The Subterranean Railway Read online

  The second scheme for a ‘Grand Girdle Railway and Boulevard under Glass’, suggested by Sir Joseph Paxton, the designer of the Great Exhibition’s Crystal Palace four years earlier, was even grander, a twelve-mile railway built above ground but within a glass arcade and, like Moseley’s scheme, also containing houses and shops. It too broadly followed the route of what would eventually become an Underground line, since the aim was to link London’s railway termini, as forty years later the Circle (which fortunately escaped the fate of being called the Girdle) was to do. Paxton’s scheme, for which he sought public funding and which he cannily called the Great Victoria Way to curry royal favour, was quite liked by the committee but was ultimately rejected on the grounds of cost.

  Eccentricity and technical innovation were not always an insuperable barrier for the promoters of what today would be considered as crackpot schemes, only fit to be laughed at in museums. After all, Eiffel got his tower and the Crystal Palace was built. Both the schemes for crystal railways were to be powered by atmospheric pressure, a system by which a cylinder under the train was sucked through a sealed pipe between the tracks by creating a vacuum at one end using huge pumping engines. Several atmospheric railways were, in fact, completed, including a line between Forest Hill (later extended to New Cross) and Croydon in south London. The great advantage was that the coaches did not need smelly and noisy locomotives to haul them as all the power came from a static engine house. While the theory was sound, in practice there was constant difficulty in keeping the seal tight, especially as the continuous valve between the rails had to be kept closed with a leather flap on top of the pipe but had to be opened to let the connection to the cylinder under the train through. Although the leather was kept oiled with lime soap, this would dry quickly and all the pressure would be lost. Far from being cheaper, the power for the trains cost three times more than conventional engines and all the various schemes soon changed over to locomotives. The demise of Croydon’s railway killed off another scheme, the idea of a tube railway, also operated by atmospheric pressure, which was intended to be cut through London’s clay from Hyde Park to the Bank and was the brainchild of Frederick Bramwell, the president of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.

  There was, too, the concept of cable railways. The London & Blackwall, which stretched from the Minories on the eastern fringe of the City (extended in 1841 to Fenchurch Street) to Blackwall, on the river three and a half miles away, operated on this principle. It was the first London railway to cross an area which was already fully built over with streets and houses and, like the Greenwich, it was constructed on viaducts. There were stationary engines at the Minories and Blackwall and the method of operation was bizarre. Carriages were attached to a rope at the end station (Blackwall) and at each of the five intermediate stations. After telegraph messages – an early use of this technology – had been dispatched to ensure that all the carriages were attached, the rope holding the carriages would be hauled in by the stationary engine. From the Minories to Fenchurch Street, the carriages coasted down a slight incline.16 Despite frequent breakages of the rope (not entirely solved when hemp was replaced by wire after a couple of years) and the fact that it was impossible to travel between intermediate stations without going to one of the termini, the railway proved highly successful, carrying 10,000 travellers per day by 1846. Cable operation, which enabled speeds of up to thirty mph to be reached, was finally replaced after nearly a decade with conventional steam locomotives. Interestingly, part of the Blackwall route survives on the line of the highly successful Docklands Light Railway.

  So, in the context of a world in which atmospheric and cable railways were being built and used by passengers, and a plethora of other outlandish schemes dreamed up by developers were being considered, Pearson’s plan for an underground railway does not appear too farfetched. Nevertheless, it took a lot of bloody-minded persistence and effort to persuade investors to stump up the money, even though the scheme had been endorsed and supported by Parliament. Even Pearson aficionados did not always have faith that the idea was truly viable. Henry Mayhew, the writer and campaigner, discussed ‘our joint schemes’ and ‘often smiled at the earnestness with which he advocated his project for girding London round with one long, drain-like tunnel and sending the people like so many parcels in a pneumatic tube’.17

  Mayhew pointed to the difficulties Pearson faced in trying to persuade his contemporaries of the viability of the idea. Writing after the opening of the first section of the Metropolitan, Mayhew recalled how Pearson had to overcome all kinds of superstition and pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo:

  Such a scheme, though it has proved one of the most successful of modern times, met with the same difficulties and oppositions that every new project has to encounter. Hosts of objections were raised – all manner of imaginary evils prophesied – and Charles Pearson, like George Stephenson before him, had to stand in that pillory to which all public men are condemned and to be pelted with the dirty missiles which ignorance and prejudice can always find readily to their hands. The proposal was regarded with the same contempt as the first proposal to light the streets with gas … so learned engineers were not wanting to foretell how the projected tunnel must necessarily fall in from the mere weight of the traffic in the streets above, and how the adjacent houses would not only be shaken to their foundations by the vibrations of the engines, but the families residing in them would be one and all poisoned by the sulphurous exhalations from the fuel with which the boilers were heated.18

  For his doggedness and stubbornness alone, in overcoming such prejudice Pearson deserves to be remembered as the man who gave us the underground railway. His original concept would go through manifold versions, often forced upon him by financial and practical constraints, and incorporate many ideas from fellow visionaries and developers, but essentially he was the midwife of the Underground.

  TWO

  THE UNDERGROUND

  ARRIVES

  To build a railway in Victorian times, developers needed three things in addition to luck and gumption: Parliamentary permission, capital and labour. Railway companies were fortunate in having a privileged position which allowed them to adopt a corporate form that meant they were able to raise capital from more than six people. Other companies operated under a restriction which limited the number of investors to five or fewer, a result of legislation introduced in response to the scandal of the South Sea Bubble in the eighteenth century and which remained in force for manufacturing companies until the 1860s. Moreover, the railways could compulsorily purchase property, but to obtain planning permission they had to introduce a private Bill and successfully negotiate it through both houses of Parliament. This was not a straightforward process since Parliament was chock-full of people with vested interests, which might incline them to be in favour or against a particular Bill, irrespective of its merits or obvious failings. This explains how all sorts of absurd schemes for railways that had no chance of making any money or which did not serve any real purpose managed to slip through the process while other, much worthier, projects never materialized. In practice, the Lords rarely rejected a project that had been accepted by the Commons and it was the lower house which became the scene of major battles on railway bills.

  The first step, therefore, towards the building of the Underground was a Bill for a line between Edgware Road in West London and Holborn Hill on the edge of the City, which was successfully taken through Parliament in 1853 by a group that had no connection with Pearson. However, as the developers had foolishly cut the line short of Paddington in a late concession to opponents, their Bill was superseded the following year by an Act for a line between Praed Street, opposite Paddington station, and the Post Office near St Paul’s, later shortened to reach only Farringdon Street.1

  As with all such legislation, the successful passage of the Bill gave the developers permission to obtain the land and anything that stood on it. Therefore, the landowners had to be satisfied by the Parliamentary p
rocess that they were to receive compensation for their loss – otherwise their objections could kill it. Generally, during the promotion of their bills, railway developers reached accommodations with the large landlords, the aristocratic estate owners, but rode roughshod over the smaller ones who did not have the clout – or the lawyers – to fight their corner during the Parliamentary process. As for tenants, trifling compensation was paid to some of the occupants of the squalid housing demolished to make way for the railways but those who rented on a weekly basis got nothing.2 The first part of the Metropolitan line from the west was to be built under what is now Marylebone and Euston roads.3 Since that section was under a road, it required no demolition of buildings, but the second part, when the line turned southwards towards Farringdon down the Fleet valley, necessitated the demolition of many homes.

  The blithe manner in which the builders of railways were allowed to cut a swathe through slum areas was one of the ongoing scandals of Victorian life and was the subject of several attempts at legislation promoted by reformers. The Underground was responsible for less damage than most railways because it was largely built underneath the streets, using what became known as the ‘cut and cover’ method – simply digging a hole, installing the railway and covering it up again; nevertheless the poor in the way of the route suffered. There is some dispute about the precise number. While an 1853 law required railway companies to set out ‘demolition statements’ listing the numbers displaced, no one checked the accuracy of these figures. The companies indulged in dirty tricks, such as paying landlords to evict their tenants a few weeks before their houses were needed.4 The official figure for the number of people displaced by the building of the Metropolitan from Paddington to Farringdon Street was just 307; but a contemporary source5 claimed that merely in driving the line through the Fleet valley from King’s Cross to Farringdon, 1,000 houses containing 12,000 people were swept away.

  There were suspicions, too, that the Metropolitan had deliberately drawn up its route to go through poorer areas where the residents were easier to displace. An outraged local vicar, William Denton of St Bartholomew’s near Smithfield, wrote: ‘The special lure of the capitalist is that the line will pass only through inferior property, that is through a densely peopled district, and will destroy the abode of the powerless and the poor, whilst it will avoid the properties of those whose opposition is to be dreaded, the great employers of labour.’6

  The developers were also required to pay compensation to owners of houses under which the tunnel passed, but the fact that the line went mostly beneath roadways, allowed the Metropolitan to largely escape that requirement. To show its benevolent intent the company bought and converted a court in St Bartholomew’s to rehouse some of those displaced. This was a cynical exercise designed to appease public concern in the short term: within two years the company had evicted the tenants and converted the houses into profitable warehouses. Pearson’s lofty motives proved, therefore, not always easy to reconcile with the practicalities of a commercially minded company beholden to its shareholders.

  After the second Bill received the Royal Assent in August 1854, there were several alterations and changes to the route over the ensuing four years but the basic concept remained the same. Construction was delayed while the company tried to overcome the second big obstacle, raising the required capital. The process for obtaining money for railway projects was remarkably haphazard. The sums required were vast, especially given that the total amount of available capital was relatively small as the banking system was still in its early stages of development. It is no exaggeration to say that railways were the principal catalyst for the creation of capitalism. As Nicholas Faith has observed, ‘railways were by far the biggest projects undertaken since the time of the Romans. Before the railways, the world’s financial markets were, at best, primitive affairs, incapable of providing the unprecedented amount of capital railways absorbed … The railways did more than create markets: miraculously they conjured up whole new breeds of men: the promoters and financiers [who] found the money.’7 Investing in railways was a risky business. A few people, particularly early on, made good returns; many received barely any dividends for years but did, at least, retain their capital; and an unfortunate minority lost everything. The investors in Underground lines during the ensuing fifty years, in which the core of today’s system was built, largely belonged to the middle of those three categories.

  The project for the Metropolitan Railway nearly foundered several times on the difficulties of the search for capital, made all the harder by the fact that the scheme involved underground travel, a revolutionary concept which understandably scared off investors. It was only through a Victorian version of a public–private partnership that the money eventually came through. The Great Western had always been willing to invest a part of the cost – £175,000 out of a total estimate of just under £1m – but the Great Northern, was reluctant to put up any money. These railways were obvious sources of investment because the Metropolitan was to have connections through to the main line at both Paddington and King’s Cross, so that the Great Northern and the Great Western could run trains, including freight, on the new railway. However, the railway companies were not prepared to stump up sufficient finance and by 1857 the Metropolitan’s directors were so dispirited that they almost wound up the business.

  Instead, in early 1858 they decided to spend £1,000 in a last-ditch effort to attract investors. And this is when Pearson became the saviour of the project. Although he was not a director of the company, he used his role as the City of London’s solicitor to persuade the Corporation to invest in the project. Basically it was the nightmare of congestion on the city streets which won over the case for the railway. The political head of the Corporation, the Lord Mayor, David Wire, accepted the case for the railway by admitting that business in the City was being damaged by the crowded streets, and that rising land prices were driving low-paid workers out of the centre. Since it was impossible for these people to travel long distances to work each day, they were crowding into unfit dwellings with forty or fifty jammed into a small six-roomed house on the outskirts. The Corporation accepted Pearson’s idea that the line would allow people to live further away from their place of work, relieving both the congested roads and the cramped and insalubrious housing conditions.

  However, public corporations like the City were not in the habit of investing in commercial ventures and the opponents of the railway even argued that it was illegal. The laissez-faire Victorian ethos did not normally allow for government involvement in commercial enterprises. But Pearson found a precedent in the Corporation’s contribution to the construction of the West India Dock at the turn of the century and used this to convince the city fathers that they could invest in the railway. The City’s involvement was a bit convoluted. The Metropolitan Railway was allowed to purchase the land it required in the Fleet valley, much of which had recently been cleared to make way for what is now the Farringdon Road, for the bargain price of £179,000; in return the City subscribed £200,000 in shares which were later sold at a profit. To clinch the deal, Pearson persuaded the directors of the Metropolitan Railway to threaten to withdraw from the project if the City did not invest, a rather dubious piece of lobbying given his position.

  It was not only Pearson’s direct intervention with the City which gained him his reputation as the saviour of the railway. For the previous couple of years, he had worked hard to persuade other investors to fund the scheme. He spoke at meetings, wrote letters and pamphlets, used his City contacts to press potential investors to stump up the cash and wooed the reluctant Great Northern to invest. Pearson sent out a Twenty minutes letter to the citizens of London, which gave a history of attempts to raise capital, stressing that he did not stand to gain personally as he only owned fifty shares and was not a director.8

  The changes in the route to reduce the cost and allay opposition were sanctioned by a Parliamentary Bill in August 1859 and, thanks to Pearson’s efforts
, construction was able to begin in the spring of 1860 with the hope that services could start running within a mere two years. And now, of course, the third element required for building a railway came into play: a team to build it within the budget, led by an engineer with the ability to carry through what was an unprecedented project – a railway carved out of city streets. The cut and cover method was used to build the entire three-and-a-half-mile stretch, apart from a 700-yard tunnel hewn out under the hill of Mount Pleasant in Clerkenwell.

  The crucial job of engineer was carried out by John (later Sir John) Fowler who remained with the project from his appointment in 1853 right through to its opening a decade later, a loyalty which, in truth, was guaranteed by the extremely generous remuneration of £137,700 he received. Given that this represented almost 15 per cent of the project’s costs, it was much more, relatively, than any of today’s fat cats receive, although Fowler would have had to pass on a proportion to his colleagues and assistants. Fowler was one of the great Victorian railway engineers and his skills were undoubtedly responsible for turning an ambitious project into reality. He came from Sheffield and his early work was on railways in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. He moved to London in 1844 with a burgeoning reputation for innovative engineering and he was either the main or the consulting engineer on most of the London underground railways that were built until his death in 1898.