‘It is the straphanger that pays the dividend’, and his other favourite dictum for success in the tramway business was ‘Buy up old junk, fix it up a little and unload it upon other fellows.’
⁵

Yerkes was both clever and ruthless, using all available methods,
legal and illegal, to see off competitors and maintain a monopoly. Bribery was simply routine and on occasion he used blackmail, reportedly sending women to compromise rivals and politicians. He was, predictably, a notorious womanizer himself, with a string of mistresses. Yerkes finally overstretched himself when he tried to obtain a 100-year franchise for his street tramways, his usual bribes to the local City Council and the Illinois state legislature proving insufficient even though they amounted to $1m. The arrangement, which astonishingly provided for no payment to the City, was passed by these two bodies but the governor vetoed the deal. When Yerkes tried again, this time for fifty-year deals, local people staged demonstrations against the plan, frightening the aldermen: ‘On the night the vote was taken in December 1898, mobs with guns and sticks paraded the streets and a hempen [hangman’s] noose was lowered from the gallery of the City Hall.’
⁶
Tammany Hall politics was coming under greater scrutiny, even if it flourished in that most corrupt of cities for another couple of generations.

Realizing that he could progress no further in the USA with his reputation ruined, Yerkes looked to Britain for what he saw as an untapped market. He sold out his Chicago interest for a sum variously estimated at $10m or $15m, but it is unclear whether any of that was left to invest in London given his propensity for extravagant spending – he had, for example, just bought another New York mansion for his favourite mistress.

Yerkes visited London almost annually from 1889 and realized that its transport system needed expanding as it was the largest city in the world and growing with alacrity. Just after the sale of his Chicago business in 1899, Yerkes met with two Englishmen, Thomas Reeves and H. H. Montague Smith who were in search of funding for a new underground railway, the Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway which eventually would become the Charing Cross branch of the Northern Line. The line had been given Parliamentary approval six years previously but investors had been slow to come forward. The
pair offered to sell the line’s charter to Yerkes for a mere $200,000 but of course, that also entailed the obligation to fulfil various contracts which the promoters had already signed, notably with Reeves’ own engineering firm. Yerkes persuaded Reeves to scrap the contract but, although quite keen on the plan, still hesitated. He despatched a sidekick, who went by the evocative name of DeLancey Louderback, to investigate the traffic situation in London and learnt that the roads were clogged and as trams were not allowed in the central area, there seemed enormous scope to make a profit on such an enterprise.

In July 1900, Yerkes travelled to London. It was to be a fateful trip both for him and Londoners. A few days after arriving, on August 3, he was taken in a coach and horses along the route of the proposed railway. The thronging streets around Euston, and then the panoramic view of the capital and pastoral landscape to the north from Hampstead where, tortuously, the sun was shining, seemed to have persuaded Yerkes of the scheme’s viability. It was, in truth, the sheer density of the population and the size of London which persuaded him, according to his biographer: ‘Even in a mammoth city like Chicago, the population began to thin out quite dramatically some two miles from the urban center. But that was not the case in London. [Yerkes] later confessed “he had never ridden through five miles of people before in his life”.
⁷

Later that same day, Yerkes met Robert (later to become Sir Robert) Perks, the lawyer for the Charing Cross Railway. It was to be the start of a fruitful collaboration between two men who, on the face of it, could not be more different but whose names, somewhat mispronounced, made for great rhyming headlines. Perks was a devout and upright Methodist whose main claim to posterity is that he raised the funds for the erection of Westminster Central Hall. A supporter of the temperance movement and portrayed by opponents as ‘humourless’ and ‘long faced’, he was in fact just the right man to partner Yerkes whose ambitions went far beyond the acquisition of one embryonic railway. Indeed, Yerkes boasted to a conversation reported by the
rather startled H. H. Montague Smith, ‘a little bit of cheese didn’t satisfy him, he wanted the whole meal’
⁸
. And nearly got it.

The amoral American financier and the moralizing English lawyer hit it off straight away. Perks, an MP in Lincolnshire, knew his way round the British establishment and had all the necessary contacts. It was therefore easy for him to help Yerkes acquire the Charing Cross Railway for the agreed $200,000 at the end of September 1900. Then Perks, a major shareholder in the District Railway, helped Yerkes acquire a majority share in the line in June 1901. Acquiring two other projects, which became the Bakerloo and the Piccadilly soon followed.

Remarkably, all three of Yeakes’ new lines were to open their initial sections in a short period between March 1906 and June 1907, and it would take another sixty-one years for another deep tube line, the Victoria, to be dug under central London. Indeed, between 1903 and 1907, if one includes the Great Northern & City and the Angel to Euston extension of the City & South London, a staggering twenty-six and a half miles of tube railways were built under London. The construction of each of these railways is a complex and intertwined story of Parliamentary bills, heroic efforts to raise capital, opaque financial deals and amazing feats of engineering and construction, most of which passed off with remarkably few mishaps.