Fire and Steam (19 page)

Railway companies, despite their size, were still pretty crude affairs and the model of a business firm, as we know it today, with departments headed by directors and a board of management, was only starting to develop. Huish introduced novel forms of accountancy and management systems that were to be widely imitated in the future, both within and beyond the railway industry. He encouraged the use of the rail network at night for mail and goods trains, thus relieving congestion in the day and making better use of the railway's assets. As his biographer Terry Gourvish puts it, ‘the experience of Huish and his company marks an important chapter in the development not only of railways but also of business management practice as a whole'.
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Huish was one of the first of a new generation of managers who were not engineers but were appointed for their administrative skills as railways became far more complex organizations.

Like Hudson, Huish favoured monopolies, seeing competition as an unnecessary diversion from the task of building up the railway business
through the steady accumulation of capital resulting from high profitability. Under Huish, therefore, the London & North Western was an aggressive company which sought to take over, bypass or crush its rivals using various tactics, such as below-cost fares, the building of new railways or simply trying to bully them into submission with threats. For example, when two railways combined to run a service between Birmingham and Chester using a shorter and therefore cheaper route than its bigger rival's existing line, Huish wrote a letter to the secretary of one of the railways, the Shrewsbury & Chester, in tones that would have done an Italian godfather proud: ‘I need not say if you should be unwise enough to encourage such a proceeding [the operation of the service] it must result in a general fight . . .'
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When the Shrewsbury & Chester refused to back down, Huish lost his temper, immediately closing that railway's booking office at Chester station, which was jointly owned by the two companies, and ordering the hapless booking clerk to be thrown out along with his tickets. Legal agreements over the onward carriage of traffic from Chester to Merseyside were broken and a price war ensued. However, like many bullies faced by courageous opponents prepared to stand up to them, Huish lost. A three-year court case resulted in defeat for the London & North Western and the two companies made matters worse for Huish by soon merging with the Great Western, creating a rival through route to Liverpool.

For the most part, however, the Goliath was victorious in these squabbles and the London & North Western grew through acquisition in the 1850s, taking over several neighbouring railways after making similar threats. However, while the company's income increased dramatically, nearly doubling during the decade, its profitability was reduced because of growing competition and the fact that it was forced into acquiring or building marginal railways that were loss-making.

Huish's desire to limit competition led him to be the driving force behind the establishment of a cartel of the eight railways operating on the Anglo-Scottish routes. This ‘Octuple' arrangement, introduced in April 1851, created a complex fares pooling system that involved companies sharing their revenue and allocating it on the basis of mileage covered, once expenses had been deducted. However, it was short-lived as a result of the desire of some members to maximize their
share of the huge business generated by the Great Exhibition which opened the following month in London.

The Great Exhibition marked a turning point in the public's attitude towards the railways, helping them overcome the stigma they had suffered as a result of the mania and its collapse. The brainchild of Queen Victoria's husband, Prince Albert, the Exhibition was conceived to celebrate Britain's technological progress and, especially, its dominant position in the world. This ‘somewhat arrogant parading of accomplishments'
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was the first ever international exhibition and was intended to be a major tourist attraction luring visitors from both home and abroad. Early in the planning process, the organizers realized that the railways would play a key role in transporting the millions of visitors needed to make the exhibition viable. The 13,000 exhibits were housed in a huge glass building, dubbed the Crystal Palace,
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erected in London's Hyde Park. Over six months it attracted a staggering 6,200,000 people (a third of the population of England and Wales),
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including 110,000 on the busiest day. The whole nation was gripped by Exhibition fever and entire towns and villages would form ‘Exhibition clubs' which organized excursion trains up to the capital – for many, their first-ever train journey. People came from abroad, too, though not as many as had been expected, mostly travelling by train and steamship. The South Eastern had arranged a package deal with its partner on the other side of the Channel, La Compagnie du Chemin de Fer du Nord, but complained that the fares imposed by the French company were too high.

The railway companies, initially slow to appreciate the import of the Exhibition business, soon realized that it could be a money-spinner and started organizing special services to the capital. At first they had tried to stick to the Octuple agreement under which they all charged the same fares, but cheap rates offered by steamship companies between Hull and London forced the Great Northern to cut its prices, sparking off a war with its rivals, the Midland and the London & North Western. Soon they responded by offering return fares to London from Leeds or Sheffield for just 5s (a third of the going rate before the price war) and the Great Northern trumped them by promising a John Lewis type ‘Never knowingly undersold' deal of 6d less than any other railway offered. Despite the collapse of the cartel arrangements, the railways
profited from the Exhibition and the London & North Western, as the largest railway, carried more visitors than any of its rivals. Huish reported that his railway had taken three quarters of a million people in and out of London during the period of the Exhibition, 90,000 of whom had travelled in 145 excursion trains and the rest on its normal scheduled services.

While this influx of visitors helped boost the profitability of the various railways, there was a more important longer-term effect: the efficiency with which they carried these millions of visitors to London and back greatly improved the public's perception of the companies. Without the railways, the Exhibition would never have attracted the volume of visitors or had such a deep and long-lasting impact. The railways had helped to create this huge popular festival which did much to give Britain its sense of identity following the troubled first half of the century. Indeed, the very term ‘Victorian' began to be used around this time.

With the Great Exhibition, excursion trains and the expansion of the network into the nooks and crannies of rural England, a mere quarter of a century after the opening of the Liverpool & Manchester, train travel had become commonplace. In 1854, 92 million journeys were made in England and Wales on a network of around 6,000 miles (which demonstrates nevertheless that the intensity of use was far less than today when over a billion journeys are taken on a system of just under twice the size). By then, virtually every town of any significance in England had been connected to the network, the major exceptions were Luton, Hereford, Yeovil and Weymouth, which would all soon get their stations. The importance of a delay in connection to the network can be shown by the fate of Norwich, which was the ninth biggest city in England at the 1831 census but had fallen to thirteenth ten years later, partly as a result of having no rail connection until 1845. Shrewsbury is a good reverse example, showing how a town that had good railway services could be transformed. Shrewsbury had lost its traditional flannel manufacture to nearby Welshpool and Newtown, but quickly recovered by exploiting its position as a railway centre with the establishment of a major carriage works which, by the 1880s, was producing thirty vehicles per week.

While the railways stood in greater esteem after 1851, that was not enough for the parliamentarians to give them what their leaders, such as Huish, wanted – a monopoly over the areas they controlled or at least the opportunity to rationalize the industry to consolidate their dominant position. Huish's plan was to merge with both the Midland and a smaller but highly profitable railway, the North Staffordshire. The latter demonstrated that companies did not have to be big or connected with London to make a profit during this period: serving the Potteries with 112 miles of route and centred on Stoke, the North Staffordshire linked at various points such as Derby and Crewe with its larger neighbours, the Midland and the London & North Western, ensuring a healthy level of traffic. Huish wanted to gain control of the railway to give him a short cut to Manchester. However the Knotty – so named because the badge of the railway was a Staffordshire knot – managed to resist both his blandishments and his aggression, and even had the cheek to propose an alliance with the Great Western that would siphon off some of Huish's traffic. Thanks to its steadfastness, the Knotty in fact survived as an independent railway until the amalgamation of 1923.

The London & North Western's merger with the Midland would have been an altogether different proposition given the latter's enormous but rather uncoordinated network. The Midland, whose very name was a misnomer since its lines extended well beyond the Midlands, had survived the departure of Hudson but the railway had not profited from the Exhibition like its rivals because it lacked direct access to London. Of the two possible solutions – building its own line through to the capital or merging with a company that already had one – the second seemed the easier option for the directors who were in something of a panic after the poor 1851 results. The London & North Western and the Great Northern were approached in turn, and both were somewhat lukewarm, but the following year Huish warmed to the idea and a Bill for the amalgamation was tabled in Parliament. Here again, the opportunity to create a more rational and integrated railway system was lost. Parliament stalled in its usual way by appointing a committee, chaired by Edward Cardwell, a prominent Liberal who later became Secretary of State for War under Gladstone, to examine the issue.
Despite hearing evidence from many senior figures in the industry who were in favour of the amalgamation, after much prevarication the committee effectively ruled against a merger and the Bill was thrown out by MPs in 1854. So too was a plan to merge the various East Anglian railways which, serving a poor and sparsely populated area, were always impoverished and underinvested. Eventually, however, with the threat of bankruptcy looming, they were finally allowed to create the Great Eastern Railway in 1862.

The thrust of the committee's reports had been rather contradictory, setting out both the advantages and disadvantages of amalgamation, and another merger, the creation of the North Eastern Railway from three separate railways centred around York, was allowed through in the same year. This grouping, the fourth largest in terms of mileage, took in the famous Stockton & Darlington nine years later, and was to become one of the great railways of the second half of the century, benefiting from the prosperity of the booming industrial area it served.

With its merger plans stymied, the Midland therefore had to make its own way to London. The company revived an earlier scheme to build a line from Leicester to Hitchin, which had previously been authorized but had fallen into abeyance, quickly obtaining parliamentary authorization to build the line but construction proved to be a major burden for the company. The contractor was Thomas Brassey, who had recently built nearly all of the Great Northern from King's Cross to York and was the most successful contractor of his generation. By the time of his death in 1870 he had constructed a tenth of the mileage of the entire British rail network (and more than double that mileage abroad),
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while retaining the trust and regard of all those for whom he worked. As his Victorian biographer commented, ‘no one, investigating the history of the work that Brassey undertook, has come forward to suggest that it was shoddy, that he broke his word, that his treatment of employees was harsh or mean',
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quite a testament for a man who spent his life in such a cut-throat and sometimes shady business. Unlike many of his fellow contractors, Brassey, born of modestly affluent yeoman parents, did not do it for the money but for the genuine ambition to create a railway network. Although on his death he bequeathed greater wealth than any comparable self-made man of the Victorian era (£3.2m,
say £225m in today's money), Brassey made no attempt to mix in high society and never stood for Parliament (unlike almost every other contemporary prominent developer and promoter of the railways). He was more than a contractor – typically the builders of railway lines often took part of the financial risk, investing their own money to help bring schemes to fruition – but despite his personal financial outlay, he survived the crash of 1868, unlike his sometime partner, Sir Samuel Peto.

The construction of the line, which began in 1853, posed both physical and financial constraints for the Midland. There were four sets of hills to cross and the original plans had envisaged considerable tunnelling, but this proved expensive and a cheaper route, with more gradients and bends, was chosen. The line was being built at a difficult time politically, with the Crimean War in full swing, which not only deterred investors but also pushed up the cost of materials. The Midland limited itself to spending £1m on the line and managed to stick to that budget, a mere £16,000 per mile, which was half the average cost of lines built in the previous decade.
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The line from the north and the Midlands through to Hitchin opened in May 1857, where it connected with the Great Northern's tracks to King's Cross, over which the Midland had running rights. Thus, at last, fourteen years after its creation, the Midland could operate its own trains through to London. Yet that still did not solve all its problems. The Great Northern's tracks were crowded and, quite understandably, its own trains were given preference, despite the generous tolls which the company received from the Midland. The Midland's lucrative coal trains from the rich south Yorkshire coalfields mostly used the old route from the north on the London & North Western's tracks between Rugby and London, but those lines, too, were burdened with a heavy load of both goods and passenger traffic. The answer was obvious but it would take another decade before the directors of what had become a very profitable railway were brave enough to decide to build another line to London terminating at that Gothic palace, St Pancras station.