A puff for the puffers
Hugh Joseph
THE RAILWAY STATION: A SOCIAL HISTORY by Jeffrey Richards and John M. MacKenzie
Oxford University Press, £15
Trains either excite people or induce a feeling of gloom. Railway enthusiasts, which are what train-spotters grow up to be, summon up a picture of bicycle clips, nut cutlets and plenty of freckles. Despite my prejudices, I determined to write this review after hearing one of the authors interviewed about his book on the radio. What impressed me was his absorbing interest in the effects on social history that the railways have produced. Trains were responsible for Greenwich Mean Time, fish-and-chip shops, the lowering of alco- hol consumption, curtailing outbreaks of social disorder, and national newspapers. These may seem far-reaching claims, but all came about as a result of railways, which were originally devised as an exten- sion of the colliery system. Ultimately they moved people, goods and food on a scale previously unknown.
Railways reduced British beer consump- tion, notably in the capital. Alcohol was, if nothing else, germ-free, and until fresh milk was provided by trains in sufficient quantities right into the heart of London, Londoners drank beer from morning to night. During the 1840s, Reading was four minutes later than London, Liverpool 12. Greenwich Mean Time was known collo- quially as 'Railway Time'. Before the advent of trains it was not man who decided the time of day, but nature.
Cows were milked at an unearthly hour to enable the milk to catch the train. Trade and industry were organised nationally for the first time. Food shortages, ever a cause of discontent, became less common with a better system of distribution and the Brit- ish diet broadened as a result. In the last decade of the 19th century bread and meat prices halved. National newspapers with large circulations could not have existed without the means to transport them across the country the same day.
Wars were won or lost by railway time- tables (notably the Franco-Prussian war of 1870). The Prussian Chief of Staff, General Von Moltke, wrote in 1843, 'Every new railway development is a military benefit, and for national defence it is far more profitable to spend a few million on com- pleting our railways than on new fortres- ses.' A century later, both the Axis powers and the Allies bore out the truth of that claim by in turn destroying lines of railway communication when it suited their pur- pose.
Massimo d' Azeglio, the Piedmontese novelist and statesman declared, 'Railways will sew up the Italian boot.' The ease of communication diminished regional differ- ences everywhere, quite apart from creat- ing new towns — Crewe being the out- standing British example. Railways were responsible for suburbia, and the introduc- tion of workmen's trains in 1872, with two-penny return tickets for a journey of up to ten miles, led to the creation of working-class suburbs in north-east Lon- don at Ilford, Leytonstone, Walthamstow and Tottenham.
The strength of the class system was mirrored by the railways. As late as 1922 when Waterloo station was rebuilt, it was deemed necessary to include both first- and third-class ladies' lavatories, Trains were run to a large extent by ex-military men and at times the railways were as much an extension of the parade ground as a public service. The discipline extended to the customers as well as the staff. If the former were unruly they were liable to fines; staff might, in some cir- cumstances, be sacked for smoking on duty, or as in the case of Harry Aland in 1921, be threatened with dismissal for wearing a non-regulation tie. For better or worse, British Rail has changed a great deal. (Complaints about the buffet are, incidentally, nothing new; Dickens and Trollope had plenty to say on the subject.) For whatever reason, railways have cer- tainly lost passengers. Seventy years ago, half as many people again travelled daily through Waterloo. As for trade unions, Sir George Findley expressed the contempor- ary view in 1871 (the year that the Amalga- mated Society of Railway Servants was founded) that 'You might as well have trade unions in Her Majesty's army as have it (sic) in the railway service. The thing is totally incompatible.'
Station staff were not always as unhelp- ful as jaded commuters (often rude them- selves) now imagine. William Vincent, whose 50 years' working on the railways were recorded in his memoirs in 1919, was certainly a believer in 'getting there':
Owing to the delay of parcels containing library books from London, I was unable one day to send books to a 12-volume subscriber some miles out of Taunton by a weekly carrier, so after business in the evening I took the 7.40 train to Wellington [Somerset] station . . . and walked the remaining five miles with the books. On returning to Wel- lington I found the last train back had been gone some time, therefore I put up at the White Horse Inn but thinking the bed damp, I slept in my overcoat and was up early the next morning for the first train. This was much better than keeping a client waiting a whole week until the carrier's journey. In- deed I didn't mind a journey like this now and then, even, as in the present case, at my own expense.
The wealth of detail in this book is remarkable, and the research prodigious, but often overwhelmingly so, and a suspi- cion lingers that the authors are keen to underline their diligence by not wasting any of the material they have gathered. By writing about railways world-wide, the authors set themselves a Herculean task which proved just beyond them. Little gems are likely to be buried under a mass of detail. One such nugget is the informa- tion that Rudyard Kipling was first pub- lished by an Indian bookstall retailer.
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