The Subterranean Railway (9 page)

The Metropolitan was spreading its tentacles, but first London was to get its Circle line, a tribute to long-term planning as it had first been set out in a Parliamentary committee as far back as 1846, but also a demonstration of the haphazard nature of the development of the Underground and the politicians’ obsession with competition; the line would be controlled by two rival companies, led by railway pioneers who hated each other: James Staats Forbes and Edward Watkin.

FOUR

THE LINE TO

NOWHERE

Until the completion of the Circle line, the Underground carried more through services than trains that simply shuttled between the two Metropolitan termini. It was, as mentioned before, little more than an underground tunnel below London which happened to serve several local stations. The Circle changed all that. London would, thereafter, have a genuine underground railway with many journeys both starting and ending beneath the streets.

The decisions of the Commissions in 1846 and 1855 had made it almost inevitable that there would have to be an underground line connecting the various railway stations springing up on the edge of the metropolis. However, both planning and construction were to prove a lengthy process, hampered by the lack of an overall coordinating body and the unresolved tension of whether to encourage cooperation between various companies or stimulating competition. The whole process was made more difficult because the Circle was built as a result of government diktat, yet it was the private sector which had to fund and construct the line. The Metropolitan, as we have seen, had begun its crawl around London with the extension to Moorgate but then progress in the east halted for a decade while various extensions proceeded in the west. A House of Lords committee, in 1863,
investigating, yet again, London’s communications, had concluded that a connection between the main line termini would best be achieved by extending the Metropolitan eastwards from Moorgate and westwards from Paddington, eventually meeting along the Thames. Various promoters came forward with schemes, including the ubiquitous John Fowler, whose idea was that the Metropolitan would extend its line from Paddington to South Kensington in the west and to Tower Hill in the east, while a new railway, the confusingly named Metropolitan District, was to complete the rest of the circle.

The following year, yet another committee, this time a joint select committee of the Lords and Commons, examined all these proposals and found in favour of the one put forward by Fowler. As all the preliminary work had already been done, three Bills were quickly drawn up and were on the statute books by July. Two of these covered the extensions for the Metropolitan and the third was for the Metropolitan District (referred to below as the District to avoid confusion) route from Tower Hill, along the Thames through to South Kensington.

Work on the extension from Paddington to South Kensington began soon after the passage of the Bill. It proved to be a more difficult railway to build than the original section of the Metropolitan because it went across the street pattern, and consequently under houses, rather than being dug under a road as with the Paddington to King’s Cross. Landowners thus affected had to be bought off, requiring large compensation payments to property owners on the way. The effect of the Underground in this section of west London must, indeed, have been much more noticeable to local residents than on the initial part of the Metropolitan. At times, as mentioned in the introduction, this line runs in short open-air sections, hidden between the backs of houses, and several property owners must have felt much as the benighted residents of Richmond do today about the aircraft flying over their heads. The ‘cut and cover’ method used for most of the line was enormously disruptive and while there was only one sizeable tunnel, under Campden Hill between Kensington and Notting Hill, there were
several short sections left uncovered, where noise and smoke affected the local neighbourhood. Resistance was strong: ‘Once the disruption along the route of the original Metropolitan railway had been seen, owners of properties all over London fought vigorously against the introduction of the underground railway in their area. The “not in my back yard” brigade were just as forceful in Victorian times as they are today.’
¹
Quick to resort to the law, local residents feared that there would be severe damage to their property from the crude digging methods then employed.

By the end of 1868, the Metropolitan was operating to South Kensington, the site of the planned connection with the District which had also began to make slow progress. Unlike the huge fanfare that had accompanied the start of work on the Metropolitan, there was no ceremony in 1865 when the first sod was turned, nor, in fact, when the line opened on Christmas Eve 1868, a date chosen because revenue on Christmas Day was expected to be high – rather different from today when the whole Underground system is closed for the holiday.

Like the Metropolitan, the District was building on expensive land, through Kensington to Sloane Square, Victoria and Westminster; and by the middle of 1866, according to
The Times
,
²
2,000 navvies were carving out the tunnels assisted by 200 horses and fifty-eight engines. At Earls Court, huge kilns were at work producing the 140 million bricks needed for the tunnels and embankments. The stretch from South Kensington to Westminster was completed in three years but the effort had brought the company to its knees because it had cost £3m – three times as much as the Metropolitan had paid five years earlier for its longer line from Paddington to Farringdon. The progress of the District line had been obstructed at every turn, especially by the big landowners who disliked the idea of underground railways traversing their land and, where possible, extracted large compensation payments from the railway. Lord Harrington banned ventilation shafts from his South Kensington estate; a pipe containing the River Westbourne had to be channelled over the platform at Sloane Square;
³
and the
company had to pay for the widening of Tothill Street and avoid the precincts of Westminster altogether. Several new sections of streets had to be provided and many others improved. There were many petty restrictions too: to avoid disturbing the barristers, the steam whistle of any locomotive engine could not be sounded near the Temple except in an emergency.
⁴

The Westbourne was not the only problem with water for the new railway. Pumps had to work all day extracting it at the rate of 4,000 gallons per minute and, moreover, a large sewer near Victoria had to be reconstructed, putting the effluent into a cast-iron cylinder eleven feet high and fourteen feet in width. The complexity of the task of digging under London, even in those days, before the advent of electricity and telecommunications, was nevertheless daunting: ‘Water pipes, gas mains, sewers and monster beams of timber presented themselves in all directions overhead while workmen, as numerous as bees in a hive, were excavating, getting bricks and fixing arches with as much dexterity as if they had served their apprenticeship in underground railways.’
⁵

Construction of the Underground lines was used as the catalyst for reshaping large swathes of London. A
Times
journalist, who went on a site visit with directors of both the Metropolitan and the District during construction of the latter in Victoria and Westminster, wrote: ‘The “slums” of Westminster will be very much improved by the construction of the line. In Broadway
⁶
a number of dilapidated houses have been pulled down and many more are “ticketed” [scheduled for demolition].’
⁷
Further towards Victoria, a brewery owned by Eliot, Watney and Co. (Watney was to survive as the name of an awful beer until the end of the twentieth century) was being rebuilt using the roofing of the tunnel as the foundations. The company had been forced out of its old premises by the building of the line and, to ensure its cooperation, the District offered the brewery a new site. At Victoria itself, there was to be what
The Times
called a large ‘exchange station’ with the new terminus being built by the London, Chatham & Dover. All the scepticism about the
viability of underground railways had disappeared. The reporter was enthusiastic, and was aware of the fact that the Metropolitan was only the start of a much bigger system: ‘Judging from the results already shown by the working of the Metropolitan line, even in its imperfect state as only a partial system, a traffic such as never has been known on any line is expected to be secured by this circular scheme.’
⁸
Indeed, that was to be true – but not until the circle was complete which meant that in the meantime the District struggled financially, as it would for most of its forty-year independent existence.

Moreover, there was a problem in beginning work on the District’s section along the Thames as ideally it should have been combined with the construction of the Embankment, to which the Metropolitan Board of Works was now, after years of prevarication, finally committed. The works had, in effect, to be integrated but the District’s shortage of cash precluded further major expenditure, especially as the climate for investment in such projects had worsened as investors saw that the substantial early dividends paid by the Metropolitan had been too generous and such rates of return could not be expected in the long term. The District wanted a period of running its trains between South Kensington and Westminster to ensure that some revenue was coming in, but the Board of Works was pushing hard to get the railway to press on with the building of the line rather than opening sections of it. Eventually, work on the Embankment started in 1869 but it was not until the following year that the District obtained powers to raise a further £1.5m to continue its progress eastwards. The line reached Blackfriars at the end of May 1870 but there were few early users. A historian of the District postulates: ‘Although it was expected that traffic levels would match those of the Metropolitan on the north side of the city, they were comparatively light, perhaps due to the variety of main line termini, any of which could be reached easily from south London and which removed the need to travel between them once reaching London.’
⁹
Indeed, the various termini north of the Thames had comparatively small suburban networks and each area tended to
be connected with a single station, whereas in south London the rivalry between the London, Chatham & Dover and the South Eastern had resulted in much duplication with many outlying towns and suburbs being connected to two major termini, thereby giving local travellers a choice of their destination in London, reducing the need to take an onward journey by the Underground.

Six weeks after the District’s extension to Blackfriars had started operating, the Embankment along the Thames opened and according to contemporary reports, following the departure of the royal guests who had performed the ceremony, ‘a great mob of roughs tried to push westwards along the Embankment but their progress was arrested “in a masterly manner” by the police’.
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The East and West Ends were very different worlds and it would be another fifteen years before the underground line linked them as well.

Once the District had reached Mansion House, effectively three quarters of the way around the circle, it started running trains all the way round to the Metropolitan’s new terminus at Moorgate, providing half the services on the line. This sort of joint service pointed the way to the solution to the operational difficulties – a merger with the Metropolitan. However, that obvious move was made more difficult by the appointment of two men who were intense rivals to lead the respective underground railway companies. Both companies were ailing financially and turned to major figures in the railway industry to help them out of their difficulties. Unfortunately, the two men chosen, James Staats Forbes and Edward Watkin, had a history that meant they would never be able to cooperate.

Forbes and Watkin were very different characters who had headed rival railways. James Staats Forbes had worked for Brunel on the construction of the Great Western and had gone on to save the London, Chatham & Dover Railway – which had been on a path of almost suicidal expansion and cut-throat competition with the South Eastern – from bankruptcy. He started there as general manager in 1862, taking the railway out of receivership and then going on to
stay nearly four decades, the last twenty-five years as chairman and managing director. He was an early exponent of spin doctoring, being described as ‘a past master in the art of bunkum’,
¹¹
and was, on the surface, an easygoing and cultured character who built up an extensive art collection with the money he made from the railways. He also had a steely backbone that was to help fuel the thirty-year feud with Watkin, who had an even more aggressive and domineering personality. The District’s directors were so desperate to obtain Forbes’s services that they reduced their own allowance by £1,250 in order to pay him a salary of £2,500 without imposing a further financial burden on the shareholders. Forbes became managing director of the District in 1870 and chairman when he ousted the Earl of Devon a couple of years later, a position he held until 1904.

While Forbes was in the mould of a company doctor, trying to sort out a legacy of unrealistic expansion, Watkin, who took over as chairman of the Metropolitan in August 1872, within a month of Forbes assuming the same post at the District, was a great visionary, ever espousing grand plans. He came from a more affluent background than Forbes since as the son of a prominent cotton merchant, he was not only born into wealth but had immediate access to the rich who could help promote his considerable railway ambitions. Like that other underground pioneer, Charles Pearson, he was also something of a campaigner, having written a book pleading for public parks and helped start the half-day Saturday movement, campaigning to allow workers to have Saturday afternoons off. He was, as many prominent people of the time were, an MP for a while; but it was the railways which were to become Watkin’s lifelong obsession, inspired, perhaps, by the fact that his father took him to the opening of the Liverpool & Manchester in 1830.
¹²
At one time or another during his long career he was a director of most of the major main line railway companies in England, and he was involved in many railway projects abroad, notably in Greece, and in Canada where his efforts to save the Grand Trunk Railway ensured that the country eventually obtained a transcontinental line.