The Subterranean Railway (27 page)

Stanley’s policy of expanding the tube lines outward did not really get under way until after the First World War, with the exception of the Bakerloo’s incursion into the countryside. Once the Bakerloo had
reached Paddington, it was always envisaged that the line would break out of the tunnels into the suburbs. However, that extension required a joint project with the country’s most profitable and dynamic railway, the London & North Western, alongside whose lines it was planned to run. The North Western had been disdainful of suburban services because its main line traffic to Birmingham and the industrial towns of the north-west, together with highly lucrative freight business, were profitable enough to satisfy the shareholders. The company felt it did not need the complication of running a lot of stopping trains which would clog up the lines at the entrance to Euston. Therefore, unlike on the other main London railways, particularly those south of the river, there were few stations on the North Western in the outskirts of London, a mere eight between Willesden and Tring, twenty-six miles away – more like the pattern on a meandering country railway. To its credit, the North Western provided an excellent service from those stations, which all quickly became the hubs of growing developments stimulated by the railways’ policy of cheap season tickets. Watford, notably, was the biggest of these new towns and grew rapidly.

From 1910, the far-sighted London & North Western, which never did things by half, decided to step up the level of services in order to boost its income and embarked on an ambitious plan of development. An entirely new two-track line was to be built solely for the suburban services, with extra intermediate stations and electrification installed. Stanley saw this as an unprecedented opportunity to take part in a scheme that was to play a key role in the development of north-west London. The Underground Company negotiated an alliance with the North Western to adopt the same electrification technology as the Yerkes tubes and to allow Bakerloo trains to operate out to Watford after emerging from the tunnel at Queen’s Park to join the main line railway three and a half miles out of Euston. The North Western reckoned it would benefit from being able to offer services that ran right through to Elephant & Castle from Watford. Work on the scheme was already well under way when war broke out in August
1914, by which time the new suburban line between Willesden and Watford had opened, and, amazingly, was seen as such a priority that construction continued with virtually unimpaired progress during the hostilities. By May 1915 Bakerloo trains were running to Willesden and two years later through to Watford.

There is still something incongruous about seeing tube trains, with their flat fronts designed to push the air through the dark tunnels, out in the open. Those on the Bakerloo must have been a particularly strange sight when running alongside the huge steam locomotives operating the main line services out of Euston. However, these tube trains were going to become an increasingly common sight in London’s suburbs. But first there was the Great War to endure, which halted most development on the Underground and, importantly, led to a hiatus in the planning process.

TEN

THE UNDERGROUND

IN THE

FIRST WORLD WAR

While the story of the Underground as air raid shelter during the Second World War is part of British folklore, it is much less well known that, briefly, thousands took refuge there during the First World War. The number of passengers using the system also went up sharply and the war marked the point at which both government and Londoners recognized the vital role of the Underground in moving people around the capital.

London suffered its first aerial bombardment on 31 May 1915 when a Zeppelin airship suddenly appeared over north-east London and dropped a ton of bombs, killing seven people and wounding thirty-five. A succession of raids continued through that summer. The orders of the Kaiser were that attacks should be targeted only at naval military installations, but dropping ordnance out of Zeppelins or primitive aircraft was a crude business and most of the damage was caused to civilian targets and population.

It was, perhaps, unsurprising that people assumed the Underground system was the safest place to be during such raids. The irony was
that at the onset of the war, in August 1914, there had been a scare prompted by G.A. Nokes, the critic of ‘Bakerloo’ and by then the editor of the
Railway and Travel Monthly
, suggesting that the system was being used as a store for German armaments.
¹
Nokes was such an eminent railway journalist and author that his ridiculous allegation resulted in a fruitless search by the police of the disused section of tunnel on the City & South London. Once the raids started, people began flocking to the Underground, either riding around on the trains or sitting at stations.

Unlike at the outset of the Second World War, both the Underground Company and the authorities were happy for people to use the system as a shelter. Antwerp had been bombed from Zeppelins as early as August 1914 and this had raised the notion that London could be attacked in a similar way. Even before the first attack, the Underground Company had responded with publicity deliberately designed to encourage people to seek protection in its system from the bombing. In October 1914, one advertisement read: ‘It is bomb proof down below. Underground for safety; plenty of bright trains, business as usual’. Another said:

Never mind the dark and dangerous streets

Underground

It is warm and bright

Be comfortable in well-lit trains and read the latest war news.

The Zeppelin raids were very sporadic and though, for a while, people sought shelter in the Underground, the attacks ceased and the issue did not become a problem. During those first raids, there were as many as 12,000 shelterers at Finsbury Park and 9,000 at King’s Cross, many of whom had simply been held up when train services stopped, as initially all trains were halted until the ‘all clear’ was sounded, although this was later relaxed. The bloodiest raids by the Zeppelins were on two nights in September 1915 when forty people
were killed, but aeroplanes attacks proved more destructive. It was not until a concentrated bombing by aeroplanes in September 1917 that the masses began to use the Underground system to shelter regularly. On hearing of a raid, the police, some on bicycles, would carry round ‘Take Cover’ signs and encourage people to head for the Underground. The Underground Company allowed its station passages and platforms to be used and was compensated by the Home Office with a mere £130 per week to pay for the extra personnel and lighting required. The company provided eighty-six stations for the shelterers, with an estimated capacity of 250,000. When there were successive raids on the 24th and 25th, which suggested that the attacks might be nightly, an estimated 100,000 people started sheltering and the authorities became concerned about the problem.

The original idea had been that only people caught inadvertently in the streets should shelter in the Underground there, but instead the system began to fill up with frightened crowds even before any warning had been sounded. And they brought everything with them. They ignored the posters which stressed that ‘people sheltering are not allowed to take birds, dogs, cats and other animals on to the Company’s premises’ and came ready to spend the whole night with bedding and food as well as their pets. Some started travelling round in trains, the Circle being a favourite, ‘partaking of refreshments’ they had brought with them, according to the
Railway Gazette
,
²
because it was less boring than staying in the same place and the trains continued running as long as a warning had not been sounded. It was, the
Gazette
stressed, principally ‘people of the poorer classes, mostly aliens, women and children’ who used the system during raids. As a result, travellers going about their normal business were allegedly being inconvenienced, especially since, as we see below, record numbers of passengers had started using the system. In many ways it was a prelude to what was to happen a quarter of a century later during the Second World War, and indeed set the tone for the authorities’ opposition in 1939 to the use of the system as a shelter. In
fact, according to a police memorandum
³
little inconvenience had been caused to passenger traffic by the shelterers, who remained ‘orderly and obedient’ throughout.

Concerned that people would expect nightly raids and therefore block the system by heading down there every night, the authorities decided that only ticket-holders should be able to go down into the system except when an air raid warning had been sounded. Yet on the very night these restrictions were imposed, on 28 September, a Russian woman was killed in the crush at Liverpool Street station, again a portent to much more serious incidents in the Second World War.

The report into the use of the Underground as a shelter during the First World War estimated that in response to the thirty-one attacks, some 4,250,000 people had used the system. That would suggest around 140,000 every night of a raid, though fewer if the figures included nights in which there were no attacks. The peak was on 17 February 1918 with 300,000 crowding into the system, well above its official capacity. This prompted enquiries in Parliament about hygiene and disease, but the Home Secretary, Sir George Cave, allayed fears by announcing that the stations were in every case thoroughly cleansed and disinfected by the management before traffic was resumed – a claim that was probably more propaganda than substance considering the task faced by the Underground Company, which had lost many of its staff to the war effort.

Indeed, the greatest social impact of the war on the Underground was the employment of women for the first time in the history of the system. They took over the men’s jobs in large numbers and were essential in keeping the network running. At the height of the war, half the 3,000 District’s employees were women, and a third of the 4,000-strong Metropolitan workforce. Whole stations came under the control of women, with the newly opened Maida Vale leading the way, though it shared a male stationmaster with three neighbouring stations. The
Railway Gazette
grudgingly recognized this as ‘preferable to employing hobbledehoys’ and women continued to take on new
tasks, replacing gatemen on trains in 1917, but the roles of guard and driver remained the preserve of men. Women received the same wages as men, which, given the gender inequalities in other industries between the two, was a remarkably enlightened policy, forced on the management by the trade unions. However, the women were displaced by men returning from the war and the system reverted to being entirely male-operated.

It was not only people who found shelter in the Underground during the Great War. Sections of the tube system were used for the storage of museum treasures and paintings, clearly a sign that the authorities were concerned about widespread bombing, even though, in the event, the threat never materialized. The disused platform at Aldwych was sealed off, and in September 1917 over 300 pictures from the National Gallery, about one tenth of the collection, were housed there until December 1918. The miniature post office railway, being built to transport mail between sorting offices using automatic trains, was used to store parts of the collection of the Tate, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Public Record Office.
⁴
The Victoria & Albert used a nearby spare station tunnel at South Kensington, shared with cases of china from Buckingham Palace. All these precautions were carried out too late in the war to be useful and proved unnecessary since, after that damaging raid on 17 February 1918, there were only two further attacks, London had strengthened its air defences and the Germans had largely lost faith in their ability to win the war.

When the attacks ended, the
Daily Mail
published a map of where bombs had fallen; there was a clear pattern of attacks along main arterial routes and in the centre of London. The final toll was 670 deaths and nearly 2,000 wounded. The Underground was not a specific target but the railways had been and several stations and lines were attacked, though damage was fairly minimal. Indeed, more disruption was caused by the authorities’ decision to suspend all underground and main line railway traffic during raids than by the consequent damage. As mentioned before, this rule was later relaxed
and trains were allowed to proceed slowly during attacks, which was a sensible compromise between safety and the need to keep transport links functioning in wartime.

The war highlighted the vulnerability of the system to attack. Indeed, to protect the system itself, the Underground Company had wanted to install flood doors in case bombs caused a breach. In response to the outbreak of war, four temporary barriers were created. They consisted of steel framework supports in which heavy timber baulks could be dropped to seal the twin tunnel mouths at the south end of Charing Cross station and the north end of Waterloo on the Bakerloo. Each barrier would take almost an hour to install and they were only designed to check immediate flooding. Nevertheless, this rather crude system required the constant allocation of 100 men on stand-by in case of a breach. A more permanent solution of steel doors was suggested by the Underground Company but as this would have required 170 tons of steel that could otherwise be used for ammunition, the Ministry of War rejected the idea. Even when it was pointed out that sixty-five miles of tunnel could be flooded, with massive loss of life, the Ministry only relented enough to discuss the issue more urgently; and it was not until after the war that a lining of armour plate was installed on the Bakerloo Line either side of the river. To this day, flooding remains probably the greatest risk of a major catastrophe in the tube system, although much stronger defences have been built.

Apart from the use of the Underground as a massive air raid shelter, the Great War had two long-term effects on the Underground: a move towards integration which became irreversible and a massive rise in usage which was to create both problems and opportunities.

Although the Underground Company controlled most of the lines, each one still had separate accounts and shareholders, resulting in complex calculations to allocate revenue. To make matters even more complicated, the District line had been taken under direct control of the government, along with most of the main line railways, while management of the tube lines had been left with the company.
This meant that District staff would receive a war bonus, but their counterparts on the tube lines would not. A strange consequence of this anomaly was that Stanley devised a plan to establish a common fund for receipts from the various lines, which convinced the government to pay the bonus to all the company’s staff, including those working for the London General Omnibus Company. More importantly, this was the beginning of the kind of pooling arrangement which was essential to create an integrated transport system for the capital, towards which Stanley seemed always to be working. The arrangement protected the less profitable parts of the Combine, the rather Orwellian name increasingly used for Stanley’s ever-growing empire, and meant that the shareholders’ rates of return were equalized. Consequently, the owners of the bus company received less than under the previous arrangement, and the Underground stockholders more.