The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London (13 page)

Even with these drawbacks, buses were one of London’s great conveniences. In the early days, they, like the short-stages, gave personal service. In
Nicholas Nickleby
, the omnibus calls for Miss La Creevy, who is visiting friends in Bow. She makes a protracted farewell, ‘during which proceedings, “the omnibus”, as Miss La Creevy protested, “swore so dreadfully, that it was quite awful to hear it”’ – but still it waits. For prosperous men with a workday routine, the bus went even further. The journalist Charles Manby Smith described a typical suburban street in the late 1840s, where at 8.30 and 9.30 every morning, two buses appeared to collect their regular passengers.
After that the street saw no more buses until they returned in the evening: it was not a regular route, and ‘the vehicles diverge from their...course in order to pick them up at their own doors’.

Methods of inner-city mass transit were increasing at a furious rate: after the steamers and the buses came the underground, confusingly also called the ‘railway’. It was long in the planning. In 1830, the first part of a new major north–south road, from Ludgate Circus to Holborn Viaduct, had been completed, and in 1838 the City Corporation obtained powers to extend this new Farringdon Street further, up to Clerkenwell Green. Partly it was to improve the flow of traffic across the Holborn area. More importantly, the aim was to clear the slum district of Clerkenwell, Saffron Hill and around the Fleet prison. (For more on slum clearance, see pp. 188–92.) A Clerkenwell Improvement Commission was established in 1840, which oversaw the relocation of the Fleet market and the demolition of the prison in 1848, but did nothing further, with the result that for decades the north end of what was to become Farringdon Road lay in a pockmarked, rubble-strewn landscape. Fresh impetus came in 1850 with the arrival of the Great Northern Railway at Euston. The following year, plans were presented to widen the road, finish it off and have a railway running underneath, from Farringdon Street to King’s Cross. Just when it appeared the project might actually move ahead, the Crimean War made its financing impossible. (All railways then were private enterprises.) It was not until, in despair, the Corporation of the City of London bought £200,000-worth of shares that building could begin in 1859.

Although people had become used to the wasteland of Farringdon Road over the decades, the construction that followed proved even worse. One newspaper asserted that the word ‘underground’ implied an air of ‘mole-like secrecy’, but ‘Those who have had the misfortune to live, or whose business has called them frequently along the line of its operations, know too well that this is a great mistake. No railway works were ever more painfully plain...For the best part of three years a great public thoroughfare has been turned into a builders’ yard...Many long patches of what was once a broad open roadway were enclosed with boarding; filled with mountains of gravel, brick, and stone...temporary wooden footways, greasy with wet clay, were
erected across echoing caverns.’ This was no exaggeration. A photograph of later excavations for the District Railway in Parliament Square shows what resembles a bomb site, London during the Blitz, perhaps, or some hideous natural disaster.

Enough disasters, natural and man-made, did occur during the construction. In November 1860, a locomotive exploded, killing two people; in May 1861, there was a landslide; and in 1862, the River Fleet – long filled with sewage, covered over as the Fleet Ditch, and known as the ‘Black River of North London’ – ruptured. By this time, the work on the underground alongside the new Fleet sewer was moving into its final stages, with the train tunnel being laid parallel to it (see Plate 10). The first intimation of looming catastrophe came when water was discovered seeping into the cellars of houses in Clerkenwell; three days later when a rush of water was spotted beside the sewer, it became clear that the Fleet Ditch was going to burst. Most of the workmen were evacuated; several others were lowered in baskets on ropes, to breach the brickwork to allow the water to escape. But even as they descended, they saw the foundations give way. They were hauled to safety minutes before the wall supporting the western embankment of the railway, a massive brick structure over eight feet thick, ‘rose bodily from its foundations as the water [from the Fleet] forced its way beneath...breaking up into fragments’ and scattering down ‘scaffolding, roadway, lamps, pavement and “plant” of every description’. A hundred feet of wall was swept away, and through the next twelve hours the water rushed north and west to King’s Cross and Paddington, a distance of two and a half miles. The water also poured into a mausoleum that had been created to take the human remains from the churchyards that had been destroyed in the construction of Farringdon Road, washing the bodies out into the excavation. It was to be another ten days before the engineers, damming the railway tunnel and creating a trench to divert the water, regained control.

Nonetheless, the Metropolitan Railway – the first line of the tube – opened on 10 January 1863, running between Paddington and Farringdon Street, with six intermediary stations. The previous day, a group of grandees had been transported along the track in open wagons, although Palmerston, the seventy-nine-year-old prime minister, had refused to go, on the grounds
that at his age it was advisable to stay above ground as long as possible (or so it was said). A photograph of this preliminary voyage, with Gladstone sitting prominently at the front, is today often captioned to suggest these were the first-class passenger vehicles. In reality, the first-class carriages were ‘luxuriously fitted up’, with six compartments each seating ten. Even second- and third-class compartments were lit with gas stored ‘in long india-rubber bags, within wooden boxes’ that were located on top of the carriages. Fares were 6d, 4d and 3d. The first day 30,000 people took the opportunity to travel underground. That evening ‘the crush at the Farringdon-street station was as great at the doors of a theatre on the first night’, and in the following week another 200,000 passengers ventured underground.

Such was the line’s success that extensions were planned westward and eastward, to South Kensington and to Blackfriars. Work on the Hammersmith and City line began in 1864, starting from Green Line (now Westbourne Park), travelling through Porto Bello (sic), Notting Barn (also sic) and ultimately to Hammersmith Broadway. The Circle line began excavations in 1868, the District line the following year (it used part of the old Kensington Canal as its tunnel). By the 1870s, the Metropolitan line alone was carrying 48 million passengers annually.

Not that it was always, or even often, an enjoyable experience. An American visitor was at first disappointed with the reality of travelling under the surface of the earth: ‘It was to be nothing but going through a tunnel,’ he wrote. But soon he realized that, between the smoke and the lack of ventilation, travelling by underground ‘was more disagreeable than the longest tunnel the writer had ever passed through...With a taste of sulphur on his lips, a weight upon his chest, a difficulty of breathing as he climbed out of the station at which he stopped, and with a firm determination to encounter ten [traffic] jams on Ludgate Hill, rather than make another trip on the underground rail of London, the writer got into the open air, and found the smoky atmosphere of London equal by comparison to that of Interlachen.’ Yet such was the convenience that soon everyone was travelling that way. In 1875, in Trollope’s
The Way We Live Now
, even Hetta Carbury, an upper-class girl, ‘trusted herself all alone to the mysteries of the Marylebone underground railway, and emerged with accuracy at King’s Cross’.

Such were the numbers of new lines and stations, and the complexities of changing, that even local residents got lost: ‘How many Kensington stations there may be...I do not know; but I know...that the officials always send you to the wrong one...All very well to say that we should look at the map at home and ascertain our route: firstly, there is no map.’ (After that ‘firstly’, surely the writer needed no other objections.) Even the station staff were bewildered: ‘The folk at the booking-offices are not...uncivil; but...I f they do attempt to advise you, take some other ticket than the one recommended, and the chances against you are reduced.’

For those who could afford it, the century had brought with it a new form of city transport that was neither entirely public nor completely private: the cab. Hackney coaches had operated in the early decades of the century. These were four-wheeled carriages, usually second-hand private carriages repurposed as hackneys, with the driver’s seat moved to a little outcropping on the side, beside the passengers’ seats. Only 1,100 were licensed until the monopoly was broken in 1832. The fare in the 1820s was 1s a mile per passenger, and the carriages seated four with a squeeze. From 1836, four-wheeled broughams appeared too, which could carry ‘a large quantity of luggage on the roof, besides six persons’.

It is hard to overstate how poor the hackneys’ reputation was. An American tourist in 1832 was appalled at the condition of his hackney: ‘all tattered and torn – dirty straw...[on the floor]...amidst greased and filthy rags of lining within, and broken panels, broken springs, and broken pole...for horses, two miserably jaded beasts...every limb presenting a skeleton of bone, with the skin here and there rubbed off’. The coaches were also difficult to get into and out of, because of the peculiar, add-on configuration of the driver. It was easy, Dickens joked: ‘One bound, and you are on the first step; turn your body lightly round to the right, and you are on the second; bend gracefully beneath the reins, working round to the left at the same time, and you are in the cab.’ And as to getting out, it is ‘rather more complicated in theory, and a shade more difficult in its execution’. But, he added as consolation, there was no point worrying about how to get out, because in all likelihood the cab would overturn and the passengers
would be pitched into the street. In Holborn and Fleet Street, he solemnly declared, one saw ‘a hat-box, a portmanteau, and a carpet-bag, strewed around’ every few yards and, on asking if anybody was hurt, one would be given the reassuring response, ‘O’ny the fare, sir.’ Even without accidents, the experience was generally miserable. If the passenger wanted the window open, it was invariably stuck shut; if the passenger wanted it closed, the glass was broken; the doors refused either to close or to open; the check-string, used to tell the driver to stop, never worked, which meant that to do so the passenger had to lean out of the window instead, whereupon the driver was so close that if he ‘had been indulging in liquor, onions, tobacco, &c., you had the full benefit’. The carriages were known as growlers, for the bad temper of the drivers.

But it was the coaches’ lack of speed that most irritated passengers. ‘If the horse is wanted, it is sure to be eating; if the cabby is wanted, he is equally sure to be drinking,’ grumbled Max Schlesinger. When one arrived at a cabstand, it was necessary ‘to bawl with might and main’ to locate the waterman and wake the driver.
³⁶
In theory residents could open their front doors and shout ‘Coach!’ whereupon the waterman led the horses over and called for the coachman. But in either situation the horses had to be woken, or their feedbags removed; the steps had to be lowered and the waterman paid. The standard joke response to a cabman soliciting by asking ‘Coach, sir?’ was, ‘No, thank you: I’m in a hurry.’

In 1823, a new type of conveyance, a two-wheeled, one-horse cab, appeared on the street. (‘Cab’ was short for
cabriolet
, French for a little leap, describing the vehicle’s bouncing motion.) These carried two people, with the driver up front; by 1830 there were 165 of them in London, charging 8d a mile instead of the hackney coaches’ 1s. Then, after a few experiments
with form, came the ‘Hansom patent safety cab’, the invention of Joseph Hansom, an architect.
³⁷
The ‘safety’ element was the larger wheels and an axle and body nearer to the ground, giving a lower centre of gravity, which made the vehicle less likely to overturn. After a few modifications on the original design, the driver sat perched up high to the rear of the roof of the cab,
³⁸
with passengers behind half-doors and a little window. For the first time, passengers could see where they were going while remaining under cover, and the primary sensation was of being cocooned: the passenger ‘is in the midst of the roar and the conflict, but he is safe and quiet’. However, perhaps because the cabs were lighter and the journeys therefore faster, cab drivers were proverbial for their recklessness: ‘he’s a havin’ two mile o’ danger at eight-pence,’ says Sam Weller of Mr Pickwick when he is ‘cabbin’ it’. Although the cabs turned over less than the coaches, accidents were still common, especially to the horses. The Illustrated London News even set out instructions on what to do when a cab horse fell: ‘The first measure...ought to be to release the horse from the shafts and draw the vehicle quite away...so that he may sweep the ground freely with both hind-feet, and gain a space...to plant them upon as he endeavours to lift his body,’ it began. Even so, the cabs’ convenience was undeniable, and their numbers soared: by the early 1830s there were 1,265 cabs in London; a decade after that, 2,500; by 1863 this figure had risen to 6,800, or roughly 1 for every 413 residents. (This is not far different from today, when London’s black cabs number approximately 1 per 300 residents.)

Cabs, cabstands, cab drivers and watermen were sources of constant complaints, bitter jokes and fear. The cabstand itself was hard to miss. Horses, cabs, the pump for the horses’ water and the equipment to service men, horses and cabs: all took up far more space than the equivalent taxi
stands do today and, as Dickens noted in 1851, cabstands might hold as many as fifteen cabs at a time. But the real complaint of Dickens and many others was the condition of the stands, where horse manure was churned into the fallen oats, chaff and hay, and the whole made wet and swilly by water from the pump in the summer, or in winter was piled up around the pump to insulate it from frost. Straw, too, was used as insulation, both for the pump and for the horses themselves, who stood all day in the cold and the rain. Piles of, theoretically, fresh and dry straw helped keep the animals minimally warm, but the straw was usually as damp and dirty as they were, while the buckets for watering the horses rolled across the road and the pavement, a danger to traffic and pedestrians alike. (Many suburban watermen kept chickens on their stands too, to add to the noise and dirt.)