Underground, Overground (29 page)

In 1927 a poster by Lunt Roberts called
Behave Yourself
began to be displayed:

I entered the Tube station and took my place in the queue

I had the exact fare ready

I passed across the lift

I stood clear of the gates

I bewared of pick-pockets

I passed down to the other end of the platform

I let them off the car first …

And so on, down to:

I had my ticket ready

I emerged by the ‘Exit Only'

I walked smartly to the office

Why?

Because I do it every day.

Why?

Because I'm, unfortunately, that sort of chap.

The ‘unfortunately' was meant to draw the sting, but in
Underground Writing
, David Welsh chronicles the bad press that the inter-war Tube – the ‘machine' – received from novelists, their reaction ranging ‘from alienation to fear to anger and frustration'. The critic-in-chief was George Orwell. In
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
the social drop-out Gordon Comstock observes the Tube, that enabler of capitalism, with increasing bitterness: ‘Something deep below made the stone street shiver. The tube-train, sliding through middle earth. He had a vision of London, of the western world; he saw a thousand million slaves toiling and grovelling about the throne of money.' Welsh makes the point that Comstock's girlfriend, Rosemary, can afford the Tube while he can't. She is liberated by the thing he rejects; the Tube is emasculating.

Comstock inhabits a London containing ‘seven million people,
sliding to and fro, avoiding contact'. He ‘avoided and was avoided'. People attempted the same on the Tube.
The Tube Train
, a woodcut of 1934 by Cyril Edward Power, shows a carriage packed with commuters, and every single one is reading the newspaper – apparently the same newspaper. And so the atomisation the novelists complained of is voluntarily reinforced. Today you can insulate yourself doubly, with newspaper
and
iPod.

And while more and more Tube riders are listening to their own soundtracks, London Underground is ever keener to make announcements.

For a long time the Underground communicated with its passengers largely by signage, or by occasional shouting – as in the case of the gatemen calling out the station names – and I liked it better like that because the shouts were intermittent. You could surrender your body to the machine but keep your mind independent. In 1938 loudspeakers were installed at 120 of the busiest stations, enabling news of delays to be broadcast to passengers from line control centres. The driver was given the ability to communicate with all his passengers when the first one-person-operated trains were introduced on the Victoria Line in the 1960s, and today the communications are incessant. This is partly determined by disability discrimination legislation, partly because about 20 per cent of the Tube's customers are from outside London and genuinely don't know where to alight for London Zoo. Also, between 2003 and 2009 London Underground had a managing director – an otherwise charming Irish-American called Tim O'Toole – who was messianic about ‘passenger information', regardless of the consideration that the most beautiful thing about the off-peak Tube used to be its dreaminess. And so regular announcements are made ‘in real time' by staff at particular stations, or recorded by them for regular use. Announcements can also be made ‘long line' – that is, from the control centre of the line. And the drivers have a menu
of automated announcements that they can trigger. (I prefer the ones who address the passengers themselves, but in a low-key way, with the mumbling modesty of indie rockers: ‘Right … this one's via Bank.')

The operation of the first escalators provided an early excuse for shouting at passengers. The very first escalator had been installed at Earl's Court in 1911, and may or may not have been demonstrated to the public by a one-legged man called Bumper Harris. In the early 1920s Charing Cross (now Embankment), where the Hampstead Tube, the Bakerloo and the District coincided, was the busiest station on the network, and its escalators operated in conjunction with a scratchy, wheedling voice endlessly saying ‘Please keep moving. If you must stand, stand on the right. Some are in a hurry, don't impede them.' The voice came from a shellac disc played on a machine called a Stentorphone, which was a gramophone with a primitive amplifier. Note: (a) the use of the word ‘impede', too rarefied for modern London; and (b) ‘stand on the right.' Why on the right? Possibly because the early escalators ended in a diagonal, the stairway terminating sooner for the right foot than the left, and you'd better be ready for that, hence standing. A silent film of 1928 called
Underground
shows a drunken soldier frowning as he descends over signs reading ‘Step off: right foot first', and he falls over at the bottom.

My dad once had a fist-fight at King's Cross with a man who was standing on the left and refused to move after polite requests. But in a way that man was correct. It would be better if we didn't walk on escalators; the swaying and bouncing motion is bad for them. This was explained to me in 1993 by a London Underground escalator engineer who had been part of a campaign called the Key Asset Plan, which had started in 1989, with the aim of fixing the hundred or so escalators on the system (about a third) that were then designated ‘non-goers' – in other
words, they were broken and had remained broken because of under-funding. The Underground escalators had been installed over the twenty years after that first one at Earl's Court, mostly by the American firm Otis (‘escalator' was a trade name of Otis until 1949), and they were meant to last about thirty years. The majority worked with minimal maintenance until the mid-Eighties, when, rather in the same way that all your light bulbs go at once, lots of them stopped working. The ones fixed under the Key Asset Plan, or KAP, were said to have been ‘Kapped', but this could take up to take six months, causing passenger flow to cease altogether at the stations concerned, an escalator being far more efficient than a lift (the rule of thumb is that one escalator does the work of five lifts).

The art of moving people in and out of stations is called ‘passenger flow'. Yet walking on escalators damages them, as most of these passengers seem well aware (or perhaps they're just posing for the photographer). Hence the injunction: ‘
Stand
on the right'.

We have two more passenger injunctions to deal with. First, ‘Keep Feet Off Seats', a command introduced on notices from 1984, but now that most seats are longitudinal it is increasingly
impossible
to put your feet on the opposite seat. Secondly, there is ‘Mind the Gap'.

Gaps occur because a train cannot be as curved as a curved platform. I once asked a London Underground official whether many people had been injured by stepping into the gap. ‘Oh God yes,' he said, ‘thousands.' The very charming Brian Hardy, who is now retired but used to be the Duty Manager of London Underground's Network Control Centre, has a sort of party piece wherein he names all the gaps on the system. He started doing this for me once, and after a while I intervened, asking, ‘How long is this likely to take?' ‘About twenty minutes,' he said, so I asked him just to confine himself to the Northern Line, which he did: ‘… Woodside Park has a very slight curvature, and West Finchley a bigger one, but I don't think there's a “Mind the Gap” announcement because the station's in a built-up area and it would annoy the neighbours. Kentish has a slight curve, so does Belsize and Chalk Farm. Euston on the Charing Cross
branch has a very definite gap. Leicester Square has a slight one …' And so on.

I once interviewed the man who made the first ‘Mind the Gap' announcement: the one that reverberated for about thirty years on the Central Line at Bank, on the Bakerloo at Waterloo and on the northbound Northern Line at Embankment. It was a stentorian command, with that patrician, 1950s' way of saying ‘gap' – ‘gep'. The speaker was Peter Lodge, who in the late Sixties was a sound engineer running his own recording studio in Bayswater, a too provincial location for Michael Winner, who complained ‘it's practically in the country' after an arrangement had been made for one of his films to be dubbed there. So Mr Lodge was spared
that
, but he did work on soundtracks for
The Goodies, Emergency Ward 10
and much else. In 1968 or 1969 – Mr Lodge can't quite recall – he received a call from a Scotsman employed by Telefunken, who had been awarded the contract to provide the equipment for playing the first automated ‘Mind the Gap' announcements. It was the advent of digital technology that had made these a workable proposition.

A professional actor had been recruited to say the words; he was willing to travel all the way to Bayswater, and the Scotsman brought him along to Mr Lodge's studio. He said the words to everyone's satisfaction, but a few days later his agent phoned the Scotsman. The actor wanted it understood that he was to be paid royalties; that every time ‘Mind the Gap' was played he would receive money. According to Mr Lodge, the Scotsman said, ‘“Not likely!” with quite a few expletives along the way.' The warning would be re-recorded, with the Scotsman saying the words, but at the start of this second session Mr Lodge tested the levels by saying, ‘Mind the gap!' at which the Scotsman said, ‘That's fine, I'll take it!' Soon after the announcements went ‘live', Mr Lodge took his children to Waterloo and watched their reaction as an incoming train triggered the warning. ‘Daddy, it's you!' they
exclaimed. It was the only feedback he ever had. Today there's a gentler male voice at Waterloo; on the Central at Bank it's an actual woman, and Mr Lodge only reigns at the northbound Northern Line at Embankment.

Early in 1938 Frank Pick said, ‘There comes a point when the size of London could become its undoing. You cannot pile up people on one site and think they can live efficiently on it.' The statement was made during discussion of the plans for a Green Belt around London, and the words contain a note of despair. It was not the first time. In 1927 Pick had spoken of a ‘Victorian flood tide. Rows and rows of mean houses in mean streets filled in all the gaps for which the suburban network of railways supplied a ready means of transport … Cheap fares for the working classes produced the vast and dreary expanse of north-east London, a district without a redeeming feature in the way of plan or building or object of interest.' London was apparently uncontainable: the trains were faster, and beginning to operate in sinister alliance with cars, in the sense that commuters were willing to drive to and from stations. As Pick's biographer writes: ‘The idea that the Outer Ring … might be in danger of losing all its open spaces filled him with a sort of horror which cannot but have been chilled by a sense of personal involvement.'

The Green Belt (London and Home Counties) Act was passed in 1938. It enabled local authorities around London to purchase land for protection. It would be augmented by the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947, which allowed local authorities throughout Britain to designate areas as ‘green belt' within their development plans.

At the beginning of the war the railways, including the Underground, were subsumed under the Railway Executive
Committee. Pick resigned from London Transport in May 1940. He had reached the end of the seven-year term to which he had been appointed in 1933; he had always been a neurotic workaholic, and now his health was failing. On leaving, he worked first for the Ministry of Transport, then the Ministry of Information, where, in late 1940, he came up against Winston Churchill.

Churchill had proposed that leaflets containing falsehoods should be dropped over enemy countries so as to lower morale, but Pick argued it was ‘bad propaganda' to tell lies. Churchill said this was ‘no time to be concerned with the niceties', and Pick responded, ‘I have never told a lie in my life', in which remark we see the priggishness of that 1927 poster: ‘I entered the Tube station and took my place in the queue/ I had the exact fare ready …'

Churchill –
not
the sort of man who made a point of having the exact fare ready – contemplated Pick for a moment, and said, ‘Mr Pick, Dover was heavily shelled from the French coast yesterday. I shall be at Dover myself tomorrow, it is likely that the town will again be shelled, and it is quite possible that I myself may be killed by one of those shells. If that should happen to me, it would give me great comfort to know that a few hours before my death I had spoken to a man who had never told a lie.' As Pick left the room, Churchill turned to his secretary, John Colville, and said in a deliberately audible whisper, ‘Never let me see that impeccable busman again.'

Pick, incidentally,
was
an ‘impeccable busman', because buses were part of his remit, and he was impeccable in everything. He had pioneered the introduction of fixed bus stops (before then you could flag down a bus from anywhere on its route), and very elegant they were: a tapering concrete pole with an enamel flag on the top, featuring the roundel. He spent many of his weekends travelling on buses, note-pad and green-ink pen to hand, planning new routes and stops. And he was just as
keen to educate bus passengers as he had been Tube riders. He arranged for notices to be posted in buses drawing attention to trade fairs, rugby games, the birth of an elephant in London Zoo and, in 1912, a ‘Votes for Women' meeting at the London Pavilion Theatre.