The Subterranean Railway (31 page)

For this type of affluent commuter, there was the Pullman service still offered by the Metropolitan. It had been introduced in 1910 and
continued to provide its passengers with meals served by obsequious waiters:

For an extra charge of sixpence from Rickmansworth or a shilling from more distant stations, travellers could journey to work in morocco armchairs set in a drawing room panelled in fine fiddleback mahogany. Chaste electric lamps sat on the tables, and for privacy there were blinds of green silk damask. Nothing was spared from the carpet on which the tycoon’s feet rested to the ormolu rack with finely traced panels of brass treillage upon which he deposited his despatch case.
¹⁰

Although the Pullmans lost money and were really just a flagship service to attract publicity, they survived on the Metropolitan until the outbreak of the Second World War.

Moor Park was turned into a full-scale station when it became the junction for the Watford branch, one of two extensions built by the Metropolitan between the wars, neither of which was particularly successful in attracting passengers. The Watford branch had been on the drawing board for a long time, having first been the subject of a petition from residents as far back as 1906. A whole swathe of land had been acquired from Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, just before the Great War, but the war’s outbreak halted progress. The Bill enabling the construction of the line was passed in 1912, and a station – used temporarily as a restaurant – had even been built in Watford High Street. Opposition from the local council meant that the Metropolitan was reluctant to revive the project after the war. Various other alternatives for new branches, some much more ambitious and drawn up with development potential in mind, were considered and rejected. Therefore it was not until 1923 that work finally started on the line, which had an intermediate station at Croxley and a terminus rather distant from the town centre at the edge of Cassiobury Park.

The construction of the line was hampered by difficult conditions near the River Gade and the Grand Union Canal, which pushed the cost of the two and a half mile extension to more than £300,000. The usual dignitaries attended the opening on 2 November 1925 and the
Watford Observer
commented: ‘The Metropolitan Railway to Watford is likely to have a much greater effect on the development of the town than is at present realized. Just as trade follows the flag, so population follows the railway.’

Not always. The
Observer
was wrong and the line has always been something of a white elephant. Even though the Metropolitan’s trains on the Watford branch were comfortable new electric stock with compartments – much better than the Bakerloo tube or the rival London Midland & Scottish suburban services from Watford Junction – the siting of the station on the outskirts of the town limited its usefulness. The service was initially run jointly with the London & North Eastern Railway, which operated steam trains on the line in contrast to the Metropolitan’s state-of-the-art electric trains, but the LNER pulled out after the 1926 General Strike because of the poor patronage. The line had the feel of a rural branch line leading to nowhere – and indeed still does today, with a poorly used and sleepy station. Despite the Metropolitan providing buses to the centre of town, the seventy services on weekdays attracted just 2,000 passengers daily. There were a few football specials, too, and while passenger numbers picked up gradually with development in Cassiobury, the line’s relative failure deterred the Metropolitan from pursuing other extension plans except for the four-mile-long Wembley Park to Stanmore branch. This line opened on 10 December 1932. Its construction had been made possible by cash provided by the government for capital schemes as part of attempts to recover from the Depression.

This last incursion of the Metropolitan into the countryside was also largely unsuccessful. There was little development on the route of the line, which had three intermediate stations – Kingsbury, Queensbury (which opened later and was another name chosen by
newspaper competition) and Canons Park – all designed by Clark who always incorporated a few new shops into his design. While perfectly serviceable, compared with Holden’s efforts on the Piccadilly they were banal and conservative, blending in with the red-brick environment rather than standing out as a prominent feature of the area. It was hardly surprising that the extension was not well patronized, given that, as a history of the Metropolitan puts it, ‘the 72 trains per day, 37 of which went direct to Baker Street, were a good service for the wooded fields and uninhabited building plots’.
¹¹
The line ended close to a golf course, well short of Stanmore village. There were so few potential passengers that outside peak hours the service was operated by a single-carriage electric car with cabs at each end. Oddly, the Metropolitan focused much of its early advertising of the line on the fact that its passengers could get to the greyhound racing at Wembley Stadium by taking a train to ‘Wembley Park at which point a bus service connects with the stadium’. Not really all that convenient, then.

In the late 1930s the suburb of Queensbury, designed to provide homes for 50,000 people and some light industry, ‘became the most rapidly developed estate in the north-west [of London]. The landscape was more or less devoid of natural features. Even the few elms were cut down along Honeypot Lane’
¹²
(the Honey was probably a reference to the stickiness of the Middlesex mud). Houses were cheaper there than in other parts of Metroland, going for as little as £600–£800, and therefore many lower-middle-class families, who had not been able to afford a home of their own, were drawn to the area. Despite the modesty of the houses, they still fulfilled the dream of Pearson and all the successive Underground pioneers by providing good homes for the masses. Each house had a hot-water boiler in the kitchen, a small garden and even space for a garage. Shopping parades around the station and cinemas soon provided residents with all they needed for a self-contained suburban life. Nevertheless, despite this rapid development along the extension to Stanmore, passenger numbers were slow to pick up, not least because fares were charged at main line
rates (i.e. based on distance), rather than being cross-subsidized like those on the Edgware and Piccadilly extensions.

The Stanmore branch was not only the Metropolitan’s swan song, but the end of the haphazard process of planning – or rather lack of it – through which the private sector had created the Underground. From then on, new lines and extensions would be designed by committees in the hope that public money would be used to build them. The reluctance of the British government to recognize the importance of the Underground ensured that such funds were rarely available to finance such schemes, and consequently there were to be only minor additions to the network until well after the Second World War.

As well as attracting little custom, the Stanmore branch had another negative result. The extra trains on the line, created to improve development opportunities for the Metropolitan rather than to meet any transport need, worsened the bottleneck on the Finchley Road to Baker Street section, a problem that was left to London Transport to sort out. Eventually, in 1939, the Metropolitan trains out to Stanmore were replaced by much more modest tube trains and the line became part of the Bakerloo, thereby avoiding the most intensely used part of the Metropolitan.

Perhaps the relative failure of the Metropolitan’s inter-war extensions was merely a reflection of geography. After all, there is a limit to how long most people are prepared to spend travelling to work and therefore Metroland had a natural limit. Frank Pick had long believed that this maximum was about half an hour plus a walk at either end, but this was being proved wrong as commuters seemed to be willing to take on much longer journeys, possibly up to an hour. In a paper presented in 1931,
¹³
Pick argued that the size of the city was determined by what area could be reached within that time. As average train speeds had increased gradually from fourteen to twenty-five mph, so the potential area got larger, too. But watching the growth of Metroland and other London suburbs, he began to be concerned that this ‘natural’ limit to the size of London was, in fact,
much greater, so much so in fact that the city might destroy itself by becoming too large. Hence he began to develop and support the idea of a green girdle around London, an idea which during the 1930s gathered momentum as it was supported by the London County Council and became the basis of the Green Belt planning policies for the capital after the Second World War.

Houses were becoming more difficult to sell. The developers offered all kinds of inducements such as free tickets on the Underground to visit the growing number of houses, some of which now had ‘fitted kitchens’ (a novel concept), or even free furniture. Taking a trip out to see the houses with their newfangled radios and bedrooms entirely fitted out by Waring & Gillow became a fun thing to do on a day off. Most builders by the mid-1930s offered ‘free’ boilers, but refrigerators were still a rarity.

The Green Belt, the over-supply of housing and the war halted the spread of Metroland, which quickly became immortalized by John Betjeman. But there was a hint of ambivalence in his attitude towards the spread of the suburbs, an awareness that the development was killing the very England of small country churches which he loved. The first stanza of his poem ‘Middlesex’ reflects that contradiction:

Gaily into Ruislip Gardens

Runs the red electric train
,

With a thousand Ta’s and Pardon’s

Daintily alights Elaine;

Hurries down the concrete station

With a frown of concentration
,

Out into the outskirt’s edges

Where a few surviving hedges

Keep alive our lost Elysium – rural Middlesex again
.

In a 1973 BBC travelogue, Betjeman said of the encroaching urbanization of the 1930s: ‘And over these mild, home county acres,
soon there will be estate agent, coal merchant, post office, shops, and rows of neat dwellings; all within easy reach of charming countryside. Bucks, Herts and Middlesex yielded to Metroland, and city men for breakfast on the fast train to London town.’

The final edition of
Metroland
wistfully acknowledged the profound changes which more than a decade of massive housing development had brought about. Of Rayners Lane, where housing had once been sold with the slogan that life there would be ‘all peace and quiet’, the pamphlet admitted that its ‘quiet rustic beauty’ was ‘now a thing of the past’.

Having given a whole quadrant of London its name, the Metropolitan as a separate entity was doomed since it had only survived as an independent concern because of its profits from housing. Selbie had approached Ashfield on several occasions to bring about a merger, but the terms offered were never to his satisfaction. Emboldened by its income from development, the railway tried to resist its inclusion into the new London Transport but inevitably that battle was to be lost. If only the rules had allowed the Metropolitan to benefit fully from all the development around its stations, then it might well have survived and, indeed, flourished. However, most of the property was developed by private concerns who often made enormous profits thanks, indirectly, to the provision by the public purse of the railway.

Frank Pick cited, for example, a developer called George Cross who bought seventy acres of farmland in Edgware for just £12,250 and had made a profit of nearly five times that amount within six years. Pick noted that if only the other lines had been able to capture some of that added value in order to pay for transport schemes, the Underground map would have many more colours and longer lines than it does today. He told the Barlow Commission, which examined the problem caused by urbanization and the possible need for new areas of development, the precursor to new towns, that in order for a public utility like London Transport to survive, it ‘should receive its appropriate share of the land values it helps to create’. It is an argument which has raged
ever since, but capturing that increased value through an equitable taxation system has, so far, proved an elusive Holy Grail – though the new Crossrail line between Paddington and Liverpool Street has been partly funded by a special addition too the business rate.

THIRTEEN

THE PERFECT

ORGANIZATION?

Even after twenty years of effort by Pick and Ashfield, London’s transport system was still a haphazard mess at the end of the 1920s despite their achievements in extending the reach of the Combine. There had been a series of commissions and inquiries which recommended more coordination and cooperation between the various transport bodies in London, but little had changed apart from the steady growth in importance and dominance of the Underground Group of Companies. It was only with the advent of a Labour government, with the dynamic Herbert Morrison as transport minister, that London’s transport system would be transformed by the creation of a powerful integrated organization, the London Passenger Transport Board, which, as mentioned before, immediately became known simply as London Transport.

The establishment of London Transport in 1933 was to mark the end of the era in which the private sector built and ran the capital’s underground railways. It had been the pursuit of profit which had hitherto governed the shape and extent of the system and, as we have seen countless times, the private companies who had persuaded optimistic or gullible shareholders to part with their money for these scheme had an impossible task in trying to make a profit out
of the enterprise of building lines. However, the importance of the new organization was not simply that the arrival of LT marked the beginning of much tighter state control over the capital’s transport system, particularly its financing. It was much more than that. LT was the first example of how a public body could be invested with commercial as well as social responsibilities, and carry out both aspects successfully. It is almost impossible to exaggerate the high regard in which LT was held during its all too brief heyday, attracting official visitors from around the world eager to learn the lessons of its success and apply them in their own countries. London Transport was the right solution at the right moment, coming at a time when the Depression had alerted governments around the world to the limits of the free market. It represented the apogee of a type of confident public administration run by people imbued with a strong ethos of service to the public and with a reputation that any state organization today would envy. Its birth was a result of the vision and socialist drive of Morrison, but its success during the years leading up to the Second World War was only made possible by the brilliance of its two famous leaders, Ashfield and Pick, who became LT’s first chairman and chief executive respectively.

It was a fortuitous and fruitful partnership whose legacy would survive well beyond both men. Ostensibly Pick was the junior of the pair, as Ashfield was technically his boss, but in many respects the latter was in awe of his colleague. Pick, the rather Spartan low-church northerner, was indeed a formidable figure, a mixture of shyness and arrogance, of self-confidence and timidity.

Shy he may have been, eating on his own in the staff restaurant, but Pick was very clear about who was boss. While he was the backroom boy, he was nevertheless confident of his own power, favouring a regime that was a benign dictatorship. He argued that it was a waste of time trying to draw up on paper the structure of the perfect organization, because its success would ultimately be the responsibility of the particular people who happened to be in charge. Pick wanted
‘a single brain’
¹
– presumably his – to be responsible for running the organization, rather than a disparate group of managers. He ran a series of committees which fed responsibility up to him but he saw his role as making decisions – endless strings of them, in fact. Pick described his job as ‘day after day, [having] to find answers to a continuous stream of questions about staff, finance, traffic, engineering, publicity, supplies … In no sense am I an expert. I have and can obtain advice wherever I want it. I merely have to decide, but in deciding I become responsible for my decisions. And while they are all separate decisions, it is necessary for me to try and fit them together into a consistent whole.’
²
It is, probably, as good a job description for the role of chief executive in a public body as any, a blueprint for others to follow. Pick was tireless: ‘[He] oversaw and planned every detail of his public transport empire. He travelled it frequently, taking copious notes in his unexpectedly flamboyant green [he used green ink for all his correspondence so that the recipient knew immediately its provenance] handwriting, ensuring that no fire bucket was left unfilled, no escalator out of service for longer than absolutely necessary. He walked each bus route.’ Remarkably, Pick met both Stalin, from whom he received a medal in 1932 for his help and advice on the Moscow Metro, and Hitler, to whom he was introduced at a major railway conference in Berlin in 1936, a measure of his peerless reputation at the time.

It was not only the brilliance of Pick’s administrative abilities and his tremendous intellectual power which ensured that the creation of London Transport was perceived as such a success. There was also Ashfield, who ultimately was more crucial to the organization because of his political skills. Ashfield was dapper, a ladies’ man, something of a playboy tycoon who was always smartly turned out and enjoyed moving in high society, in contrast to the diffident Pick. As befitted his role as a non-executive chairman, Ashfield did not have the burdens of day-to-day management and decision-making, but could sit back and work out strategy. He was a skilled negotiator, and used that trick of feigned artlessness when unwilling to answer a difficult question. But
artless Ashfield was not. ‘He always seemed to be two or three moves ahead of the ordinary able person when it came to negotiation. When this faculty was associated with every appearance of bonhomie and charm, and an unfailing sense of humour, one can begin to understand why he was so successful in promoting and carrying through the long series of transactions which culminated in the unification of London’s local transport agencies.’
³

Ultimately it was the fortuitous combination of these two great talents on which the success of LT was founded: ‘The two men seemed to work together like the blades of a pair of scissors. But there was a difference. Whereas neither blade of the scissors will cut without the other, it could not be said that Pick was indispensable to Ashfield as Ashfield was to him. The real dependence was all one way.’
⁴
Perhaps that is harsh, since capable administrators of such talent are a rarity. As the historians of London Transport put it: ‘The combination of the experienced, far-sighted politically astute chairman, who was willing to adopt accommodations on the way to securing his objectives, with the brilliant chief of staff whose cast of mind did not so readily accept compromise, provided a balance of flexibility in approach with rigorous management methods which made the LPTB in its first years an object of (sometimes unwilling) admiration.’
⁵
It was a remarkable team, which worked together for a third of a century and does not appear to have fallen out significantly until late on, at the outbreak of the Second World War, in what was ostensibly a dispute over fares policy but in fact centred around the mundane issue of Pick’s pension.

And London Transport nearly did not happen. Had it not been for a series of fortuitous events and remarkable political machinations, London would have got a semi-regulated private monopoly with none of the vision and creativity of London Transport. The need for a more integrated system had long been recognized by Ashfield. In a 1924 pamphlet,
⁶
he explained the fundamental problem with railway economics. Railways, he argued, were essential for the development
of outer housing zones because to reach the centre by tramway or bus was too time-consuming. But there was a conflict between people’s desire to live on estates laid out in spacious grounds and the need for density required by mass transport systems. At twelve houses per acre, the standard generally applied in the 1920s, Ashfield calculated that there would be only 6,000 houses within a half-mile radius – walking distance – and at 500 railway journeys per year, which assumed the sole breadwinner went to work every day, the passenger traffic would be 3 million: not enough to ‘yield a sufficient income to support a tube railway except at high fares’. Ashfield concluded that ‘either the circuit covered by a station must be rendered wider or the traffic denser by some means; cheap auxiliary forms of transport such as the motor omnibus may be developed to concentrate traffic on the railway stations … A measure of coordination among the transport facilities in a district is thus unavoidable for success.’ As he later pointed out, ‘it may be a surprise … to know that the Underground railways in London have never been, in their whole career, a financial success. In other words, they have failed to earn a reasonable rate of return on capital invested in them.’
⁷

Instead of integration, from the mid-1920s the system became more fragmented, with the outbreak of bus wars in the capital. The Underground Group, which since its takeover of London General had run the majority of buses in the capital, found itself up against countless small companies – often consisting of just one man and a bus – who were able to cream off passengers on well-used routes at busy times. The Group was short of buses for several years after the Great War because many had not been returned by the War Office, and it was powerless to prevent these independent operators, dubbed ‘pirates’, from causing chaos on the streets. The pirates, who bought cheap new buses from manufacturers eager to push their wares, would try to run just ahead of a General service to maximize the number of passengers, and they frequently raced each other because the income of the drivers – who were often exceptionally skilled – depended on
speed. Pirates were even known to do a U-turn, rapidly dumping any passengers if the driver noticed more potential customers waiting on the other side of the road. Passengers may have enjoyed the occasional low fare or quicker ride, but the pirates were more prone to accidents and breakdowns than were the more conventional operators. It was a risky business, as one passenger recalls: ‘If there was an accident, they never used to wait for the police or anything like that, unless it was serious, but in a smaller accident, they’d just pat the bloke on the head and most likely slip him a quid and away they went.’
⁸
By 1924, there were nearly 500 such pirates on the roads; it may have only been 10 per cent of the number run by the General, but it was enough to dent the larger company’s profit margins, which were used to subsidize the Underground system.

A fundamental difference of opinion over how to deal with this unruly situation led to a five-year battle between Ashfield and Herbert Morrison, who was already a strong local political force in London. Morrison’s vision for London transport’s system had been set out in a pamphlet published in 1916,
The People’s Roads
,
⁹
in which he argued that ‘the answer [to the lack of coordination between tram and bus routes] was the municipalization of the entire London passenger traffic’. Coordination, rationalization and equalization of burdens could, he said, all be achieved by common public ownership and control.

Ashfield wanted much the same, with one major difference: the word ‘public’ was not on his agenda. Of course he wanted control and a monopoly, but he sought to ensure that it was a private one, protected by regulation which would keep the pirates off his back and allow his company to make enough profits to pay its way. He also had his eye on taking over the tramways run by the London County Council and local boroughs, and which therefore were not coordinated with either the Underground Group’s buses or its trains. Ashfield’s vision clearly fitted in with the ideology of the ruling Conservatives and, in a Parliamentary Bill, they backed his idea, setting out a scheme through
which the Ministry of Transport, advised by local interests, would regulate routes. Morrison, by then an MP, was aghast. He organized the opposition and devised a striking poster showing a London County Council tram menaced by the grabbing hand of the Combine (Underground Group).

However, the Conservative government fell before the Bill could become law, and was replaced by the minority Labour administration of 1923. Morrison, who had hoped to become the Minister of Transport, thought the legislation would be dropped. However, he was passed over in favour of Harry Gosling, and as the result of a shadowy deal between Gosling and Morrison’s lifelong enemy, Ernest Bevin, the Tory Bill was pushed through virtually unchanged. Although recognizing that the legislation was weak, the ministers argued that the chaos on the streets demanded urgent action. Morrison was so incensed that he even voted against his own government. The new Act created a limited amount of regulation – such as specifying routes for buses for the first time – but while it moderated the behaviour of the pirates, they were still able to operate on a significant part of the network. Moreover, the legislation did nothing to address the fundamental problem of the absence of integration between the various transport concerns. This lack of coordination meant that the trams and the buses were often rivals to the Underground trains, rather than complementary, and passengers still faced all sorts of difficulties in buying tickets which could take them right across London.