Underground, Overground (18 page)

On 4 October 1975 London Transport transferred the Big Tube to British Rail. Today the trains of First Capital Connect withdraw their pantographs from the overhead wires at Drayton Park and proceed into the tunnel by means of third-rail electrification, which is a method more suitable for tunnel transit. It's a squalid business really, symptomatic of the blinkered vision, the make-and-mend, that characterises our railway planning, and I'm sure it's of little interest to the football fans who crowd bi-weekly into the Emirates Stadium that now overshadows Drayton Park, but the fact is that the Big Tube has finally reached out to Hertfordshire with a through connection at Finsbury Park, which is all it had ever wanted to do.

How to justify naming a chapter after this man? How about this: within the space of five years he electrified the Metropolitan and the District, built the lines that would become the Charing Cross branch of the Northern and the central section of the Piccadilly, and completed what would become the central part of the Bakerloo, a project already under way when he stepped in. He also acquired London United Tramways and fused all the elements together in his Underground Electric Railways of London, the forerunner of London Transport.

Yerkes introduces a welcome note of loucheness to our story, and the only mentions of sex you'll find in most Underground histories are associated with his name. He was twice married and had many affairs. We learn from
Robber Baron
(2006), John Franch's biography of the man, that two sculptures of female nudes flanked the grand staircase of his Fifth Avenue mansion. In the Louis XV room an ornate bed was decorated with ‘the
likeness of a voluptuous nymph, nude and provocatively posed'. In their
History of London Transport
Barker and Robbins have a fine line in hauteur. When it comes to Yerkes, they introduce him as follows: ‘Charles Tyson Yerkes, born 1837, was a stockbroker and banker (once imprisoned) in Philadelphia before he moved to Chicago and became interested in street railways.'

Yerkes, then, was an American, and that ought not to surprise us. American tourists on the Tube seem rather gauche sorts, delightedly photographing each other in front of any old station roundel, but really it's
their
Tube. We have seen that Americans were the pioneers of electric traction, and most of the unfortunate investors in Yerkes schemes would be American. At the turn of the century the balance of trade between Britain and America was shifting in America's favour. There was spare capital in the States, and the cultural and economic colonisation that has been continuing ever since was getting under way. Yerkes had made his first fortune in the purchase and manipulation of municipal franchises for electric trams and elevated railways. In Philadelphia, his repertoire included bribery of officials, blackmail and artificial leverage of stock values. In about 1895 Yerkes said, ‘The short-hauls and the people who hang on the straps are the people we make money out of', which usually appears as ‘It is the strap-hangers who pay the dividends.' But it was generally the case with Yerkes that nobody received any dividends.

In 1872 there was a fire in Chicago. According to
Rails through the Clay
,

The ensuing financial panic caught Yerkes with his funds spread very thinly in a scheme to enlarge his Philadelphia tramway holdings, and he was forced into bankruptcy. Worse, he was indicted for technical embezzlement because he could not immediately deliver to the city the money he had received from the sale of municipal bonds.

He did nine months in the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. He then moved to Chicago, where he built street railways, but the Illinois state legislature was so alarmed by his money-raising schemes that it took over operation of the lines. Refining their disdain, Barker and Robbins note, ‘In the end … bribery and corruption failed, even in Chicago.'

So Yerkes came to London in 1898, together with his 24-year-old mistress, the interestingly named Emilie Busbey Grigsby. She was the daughter of a prosperous Kentuckian family which became less prosperous when her father died. Her mother then began running a brothel in Cincinnati, but the young Grigsby would become a coquette of international significance. She liked writers and had made a pitch at Henry James, who unfortunately (for her) was probably gay, insofar as he was anything in that line. Grigsby had written a novel herself, dauntingly entitled
I
, with the subtitle
In Which a Woman Tells the Truth about Herself.

Yerkes also brought the twentieth century to London. The city, he told the
New York Herald
in July 1900, ‘is in crying need of modern transport facilities'. There were plenty of steam trains, but they didn't serve the centre. There were the three Tuppenny Tubes, but two of them were City specialists, and the middle of the largest and fastest-growing city in the world was still full of horses, and full of slums. There was a need, said Yerkes, for the ‘labouring classes to get away from densely populated parts into uncrowded localities'. With proper transport, ‘People will think nothing of living twenty miles from town.' He sounds like another Charles Pearson, albeit more worldly, and, as with Pearson, the surviving image of Yerkes shows a burly man sitting at an untidy desk. With Yerkes the picture is usually captioned something like ‘Yerkes, the cad', and he does have a caddish moustache, but he was apparently softly spoken, with hypnotic eyes and a subtle magnetism. The main difference is that, whereas for Pearson trains were a means to an end – a better life for the masses
– Yerkes was keen on trains per se. He liked speed – driving cars, riding horses – and he was ‘a bicycle crank'. He said, ‘I hope when I leave the world I shall leave an impress on it, something accomplished, something lasting done', and he chose the building of electric underground railways as his method of achieving it. In 2012, when people tend to make their mark by less laborious means, there is something heroic in this, and soon after he arrived in London, a journalist who knew Yerkes observed that ‘although he is a very shrewd man … he is a good deal of a dreamer'.

Yerkes's first move in London was to engage with the promoters of a Tube whose route is evident from the title: the Charing Cross, Euston & Hampstead Railway. Contracts had been drawn up for its construction in 1897, but the promoters lacked the capital to go ahead. In August 1900 Yerkes and his private secretary, a former member of the volunteer Cavalry Regiment, the Rough Riders, were given a tour of the route by members of the syndicate. The legend has it that, high on Hampstead Heath, while his companions looked south pondering the connection to the city 400 feet below, Yerkes looked
north
, towards the further unspoilt fields. ‘This settles it,' he is reputed to have said, the implication being that he planned to build houses on those fields in conjunction with his railway. But there are other versions of what was said on Hampstead Heath on that summer's day. In one, Yerkes asks – rather naively, I would have thought – ‘Where's London?' On being shown the town smoking away below, he pronounced, ‘I'll make this railway.' On 28 September, in a signing ceremony at the Charing Cross Hotel, Yerkes became chairman of the Charing Cross, Euston & Hampstead Railway, having subscribed for one quarter of the capital required to build the line. It is hard to think of that hotel without a Tube line running below it. Well, it soon would be.

In February 1901 Yerkes bought up $3 million worth of District
Railway stock. By the end of 1901 he had, via his Metropolitan District Electric Traction Company, acquired total control of the District and the Charing Cross, Euston & Hampstead, and also the powers granted to the Great Northern & Strand Railway, which – it will be recalled from the sad story of the Big Tube – was the Great Northern Railway's first favoured method of easing commuter blockages at Finsbury Park. Yerkes would join this to the Piccadilly & Brompton Railway to create the Great Northern Piccadilly and Brompton Railway, and you can still see those proud if unwieldy initials, ‘GNP & B', written in gilt letters on the front of Holloway Road station. (That's on the Piccadilly Line, which is what the GNP & B would become.)

In 1902 Yerkes also bought from liquidators control of the half-completed Baker Street & Waterloo Railway (which had been authorised between Elephant & Castle and Paddington, and which would become the Bakerloo); progress on which was halted by the crash of a paper edifice called the London and Globe Finance Corporation. At the head of
that
was an extravagant individual who makes Yerkes seem almost demure, and who triggers (for reasons that will be explained) the following eye-catching index entry in Stephen Smith's book
Underground London
: ‘Underwater billiard table'.

James Whitaker Wright was not exactly American, but he learned his creative financing there. He had been born in Cheshire and moved to the States at a young age where a made a fortune in gold-mining and acquired a famously beautiful wife, even though he looked like Billy Bunter. On his return to Britain he bought a yacht called
Sybarita
and a Park Lane mansion, and created a vast estate in Surrey: Park Lea. That connoisseur of British mavericks, David McKie, has written of Park Lea:

Hills were levelled and new hills created … A vast lake, complete with a boathouse commissioned from Lutyens, was
designed as a centrepiece. Beneath it, reached by tunnels, was a smoking room in the form of a subterranean conservatory, so that as they smoked his guests could watch fish, or sometimes even swimmers, disporting themselves overhead.

Or they could play billiards: hence that index entry.

Wright's London Globe & Finance Corporation invested heavily in the Baker Street & Waterloo Railway, enabling tunnelling to begin from a staging in the Thames in 1898. The staging was a platform upstream of Charing Cross Bridge, and from it two shafts were sunk into the riverbed. It sounds bizarre to use the middle of the Thames as a base of operations, but both the City & South London and the Waterloo & City had done the same because it was cheaper to remove spoil by barge than by road. The under-river digging required the use of compressed air, and some workers succumbed to the diver's condition the bends (decompression sickness), requiring a decompression chamber to be built on the works platform. In his pamphlet
Early Tube Railways
(1984) Nigel Pennick takes up the story:

On August 20th and 21st, blows [or blowouts] occurred which produced waterspouts two and a half feet above the river surface … A competitor in the London Waterman's traditional race for
Doggett's Coat and Badge
got into difficulties in the whirl of water, and complained bitterly that it had caused him to lose.

As that poor chap (I imagine him as an irate Mr Kipps) was floundering in the Thames in consequence of the infant Bakerloo's great fart, Whitaker Wright was floundering in a wider sense. Having made a fortune in American gold-mining, he was now losing one in
Australian
gold-mining, and juggling the shares in his network of holding companies to conceal the
shortfall. In late 1900 the London & Globe and twenty-seven other Wright companies went bust, and in 1902 work stopped on the line. Wright's shareholders lobbied for his prosecution, and in January 1904 he was convicted under the Larceny Act. He got seven years.

Wright was shown into an ante-room before being conveyed to prison. Here he handed his watch and chain to a friend who waited with him, saying he wouldn't be needing it where he was going. He was right about that, because he then fell over and died. Wright had taken prussic acid on a visit to the Gentlemen's after sentencing. A fully loaded revolver – his back-up plan – was also found in his pocket.

But now back to Yerkes …

In 1902 he formed the Underground Electric Railways of London company, and the initials UERL were to become familiar to all Londoners. Shares were issued around the world – dodgy shares. In
Underground to Everywhere
(2004) Stephen Halliday writes, ‘The capital structure of the company involved a complex hierarchy of shares, certificates, huge commissions to the bankers and other instruments which aroused the suspicion of the financial community.' It also prompted the best sentence in the Barker and Robbins book: ‘All this rustling of commercial paper was received rather coolly in London.' A Royal Commission on London Traffic of July 1903 could not understand the detail of the arrangements, and, let's face it, nor can I. At the same time as he was ensnaring investors with what have been called his ‘exotic securities', Yerkes was outwitting an even bigger beast in the financial jungle than himself …

John Pierpont Morgan, famous for once having actually bailed out the US government, was planning a new Tube in partnership with London United Tramways. Their electric trams were banned from the centre, and they therefore wanted to expand by going underground. ‘The Morgan Tube' would have followed
roughly the course of what became the Piccadilly Line. It would go from Hammersmith to Kensington, through the West End to Charing Cross then into the City and north via Tottenham to Southgate, with another prong heading north-eastwards to Waltham Abbey. Morgan's plan came up against Yerkes's schemes and those of other promoters motivated by the early financial success of the Central London Railway (a success that would soon be sharply curtailed by the motor buses). All were to be considered in 1902 by two committees of the House of Lords. The accounts of those deliberations form the densest passages in any long Tube history, but the headlines are as follows.

Yerkes gained approval for the embellishment of the Charing Cross, Euston & Hampstead, and one sees the Northern Line taking ominous shape in the permissions granted for extensions to the original scheme: the southern terminus would be extended in 1914 from Charing Cross to what is now Embankment station. The line would be extended north from Hampstead Heath to Golders Green and from Kentish Town to Archway. (Assent to the junction at Camden from which the Edgware and High Barnet branches would sprout had already been given.)