The Subterranean Railway (6 page)

Despite the improvement provided by the new Beyer locomotives, running steam engines in long tunnels was a fundamentally bad idea, necessitated by the available technology. Indeed, the situation was so bad that a Board of Trade inquiry was set up in 1898 to examine ventilation in the tunnels, which were then being used by a staggering 550 passenger and goods trains daily. The Metropolitan again mounted a campaign to allay concerns. The General Manager, Colonel John Bell, repeated the line of his predecessors that the company’s employees were the healthiest railwaymen in the country and that Great Portland Street was ‘actually used as a sanatorium for men who had been afflicted with asthma and bronchial complaints’.

The staff would have taken issue with Colonel Bell. According to a Mr Smethurst, President of the Short Hours League, ‘hours of men on the Metropolitan, although not so long as others, are yet in my opinion dangerous, excessive and injurious. The effect of a daily journey on the underground railway is too well known to need description.
What must the men feel who spend their lives in whirling round the sulphurous tunnel?’
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He reported that drivers and firemen worked up to thirteen hours per day. Signalmen normally worked eight or nine hours per day but they also did thirteen on Sundays. Most Met staff worked three out of five Sundays, too.

These hardworking men were largely newcomers to London. Henry Mayhew, the journalist and social reform campaigner, visited the line in May 1865 and was most impressed with the railway officials who ‘struck us as being so smart a body of men’
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that he wondered how they had been gathered together in such a short space of time. Mayhew was accompanied by Myles Fenton, the general manager of the Metropolitan, who told him that most of them, particularly the inspectors, guards and signalmen, came from the West Country, with Somerset and Wiltshire contributing the greatest number. ‘It is surprising,’ noted Mayhew patronizingly, ‘how soon a raw rustic is converted by a severe course of discipline into a smart civil and skilful officer.’ The drivers, however, were mostly local people who had been poached from main line companies, especially the Great Northern.

Another objection was that there were no waiting rooms at any of the stations. These had not been deemed necessary by the Metropolitan since trains were so frequent, but one small shareholder, a civil servant commuter, suggested that this was mistaken: ‘I can assure you that the draughts during the winter months are enough to kill a bronze rhinoceros.’
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There were buffets, but he argued that he should not have to lay out sixpence merely to seek shelter. Another option was the penny-in-the-slot weighing machine. Every station had one and they were a popular feature of platform life in the Victorian tunnels. They were large balances fitted with red velvet cushions which, in effect, provided a free comfortable seat for old gentlemen waiting for a train.

Yet, despite the awful conditions for the staff and the various complaints from passengers (vitiated, perhaps, by other reports like those of Sir John Hardman and by the Metropolitan’s effective PR), most Londoners seemed to have been prepared to venture down to
use the line. Indeed, the bad publicity before the opening may even have contributed towards the Metropolitan’s success by lowering expectations so that travellers were then surprised to find it was not quite as bad as they had been led to expect. By the standards of Victorian railway building the Metropolitan was highly successful, even in financial terms. In the first full year of operation, 11.8 million people used the line, more than four times the population of the capital – a daily average, including Sundays, of 32,300, which was a remarkable achievement given the limited route it served. There was, incidentally, only a partial timetable on the Sabbath, since the trains were suspended during the morning church service hours, a practice which survived on the Metropolitan until October 1909. The peak day in the first year for the Metropolitan was Saturday, 7 March, when Princess Alexandra of Denmark arrived in London for her marriage to the Prince of Wales: 60,000 people, double the usual number, travelled on the line. The Princess did not venture onto the Metropolitan herself, but thousands travelled on the line to Paddington to see her off on her journey to Windsor.

The Metropolitan’s receipts were so healthy, with profits of £102,000 in its first year, that initially generous dividends could be paid to the shareholders: 6.25 per cent in 1864, a much better return than most railway companies paid. In May 1864, the Metropolitan made a staggering £720 per mile per week, compared with the £80 for the London, Chatham & Dover, the next best performing railway, and just £22 for the Great Eastern & Midland. Yet there were still attempts to do down the Metropolitan. William Pinks, the Clerkenwell historian who wrote that analysis of the early traffic, suggested there were only half the expected number of passengers, providing a weekly income of £1,885 rather than the £4,000 or so needed to make a profit.
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But this seems at odds with the Metropolitan’s figures and it was apparent that the line was well used and profitable. It was only when the railway started expanding that it hit financial difficulties as the cost of the work was normally too high to earn shareholders a
decent return on their capital. As the authors of the definitive history of London’s transport put it:

Shareholders were not to reap the full reward of this important pioneer venture, for the board had already become involved in much less remunerative expenditure. The initial successes had played into the hands of those who have a vested interest in extending the line: the contractors who built the railway, the engineers who supplied the technical advice, and the solicitors who looked after the parliamentary proceedings and the subsequent conveyancing.
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While this is a somewhat harsh judgement, which ignores the enormous social benefit for London of the Underground, it is one that has resonance today given that the infamous public–private partnership introduced by the Labour government in 2003 cost a staggering £500m in fees for lawyers, consultants and engineers before a single improvement had been made.

The speed with which the Metropolitan was accepted as a vital part of London is shown by the fact that a music hall ditty about the railway soon became widely sung. To the air of ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’, it went:

The underground railway’s a fact

It’s made cab-owners groaners

Sent drivers and conductors crack’d

And riled the great ’bus owners
.

LGOC monopolists weep
,

That railway each one curses;

It’s sure to do, because it’s cheap
,

And runs under the ’buses
.

The ‘monopolist’ of the London General Omnibus Company (LGOC)
no doubt preferred the comic song ‘The Underground Railway’ by Watkin Williams. Although its publisher claimed it was widely sung, that seems unlikely and it is too tedious to set out here in full. It laboriously relates how a man and his sweetheart, Mary Jane, decided to journey to Paddington from Farringdon Street. In the crush on the platform Mary Jane collapsed, as young Victorian women were wont to do, and was helped by another traveller. In the meantime her fiancé had to rescue another woman who had fainted in his compartment. The net result was that when reunited at the end of the journey, the couple found they had been the victims of clever pickpockets:

And of our little stock, they eas’d the whole lot
,

We’d sav’d to get wed when we’d a little more got
,

Now till more is earn’d that bliss is adjourned
,

Through going on the underground railway
.

So what was the explanation for the immediate phenomenal success of the Metropolitan? Underpinning the heavy usage was the fact that the system was remarkably safe and, more importantly, was perceived as such, allaying the natural fear of walking down those steps to go beneath the streets. Had there been a big accident early on, the whole concept might never have taken off. Indeed, in France during August 1903 the number of passengers slumped by more than half, just three years after the opening of the first Métro line following the world’s first major disaster on an underground railway. A fire had been allowed to spread as a result of staff incompetence and panic, and eighty-four people were killed. Despite the predictions and, at times, rather haphazard safety practices, there was no such disaster on the Metropolitan.

The signalling, for example, was simple but effective. Clearly, it was necessary to have a proper signalling system rather than just leaving a time gap between departures, a method still prevalent on the main line railways.
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Mayhew cited an article in
Railway News
which described
how signalmen at each station had to press keys to communicate with the next one, making a dial show either ‘line clear’ or ‘train on line’. With this simple but clever system, trains could run at intervals of two minutes while without them Mayhew reckoned it would have been a quarter of an hour. Moreover, there was also a system of interlocking which meant that the points and the signals worked together and could not be set in a conflicting way – a safety device that was becoming standard in the railways at that time.

While there were no serious accidents, there was, of course, the odd mishap. Within weeks of opening, in February 1863, there were two minor crashes at the same spot at Farringdon Street station. On 17 February, a train leaving the station was switched onto the wrong track and collided head-on with one arriving, but at low speed so only a few passengers were injured. The interlocking had been temporarily disconnected. Ten days later much the same thing happened again at the same location, this time causing thirty injuries and providing another proof that the ‘compensation culture’, generally considered a modern scourge, was already flourishing in Victorian times. Most of the passengers accepted under £20 in compensation, but one victim, a Mrs Mee, was more persistent, turning down £150 and eventually receiving £220 for her pains in an out of court settlement.

Bearing in mind the novelty of the whole concept of underground railways, it is impressive that eighteen months passed before there was a fatality on the line, and even then it was caused, as many since, by drunkenness. A couple rushed for the last service from Portland Road to Edgware Road and the woman, Kate Gollop, somehow got onto the tracks underneath the train, where the porter on duty found her dying. The man, Thomas Powell, disappeared, having caught the train. In the subsequent court case, when her husband John sued the Metropolitan Railway – yet another example of Victorian litigiousness – it emerged that both had drunk large quantities of alcohol. Powell remembered taking her to the station and seeing her fall, but he then went home without realizing she had been hit by a train. Other evidence was
conflicting and the precise circumstances never emerged. Although Gollop won his case, the jury only awarded him one shilling, despite the fact that he was disabled and his wife was the breadwinner.

Despite isolated incidents such as these, the Metropolitan had a remarkably unblemished safety record and in its first forty-four years did not experience a single railway accident resulting in the death of a passenger, which is extraordinary given the intensity of service, the use of steam engines and high passenger numbers. Indeed, according to the definitive history of London’s transport, ‘during the whole period of steam operation, there was no fatal accident to any passenger in these cuttings and tunnels’
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caused by a train collision or derailment. The first serious accident on the underground system involved a head-on collision near Earls Court in August 1885 between a District train and a Great Western service, which killed the two crew of the Great Western train. Safety was the cornerstone of the rapid success of the railway but its excellent economic performance was based on the fact that the line fulfilled a hitherto unmet need, offering the convenience of reaching Farringdon from Paddington far more quickly and for the same fare (sixpence) as the lumbering omnibus. What a joy it must have been to escape the hurly-burly of the streets for the relative, if smoky, peace below. With 650 services per day, each train of four coaches carried, on average, only fifty people on its whole journey. Of course there were peak hours when the trains were crowded, just as there are today, but for the most part the experience – especially in those early days when passenger numbers were building up – must have been relatively pleasant.

The Metropolitan’s attitude to smoking provides a comic counterpoint to the constant complaints about the foul air in the Underground. Uniquely for the time, the Metropolitan – of all railways – banned smoking in its carriages, presumably not wishing to add to the already smoky atmosphere. Yet, five years after the opening of the line, the provision of smoking carriages was made compulsory when the MP for Dudley, H.B. Sheridan, successfully moved an amendment to the
Railway Regulation Bill requiring all railways to provide a smoking carriage, unless excused by the Board of Trade. The amendment attracted the endorsement of none other than the political philosopher, John Stuart Mill, who devoted the last speech he made in the House of Commons to supporting the clause, and it was largely thanks to his advocacy that the measure was passed by a majority of twenty-two. Although the Metropolitan was initially excluded from the requirement and endeavoured to continue to prevent people lighting up, other railway companies using its lines all had smoking carriages and there was a public clamour for the Metropolitan to follow suit. In fact, when the smoking coaches were officially introduced in 1874, the company was probably merely meeting the demands of its passengers since contemporary reports suggest that the ban was being widely flouted.

The people who flocked to the new subterranean railway were a disparate bunch. Top-hatted bankers travelled on the same trains as the artisans, albeit, of course, in different classes. While the fares represented a substantial amount of money for some low-income earners, most Londoners in work could afford to use the service. The Metropolitan realized that there was a whole new market to exploit, using spare capacity in the early mornings when their more affluent customers were still tucked up in bed. In line with Pearson’s aspirations, it became the first railway to provide cheap workmen’s trains when in 1864 the Metropolitan started running two trains in each direction before 6 a.m. at a return fare of just threepence (later reduced to twopence), with the right to go back by any train, which greatly increased their attractiveness. The workmen’s service immediately attracted 300 daily users, a number which soon doubled. In fact, overall, the working classes provided by far the greatest proportion of the Metropolitan’s passengers since 70 per cent of tickets sold in those early years were for third-class travel, with 20 per cent and 10 per cent respectively for second and first. Only a minority of travellers, around a sixth according to figures given to
Mayhew by Fenton, travelled between the two termini, with the rest joining or alighting at one of the intermediate stations. Fenton told him: ‘Each additional station produces a large accession of traffic creating as it does an interchange with each previous station; whilst great numbers of passengers now travel between the terminal stations, yet the numbers conveyed between the several intermediate stations are much greater.’ In other words, Londoners were learning to use the Underground for short hops around town and railway managers were beginning to understand the real benefits of an urban rail network.