A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain (17 page)

Though the coaches were seen as the epitome of speed, they could travel no faster than fifteen or sixteen miles an hour, which before the railway age was thought to be the most that the human frame could stand. A journey of more than a few score miles would therefore involve overnight stops, and to cater for passengers there was a network of coaching inns, some of which had been accommodating travellers since the days of medieval pilgrimages. In a city such as York, which dealt with a vast amount of coach traffic, these would be very substantial establishments, with several floors of bedrooms, large communal dining- and coffee-rooms, and the necessary stabling, hay stores and carriage houses. They were a prominent part of the community, an important provider of local employment and a source – because of the traffic that passed through them – of news from the outside world. The mere sight of an approaching mail coach would suggest the glamour of
speed, the excitement of far-off places and the prospect of interesting tidings, for they brought the newspapers. It is worth emphasizing, however, that although anyone could look at a mail coach, the majority of people could not afford to ride in one. The cost of transport in these vehicles was such that many, in the course of a lifetime, never used them. Others might take a coach only in exceptional circumstances, such as for an annual visit to a large city.

It was during the forties that the competition between train and coach became most acute, for the ‘railway mania’ in the middle years of that decade began to cover the landscape, and major cities, market towns and even villages increasingly became linked by the ‘permanent way’.

One aspect of the railway age that became apparent within a matter of years was the decline of the coaching inn. In towns that were not on an important line, or where the local authorities resisted the blandishments of the railway builders, coaching inns ceased to be hubs of news and traffic and became mere local taverns. This could also be seen in London, where a number of famous establishments had hosted travellers before their journeys to all parts of the kingdom. South of the Thames, in Borough High Street and its surroundings, important coaching inns had included the Tabard, from which Chaucer’s pilgrims had set off for Canterbury, and the White Hart, scene of Mr Pickwick’s meeting with Sam Weller. London’s first railway, arriving at the end of the thirties, ran through precisely this area. By the mid-century the inns were either gone altogether or were surviving only as public houses. A later, sentimental desire to preserve some of these obsolete premises for posterity came in time to save only one of
them – the George. Much photographed today, its surviving galleries are a reminder of the Pickwickian travellers who, for a few years after the start of Victoria’s reign, were roused at dawn to gulp down coffee and cold meat breakfasts while their luggage was loaded and the horses put in the shafts for a long and uncomfortable journey.

By the end of the reign, this simpler world had attracted a good deal of nostalgia. Prints and paintings depicted the sad ruins of once-proud vehicles, forgotten in barns, covered with straw or used as hen houses. In fact, however, coaches did not become extinct. They continued to run in areas where there was no railway access, and within towns provided a service from hotels and coaching inns to the stations – carrying out the same work that was by this time being done by buses. Even at the end of the century, the coach did not quite disappear, for, when it was realized that these noble vehicles were really on their way to oblivion, they began to enjoy a revival in popularity. Sentimental attachment was combined with pleasure in racing or driving them, and coaching clubs became a noticeable feature of upper-class Victorian leisure. It is difficult to identify the precise moment that coaches ceased to be a form of public transport and became a private hobby, for the two functions overlapped. The clubs held runs across country, often departing from the same inns from which in earlier generations the mails and passengers had been carried, and thus momentarily reviving past glories. They might set out to break records over a set distance – or simply to have a pleasant day in the country. Since their roofs were ideal places on which to lunch or watch sporting events, they became extremely popular at race meetings, and continued to appear at the Eton and Harrow cricket match until the mid-1980s. The stage-coach, in other words, was quickly superseded by the railway, but never went away.

The steam locomotive had first been publicly demonstrated in London by a Cornishman, Richard Trevithick, in 1808 – though five years earlier he had already used a steam engine to pull colliery wagons along a tracked route in Wales. His machine, called the ‘Catch Me Who Can’, had been driven round a circular set of tracks. While this may have been an entertaining novelty for those who saw it, there was no immediate progress in the development of passenger rail travel, though an increasing number of steam locomotives were in use in the north (one estimate is that more than ninety were in service by the mid-twenties). A railway was established between Stockton and Darlington in 1825, and four years later a trial was held, at Rainhill in Liverpool, to establish the fastest and most efficient between several types of engine, the winner being George Stephenson’s
Rocket
. In 1830 a railway was opened between Liverpool and Manchester, and in 1837 between London and Birmingham, with the capital’s first terminus opening at Euston. A few years previously the Great Western Railway, essentially the personal creation of its brilliant chief engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, had been established in the West Country. It was to be the largest of what would ultimately be hundreds of railway companies that began to sprout throughout the country (by the time the railways were consolidated into four major companies in 1921, there were more than two hundred and forty).

Most locomotives ran – following Stephenson’s example – on rails that were a standard width apart: 4 feet 8½ inches. This was more or less exactly the width that horse-drawn wagons had been since the time of the Romans. Only Brunel’s Great Western differed from this. GWR trains ran on a broadgauge track whose width was 7 feet ¼ inch, and they continued
to do so until compelled by parliamentary legislation to convert to standard gauge in 1892, at which time armies of workmen descended on the tracks, lifted the rails and carried out the entire operaton in a single weekend.

Railways made an immense difference to the landscape. They cut across obstacles of whatever kind – ploughing through hills and woods, hurdling rivers, cutting swathes through towns and cities. There was frequently opposition from landowners, though this was rarely effectual. In many cases compulsory purchase was possible, in other instances persuasion was sufficient (townspeople could see the benefits to local trade, estate owners with coal or cattle to sell knew they could move commodities more easily). In some cases it was necessary to divert the line to avoid trespassing on sacred ground. At Cambridge the railway station is a brisk quarter of an hour’s walk from the town centre, and when a line was built from Slough to Windsor, it had to make a wide loop to avoid crossing ‘the playing fields of Eton’. Sometimes powerful local interests could do the opposite – summoning a railway link rather than keeping it at a distance: at Alnwick, a branch line and a station were built for the convenience of the Duke of Northumberland, whose castle was in the town. Every year there were more miles of track: 97 in 1830, 969 in 1839, 1,775 in 1841, 9,446 in 1861. By the first years of the twentieth century there would be more than 19,000.

As routes opened up, and it was realized that travel by train was not injurious to health, the railways began to do an unprecedented amount of business in transporting people. To begin with it was a thrill to be able to travel at thirty miles an hour – twice the speed, after all, of a coach. As they became widespread, the railways became cheap. In 1844 a Railway Act, as well as laying down obligatory minimum standards of safety and service, established third-class fares at
a penny a mile, and sixteen years later workmen’s fares were introduced. By the time the novelty had worn off, the convenience of rail travel had won over the public. In the year 1851, 19 million passengers travelled by train.

As the network spread, the railways became an increasingly popular investment. It seemed as if every town in Britain wanted to be on at least a branch line. Railway companies, and shares, proliferated, and a particular peak of hysteria was reached in the mid-forties. To the public, it seemed that investment in these was a sure-fire way to make money, for this new form of transport clearly represented the future. The network could surely only continue to grow, the companies to multiply. The newspapers whipped up a storm of public interest with saturation coverage and advertisements. Interest rates at this time were low, and people were encouraged to invest at once – to catch the moment – while there were shares to be had. It was a rush of enthusiasm something like the buy-to-let property boom of a later generation, and it similarly encouraged those who were not habitual speculators and who had little capital. It was characterized by the number of small shareholders, and many middle-class families committed the whole of their meagre resources.

The result could have been predicted, except that mercifully there was no swift crash. Many schemes had been fraudulent, while other companies had simply been thwarted in their efforts to build. Interest rates went up again, and thousands of shareholders lost their investments; those of most modest means were, as always, the hardest hit. The Railway Age was not without birth pangs.

The creation of Britain’s railway system was described by contemporaries as the greatest building project since the Egyptian pyramids. There had certainly never been anything like it in British history. Between 200,000 and 250,000 labourers,
many of them from Ireland, worked to create the multitude of lines that ultimately reached to the far north of Scotland. At the height of the railway-building boom, between 1844 and 1847, over nine and a half thousand miles of track were laid and, while the lines stretched out toward remote regions, the suburbs of cities were enmeshed in systems that carried local traffic. Because there were innumerable companies of varying size and ambition, there were hundreds of building projects in progress at once – many of them duplicating services and thus giving towns more than one station – and no unified plan. For passengers on long journeys, the need to book a ticket that involved travelling with several different railway companies created such inconvenience that in 1842 the Railway Clearing House, a centralized booking office, was set up. The railway network that covered the country grew haphazardly, though much of it eventually resolved into a logical pattern that linked together the major cities. The man most responsible for this was George Hudson, nicknamed ‘the railway king’. The personification of the get-rich-quick railway decade, he was a Yorkshire businessman who bullied his way to control of several railway companies and then embezzled hundreds of thousands of pounds. His motives were, of course, selfish, and after a few years he was discovered and disgraced. Together with his greed, however, he had had a genuine flair for organization, and had consolidated his various railway holdings into a viable, nascent network, an achievement on which others could build.

The builders – and Brunel in particular – made valiant efforts to blend their work with the landscape. Cuttings hid the line, embankments were sown with grass and planted with trees.
Bridges and viaducts were designed to be graceful, and built with costly materials. The architecture of the railway bridge in the shadow of Conwy Castle in Wales pays tribute to its illustrious neighbour, and the entrance to Box Tunnel, near Bath, is decorated with italianate balustrades and keystoned arches to resemble something from the Renaissance. In the towns, where the coming of the railways had caused the most havoc (for entire districts had been truncated or demolished to allow the tracks through), equal care was taken to make this new intrusion appear dignified and appropriate. Temple Meads station in Bristol looks like a castle but has hints of an Oxford college. There were others that resembled Greek temples or Jacobean country houses. Small rural stations often looked like cottages or farmhouses. Not only the lines and stations were built by the railway ‘navvies’, but the engineering marvels that carried trains over rivers and through hills and mountains. Their most striking monument is surely the Forth Bridge, completed in 1890.

In London, on which all the main lines converged, there were a number of great termini. Every one of them was built during Victoria’s reign, and, because no two looked alike, they usefully reflect the change of taste and the competing styles that characterized the era. The first was at Euston Square, completed in 1838. It was followed by London Bridge, Fenchurch Street, King’s Cross, Paddington, Bishopsgate, Victoria, Charing Cross, Waterloo, Cannon Street, St Pancras and Marylebone, which, opened in 1899, was the smallest as well as the last. Euston, with its Doric-pillared arch, was severely Classical. King’s Cross was prim and understated, as functional as an engine-shed, while its neighbour, St Pancras, was a colossal neo-Gothic fantasy that looked more like a city hall in Flanders. It is worth remembering that no secular structure on the scale of these buildings had been seen before (with the
exceptions of the contemporary Crystal Palace and Houses of Parliament). Even the smallest were as big as cathedrals. Although their architecture often looked to the past, they were a potent symbol of the Victorian present – massive, expensive, technically bold and accomplished, expressive of a great and unassailable confidence.

Even as the railways were covering their own country, British engineers were taking their skills abroad. Western European countries quickly adopted the new form of transport, and lines began extending eastwards and southwards across the Continent. The railway was even more popular in the vastness of India and Russia and of North and South America, where it was not simply a convenience – as it was in Britain – but a crucial link that made life viable in remote settlements. Britain manufactured the locomotives (often tailored to local terrain or conditions), rails and rolling-stock, and sent the engineers, builders, coal, drivers and maintenance men to set up the systems. In the process, they learned to solve problems and cope with extremes that were far greater than anything found at home – jungles, deserts and mountain ranges like the Andes and Himalayas. The manufacture and export of railways was a major industry that employed thousands and earned millions throughout the century.