The Subterranean Railway (20 page)

While the stations themselves had none of the style of the dome-capped edifices which graced the City & South London, below ground the sound financing had been used to ensure that conditions underground were much better than on its predecessor. As O.S. Nock put it, ‘Where the City & South London displayed remarkable ostentation above ground, and the most dismal cramped conditions on the railway itself, the Central London did almost exactly the reverse. The surface buildings were simple and business-like, but underground there was plenty of space and light.’
¹⁶
The stations themselves were built in a style described as ‘a kind of Renaissance carried out in terra-cotta’.
¹⁷

The carriages, too, were totally unlike the claustrophobic monstrosities of the City & South London. The
Daily Mail
was perhaps waxing a little bit too lyrical when it called the coaches palatial and luxuriously upholstered, but there was no doubt that they were a great improvement on the ‘padded cells’. The trains, six cars at first but soon expanded to seven, each had forty-eight seats, both lining the sides and at right angles to them, and could accommodate over 400 people, including standing passengers, at busy times. The Central’s carriages were longer than those on the City & South London and also had gates at each end. They had a stylish modern appearance as they were painted in purple, brown and white, again a brave choice given that the tunnels, though not smoke-filled, still generated considerable amounts of dust. Indeed, as with the Metropolitan nearly four decades previously, ventilation was a major concern. While
The Times
had also been excited by the new line, referring to ‘ample accommodation, the spacious lifts, the pure air, the uniform temperature, the convenient stopping-places, the good light and the rapid movement’,
¹⁸
a reader wrote to complain that he had been stuck for half an hour in a train at Marble Arch.
¹⁹
He expressed concern that the air became ‘exceedingly oppressive’ and wondered what would have happened if the lights had gone out as well. He asked for more information to be passed on to passengers by the guards, a complaint that will have great resonance for today’s rail travellers.

Another correspondent to
The Times
, a barrister,
²⁰
suggested rather sensibly that smoking should be banned from the lifts which gave access to the stations. These were built to carry up to 100 people and were clearly not a pleasant experience as not only were they tightly packed but, according to the lawyer, ‘add to this, workmen smoking clay pipes, or would-be gentlemen smoking bad cigarettes or rank cigars, accompanied with spitting, and you have an unmitigated nuisance, which will tend to prevent many persons from making use of this new means of locomotion’.

The Central Railway responded to these criticisms with a typical bit of Victorian pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo, reminiscent of the Metropolitan defending itself against similar charges: ‘Numerous experiments on a scientific basis,’ a director wrote to
The Times
, ‘have proved that the oppressive condition of air sometimes complained of in railway carriages above or below ground is related to the temperature and not to the purity of the air.’ He went on to use a not entirely reassuring analogy: ‘It has been practically demonstrated by physiological and chemical experiments that a live man might be sealed up in a lead coffin for half an hour without any resultant feeling of oppression – I say nothing of depression – provided he were treated as frozen mutton in a cold store, so that the air he breathed might still remain cold.’ He concluded that the worst that could happen in a prolonged stoppage is that ‘some of the passengers might get warm’.
²¹
In fairness, the Central, like its predecessors, proved extremely safe with no major mishap – a remarkable achievement given the experimental nature of the technology and the inexperience of most Londoners in using this new form of transport.

Initially, the Central had hoped that the piston action of the trains as they sped through the tunnels would be sufficient to keep the system ventilated, but this proved wildly optimistic because it was the same air that was simply being shunted around a virtually closed system. One suggestion, from a botany professor, George Henson, was that the smell could be alleviated by placing evergreen shrubs such as holly and
rhododendron on the station platforms. The line’s manager, Granville Cunningham, was enthusiastic, but seems not to have pursued the idea, which presumably would have resulted in a lot of dead foliage. The Railway was forced into more concerted action when London County Council chemists, alerted by a series of complaints about the malodorous fetid air – including one from a civil servant in the Sudan Political Service who likened the atmosphere to a crocodile’s breath – were called in to investigate pollution underground. They found that the evil-smelling atmosphere was caused by excessive dryness, with an average humidity of 45 per cent, compared with the normal street level of 76 per cent,
²²
and an excess of sulphur and nitrogen oxides. The answer was to install fans, one at Bond Street in 1902 and another larger one at Wood Lane, but complaints persisted. It was not really until filtered and ozonized air was injected into the Tube system, a process that started in 1911 but was not completed until the 1930s, that the atmosphere really started to improve. Nowadays, the air in the tunnels is controlled by 130 fans which are supposed to keep the temperature at around 21°C (73°F), rather warmer than the 13°C (55°F) which prevailed in Edwardian days and which actually was perceived as fairly reasonable. People in those days tended to dress warmly to go out, which meant that 55°F never felt cold and, in the hot weather, was reckoned to be pleasantly cool – especially during that first summer when there was a heatwave with temperatures regularly hitting 90°F.

The
Daily Mail
, led by its proprietor Alfred Harmsworth, an enthusiast for all newfangled gadgets, gave much more positive coverage. The paper was founded in 1896, after the opening of the City & South London, which therefore missed out on having such a strong supporter in the press. By 1900, the paper was already selling half a million copies daily and Harmsworth used it to promote inventions such as the telephone, motorcycles and, in particular, motor cars.
Mail
reporters were therefore expected to be enthusiastic about a new development such as the Tube, but this means that their reporting
has to be viewed somewhat circumspectly today. At the opening, the
Mail
front page read ‘if this kind of thing goes on, London will come to be quite a nice place to travel in’. The staff were commended for their coyness and the conductor was singled out for being ‘all of a quiver of joy and pride. But there was no indecorous exhibition of emotion; every man was resolutely British’.
²³
It was the
Daily Mail
, as early as 4 August 1900, just five days after the opening to the public, which first dubbed the line the ‘Twopenny Tube’. The
Railway Times
made the outlandish claim that motorists and cyclists were calmer as a result of the opening of the line and even suggested that an anorexic, who had not eaten for eighteen months, suddenly developed a ravenous attitude as a result of a journey on the line.
²⁴
As O.S. Nock accurately points out, this favourable coverage was rare indeed among newspapers: ‘The “Twopenny Tube” got a most enthusiastic reception in the English press, which has never in its history been very well disposed towards railways of any kind.’
²⁵
Perhaps this positive coverage was a counterpoint to all the bad news in the papers, which were full of harrowing tales about the casualties in the Boer War and, on the day after the opening, news of the death of the Prince of Wales’s younger brother, Alfred.

Unlike the poor gloomy City & South London, the Twopenny Tube caught the public imagination. People flocked to the line. Within weeks, 100,000 were travelling on the railway daily. On the day of the triumphal return from the Boer War of the City Imperial Volunteers, who made a state entry into the capital, a staggering 229,000 travelled on the Central. During the early 1900s, the annual total was around 45 million annually, nearly 125,000 daily.
²⁶

There were several reasons for this success. First, the line was on a transport artery and took a lot of existing business off both buses and the underground lines. According to one newspaper report, ‘The busmen are in despair. “Six of my regulars went by it today” growled a Bayswater conductor’.
²⁷
As its directors had feared when they objected to the building of the Central, the Metropolitan, still
steam-hauled, lost out heavily to the new line with its modern electric trains. Secondly, the Central had been built to a high standard. Even the Board of Trade inspector reckoned the stations and passageways were ‘commodious’. Access to the trains was by lift and the bigger stations had three or four – there were forty-eight in the whole system. Thirdly, the line benefited from the growing economy which boosted not only employment but travel to the growing number of shops in Oxford Street; when, in 1908, Harry Gordon Selfridge was building his eponymous store, he wanted Bond Street station to be renamed Selfridges and tried to connect it with a passage under Oxford Street, but in the end was unsuccessful in both enterprises. And finally, the supportive press coverage provided free advertising for the line.

Unlike on the City & South London, the carriage manufacturers had anticipated that there would be standing passengers and fitted straps to the carriage roof for them to grab, thereby creating ‘straphanging’, the long-suffering Londoners’ expression for commuting. The railway was rather more stylish and comfortable than its predecessor, yet still kept the same cheap fares with everyone travelling in one class, a real bargain for such a long line. Originally the promoters, put off by the bad publicity engendered by the cheap and nasty City & South London, had inserted in the Bill that there would be two classes – first and third – costing twopence and a penny respectively per mile. But the manager, Granville Cunningham, suggested the uniform fare that was to be important in creating the popular image of the line as a ‘people’s railway’. Moreover, workmen could get cheap early morning tickets, allowing them a return journey for the normal single fare of twopence. As a result, the name of Twopenny Tube quickly became widely adopted, and began to appear in songs. Gilbert & Sullivan hastily changed their reference for the 1900 revival of
Patience
from a man travelling on a threepenny bus to ‘the very delectable, highly respectable, Twopenny Tube young man’. A more substantial recognition came in a song in a musical,
San Toy
, then playing in the West End, which contained a verse about the fears of a Chinaman
travelling on the line, expressed in the racially stereotyped language of the time:

Me goes out, come on to rain

Me tink me go by low down train
,

Climbee in bus seem too much fuss

Me hearee talk ’bout tupn’y drain

Me getee in, me takee seat

Lift go miles down underee street
,

Me very frightee where me go

Me hearee place much hot below

Me tink maybe me meet Old Nick
–

Me hopee out dam quick, quick, quick!
²⁸

Blessed with such good patronage, the Central, uniquely of the major underground lines, paid good dividends right from the start. There were such large numbers travelling on the line that the operating expenses only represented just over half the revenue, even with the large crew on each train. Consequently the company managed to pay a healthy 4 per cent dividend in each of its first five years, and 3 per cent until its merger into the Underground Group shortly before the outbreak of the First World War.

This was in spite of the cost of rectifying a very major mistake which attracted unfavourable coverage in the newspapers: rather than following the successful example of the Waterloo & City and using motor coaches, the trains were hauled by locomotives, which, though bigger than those on the City & South London, were still an unsuitable form of traction for an underground line. Greathead had originally intended to have a locomotive at each end, which would have avoided the complication of having to shunt the locomotive round at the termini, but this would have required connecting the two with a large electrical cable running under the train, an idea vetoed by the Board of Trade because of the fire risk. Consequently, the single
locomotive, using a relatively new and untried technology,
²⁹
had to be very heavy to haul the train and the vibration caused by the forty-three-ton locomotives with only a rudimentary suspension had a devastating effect on buildings on the surface. There were so many complaints from proprietors fearing a collapse that the Board of Trade was forced to appoint a committee of three scientific experts to examine the issue. They were told that when the trains passed, buildings shook so that it became impossible for draughtsmen in Cheapside to draw straight lines. To alleviate the problem, some of the locomotives were modified and fitted with gears which made their passage a bit smoother; but the Central’s management had the wit to realize quickly that the only long-term solution would be the use of motor coaches.

The change was effected quickly, pre-empting the inquiry report which did not appear until February 1902. By August 1901, only a year after the opening, the company had already introduced two experimental six-car motor coach trains on the line and this trial proved successful. As a result, a whole set of motor coaches, built in Britain but using American motors, was ordered. They began to be phased in from April 1904, and by 8 June that year the remarkably swift and successful changeover was complete. The move to motor coaches had the added advantage of reducing the time needed at the termini from five to just two minutes, alleviating the other great problem facing the line in its early days: overcrowding. One daft wag suggested in
The Times
³⁰
that the solution would be to run trains on both tracks eastwards in the morning to take people into the City and in the opposite direction in the evenings. Subsequent correspondents sensibly pointed out that there would be no way of bringing the rolling stock back to carry more passengers. Another correspondent, Janet Hogarth, who had been forced to resort to using an omnibus because the rain had brought a surfeit of people onto the Central, made a plea for ladies’ coaches, as she was at a loss to know how to deal with the issue of mixed travel because of the chivalry of her fellow gentlemen travellers: ‘The man travelling habitually to the City between 9 and
10 a.m. naturally wishes to keep the seat he has secured; the woman, also travelling habitually, is most loath to deprive him of it. But what is she to do? She cannot always see if a car is full before entering, she feels it ungracious to refuse his chivalrous offers, and she is made painfully conscious of the inconvenience she has unwittingly caused.’ Her suggestion for a ladies-only coach, like those segregated compartments which survived on British Rail suburban trains into the 1970s, was not taken up by the Central.