Fire and Steam (23 page)

Until the mid-1850s, at least the South Eastern had a monopoly of Kent and shared in the lucrative London–Brighton traffic with the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway. However, this monopoly ended when a small company called the East Kent Railway built a line from Strood to Canterbury, and was soon authorized to extend it to Dover and, towards London, to St Mary Cray. This was also the eastern terminus of another new railway, the Mid-Kent, which opened from Lewisham to Beckenham in 1857 and thence to Bromley the following year, with a gap filled by the intriguingly named but small West End & Crystal Palace railway. This illustrates the way that many Victorian railways built up incrementally, earning a bit of revenue on an initial stretch to help fund expansion and consequently becoming more and more attractive to a wider market, at the same time as building alliances
by obtaining running powers over neighbouring lines.

The East Kent then revealed its true ambitions, changing its name to the London, Chatham & Dover Railway and, in 1861, it started running services between the capital and those two destinations, deep in the heart of the South Eastern's territory. Moreover, the run to Dover on the ‘Chatham', as it quickly became known, was ten miles shorter than the South Eastern's route. So by stealth a rival to the South Eastern had emerged, creating a rivalry that was to be one of the most fiercely fought on the rail network. Its legacy today is that this important commuter area remains served by a slow railway, with sharp gradients and countless flat
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junctions, which make for difficult operation and insufficient trains at peak times. Even worse, many towns had two stations, which did not connect with each other, serving the rival railways.

The battle between the South Eastern and the Chatham was, for most of its near forty-year duration, something of a personal war between two major rail entrepreneurs. The companies were led respectively by a couple of equally belligerent characters: Edward Watkin, who as well as running the Metropolitan was chairman of the South Eastern for almost thirty years, and James Forbes, who had an equally long stay at the Chatham and, incidentally, also ran the Metropolitan District, which competed with the Metropolitan on the London Underground system. It was as one historian put it, ‘a great misfortune to have a couple of such aggressive personalities in charge of the transportation companies of Kent'.
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They were more intent on doing each other down, by competing on fares and building unnecessary lines which duplicated their rivals', rather than attempting to improve the quality of the service for passengers.

The South Eastern made a handsome profit catering for passengers using the cross-Channel ferry services at Dover, and so the Chatham quickly set about tapping into that market. Both companies reserved their best services for the boat trains which were integrated with their own ferries, fleets that included the most modern steamships. But by comparison with other railways, the coaches were still dire, and their condition must have shocked many visitors to Britain whose initial experience of the world's most powerful nation would have been a slow and uncomfortable train ride: both the Chatham and the South Eastern
became ‘bywords of poverty stricken inefficiency and dirtiness, which was a pity seeing that one or other of them was the first English railway to be sampled by millions of intelligent foreign visitors'.
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(Hamilton Ellis does point out, a tad jingoistically, that the service on the French side, provided by the Compagnie du Nord was even worse.)

The Chatham, in particular, was a dreadful railway, bankrupted by its urge to compete with its rival. The company fell into financial difficulties in 1864 and went bust in 1866, though it continued to run thanks to special dispensation from Parliament and Forbes's skill at brinkmanship. Its permanent state of penury meant it had precious few resources for investment and, indeed, right from the beginning it had a motley collection of locomotives, many bought second-hand from abroad or borrowed from other railways. One type, built by a designer called Crampton, had the rather unfortunate habit of damaging the track to the extent that the following fast train was derailed, a couple of times with fatal consequences. The coaches were no better, with the Chatham's rickety four-wheeled carriages clattering around the network until the end of the century, long after most other railways used more comfortable stock with six or more wheels.

The South Eastern, by all accounts, was little better with equally grotty coaches and slow trains. Even today, it takes at least an hour and a half to travel the seventy-seven miles from London to Dover by train, while Peterborough, the same distance away from the capital but on a far better line, can be reached by many fast services in just forty-five minutes.
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The two railways eventually did the sensible thing and merged in 1899,
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but the damage was already done and Kent was left with the legacy of an inadequate and badly laid out network.

Given Parliament's policy of only rarely allowing mergers, the continued development of the rail network meant there was competition on many other routes. In 1870, seven out of the ten largest provincial cities in England and Wales were linked to London with trains from at least two different companies. There were ridiculous fights between companies. Occasionally a rival railway's engine was captured and temporarily confiscated; this happened to a Great Northern locomotive when the company first tried to run to Nottingham. And in 1884 at South Kensington on the London

Underground, a Metropolitan District Railway locomotive was blocked in by three Metropolitan engines. Indeed, this could be seen as the second front of the long war between Forbes and Watkin given they both ran the Metropolitan District and the Metropolitan respectively for most of that same period.
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There is no doubt that as a result of competition many unnecessary lines were built, creating an over-complex system, and thousands of shareholders lost money on investments that could never realistically have made a decent return. However, competition should not be viewed in an entirely negative light. The speed of trains increased as companies vied to provide the quickest journey and fares in general were kept down on any routes that were duplicated and actually plummeted in the course of some local battles. For example, the Great Northern and the Midland vied for the custom of visitors to the international exhibition of science and industry held in London in 1862, which resulted in daily, and at times even hourly, price cuts. The Leeds to London return fare was just five shillings, less than a farthing (¼d) a mile, and the return from Nottingham to the capital a mere 3s 3d. Standards of service began to improve too, thanks largely to the Midland's innovation, and competition also ensured that many places were connected to the network when otherwise they might have been ignored. The feud between the Chatham and the South Eastern extended to London where the rival railways put up six termini between them, with the largest, Victoria, being shared between the Chatham and the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway with only a dividing wall separating them. As we have seen, every major railway wanted its London terminus and each one needed to be grander than the last; between 1860 and 1875 seven new terminal stations were opened in the capital. The south London railways were also keen on having both a West End terminal (Charing Cross or Victoria) and a City one (Blackfriars or Cannon Street).

It was a silly competition, but it has given us some splendid architecture. John Betjeman was inspired to write a book on London's termini, in which he describes Victoria as ‘London's most conspicuous monument to commercial rivalry'.
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Even today it is clearly two stations half-heartedly melded together but it was even more of a mess
when first built and, as Betjeman puts it, ‘the pleasantly muddled interior must puzzle foreigners. How easily they might find themselves on a Pullman to Brighton instead of a boat train to Dover.'
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Victoria, though, is conveniently sited and it was remarkable that the two railways managed to build their terminal on the north side of the river, bringing the railway close to the heart of Belgravia, one of the most affluent parts of London, whereas other stations were confined to either side of the riverfront or north of the Euston and Marylebone roads.

With the exception of St Pancras, these stations mostly served the growing suburban traffic and conveniently they were all sited on the Circle Line, completed in 1884, as envisaged by the 1846 Royal Commission on Metropolis Railway Termini, a rare example of successful long-term planning of the railway network. The railways had a greater influence and effect on London than on any other part of the country, and not just because it benefited from the first ever Underground system as well as the world's most intensive rail network, nor merely because it is the country's largest conurbation. Rather, it is because the capital was transformed completely by the arrival and proliferation of the railways in a far more profound way than other cities, and the importance of the railways, both over and under ground, to London remains far greater than anywhere else, as evidenced by the high proportion of the capital's workers who commute by rail today.

Railways affected the economy of the capital in a host of unpredictable ways, wrecking some industries while stimulating the creation of others. Just as the effect of the railways touched every part of Britain, they influenced every part of life in the capital. Take industry: London was a manufacturing city in the mid-nineteenth century, the largest centre in the country, producing 15 per cent of the nation's output. The railways increasingly came to service that sector, and at some plants vast internal railways were built, such as the seventy miles of track laid in the works of the Gas Light & Coke Company in Beckton, on the easternmost fringes of the docks area, linked to a branch from the Great Eastern.

Yet, on the other hand, many plants moved out of London, not least the numerous locomotive builders, because improved transport for their goods, and indeed for their workers, allowed them to shift production to
anywhere that was near a railway; for example, manufacturing engines for the South Eastern moved to Ashford in Kent while the London & South Western works was at Eastleigh in Hampshire. Jobs that were lost in the heavy industries such as locomotive production were more than made up for by a host of smaller manufacturers, many of whom were suppliers to the railway industry, producing anything from signalling equipment to hand-bills for advertising train times. Oddly enough, the early railways that served London were slow to take advantage of the potentially lucrative coal trade, partly as a result of regulations and restrictive practices, and most coal continued to arrive by ship until the early 1850s. From the outset, though, the Great Northern resolved to sell South Yorkshire coal and other railways, notably the London & North Western, began to compete. By 1856 a quarter of London's coal was arriving by train, and a decade later, over half. The price went down too, but not very dramatically, from an average of 18s in the 1850s, to 15s 7d thirty years later. However, the railways allowed a massive expansion in the quantity of coal being brought into the capital – it doubled in that period – and without them the old supply route via the Thames would have clogged up with too much shipping.

As London grew in both size and affluence, the demand for food soared and that, too, began to be transported to the capital by rail, changing the tastes of the population. As Jack Simmons reports, ‘in the 1830s, the clerk of Billingsgate Market said that the working classes strongly dislike fish, as expensive and undependable in quality. Mayhew, twenty years later, saw it as a main ingredient of their diet.'
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London began to lose its agricultural smell: the roads into town were no longer full of animals messing and fouling the streets wherever they went as meat could be slaughtered elsewhere and brought in as carcasses by rail; and the cows that supplied milk gradually disappeared from the backyards and cellars of London (there were as many as 20,0 as late as the mid-1850s) because milk could be brought by train, principally by the aptly named Express County Milk Supply Company, the forerunner of Express Dairies. By 1870 half the milk was coming in by rail, and by the turn of the century virtually all of it. Market gardens sprang up in the Home Counties and flourished wherever there was a railhead. Special train services were run to cater
for particular produce such as turkey specials from Norfolk (a local speciality long before the days of Bernard Matthews) and broccoli trains from Cornwall during the season.

The shopping habits of Londoners were also transformed by the development of the railway, and, in particular, the Underground. Larger and larger shops established themselves, offering a huge range of goods, and the owners of these ‘department' stores realized the advantages of being sited near a station. When William Whiteley was looking around for a suitable site, he chose Bayswater to build his store as it was near the Underground, as opposed to Islington, which at the time was not. It was no coincidence that Ponting's, Derry & Tom's and Barker's all opened next to High Street Kensington station. Entertainment, too, was best sited next to a station. The London, Brighton & South Coast railway funded the removal of the Crystal Palace, once the Great Exhibition was over, to the eponymous area in south London, while Watkin promoted the construction of a bigger version of the Eiffel Tower next to the Metropolitan at Wembley, which was sadly never completed. His rival, Forbes, leased land belonging to the District Railway on which a big wheel was built at Earls Court in 1896. Every racecourse around London soon acquired a station – often equivalent in size to those serving the major towns – since on race days special services would bring in thousands of spectators as well as the racehorses themselves. The very development of professional football and the creation of a national Football League in 1888, as well as a county cricket championship, owe much to the railways. Without them the players and, crucially, the paying fans would not have been able to travel to watch their teams play.