A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain (18 page)

In Britain, the consolidation of a swift and increasingly efficient railway system had led to the standardization of timekeeping, a concept unknown and unattainable until then. When travel had been slower, every city, or district, could set its clocks as it pleased. With the advent of timetables – and of the electric telegraph through which the railways communicated – it became necessary for far-distant towns to synchronize. ‘Railway time’ became uniform, and was the standard to which all municipalities, organizations and institutions came to adhere. The result – a single, agreed reckoning of time,
based on Greenwich – appears obvious to us. To the Victorians it seemed a miracle.

If the railway stations with their soaring glass-and-iron vaults were engineering marvels, the locomotives that arrived and departed within them were no less impressive. Within twenty years of the Rainhill trial, the engines of the
Rocket
generation looked as anachronistic as a propeller-driven aircraft does to us. Engines were bigger, sleeker and, above all, faster. They had acquired longer boilers, lower funnels, larger tenders to carry more coal and more, and bigger, wheels, driven by pistons (by 1870 the famously elegant Stirling locomotive with its eight-foot driving wheel was in service on the line from London to Scotland). Drivers and footplates were given protection within semi-enclosed cabs, water and coal were made strategically accessible at track-sides so that trains could refuel without lengthy delays. Speed and efficiency were constantly, relentlessly being increased, though there were constant accidents, numerous deaths, frequent official enquiries and several Acts of Parliament aimed at making the service safer.

Passengers were divided, according to their means, into three classes – as they were in society itself. First Class carried the nobility and gentry and the upper middle class. Second was appropriate for the clerk, shopkeeper and suburbanite. Third was for the lower middle class and for workmen. In First Class there were horsehair-stuffed seats. In Second, the seats were wooden. In Third – at least until the 1844 Act – there were no seats, or indeed roofs. The carriages, known as ‘standipedes’, were simply open wagons in which the travellers huddled, and only gradually did this section of the public gain any basic comforts. The standard of accommodation in all classes improved rapidly, however, once competition for passengers between the companies became more acute.

Though railway travel had ceased to have the excitement of novelty, it came to acquire a different sort of glamour. The longest routes in Britain were those between London and Scotland, and on the east-coast line, to York and Edinburgh, a train left King’s Cross at ten o’clock each morning. This, initially called the ‘Special Scotch Express’, soon took on the more resonant nickname ‘The Flying Scotsman’, and became one of the world’s most famous train journeys. It was known not only for speed but comfort. Engines and rolling-stock were the best available, carriages were well appointed and there was no Third Class. The companies that ran the –slightly longer – west-coast route from Euston had to compete for passengers in what became bitter rivalry, and the ‘railway race to the north’ saw both sides increase train speeds and shorten passengers’ comfort-stops in an attempt to improve the service. This sense of witnessing, or participating in, a sporting event that might involve breaking records (both sides reduced the time of their run to eight hours), increased public excitement and affection for the ‘permanent way’.

Because railway travel was within reach of all but the very poorest, it altered the habits of the population. Public events, such as the weekly Saturday afternoon musical concerts at London’s Crystal Palace, were attended by thousands who were able to reach its rather off-the-beaten-track location within minutes from Victoria. It became possible for the first time, from the late thirties, for many people to take holidays. Naturally, many wished to go to the coast – although inland spas like Malvern and Buxton, and places of known beauty like the Lake District were also popular – and an increasing amount of railway traffic was devoted to getting them there. It became possible to reach a town such as Brighton or Eastbourne, spend some hours there and return within the same day, and thus the ‘day trip’ became a staple experience for the
lower middle class. Railways also meant that families with their luggage – and even servants – could be transported to seaside resorts relatively easily. It was common for a wife, children and nanny to be installed in a hotel or boarding house while Father remained in town to work, joining them at weekends. Traffic to the coast proved so lucrative that railway companies began promoting resorts themselves, and actually building piers and other attractions to lure the public. Southend, Seaford, Minehead and Weston-super-Mare were all created, or improved, by railway companies to generate holiday traffic. With the growth of rail systems on the Continent, it also became possible for tourists to venture further afield by catching boat-trains that delivered them to Channel steamers, and – in another example of a ‘shrinking world’ – it was possible to book tickets at the London termini to destinations all over Europe and Asia. Captain Fred Burnaby, the traveller who wrote the epic and bestselling narrative
A Ride to Khiva
about a trek through Turkestan, began his journey, somewhat prosaically, by boarding the Folkestone train at Charing Cross.

The steam engine could be used, with equal success, to drive vessels on water. In the United States, Robert Fulton had patented a steam boat driven by paddles, and tested it on the Hudson River with a four-day journey from New York to Albany and back. It represented an important victory over nature, for it was the first time in history that the propulsion of a vessel through water did not depend on the power of wind or muscle.

Steam boats ran on coal, and moved with the aid of paddle wheels. With one of these at each side, it was possible to turn
the vessel by using one or other of them, though a version with a single, wide wheel at the back was also developed. These boats quickly proved their worth on rivers and in coastal work, and within ten or fifteen years had become commonplace, but they could not easily be used for long sea voyages because they needed constant supplies of coal. When, in 1818, an American steam vessel, the
Savanna
, succeeded in crossing the Atlantic, she did so only with the help of sails.

What caused the revolution in steam navigation was the invention of the screw propeller. Two men developed the idea at more or less the same time. In 1834 a Hampshire clergyman, the Reverend Edward Berthon, conceived the idea that a boat could be driven by a type of finned screw in the vessel’s stern below the waterline. He proved it by building a model which performed well in a pond in his garden. Almost simultaneously, Francis Pettit Smith came to the same conclusion, and he too experimented. Both men patented their idea in the same year – 1837 – though Smith was the first actually to build a full-sized boat and sail in it. The Admiralty was persuaded to test the notion, and a larger screw-driven vessel, the
Archimedes
, was built. Her top speed of ten knots meant that she outperformed the
Vulcan
, which was among the Navy’s most powerful paddle-steamers. A trial of strength was subsequently arranged between two other boats, this time involving a tug of war. They were of similar size and design, and had the same engines. The
Rattler
was propeller-driven and her rival, the
Alecto
, had port and starboard paddles. A tow-rope was fixed between their sterns, and on a signal they steamed in opposite directions. Watched by an interested crowd,
Alecto
suffered the indignity of being dragged backwards by her opponent. It was a victory for progress. Throughout the twenties and thirties, steam navigation companies came into existence, and steamers
began to carry mail for considerable distances – from London to Alexandria, for instance.

In the meantime Isambard Brunel, already heavily involved in building the Great Western Railway, was considering the possibilities of extending its reach all the way to the New World. He wanted to create a shipping service that would enable train passengers from London to disembark at Bristol and directly board a boat to America so that, as he put it, it would be possible to book a ticket ‘from Paddington to New York’. He managed to persuade the company’s directors to back him. Because Brunel was an engineer and not an administrator, he was less interested in the logistics of the scheme than in the design of the vessels that would make it possible, and he wanted a steamship that could carry enough coal to make the 2,500-mile voyage without recourse to sails. He planned, and built, such a ship, and named it after the railway. The
Great Western
was a paddle steamer, though she had masts and carried sail. At 212 feet long, she was the world’s largest vessel, and though built of oak her hull was reinforced with iron. She was launched in the year that Victoria became Queen.

In 1838 she made her first voyage to New York. By the time she departed, she had attracted a rival in the shape of the
Sirius
, another sail-and-paddle hybrid that was attempting to make her way across on behalf of the British & American Steam Navigation Company. They did not set off together –
Sirius
had a head start – but their time across the ocean was measured.
Sirius
arrived first, though only by a few hours, after a voyage of eighteen days. It was a pyrrhic victory. She had run out of coal and been forced to burn all her cabin furniture, and even her doors. When the
Great Western
reached port, having taken fifteen days to make the crossing, she was found to have more than 12,000 tons of coal left.

This achievement was not built upon, and the Great Western Railway failed to create its own fleet. Brunel’s ideas, however, moved on. His next ship was even more ambitious. The
Great Britain
, launched at Bristol in 1843, was 108 feet longer than
Great Western
and at 3,500 tons she boasted two important innovations: her hull was completely built from iron, and she had a propeller.

It was this latter feature that made the difference. The screw propeller finally came of age in the 1840s, and shipping experienced something of a renaissance (Samuel Cunard, to cite one example, founded his fleet in 1840). The British shipbuilding industry expanded to meet demand, producing 131,000 tons during the forties – a figure that increased to 314,000 tons for the sixties. This was not simply the result of growing interest in global commerce. The repeal, in 1849, of the Navigation Act meant that all restrictions were removed on the carriage of British goods by foreign vessels. British ships were no longer protected against fierce competition, and it was necessary to fight back. Also significant, however, was the increase in passengers with the immense flood in emigrants from Ireland and the discovery of gold in California and Australia. In addition, during the sixties, British yards built vessels for the Confederate Navy. The slipways were kept busy, and by the fifties it was largely iron ships they were turning out.

Brunel had planned yet another leviathan. In the autumn of 1857 three years’ work on the
Great Eastern
was completed at Millwall. Once again this was the largest ship ever built (a record she was to keep until 1906), and this time undoubtedly dwarfed all that had gone before. She was 692 feet in length and 18,915 tons. She had a 24-foot propeller and side paddle-wheels which, at 58 feet, were as high as a three-storey house, though she also had masts and sails. The ship was so vast that
she could not be launched bow-first, and she had to be lowered, somewhat gingerly, sideways into the Thames, watched by a crowd that exceeded 3 million.

Unfortunately she stuck, and it required a further three months of careful nudging before she reached the river. Once at sea, her performance was disappointing, for her colossal engines could not coordinate the work of the wheels and propeller, and the ship never reached the speeds expected. Brunel died before she made her maiden voyage, and when she crossed the Atlantic in the summer of 1860, she was welcomed in New York but attracted few passengers. A year later she was badly damaged in a storm while on a return voyage, losing both wheels and what little prestige she had left. In 1864 she was sold to become a cable-laying vessel, and, made redundant from this, in 1886 she became a funfair in Liverpool harbour. Two years later she was broken up.

Great Eastern
had symbolized the power of British technology, and her failure was unable to dent the confidence of the engineers and mechanics who continued to design. In the same decade that Brunel’s great ship was lying idle, British yards were building more ships than the rest of the world put together. A greater achievement – for it was to power the fleets of the twentieth century – was the steam turbine. This was invented in the eighties by Charles Parsons, who took a further ten years to develop one that could be used aboard a vessel. It was a steam engine that did not use a piston, whose basic principle was the shooting of very hot steam at a revolving set of fan-blades. This simple idea, which was extremely difficult to fulfil in practice, was used for the first time in a small vessel Parsons built called the
Turbinia
, which was able to travel at a speed of thirty-four knots, almost twice the rate of one of the sail-driven tea-clippers, the ‘greyhounds of the ocean’. The future had arrived.

While steam navigation represented progress, the sailing ship continued to claim a hefty share of the oceans until the end of the century – in 1865 only a sixth of British shipping was steam-driven – and did not tamely give up its glamour. The clippers that brought China tea and Australian wool to England were the fastest merchant vessels ever powered by wind. The races to the Thames from Shanghai or Melbourne were not only epics of seamanship but major sporting events that attracted wagers and enthralled the public.

‘Clippers’ were light and fast sailing ships of a type that were first built for the coastal trade in the eastern United States. Only when they began carrying tea cargoes to Britain was the native shipbuilding industry galvanized into competing with them, and soon developed an expertise of its own. Although they carried many types of cargo, the task for which they were celebrated was the bringing of the annual tea crop, in May, to London from ports on the China coast. Because China tea lost freshness if it took too long to reach the consumer – and did not improve at sea – it was a matter of urgency to transport it as swiftly as possible. The first ship to arrive home could command the highest prices, and the crew would receive a substantial bonus. The result was a race across the world – a distance of 14,000 miles – at breakneck speed, by streamlined ships with highly experienced and professional captains and crews. Thanks to the electric telegraph, the progress of these ships could be followed as they dashed across the South China Sea, rounded the Cape and sailed up the Atlantic to the Channel and the Pool of London. Public interest was intense, and mounted steadily as they neared home. The most dramatic of these contests was that of 1866, which was dominated by two ships –
Ariel
and
Taeping
– in a field of sixteen. Though the members of this pack jockeyed for the lead in the opening stages, three vessels pulled ahead and raced for home, crossing
the Equator at the same time and exchanging the lead as one or other caught the wind or fell behind.
Ariel
and
Taiping
appeared in the Channel together, and were neck and neck as they rounded the Kent coast into the Thames.
Ariel
arrived first, but
Taiping
was the first to dock, and won by twenty minutes. The third vessel,
Serica
, had joined them within less than an hour. All three had made the journey in ninety-nine days.