Underground, Overground (20 page)

So it had ceased to be monstrous, and we might say the same of Yerkes. He built Tubes to be remembered, but he is not remembered. When he was safely dead, in 1912, Theodore Dreiser began a three-decker novel based on his life. (I've never met anyone who's read it.) There is no blue plaque to Yerkes anywhere in London, perhaps for the simple reason that he lived in hotels when here, so I hope that when Lots Road is redeveloped, there will be some commemoration. It would seem a fitting place, Yerkes having been such a powerhouse himself. But then again, he is also a poignant figure. He goes down as another martyr to the Tube in that – like Charles Pearson, like Watkin of the Met, like Greathead of the tunnelling shield and like Whitaker Wright of the Bakerloo – he died before his vision could be fully realised. The building of the Underground seems like a relay race, in which the competitors expire soon after passing on the baton.

The Yerkes Tubes performed well below expectation in their first years, owing to competition from road transport, especially electric trams. They would be extended in the Twenties and Thirties in an attempt to make them turn a profit, and to create jobs for unemployed Londoners. It was this move that made
London into a true city of commuters, a city of suburbs, and if you think that's a bad thing, you can't really blame Yerkes, who only set the ball rolling.

Yes, his Tube empire may seem like a crass American colonisation of London. It involved guards called conductors after the American fashion, a system of electrification imported from America and American elevators and, from 1909, American escalators; it brought long hours of operating (from five o'clock in the morning to one in the morning), as an approach to the twenty-four-hour operation of many railways in workaholic America; it brought an end to such English gentility as the ‘church interval' by which cut-and-cover line trains (and others) did not run between about 11.30 a.m. and 1 p.m. on Sundays. And many of the shareholders in the UERL were American … but they lost out badly. You might say that what Yerkes brought to London was in effect American aid, an accidental Marshall Plan. As Stephen Halliday writes in
Underground to Everywhere
, ‘If Yerkes had been an entirely honest, upright banker, much of the underground system would not have been built.'

Towards the end of his life Yerkes was approached by an astronomer at the University of Chicago, George Ellery Hale, who wanted him to fund a telescope. Fairly typically, Yerkes agreed, on the strict understanding that it would be the biggest telescope in the world. But the sequel also reveals an endearing naivety in his character. Announcing the funding of the telescope, Hale added that Yerkes would in addition be building an observatory to house it. He had not run this past his benefactor beforehand, but it would have been embarrassing for Yerkes to pull out, so the supposedly rapacious capitalist was outwitted by the humbly petitioning academic. The Yerkes Observatory stands at Lake Geneva in Wisconsin, 80 miles north of Chicago, where the winter temperature can be –20° F, cold enough for skies to be quite clear. The floor of the observatory ascends to
carry the viewer to the eyepiece. It contains the Yerkes Refractor telescope, ‘the last of the great refractors'; it is 62 feet long on a 43-foot-high stand, and is presumably more than adequate for viewing the crater on the moon that, in 1935, the International Astronomical Union named Charles Tyson Yerkes. Fittingly enough, it is on the edge of the Mare Crisium, the Sea of Crises.

If I approach the mouldering Chelsea Monster in the evening, I might see the moon above the surviving chimneys, and I call to mind an Underground advertising poster created in 1938 by Man Ray. It was called
Keeps London Going
, and it showed the Underground roundel adapted so as to resemble a Saturn-like planet benignly orbiting the earth. That's the astronomical Yerkes up there, looking down on London, and to any commuters who do feel he created a mobile prison for them I commend the principles that the man himself laid down for those who would escape a life of drudgery. They are quoted in John Franch's book
Robber Baron:

1. The worst-fooled man is the man who fools himself.

2. Have one great object in life. Follow it persistently and determinedly. If you divide your energies you will not succeed.

3. Do not look for what you do not wish to find.

4. Have no regrets. Look to the future. The past is gone and cannot be brought back.

The Baker Street & Waterloo opened from Elephant & Castle to Baker Street in 1906, before progressing in 1907 to Edgware Road station (a different one from the Met's), embracing Marylebone on the way. It would be at Paddington by 1913. Soon
after opening, it was officially named what had hitherto been its nickname, the Bakerloo, and the
Railway Magazine
applied its favourite, indeed its only, epithet: it was a ‘gutter title'. But you'd have thought the provenance was sufficiently pukka, the name having been invented by no less a personage than Captain G. H. F. Nichols, who wrote a column in the
Evening News
under the byline ‘Quex'.

The Great Northern, Piccadilly & Brompton (‘Piccadilly' for short) opened in 1906 from Hammersmith to Finsbury Park. The Hampstead Tube opened in 1907 from Charing Cross to Camden Town, where it split to go either west to Golders Green or east to Archway, which was called Highgate, even though it is not in Highgate but at the foot of the hill on which Highgate stands. Hold on to your hat while we follow the history of that station's name. In 1939 an element of honesty crept in when it was re-named Archway (Highgate), but then, in 1941, when a station further north called Highgate (also not in Highgate) opened, there was a reversion towards
dis
honesty when Archway (Highgate) became Highgate (Archway). In 1947, it became Archway.

Between Hampstead and Golders Green another station had been completed, called North End or Bull & Bush. Well, it had been completed at platform level, but no surface building was ever built because, the surrounding country having been unfortunately (from Yerkes's perspective) preserved for the nation, insufficient numbers of commuters would ever use it. Being 221 feet below the Heath, it is the deepest station on the underground. North End or Bull & Bush is also the only closed-down station never to have opened, and you'd think its poignant situation would put a brake on the revels in the Heathside pub called the Bull & Bush after which it was named. (If your train ever stops in the tunnel between Hampstead and Golders Green, you might make out the remnant of a southbound platform.)

I suggest that these Yerkes Tubes are entangled in the minds of most modern Londoners. You are on a deep-level Tube in the centre of the town; the stations are more or less crowded; they are also, if you stop to think about it, attractive. The lines were very civilised in conception. In the early years the lights in the tunnels were kept on, so as to reassure passengers. (Today tunnel lights are
not
kept on, and if you travel in the cab of a Tube train, the stations seem so brilliantly illuminated by contrast that all the passengers seem to be poised on a stage.) Most of the stations have surface buildings. That may not seem like much of a boast, but most of the stations of the Paris Metro do not have surface buildings. There is just an elevator or a staircase set into the pavement, like a challenge presented by a conceptual artist, or like a dream. (This stems from the vanity of Paris. The city authorities considered the city too beautiful to be cluttered with subway station buildings, and it helped that the Metro is a cut-and-cover network, with no need of lift housings.)

The architect of the stations on all the UERL Tube lines was Leslie Green (1875–1908), a delicate-looking man who did everything young, including dying. He'd set up in architectural practice at twenty-two; he became architect to the UERL at twenty-eight, and his early death probably came from overwork – so making him another of our Underground martyrs. He made the Yerkes Tubes assert themselves through four-square, classical buildings containing ticket offices, lifts and an arched mezzanine. These buildings are covered in glazed oxblood tiles that vie with the red of Routemaster buses for being the colour of London. It is not an attractive colour. It's reminiscent of a bruise, or raw liver, or the face of a wino, but then London is not a pretty city. Being glazed, the tiles magnify the effect of rain and shine darkly on a rainy night, with the aid of large and rather funereal shaded lamps, which remind me of the shaded lamps that hang over snooker tables. They would come to be
augmented by glass canopies of a midnight blue, on which was written the word UndergrounD, the ‘U' and ‘D' being exaggerated so as to suggest that the word is progressing from one tunnel to another, and my favourite Leslie Green stations are the ones that still parade this logo: for instance, Russell Square and Chalk Farm.

Altogether the stations offered a subdued welcome, as if to assert that the base note of London life is or ought to be a resigned melancholia. On a rainy evening they seem to proclaim: forget about today; go home to bed and try again tomorrow. The buildings had steel frames, and the roofs were flat, in case anybody wanted to buy the ‘air rights' and put an office block on top. In most cases there have been no takers, although Leslie Green stations at Oxford Circus and Camden, for example, have buildings on top. The ticket halls were lined with wood panels and tiles of a relaxing mid-green, with Art Deco stylings that – in spite of the contrast mentioned above – offer an echo of Paris, where Art Nouveau had been rampant in the early twentieth century, and where Leslie Green had trained.

In the absence of trees, gateposts, signal gantries or other signs of ‘home' that a traveller on a main line would look for, each platform wall was given a unique design by means of coloured tiles. The names of the stations were often spelled out in these tiles, with charmingly over-exuberant punctuation, hence ‘: Tufnell: Park:'.

Much of the special patterning was lost in the Seventies, but as part of the current Upgrade, the Yerkes (and other) stations have been restored with a fine feeling for history. So Warren Street is proudly announced as ‘EUSTON ROAD', which it hasn't been called since 1907. (But the modern name, written on the roundels, puts you right.) And I sail most days from Archway to Charing Cross through stations decorated in old-fashioned creams, blues and greens … although perhaps my
favourite of the restored Yerkes/Green stations is Regent's Park, on the Bakerloo, which is brown, cream, yellow and white – like a chocolate sundae.

The trains on the Yerkes Tubes varied from line to line and were manufactured in various countries, but they were all flat-ended electrical multiple units, with mainly longitudinal seating. They had colourful liveries. On the Bakerloo they were scarlet and cream. It must have been like seeing a stick of rock shooting out of the tunnel at you.

The carriages – or cars – had gated platforms at the end, where ‘gatemen' stood and controlled the flow of passengers on and off the trains in the absence of automatic doors. (The Yerkes trains were always crowded in peak times, even though they came into the stations every ninety seconds or so.) When each gateman had secured his doors and gate, he rang a bell, then the conductor rang
his
bell as the signal for the driver to set off. ‘This tintinnabulation down the train was a joy to the ear', write Jackson and Croome in
Rails through the Clay
. But passengers wrote letters to
The Times
about the way the gatemen would mangle the station names they shouted out: ‘Ampstid' for ‘Hampstead' and ‘Igit' for ‘Highgate'. (Today the automated female announcer infuriates me by saying ‘High-gut' and ‘Goodge Stree …', with no terminal ‘t'.) The train staff were at least smartly dressed. They had better be, or they were sacked. They had to keep their double-breasted uniform coats buttoned right up at all times, and so it is just as well that besides passenger flow, there was also air flow, using stair and lift shafts and directed by electrical exhaust fans.

The Yerkes Tubes were more uniform than disparate, and they would not develop their defining individual characteristics until they were extended. Then the Bakerloo would become notable for complications to the north, and entanglement with overground railways, which would serve to highlight the
abruptness of its termination to the south: there would never be any advance in that direction beyond Elephant & Castle. The Piccadilly would be not so much extended as over-extended. There are too many stops on it. As for the Charing Cross, Euston & Hampstead, even the 1907 operation was fraught, its trains ominously fitted with destination plates to show whether it was bound for Golders Green, Hampstead or Highgate. The stressful complications would soon be multiplied when it became conjoined with the City & South London, so making the Northern Line.

In spite of being overcrowded in peak times, the cost of building these Tubes cancelled out any savings that occurred from the use of electricity in place of steam. Also, the lines all fell short of their expected passenger targets by about half, mainly because of competition from electric trams – up and running from 1901, as mentioned – and now also petrol-driven buses. In early 1906 Sir George Gibb, formerly General Manager of the North Eastern Railway, became chairman and managing director of the heavily indebted Underground Electric Railways of London. He and Yerkes's banker, Sir Edgar Speyer – a man increasingly indignant at having funded a transport revolution for London with no assistance from the public purse – attempted out of desperation to sell UERL to the London County Council, but nothing came of the scheme.

We should at this point take note of the London County Council (or LCC), which was the democratically elected successor to the Metropolitan Board of Works (which had been a body of appointees) and the forerunner of the Greater London Council. In the two decades after its foundation in 1889 the LCC was run by a progressive grouping and, transport-wise, the Council could be seen as a moral corrective to the UERL. It had disapproved of the financial machinations of Yerkes; it wanted London transport to be run for the benefit of Londoners rather than
shareholders, and it operated the largest of the London tram networks, over a Polo-mint shaped territory in central London (since trams were banned from the City and the West End).