The Subterranean Railway (25 page)

These opening ceremonies had all become rather routine, and so were the new lines. Fundamentally, they were all based on the same concept with the same style. The lifts serving every station were provided, as on the other two Yerkes tubes, by Otis, the US company; and the cars were, like most of the others, made in America and assembled at Trafford Park in Manchester. This reliance on American equipment did not endear Yerkes and his successors to many Parliamentarians and British industrialists but its use was for practical rather than sentimental reasons. The Americans had greater experience of dealing with electrical equipment and the company defended itself, arguing that English equipment was priced much higher when quotes were sought. In fact, barely 10 per cent of overall purchases were made abroad and the picture, even with the cars, was a mixed one: the
District, for example, bought 280 in Europe and half that number from the UK, which the management complained was an unreliable source because of strikes. The Piccadilly used all European cars, half from France and the rest from Hungary.

The labour to run the system was, of course, all British and there was plenty of it. Drivers were the elite with the top grade receiving, in 1909, seven shillings and a penny per day compared with a porter’s mere two shillings and tenpence and four shillings and sixpence for a booking clerk or guard.
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Conditions were onerous, with a ten-hour day as the norm and just six days paid holiday a year. Time and a quarter was paid for working on Sunday, Christmas Day or Good Friday. Train crews carried meal baskets while station staff had a mess room and booking clerks gas rings where they could cook or brew up in their ticket offices. Staff discipline was strict, along the traditional quasi-military lines adopted by the railways, with workers being dismissed for such minor offences as smoking on duty, overshooting stations or having altercations with passengers. The uniforms had to be worn buttoned to the neck, even in hot weather, and black boots were de rigueur as brown ones were thought to look untidy.

With all these tube lines now open, Londoners were having to learn how to use them. Passengers were used to sedate overground trains where there was always time to get on and off, helped on by polite porters and train dispatchers, but the experience on the Tube was very different. There were plenty of staff: a guard at the front of the train between the first and second cars, and a gateman on the gangway platform between each car and the next. But the trains had to keep time and the staff were ever ready to hurry passengers along with a judicious push or shove, and much shouting: treatment that attracted complaints in newspaper letters columns from aggrieved travellers. The job of the gatemen was made more difficult by the fact that passengers were allowed to travel on the small outside platforms on each car. Indeed, it was probably a pleasant alternative to the crowded insides in the heat of the summer when gatemen were encouraged to
leave the bulkhead doors open for ventilation purposes.

Essentially, Londoners had to be educated the hard way in how to use a mass transit system. In particular, they had to be made to realize that, in the rush hour, they could expect another train within a couple of minutes if they could not get on the first one, rather than twenty or even thirty minutes later as on the suburban overground services. Therefore, it was not worthwhile trying to cram onto an overcrowded train.

On the Yerkes tubes, instead of hand signals like those on the Central, the rear man sounded a bell through to the next gateman once all his passengers were safely on or off the train. The bell ringing travelled up the train until the guard sounded his to inform the driver that the train was ready to depart. This cacophony of bells was a characteristic sound of travelling on the Tube in its early years, until the next generation of trains, with compressed-air-operated sliding doors, began to be introduced in 1919 and became universal in the interwar years. These did not require gatemen between each set of cars, an added advantage at a time when labour was in short supply after the carnage of the Great War.
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Another source of complaint was the poor accent of the gatemen who, despite the name plates and differently coloured tiles at each stop, were required to shout the name of every station, turning Tottenham Court Road into
Totnacorranex
, Hampstead into
Ampstid
and Highgate into
Iggit
. It was, though, the perception that the staff were discourteous which attracted the most criticism. The
Railway Engineer
used it to further its campaign against all things American: ‘Such methods [of dealing with customers] are only importations from America, where rudeness and noise from railway servants are meekly tolerated, if not appreciated.’
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Such comments were part of a concerted campaign against the Underground by a largely hostile press. Every little incident was picked up, in a not dissimilar way to the rough ride given to the railways in the UK especially since the mid-nineties’ privatization. Like Nokes’s remark about the name ‘Bakerloo’, much of the coverage was anti-American,
a criticism of ‘their’ methods of doing business and treating customers. The District, too, attracted considerable negative coverage with various mechanical failures and, in particular, its primitive air-operated doors which apparently had a tendency to tear off ladies’ skirts, something particularly shocking to the Edwardian psyche.

The coverage of what were often simply teething problems in a remarkable new system of electrified railways was so negative that Sir George Gibb, the managing director of UERL, wrote to the papers complaining of ‘a perpetual shower of virulent and premature criticism’. To no avail. He failed to stop the flow of negative coverage, not least because at root there was a fundamental problem: as soon as numbers on the Bakerloo failed to meet expectations, the company was permanently at risk of going bust and the press picked up on this financial weakness.

Indeed, in financial terms, unlike the Central, the three Yerkes tubes were a flop – the
Railway Engineer
in July 1906 was ready to write off the Bakerloo, observing, somewhat prematurely, ‘this tube railway may now be regarded as a beautiful failure’. The passenger figures for all three lines were nowhere near expectations, nor indeed close to the levels needed to give the rate of return which Yerkes had promised. Yerkes had procured the services of Stephen Sellon, a tramway expert, and used his figures gaily to predict annual passenger numbers of 60, 50 and 35 million respectively for the Piccadilly, Hampstead and Bakerloo as well as a massive increase for the District, which, following electrification, was projected to attract 100 million users annually. In reality, in the opening full years of each of these lines, the totals were respectively 26, 25 and 20.5 million, around half the totals predicted, and the District carried just 55 million passengers in 1906.

In fairness, there is a long tradition of railway passenger predictions being over-optimistic and such errors are still commonplace today.
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It is a necessary game to go through because the railway promoters, whose motive is often more complex than simply to make money, know that their projects will benefit society and be impressive memorials even if they don’t stack up economically. But nowadays, governments pick
up the tab for such schemes, as half-built infrastructure projects are too much of a political embarrassment, whereas poor old Speyer had to battle with shareholders in order to keep the companies solvent. Modern projects, too, are invariably dogged by cost overruns, whereas, to his credit, Yerkes seems to have built his lines on schedule and on budget, though the opaqueness of the contracting arrangements means it is impossible to verify that absolutely.

The timing of the building of the tube lines was fortuitous and Londoners owe Yerkes rather more than may be apparent. Just as Pearson’s foresight ensured the construction of underground railways long before any other countries were considering such schemes, and otherwise they might never have happened at all, so, too, did Yerkes ensure that London had a tube network. It is no exaggeration to say that, without him, many of the tube lines might never have been built. As we have seen, while the plans to build them had been given Parliamentary sanction, they were all stalled by planning and financial difficulties.

Had there been a delay of even as little as ten years, the competition from the motor bus would have deterred investors. The idea of the motor bus began to be considered in the late 1890s, and after various failed experiments with electric and steam vehicles, the first one ran on London’s streets before the century was out. In October 1899, the Motor Traction Company started running two twenty-six-seater buses, powered by Daimler engines, between Kennington and Victoria, later extending the route to Oxford Circus. The service lasted just over a year and there was a smattering of other efforts, but fortunately for Yerkes, at the time when he was seeking capital for his various railway enterprises, in 1901–2, the motor buses had not managed to obtain a toehold in the market, nor to present a convincing case for potential investors despite the fact that petrol engine technology was becoming more reliable. It was not, in fact, until 1905 that motor buses began to be used in any great numbers and start to displace the horse buses which, while cheaper to purchase, were much more expensive to run, oats being more costly than petrol.

Therefore Yerkes had sufficient time to obtain capital and, crucially, start building his railway before the arrival of the much less capital-intensive and potentially profitable motor buses. It was just in time given that the war would have stopped the construction of any planned railways, and the technological developments it engendered gave motor transport even more of a competitive advantage compared with rail. Yerkes’s amazing feat in raising the vast sum of £18m to push through the construction of these lines was crucial in ensuring that London got its Tube network. Given the crucial role these lines played during the interwar years in fostering the growth of the northern suburbs, it could be argued that much of London owes its existence to the early failure to take advantage of the internal combustion engine.

The depth of Yerkes’s achievement is made greater, too, by the fact that he built the central parts of the system, which were the most expensive and technically difficult, rather than bringing in a semi-suburban railway to meet the Circle line at the edge of the capital in the hope of raising revenue to continue work. Moreover, Yerkes bravely raised all the funds in one huge deal. What he told the investors to persuade them to stump up the money is unclear, but the poor souls did not make any money.

Yerkes never saw any of these tube lines open. Like Pearson before him, he died before seeing the fruits of his efforts. In ill-health, he had chaired a meeting of the UERL where he had to calm down irate directors representing worried shareholders, and the following month he returned to the USA where he died of kidney disease on 29 December at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, a few blocks from his own mansion where his estranged wife was living. His debts ate up most of his intended bequests, but his great legacy, the Underground Electric Railway Limited, survived, with Yerkes’s banker, Sir Edgar Speyer, as chairman. When the UERL took over two more tube lines just before the Great War, the City & South London section of what became the Northern, and the Central, it would become known as the Combine, controlling all major underground lines apart from the Metropolitan.

NINE

BEGINNING TO

MAKE SENSE

The pattern of London’s Underground network was now set. It was not to be until the late 1960s that another tube line under the centre of London would be opened but, for the time being, there was plenty of spare capacity and some duplication, where lines competed against each other, in a system which had expanded at such a breathtaking pace. The haphazard method of development was partly the price London had paid for being a pioneer, and partly due to the refusal of the government to engage with the planning of the system, leaving it all to the capricious Parliamentary process. The French system of central planning was not the British way, which was still dominated by its emphasis on entrepreneurship and a disdain for government involvement, notably the refusal of the state to pay for these railways.

However, the system could not continue as a random collection of uncoordinated lines, and the next two decades of Underground history were more about consolidation and creating a coherent administrative structure following the exciting Edwardian period of development. That does not mean that this era was either dull or unadventurous since there were, after the war, significant extensions into the suburbs and the establishment of the London Passenger Transport Board at the end of the period was a ground-breaking triumph. And just as
the physical creation of the network required pioneers and heroes such as Pearson, Watkin, Forbes and Yerkes, so did its melding into the most famous and respected transport system in the world. Again, it was two very different men who achieved that success, this time working together, even though at times their relationship was difficult: Frank Pick who joined the Underground Electric Railway Limited at a junior managerial level in 1906 and became chief executive of London Transport on its creation; and Albert Stanley (later Lord Ashfield) who joined the UERL in 1907 and eventually became chairman of London Transport.

The years before the Great War were the start of the consolidation and integration of London’s transport system through a concentration of ownership and the creation of links, both physical and practical, such as the use of through-ticketing between lines. But it was to take twenty years, interrupted by the world’s greatest conflict, to knit the disparate bits of London’s transport system into London Transport. First there was the issue of saving the Underground from bankruptcy, which was the responsibility of Speyer and his new managing director (later Sir) George Gibb. The parts played by both Speyer and Gibb in this story may be minor when set against the likes of a Pearson or Pick but they are nevertheless highly significant. Speyer took on Gibb because he realized he needed an experienced railway operator following the departure and death of Yerkes. Gibb, a Scottish solicitor, was what we would now call a moderniser – broad-minded and accessible – traits rarely found then in the rail industry. He had previously been general manager of the North Eastern Railway where he had reformed the administration, notably making use of statistics to inform business decisions, which may sound obvious but was innovatory at the time and became the basis of his efforts to simplify the Underground structure. Unlike many railway operators, who tended to be insular, he learned from the experience of a visit to the USA and attempted to apply ideas he had learnt there. He was also unlike his peers in being friendly towards the press, despite its overall hostile attitude towards
the railways, and even took an interest in transport economics. Gibb’s most outstanding but unwitting legacy was that he appointed both Pick and Stanley, the men who were to shape London’s transport for a third of a century.

There had been several missed opportunities to create a more coherent structure for the Underground, rather than allowing it to be at the mercy of free market forces. Private ownership of such a metro system is not sensible given the central role it plays in a city’s life, the impossibility of making even well-used lines pay for themselves without subsidy let alone provide a decent return for investors, and the need to develop the network in the way that maximizes social benefit. The left-leaning London County Council had realized this as early as 1902, when it sought to obtain overall control of the network by becoming a traffic authority with powers to plan and control all London’s Underground railways like the New York Rapid Transit Commission on the other side of the Atlantic. But no Edwardian government was going to agree to that, and instead, in the traditional way of British politicians seeking to defer decisions, it announced a Royal Commission on transport in the capital.

A more concerted attempt to take over the Underground was made in April 1906 by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, the illustrious socialists who founded the Fabian movement. Sidney sat on the LCC for all the Edwardian years and Beatrice, in her diary, recalls a meeting with Sir Edgar Speyer and Gibb who wanted the LCC to raise £5m for the UERL to become a sleeping partner – an early version of a public private partnership – with the right to take full control twenty-one or forty years later. However, the Progressives soon lost power and the Conservatives who replaced them were not interested in such municipalization.
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At the opening ceremony of the Hampstead tube, both Gibb and Speyer pleaded publicly with David Lloyd George, the president of the Board of Trade, to help their dire financial situation, arguing that the level of losses by the Underground companies was unsustainable
and that London was alone among major cities in not subsidizing its transport system.
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They wanted the government to help either through financial support or regulation of the rival bus and railway companies. It was not to be. Lloyd George fobbed them off by remarking that he was not going to come to the rescue with any ‘socialistic legislation’.
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Unable to seek government help, Speyer and Gibb had to persuade their shareholders to allow them to restructure the company’s finances. Not an easy task when, essentially, investors had been sold a pup. The crisis was brought to a head by the promise Yerkes had made to redeem his £7m worth of junk bonds, the ‘profit sharing notes’, on 30 June 1908. By the time the three tube lines had opened, the value of the £100 notes had fallen to a third of their sale price and Speyer had to bail out the company with his bank’s money by paying off shareholders who were threatening to launch bankruptcy proceedings. The solution put together by Speyer and Gibb was the only one available – to convert the notes into long-term debt, redeemable in 1933 and 1948.
⁴
The shareholders reluctantly accepted the arrangement, realizing, as in all such situations, they had little choice since bankruptcy would have left them with nothing.

Why had it proved impossible to run the fantastic tube network and District line at a profit? At one of a series of acrimonious meetings, in May 1908, Speyer outlined what had gone wrong: unfavourable money markets (in which to redeem the profit-sharing notes); delays in completion (though, in reality, that was merely a result of over-optimistic scheduling without contingency plans since the lines were built remarkably quickly and with no major problems such as tunnel collapses or unexpected geological conditions); bus and tram competition (fair enough, as both were expanding); late changes required by Parliament (changes in scope are always a difficulty with big schemes); fares which were too low (a criticism of Yerkes’s strategy of flat fares); and the burden of taxes and rates (highly predictable and a lame excuse). Speyer did have the grace to admit that mistakes had been made by his traffic experts and, in truth, the failure to attract
numbers to match those over-optimistic predictions was the major cause of the company’s parlous state.

Gibb endured an awful first year in the job, trying to stave off bankruptcy and boost passenger numbers. Even by the time of the debt rescheduling, Speyer and Gibb were making progress on a programme to improve the financial situation of the business, both by reducing costs and increasing revenue. On costs, Gibb tried to bring together the various lines under one management but this was thwarted by the American interests who were worried about losing potential capital gains on what were virtually worthless shares. It was only when Stanley took over in 1910 that the change was pushed through.

On the revenue side, the company moved away from the idea of flat fares which Yerkes had always supported. Uniform fares had made travel too cheap and, more important, were not compatible with encouraging through bookings with other transport systems. If passengers were to be allowed to buy tickets which involved the use of more than one line, there had to be differentiation between short and long journeys as London’s system was simply too large to set a single fare that was a fair average for all travellers. However, introducing gradations of a halfpenny went too far in the other direction and the system could have been simplified, something that did not happen until Ken Livingstone introduced his Fares Fair system, based on zones, in the 1980s. The non UERL lines such as the City & South London and the Central, which had started with single fares, had also gradually moved away from the concept as their lines lengthened and competition from bus and trams forced them to try to maximize revenue.

For a brief enlightened moment in 1907, there were efforts by the majority of transport undertakings in London, both rail and bus, to coordinate their fares policies. The process started with an agreement between the various operators of east–west services which resulted in the Central increasing fares for longer journeys to threepence and the Metropolitan making corresponding rises on the Hammersmith.
Following this agreement, a meeting was held involving bus and tram as well as Underground interests, and even the North London Railway, which also managed to agree a series of coordinated fare rises. But ultimately these companies were private concerns in competition with one another, and without any legislative backing their cooperative efforts were bound to peter out.

While the bus and tram operators soon withdrew, the various Underground operators decided to form a joint committee to discuss fares and related issues; they realized that there was more to gain through coordination than through cut-throat competition, given the growing threat from motor buses. A meeting of all the underground line owners, including the Metropolitan and others not controlled by the UERL created a joint booking system allowing through journeys without having to buy a second ticket, and this was gradually introduced throughout the system and parts of the main line railways. The underground line owners also agreed to install illuminated signs outside each station with the word ‘UndergrounD’, with the familiar capital first and last letters replacing the rather more prosaic but handy word ‘Tube’, favoured by the Central.

This branding was the brainchild of Albert Stanley who was already working behind the scenes in bringing together the disparate transport methods in the capital. The beginnings of an integrated London Transport system were being created, fittingly, by the man who would eventually lead it. Stanley was first appointed at the instigation of the US investors who wanted to prevent the merger of the management of the lines in order to protect their investment but, ironically, was soon to recommend the same strategy. Born into a humble Derbyshire family, Stanley
⁵
had gone to America with his family as a small child and worked on the railways from the age of fourteen, starting as a messenger boy with the Detroit tramways company. His obvious administrative and strategic talents must have been immediately apparent, as by the age of eighteen he was made a divisional superintendent and two years later overall superintendent responsible
for the opening of many new lines. He moved to New Jersey where again promotion was rapid, and he was given responsibility for the state’s tramways in 1904 and for all its transport operations three years later. But he spent little time in that job as in 1907 Gibb, who had become aware of Stanley’s talent on his 1901 visit to the USA, invited him to return to Britain as the general manager of the UERL.

Stanley, who of all the Underground pioneers probably achieved the most simply because he was to work for the organization for over thirty years, said later that he had been reluctant to leave New Jersey, in view of his recent promotion, and only came on the understanding that he could return within a year. Stanley is also reported
⁶
to have told his senior managers that the UERL was bankrupt and he wanted resignation letters from all of them post-dated six months ahead. He then borrowed £50,000 from the banks to pay for publicity but soon found that the local London press was amenable to publishing news about improvements to the system. In that sense, Stanley, amongst all his other talents, was a pioneer of PR techniques, as well as a brilliant operator of railway systems.

For instance, until Stanley’s intervention, the Yerkes tube lines had each produced their own promotional literature, a wasteful duplication.
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Now, a huge publicity campaign was launched, involving the production of 6 million free leaflet-sized maps of the system, showing each line in a different colour, which could be picked up at stations or hotels, restaurants and even ocean liners. It was a breakthrough in showing integrated information, although it was still fairly confusing compared with the simple brilliance of the version Harry Beck designed in the 1930s.
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Large enamelled copies of the map were displayed at stations and outside there were illuminated versions under the slogan ‘Anywhere Quickest Way Cheapest Fare’. This slogan was the idea of a fourteen-year-old boy who had entered a competition organized by the
Evening News
on the instigation of Stanley, another example of his talent at dealing with the press. There was even a game called ‘How to get there?’, based on Ludo, with various penalties and
obstacles for lost tickets or signal stops, which the
Railway Gazette
ribbed mercilessly by suggesting further forfeits such as ‘Breakdown on District, proceed on foot’, ‘City & South London closed for cleaning, retire from game’ and, best of all, ‘polite conductor on Hampstead Tube – miss eight moves through shock’.