The Subterranean Railway (14 page)

SIX

THE SEWER RATS

Although the District did not have the vision to create an equivalent of Metroland, the line stimulated considerable development and change in what is now west London. Despite the perpetual cold war with the Metropolitan and its equally permanent impecunious state, the District’s achievements in carving out such a large railway in the last quarter of the nineteenth century were remarkable. In fact, by developing a dense network of lines, in contrast to the Metropolitan’s single line adventure into the depths of the countryside, the District arguably did more than its rival to accelerate the rapid expansion of London’s suburbs. Even before the completion of the Circle, the District’s tracks were incredibly busy, not least because of the company’s desperate need to reward its shareholders. By 1880 trains were serving Fulham, Richmond and Ealing, as well as running the three circle services described above. This meant that even in quiet periods there were always at least fourteen trains per hour in each direction between South Kensington and Mansion House where, until 1884, they terminated. By 1904, the last year of exclusive steam operation, the District was carrying 51 million passengers per year and it ran,
on average
, nearly twenty trains per hour between South Kensington and Mansion House, with more during the peak. This was achieved despite all the problems of unreliability and slow acceleration of steam locomotion in small and not always well-ventilated tunnels.

The vexed issue of ventilation had never gone away and remained a source of controversy until the electrification of the lines in 1905, and while the underground companies still argued that the smoky air was beneficial, a more realistic feel for what Underground travel was like in the early days of the Circle Line can be gleaned from one of the rare detailed contemporary accounts of a trip along the line. In the early 1890s, a journalist with the
English Illustrated Magazine
,
¹
Fred Jane, concerned about the long hours worked in the sulphurous atmosphere by the railway workers, who were often in the tunnels for sixty hours a week, managed to get a footplate ride on locomotive No. 18 around the Circle one bright June morning, which he recounted in great detail as part of a series entitled ‘The Romance of Modern London’. Our hero, travelling anticlockwise, boards at St James’s Park and is accommodated on the platform side behind the left-hand tank, from which he gets a supposedly ‘uninterrupted’ view. The train plunges ‘into a black wall ahead with the shrieking of ten thousand demons rising above the thunder of the wheels. The sensation altogether was much like the inhalation of gas preparatory to having a tooth drawn.’

Jane turned out not to be the most intrepid of reporters. He complains of being too hot, hardly a surprise considering the heat emitted by the locomotive and the tank, and fears for his safety: ‘Visions of accidents, collisions and crumbling tunnels floated through my mind; a fierce wind took away my breath and innumerable blacks filled my eyes. I crouched low and held on like grim death to a little rail near me. Driver, stoker, inspector and engine – all had vanished. Before and behind and on either side was blackness, heavy, dense and impenetrable.’

Westminster, Charing Cross (now Embankment), and the Temple pass by without the poor chap really noticing, but on approaching Blackfriars there is some relief: ‘I looked ahead. Far off in the air, and from it, came four silver threads palpitating like gossamers in the morning breeze. Larger and larger grew the hole, the threads became rails and the hole a station, Blackfriars, with rays of golden sunlight
piercing through the gloom.’

Jane’s style may be rather overwritten, in the Victorian fashion, but his account manages to convey the drama of the men working with a blazing fire in the Stygian gloom of the tunnels:

Off again, a fierce light now trailing out behind us from the open furnace door, lighting up the fireman as he shovelled more coal on to the furnace, throwing great shadows into the air, and revealing overhead a low creamy roof with black lines upon it that seemed to chase and follow us. Ever and anon, the guard’s face could be dimly seen at his window, more like a ghost than a man; while in the glass of the look-out holes were reflected the forms of the engine-men like spirits of the tunnel mocking us from the black pit into which we were plunging. Then again we would seem to stop, and to fall down, down, down, with always the wild shrieking surge and ceaseless clatter of the iron wheels.

He notes how quickly the water is replenished at Aldgate: ‘The fireman at once jumped off the engine and made the necessary arrangements for filling our water tanks. So quickly was this done that probably none of the passengers noticed any difference in the length of stoppage, and in a very short time we were off …’ And he gets excited about the train’s speed: ‘From Farringdon Street to King’s Cross is the longest stretch without a station, and the driver here gave us an exhibition of full speed and No. 18 came into King’s Cross at the rate of some 40 mph. The average speed of trains between one station and another is from 20 to 25 mph.’

Now he enters the oldest tunnelled section of line, which had, over the past thirty years, elicited the most complaints about the atmosphere. He is no exception:

The road [a railway term for the track] now began to be uphill,
and at the same time the air grew more foul. From King’s Cross to Edgware Road, the ventilation is defective and the atmosphere more on a par with the ‘tween decks, forrud’ of a modern ironclad [battleship] in bad weather and that is saying a great deal. By the time we reached Gower Street [now Euston Square] I was coughing and spluttering like a boy with his first cigar. ‘It is a little unpleasant when you ain’t used to it,’ said the driver, with the composure born of long usage, ‘but you ought to come on a hot summer day to get the real thing!’

Other than on that notorious section between King’s Cross and Edgware Road, the journalist finds the air ‘purer than I had expected’ and actually blames the travellers for the fetid air: ‘The bad air so much complained of by the “sewer-rats” – as those who habitually use this Circle are called in the City – is due in a great measure to their almost universal habit of keeping all the windows and ventilators closed.’ He begins to enjoy the journey and notes that ‘the finest bit of scenery on the underground is the Baker Street junction, where a second tunnel lead[s] to the St John’s Wood branches’ which already actually stretched deep into the Buckinghamshire countryside. On the left, he reports, getting a trifle carried away, the station is ‘a medley of crimson and gold; on the right, the daylight creeps in and the picture is a harmony of blue and silver. It is a novel and unexpected sight to see the ordinary black coat of respectability look crimson, as it does when seen after the intense blackness of the tunnel. But like all the other scenes, this was brief and momentary; then a dream of the past.’

Now, changing over to the right-hand side of the locomotive, he notes the trains coming the other way: ‘Far away in the distance was an ever-increasing speck of light – the headlight of an approaching train. A moment later, it had come and gone – a silent flash of light, so silent that it might have been a phantom.’ Not because it was quiet, though, but because ‘our own engine made too much noise for any other sound to be audible’. He adds: ‘Curiously enough, an approaching train is
totally unlike what one would imagine it ought to look like. A strong light bursts from the furnace if it chances to be open, and illuminates the tunnel overhead, the carriage windows and brasswork make lines of light that run off and die in the distance, but the engine itself is lost in the blackness through which it is rushing.’

At High Street Kensington, the engine is changed, No. 7 replacing No. 18. Jane explains how it is necessary to replace the engines because of the strain caused by the numerous stops and that in order to prevent the wheels on one side wearing down faster than the other, ‘engines halve their time run “backwards, forwards”, as they say in the West Country’.

Off he goes again, rushing past ‘men pasting bills on the advertisement hoardings that border on the line below South Kensington’ until reaching St James’s Park seventy minutes after leaving it, just a few minutes longer than it takes today with electric trains. This rapid progress was made possible, the reporter stresses, by the excellence of the brakes and of the block-system of signalling (which means the system is divided by the signals into blocks in which only one train is allowed at any time). While this timing might appear slow for a mere thirteen miles, he points out that there were twenty-seven stops on the journey and that without the stops it would have taken just forty minutes. Rather optimistically, he suggests that if the train were allowed to run full speed around the circle it would take a mere twenty minutes, for what would be a completely pointless trip.

Finally, Jane gives an example of the way that the passengers cause delays: ‘The length of the stoppages could not well be reduced; indeed, they are already too short if we are to believe the tale now current of a wandering Jew sort of passenger – a lady of advanced years who can only alight from a train backwards. Every time she begins to get out, a porter rushes up crying, “Hurry up, ma’am, train’s going” and pushes her in again.’ The apparent paucity of reports of passengers being injured getting on or off the trains seems remarkable, given that each compartment had a door and the station staff must have been under
constant pressure to get these all closed and the trains away again to keep to the tight schedule.

Another graphic description, an entirely negative one, was written in 1887 by the journalist and author R.D. Blumenthal. He recorded his impressions of a journey on the Underground in his diary
²
for 23 June 1887:

I had my first experience of Hades to-day, and if the real thing is to be like that I shall never again do anything wrong. I got into the Underground railway at Baker Street. I wanted to go to Moorgate Street in the City … The compartment in which I sat was filled with passengers who were smoking pipes, as is the British habit, and as the smoke and sulphur from the engine filled the tunnel, all the windows have to be closed. The atmosphere was a mixture of sulphur, coal dust and foul fumes from the oil lamp above; so that by the time we reached Moorgate Street I was near dead of asphyxiation and heat. I should think these Underground railways must soon be discontinued, for they are a menace to health.

For all the discomfort described by Jane and Blumenthal, the Underground was becoming a magnet for Londoners making all sorts of journeys, not just commuting to and from work. Economic growth, although spasmodic with periodic booms and busts, was transforming the lives of millions of people. This combined with the expansion of the London population, created markets for all sorts of activities, ranging from shopping and visiting fairs and exhibitions to attending sports matches. This was the genesis of the consumer society which only became possible through mass transportation systems. There was more holiday time at Christmas, Easter, Whitsun and August, and, despite the protests of the powerful Sabbatarians, Sundays became days of leisure activity as well as churchgoing. The main line railways catered for the seaside trippers, offering return fares to seaside resorts like
Brighton and Margate for between three shillings and sixpence and five shillings while, as we have seen, the Metropolitan extolled the virtues of the countryside for its Sunday strollers.

The District was particularly good at developing markets for its railway aside from peak-hour traffic of people going to and from work. It sponsored many bus services, run by contractors, to feed into its system and it made sure that it laid on extra services for special events. Exhibitions were a major source of traffic and many were held at the then open grounds between the Albert Hall and South Kensington. The District actually built a pedestrian subway under Exhibition Road from South Kensington station, charging users a penny for the pleasure of avoiding the traffic above to reach the exhibitions or South Kensington (later Victoria & Albert) museum. The opening of the passage in May 1885 coincided with the start of an Inventions Exhibition and thereafter the District, rather meanly, only allowed it to be used on special occasions. It was not until December 1908 that it became open permanently and the toll was abolished. Many of the varied set of exhibitions on the grounds in the 1880s attracted huge crowds, including fisheries (attended by 2.75 million people), health, and ‘colonial & Indian’ (the biggest, which brought in 5.5 million). The District further encouraged this trade by offering ‘artisans’ a return journey to South Kensington, together with admission for just one shilling. After 1886, when the site was developed for what is now Imperial College, the exhibitions moved to Earls Court.

There, another attraction owed its location, indeed its very existence, to the District: the Big Wheel at Earls Court. The District had already built a covered way to give passengers easy access to the site of the many exhibitions at Earls Court, now the site of the two Exhibition Halls. But it was the Big Wheel, London’s response to the Eiffel Tower, which proved the real draw. Built in 1895, the 300-foot-diameter wheel was based on the famous Ferris wheel in Chicago and attracted 2.5 million visitors during its twelve-year life. Ironically, the biggest lure seems to have been the prospect of a breakdown. In May 1896, the
company running the tower responded to the one prolonged failure by paying each of the hundreds of people who had spent all night dangling in mid-air the sum of £5, equivalent to several months’ wages for many of them. Consequently, a queue of 11,000 people hoping for a similar mishap built up the following day. Just a little north of Earls Court was the Olympia building, opened in 1886 and served by Addison Road station, on the outer Circle route. Olympia was used by circuses, including Barnum’s, which attracted massive crowds in the winter of 1889–90, and then was briefly a roller-skating rink when the sport was at the height of its popularity before the Second World War. By the late 1880s, it enjoyed a fantastic train service, with 331 trains daily.