The Subterranean Railway (7 page)

The Metropolitan had been the first railway to be required to run such cheap workmen’s trains, as this was a condition of being granted powers, in 1861,
²¹
to extend the line through to Moorgate and double the tracks to four between King’s Cross and Farringdon. The condition had been suggested by the Metropolitan to allay criticism that the railway was destroying large swathes of housing and therefore turning working men out of their homes. However, the Metropolitan began running these trains even before the extension was completed, exploiting what was a very useful source of extra revenue. The London, Chatham & Dover Railway, which, as we see below, connected over the Thames with the Metropolitan in 1866, was also required to provide similar cheap trains but those using them had to go through huge bureaucratic hoops. The trains were to be for the exclusive use of ‘artisans mechanics and daily labourers, both male and female’ going to their work or returning from their jobs to their homes. They were required to buy a weekly ticket for a shilling, and, to prevent abuse, the ticket holder was required to give not only their name and address but those of their employer and not vary the journey or carry any luggage except for a workman’s basket of tools ‘not exceeding 28lbs in weight’.

The Metropolitan imposed no such conditions on its trains. Mayhew, travelling on a 5.15 train one Saturday morning in 1865, complained of having to get up at such a ‘ghostly and burglarious’ hour in order to catch the workers’ train. He was most impressed with
the whole set-up, though one slightly suspects that he was in a frame of mind to be positive about the new invention from the outset. His book of reportage about Britain’s industry, which took him around the country, starts with a typically florid and upbeat description:

It was so novel a means of transit, so peculiar and distinctive a feature of the great English capital, that to omit this underground mode of intercommunication from a publication professing to be descriptive of the foremost institutions and establishments of the British metropolis would be the same as playing the tragedy of Hamlet with the principal character left out. Indeed this subterranean method of locomotion had always struck us as being the most thoroughly Cockney element of all within the wide region of Cockaigne.
²²

Mayhew’s positive feelings about the railway may well have been encouraged by the fact that his book had an advertisement for ‘J Willing, Advertising Contractors, 366 Grays Inn Road, WC’, who were sole contractors for advertising on the Metropolitan, the North London, Hammersmith & City and several other railways and had paid £1,150 for the right to sell books and post advertisements at the stations for a period of three years. The deal must have been a real money-spinner since Willing paid more than £34,000 to renew the contract for a further seven years in 1866. Despite what may appear to readers as a potential conflict of interest, Mayhew’s account is invaluable as it is one of the most detailed contemporary reports of early Underground travel and has the added advantage of being written by someone with an acute eye and a reporter’s instinct.

Mayhew found the carriages to be ‘extremely handsome and roomy vehicles’, forty feet long, and in first class, luxuriously fitted up ‘with six compartments arranged to hold as many as sixty passengers in all’. But even the second and third class, which had eight compartments, he described as ‘fine spacious vehicles; indeed there are no third class
carriages on any other line which are the least comparable to them’.

When Mayhew reached the platform at Bishop’s Road, there was, despite the early hour, ‘a bustle with men, a large number of whom had bass baskets in their hand or tin flagons or basins done up in red handkerchiefs. Some few carried large saws under their arms, and beneath the overcoat of others one could just see a little bit of the flannel jacket worn by carpenters, whilst some were habited in the grey and clay stained fustian suit peculiar to ground labourers.’

His compartment was full of plasterers, joiners and labourers: ‘All present agreed that the cheap and early trains were a great benefit to the operative classes. The labourer assured us that he saved, at least, two shillings a week by them in the matter of rent only. He lived at Notting Hill and would have to walk six miles to and from his work every day, if it were not for the convenience of the railway.’ Moreover, the labourer had benefited from better housing conditions in the way that Pearson had hoped. Thanks to the railway, he was able to live in greater comfort further out of town than he would otherwise. He had two rooms, almost in the open country, for the same price as he would have had to pay for one in a much less salubrious court in the heart of London, and thereby, Mayhew noted, avoided needing ‘medicine for his wife and family’. A plasterer, on his way to Dockhead, joined the conversation and said ‘it was impossible to reckon up how much workmen gained by the workmen’s trains, especially if you took into account the saving in shoe leather, the gain in health and strength and the advantage for men to go to their work fresh and unfatigued by a long walk at the commencement of the day’. The plasterer added that there was a moral benefit, too, ‘since it enabled operatives to have different sleeping rooms for themselves and their young children’.

Mayhew later met another man who also benefited from improved accommodation out of town. He had rented ‘a six roomed house, with a kitchen and for this he paid £28 the year, rent and taxes. He let off four rooms for 8s the week so that he stood at about 3s a week rent for himself and for the same accommodation as he had now, he would
have to pay from 6s to 6s 6d, the week in some wretched dog hole in town.’ The only problem was that the local food was more expensive than in the centre of town, but he bought most of his provisions after work and took them home.

At Gower Street (now Euston Square) Mayhew moved to the next compartment where he found a butcher on the way to the meat market, a newsvendor going to fetch his morning papers, and others connected with the building trade. Most of those he met were extremely supportive of the railway but inevitably he found the odd grouch, a carpenter who ‘was one of those growling and grumbling characters so often met among the working class’ and who failed to perceive the benefit of paying a shilling a week for the service. The carpenter was interrupted by another passenger who extolled the virtues of commuting: ‘If a man gets home tired after his day’s labour, he is inclined to be quarrelsome with his missus and the children, and this leads to all kinds of noises, and ends in him going off to the pub for a little bit of quiet; while if he gets a ride home, and has a good rest after he has knocked off for the day, I can tell you he is as pleasant a fellow again over his supper.’ This might not quite chime with the experience of today’s commuters, crammed by the hundreds into tiny Underground trains.

Mayhew also noted the excellent refreshment bars provided by Messrs Spiers and Pond and here his report seems so like advertising copy that one wonders how many free cakes he was offered: ‘So moderate are the prices and excellent the fare that 300–400 people come daily to dine at the Farringdon Street terminus.’ The company, which also had the concession for the London, Chatham & Dover Railway and the station at Birmingham New Exchange, were ‘manufacturers of all the biscuits, cakes, ices and even soda water which they dispense to their customers and are able to supply better articles at cheaper prices than usually prevail at the wretchedly served refreshment bars of other railways’.

Although Mayhew may have been slightly too ready to accentuate the positives and ignore the negatives about the railway, there is no doubt that the Metropolitan’s immediate impact on London was
enormous. It had the same kind of regenerative effect as modern urban railway systems in London such as the Docklands Light Railway, the Jubilee Line Extension and the London Overground. Landlords and businesses were quick to exploit the potential of the new railway. Its convenience was unrivalled – a mere eighteen minutes from Paddington to Farringdon was the normal schedule (fast non-stopping trains which did the journey in fourteen minutes were briefly introduced but soon dropped because such a schedule was impossible to maintain). Newspaper advertisements for shops began to stress their proximity to the line. Messrs Samuels Brothers of 29 Ludgate Hill, for example, explained how ‘Underground railway passengers have the great advantage of a speedy transit to within four minutes walk of the warehouses’ where they would find that ‘every description of plain and fashionable clothing is supplied to gentlemen and their sons, ready made or made to measure’. Thus, part of the success of the railway was that it not only provided a new mode of transport for existing travellers but generated its own business, a lesson that is still not sufficiently taken account of when ideas for new lines for the twenty-first century are conceived. Even this short section of line was having a major impact on London’s economy.

But the railway was not only for Londoners. The Metropolitan had been forward-looking right from the start by encouraging other rail companies onto its tracks as a way of contributing revenue. They carried people from stations on their own lines, before connecting with the Metropolitan at Paddington or King’s Cross. This, however, caused the row between the Great Western and the Metropolitan as, very soon after its opening, the latter wanted to increase the frequency of its trains from four to six per hour throughout the day. The Great Western, whose rolling stock was being used, was only willing to provide that intensity of service during the peak hours, because it wanted to retain sufficient train paths for its through trains coming off its network into the Underground at Paddington.

Although, as we have seen, the Great Western rather childishly
withdrew its stock, the company continued to run its through trains along the subterranean railway track to Farringdon Street. Indeed, to understand the role of the Metropolitan in these early days, it is best to visualize the railway as a part of the main line network which happened to go underground when it reached London. Through trains for the Great Western via Paddington and for the Great Northern via King’s Cross, which started to operate in October 1863, gave Underground users a host of destinations in the suburbs and beyond. The Great Western, for example, ran trains between Farringdon Street and Windsor, initially using its commodious broad gauge trains. The Great Northern ran trains out to Hatfield and Hitchin and their popularity was clear from the beginning, when the passengers on the first through train to Farringdon Street were reported as expressing their delight by swooping down in force on the newly opened station refreshment buffet and consuming all it contained.

And while the Metropolitan was conceived as primarily a passenger railway, there was also, surprisingly, freight. Mayhew suggests that the ‘the original idea was that [the Metropolitan railway] would receive its chief income from the conveyance of goods from the west to the eastern district of London’ but concedes that ‘this proved so complete a fallacy that, whilst millions of passengers have been carried by it annually, the goods traffic has been comparatively inconsiderable’. However, he predicted this would change when the Circle was complete. In fact, there is little evidence for Mayhew’s assertion. The railway was principally seen by Pearson and its other promoters as a people mover, with goods playing only a small role towards helping the finances of the project. An early example was the carriage of carcasses from the cattle market, which previously had been at Smithfield but had moved a couple of miles north to Islington. After the connection at King’s Cross was opened, the underground line was used to take the dead animals through to Smithfield where there was a special underground spur for deliveries of meat. There were, too, various
new warehouses on the section between King’s Cross and Farringdon which had been built near the line specifically to make use of it and freight was carried until well after World War Two.

The principal use of the Metropolitan was to service the needs of the City of London, which was rapidly growing towards its zenith as the centre of an empire. The City was a magnet for employment throughout the region, ensuring that the Metropolitan’s lines were well used but also putting immediate pressure on the railway company to expand. Indeed, the little stub of a line between Paddington and Farringdon was never intended to be anything but the basis for a much larger network, and even before its completion plans were being drawn up for extensions and branches, with the ultimate aim of a circle around the centre of London. But that aspiration was to take a quarter of a century to become a reality. In the meantime various connections and new lines were added to the system to allow London’s burgeoning major railway companies to make use of the Metropolitan, which had realized that allowing other services onto its tracks for a fee was the quickest and easiest way to achieve profitability.

The success of the Metropolitan also brought forward a spate of proposals for new railways in the capital. There were a staggering 259 different projects for creating around 300 miles of railway – many, of course, duplicating each other and several being little more than lines drawn vaguely on a map – in and around London. If all the lines had been built, four new bridges would have been needed across the Thames and only a quarter of the existing city would have been left standing. That is not as fanciful as may be imagined. In Paris, at around the same time, nearly half the housing was razed to construct the great boulevards, the centrepiece of the grandiose and revolutionary schemes devised by Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann. As one historian put it: ‘The splendid new Paris had many admirers in this country, and a similar havoc could easily have been wrought in London.’
²³
Britain, even at the height of Victorian entrepreneurship, was always more conservative in planning matters
than its European neighbour and more fearful of riding roughshod over the populace, eschewing the
grands projets
so beloved of the French. Muddling through has always been the chosen method of progress and the untidy structure of today’s Underground could be seen as a result of that failure of imagination. In effect, the British state was much more willing than some of its European counterparts to defend the property interests of the landowners, particularly the big ones, against the demands of the railway developers (and the passengers they served). Parliament, therefore, could not stand back idly while the City and Westminster were torn to pieces by competing companies and so, as in the 1840s, fresh parameters for future urban railways had to be established. The score or so of serious schemes were referred to a joint committee of both Houses of Parliament which, reporting in 1864, rejected all but four of the additional lines affecting the Metropolitan – three for various sections of what was to become the inner Circle and one allowing the company to expand out of Baker Street into the north-west suburbs which, as we shall see later, was to be a far-reaching decision both for the Metropolitan and London.