The Subterranean Railway (10 page)

He had, as one historian puts it, ‘business acumen, superb negotiating skills with tremendous flexibility to manipulate several options to achieve a personal objective’.
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Other descriptions are even less kind: ‘He could be fairly described as a nervous and aggressive workaholic who from his twenties onwards suffered from anxiety, depression and nervous breakdown.’
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There is no doubt he was a difficult man to work with. Although he was, at times, extremely affable, he was ruthless and enjoyed nothing more than a good fight, including public disputes with the directors of companies he chaired. His belligerence resulted in a battle with Forbes that lasted for over three decades, but fortunately for Londoners, most of the conflict between the pair was fought out in the Kent countryside. Even today, the pattern of the railway network and the existence of two stations in many modest-sized towns such as Maidstone, Sevenoaks and Margate, serving different London termini, is a reflection of the long battle between the two railways when they were led, respectively, by Forbes and Watkin. Watkin was secretive and abrasive in negotiations, while Forbes, possibly disingenuously, presented himself as more amenable. Forbes refused to bow to pressure from his rival and set out to expand to survive.
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The ruinous competition, which was to the detriment of both passengers and shareholders of the two railways, only ended when Watkin retired in 1894; within five years, the two companies had effectively merged.

In London, the battle was less wasteful but still damaging to the long-term interests of the capital. After the District reached Mansion House, at last the Metropolitan started its journey east, with an extension opened in February 1875 into Great Eastern’s huge new Liverpool Street terminus. Later that year trains were rerouted to a nearby station at Bishopsgate. A further extension to Aldgate was completed in 1876, largely because of pressure from the Corporation of London, but by then the Metropolitan realized that building cut and cover lines through expensive City property was not viable and stopped its expansion.

Even before the arrival of Forbes and Watkin, relations between the District and the Metropolitan railways had been fraught. The idea of having two railways was already creating conflicts which made life harder for passengers. At Kensington, for example, the ownership pattern was confusing. While the track from Moorgate round to South Kensington via Paddington belonged to the Metropolitan, the two companies jointly owned the stations at Gloucester Road and Kensington High Street where the eastern platform belonged to the Metropolitan and the western was in the hands of the District. At South Kensington there was another silly situation: the entire station was owned by the Metropolitan, and the District, unwilling to share it, started building an entirely new one which required the demolition of thirty recently built houses in Pelham Street.
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Usage increased when the District reached Mansion House in July 1871 but the money problems continued. Indeed, it was rather ironic that the District had been created as a separate company from the Metropolitan in order to raise money and yet throughout its history it struggled to do so. At first the District trains were run by the Metropolitan, but inevitably squabbles arose over the precise level of payments. The two companies had signed an operating agreement in 1866 by which the Metropolitan was supposed to get 55 per cent of the receipts for providing the trains, but it actually got 62 per cent since it ran additional services beyond those in the contract. This forced the District to provide its own trains and it bought the same Beyer, Peacock locomotives which had proved so effective for the Metropolitan. That did not stop the constant bickering over the amounts each should receive from the fare box and it was only in 1878, several years after the completion of the initial stages of the District, that the money was shared equally.

There were all kinds of other disputes. For example, the District had rather cheekily built two extra tracks parallel to the Metropolitan’s between Gloucester Road and High Street Kensington, the Cromwell curve (named after Cromwell Road under which it runs), without either
Parliamentary authority or an agreement with the Metropolitan. This allowed the District to avoid running over part of the Metropolitan’s tracks, for which it had to pay a usage charge, but did much to sour relations between the two companies, and arguments over the use of the curve carried on into the next century until, in a court case in 1903, the Metropolitan prevented the District from using it.

Even before the completion of the circle, the public were beginning to get a genuine underground service that covered much of London north of the Thames. The District’s rapidly built extension to Mansion House was opened by the Prime Minister, William Gladstone, and brought the line tantalizingly near to Tower Hill, just three quarters of a mile away, where eventually it was to meet the Met. By July 1871, when the District started running its own trains, there was a ten-minute frequency, half operated by each company, from Mansion House to Moorgate and a five-minute frequency between Mansion House and Gloucester Road. The trains were not luxurious but were relatively comfortable. They were painted green on the District and consisted of eight carriages: two first, two second (later a third second-class carriage was added) and four third. The first class only had four compartments per carriage, upholstered and roomy, while the others had five, and whereas the second class had a modicum of comfort the third’s furnishings were confined to a strip of carpet on the wooden seats and a padded back strip at shoulder height. Once the ninth carriage was added, there was space for 430 people on each train, impressive given the frequency of service. As with the Metropolitan, the District started out as non-smoking but was forced to allow it from 1874, adding to what was already an unpleasant atmosphere.

Like the Metropolitan, the District realized that there was money to be made by feeding trains from suburban lines onto the underground section. It first started operating services from West Brompton, on the West London line, through to Kensington High Street; but there was no station at Earls Court, between the two termini.

Earls Court is an early example of how quickly the arrival of the
underground railway could transform an area. At the time, Earls Court was fertile market garden land with few houses. The residents petitioned for a station and this was eventually completed in October 1871. The early building, a modest affair with a wooden booking office, lasted only four years before being burnt down, an event which enabled the company to provide a much grander station to meet the demands of the population, as the surrounding area had developed rapidly in the intervening period.
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The Earls Court and West Brompton connection was to be the start of the District’s drive westwards, just as the little spur from Baker Street to St John’s Wood would be the basis of the Metropolitan’s great expansion, both described in the next chapter. Meanwhile, though, the Circle needed to be completed and work was stalled. The antagonism between Watkin and Forbes delayed the completion of the Circle line, both being more concerned with doing each other down than ensuring the completion of the project.

There was, as ever in this story, a shortage of capital; and the state of the Metropolitan’s finances, which had been the main reason for employing Watkin, was, he discovered, worse than originally thought. The handsome returns paid by the Metropolitan in the mid 1860s were partly coming out of capital raised for future projects,
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forcing the company to cut dividends, which in turn prompted a shareholders’ revolt and a boardroom coup. The new board discovered that the books had not been properly kept and, according to one account, there was the suggestion of widespread corruption: ‘there was a considerable amount of slackness and waste in the stores and engineering departments’.
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Indeed, Watkin was incensed at what he found when he took over the chairmanship of the Metropolitan. He was scathing about John Fowler, the engineer, who had been paid the enormous sum of £152,000
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and who also received a further £157,000 from the District. While obviously part of that had to be passed on to his own employees and contractors, it represented a staggering amount given that the whole of the original section of the Metropolitan had been built for £1m. As Watkin pointed
out in an indignant letter to the engineer at a shareholders’ meeting, it was a poor example to other professionals involved in the construction: ‘No engineer in the world was so highly paid. Taking it any way you like – time, speciality, risk, quantity, value or all combined, you have set an example of charges which seems to me to have largely aided in demoralization of professional men of all sorts who have lived upon the suffering shareholders for the past ten years.’
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Watkin went on to lambast contractors generally: ‘At the opera, if we look at the lady occupants of the best boxes, who are glittering with the best diamonds, and ask who they are, we are told that they are the wife and daughters of Clodd, the great railway contractor. In the park whose carriages, horses and equipages are the most fashionable? Why, those belonging to Plausible, the great railway engineer. And if we hear of some poor nobleman’s estate being in the market, who buys it? Why, Vampire, the great railway lawyer.’
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It is interesting that Watkin, the son of a merchant, felt impelled to side with the landed gentry, rather than the ranks of the new entrepreneurs to which he belonged, in the great class battle which had been raging since the start of the Industrial Revolution nearly a century before.

The need for the completion of the Circle was apparent from the high usage of the sections that were already built. By 1875 the Metropolitan was carrying 48 million passengers per year, and the District, though continuing to struggle, managed to carry around half that number, still a substantial achievement. Three quarters of these passengers used third class, suggesting they were manual workers and low-paid clerks attracted by the low fares, but interestingly, as it expanded, the Underground managed to attract a substantial body of first-class passengers who were vociferous in their complaints about travelling on the slow and uncomfortable services. But where had these new travellers come from? Without the railway would they simply not have undertaken their journey, or were they transferring from other modes?

The steamboats, which were first introduced in 1815, had once been the mainstay of travel from south-east London but were in decline,
hastened by a disaster in 1878 when the overcrowded
Princess Alice
capsized, drowning over 600 people, mostly day-trippers. New forms of transport undoubtedly generate journeys, as witnessed by the rapid filling of any new motorway, and it was the same here: rather than the Underground eating into the traffic of its main rival the horse-drawn omnibus, usage of both modes of travel increased after the creation of the Metropolitan. The number of omnibus users rose from 40 million in the year of the Metropolitan’s opening to nearly 50 million in 1875. Partly this was the result of clever strategies by the omnibus owners: they reduced fares to cope with the competition, which, along with the fact that the average journey was now shorter, resulted in a fall in revenue in this period, despite the upsurge in passenger numbers; and they also provided, with encouragement from both the District and the Metropolitan, feeder services to the Underground, an early recognition of the importance of integrated transport. In some cases, the Underground companies had to subsidize these feeder services in order to boost passenger numbers on their trains. When the District first opened, there was no public transport between Regent Street and Church Lane (now High Street) Kensington, or anything along Park Lane or Palace Road. The reason was that in this affluent area of Central and West London people could afford their own carriages and therefore the District had to guarantee the revenue for the first omnibuses between Victoria and Paddington along Park Lane. Similarly, the Metropolitan paid for services from Piccadilly along Regent Street to what is now Great Portland Street station.

With suburban railways springing up – especially in south London – as well as the growing Underground in central London, it was the end of the half-century-long dominance of horse-drawn public transport and one estimate suggests that by 1875 there were three times more train passengers than omnibus riders.
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The omnibus still had a niche market for shorter journeys and those for which there was no rail alternative, but the train services, both underground and suburban, were becoming the main way for Londoners to get about, not least
because they were so much faster for any journey of more than a mile, despite the problems of access up and down often quite difficult stairs. And interestingly, the London General Omnibus Company managed to pay much more handsome dividends to its shareholders during this period than did the train companies, because of external changes such as the reduction in the cost of horse feed and various savings in tolls and taxes. The Underground companies, moreover, were burdened with a huge capital base, together with continual pressure to raise more in order to expand.

With both the Metropolitan and the District ailing, others tried to fill the gap in getting the Underground circle completed. In June 1873, a group of City financiers, who later called themselves the Metropolitan Inner Circle Completion Company, published a plan to build a link between Mansion House and Bow, not only completing the circle but linking with the North London, Great Eastern and East London railways. This scheme, which obtained Parliamentary powers in 1874, prompted a couple of years of wheeling and dealing with Watkin, as ever, behaving badly. He tried to block the Completion Company’s scheme by starting work on the Metropolitan’s extension and introducing another bill for the completion of the inner Circle by a shorter line from Aldgate to Cannon Street, but that was rejected by Parliament. Watkin kept on trying delaying tactics against the Completion Company as well as pushing the Metropolitan on as far as he could, but when the line reached Aldgate in November 1876 there was neither money nor permission to go any further. As with its westward extensions, constructing the line was a much more difficult task than the original section because not only did its path take it under buildings, but as the line was now heading for the heart of the old City, the property was increasingly expensive. For example, the Roman Catholic chapel at Moorfields needed thirty feet of costly underpinning and even then part of the building collapsed.