The Subterranean Railway (28 page)

The overcrowding was also to have long-term consequences. At the beginning of the war, as mobilization resulted in hundreds of thousands of new recruits heading to training camps and to southern ports for transfer to France, the Underground Company allowed all uniformed men to travel free until 1 October 1914. But even after the soldiers had to pay, the Underground system had to cope with vastly increased traffic – in contrast with the Second World War when numbers were to go down. There were a variety of causes: the massive troop movements, leave travel, cutbacks in road services as vehicles were used for war and their drivers sent to the front, and the greater affluence that accompanied the high employment levels resulting from the conflict. The major history of the tube network suggests another reason: ‘Another contributory factor [to the growth] was the dim-out enforced after dark as a precaution against air attack – people naturally preferred travel in the well-lit tube cars to slow bus and train journeys through darkened streets.’
⁵
Clearly the Underground Company saw the war as an opportunity, too. For Easter 1915 the company issued a poster using the war in a ironic way to boost passenger numbers: ‘Why bother about the Germans invading the country – invade it yourself by
underground and the motor bus’, a testimony to the confidence and courage of those running the company who were not scared of making light of a very sensitive subject.

The growth continued throughout the war and by 1917 was causing such overcrowding on the tube system that it engendered widespread criticism in the press and even Parliament. The limitations of the technology as originally designed were beginning to be felt. The attendant-operated lifts were slow and there was a shortage of rolling stock, exacerbated by the difficulty of getting spares during the war, which meant many trains were shorter than normal. Although some improvements were being made, such as controlling the lifts from landings (which was faster as well as saving labour), and replacing hydraulic operation with electric lifts or escalators, these were long-term investment programmes which would take decades to complete and had little short-term impact. The overcrowding problem was exacerbated when in May 1918 the government, through the Board of Trade (whose president was now none other than Sir Albert Stanley)
⁶
, ordered a cutback in services because of concern over coal shortages, and several stations had to be closed early or on Sundays. Despite all the problems, overall use of the Underground increased by two thirds during the course of the war, and by the end of the conflict half of all passenger journeys in the capital were on the Underground system.

In terms of the numbers of trains, the busiest section was the Metropolitan’s City widened lines, the link built fifty years previously to allow trains to go from Farringdon across the river and into the overground rail network. This was still one of only three rail connections through London, and the most direct. Therefore it had carried an extraordinary number of troop and other special military trains, a total of 26,000 during the war, an average of sixteen trains per day. At peak periods, in a build-up to an offensive, the traffic was much greater than that, reaching, for example, 210 trains daily for the first fortnight of 1915.

To cope with the crowds on the tube lines, various short-term measures were introduced, including barriers at platforms which slid open once the alighting passengers had left and queuing systems at the busier stations, but in reality little could be done to improve the situation except to increase the overall capacity. It is no exaggeration to suggest that the war made both government and the population realize the extent to which the Underground system was a vital part of the infrastructure of the capital – and even of the nation. The increased usage was so great that, together with a rise in fares of one third, it enabled modest dividends to be paid to all the various shareholders of the companies making up the Combine – with the exception of the District which was still unable to provide its owners with any return whatsoever. The Underground system came of age in the Great War, and now, with Stanley back at the helm after his stint in government, the stage was set for expanding and consolidating the network.

ELEVEN

REACHING OUT

While the short-term effect of the war had been to halt progress on a number of planned developments on the Underground system, the increase in passengers strengthened the case for these extensions to be built. Stanley understood that it would always be difficult to justify these new sections stretching far out into the suburbs and countryside in purely economic terms. Of course, they would generate additional traffic, but that would not be enough to compensate shareholders adequately for their investment and risk. The war therefore marked the end of the pretence that the Underground could be a solely private enterprise; all future work would have a public component in its funding.

Stanley had returned to the Underground after resigning as President of the Board of Trade in 1919 and became Lord Ashfield of Southwell in the 1920 New Year’s Honours list. The two years at the Board of Trade proved to be vital experience for Ashfield, giving him the opportunity to see the world from the other side, an insider in government moving freely among civil servants, MPs and ministers. Previously, Ashfield had been a hands-on manager, wheeling and dealing and outwitting opponents by the sheer vision and clarity of his thinking. Now he became even more impressive, using diplomacy and charm as well as sheer force of intellect. His talent was always obvious but he was a complex character who did not give away
much even in his personal writing. He was, therefore, a somewhat unfathomable genius who confused those who worked with him as they could never quite suss out his aims and motives. Ashfield, for his part, was very perceptive, with a sharp intuitive understanding of his fellow men, and he had that indefinable quality, presence, which allowed him to dominate meetings effortlessly. He inspired loyalty, devotion even, among his staff and he had a quality that was rare in those class-ridden days, the ‘common touch’. There is no doubt that without this formidable character at the helm, the Underground would not have developed so comprehensively and extensively over the next two decades.

The Bakerloo’s expansion to Watford having been completed despite the war, the next proposed extension was for the Central to run out to Ealing Broadway. That line had been opened without electrification to carry freight during the war, but now it needed intermediate stations and electrification to be integrated into the tube system, a task that was carried out quickly with services inaugurated on 3 August 1920. There were also well-developed plans for two extensions: Golders Green to Edgware on the Hampstead railway; and Shepherd’s Bush to Gunnersbury on the Central, which in fact was never built. Ideas for several more were being floated, such as extending the District out to Sutton, linking Highgate with Muswell Hill and extending the Piccadilly beyond Hammersmith, only the last of which was ever realized. Before the war, as we have seen, the economics of such schemes made it impossible to provide adequate returns for shareholders. Now, with both labour and materials more expensive, the price of building a mile of fully equipped tube railway had risen from £600,000 in 1914 to £1m five years later (around £25m in today’s money). The cost of borrowing capital for a private company was around 5½ per cent, while the deep tube lines were returning, even after a strong period of growth, a mere 2 per cent. The basic economics thus demonstrate why the building of lines and extensions on the basis of private capital was coming to an end.

The Underground, therefore, needed to obtain cheap money to fund these schemes. While the Victorian attitude of minimal government involvement was beginning to soften, obtaining direct grants to fund major infrastructure projects was not yet on the political agenda. However, underpinning such schemes with low-interest loans from the state was made possible by the need for Lloyd George’s coalition government to tackle the growing unemployment problem. The post-war boom quickly turned into a major recession, with almost 2 million unemployed by 1921, and the government brought in legislation, the Trade Facilities Act, to encourage public works that would relieve unemployment through Treasury guarantees. Ashfield jumped at the chance and produced a £5m scheme for a variety of works including the extension to Hampstead, 250 new tube carriages and the linking of the Hampstead and City & South London lines at Euston to create what was to become the Northern Line.

The extension to Edgware marked a new departure for the tube railways, the first journey deep into the countryside without an existing main line railway to run alongside, in contrast to the Bakerloo’s line to Watford which ran beside the London & North Western. At last Ashfield was beginning to achieve his ambition of enabling London to grow by creating lines which stimulated development. This section of line marked, too, the start of the new Underground policy which was to allow people to travel from the outer suburbs directly by train, rather than having to change at overcrowded interchanges from trams or buses. Since the Combine now controlled many of these bus and tram routes, it was in a position to run down services when they were in competition with new rail extensions, and ensure that they fed into the Underground rather than competed with it. The concept of ‘integrated transport’, a fashionable term among transport experts today, had not been developed, but Ashfield, more than many of today’s planners, understood precisely what it meant and in a way can be said to have invented it.

Reaching Edgware involved building a viaduct over the Brent Valley,
passing over what is now the North Circular – an impressive edifice for the little flat-fronted trains which spend most of their time in dark tunnels. The ten-year delay between the original approval for extending the line beyond Golders Green and the start of work as a result of the war meant not only a doubling of the cost but also, rather embarrassingly for the Underground company, demolishing some of the very houses which the company had encouraged to be built, because of a change in the northward route.

The open-air stations on the Central’s extension were modest affairs that were little more than shacks, but Pick, who was now assistant managing director of the company, wanted something rather more permanent and stylish for the Edgware branch. The stations at Hendon and Brent were an attempt by the architect, S.A. Heaps, to develop a new suburban type of station. Clearly the late Green’s dark ruby tiled walls would have looked incongruous in suburban and rural settings. Heaps went for a rather conventional classical style, with Portland stone porticos of large Doric columns and spacious but simple brick booking halls. At the centre were oak ‘passimeter’ ticket offices, which had previously only been installed at Kilburn Park in 1921. Passimeters, an American concept, were free-standing booths, fitted out with modern ticketing equipment, which allowed passengers’ tickets to be both issued and checked without having staff at the barriers. They were an ideal labour-saving device for lightly used stations as they enabled the booking clerks both to issue and check tickets from the comfort of their booth. Their awful name, derived from the devices which counted the passengers as they passed through turnstiles on either side of the booth, belied their elegant rectangular shape. Similar booths became fairly standard at outlying Underground stations, but the name, fortunately, did not pass into current usage.

In contrast, Burnt Oak only had a small shed as a ticket office, and no accommodation for passengers as there were none! The station was entirely surrounded by fields, linked to the Edgware Road by an expensive new approach road that foretold of further development. It
was only in 1926 when the London County Council starting building the Watling Estate around the station that traffic picked up, and in 1928 a Heaps Georgian-style building was erected. Fortunately, thereafter Pick did not persevere with Heaps, turning instead to Charles Holden, who, as we see below, built a series of futuristic stations which remain today the only notable buildings in most of the districts they serve.

When the Edgware extension opened in the summer of 1924, the village of barely 1,000 souls had a fast and frequent train service to Charing Cross, with a train every ten minutes taking just half an hour to reach the West End. Clearly, the provision of such a good service was predicated on the expectation of rapid growth.

The line that was to become the Northern was beginning to take shape. A link between Kennington and Charing Cross was built, which, together with the new Camden Town to Euston section, created a loop which allowed trains from the south to go on either the Bank or Charing Cross branches. However, to integrate the Hampstead tube fully with the City & South London required the difficult task of enlarging the older section’s tunnels, by replacing all 22,000 supporting rings which had been built to a slightly smaller gauge. The platforms also needed lengthening so that the whole route could take seven-car trains. That was not only an expensive operation which caused major disruption during 1922–3 but also resulted in one of the rare major tunnel collapses in the history of the Underground.

On 27 November 1923, a train hit a wooden board used to shield the work from the passing train and when the driver stopped to remove it, his guard informed him that there was water and gravel coming into the tunnel behind the train. With great presence of mind the driver managed to get to nearby Borough station, and within fifteen minutes an estimated 650 tons of gravel had collapsed into the tunnel. A huge crater opened up in Newington Causeway, forty feet above the rail line, causing a massive gas explosion when the main broke – but fortuitously a water main also cracked, dousing the flames. Amazingly,
there were no casualties; but the brave attempt to run a partial service through the building work had to be abandoned and a full train service was not restored until a year later.

Meanwhile, work had begun on the extension to Morden, deep in the Surrey countryside, but still, until just before the terminus, in deep tube tunnels. This extension was aimed at tapping into the lucrative markets of Balham and Tooting, and here the Underground was in direct competition with the suburban network of what was now the Southern Railway, one of the four new consolidated railway companies. There was a trade-off, with the Southern agreeing to the extension to Morden provided the Underground Company abandoned plans to extend the District from Wimbledon to Sutton. That deal partly explains the Underground’s absence in much of south London, which, as mentioned before, is also a result of the geological conditions. The attention to detail was demonstrated by the way the Underground Company built an entire mock-up of Morden station inside an exhibition hall to assess the suitability of the design. Morden was in the open air, just below street level, but all the other new stations were connected to the street by escalators.

The Morden section was opened on 13 September 1926 by the junior Transport Minister, John Moore-Brabazon.
¹
The minister made clear in his speech that while he was delighted to be opening the extension and to drive the first train, he stressed that it would only be possible to build further extensions if the railway were well supported and earned the required dividends. Ashfield, standing next to him, said that 14 million extra passengers were required to make the extension pay, but, of course, the complex finances of the company with its hidden subsidies between buses and trains meant that such figures were difficult to verify. Ashfield, naturally, knew such lines could never pay for themselves out of the fare box. By then there was a sixty-year body of evidence (since the completion of the first section of the Metropolitan) to that effect.

The opening marked the end of the first post-war Underground
expansion programme funded on cheap government money. While London Underground would benefit three times in the inter-war period from government measures which encouraged such expansion and allowed the network to expand considerably, these policies were always a result of a wider macroeconomic strategy designed to reduce unemployment. They were not what they should have been: a recognition of the fundamental benefits of having an efficient and cheap transportation system in a city like London. Indeed, this is a characteristic of the whole history of the Underground which Brabazon’s ill-informed comments illustrate well. Successive government have failed to recognize the intrinsic value of the system not just for Londoners but as part of the lifeblood of the whole nation. Investment has always been a balancing item in the national accounts or a bauble thrown to London Underground in furtherance of wider economic objectives.

An average of thirteen trains per hour were run from Morden to Golders Green via Charing Cross but at peak times some went on the other section via Bank. The railway, which was effectively today’s Northern line, with the exception of the extension out to High Barnet and Mill Hill East from Highgate, still did not have a proper name. There was no easy way to identify it as there had been with the Bakerloo.
The Times
tried valiantly with ghastly suggestions such as Edgmor, Medgeway, Mordenware and even Edgmorden, but none had the simple ring of its predecessor. It was not until 1937 when work started north of Highgate that ‘Northern line’ was adopted as the official title, a confusing choice to people unfamiliar with the system since it is the only tube line that penetrates into deepest south London.

The Underground Company, far-sighted as ever, created what was effectively the first ‘park and ride’ station at Morden. An extensive network of single-decker buses from such places as Cheam, Sutton, Mitcham and Banstead took passengers to the station, and the company built a huge shed opposite the Underground terminus to house both cars and cycles for those arriving at the station under their
own steam. At the time, Morden was a mere village, with barely 1,000 inhabitants. As one history describes it, ‘Clustered around the new terminus were three streets of cottages, three or four large villas and the Crown Inn. All around, as far as the eye could see, were fields and parklands.’
²
That soon changed. Within five years, according to the 1931 census, there were 12,600 residents.