The Subterranean Railway (35 page)

For a long time, the authorities tried to keep ‘able-bodied’ men out of the tubes, implying that sheltering there was an act of cowardice which took up space that could be occupied by women and children. London Transport put up bills stressing the need to keep services running and exclaiming: ‘Be a man and leave it to them’ because of the limited space. It was a theme quickly picked up by several newspapers, which greatly exaggerated the issue, even though the shelterers themselves do not seem to have been hostile to the presence of men. Indeed, many of
the adult males were key workers in the war effort, who could function more efficiently during the day after a good night’s kip in the Tube. The newspapers accused them of being aliens and pacifists, the same allegations that had been laid on
all
shelterers in the First World War.

By Christmas 1940, life started to become routine. As the authorities had now accepted the situation, a lot more amenities were available, thanks largely due to the efforts of a retired London Transport Manager, J.P. Thomas, who had been recalled from retirement to coordinate the organization’s work. The refreshment trains carrying eleven tons of food nightly had become standard throughout; beds were installed with accommodation for 22,800 people, which LT proudly proclaimed represented eight and half miles of three-tier bunks; and medical teams provided by local authorities were installed at every station. Each medical post was a brilliant compact design with a consulting space, an isolation bay with five bunks for infectious cases, electric heating for sterilizing instruments, various cupboards and bunks for the nurses, all tucked into a space of 18½ft by 7½ft.

There were libraries at several stations and others were fitted with amplifiers which played records. Some groups of shelterers even produced their own newsletters which, while short-lived were lively records of life in the stations. The bulletins contained useful advice, such as recommending that children be inoculated against diphtheria, but also quite a lot of political messages. One issue of the Belsize Park newsletter,
⁵
for example, warned ‘it has become more obvious lately that there is being created a definite anti-Semitic and anti-foreign feeling. We regret to have to remind some people that this is one of the things we are fighting against.’ It recommended that everyone should see the new Chaplin film on fascism,
The Great Dictator
. The Swiss Cottage paper, the most expertly produced, as demonstrated by its witty name of
De Profundis
, announced that a committee of shelterers was to be formed to negotiate with London Transport. There was, too, a request for a penny from every shelterer ‘for the porters to buy First Aid equipment for the users of the station’. It reported that 1,503
people slept there one night, ‘1,650 of whom seemed to be snoring’. One fellow found his romantic notions quickly thwarted: ‘Last night, not six inches from me, lay the most beautiful girl. Then she began to snore, and her loveliness faded.’

By the middle of the Blitz, all seventy-nine tube stations were in use as shelters. There were, too, various redundant or partly built sections of the Underground which had been turned over to the shelterers with official blessing, such as the disused stations at South Kentish Town, British Museum and City Road, and the unfinished section of lines at Bethnal Green, the largest in the capital with accommodation for 5,000, and Highgate.

The deep shelters announced by Morrison were not available for use during the Blitz of 1940–41 and they were kept in reserve, as numbers in the shelters dwindled during the subsequent lull. Five of them finally found use as shelters briefly in the summer of 1944 during the assault by V1 and V2 rockets, but in terms of protection from the bombs they were too little, too late. They were later used to house returning evacuees made homeless by the bombing.

The elite of shelters was probably Aldwych. The whole little-used branch line to Holborn was given over for the use of thousands of shelterers soon after the onset of the Blitz, by Lord Ashfield. Westminster council provided generous facilities, including a library of two thousand books and educational lectures. Various feature films and Shakespeare plays were shown and there was even a performance by George Formby.

There are many myths about the tube shelterers. While it is undoubtedly true that they were a very visible expression of the Blitz spirit, contrary to the impression given by many accounts of London in the war, seeking protection in the underground from the air raids was a minority activity. The numbers were significant but not massive. In the first year, London Transport reported that a total of 16 million nights had been spent in the shelters. On the first night on which a count was taken, 27 September 1940, 177,500 people were estimated
to be in the tube stations, and the average throughout October was 138,000. A survey of all shelters at the end of November showed that 9 per cent of the population were in public shelters, 27 per cent in household ones, principally Anderson shelters at the bottom of their gardens (later many used the indoor shelter devised partly by Morrison), and only 4 per cent in the tube stations.

The nightly numbers dropped markedly during 1941, from the average of 70,000 in May to around 10,000 by November. The low point was in December 1942 when there were just 5,000, a number that rose rapidly to 150,000 per night when the ‘little Blitz’ of early 1944 started. About half the stations had been closed to shelterers during the long lull and, as the history of the shelterers puts it, ‘although the unique communal existence of 1940/1 was never revisited after the closures … a significant number of people still retained an attachment to the security of the station shelters’.
⁶
Amazingly, in Islington and Southwark over half the shelterers still using the tubes in 1943 had been living there since the raids began three years previously. The concerns by the authorities about a deep shelter mentality developing may not have been entirely correct, but certainly a small minority clearly became attached to their troglodytic existence. Many of these were elderly people who liked the companionship and the hubbub, rather like those old ladies who sit in the street to watch the world go by in Mediterranean countries.

Other uses were found for sections of the Tube during the war. As in the First World War, some art treasures were taken there for safekeeping, including the Elgin Marbles from the British Museum, which were housed in the Aldwych tunnel. The disused station at Down Street became the HQ of the Railway Executive; it also served to accommodate Winston Churchill, and his war cabinet often met there. Most notably, two miles of the unfinished Central Line at Wanstead and Ilford were converted into a factory making aircraft components for Plessey, which employed shifts of 2,000 workers, both day and night, with a little railway to ferry components.

The instincts of the shelterers to take refuge in the tube stations were right. The average tube station, sixty feet below the surface, proved to be 100 per cent safe during the war. All the major disasters where bombs penetrated stations involved those less than thirty-five feet below the surface. There were surprisingly few serious incidents, though the handful that did occur were among the most widely remembered of the war. The worst, in fact, was kept secret for several months and was not caused directly by enemy action. At half past eight on 3 March 1943 a salvo of anti-aircraft rockets were fired, prompting people to rush into the Bethnal Green shelter. The stairs were poorly lit and had no handrail, and people were groping their way down the stairs when a woman carrying a baby tripped and fell on the third step from the bottom. Suddenly, dozens of other people tumbled on each other and the people at the top of the stairs, unaware of the impending catastrophe, pushed down, fearing that the platform doors had been closed against them. The shoving continued for a horrible fifteen minutes, by which time twenty-seven men, eighty-four women and sixty-two children – 173 people – were crushed to death. The tunnel had filled with bodies from the floor to the ceiling but miraculously the woman and her baby survived the disaster.

The Bethnal Green shelter had been ordered to be open by Morrison during his first days as Home Secretary and he immediately launched an inquiry that, controversially, was held in secret. It concluded that while there had been defects with the shelter, which despite its size only had one entrance, the main cause of the disaster was that several people had lost their self-control and panicked. It even suggested that had there been a better design, the same result might have occurred. The report and details of the accident were not published until nearly two years later because of fears that it would damage morale. But observant Londoners would have noticed that stairwell entrances on several underground stations were hooded to enable better lighting, and handrails were fitted on the stairs. This incident is also the reason why nowadays throughout the system there are no long series of steps
without breaks.

The most serious bombing disaster was at Balham where, on 14 October 1940, a device penetrated the northbound tunnel and ruptured a water main and sewers and the story features in Ian McEwan’s novel
Atonement
. The explosion filled the tunnel with an alarming sludge of water and gravel which, together with escaping gas, took the lives of sixty-eight people. Nineteen others, mostly Belgian refugees, had been killed the day before at Bounds Green on the Piccadilly. Since they are in the suburbs, both these stations are nearer the surface than those of the tube lines in central London and therefore offered less protection.

There were, nevertheless, a few major incidents in central London. The earliest, just a few days after the start of the Blitz in September 1940, was at Marble Arch on the Central Line where a bomb penetrated the roof and plunged into the station, killing at least twenty people.

At Bank, on 11 January 1941, fifty-six people were killed by a bomb which cut through the concourse just below the street and exploded in the escalator machine room just beneath it. The blast penetrated deep enough to damage two trains but most of the dead had been relatively near the surface. Otherwise, there were no incidents in which more than seven people were killed and, in total, 152 shelterers and railway employees died in tube stations from the attacks.

On the vast majority of lines the services kept running throughout the war because even when there was bomb damage, reinstatement was impressively fast. Both the Balham and Bank bombs, for example, caused a closure of those sections of the Northern line for just three months. Overall, the damage to the system was severe but never crippling although 181 LT staff were killed while on duty during the war. In terms of disruption, the worst night was 10 May 1941 when the Underground was hit in twenty different places, resulting in the closure of ten sections. Nevertheless, most services were back on track within ten days except for sections of the Northern and Circle lines. Except when services were disrupted by such bomb damage, trains ran normally throughout
the system, though travelling in the trains was a grim experience since at first trains ran without internal lights in the open sections; later, special ‘Osglim’ – a corruption of Osram – light bulbs, which emitted a cheerless blue glimmer, were fitted. Eventually, LT managed to design a light which beamed a small ray downwards to the seats and which it hoped could not be seen by the planes above even at stations when the sliding doors were open. The windows were covered by a sticky netting, designed to hold the glass if it shattered, but it meant that there was no view of the outside until, belatedly, small rectangular shapes were cut into the centre in order to allow some visibility.

Probably the most irritating experience for the passengers was having to read the advertisements featuring the awful cartoon goody-goody, Billy Brown of London Town, who advised them on how to behave in ghastly rhyming couplets. Notably, he warned them not to rip off the netting: ‘I’ll trust you’ll pardon my correction, that stuff is there for your protection’.

Not surprisingly, the newspapers were wont to mimic Billy and the
Daily Mail
responded to the injunction about netting by saying

… But you chronic putter-righter

Interfering little blighter
,

Some day very soon by heck
,

Billy Brown – I’ll wring your neck
.

The Underground suffered a severe dip in passenger numbers in the early stages of the war, carrying just 333 million in 1941. But this decline was reversed as the attacks reduced and soon the system was being used by more people than ever before, as soldiers, including many from the US service, flooded onto the trains. By 1944 there were nearly 500 million passengers annually and in 1945 this leapt to 543 million. One result of the influx of all these non-Londoners was the erection of huge ‘Please stand on the right’ banners in escalator shafts and ‘pass along the platform’ flashing lights at busy stations.
Londoners, of course, knew the rules without being told.

Another change brought by the war was the employment of women again. As in the First World War, women took over many of the jobs required to run the Underground. At first they were made to wear ghastly white dust coats and grey kepi hats, but later they were given proper uniforms with berets. However, unlike after the First World War, many remained in their jobs when hostilities ended.

The war came at just the wrong time for the Underground, not only halting its investment programme but cutting short its heyday. Had Ashfield and Pick been in control for a few more years of peacetime, they might have created such a robust structure that it could not have been dismantled although financially LT was hamstrung by the arrangements created at its birth and would have needed refinancing had the war not intervened. As it was, within a very short time after the conflict ended, the brilliant reign of Ashfield and Pick would be a distant memory and the system would be in seemingly terminal decline.

FIFTEEN

DECLINE –

AND REVIVAL?
¹

There is a paradox about the Underground. The miraculous system created by the pioneers is largely disliked and reviled by today’s regular users. Few notice the elegant architecture or the brilliant simplicity of what has been called the ‘turbine grinding out human beings on all sides’
²
at Piccadilly Circus. Instead, all most of them experience is the horrendous overcrowding which means that up to 1,300 people
³
can be crammed into a train at peak times, their heads bowed as the doors crunch shut behind them. They see, too, the grime and squalor that is only half hidden behind the glossy advertisement displays and they notice, often admiringly, the little black mice gambolling under the tracks, which are well on their way to become a subspecies, presumably to be called
mus Metropolitanus
.
⁴
The trains are, on the whole, reasonably modern – though the newer they are, the fewer seats they have, which is hardly a measure of progress – and the service is generally reliable, even though it may not be as good as in the heyday.

So what is the big problem? There are fundamentally two issues: the lack of investment for much of fifty years after the Second World War, and overcrowding, with record numbers now using the system. The story of the Underground since the war is a sad tale of missed opportunities, displaying a lack of foresight over the need for new
lines and based on the mistaken notion that usage of the system would decline as a result of the near universal ownership of the motor car. There was the failure to build on the brilliant platform created by Ashfield and Pick, not just the system they left in such good shape but also the successful administrative structure they had created. And, above all, there was a complete lack of investment for much of the first three decades after the war. Nevertheless, despite the neglect and muddle, the London Underground remains the very life force of the capital; arguably, given the record number of travellers, even more so than during its heyday.

The post-war period started with a disastrous administrative change which appeared technical and innocuous but proved to be entirely negative. It was not so much the physical damage and neglect during the war, or even the overuse of the system, that caused the long-term deterioration, but London Transport’s loss of independence. Instead of its quasi-autonomous status as a board controlled only remotely by the government, London Transport was nationalized in 1948, becoming part of the huge British Transport Commission (BTC) which, as its name implies, ran virtually all aspects of transport on the British mainland.

On the face of it, this seemed a logical step. This was the era in which state ownership was seen as the optimum way to provide key services and London Transport was just one of several industries over which the government now assumed total control. However, it was a slightly odd decision to include London Transport within the BTC since, in a way, it was renationalizing an organization that was already in the public sector. Pick, who died in 1941, would undoubtedly have warned against the plan, recognizing the dangers of merging LT into a much larger organization with national prerogatives. Ashfield too had become a peripheral figure and, having retired as chairman of LT in 1947, he died the following year. Pick’s view that an organization is more dependent on its leaders than on its structure proved prescient. With the occasional exception, LT was to be led by a series of nonentities and placemen for the next fifty years.

LT, therefore, became just one arm of the British Transport Commission, which in turn was in the iron grip of the Treasury. London’s needs for investment were bound to lose out to those of the country as a whole, given the massive requirements of health, electricity and housebuilding; and the small amount of money – and resources such as steel – made available for transport went to the main line railways which were in a dire state. The Underground consistently lost out in competition for investment because, as we have seen, it had benefited from successive government-funded improvement schemes between the wars, and therefore was in a relatively good state, compared with the railways. The contrast between its clean electric-powered trains and the grimy dirty steam engines which were still to be seen throughout the rail network was not helpful to the Underground cause. Moreover, far from being free to invest with no government interference, as London Transport had been able to do before the war, the new London Transport Executive was subject to a requirement of referring any item above £50,000 – not a lot of money even in those days – to the BTC. Inevitably under such constraints, buses, which were cheaper to buy and operate, absorbed what money London Transport could obtain. Improvement schemes to the Underground could never be justified on purely economic grounds and there was no money to subsidize them. Inevitably, planned expansion, such as the Central’s extension to Denham and the connection between the Northern line’s two ends through Mill Hill and continuing to Bushey Heath, were scrapped – hence the existence of the funny little single-track spur to Mill Hill East, a real ‘middle of nowhere destination’ – as was the branch to Alexandra Palace. It was something of a miracle that the partly built extensions of the Central, both eastward (to Epping) and westwards (to West Ruislip), were completed by the end of the 1940s, thanks to a decision made by the board of LT on the orders of the government before its takeover by the BTC. These extensions aside, the system that was lauded as the best in the world started its long, slow process of decline.

After an initial increase in usage, once the war had ended passenger numbers were broadly stable, though in the long term the trend was clearly downwards. In 1948, when LT came under the wing of the British Transport Commission, there were 720 million passengers
⁵
annually, a number that would not be bettered until the late 1980s. Between 1950 and 1965 the number of cars registered in London quadrupled, from under 500,000 to nearly 2 million and, as Ashfield had predicted, this had a major impact on the Underground. In the 1950s, the annual passenger totals on the Underground hovered around 670 million, as those taking to their cars were replaced by new workers since London was enjoying virtually full employment. Then, despite the advent of the new Victoria line, numbers went into a decline – partly because TV ownership was becoming universal and proving more of an attraction than the cinema or theatre which often involved a trip up to town on the Underground.

The other social factor which affected the Underground was a tremendous labour shortage caused by the huge upsurge of jobs in the peripheral areas of the capital, notably on the Great West Road and the North Circular, as well as Heathrow Airport. Demand for the largely semi-skilled employment on the Underground and buses is highly dependent on the availability of jobs elsewhere which, since they require a higher level of skills, are usually better paid and therefore attract more potential employees at times of economic boom.

London Transport’s solution was to attract labour from overseas. Employing immigrants from the Commonwealth was encouraged by the Tory government in the 1950s – a fact which seems extraordinary in these days of obsession with the problems caused by ‘asylum seekers’ – and London Transport was to play a key role in attracting immigrants, leading the way by opening an office in Barbados. LT’s motives were hardly altruistic. With the post-war boom in full flow there was full employment, which meant that bus and Underground staff were in desperately short supply because of the low wages. This had been partly alleviated by the employment of women, who had
started being taken on as bus conductors – but not drivers – at equal wages from 1951, but there was still a shortage and London Transport begun to cast widely for staff first within Britain, then Ireland and eventually the West Indies. There was a deliberate initiative by the Barbadian government to encourage its citizens to work for London Transport and it set up a Barbados Migrants Liaison service in 1955. The following year, LT’s personnel director, Charles Gomm, went to Barbados and recruited seventy station men and seventy bus conductors, twenty of whom were women. It was the start of a huge influx. Between 1956 and 1965, LT recruited 4,000 Barbadians. Direct recruitment from Jamaica and Trinidad did not start until 1966 and numbers were much smaller.

Many West Indians only intended to stay a short time but remained for the rest of their working lives, often returning on retirement. The Barbadians were given an interest-free loan from their government to pay the fare to London.
⁶
Many of the new arrivals, though, found life difficult. They tended to come from the more affluent groups in their society and were often well educated people seeking higher wages in the ‘mother country’. They were not, though, treated in keeping with this status and were given menial jobs for which they were overqualified. Some were housed in LT hostels but others had to cram into overcrowded accommodation where they had to share rooms, something they were not used to back home. But their experience was by no means all bad. Many reported not finding Britain racist, and although rising up the career ladder was harder for black people than their white equivalents, many did eventually get promoted. By recruiting so many West Indians, LT made a considerable contribution to the creation of a multi-cultural society; and while LT was by no means a perfect employer in terms of race relations, it was a lot better than many others. One recruit, Lloyd Ellis, who later became a high court judge back in Jamaica, said that while it was made harder for black people to climb the ladder, ‘on the other hand, I must give credit to London Transport because it was one of the first corporate bodies
in England to reduce the barrier. People eventually became supervisors and all sorts of thing in London Transport.’
⁷

In the twenty years between the takeover by the BTC and the opening of the first section of the Victoria line, the Underground had lost its cachet as a pioneering organization. It was still setting high standards in technical and engineering development, but was clearly in decline. Even Ashfield and Pick would have struggled to have maintained standards in the face of its new structure. Indeed, they would have tendered their resignations long before rather than work in such a constrained context.

In terms of investment, the 1950s were the leanest years in the history of the Underground, causing long-term damage from which, arguably, the system has never been able to recover. The levels of spending on re-equipping the system were quite remarkably low. The modest pocket-sized London Transport annual reviews of that period show the extent to which the system was being run down. Most tellingly, none of the reports of this period contains any sign of planned maintenance programmes or assessments of future needs. The 1953 report, for example, records that ‘capital expenditure on the railways, on station reconstruction and other works including signalling, modernization amounted to £0.3m during the year’, a staggeringly low sum. The following year mentions £276,000 spent ‘on the provision of passing loops at Wembley Park, to improve the running of the Metropolitan and Bakerloo services and to improvements in signalling’ and ‘other capital expenditure on stations, tracks and other non-depreciated assets’ amounted to just £126,000. These were minor works; clearly major overhauls or replacements of big assets such as lifts or escalators were simply not on the agenda.
⁸

Part of the reason why the Underground had less money available for investment was because it could no longer rely on cross-subsidizing from the profitable bus services. LT’s bus services had been something of a cash cow for the Underground ever since the First World War when Ashfield created the Common Fund, pooling the resources of the Combine. Now
buses were becoming less profitable because of the growing number of cars, a damaging bus strike in 1958 and the resulting congestion. The business sense of the management at the time also seems questionable. In 1957, the little-used extension from Epping to Ongar, operated as a shuttle by steam trains, was electrified at a cost of £100,000, a large proportion of the investment funds available that year. Not only did few people live in these wilder parts of Essex, but even after electrification the service was still run as a shuttle, necessitating a change at Epping, and a journey into central London would normally take over an hour. Not surprisingly, there were few regular users.
⁹

The 1960s were something of an improvement but still little was spent on the existing network. There were more funds but few went on refurbishing the system of tunnels and track, parts of which were now entering their second century. Instead, the purchase of much-needed new rolling stock took up most of the available cash. The rest went into preparations for the first new tube line under central London since the opening of the Yerkes tubes – the Victoria line – which was originally known as Route C. The historians of London’s transport sum up the decision-making process over the new line with well-merited sarcasm: