Fraud, Bankruptcy, Suicide and Transportation: the History of the London Underground Railway Transcript

Fraud, bankruptcy, suicide and transportation: The history of the London Underground railway Transcript Date: Thursday, 16 March 2006 - 12:00AM Fraud, Bankruptcy, Suicide and Transportation for Life: The Early History of the London Underground Railway Dr Stephen Halliday The title of this lecture is “Fraud, Bankruptcy, Suicide and Transportation for Life: The Early History of the London Underground Railway”. You may wonder what those rather sinister sounding things have to do with the history of the London Underground Railway. Well, all will become clear, because they all featured in its early history. The current tube map represents what we think the Underground looks like. This is what it really looks like. An an early version of the Underground map, which was produced in the 1920s, shows what it really looks like. Although they had already began to use the idea of colours to distinguish the different lines, it is nowhere near as clear as the modern map. The first version of the famous map was produced by Harry Beck, 1901 to 1974, who was an electrical draughtsman employed by the London Underground, and regularly made redundant by them, because in those days, they had the kind of financial problems that they often have nowadays. During one of his intermittent periods of redundancy, he sketched out the map on the back of an envelope, literally, using principles associated with wiring diagrams. The way in which the map is constructed is that, first of all, as far as possible, you have straight lines. Where necessary, you have 45 degree angles or 90 degree angles, and the other characteristic of it is that there is no resemblance at all between the distance between the stations on the ground and the distance between the stations on the map. So, for example, Leicester Square to Covent Garden is about 400 yards, whereas Upminster Bridge to Upminster is about 3 miles, but they look the same on the map, and the reason is that they wanted to be able to get the whole system on one useable sheet of paper. He submitted his design to the design committee of the London Underground, which was chaired by a man called Frank Pick, of whom more later, and they thought it was too revolutionary and that people would not understand it, but after a further attempt, they agreed to give it a whirl and printed 300,000 copies, which went within 48 hours, and they realised that this was actually quite a good idea. Someone then pointed out to Frank Pick, who was the Chief Executive of the London Underground, that since Harry Beck had produced this while he was redundant and therefore technically not an employee of the London Underground, he held the copyright. So Frank Pick said, “Offer him 5 guineas,” and he took it! Of course, since then, the London Underground has made far more money out of this map than it has ever made from running trains! There is a competition at the moment for Britain’s greatest design icon. Concorde is one of the competitors, and the London Underground map is also one of them. The Metropolitan Railway was opened in 1863, and in 1987 and the Docklands Light Railway opened. Bear in mind that different underground railway companies started life as separate enterprises, financed in the early days by private capital. They competed with one another, and often they did not get on very well. The world’s first underground railway was between Paddington and Farringdon, and it was what is known as a sub-service railway, by which I mean you dig a trench, you build a railway, you cover it in. The first of the deep level tube was the City and South London Railway, which was built with a tunnelling shield. In 1907, the Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway was built, and in 1924, it was united with the City and South London Railway to create what we know as the Northern Line. The next major development had to wait until 1969 and the construction of the Victoria Line, so not a great deal was undertaken in the way of new lines, as distinct from the extension of existing lines, between 1907 and 1969. They were private enterprises until 1933, when the London Passenger Transport Board brought them all together under one unified management, as a result of an arrangement between Herbert Morrison, whom some of you may remember, the grandfather of Peter Mandelson, and Lloyd Ashfield, who was the head of the underground system. But even then, they were not fully nationalised, because the previous shareholders were given interest-bearing stock, and the whole operation was overseen by trustees, a board who represented the London County Council, the Institute of Chartered Accountants, the Law Society, the Committee of London Clearing Banks and various other organisations. So it wasn’t really until after the War that it came into public ownership in the full sense of the word. Now, I want to talk to you about Victorian London’s transport problem, which can be summed up in one word: railways. If you look at a map of London you will see the Marylebone Road, Euston Road and City Road, and you can see that the main line terminus stations are all situated to the north of these roads: Paddington, Marylebone, Euston, St Pancreas, Kings Cross, and Liverpool Street Stations. Why were they all situated north of this road when their passengers really wanted to be in the City? Two reasons: first of all, a terminus station takes up a lot of space, and it was cheaper for the railways to buy land in what was then still an agricultural area than in the City; and secondly, after 1840, Parliament decreed that no mainline railways could come south of that road line because of the disruption that their building caused. So these railways – the Great Western, the London Midland, and so on – were bringing people in and dumping them, when they wanted to be down in the City, and the result was that the City was full of traffic jams. So various ideas were put forward to transport people from the terminus stations to the City and Westminster. One of them was put forward by Sir Joseph Paxton, best known as the architect of the Crystal Palace, and he proposed his Great Victorian Way, which would link the terminus stations with this facility, enclosed in glass. It contained flats and shops, and a pedestrian way, with railways running at first floor level, linking the terminus stations. Estimated cost in the 1840s: £34 million, which in today’s terms would be about £34 billion. So the parliamentarians said, “Great idea, Sir Joseph. Sorry we can’t afford it.” Then there was another idea, which was put forward by an architect called William Mosley: the Crystal Way. Here the railways would have been at ground level, with shops at first floor level, and flats. Again, it was too expensive. By the way, these projects were enclosed in glass because the atmosphere of London at the time was so appalling that people didn’t want to breathe it, owing to the mixture of smoke fumes and sewage. So the next innovation was by a man called George Shillibeers, who on the 4 th of July 1829 instituted an omnibus service, the first in the world, between Paddington and the City. It was not a great success, basically because the roads were so congested. He went bankrupt, so he is our first bankrupt, though not our last, and fled to France. He was brought back from France, put in jail as a debtor, eventually emerged from jail, and redesigned the omnibus as a hearse, which I think it rather resembled anyway, and made his fortune. So he is also our first jailbird, though not our last. Now we start to enter more sensible ideas. There was is Charles Pearson’s arcade railway. He proposed to build a railway down the middle of the Farringdon Road, which runs down towards Blackfriars (no doubt many of you are familiar with it, it is a wide road), and the idea was that this railway would be built beneath the surface but open to the sky, so that people could pass on either side. The mainline railway companies were very keen on any scheme that enabled their passengers to get into the City, and agreed to put up money to finance it. However, when the money was called upon, the money that had been put up by the Great Northern Railway, £170,000, roughly £170 million in today’s terms, had been stolen by one of their officers, a man called Leopold Redpath, who was taken to court and was one of the last people to be transported to Australia, in 1857, so he’s our transportation, but they did get their own back, because one of his descendants, Ian Redpath, the New South Wales batsman, caused the English cricket team a great deal of trouble in the century that followed! Finally, we have a similar concept, the Metropolitan Railway from Paddington, which was opened in 1863, on the 9 th of January. Much of it was actually financed by the people who built it, the contractors, who thus became shareholders in it, which resembles the private finance initiative that we have been hearing so much about in recent times. That was opened in January 1863, conveying people from Paddington to Farringdon, and picking up people on the way at Euston and Kings Cross and St Pancras.

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