UNTIL THE AUTUMN of 1896 very few people were aware that one of the new-fangled horseless carriages was lurking in their midst. Young Bob and Peter Foster spent most of their time tinkering with their strange contraption in the privacy of the family mews, often to the annoyance of their father’s cabmen and the alarm of the horses. Stablemen complained bitterly of the machine’s poisonous breath and of the treacherous pools of dark oil which it persistently excreted on to their swept cobbles. To soothe these ruffled tempers, George Foster would make a show of reprimanding his boys, but secretly he was proud of their pioneering efforts. As for grandfather William, who had accompanied his father on the old Eclipse and still cherished his long, polished post-horn, he found the horseless carriage a great joke, little dreaming, as he chuckled over its strange antics, that it would one day avenge John Foster’s defeat. Occasionally, after nightfall, the carriage would furtively emerge to make a brief, hesitant sortie through unfrequented back streets, its candle-lamp eyes blinking with the vibration, its exhaust tuff-tuffing manfully and its automatic inlet valve sneezing, to the astonishment of stray drunks and belated pavement loungers. For the law saw no distinction between such carriages and the lumbering traction engines which hauled the farmer’s threshing drum, and refused to concede them the freedom of the road. As soon as that freedom was grudgingly acknowledged in November, 1896, however, the Foster brothers’ horseless carriage appeared boldly in the light of day before a wider audience. Bob and Peter could not join the triumphant procession of cars from London to Brighton on ‘Emancipation Day’ but they celebrated the occasion as best they could by driving up Bridge Street and along the length of the High Street, an exploit which won them a somewhat facetious and patronizing paragraph in the columns of the Winterstoke Sentinel. To the youth of the town the brothers were heroes, but by the older generation they were generally regarded with disfavour. Anyone who owned or drove horses hated the sight of them. Horses were certainly terrified by the machine, and more than once an angry driver struck out at Bob with his whip as he struggled to control his rearing and plunging team. Again, when the best method of starting the engine was to create a petrol fire so as to encourage the surface carburettor to vaporize its fuel, it was difficult to persuade the perturbed onlookers that the machine was not about to explode and that the services of the fire brigade were not required. The opposition made no attempt to conceal its delight when, growing more venturesome, the brothers attempted to scale Emberley Hill with mechanical results so disastrous that they had to be towed back to the Mews behind ‘Rosie’, the oldest and most staid member of the Foster brothers’ stud. But in spite of the enmity and the setbacks the young Fosters persevered, for they dreamed, not only of larger and faster cars, but of motor omnibuses which would replace the horsedrawn ‘knifeboards’ which their father ran between the High Street and the railway station. In the event these dreams proved a little premature, for steam and the rail had still one more card to play before the motor bus could come into its own and they played it through the medium of another new agent—electricity.
The Tramways Act of 1870 had empowered Town Councils to build tramways, and in 1901 the Winterstoke Council applied for and obtained an order from the Board of Trade authorizing the construction of the Winterstoke District Tramway system. The lines and overhead cables were laid through the High Street, Ambling Street, Bridge Street and Station Road. Subsequently they even penetrated the hinterland of the Lobstock Road as far as the ‘Woodcolliers’. The moaning, clattering monsters which lumbered along the new tracks flashing blue fire struck far more terror to the hearts of the horse traffic than the little horseless carriage had done and they soon drove George Foster’s knifeboards off the road. The source of their power was a new building at the end of Wharf Road beside the Wendle. It was Winterstoke’s first electric generating station and it housed five of the very latest examples of steam engine design, Willans high-speed compound engines, each direct coupled to a Crompton dynamo. Here there were none of the moving rods and links or the majestically-wheeling cranks which had made earlier engines machines of such hypnotic fascination. These engines were totally enclosed and even their disc flywheels spun so swiftly and so truly that their highly-polished rims scarcely betrayed a flicker of motion. Their cylinders, teak-lagged and brass-banded, rose one above the other like the tiers of a wedding cake. No extraneous detail marred the smooth immobile symmetry of their outline, for steam was admitted to the cylinders internally through their hollow piston rods. By contrast to the slow, heavy sighing of the big horizontal mill engine at Darley Bank, the voice of these machines was an urgent throbbing, a steady pulsation of power which was the last word of the reciprocating steam engine to the demand of the age for speed and yet more speed. ‘More revolutions’ called the new race of electrical engineers, ‘whooo—whooo—whooo’ sang the spinning armatures of the dynamos, power flashing from their gleaming copper commutators, and the great heart of the old power replied, holding the load so steadily hour by hour that on the switchboards of polished slate the needles of the voltmeters scarcely wavered from their appointed mark.
Two of these new generating sets were exclusively dedicated to the tramways, one running and one standby, but the remaining three supplied other users with current. One set ran continuously, a second was brought in to share the evening overload, and the third was spare. For the demand for this product of steam’s latest partnership grew steadily. The wealthier householders and the smarter and more enterprising shopkeepers preferred the new carbon filament bulbs to their old gas mantles; the Theatre Royal was re-equipped with electric foot and house lights and carbon arc floods; one by one the manufacturers replaced their steam engines by electric motors. It was not many years before the first steam turbines came to Winterstoke power house and the reciprocating engines, except those powering the trams, became standbys.
The power station down Wharf Road was not the only new temple of magic in the town. The exchange of the National Telephone Company in Church Street was filled with technical mysteries even less intelligible to the layman. A new and enthusiastic generation of young men could talk as much as they liked about sound waves and carbon particles; it was miraculous, and at the same time rather frightening, to pick up the telephonic instrument by its slender handpiece of fluted brass and hear the disembodied voice of your friend, familiar and yet somehow strangely thin and unfamiliar, speaking to you over miles of wire. The telephone system did not spread rapidly in Winterstoke and it was some years before its subscribers could be connected to any town in the country. For the Company’s right to lay underground cables was disputed and there was a long drawn out argument over the control of the new system before a vacillating Government finally decided to make the post office responsible for it and to pay the Company an agreable sum in compensation. Whereas the power cables from the generating station were laid underground like the gas mains, the telephone system at once changed the landscape as its poles marched out along the roads. Soon the elaborate but invisible root system of sewers, of gas, water and electricity mains which was making Winterstoke one complex organism, one enormous living machine, would have its overhead counterpart in an intricate cat’s cradle of wires and cables.
It is a paradox that the coming of electricity helped to bring about the extinction of the electric tram by making the horseless carriage respectable, yet this was the case in Winterstoke. So soon as battery charging facilities became available in the town the enterprising but eminently respectable Doctor Harald of Abbey Road invested in a smart electric brougham. The sight of this prosperous physician bowling round the town in his gleaming vehicle with its smart black leather mudguards driven by his familiar coachman in top hat and white cockade, did much more to reconcile the population to the horseless carriage than the efforts of the Foster brothers. Yet their dreams were coming true. Cars were beginning to appear with increasing frequency in the streets of Winterstoke. Though not so silent as the doctor’s sedate and decorous brougham, they moved far more swiftly and purposefully than the Fosters’ old horseless carriage, and with less mechanical protest. Their wheels travelled more easily and lightly over the cobbles for instead of solid bands of rubber they were shod with pneumatic tyres. Admittedly their great-coated and begoggled drivers were often to be seen wrestling with these new tyres by the roadside to the accompaniment of a great deal of blasphemy, but these new vehicles could no longer be dismissed by even the most confirmed champion of the horse as a mere mechanical extravaganza. Whether they liked it or no, the new power had arrived.
Despite the outraged mutterings of his cabmen, George Foster was persuaded to invest in two motor cabs with towering landaulette bodies which duly joined the old growlers on the rank outside the railway station. So popular did they prove that two more, and then a further two, each pair an improvement on their predecessors, were added to the fleet which was housed in a new garage at the Coltisham end of the High Street with Bob Foster in charge. Bob insisted that the services of the new garage should be available to any motorist and so the Winterstoke Autocarists’ Depot came into being. ‘Everything for the Autocar’ was Bob’s enterprising slogan, and motorists were glad to find somebody so willing to struggle with obstinate tyres, to cure the unfathomable maladies of new-fangled electrical ignition systems, to sell them cans of petroleum spirit or to replenish with carbide the generators of their acetylene headlamps. Meanwhile, Winterstoke’s first motor bus appeared, plying between the railway station and Emberley village with Peter Foster at the wheel. It was a crude vehicle: steeply ascending tiers of seats behind the driver with only a simple canopy on stanchions for protection; wooden wheels fitted with solid rubber tyres and a final drive by two grumbling, exposed chains covered with a mixture of oil and road grit. Yet like the taxies it proved popular and, so far as the trams were concerned, it represented the thin end of a very formidable wedge.
By 1914 Winterstoke had learnt to accept the new power which had appeared on its roads as part of the normal. No machine could be more docile and well-bred than the ‘Silver Ghost’ Rolls-Royce for which Doctor Harald had just exchanged his electric brougham, and the intransigent past of the horseless carriage was quite forgotten. Even the despised horses themselves were rapidly growing accustomed to the sight and sound of the cars which now began to invade the streets; long, low ‘torpedo’ touring cars equipped with the electric lamps which the tungsten filament bulb had made possible. Only the roaring solid tyred buses and lorries, the trams or the snorting steam wagons still caused panic amongst the horse-drawn traffic. But the powers of internal combustion and electricity were still in their infancy. Upon a society which, during a century of precocious development, had endeavoured to adjust itself to the pace dictated by steam power, the technicians of the revolution had launched these new mechanical forces which dictated a much faster rhythm, developed far more rapidly and so produced another bewildering cycle of social change. Each year brought something new to wonder at so hot was the pace. A sound of angry buzzing, like that of some enormous wasp which seemed to fill the sky over Winterstoke, brought people running from their doors to point and shield their eyes as they gazed upwards at their first aeroplane. They could see the intrepid aeronaut, a small figure slung like some black spider in the slender web of struts strung between the wings which was all that served for fuselage. They watched the strange and wonderful machine, pitching and swaying dizzily through the uncharted currents of the air at seventy miles an hour, until it disappeared over the brow of High Hanger Down and its droning faded in the distance.
A strange and garish new frontage in Bridge Street harboured another new and more exotic marvel. A fantastic erection of white pierced woodwork and stucco, red plush curtains and mirrors, it resembled the entrance to an oriental mosque except that the whole of its bizarre outline was pricked out by hundreds of dazzling electric lamps. This was a palace, indeed, the Winterstoke Electric Theatre, and what an inexhaustible store of wonders peopled the hot darkness within! Here, while a tireless pianist tinkled and strummed, you could sit, for less than the price of a seat in the gods at the Theatre Royal, and watch a shadow pageant of restless figures: pompous gentlemen in flyaway collars, correct frock coats and striped trousers, who slipped on banana skins, fell down flights of stairs, bombarded each other with custard pies or were found, hiding behind the potted palms, in the boudoirs of outraged ladies; grim-faced cowboys, hopelessly outnumbered by hostile Comanche and Cherokee, defending the stage-wagon to the last bullet; romantic heroines with long, curling tresses and kohl-darkened eyes being kidnapped by handsome sheiks or facing a fate worse than death in the old log cabin. What a Nirvana to be able to relax and allow the mind to lose itself in this fairyland; to forget for a while the hard and unromantic realities of life in twentieth century Winterstoke, the thin rain falling on the cobbles outside, the raw smoke-laden wind in the alleyway, the never-ending drudgery of cramped kitchens and back-yards, and the brazen voices of the steam bulls of Darley Bank and Great Ketton which would bellow their peremptory summons through the cold darkness of winter mornings.
The progress of internal combustion and electricity might have continued even more rapidly had the brittle fabric of European society been able any longer to withstand the titanic stresses and strains imposed upon it by a competitive world economy driven by such prodigious mechanical powers. It could not. In August, 1914, chaos was loosed upon the world. It took the people of Winterstoke some time to discover that this was not like other wars; that it was not merely a bloody trial of strength played out according to old-established rules of war by professional armies marching and counter-marching over remote battlefields. The Crimea and the South African campaign were the only wars they had known. They began to realize that this war was different: when every able-bodied man was conscripted to join the shambles in the Flanders mud; when new machines at Great Ketton began to hatch in their thousands the wicked steel shells; when, instead of locomotives, the first tanks crawled like amphibious monsters from primeval slime out of the forge at Darley Bank; when windows were darkened and the wheeling arc of a searchlight on High Hanger Down picked out the sinister silver cigar shape of a Zeppelin; when they heard its bombs crump down on the courts of Hanger Lane and in the morning saw the pointless and poignant havoc, the utterly meaningless misery which was all that so prodigal a display of aeronautical bravado had achieved. This was indeed a new kind of war; the first inevitable and gigantic clash between rival industrial machines which involved, not armies alone, but whole peoples and where the potency of the weapon made the hand that held it seem a puny and a pitiful thing.