The Subterranean Railway (34 page)

Even today, very few companies communicate their purpose as clearly as LT did in the 1930s:

The remarkable thing about this early exercise in corporate identity is not that it existed, but that it was so sophisticated and stylish. Not for Pick the monoculture of the carefully controlled image, the proscriptive rules, the single voice. The images that emerged were witty and cultured, and promoted the idea of a progressive, efficient, caring and style-conscious organization … The use of good design became a tradition but was never ‘traditional’. The main characteristics were a willingness to seek new ideas and solutions, to experiment with new methods and materials, unrestricted by the past.
²⁸

Pick’s philosophy is best summed up in his own words: ‘The test of the goodness of a thing is its fitness for use. If it fails on this first test, no amount of ornamentation or finish will make it any better; it will only make it more expensive, more foolish.’
²⁹

The influence of LT design went well beyond the passengers. As Nikolaus Pevsner put it, ‘no exhibition of modern painting, no lecturing, no school teaching, can have had anything like so wide an effect on the educatable masses as the unceasing production and display of [Underground] posters over the years 1930–1940’.
³⁰
It was
free art for the masses.

The most enduring image of the Underground, also introduced by Pick, is, of course, the famous schematic Underground map conceived by Harry Beck. Along with the roundel, it typifies how London Transport wanted to be perceived – modern, clean, forward-looking and elegant.

Like London Transport itself, the map nearly did not happen. Its designer, Harry Beck, had been a junior draughtsman for the Underground but had been made redundant by the time he sketched out the first draft of the famous map. Beck had worked in the signal engineers’ department for six years and the original map was based on an electric circuit diagram. The brilliant aspect of its innovation is the idea that conventional maps can be too accurate, and thereby unnecessarily complex. It is, of course, based on a simple bit of cheating. Instead of trying to portray the real distance between stations, and the correct angles at which lines intersect, the map provides a schematic display, suggesting that virtually every station is equidistant and that lines only meet or change direction at neat 45º or 90º angles.

When Beck first presented the map to Frank Pick’s publicity committee in 1931, it was rejected. But he tried again the following year, by which time he was back working for the Underground, and although the original did not have the bright colours which later become an essential part of the distinctive design, the committee agreed that a test run should be commissioned. According to differing accounts, Beck was paid a mere five or ten guineas for his design but, after the trial proved successful, some 750,000 were produced in January 1933 and distributed free to Londoners. Certainly from London Transport’s point of view it was a great bargain, since the design has brought in millions of pounds in licence fees for a veritable A to Z of items ranging from alarm clocks and boxer shorts to oven gloves and quizzes.

Beck’s schematic design has been followed both for other underground maps, such as those of New York and Berlin, and for other modes
of transports, such as buses, main line trains and airlines. Even the French, with their Parisian Métro and RER (suburban rail services) maps, now follow Beck’s essential rules on angles and station distances after decades of using a conventional style of map.

The cleverness and durability of Beck’s work is demonstrated by the ease with which nine lines has now become fourteen
³¹
but still retain the same look. Beck’s stroke of genius was to look at the problem of the map from the passengers’ point of view, rather than in the way that those running the Underground perceived it. The map tidies up the chaos of the city, giving the impression that the city is of a size and design that is comprehensible to both its inhabitants and visitors.
³²
The Beck map, along with the roundel and the typeface, is the third part of the iconography of the London Underground which has done so much to establish the image of London across the world. Uniquely among transport systems, London Underground typifies the city itself.

The timing of the creation of a strong, state-run London Transport was perfect in historic terms. The 1930s were the point at which the Underground was probably most crucial as a means of transport to the widest range of social classes and it enjoyed its highest ever modal share
³³
of journeys in London. The capital’s population peaked at 8.6 million just before the Second World War. Mass car ownership was only beginning to take off, but would soon turn the centre of London into a permanent traffic jam and cream off some of the Underground’s custom. Although the number of passengers rose to 488 million in 1938, the last full year before the outbreak of the war, the car was beginning to take its toll on certain types of journey.
³⁴

Ashfield had already realized that the Underground would no longer have a monopoly on the medium-distance journeys that were essential to its economics. Prescient as ever, he had pointed out in his speech to shareholders that ‘the motor car has grown to be an important feature … they carry not only the family, but also neighbours and friends, and therefore withdraw more people from the public means of conveyance than at first sight would seem possible’.
³⁵
In particular,
the theatre traffic had been lost to cars and Ashfield predicted that it would be increasingly difficult for public transport to compete. He argued, too, that the quality of services, both in buses and trains, had to be improved in order to meet the competition. He was absolutely right, but all these developing trends, as well as the Underground’s expansion programme, were about to be interrupted.

FOURTEEN

THE BEST

SHELTERS OF ALL

The Underground at war was not just about people in shelters, the most enduring image of the system. The trains, by and large, kept going throughout the conflict, playing a vital part in ensuring the capital still functioned. There had been, well before the outbreak of the war, a debate within government circles about the use of the system as a shelter and that would continue well after the commencement of hostilities. As far back as 1924, the Orwellian-sounding Air Raid Precautions Sub-committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence concluded that the tube lines would be needed for transport purposes and therefore should not be used as shelters. That view was partly informed by the widespread feeling among officialdom that allowing people to go underground would create a ‘deep shelter mentality’, fostering a subterranean population who would refuse to come up once the bombers had gone. Those fears were in sharp contrast to the attitude of the local politicians in Barcelona, bombed by Franco, who created a network of deep tube shelters able to accommodate much of the population.

The importance of the Underground in the event of an attack was recognized with the installation of anti-gas measures at new stations and the Post Office’s plans for an emergency communications system.
More strangely, in the days running up to Neville Chamberlain’s infamous 1938 visit for talks with Hitler in Munich, Londoners found that several stations close to the river had been closed and that trains could no longer travel under the Thames. The reason was that the panicking London Transport Board had ordered the construction of enormous concrete plugs at each end of the tunnels under the river because they feared an attack with bombs would breach them and cause disastrous flooding of the system. Following Chamberlain’s return from Munich, clutching his peace pledge, the tunnels were restored two weeks after their closure. Instead, vast electrically operated iron floodgates were built to allow trains to continue running under the Thames. These were interlocked with the signalling so that they could not be closed with a train in the sealed part of the tunnel. However, by the time war broke out on 3 September, only the gates on the Bakerloo had been completed and for a time the Northern was, again, blocked by concrete plugs which were also used to seal off various passageways at nineteen stations deemed at risk of flooding from broken mains. Eventually, twenty-five floodgates, each weighing nearly six tons and electrically operated from a control centre at Leicester Square, were completed by October 1940, just after the start of the Blitz.

LT carried over half a million evacuees in the first four days of September 1939, a scheme organized by Frank Pick, but the long period of the ‘phoney war’ meant that many had drifted back to their parents by the time the Blitz started a year later. During the time of the phoney war, the authorities tried to hold the line on their non-shelter policy as announced by the government on the day the war broke out. Posters throughout the system stated baldly in Johnston capitals: ‘The tube stations are required for traffic purposes and the tube stations are not available as air raid shelters’.

But banning people from seeking protection was always going to be a difficult policy to maintain. Had the authorities built a series of deep shelters elsewhere in the capital, perhaps that line could have held. But they had done little to protect their citizens – brick shelters had been
built in the streets but these were clearly vulnerable to a direct hit and were highly unpopular. The tubes, in contrast, were perceived as safe havens. They were easily accessible and provided companionship and warmth, in what appeared to be a completely safe environment away from much of the noise of aircraft and their bombs, which could only occasionally be heard even underground.

Moreover, there was a popular movement of resistance to the ban on the use of shelters, spearheaded by the Communist Party, which ran a sustained media campaign throughout 1940 pressing for a proper policy on air raid protection which would include the widespread provision of deep-level shelters. As attacks began to intensify in the summer of 1940, the authorities were finding it harder to defend their stations. London Transport officials were instructed to turn away people who were not considered to be bona fide travellers, but this was an impossible task. The first heavy raids were on the night of 7 September 1940 when docks and gas works in the East End were targeted. That first big attack claimed the lives of 430 people and gave fuel to the Communist Party’s campaign. It was not just the masses of the East End who were affected. A
Daily Telegraph
reader wrote to complain of being ‘directed to a street shelter after being refused re-admission to a station I had left during a raid’.
¹

The Communist Party, inevitably, saw it as part of the class war against the workers. Its newspaper, the
Daily Worker
, argued predictably: ‘The shelter policy of the Government is not just a history of incompetence and neglect. It is a calculated class policy, a determination not to provide protection because of profits being placed before human lives.’
²
The paper spoke of ‘the ruling classes’ in their ‘luxury shelters’ and to highlight this, on 14 September, a group of Stepney CP activists occupied the luxury shelter built for the guests of the Savoy where they partook of tea and other refreshments served on silver trays. This little bit of direct action attracted enormous press publicity and helped make the government’s shelter policy untenable.

By then, it was already crumbling. People had quickly cottoned on
to the notion that they could buy a cheap penny ticket for travel to the next station but could not get on a train. Shelterers had also started using, with official approval, the disused section of the City & South London line to its original terminus at King William Street. Within a couple of days of that first big raid, 4,000 people who had presented themselves at Old Street station to seek shelter had been allowed in by policemen too scared to resist them. Londoners, therefore, swarmed into the tube system. The
Daily Worker
cheered, celebrating its victory, which it claimed was a result of the efforts of the Communist Party. This was undoubtedly partly true, but once the bombs started raining down, it seems unlikely that the authorities could have stopped people going down below. Indeed, unless the authorities had been prepared to resort to using soldiers with fixed bayonets, the sheer intensity of the bombing ensured that nothing could stop the people taking to the tubes.

Herbert Morrison, who had been appointed Home Secretary in October 1940, quickly made clear that no attempt should be made by the police to prevent orderly access, provided that services were allowed to keep operating. The Labour Party had long argued for more shelters and Londoners welcomed the appointment of Morrison, expecting him to bring about rapid improvements. They were not to be disappointed. He announced a series of deep shelters to be built under tube stations, but also set about improving the lot of the shelterers in the Underground system. While those shelters would take too long to build to protect the citizens from the brunt of the Blitz, which reduced in intensity during the summer of 1941 when the Germans turned their attention eastwards, the announcement of their construction was a big morale boost for Londoners who felt that something was at least being done for them.

By 22 September, the
Sunday Dispatch
was reporting that ‘30,000 spent last night in the Tubes’. This was a gross understatement. The authorities leaned on the press to curtail enthusiasm for the use of the tubes as shelter. According to a history of the shelterers, ‘four times
that number had actually sheltered in the Tubes the previous evening’.
³
Indeed, the
Dispatch
rather gave the game away by reporting that ‘by 6 p.m. there seemed no vacant space from St Paul’s to Notting Hill, from Hampstead to Leicester Squares’. And who were these shelterers? The
Dispatch
said ‘types varied much, from the trousered, lipsticked Kensington girls to the cockneys at Camden Town; but all were alike in their uncomplaining, patient cheerfulness’.

The
South London Press
was less impressed. The reporter told how it took him a quarter of an hour to reach the station entrance from the platform:

I stumbled over huddled bodies, bodies which were no safer from bombs than if they had lain in the gutters of the streets outside … Little girls and boys lay across their parents’ bodies because there was no room on the winding stairs. Hundreds of men and women were partially undressed, while small boys and girls slumbered in the foetid atmosphere absolutely naked … On the platform, when a train came in, it had to be stopped in the tunnel while police and porters went along pushing in the feet and the arms which overhung the line.
⁴

It was, apparently, the same all along the line, a driver told the reporter.

At the beginning, life in the tubes was rough. The stench must have been horrific, as there were no toilets and urinating over the tracks or in corners was the norm. Moreover, through fear of a gas attack, the ventilation fans were switched to a minimum; and, more important, the trains, whose action through the tunnel has always been the tube lines’ primary form of ventilation, did not run at night.

Spaces were, at first, reserved on a free-for-all basis, often by spivs with time on their hands who queued for hours before the warning sounded and then sold on the pitch. The spivs charged as much as half a crown (two shillings and sixpence), which, given that the wage of a station worker was a mere £3 per week at the time, is a measure of
how much value Londoners placed on getting a good night’s sleep in safety. The police tried to create some order by instructing people at overcrowded stations to go further down the line, but the early days in the shelters were chaotic.

Rules began to emerge quite quickly. At the beginning of October, white lines were painted at four and eight feet from the edge, allowing passengers a free passage along the platform and ensuring that no limbs overhung the rails (there was at least one report of a man plunging into the pit and being killed by a train). No reservations were allowed before 4 p.m. and then spaces could be taken up to the eight-foot line, and after 7.30 p.m., up to the four-foot one. By November, London Transport started to introduce a system of tickets, which were distributed to the shelterers by local authority marshals. This guaranteed people their allocated space and avoided the hassle of having to spend much of the afternoon queuing and scrambling for places, which occasionally led to fights. Some people took to bringing little brushes to sweep their space.

The sanitation problem, too, began to be addressed. Chemical toilets started to arrive late in September and by November a much more sophisticated sanitation system was introduced, involving the use of compressors to pump up sewage to ground level. Conditions were still not pleasant, however. The system was plagued by a variety of mosquito,
culex molestus
, which had led a relatively spartan existence until suddenly the massive influx of night dwellers provided a seemingly endless supply of blood. The population of the pest increased exponentially. Fortunately, though its bite caused itching, it did not carry any disease and the plague of insects was eventually brought under control, but not wiped out, by the spraying of its breeding grounds, mostly pools of water under platforms, with disinfectant and paraffin. Bedbugs also preyed on the shelterers, with outbreaks at various stations throughout the war caused by people bringing in their own infested blankets. Although LT said it would ban verminous-looking people, and those found with bugs were referred
to the medical centres and subjected to the indignity of a home visit, according to the history of the shelterers: ‘happily no shelterer had their reservation tickets cancelled on account of being carriers of vermin as suspects invariably submitted to the cleansing treatment’. The worst reported infestation was the discovery of a large group of rats at the Bethnal Green station shelter, which led to fears of a plague epidemic, but fortunately that never materialized.

Food was the other major task for the authorities. Refreshment trains began running by the end of October, delivering supplies to stations. The water for tea had to be heated using electric ovens, since gas flames were banned from the system. London Transport used 1,000 of its women workers, dressed in a kind of uniform with green frocks and red kerchiefs on their heads, to take the supplies to the public in baskets and specially constructed two-gallon teapots. A cup of tea or cocoa was a penny, as were buns (the favourite) and pieces of cake. Meat pies, packets of biscuits, apples and sandwiches were also available. Shelterers were, however, expected to bring their own utensils and cups.

The most telling evidence of LT’s change in attitude from hostility towards the shelterers to acceptance that it had a duty to provide for them was, perhaps, a little sign put up at the depots where food was assembled for dispatch. It read: ‘Tube refreshments. This depot supplies service points, stations and feeds people. They rely on us for food and drink night and morning. We must not let them down.’ The Blitz spirit had clearly percolated upwards.