The Subterranean Railway (24 page)

Certainly, the history of London’s Underground would have been very different had J.P. Morgan triumphed over Yerkes. There would have been a whole different set of stations on what is now the Piccadilly and there might well have been a line from Clapham Junction to Marble Arch and possibly one from Charing Cross to Acton, both ideas for which Morgan’s team sought Parliamentary approval. Perhaps, too, London would have had an all-night underground service, as New York does, since this was one of the innovations put forward by Morgan which particularly pleased the Parliamentary scrutineers. He suggested that trains would run every two and a half minutes during the rush hour, every five for the rest of the day, and that there would be a half-hourly service in the small hours. Since the Underground, with the odd exception such as New Year’s Eve, has never run all night, would Morgan have been able to deliver on his promise? Had he reckoned on the need for engineering work? Perhaps. Such a service can only be offered if there are sufficient crossovers between the two lines for sections to be closed while still allowing a shuttle service in both directions on the same track, as happens with the Channel
Tunnel. New York can run services all night because many lines are four-track and two can be closed without shutting the whole route. Morgan, with his millions, probably would have managed to get his schemes built, but, on the other hand, would he have matched Yerkes’s amazing achievement in building three lines and electrifying another all in the space of half a decade? Unlikely.

After his victory, Yerkes’s joint proposal melding the various sections of the Great Northern and Brompton schemes into what became the Piccadilly – no nasty amalgamated names to antagonize the
Railway Magazine
here – was given the go-ahead by Parliament in August 1902. Various other rival schemes for parts of that route failed to get Parliamentary approval, leaving Yerkes a clear field. Indeed, so confident was he of victory that work had already started at Knightsbridge the previous month, before the formality of Parliamentary approval.

As with the Bakerloo, work proceeded without major mishap, using the now well-tried technology of the Greathead shield. Officially the contractor was the UERL itself, but the work was then divided up between several subcontractors, an arrangement which made the finances of the company even more opaque. The line was effectively complete by the autumn of 1906 and, after the usual test-running by empty trains and a press run with a good lunch for the journalists at the Criterion, it was opened by the President of the Board of Trade and future Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, on 15 December. This was deliberately timed to cater for the Christmas shopping rush, seen as a lucrative market particularly as, in those days, it was squeezed into a much shorter period than today.

Given that the line was eight and a half miles long, there was no attempt to have a unique fare; but there was only one class. Passengers were charged between a penny and fourpence and one innovation was that they could buy strips of six tickets at a discount between two specified stations. There were season tickets, too, for regular commuters. Since the stations were designed in the same way as those on the Bakerloo, by Leslie Green, and the cars were also similar, there was little
new of note for Londoners to see. With one exception. At Holloway Road station, a circular kind of Trav-o-lator had been built which, the engineers promised, would deliver people up at a rate of 100 feet per minute. This was a heroic failure and was never put into service. Nor, unfortunately, do any drawings of how it was intended to work survive. The remains of the system, a mess of steel chains and decaying wooden steps, were found at the bottom of the lift shaft a few years ago and sit, forlornly, in the London Transport museum depot at Acton, with a sad little notice saying that the idea was ‘not a success and was quickly abandoned after the station opened in December 1906’.

In fact, the first functioning railway escalator in London was opened on 4 October 1911 at Earls Court, between the Piccadilly and District line platforms. A man with a wooden leg, ‘Bumper’ Harris, was reported to have been employed to travel up and down all day to give passengers confidence that they could use it safely, but in fact this oft-told story is a myth.
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Generally, the new device was accepted by the public but its name, ‘escalator’, incurred the wrath of a correspondent to
The Times
,
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a Mr E. Anton, who wrote: ‘you announce the instalment of an “escalator”! Pray save us from such a barbarism.’ He went on to suggest that ‘not one person in 20’ will have an idea of its meaning which, he said, was taken from the French
escalier
, combined with the Latin
ator
, meaning doer. Instead, he suggested it should be called a ‘stair lift’, ‘simple familiar understanded [
sic
] of the people’.

The Piccadilly had one curiosity: the branch between Holborn and the Strand (later called Aldwych), a legacy of the fact that the line had been conceived as three different schemes which were somewhat untidily patched together by Yerkes. The Strand was opened in November 1907 and mostly operated as a shuttle between the two stations on which few people ever travelled. In fact the inaugural service attracted no passengers apart from a labourer who travelled ‘in lonely grandeur to the Strand’.
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However, there was a junction with the northbound main line which enabled a ‘theatre express’ to be run through to Finsbury Park at precisely 11.13 p.m. on every weekday.
Aldwych, at the time, was very much the heart of theatreland and, at least initially, the trains were ‘thronged with appreciative customers’; but the more popular playhouses gradually became those nearer the Piccadilly’s main line, and the service was withdrawn. In truth, the small branch line hardly seemed long enough to make it work bothering to wait for the shuttle service and throughout its life the service to Aldwych was sparsely patronized but it is frequently used today for filming scenes of the Tube.
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Another innovation of the Piccadilly was the decision that some trains should skip the less-used stations in order to reduce running times. Passengers were warned that the train was ‘passing’ the next station, which inspired the title of a 1928 play by Jevan Brandon-Thomas,
Passing Brompton Road
, a mildly successful West End farce about a socialite who thought this was the reason for her poorly attended parties. Brompton Road, always too close to its neighbours, South Kensington and Knightsbridge, in any case closed permanently six years after the play opened and the habit of ‘passing’ stations was quietly dropped. Such anomalous stations built too close to their neighbours have mostly been closed over the years, even though in Paris the distance between Métro stations is much less and there has been no such similar rationalization. The reason is simply that the London lines are on the whole much longer than the Métro and therefore, to keep running times reasonable, stations had to be kept well spaced, apart from the rare exception, such as Covent Garden, which is separated by a mere 280 yards of track from Leicester Square.

The tube line which had first attracted Yerkes’s attention, the Charing Cross, Euston & Hampstead railway, was the last to be completed, as a result of planning delays. The line, as first conceived, was to go from the Strand via Tottenham Court Road to Euston, Camden and Hampstead and, with the usual changes – for example, ensuring a connection with the London & South Eastern railway at Charing Cross – had been approved by Parliament back in 1893. However, raising the capital had proved even more difficult than for
the other tube lines being promoted at the same time. Perks, Yerkes’s strange bedfellow (there were jokes about the machinations of Yerkees and Per-kees in business circles), had become involved in the line in 1897 but the directors’ energies were mostly devoted to keeping the powers alive rather than raising funds to build it. Even though a contractor had been appointed in 1897, no start had been made by the time Yerkes took an interest. Perks acted as intermediary when the company was bought by Yerkes in October 1900 for £100,000, paid by a syndicate dominated by American interests including Marshall Field, the Chicago store magnate.

Before starting work, though, Yerkes was intent on changing the route to accommodate his ideas of stretching into the green fields and had to obtain Parliamentary powers for the new route terminating at Golders Green, where there was also to be a depot. The extension to Golders Green was strongly opposed by Hampstead residents who, aroused by sensationalist press reporting, feared, no less, that the whole Heath risked being damaged by the tunnelling underneath.
The Times
, again ready to stimulate fears about the possible effects of any modern invention, ran a story from ‘a correspondent’ on Christmas Day 1900, presenting an imaginary picture of the possible consequences as if it were a factual news report: ‘A great tube laid under the Heath will, of course, act as a drain, and it is quite likely that the grass and gorse and trees on the Heath will suffer from lack of moisture … Moreover, it seems established that tube trains shake the earth to its surface; the constant jar and quiver will probably have a serious effect on the trees by loosening the roots.’

It was the kind of stuff that may have been reasonable when the first underground trains were being mooted in the 1860s, but
The Times
seems not to have noticed that this was the dawn of the twentieth century. Nevertheless these fears were taken seriously by many of its readers. Eventually, sense prevailed and Hampstead Borough Council, which had originally opposed the line, gave its support, provided no intermediate station between Hampstead and Golders Green were
built.
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As for the ‘jarring’, the line was to be operated using multiple units, not the heavy locomotives originally used on the Central, and the Heath has survived intact. In fact, the line is 250 feet below the surface at Hampstead Heath, the deepest tunnel in the whole system and as far below ground as Nelson stands above Trafalgar Square. Even the nearby Hampstead station is 192 feet below ground, necessitating the longest lift journey on the network.

The Bill for the amendments was passed by Parliament in November 1902 but preliminary demolition and preparation had already been started in July. Tunnelling began in September 1903 and was complete by December 1905. There were very few problems with tunnelling, except at Euston where watery sand proved an obstacle. There were, however, greater difficulties with the stations, notably at the original Charing Cross terminus. Again, the lack of coordination between railway companies caused unnecessary difficulty because the South Eastern Railway, rather than seeing the arrival of the Tube as a great boon, was more concerned with ensuring that there would be no interference to the cab traffic at the front of Charing Cross. But fate intervened. The arched roof of Charing Cross collapsed on 5 December 1905, killing six people
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and wrecking the adjoining Avenue Theatre. The terminus was closed for more than three months and in the meantime the builders of the Hampstead tube took full advantage by digging up the station forecourt and covering it over with steel girders, allowing the contractors to build their station by digging downwards, rather than upwards as they would have done had the accident not occurred.

The final route approved by Parliament allowed for a split into two branches at Camden Town, with the eastern section, originally planned to go only as far as Kentish Town, stretching as far as Archway. On the western side, permission had been obtained to continue another four miles to Hendon and Edgware, but that extension was not built until the 1920s; a plan to reach Watford never materialized. The Hampstead tube would remain as a separate railway to the City & South London until after the Great War and the name ‘Northern line’,
by which both routes are now known, was not used until 1937.

Since this was the third tube line opening within a year, the lucky Londoners might have been a bit blasé about these events – but not enough to forgo the chance a free ride. After Lloyd George, again, had performed the opening ceremony on Saturday, 22 June 1907, travel for the rest of the day was free and
The Times
estimated that 127,000 people used the line. This generosity was not appreciated by everyone. A letter to the
Hampstead & Highgate Express
, written just before the opening, warned that

as this offer is sure to be chiefly taken advantage of by the great unwashed of St Giles’s and the equally hydrophobic denizens of the ‘Dials’ [Seven Dials, then still a slum], not to mention tramps, outdoor dossers of St James’s and Hyde Parks with other germinals, let us hope, for our peace of mind, and body, that the trains will be thoroughly fumigated and disinfected before the railway is opened to the paying public.
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This curmudgeonly fellow’s heart may not have been warmed by the report in the following week’s paper which said that ‘among the Hampstead youngsters who enjoyed themselves in the Tube on Saturday was Ernest Thrush of Wildwood Grove, aged eight years. His final ride landed him at Charing Cross after the last return had left that station. He had never been to London before that Saturday.’

The
Ham & High
itself was more sanguine than its mean-minded correspondent, recognizing in its editorial that the arrival of the Tube had begun to attract development to the area even before its completion, bringing great changes to Hampstead ‘which have begun in the erection of a considerable number of large, first-class houses in the neighbourhood, as well as a terrace of villas adjacent to the Tube station. Shops are to be erected on the North End road, while one block of flats, with a shop underneath, has already been built at the corner of the lane which leads to the Crematorium.’

The terminus, Golders Green, was an interesting portent for the future in showing how the Tube helped the expansion of London. It was the first station on the Yerkes tube lines built in the open air and it showed that such new transport links could quickly transform sleepy outlying villages into thriving London suburbs. Indeed, Golders Green had not even been a village when the Tube arrived, merely, according to contemporary photographs, a farm with a crossroads and a wooden signpost. The first house was only completed in October 1905, less than two years before the station opened, and by the following year the place was already a boom town according to a visitor: ‘Within sight of the Golders Green terminus of the Hampstead Tube, half a dozen estate agents’ pavilions may be counted dotted about the fields.’
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Once construction of the Hampstead line started, the value of the land went up from between £200 and £300 per acre to between £600 and £700. By the end of 1907, six months after the opening, there were seventy-three houses in Golders Green, and by the start of the war this had mushroomed to 471. Nearby, too, Dame Henrietta Barnett’s dream of Hampstead Garden Suburb, where ‘poor shall teach the rich and where the rich, let us hope, shall help the poor to help themselves’ was being realized and made possible by the easy access into town for work.
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