The Victorian era ended with the death of the great queen. The Edwardian era that followed was short, brought to an abrupt end by the First World War, but it was a period when the railway system in the United Kingdom was almost completed, and a period of peace and prosperity during which many people were able to enjoy the fruits of the progress made by the Victorians. Not for nothing have many historians described this period as ‘La Belle Epoche’.
Queen Victoria had not enjoyed railway travel. She had made her first railway journey on 13 June 1842, travelling from Slough, then the nearest station to Windsor, behind the locomotive Phlegethon. Gooch drove the locomotive at an average speed of 44 mph, which alarmed Her Majesty, so that Prince Albert was moved to request that future journeys be conducted at lower speeds. The rule that her progress by rail was stately survived the Prince Consort’s early death, but not her own. Impatiently, her son called for her funeral trains, the first from Stokes Bay, near Gosport, to Waterloo, for the lying in state and the state funeral, and afterwards, the second from Paddington to the Royal tombs at Frogmore, to be run at normal express speeds!
This also explodes another myth about railways and Queen Victoria, that her route to her beloved retreat on the Isle of Wight at Osborne House was the one used by most travellers to and from the island, the Portsmouth Direct, which is the line from Waterloo to Portsmouth via Woking and Guildford, and the crossing from Portsmouth to Ryde. It wasn’t. The line suffers from many gradients and, at first, once opened through to Portsmouth in 1859, didn’t run through to the harbour because for some years the Admiralty wouldn’t allow it. Queen Victoria used to travel down the London & South Western main line to Eastleigh and then to Fareham, continuing on the short branch to Gosport, which her train would leave at the small station of Brockhurst (not to be confused with Brockenhurst, in the New Forest) and take the even shorter branch to Stokes Bay, where a short pier was built so that the Royal family could board a small steamer for the crossing to Osborne House, whose beautiful grounds stretched down to the Solent.
Edwardian confidence was if anything much greater than that of the Victorians: after all most of them were the same people! In London, this was the period of the first railway electrification and the first motorbuses. A Great Western steam locomotive, the City of Truro, set an unofficial steam record in 1904, of 100 mph, faster than any aeroplane for some years still to come. While the record was unofficial and over the following decades often doubted, more recent investigation has verified the claim. The Wright brothers, who had made their first tentative aeroplane flights in December 1903, made their first public demonstrations in 1908, initially in the United States, and then in France. The following year, the Frenchman, Louis Bleriot, flew a monoplane to make the first aeroplane crossing of the English Channel, and on the Medway, the Short brothers became the first licensees for the Wright series of aeroplanes.
Aviation might seem to have little to do with urban transport, but, as we will see later, when they developed, airports were to become significant traffic generators for the railways in particular.
Many portray the early years of the twentieth century as a time of peace and optimism. But apart from growing fears over the power and ambitions of Germany, and unrest in the Balkans, there were other signs that all was not well. In 1909, two Latvian anarchists stole £80 from a clerk in Tottenham. This was a time when the public as a whole rose up against a criminal, and several of them chased the two men across Tottenham Marsh. A policeman and a ten year-old boy were both shot dead and another fourteen people were wounded, before the anarchists tried to make good their escape by hi-jacking a tram. This was the most unlikely and unsuitable vehicle in which to make an escape, and no doubt to avoid being caught, the two men shot themselves. This was rare burst of excitement in what had become a well-ordered city.
In 1900, most trams were horse-drawn, but by 1914, the horse-drawn tram had gone from London. The expansion of the network continued, but started to slow after 1910 as the most obvious routes had been built. Even so, the total tramway route mileage grew from 1,040 in 1900 to 2,530 by 1914. Yet, at the peak of its success, the tram, which so threatened the suburban railways, was also challenged by the internal combustion engine which transformed the omnibus. After 1910, buses were increasingly powered by the internal combustion engine, which at the time was fuelled by petrol. The railways also saw electrification as the way forward for their suburban services, forced to consider change because of the threat to their traffic posed by the electric tram. Nevertheless, the first railway electrification was not in London, as we have already seen. The Inner Circle was London’s first, in 1905. Growing competition from buses and trams had forced the District Railway to cut its fares from 1d a mile in 1901, and a further cut followed, increasing traffic but not the overall revenue.
The Great Western Railway took what might be considered as an outer-suburban branch for the first experiment the internal combustion engine on Britain’s railways. In 1911, the company took delivery of a British Thompson Houston petrol-engined railcar, albeit a very small one, just 33¼ ft long, about half the length of a main line carriage, although longer than the then permitted maximum length for a bus. With a maximum speed of just 32 mph, the new railcar was hardly likely to compete with the best steam locomotives, but it was seen as being used purely on a feeder service and on local services with short distances between stations, acceleration mattered more than maximum speed. The new railcar was probably none too comfortable, with just two axles rather than bogies and a short wheelbase that would have left it pitching as it passed over track joints and points, while to accommodate a worthwhile forty-four seats, these were arranged in a three and two aside layout. Nevertheless, in February 1912, it entered service between Slough and Windsor, a branch of just 2.7 miles in length, taking eight minutes for the journey.
The small railcar, like many others that were to follow a half-century later when British Railways rediscovered the concept, albeit with diesel engines, soon proved to be too small for peak period traffic, when it often had to be replaced by a push-pull steam train. The media adopted an enthusiastic and encouraging tone when covering the new vehicle, but the GWR seems to have been disappointed, possibly because the new arrival was undersized. Either way, the new service did not last long, so steam once again reigned supreme between Windsor and Slough. It was to be another twenty years before the GWR once again experimented with the internal combustion engine.
The age of the electric tram and the start of the age of the internal combustion engine was still the age of the horse, especially for the collection and delivery of goods of all kinds, even if it had been displaced from public transport. There are no straight lines or abrupt endings in propulsion, and the edges are always blurred, but one thing was clear, and that was to hang on to their suburban traffic against competition from the tram, the railways would have to electrify.
The dawn of the commuter age
The sheer size of London meant that commuting pre-dated the railways, but the railway age gave a new dimension to commuting, and it was no longer a case of travelling from, say, Richmond or Kingston, to town, but of travelling from places much further afield. During the era of the stagecoach, regular travellers would catch the ‘short stages’ from dormitory towns such as Esher into London.
The term ‘commuting’ was not used at the time and indeed did not enter popular usage until well after the Second World War, being of American origin. In the USA, the term ‘commute’ was used to recognise the change between being a resident and a worker, or the payment for journeys in advance, ‘commuting’ the fares into a single advance payment. Before the term became widely accepted in the UK, the term was ‘season-ticket holder’, although in the north the term ‘contract’ was more widely used. A season ticket came to provide unlimited travel between two points, often including the use of intermediate stations, for a period of a week, a month, a quarter or a year, and regular travellers came to expect substantial discounts, even in excess of 60 per cent of the standard single or return fares on longer distances, despite putting railways, and other public transport operators, to considerable extra expense in providing extra rolling stock and personnel just for the daily peak periods.
This tradition of heavy discounts for peak period travel arose as the railways needed to fill seats on their trains at a period when early morning traffic was still light and the heavy commuter flows of more recent years had still to appear. The custom has become so ingrained that it is now impossible to change it.
The first recorded example of season tickets on Britain’s railways was in 1834 on the Canterbury & Whitstable Railway, but these were not intended for workers, but for pleasure-seekers. As early as 1836, the London & Greenwich offered ‘Free Tickets’ for a quarter’s travel, at £5 first-class, £4 second-class and £3 third-class. The London & Brighton introduced first-class season tickets between the two towns for the not inconsiderable sum of £100 in 1843, but by 1914, its successor, the London Brighton & South Coast, was offering this facility for just £43. The all-Pullman express, the ‘Southern Belle’, did the journey is just an hour.
It was not until 1851 that the Great Western introduced season tickets, and then only as far from London as Windsor and Maidenhead. Others, such as the London & North Western provided heavily discounted tickets at outer suburban stations to encourage new housing development. On the other hand, the pressures on housing in central London meant that the Metropolitan in particular found that there was a movement away from the centre to the cheaper housing of the outer suburbs, for which the term ‘Metroland’ was coined. The trend towards longer journeys to work really became significant with the dawn of the twentieth century, helped by a combination of electric trams and the electric trains that were the railways’ response, but the lack of electrification in itself was no deterrent to the Diaspora of urban dwellers, and both Liverpool Street and Fenchuch Street soon became busy commuter stations. Initially, only first and second-class season tickets were offered, but soon all classes were available.
The First World War saw a dramatic increase in the sale of season tickets as, to cut unnecessary travel, ordinary fares were increased, but not season ticket rates. Between the wars, the Southern Railway in particular sought to encourage season ticket holders to its newly electrified lines, as we will see later. Working hours were longer at the time and Saturday morning working was normal, so the morning and especially the evening peaks were longer than became the case post-war.
A day ‘up in town’
Living in Maidenhead, already home for many who worked in London, was Ruth Belville, whom we have met earlier taking the correct Greenwich Mean Time from the Royal Observatory to her clients across London. She had started her business, which she inherited from her father, living close to the Royal Observatory, but by the Edwardian era, she had moved to the other side of town.
‘On average I make about thirty calls each Monday after visiting Greenwich, and it is a hard day’s work,’ she told a reporter from the Maidenhead Advertiser, which reported that she was ‘carried all over London in tram, bus and electric train. In fact, she would be hard put to do the same journey today, make all of the calls and return home, especially since she also took the opportunity to do her shopping as she made her way back to Paddington.
Like many commuters her weekly visit to London started with a twenty minute walk from her house to the railway station at Maidenhead in time to buy a ticket and catch the 8.59 am to Paddington, which would have arrived at 9.37 am. Here her travel options had broadened considerably over the years. She was heading for Greenwich, so one option was to take the Circle Line to Charing Cross, but that was not the most direct route, although after electrification was completed in November 1905, it was no longer dirty, smelly and dusty with steam locomotives working hard as they accelerated between the frequent stops a into the cut and cover tunnels and then, all too briefly, into a stretch in cutting. The more direct route was the Baker Street & Waterloo Railway which had been extended to Edgware Road in 1907, and in 1913 this was connected to Paddington Station. The ‘Bakerloo’ would have carried her across the centre of London to Charing Cross to catch a train to Greenwich.
THE MAN BEHIND THE COMBINE:
Charles Tyson Yerkes, 1837-1905
Born in Philadelphia in 1837, Charles Yerkes was initially involved in tramcar operation in Chicago before crossing the Atlantic and becoming involved in the development of the London underground system. He sought parliamentary authorisation for the Charing Cross & Hampstead tube line in 1900, and the following year he established the Metropolitan District Electric Traction Company, putting these ventures into a new company, the Underground Electric Railways Company of London in 1902. He moved quickly to electrify the District and build and equipped three tube lines, the Hampstead, Bakerloo and Piccadilly. His methods of financing his enterprises were new to British financiers and treated with suspicion, with most of his funds being raised in the United States. Nevertheless, he succeeded in raising £16 million (about £1,100 million today). Possibly his somewhat racy personal life and lavish personal expenditure was not to the taste of Edwardian London, and certainly his private art collection had to be auctioned after his death to pay his debts, but there seems to be no record of any fraudulent dealings.
Yerkes transformed transport in London, providing relief from the congested streets and connecting the main railway termini while standardising operating systems on the lines under his control, aided by a strong team of American railwaymen brought to London to ensure operating efficiency and overcome resistance to new ideas. His lines continued to develop after his death and his company expanded into trams, buses (known as the ‘Overground’), and trolleybuses, eventually in 1912 acquiring the London General Omnibus Company, attracting much jealousy and with his transport interests becoming known as the ‘Combine’ to his competitors. However, any monopoly positions were strictly local. The entire transport empire passed into the control of the London Passenger Transport Board in 1933.
It is clear that the expansion of his business made the formation of the LPTB, the first transport nationalisation, much easier. The question is whether the continued existence of his empire and its natural expansion would have created a more efficient and commercially acute organisation than London Transport.
Another walk awaited her at Greenwich, but this time it was a steep twenty minute climb from the station to the observatory. There she would be grateful for the chair and the cup of tea offered her by the porter while her chronometer was checked for accuracy.
Her weekly round visiting clients then began. She would have most probably walked down the hill through Greenwich Park to Greenwich Pier, taking about fifteen minutes, before catching the steam ferry to the Isle of Dogs and then walking again to North Greenwich railway station, which was above today’s Island Gardens Station on the Docklands Light Railway. An alternative would have been to use the tunnel for pedestrians and cyclists built in 1902, and although this would have taken longer, it may have been an attractive option in fog when the ferry services were unreliable and, in the days before radar, dangerous. She would then have taken the Millwall Extension Railway, part of the London & Blackwall Railway, to visit clients in the Millwall, West India and East India Docks, after which she would resume her journey alighting at Shadwell for the London Docks.
Ruth never discussed her clients and named but one or two, so it is possible that she may have left the observatory and caught a tram from Greenwich to New Cross to catch a train on the East London Railway to Shadwell for the London Docks. Here the alternative routes met and after conducting her business in the London Docks she could have caught the London Tilbury & Southend Railway train to Fenchurch Street.
We do know that Ruth next visited the Minories, the City and Clerkenwell, possibly walking briskly although she was by this time in her fifties and no doubt pressed for time, took the underground from Aldgate to Farrington, convenient for Clerkenwell, important for her because of the number of watchmakers and jewellers. She would then return by train to Moorgate and continue on foot to visit her clients in the City. Fortunately, her clients seem to have been clustered together in well-defined districts.
Leaving the City for the Borough, she could have caught the City & South London tube, but let’s say that instead she caught the dark green No 90 bus that ran every five minutes, possibly one of the new motor omnibuses that were rapidly displacing the horse-drawn omnibuses that had served London so well for more than half-a-century. She would have called on her client, and then caught one running in the opposite direction for Fleet Street. From here, she called on more clients, before heading for the Strand, catching another bus, this time a white ‘Waltham Green’ No 5 bus that operated every six minutes through the centre via Liverpool Street and the Strand, and costing just tuppence. Like many of the bus services of the day, it did not start until 8 am, although it did run until midnight.
Her next cluster of customers were located in Kensington and Chelsea, so the District Railway was the most likely mode of travel, boarding at Temple Station and travelling first to Kensington and then perhaps she would walk to Chelsea. Afterwards, she would return to Dover Street, now known as Green Park, on the new Piccadilly & Brompton Railway, today’s Piccadilly Line, to visit her clients in Bond Street and Regent Street. Perhaps she would have started her shopping at this point as, hardy though she undoubtedly was, she wouldn’t have wanted to carry it with her all day. She would have caught the Bakerloo back from Piccadilly to Baker Street, where we know that she had a customer, before continuing to Paddington, possibly on foot. She then had to catch her train back to Maidenhead, almost certainly at the height of what would today be the rush hour, but the morning and evening ‘peaks’ were much less pronounced at this time as working hours were longer for the mass of clerks, typists, secretaries and shopworkers.
The Underground Group
Nevertheless, this is to race ahead a little, as another development was to take place that was as significant in its way as the formation of the London General Omnibus Company in 1855.
Victorian London seems to have attracted not just the best and most ambitious of British talent, but that from abroad as well, and especially from the United States, but the financier Charles Tyson Yerkes was to prove far more successful and his legacy far more enduring than that of the unfortunate Train with his trams.
Even before Yerkes arrived in London, the deep level tubes, of necessity using electric traction, was not only being approved by Parliament, but were being built and three had already opened, the short-lived City of London & Southwark, the Waterloo & City, of which more later, and the predecessor of today’s Central Line, the Central London Railway.
The arrival of the Bakerloo line immediately transformed the position of London’s Waterloo, for too long the most isolated terminus even though it served territory that was already favoured by affluent commuters and this had not only seen the launch of a horse bus service linking the terminus with the City, but also led to building of what was almost the shortest of all London tube lines and the only one to be operated by a main line railway company, the Waterloo & City Line. This opened in 1898 to give direct access to the City of London, and although nominally independent at first, from the outset it was worked by the London & South Western Railway which took it over in 1907. Using specially-built four-car trains, the line ran for 1½ miles under the Thames, without intermediate stations from Waterloo to the Bank, where in later years passengers could interchange with the Central London Railway. An electric hoist at Waterloo enabled vehicles to be removed for overhaul. The line passed into the control of the Southern Railway in 1923. It was to be the only tube railway not to pass into the control of the London Passenger Transport Board in 1933.
The Bakerloo line ran across the centre of the West End, serving such important points as Piccadilly Circus and Oxford Circus. It was acquired by the Underground Electric Railways, which had originally been formed by Yerkes to acquire the Metropolitan District Railway in 1902, and had already converted the MDR to electric traction, providing power from its Lots Road, Chelsea, power station and before acquiring the Bakerloo as well as the Hampstead and Piccadilly railways, both of which were still under construction.
Although regarded by suspicion as profiteers at first, not least because statutory undertakings (i.e. railways, authorised by Parliament) were being controlled by a non-statutory company, the company bought in a strong American management team that ensured efficiency and standardisation on its lines, with its third and fourth rail dc current supply becoming the standard for London that continues to this day. It also introduced multiple unit trains, lifts and escalators, and automatic signalling. The term ‘Underground’ became synonymous with the London network, especially after the other companies outside the UER group agreed to adopt the term for station signs and network maps. It also introduced a logo, a roundel with a horizontal bar, which has persisted to this day as the symbol for London Transport. No doubt this was due to its adaptability, as it could be used for an individual underground line or a station, and then later was used for buses and bus stops.
The UER on its own did much to transform travel and make the congested centre of London more accessible. While the Bakerloo ran across the centre from the south-east to the north-west, two of the other lines provided complementary links and connections. These were the Piccadilly, running from the north-east to the south-west and the Hampstead, which ran north-south and which also helped to ease the isolation of Waterloo.
When the Piccadilly Line opened as the Great Northern Piccadilly & Brompton Railway in 1906, it had what was then the longest deep level tube line in London, running 8½ miles from Finsbury Park to Hammersmith, with no less than 7¾ miles below ground. Its origins lay in a deep level scheme planned by the Metropolitan District, the Brompton & Piccadilly Circus and the Great Northern & Strand Railways, which were merged in 1902.
The line was extended during 1932-33, running over tracks abandoned by the District to Hounslow and South Harrow, and over the Metropolitan Line to Upminster using a new stretch of tube, while surface sections took it to Southgate and Cockfosters, giving an Uxbridge to Cockfosters run of thirty-two miles. A short branch was provided from Holborn to Aldwych, which was closed in 1994, although earlier it had its services suspended during the Second World War.
The third of this trio of essential deep level tube railways across the centre of London was what is known today as the Northern Line. For many years it was known more usually as the ‘Hampstead Line’ or the ‘Hampstead & Highgate’. Originally authorised in 1893 as the Charing Cross Euston & Hampstead Railway, and there were very many variations to the original plans before it opened in 1907 as part of the Underground Electric Railway tube lines. At the time, it was known as ‘The Last Link’, running from Charing Cross to Hampstead via Euston, and brought to an end plans for a railway linking the South Eastern at Charing Cross with the London & North Western at Euston. While the CCEHR undoubtedly filled the need at the time, one can only speculate over the advantages of having a mainline link across the centre of London, which could have filled a similar role to the regional expresses running through Paris and in this case could have reduced the need to change trains as well as providing additional capacity on an overcrowded underground system. The problem, of course, was that at the time the CCEHR served more people and provided better links, and it was a case of one railway project or another, definitely not both. The CCEHR was completed with a branch to the Midland Railway’s suburban station at Kentish Town, but before opening it was extended to Golders Green, in 1906 nothing more than a muddy country cross roads, and Highgate. In 1914, it was extended southwards to the District Railway’s Charing Cross station on the bank of the Thames to provide a loop that avoided the need to reverse trains.
The platforms at Hampstead remain the deepest on the London tube network, at 192ft below ground level, while the tunnel between East Finchley and Morden via the CSLR line at 17¼ miles was for many years the longest railway tunnel in the world.
In 1910, the Underground Electric Railways passed to the recently formed London Electric Railway. Steady extension then followed, with the Bakerloo Line reaching Paddington in 1913, and in 1915 it reached Queen’s Park where it connected to the London & North Western Railway, and in 1917 used the LNWR tracks to reach Watford. A plan to extend the line south to Camberwell was authorised in 1931, reconsidered in 1949, but then abandoned.
Whatever his detractors thought of him, Yerkes transformed transport in London, providing relief from the congested streets and connecting the main railway termini while standardising operating systems on the lines under his control. His lines continued to develop after his death in 1905, with his company acquiring the London General Omnibus Company in 1912, attracting much jealousy and becoming known as the ‘Combine’ to his competitors. This was one advantage of working through a major holding company, for at the time the railways were allowed to operate feeder bus services connecting with their trains, but it was to be another seventeen years before they could invest directly in bus companies. Nevertheless, any monopoly positions were strictly local, and even the mighty ‘Combine’ faced considerable competition in many areas, especially south of the River Thames. Many of the tramway systems were under the control of local councils. It is interesting to wonder what might have become of the London tram network had it enjoyed a strong coordinating and guiding hand, such as that provided by Yerkes and his successors, rather than having been left as a series of isolated and often unconnected municipal fiefdoms. Given a free rein, the ‘Combine’ might even have produced many of the benefits of coordination that resulted from the creation of the London Passenger Transport Board, but with fewer restrictions and less bureaucracy.
‘The twopenny lodging-house’ and others
While the trams were the highlight of the Edwardian era in urban transport, another significant development was taking place on the roads, the motor omnibus. In fact, such was the poor reliability of the first motor buses as they appeared in the early years of the century, that manufacturers of steam buses and battery electric buses were also able to find a market for their wares. The steam bus had in fact advanced considerably since the early days of the steam engine and was no longer the heavy and unwieldy beast that stage coach operators had tried, and almost immediately abandoned. Coal was abandoned in favour of oil so there was no need for a fireman. One major operator, the National Steam Car Company, was even formed around the new generation of steam omnibuses, and its constituent companies eventually became the Eastern, Western and Southern National bus companies on being purchased by the railway companies after 1929.
The first steam, battery electric and motor buses were adaptations of the horse bus, albeit usually with solid rubber tyres on their wheels. The driver sat much lower down behind the engine, although on some vehicles, including those produced by Renault and on the steam buses, he still had a high driving position.
A few enthusiastic individuals operated wagonettes in London from May 1899, but the first attempt to establish a regular service in the capital was not until 1 April 1901 by the South Western Motor Car Company, which ran between Streatham and Clapham Junction via Balham. The entrepreneur behind this venture was Walter Flexman French, who was, following the First World War, to be involved with such famous bus companies as East Kent, Maidstone & District and Southdown. SWMCC used two Daimler wagonettes with a fixed awning and room for eight persons on longitudinal seats inside, while another two sat beside the driver. Nevertheless, even without the horses and no conductor, costs were high and passenger volumes low, so the service lasted just a few months. Perhaps the starting date was inauspicious.
On 18 September 1901, another wagonette service was started in London running between Piccadilly Circus and Putney. The promoter was one Francis Joseph Bell, whose publicity proclaimed that he had for ‘two years carried on a successful service of ten motor omnibuses at Bournemouth’. Bell used seven vehicles on MMC chassis with solid rubber tyres and 10 hp Panhard-Daimler engines. Just eight passengers could be carried, of whom two sat beside the driver. Although normally open, the red wagonettes could be fitted with a roof and sides for wet weather.
The wagonette period was short-lived, but, as we will see later, slightly larger single deck vehicles also enjoyed a period of operation, perhaps similar to that of the single horse single-deck buses noted earlier.
Although the law demanded rubber tyres, many of the early mechanically-powered buses had steel tyres, and it was not until 1903 that a large bus appeared using rubber tyres, still solid, of course. Meanwhile, Thorneycroft, a builder of haulage vehicles, built a coke-fired steam bus for the London Road Car Company with the unusual feature that the horse-bus style body had the upper deck extended over the driver, who effectively sat just above the lower deck rather than on or just below the upper deck. This meant that while twelve passengers sat inside, no less than twenty-four could sit outside. As with the earlier steam bus mentioned in the previous chapter, this also had the chimney sticking up through the front end of a canvas awning, again doubtless to shield passengers from smuts, although it was also equipped with side curtains for inclement weather. A hint of railway practice was that the bus included sandboxes for starting on slippery road surfaces, possibly also another drawback of steel tyres. This was the first experiment with mechanical propulsion by an established horse-bus operator and it entered service between Hammersmith and Oxford Circus running via Shepherds Bush on 17 March 1902, charging a fare of 2d. The street urchins called it ‘the twopenny lodging-house’, clearly a reference to the chimney. The service lasted until May, when it was withdrawn, again because it was uneconomic.
The first large bus to be fitted with rubber tyres appeared on 3 October 1902 working Charles Claude Dennis’s route from Lewisham to Eltham Green via Lee Green. This bus was built by Canstatt-Daimler to a design by Henry Lawson, who had been a prominent member of the motoring lobby and had organised the first 1896 ‘emancipation’ run from London to Brighton. Completely open-topped with a high driving position, it had twelve seats on the lower deck and fifteen outside on the upper deck. This vehicle only remained in service until early 1904.
No doubt the LGOC felt that it was in danger of falling behind while other horse-bus operators experimented with new forms of propulsion. In June 1902, the company had ordered a petrol-electric chassis from Fischer, an American vehicle manufacturer, and which the LGOC claimed would be the first of nine such vehicles, each costing £450. In a petrol electric vehicle, the petrol engine drove a dynamo which charged batteries, from which the current then powered an electric motor. On arrival, in April 1903, the LGOC fitted a double-deck body, but the following month, the Metropolitan Police refused to grant a licence on the grounds that the vehicle was too wide. Nevertheless, it eventually entered service after gaining a special exemption, but it proved to be so heavy and fuel consumption so high that after some experimental running, in October the manufacturer was asked to take it back and refund the cost.
One problem was that it was still difficult to find a prime mover that was light enough and powerful enough to be suitable for a double-deck bus, even of horse-drawn proportions. Just as the horse-drawn double-deck bus was preceded by single-deck vehicles, something similar occurred in London.
The first of these, as opposed to a wagonette, was the Stirling twelve-seat single-deck bus introduced by the London Motor Omnibus Syndicate on a service between Oxford Circus and Cricklewood via Marble Arch on 26 November 1902. The completely enclosed body had a rear entrance with platform and nearside steps. Just four vehicles launched the service, and these were all withdrawn in autumn 1903. The business reorganised itself and emerged as the London Power Omnibus Company, and with two of the original vehicles and five new vehicles, launched a service between Marble Arch and Kilburn on 18 February 1904. This must at last have been successful as by the end of the year the fleet had grown to twelve vehicles, with the latest ones having fourteen and sixteen seats. A further sign of success was that in February 1906, the single-deck buses were all withdrawn and replaced by double-deck vehicles.
Despite this activity, the number of ‘horseless’ buses running in London was very small. In 1899, for example, there were just five, of which three were double-deck. In 1901, there were ten, all single-deck, but there was a surge the following year, with twenty-eight single-deck and two double-deck vehicles, but by 1903, there was just one solitary double-deck bus while the number of single-deck vehicles had dropped to eleven. Yet, by 1904, there were five double-deck and twenty-six single-deck buses in service. Despite this, at the start of 1905, there were only twenty motor buses in London: five of these were Milnes-Daimler double-deck vehicles, with three being operated by Thomas Tilling and another two by Birch Brothers. The Thomas Tilling vehicles set the pattern of urban double-deck buses for the next fifteen years, with sixteen seats inside and eighteen outside, with the driver sitting behind the engine in what has become known as the ‘normal control’ position. Unlike some of the steam buses, there was no attempt to cover the upper deck, which remained open, but rubberised sheets were placed behind the seat backs and these could be used to cover the passengers when it rained or snowed. It became the custom for the sheets, when folded behind the back of the seat in front, to carry advertising. Travel outside was not for the weak and even with spiral staircases and a platform, getting on and off required some agility. By this time, the same fare was being paid regardless of which deck one chose for the journey.
It was around this time that both the LGOC and the London Road Car Company started mechanised bus operation in earnest. They did not use the internal combustion engine, however, but instead both opted for steam buses and single-deck at that. On 8 October 1904, the LRCC introduced two Chelmsford buses with fourteen-seat bodies, and the same type of vehicle was introduced by the LGOC on 10 October, but only remained in service until 7 June 1905, having lost its owners £319 18s 5d in the meantime. The LRCC buses soldiered on until August before also being withdrawn. The Chelmsford name was later to change to Clarkson, but before this, the LRCC introduced a double-deck Chelmsford steam bus on 5 September 1905, running between Hammersmith and Oxford Circus. A much larger twenty-seat Darracq-Serpollet steam bus was introduced as an experiment in March 1909 by the Metropolitan Steam Omnibus Company.
Far ahead of their time were the single-deck Pullman buses introduced on 4 May 1908, which ran for a period providing a luxury service with armchairs and pneumatic tyres, but the latter innovation was still in its infancy and unable to bear the weight of a double-deck bus.
By 1908, it was also becoming clear that, except where low bridges or other obstacles made double-deck operation impossible, it was the double-deck bus that was the most efficient and economical means of transport in cities. The volume of traffic was there, but the better use of road space and personnel also meant that everything pointed in favour of the double-deck bus and, for that matter, double-deck tram. Contrary to popular belief, the double-deck bus was by no means unique to the British Isles at the time, but in widespread service in the cities of the northern hemisphere.
The reluctance to obey the letter of the law and use rubber tyres was a question of cost. It has been estimated that a set of solid rubber tyres on a one ton vehicle, a small wagonette, cost 10d per mile in 1902. The Great Western Railway sought to minimise these costs by negotiating what is believed to be the first tyre-mileage contract for its 22-seat Milnes-Daimler vehicles, which amounted to 3.0576d per mile, but even so, these vehicles remained in service from 30 January 1904 before being withdrawn at the end of the year due to the high cost and poor reliability of the tyres. One operator claimed that tyres would not last 200 miles before coming off the rims, when it was not unknown for a police officer to maintain that the vehicle then had to operate as a traction engine with a maximum speed of 4 mph!
Fortunately, by 1905, in an attempt to encourage the use of their products, the main tyre manufacturers started to offer contracts of 2d per mile for a set of tyres, so that the standard motor (or steam or electric) bus had wooden carriage wheels encased in solid rubber tyres. This started to transform the economics of horseless bus operation. Nevertheless, it does not compare with today when a bus operator will pay £19 per thousand miles and tyres can, with a little bit of luck, last for up 40,000 miles, 200 times the mileage in 1905.
New companies continued to appear, of which the most prominent was the London Motor Omnibus Company. Its traffic manager was a certain George Samuel Hicks, an experienced busman, who introduced some new ideas which have become commonplace ever since. It was Hicks who introduced the large fleet name, in effect a trading name, and all of the buses introduced by the LMOC carried the name ‘Vanguard’ in prominent letters. Vanguard commenced operations on 27 March 1905. Hicks next introduced route numbers, the first of which was used a little over a year later, on 30 April 1906, but surprisingly did not provide any indication of which direction the buses were travelling; this was left to Tilling who introduced front destination boards in September 1904. Hicks also ensured a high degree of standardisation in the Vanguard fleet, and stole a march on his competitors, by taking priority for deliveries of Milnes-Daimler vehicles, and so while the LGOC had obtained its first Milnes-Daimler on 29 May 1905, it was the first of few. As they sought to catch up, the established horse-bus operators were forced to look elsewhere.
The importance of route numbers should not be underestimated and it was a far more flexible method of advising waiting passengers of the route than the alternative, which had found favour with the North Metropolitan Tramways, of painting the cars in one of five different colours according to the route worked. It also enabled passengers to distinguish between vehicles that made a detour and those that were more direct.
The LGOC turned to the French concern, De Dion, the first of whose vehicles entered service on 19 October 1905 and until 1910, these became the most numerous type in the LGOC fleet. The rival London Road Car Company favoured Straker-Squire vehicles which were built under licence from Bussing of Germany, as well as Clarkson (formerly Chelmsford) steam buses. The pace of change accelerated rapidly, so that while there were just twenty motor buses operating in London at the beginning of 1905, by August there were a hundred, and by the end of the year this had more than doubled to 230, while by March 1908, there were no less than a thousand. The petrol-engined bus established itself as the mainstay of the fleet, but there were also ‘gearless’ petrol-electric buses and the London Electrobus Company had a small fleet of battery-powered vehicles that lasted from 15 July 1907 until March 1910. Nor should we forget the Metropolitan Steam Omnibus Company, which ran Darracq-Serpollet steam buses from 5 October 1907 to 16 October 1912.
Such rapid change does not come without cost. The new arrivals were at the end of their resources and the old-established horse-bus companies found the conversion to the internal combustion engine costly. It was the case that while horses were still in demand, the rapid conversion meant that there were too many of them and the market collapsed. On top of this, bus operators were free to compete with one another with little regulation by the standards of later years. As happened with the shipping lines, when regulation is not imposed, transport businesses have means of regulating themselves. This is important, for there is nothing more perishable than a seat on a bus or train, or berth on a ship, which makes the life of the butcher, baker and candlestick-maker relatively relaxed by comparison. The shipping lines sought salvation in the ‘conference system’ of coordinated sailings and charges, while the bus companies sought ‘fusion’ or ‘amalgamation’.
The end result was that on 1 July 1908, the LGOC, the London Road Car and Vanguard fleets combined, leading many to refer to the LGOC as the ‘Combine’, although the fleet name in large letters on the sides of the buses now became ‘GENERAL’. The new and enlarged LGOC had no less than 885 out of the 1,066 horseless-buses in London at then time. Of these, 1,015 were petrol-engined, one was petrol-electric, thirty-five were steam and fifteen battery-electric. The most popular make was Straker-Squire with 356, followed by Milnes-Daimler with 312 and De Dion with 165, while just seventy-five were built by Wolseley.
There was little standardisation, and there were still many horse-buses to be replaced. The Combine’s chief engineer, Frank Searle, suggested that the company should design and manufacture a bus to its own requirements, using the former Vanguard engineering works at Walthamstow. The LGOC board accepted his recommendation and the first, known as the X, was completed on 12 August 1909. After some delay in licensing the vehicle because of objections by the Metropolitan Police to the noise it made, the first of sixty-one to be built entered service on 16 December 1909. The wits amongst the trade press described it as the ‘Daimler-Wolseley-Straker type’. This was not unfair as Searle would have been foolish not to borrow the best feature from each.
‘In the manufacture of the X type cribbed shamelessly,’ he wrote many years later. ‘Any parts of the 28 types which had stood up to the gruelling of the London streets were embodied in it.’
The ‘X’ provided valuable experience and was to lead to a still greater vehicle, the B type. The design of the B type began in March 1910 and the first bus was ready at Walthamstow on 7 October, entering service on 18 October. Despite the gloomy prediction of the Chief Officer of the London County Council Tramways, Llewellyn Fell, that ‘twenty years hence motor buses will be exhibited as curios in museums’, around 2,900 B types were built and did not disappear from service in London until 12 October 1926. The bus was also produced in single-deck form for services through the Blackwall Tunnel. Amongst the early routes to use the bus was the 16, running from Kilburn to Grosvenor Place, and not only had the LGOC adopted route numbers, but from 1908, it had also standardised its destination boards. Surprisingly, uniforms for drivers and conductors were not introduced until December 1910.
Meanwhile, on 31 October 1910, the tipping point was passed, when there were exactly 1,142 horse-buses and 1,142 horseless-buses licensed in London.
The ‘B’ was the first product of the Associated Equipment Company, established by the LGOC to provide its vehicles and the predecessor of AEC, which for many years was the supplier of most London buses even after the creation of London Transport in 1933. Sadly, AEC is no longer with us, having been merged with its arch rival Leyland in the 1960s.
It seemed that steam had lost the battle as the mode of transport for London’s streets, but Thomas Clarkson, the manufacturer, retaliated by moving into bus operation, forming the National Steam Car Company. The NSCC started operations in London on 2 November 1909 with just four buses, but by the outbreak of war it had 184. The buses used paraffin as a fuel for its vehicles, but post-war, it was decided that National would also operate petrol-engined buses, and the last steamer went on 18 November 1919. Clarkson left the company in disgust. The company then started to develop services in the provinces, (as mentioned).
There was also a rear-guard battle fought for the petrol-electric. This held more promise. The Tilling concern had been interested in this type of propulsion since 1907, when it experimented with a bus known as the SB & S type, which proved capable of withstanding severe testing in London service. The chassis for the bus was completely redesigned and it had a much lower weight than earlier petrol-electric buses. The successor was the TTA1, which entered service in London on 11 June 1911, and afterwards was produced not only for service in London but also with Tilling’s growing empire of provincial bus companies.
As war approached, further changes took place. The Metropolitan Police insisted that all new buses had to have provision for destination displays front and rear, while boards on the sides of buses stated the main route points. In April 1912, service numbers were encased in a glass box, illuminated from behind. Attention to public safety saw the provision of ‘lifeguards’ along the sides of buses, wooden slats under the chassis to make it more difficult for pedestrians to fall under the bus. Chassis, and thus floor, heights were much higher at the time with rigid axles and it was to be more than ten years before a rear axle with a lowered centre became available and vehicles became lower.
On the other hand, despite upholstered seats ‘inside’ in the lower saloon, protection for the outside passengers was still lacking. Apart from the steam buses with their light canvas awnings to protect passengers from smuts, the Metropolitan Police refused to sanction any form of covering on the upper deck.
Electrification
As mentioned in the previous chapter, the impact of the electric tram on the suburban railway services was considerable, being far faster than any street transport so far. While with hindsight, electrification was the obvious answer to both competing with the trams and improving productivity on the railway network, the railways were slow to adopt this and many of the first British electric railways were tourist attractions rather than workaday railways. Despite its connections, both personal and operational, at first with the Metropolitan Railway, when it thrust towards London, the Great Central was completely oblivious to electrification. This was not just because the Metropolitan was, and remained for many years outside the centre of London, steam-hauled, but also because the Great Central could not afford the costs of electrification. There were other reasons as well, apart from the innate conservatism of railway management. One was that electric trains at the time showed considerable improvement in journey times on stopping services, where the superior acceleration of the electric train put the steam locomotive at a disadvantage, but on fast and express trains, the electric trains failed to match the best that steam could offer.
It was not until more serious consideration of electric and diesel propulsion took place between the two world wars that other advantages began to be discussed. One of these was that less manpower was needed as even a single steam railcar still needed a driver, fireman and guard, while the fireman was dispensed with on electric and diesel trains, at least on the private enterprise railway for, as we will see later, having just one man on the footplate was a battle that British Railways shirked time and time again. Another point was made too between the wars, which was that electric and diesel trains only consumed fuel whilst on the move, unlike the steam locomotive, which had to be kept in steam, and indeed took hours to reach a working temperature. This argument, expressed in the journals of the day, sits strangely with the sight today at many stations and goods yards of a diesel engine sitting idly with its engine throbbing.
While a full-sized battery-powered railway engine, Galvani, was demonstrated in London by Robert Davidson from Aberdeen as early 1837, electrification in railway terms means trains powered by current picked up from either special rails or from overhead wires. A step forward came in 1879, when Werner von Siemens demonstrated a locomotive drawing power from a third rail at the Berlin Exhibition of that year, and then brought his invention to London to demonstrate at the Crystal Palace in 1881-82. This was followed by no than three electric railways being built in the United Kingdom between 1883 and 1885, two of them in what is now Northern Ireland, and the Volk’s Railway at Brighton, the only one to survive.
Between 1890 and 1900, there were four more electric railways opened in Great Britain: the City & South London; Central London Railway; Waterloo & City; and the Liverpool Overhead Railway. Initially, these all used third rail electrification at 550-550 V dc. A significant advance was the invention in the United States by Frank Sprague of a system for controlling locomotives or self-propelled units, ‘multiple units’ in railway terms, operating in tandem or ‘multiple’, in 1898. This meant that two or more units could be coupled together and still need just one driver. The first trials of this system in Britain was on the Central London Railway in 1901, while the first to order electric multiple unit trains was the Great Northern & City Railway that same year, although by 1903, the CLR was first to actually put such trains into service. It was soon followed by the Metropolitan District and by the Metropolitan Railway, although the latter electrified only its underground or sub-surface sections, with trains steam hauled once in the open and electric engines used instead of multiple units. It was from this time that the London Underground Railways began using a central insulated negative rail for return current to avoid leakage from the return rails that could cause electrolytic corrosion of tunnel linings. It became the practice for the ‘live’ rail to be positioned outside the running rails.
As we have seen, competition from electric street tramways was beginning to make inroads into the traffic for suburban steam railways, and electrification was seen as an effective counter-measure.
The next stage was to consider using higher voltages, necessary if main line electrification was to be contemplated. The Midland Railway in Lancashire in 1908, and from 1909 the London Brighton & South Coast Railway, both favoured 6,600/6,700 V ac overhead electrification, but the latter’s suburban plans were not completed until after the First World War.
There were distinct advantages and disadvantages to the different systems. Third rail direct current required less infrastructure work as bridges and tunnels could remain unchanged, but needed many more additional sub-stations. Overhead alternating current required fewer substations, but overbridges and tunnels needed higher headroom while the trains themselves lost space to transformers. Some third rail systems used overhead wires in sidings and marshalling yards to ensure the safety of railwaymen, especially shunters, working on the ground.
The greatest enthusiasm for electrification in the London area by the surface railways was amongst the companies in the south. As already mentioned, the first electric services were introduced on the London Brighton & South Coast Railway’s South London Line London Bridge to Victoria in 1909 using a 6,700 volts ac overhead system, described very confusingly by today’s terminology as the ‘elevated electric’, and after this proved successful, the lines to Crystal Palace and Selhurst were electrified in 1912. This was completed during the same year, with services from London Bridge to Crystal Palace Low Level via Tulse Hill on 1 March, and to Streatham and Victoria via Tulse Hill on 1 June. What today would be described as the ‘sparks effect’ showed a tremendous increase in activity, with the pre-electrification services into the Brighton station running at 663 trains a day, but rising to 901 in 1912. At the other end of the South London Line, Victoria, the line to Streatham Hill and Crystal Palace Low Level was electrified from 12 May 1911, followed on 1 June 1912 by those to Norwood and the line Victoria to London Bridge via Streatham Hill.
On the other hand, it was not until Herbert Walker was poached from the London & North Western to become the London & South Western Railway’s last general manager in 1912, that the company’s suburban electrification started, including the rebuilding of Waterloo, until that time a collection of four stations built at different times to cope piecemeal with expansion, so that this had the distinction of becoming the first major railway terminus in the world built for an electric railway. The rebuilding of Waterloo took from 1910 to 1920, and so it is no surprise that the LSWR’s first suburban electrifications were not completed until during the war years. Walker’s eye for value meant that this was done on the 600-volt DC system using a third rail. Waterloo to Wimbledon via East Putney was completed on 25 October 1915, and on 30 January of the following year it was joined by the Kingston Roundabout and its Shepperton branch. On 12 March 1916, the Hounslow Loop was electrified, followed by the Hampton Court branch on 18 June. The so-called ‘new’ Guildford line, running via Cobham, was electrified as far as Claygate on 20 November 1916, and initially there was a steam push-pull service beyond for stations to Guildford, but the line had to return to steam working in July 1919, as demand on the other routes meant that the rolling stock could be used more effectively elsewhere.
Plans to electrify the South Eastern & Chatham’s suburban services were overtaken by the grouping, having been delayed by the poverty of the two partners even though the powers had been obtained as early as 1903.
Not all of the other railways were so far behind. Between 1914 and 1922, the London & North Western Railway electrified its suburban services from Euston and Broad Street to Watford, using the third and fourth rail system favoured by the Underground Group of Companies. Post-war, and after grouping, these were extended to Rickmansworth. The Broad Street services were actually those of the North London Railway, whose operations were taken over by the LNWR in 1909, although the LNR remained as a separate company. The essentially suburban nature of the NLR meant that it was one of the first to suffer the impact of electric tramways, and this forced it to consider electrification. Electrification was approved in 1911 as part of the LNWR’s scheme for its London suburban services, with electrification completed between Broad Street and Richmond in 1916, and then between Broad Street and Watford in 1922, using the third and fourth rail system.
On the Great Eastern at Liverpool Street, competition from the expanding London Underground and the electric trams meant that electrification was considered as early as 1903. Nevertheless, the Underground seemed to have stopped expanding and while Parliamentary approval was obtained, nothing was done, even though daily passenger numbers rose from around 200,000 in 1912 to 229,073 in 1921, but just fourteen trains had been added to the timetable. The cost of electrification was enormous, estimated in 1919 at £3.5 million (equivalent to more than £70 million today), with little prospect of achieving a worthwhile return. The alternative, a stop-gap measure, costing £80,000, was to change the layout of the approaches, the station arrangements and signalling, so that steam trains could continue to operate, but at the maximum efficiency. Despite these disappointments, overall traffic continued to grow, so that by 1912, Liverpool Street was handling a thousand trains daily. These included Britain’s first all-night service, half-hourly between the terminus and Walthamstow, introduced in 1897. Walthamstow’s population had grown from 11,092 in 1871 to 95,131 in 1901. This was not unusual and other suburbs saw similar expansion.
A map of London showing the built up area would have shown it confined to the City and West End in 1801, with the West End stopping at Marble Arch, but by 1914, it stretched from Purley, south of Croydon, and as far north as Enfield, although it was patchy and Barnet, little further north than Enfield, was still in open country, and Orpington, not as far south as Purley, was also in open country. Much of this reflected the development of the railway services, and to a certain extent, that of the trams. Good, frequent, direct services meant development and urban or, perhaps more correctly, suburban growth. In 1906, Golders Green was a muddy country crossroads with a few buildings, but development started once the Hampstead tube reached it the following year. By the early 1920s, it was a built-up but prosperous suburb with substantial villas in leafy roads within walking distance of the tube station, the first outside the tunnel northbound and on embankment, and with a substantial depot for trains with, in front of the station, a large bus terminus.
On edge of the growing built-up area lay Coulsdon North on the LB&SCR main line to Brighton. At the time the station was known as Stoat’s Nest. On 29 January 1910, an up express from Brighton split in two as it crossed points at the station and the last three carriages, a Pullman car and two third-class vehicles, derailed and crashed into the platform at around 40 mph, with the loss of seven lives and another thirty injured. The station was renamed the following year.
Clearly, the rewards were there for the railways, but even so the initial capital cost of electrification was to be a recurring problem, and after the First World War, only the Southern railway was to pursue this with the necessary enthusiasm and commitment. As we shall see, there were sound reasons for this, as the Southern was the one of the ‘Big Four’ railway companies most heavily dependent on passenger traffic, while the next most heavily dependent, the Great Western, had the smallest suburban traffic of any main line railway.