The Subterranean Railway (41 page)

1

Indeed, local politicians were not to gain control of London Transport until 1970, and, after losing it in 1986 with the abolition of the GLC, did not regain it until 2003, a measure of the instability of the complex relationship between central and local government over London’s transport system.

2

A familiar complaint. Even today, London Transport receives around half the level of subsidy in relation to income compared with its counterparts in European cities – typically only 30 per cent of its money comes from subsidy, compared with twice that level in Paris or Berlin.

3

The Times
, 24 June 1907.

4

By coincidence, both momentous years in the future history of London’s transport system: the creation of London Transport and its nationalization.

5

The family was originally called Knattriess.

6

Stanley told this story, for which there is no contemporary evidence, much later in life.

7

Much was well designed, such as the folding card for the Hampstead, which, when opened, revealed a tube train emerging from a tunnel.

8

The early maps all fall into the trap of trying to represent the real path of the Underground rather than the schematic illustration which Beck introduced.

9

The Times
, 7 October 1908.

10

Alan A. Jackson and Desmond F. Croome,
Rails through Clay
, George Allen & Unwin, 1962, p. 137.

11

Ibid., p. 149.

12

Ibid., p. 143.

13

John Betjeman,
London’s Historic Railway Stations
, John Murray, 1972.

14

Piers Connor,
Going Green
, Capital Transport, 1993, p. 40.

1

Stephen Halliday,
Underground to Everywhere
, Sutton Publishing, 2001, p. 151.

2

Railway Gazette
, 5 October 1917.

3

Cited in John Gregg,
The Shelter of the Tubes
, Capital Transport, 2001, p. 5.

4

Interestingly, work on that railway, with its little two-foot gauge trains and nine-foot diameter tunnels, continued despite the war until 1917, but it was not actually fully fitted out and opened for a further decade.

5

Alan A. Jackson and Desmond F. Croome,
Rails through Clay
, George Allen & Unwin, 1962, p. 155.

6

Stanley’s talents had been spotted by the government which enlisted him in the war effort first as director-general of mechanical transport at the Ministry of Munitions in 1916 and then as President of the Board of Trade, a post which necessitated finding him a seat in the House of Commons and which he held until May 1919.

1

He later became Lord Brabazon of Tara and had been a keen early aviator in
his youth. His main claim to fame was that in 1909 he took a pig up in his aircraft in order to show that the saying about pigs not being able to fly was mistaken. The poor creature was strapped into a bucket on which the slogan ‘I am the first pig to fly’ had been written.

2

Alan A. Jackson and Desmond F. Croome,
Rails through Clay
, George Allen & Unwin, 1962, p. 186.

3

Read out at a public inquiry held by the London and Home Counties Traffic Advisory Committee.

4

Christian Barman,
The Man who built London Transport, a biography of Frank Pick
, David & Charles, 1979.

5

Jackson and Croome, p. 206.

6

Dennis Edwards and Ron Pigram,
London’s Underground Suburbs
, Baton Transport, 1986, p. 38.

7

Desmond F. Croome,
The Piccadilly Line
, Capital Transport, 1998, p. 45.

8

O.S. Nock,
Underground Railways of the World
, A & C Black, 1973, p. 177.

1

Quoted in Dennis Edwards and Ron Pigram,
The Romance of Metroland
, Baton Transport, 1986, p. 24.

2

Quoted in Edwards and Pigram,
The Romance of Metroland
, p. 26.

3

Say, £40,000 to £80,000 today, but comparisons are difficult because house prices have risen much faster than the retail price index.

4

Edwards and Pigram,
The Romance of Metroland
, p. 26.

5

Thereafter, despite the annual cup final and a few other events, Wembley Stadium’s mainstay was its greyhound track, which attracted large crowds travelling by the Underground.

6

Some survived in a different form: the Palestinian one became a Glasgow laundry and the New Zealand one a dance hall.

7

Dennis Edwards and Ron Pigram,
London’s Underground Suburbs
, Baton Transport, 1986, p. 66.

8

Quote in Edwards and Pigram,
London’s Underground Suburbs
, p. 71.

9

Stephen Halliday,
Underground to Everywhere
, Sutton Publishing, 2001, p. 114.

10

Hugh Douglas,
The Underground Story
, Robert Hale, 1963, p. 162.

11

Mike Horne,
The Jubilee Line
, Capital Transport, 2000, p. 16.

12

Edwards and Pigram,
London’s Underground Suburbs
, p. 72.

13

Christian Barman,
The Man who built London Transport, a biography of Frank Pick
, David and Charles 1979, p. 247.

1

T.C. Barker and Michael Robbins,
A History of London Transport
, Vol. 2, George Allen & Unwin, 1974, p. 287.

2

Christian Barman,
The man who built London Transport, a biography of Frank Pick
, David & Charles, 1979, p. 205.

3

F.A.A. Menzler, address to the Institute of Public Administration,
Lord Ashfield and the public corporation
, 1951.

4

Ibid.

5

Barker and Robbins, p. 285.

6

Lord Ashfield, ‘London’s Traffic Problem Reconsidered’,
The 19
^th
Century and After Review
, August 1924, p. 4.

7

John Glover,
London’s Underground
, Ian Allan, 1999, p. 39.

8

Gavin Weightman and Steve Humphries,
The Making of Modern London, 1914–1939
, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1984.

9

It was originally published in the
Daily Herald
and is quoted in Bernard Donoghue and G.W. Jones,
Herbert Morrison, Portrait of a Politician
, Phoenix Press, 2001, p. 116.

10

Donoghue and Jones, p. 121.

11

Ibid., p. 145.

12

House of Commons, 31 March 1931.

13

Financial News
, 14 March 1931.

14

Donoghue and Jones, p. 145.

15

Jonathan Glancey,
London bread and circuses
, Verso, 2001, p. 38.

16

Indeed, this lack of integration still causes problems today. When Transport for London introduced the Oyster card in 2004, it could not be used on much of the suburban rail network for individual journeys and it took until 2009 before it could be generally used for all rail trips in London.

17

Menzler.

18

This was the first Lord Hailsham, the father of the one who was Lord
Chancellor in the 1970s and 1980s.

19

House of Lords, 30 March 1933.

20

Donoghue and Jones, p. 114.

21

Barman, p. 155.

22

Ibid., p. 160.

23

Ibid., p. 155.

24

Glancey, p. 35. It was the financial framework which Ken Livingstone, the London Mayor, would seek, unsuccessfully, in his battle with the government during 2001–2 over the Public Private Partnership.

25

Barman, p. 26.

26

Oliver Green and Jeremy-Rewse Davies,
Designed for London: 150 years of transport design
, Laurence King Publications, 1995, p. 13.

27

A term not invented until the 1960s.

28

Green and Davies, p. 15.

29

Quoted in Ibid., p. 15.

30

Nikolaus Pevsner,
Studies in Art, Architecture & Design
, Vol. 2, Thames & Hudson, 1968, p. 193.

31

It now includes other railways such as the Docklands Light Railway and the North London line. See Tim Demuth,
The Spread of London’s Underground
, Capital Transport, 2003.

32

But visitors may be deceived, too. Bill Bryson points out in his book
Notes From a Small Island
that a tourist might use Beck’s map to get from, say, Bank Station to Mansion House, which would involve a change and six stops, only to emerge 200 yards down the street from where he or she started.

33

A transport term to describe the share of each mode of transport – bus, rail, car, underground etc. – as a percentage of overall journeys.

34

To put this in perspective: even though there was for most people no alternative form of transport in those days, that total represents just half the numbers travelling on a system that is only slightly bigger, with two extra lines, today. Given that car journeys have soared, too, and that the population of the capital is now smaller, that reflects the massive increase in mobility today compared with sixty-five years ago.

35

Barker and Robbins, p. 282.

1

Daily Telegraph
, 2 September 1940. Some of the newspaper quotes in this chapter are taken from the very comprehensive book,
The Shelter of the Tubes
by John Gregg, published by Capital Transport, 2001.

2

Daily Worker
, 7 September 1940.

3

Gregg, p. 24.

4

South London Press
, 1 October 1940.

5

Quoted in the
Hampstead & Highgate Express
, 3 January 1941.

6

Gregg, p. 24.

1

Part of this chapter is based on
Chapter 3
of my previous book,
Down the Tube
, Aurum Press, 2002.

2

Steen Eiler Rasmussen,
London, the Unique City
, MIT Press, 1934, p. 343.

3

At the enquiry into the new Arsenal stadium, the maximum capacity of a Piccadilly Line train was given as 1,056, while that of a Victoria Line train was given as 1,288.

4

There are, incidentally, also well-documented tales of pigeons deliberately hopping into a train for a stop or two, apparently knowing precisely their destination.

5

The figures are not entirely comparable with those in previous chapters because the BTC included those who had travelled on the Underground using British Railways tickets.

6

The first recruits came by boat but flying became the norm thereafter.

7

Interviewed by Felicity Premru at the London Transport Museum for the exhibition ‘Sun-a-shine, rain-a-fall’.

8

As Stephen Halliday points out in
Underground to Everywhere
, in the five years ‘1954–9 the value of the Underground’s fixed assets increased by less than 5 per cent before depreciation, which demonstrates that the assets were being run down rather than built up’. It was what economists call disinvestment. In 1955, the British Transport Commission launched a plan to modernize the national rail network and replace steam with diesel at a cost of £1.24bn (over £20bn at today’s prices) in the ensuing fifteen years but made nothing available for London Transport.

9

After three failed attempts to shut it, the line was finally closed in 1994 when there were so few passengers – 100 per day – that the drivers reportedly said they knew most of them.

10

T.C. Barker and Michael Robbins,
A History of London Transport
, Vol. 2, George Allen & Unwin, 1974, p. 344.

11

A small pamphlet,
London Transport Railway Signalling, papers on the life and work of Robert Dell 1900–1992
, Nebulous Books, 1999, outlines his achievements.

12

Computers generally drive the trains in a more economical way, although the issue is quite complex. The frequent adjustments to the speed made automatically, compared with a human being who will make fewer changes, can increase the wear and tear on a train.

13

London Transport Executive,
Annual Report and Accounts for the year ended 31 December 1971
, p. 22.

14

The exception was 1970 when the Tories retained it, but otherwise the GLC changed hands at every other election (1964 – 1981) for its whole existence.

15

Christian Wolmar,
Down The Tube
, Aurum, 2002, p 65, now available for Kindle at Amazon.

16

The only other accident of note, the first major tube disaster, occurred on the Central line in April 1953 in a tunnel east of Stratford. There had been a signal failure and trains were being allowed through on a ‘stop and proceed with caution’ basis, but the driver clearly went too fast and slammed into the rear end of the train in front. Twelve people were killed and forty-six injured, and safety procedures following signal failures were tightened up.

17

See C. Wolmar,
Down the Tube
, Aurum Press, 2002,
Chapter 4
, for a detailed account of the King’s Cross disaster.

18

Desmond Fennell,
Investigation into the King’s Cross Fire
, HMSO, 1988, Cm 499.

19

My previous book,
Down the Tube
, is an account of how the PPP scheme came about.

20

National Audit Office,
London Underground: Are the Public Private Partnerships likely to work successfully
and
London Underground PPP: Were they good deals
, The Stationery Office, 2004.