A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain (19 page)

When Australian wool was brought from Sydney or Melbourne to London there was a similar interest in the speed of the ships. This voyage involved making for the Channel by the most direct route, around the notoriously rough Cape Horn, and the most famous clipper of all,
Cutty Sark
, gained considerable glory for breaking speed records. Built in 1869 and sold in 1895 – a fate that befell many ‘ocean greyhounds’ when it became obvious that they could not compete with steamers – her great days were in the eighties when, among other achievements, she made the voyage home from Australia in only seventy-seven days – as opposed to the customary hundred.

The clipper of the
Cutty Sark
’s generation represented the highest attainment of the shipbuilding art as it related to sailing vessels. Technology had already bypassed her when her keel was laid, and her reign was short, for within thirty years her elegance appeared quaint as she lay in harbour alongside the funnels of a new race of ships. Nevertheless she and the other clippers had their place in the epic of nineteenth-century sea transport, and they epitomized something about the Victorians. In their combination of sentimentality and thrusting, materialistic confidence, they were a potent symbol of the era.

At the start of the nineteenth century city streets were filled with people on foot. It was an age of pedestrians, for unless you owned or rented a carriage, and unless you could afford to hire a cabriolet or a chaise or a Hackney – all of which were too expensive for the greater part of the population – you walked. Clerical workers travelled in to their offices and counting houses on foot, great streams of them following the roads in from the suburbs, and plodding home in the opposite direction at the close of business. Though these journeys might take an hour and more, they were seen as an inescapable fact of life. ‘Public transport’ did not exist.

Although it was the Victorians – during whose epoch the populations of many cities doubled – who solved the problems of moving millions efficiently in and out of great conurbations, the situation had already begun to be addressed before Victoria came to the throne. One answer was the ‘omnibus’, a vehicle first seen on London’s streets in 1829.

The transporting of people in and out of London was, of course, no novelty. As early as 1772 there had been a ‘new contrived coach’ running between Charing Cross and the Royal Exchange for a fare of sixpence. Like all coaches, this had seating for half a dozen passengers inside and a few more on the roof. Stage-coaches developed runs along short routes in the suburbs, stopping at inns, though they did not follow main thoroughfares into the city centre.

This situation changed with the opening, in July 1829, of a service between Paddington, at the time outside London, and the Bank, the traditional hub of the business and financial
world. It was established by George Shillibeer, a carriage-maker who had worked in Paris and copied the idea direct from the French. Shillibeer designed a vehicle (in fact, he made two of them) that was long, flat-roofed and box-shaped, high off the ground – passengers had to mount three steps to enter it – and drawn by three horses walking abreast. There was a single door at the back, and inside there was room for about eighteen passengers, who sat facing each other on two long benches. The driver’s seat was on the roof, directly above the horses. A conductor, who sold the tickets, helped passengers on and off, and called out the stops, stood on the steps at the rear.

Shillibeer’s service departed from a Paddington public house, the Yorkshire Stingo, and travelled into the City along Euston and Marylebone Roads. It cost a shilling, at a time when a clerk’s wages were between seven and ten shillings a week, so it was not intended to be a democratic form of transport. It offered privacy, and comfort, to the comfortably off. Shillibeer had once been a naval midshipman, and the first two conductors he employed were the sons of naval officers. They were dressed in nautical blue jackets that brought a certain flair to the enterprise, for clearly bus-conducting was initially seen as a career for gentlemen – a notion that did not long survive. The vehicles were painted dark green and each had painted on its side the word ‘Omnibus’, which Shillibeer had also appropriated from Paris.

His service was an immediate success, prompting him to build more conveyances – within a year he had twelve in operation – and plan more routes, though his vehicles proved too heavy. Later versions were smaller, and pulled by only two horses. Others began almost at once to imitate him, and in less than a decade, when the Victorian era began, there were some four hundred omnibuses operating in London. As the idea
spread from the capital to other cities, it spawned local variations: in 1852 a Manchester operator developed an immense vehicle pulled by three horses, which seated no fewer than forty-two. A contemporary newspaper explained why omnibuses were so popular in comparison with the coach: ‘In an omnibus there is no delay in taking up and setting down; no calling at booking offices; no twenty minutes waiting at “the Cellar” ’ (
Morning Herald
, 10 October 1829). In other words, making a short journey to work by suburban coach was as troublesome and time-consuming as going on a long-distance expedition with all its booking and hanging about waiting to board. The omnibus brought a convenience that was refreshing.

This convenience was only relative, for other aspects of travel by omnibus would not become standard practice until the latter part of Victoria’s reign. The suburban coaches had had stopping-places, the omnibus did not. It could be hailed, like a taxi, by anyone at the kerbside, and might therefore be constantly stopping – or crossing the road – to pick up fares. As with other vehicles of the time it did not keep to the left, but simply forced its way through the traffic wherever there was a gap. Passengers were picked up or put down in the middle of busy streets and left to fend for themselves. There were no destination boards, therefore the driver and conductor had to tout for custom as they went along, calling out the names of places they were going, and enticing pedestrians to get aboard. As more operating companies came into existence and competition for passengers became keener, rival conductors might even come to blows over whose vehicle a hapless individual was to board. It was not until 1855 that an attempt was made to consolidate the various lines and rationalize the service. When this did happen, the impetus came from an unusual quarter, for the resulting body was called the Compagnie
Générale des Omnibus de Londres, and had its headquarters in Paris. The notion of amalgamating had been conceived by a French businessman, Joseph Osri, and his organization became, with six hundred vehicles, the world’s largest public transport provider. It was only after four years that its offices actually moved to London.

The omnibus, its title soon shortened to the more familiar ‘bus’, remained a single-decker vehicle until the 1840s, and its further development was very gradual. One or two seats were made available next to the driver, and a few more installed behind him, but when in 1847 buses were fitted with roofs that had a clerestory in the middle (to allow headroom in the aisle inside), travellers began to sit on the roofs, leaning against these. By the time of the Great Exhibition, when business vastly increased, some companies had installed plank seats and created the ‘knife-board’ omnibus, on which passengers sat in two back-to-back rows, entirely exposed to the weather. Their only way on or off was via rungs or a precarious ladder. Nevertheless, many preferred to perch at this height. The inside of a bus rapidly became overheated and claustrophobic, and the stuffed seats, as well as the straw that was put on the floor, were thought to spread infection. The knife-board gradually became less precarious and more comfortable. Steps with a handrail made access easier and guard-rails on either side lessened any sense of vertigo. This style of bus remained in use until the end of the eighties, when outward-facing knife-board seating was gradually replaced by forward-facing ‘garden seats’ – rickety two-seater wooden benches, on either side of an aisle, a design favoured on the Continent. A set of regulations laid down in 1867 had brought a degree of order, for they allowed local authorities to establish routes, and stipulated that buses could only pick up on the near- (left) side of the road. This meant that instead of a ladder there could
be a spiral stair. There was also a substantial rear platform, and there were proper walls around the upper deck. These vehicles could seat twelve passengers inside and fourteen outside, and the new arrangements meant that women could comfortably use the top deck for the first time. By the end of the century hundreds of buses were running on a comprehensive network of routes, many still in operation.

Like the omnibus, the tram was an invention that predated Victoria’s accession but which came into its own during her reign. The street railway was not a British concept, for in London the thoroughfares were well-paved and buses did not require rails on which to run. In the United States, however, city streets were often so muddy and uneven that a journey in a bouncing, lurching and stalling omnibus was likely to be slow and uncomfortable. It occurred to one operator in Baltimore that by laying rails in which a vehicle could run it would be possible to ensure smooth progress, and a street railway of sorts was in use there by 1828. Four years later the idea was tried in New York. The intention was to lay a track along the roadside and create a railway link between Manhattan and Harlem that would then continue north to Albany. The city authorities did not welcome the prospect of locomotives in their streets, and so instead a horse-drawn bus service that ran on rails was introduced. It was called a ‘tramway’. The vehicles, drawn by two horses – whose job was made easier in that they did not have to pull over uneven ground – could carry up to sixty passengers. At first, turntables had to be provided at the end of the route so that the vehicle could be turned round, but before long the easier arrangement of having cars with an identical stair at both ends, and seat-backs
that could be tipped to face the opposite way, had been introduced.

The concept was introduced to Europe by the French, who had pioneered so many aspects of public transport. In 1855 an ‘American railway’ was inaugurated in Paris and, after some initial difficulties, proved a success. Proposals for a similar service in London were floated in 1861, but met with little encouragement. The rails – whether they lay above the road surface and caused other traffic to stumble over them, or were flush with the street and caused carriage wheels to get stuck in them – were unpopular with other road-users. It was for the latter reason that Sir Benjamin Hall, the Chief Commissioner of Public Works (after whom Big Ben was named) refused to allow the laying of rails – his own carriage had once been overturned in similar circumstances. Nevertheless, three experimental lines were built during 1861 and of these one survived. Similar lines had meanwhile been introduced at Liverpool docks and at Birkenhead, in the Potteries and at Darlington. Of these, it was Liverpool that put in place the first comprehensive local service, authorized in 1868 by an Act of Parliament.

In the same year the tide of opinion turned in London and new lines were built, in southern and eastern parts of the city. Because tram lines were excluded from the City and were not wanted among the ‘carriage folk’ of the West End (whose wheels would become stuck in them), the networks congregated in the poorer parts of the capital, and were particularly extensive south of the Thames. They thus gained a reputation as a poor man’s transport, and in fact they deliberately cultivated this. They began operations earlier in the morning than buses did, and pitched their fares to capture the custom of labourers. In the country as a whole this does not seem to have been true, and tram systems spread rapidly in other cities, such
as Leeds, Glasgow and Plymouth. While horse power was the usual means of moving tram cars, a wide range of other options was introduced. Steam had been used to drive road vehicles in the 1830s, when several services had been operated (such as that between Cheltenham and Gloucester) by what were, in effect, horseless mail coaches with a boiler and a two-cylinder engine attached. The service had never proved popular and had been disregarded, though forty years later ‘steam cars’ reappeared. They ran both on tracks and on the roadway, and comprised a locomotive pulling a ‘trailer’ which carried the passengers. Entire steam-powered systems were introduced, notably at Govan in 1877 and at Huddersfield in 1883. There was at least one line driven by compressed air, and others used steam power to haul the cars by cable (the method still in use in San Francisco). Electricity was first used to power trams in Berlin at the beginning of the eighties, and within a few years an American had invented the ‘troller’, a wire attached to a set of wheels that ran along an overhead cable, drawing power from it. This was successfully used, but much improved upon when a rigid pole was substituted. Blackpool trams, whose survival has made them the most famous in Britain, started in 1885, drawing electricity from a conduit in the ground but later converting to cables. The first system to be entirely powered by electric cables went into operation in Leeds in 1891. This method was now considered reliable enough to see widespread use, and throughout the decade one city after another festooned its streets with ugly masses of overhead wires.

Trams were now everywhere and they made a massively important change to British life. Before the advent of cheap and convenient public transport, people had had to live near their place of work – or at least within walking distance of it. With the coming of railways, the wealthy were able to live
farther out of town and travel some way to their offices, but artisans had continued to inhabit crowded and often insalubrious city centre districts. The introduction of the workmen’s trains and, to a much greater extent, the trams, meant that for the first time people’s homes and workplaces could be entirely separate. Many large building projects (King’s Cross Station, for example) had in any case meant the clearing of whole neighbourhoods, and, with the creation of ever bigger office buildings, a transformation of the appearance of cities took place, and the notion of people – of any class – actually living in a ‘business district’ began rapidly to disappear. Because of the tramway system, lower-middle-class suburbs sprouted like mushrooms, and the outskirts of cities grew on a scale that had previously been unimaginable. Where a tram stop was designated and people would therefore gather, shops appeared (this is often the origin of the local ‘parade’ that is such a feature of British suburban neighbourhoods). The urban landscape in which we still live – of scattered miniature communities linked by the lines of a transport system – began at this time and in this way. The tram was to become extinct, but its legacy has remained.