No one today remembers the bombing raids of the First World War. While these did not compare with the ‘Blitz’ or Blitzkrieg of the Second World War, to a population not expecting to be bombed, they were bad enough.
The railways were largely unprepared for wartime and its demands, let alone the bombing. The sole exception was the London & South Western Railway, which during the Boer War had been the principal railway handling British forces destined for South Africa. Many of the troops passed through London’s Waterloo Station while the cavalry’s horses used the goods station at Nine Elms, and virtually everyone used the LSWR’s port at Southampton. Yet, this was a much shorter war than the First World War, or Great War as it was known until 1940, and did not impact on the economy, the workforce, industry or transport, let alone the mass of the population, in the way that the First World War did. Continental populations, and their transport systems, were used to wars; the population of the British Isles, and transport management, were not.
One lesson had been learnt from the Boer War, when the LSWR had remained under the control of its own management, which was that concentrating so much traffic on London was inefficient, and in the years leading up to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the railway links between the coast and the military training and rear concentration areas on Salisbury Plain were improved.
The railways
A mechanism for the state to take control of the railways in wartime had existed from as early as 1842, when legislation was passed that allowed the government emergency powers over the railways; but at first the reason was that of internal security. It was not until invasion fears arose again in 1859 that consideration was given to the use of the railways in wartime. In the UK, parliamentary scrutiny of legislation authorising new lines began to take defence requirements into account. The War Office accepted the London Tilbury & Southend Railway’s extension to Shoeburyness in 1882. The War Office also joined those opposed to the Great Western Railway’s broad gauge, seeing it as slowing the movement of men and equipment in an emergency.
The original emergency powers simply gave the government of the day the authority to direct how the railways should be run, leaving operational control in the hands of the companies. This remained true with the legislation of 1844 and 1867, and even with the Regulation of the Forces Act 1871. Other recognition of the importance of the railways to the military included the creation of the Engineer & Railway Staff Volunteer Corps in 1865, so that experienced railwaymen would be on hand when needed. Amongst those who helped plan for the use of the railways in wartime was Sir Myles Fenton of the South Eastern Railway. In 1896, an Army Railway Council was established, which later became the War Railway Council.
War in Europe was widely expected, certainly in the United Kingdom and France. The Liberal government had begun to consider nationalisation of the railways, but this was put aside as war loomed. Even so, the state took far more extensive powers over the railways than had ever been anticipated, with the President of the Board of Trade, whose department was responsible for the railways, as well as ports and shipping, taking control of the railways and acting as nominal chairman of the Railway Executive Committee, REC, formed as early as 1912, to run the railways on behalf of the government. Membership of the REC included the general managers of the ten most important railway companies, and one of them, Herbert Ashcombe Walker, general manager of the London & South Western Railway since 1912, was chosen as acting chairman, despite being one of the youngest general managers. It could have been the LSWR’s experience of the demands of the military during the Boer War that had resulted in Walker becoming acting chairman, or it could have been the commonsense argument that since so much traffic would travel over the company’s metals and it owned the port of Southampton, that it would be best placed to coordinate matters and liaise with both the Army and the Royal Navy. The military training area of Salisbury Plain, the British Army’s headquarters at Aldershot, and two of the Royal Navy’s three main ports, Portsmouth and Devonport, were served by the company. Everything suggests that Walker was a great success in this post, for which he received a knighthood in 1917. His career post-war was to show that he was indeed a visionary, and perhaps it was no surprise that, in a 2008 poll by the magazine, Modern Railways, to find the most significant railwayman of all time, Walker came top.
THE GREATEST RAILWAYMAN?:
Sir Herbert Ashcombe Walker, 1868-1949
Voted by readers of Modern Railways in 2008 as the greatest railwayman of all time, Sir Herbert Ashcombe Walker was the last general manager of the London & South Western Railway, and was in that company’s tradition of recruiting its general managers from outside, in his case from the London & North Western Railway, which he had joined at the age of seventeen. He joined the LSWR in 1912 when he was forty-three, at a time when it had already started on third rail electrification and on the massive and desperately needed reconstruction of Waterloo. Despite being one of the youngest general managers, during the First World War he became acting chairman of the Railway Executive Committee, the body that ran the railways on behalf of the government, and his valuable work was recognised by a knighthood in 1917.
Walker has become famous for his extensive system of third rail electrification, completing that of the suburban network and extending it to the coast so that, by 1939, the third rail covered the Sussex coastline as far east as Hastings and extended into Hampshire as far as Portsmouth and, well inland, Aldershot and Alton. He also took the credit for the extension of the docks at Southampton that enabled it to become Britain’s premier passenger port at a time when overseas travel meant travel by sea and air travel was still in its infancy. Others credit him with even interval or ‘clockface’ scheduling, on which he insisted, but many of the early railways had operated on such a basis, including the London & Blackwall, where high frequency lent itself to even interval operations.
It is true that Walker deserves acknowledgement for all of these, and indeed for the strong leadership that he provided throughout his time at the Southern Railway. Yet, to confine any appraisal of him to these matters alone is to overlook his other qualities. He had a strong grasp of financial matters coupled with what can only be described as common sense. Typical of him was the decision not to rebuild the whole of Waterloo because the ‘Windsor’ station was at the time a new structure and could be incorporated into the design for the reconstruction without damaging the completeness of the new terminus. Equally, one suspects that his enthusiasm for third rail electrification was based on the economy of a system that did not require the wholesale reconstruction of tunnels and overbridges, the cost of which could well have changed the economics of the programme completely. In many cases, carriages originally built for steam haulage were rebuilt as suburban electric multiple units, again a worthwhile economy, especially as the newer rolling stock was selected that otherwise could have been wasted by premature retirement. Walker also had an eye for publicity and recruited the young journalist John Elliot to handle the Southern’s publicity. The LSWR had no great history of named trains, but the Southern Railway soon established a range of named expresses, showing that Walker did not adhere blindly to every LSWR tradition.
Walker was no slave to new ideas. Hiring a press officer was one thing, but modern corporate image-makers would have found him more than a ‘hard sell’. He resolved a debate over the correct colour for the Southern’s rolling stock by buying a length of green cord for his spectacles, cutting it into segments and giving each senior officer a piece, retaining one for himself. He then instructed them that the cord represented the correct shade of colour for locomotives and carriages, and any questions could be resolved by reference to the piece that would be kept in his office at Waterloo!
That Walker also took the long view and was aware of developments in transport generally can be gathered from the Southern’s keen interest in acquiring bus companies, and where the entire company could not be purchased, taking a substantial shareholding, and the company was the first to build stations at airports, notably at Gatwick but also changing the name of an existing halt to create Shoreham Airport Halt, near Brighton, and was one of the more active members of Railway Air Services, which did much to develop domestic air services. His enthusiasm for main line electrification has led many to believe that his ultimate ambition was that of complete electrification of the Southern, but this seems unlikely given the sparse service and poor business prospects of many of the lines in Devon and Cornwall.
As a man, Walker has been described as quiet but authoritative, a consummate professional with a strong grasp of all aspects of railway operation, and a leader who always got the best from his management team. He had a strong sense of duty towards his shareholders and the travelling public. A weakness was the failure not to look for greater integration of the old companies that could have rendered economies in management. Integration was carried through efficiently in such places as the Isle of Wight, where three small island companies rapidly became one. It also has to be accepted that communications and automation were less sophisticated than today, so that keeping distinct divisions would have been seen as a practical approach rather than allowing over-centralisation. Undoubtedly, the network could have taken more line closures than was in fact the case, with short branches proving a drain on the finances of the Southern Railway at a time when market conditions were far from buoyant, while those closures that did take place could have been accelerated. There was a curious contradiction in that the man who managed a railway and shipping concerns, and several ports of which the most significant by far was Southampton, believed that airports should be provided by the state, rather like roads.
Walker retired in 1937 and became a non-executive director of the Southern until nationalisation. He died in 1949.
The REC’s remit initially only covered railways in Great Britain, and it was not until 1917 that the Irish railway companies also came under its control.
Of course, the LSWR had no monopoly of cross-Channel traffic, which was also shared with four other railway companies, the Great Eastern, with its port at Harwich and London terminus at Liverpool Street; the South Eastern & Chatham, with its ports at Dover and Folkestone, and termini at Charing Cross, Cannon Street, Holborn Viaduct, Blackfriars and London Bridge; and the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway, with its port at Newhaven and termini at London Bridge and Victoria. The LSWR operated cross-Channel and Channel Islands services from Southampton, while the Great Western operated to the Channel Islands from Weymouth. Other shipping services were bringing men and horses across the Irish Sea, with Ireland an important source for both, while the entire railway network was pressed into service to meet the needs of industry as well as the armed forces.
Few had any real idea how modern warfare would affect the railways. Only a few considered attack from the air to be a serious threat, but as early as October 1914, the SECR had a lookout posted on Hungerford Bridge, carrying the line from London Bridge and what is now Waterloo East (then known as Waterloo Junction) into Charing Cross. The lookout was expecting not bombers but Zeppelin airships, and was there to stop trains running across the bridge.
While longer distance commuting was in its infancy at the time, the war years saw a number of cut backs and reductions in service. Unlike the Second World War, first-class travel was not abolished, but many trains that had been exclusively first class or even exclusively Pullman, such as the London Brighton & South Coast Railway’s City Limited and Southern Belle, running between London and Brighton, were forced under wartime pressures to allow third-class travel. The number of services to the coast was substantially reduced, not least because the railways lost the ports of Dover and Folkestone to the military’s exclusive use. Services to East Anglia were also affected, with Harwich becoming a naval base.
Suburban services were also affected, with reductions in services to save coal, as even electric trains used coal-fired power stations, and release men and rolling stock for war use. The South Eastern & Chatham Railway withdrew its service over the Metropolitan Extension from Victoria on 3 April 1916, so the South London Line had to deal with all of the traffic from stations between Victoria and Brixton. At the start of 1917, South Bermondsey and Old Kent Road stations were closed entirely, while other stations such as East Brixton and North Dulwich were closed on Sundays. Some stations, such as Old Kent Road, never re-opened. On other routes, Sunday train services were cut dramatically or disappeared altogether.
To discourage unnecessary travel, off-peak fares were increased and cheap day returns withdrawn.
There was relatively little damage to the railways from bombing during the First World War. Aircraft were in their infancy, and even a Zeppelin could only carry a limited bomb load. Most of the action affected Liverpool Street. On the night of 8/9 September 1915, several bombs fell on Liverpool Street, damaging the suburban and through lines, and fracturing a water main that flooded the suburban tracks. Nevertheless, partly because of the small size of the bombs, repairs were put in hand and a full service restored by 11 am on 9 September. The bombs also demolished a wall and shattered glass at Broad Street next door, where some horses were injured. A more significant incident followed during the air raid of 13 June 1917. Again the City was the target, and again three bombs landed on the GER’s terminus at Liverpool Street: one of the bombs was a dud and failed to explode, another exploded on a platform and a third hit the dining car of the noon express to King’s Lynn and Hunstanton, setting it alight. Two carriages between platforms 8 and 9 were being used for medical examinations, and these were smashed. All in all, sixteen people were killed and another thirty-six wounded, making it one of the worst bombing casualty rates in England during the First World War.
During the war the Great Northern Railway at King’s Cross used Gas Works Tunnel as a shelter for main line trains whenever enemy aircraft approached, but the station was untroubled by German bombing during the war, even though a massive volume of freight traffic passed through the station on its way to the SECR, including train loads of explosives for the British forces fighting in France.
It was not at King’s Cross but across the road from it at St Pancras that the worst loss of life on the railways occurred. On 17 February 1918, a stick of bombs was dropped across the station, but it was the one that fell just outside the booking office in the cab court that did the most harm, killing twenty people as they queued for a taxi. Railway traffic was not affected.
State control of the railways was intended to ensure that the system operated as one: an excessive measure as the pre-war railways had coordinated themselves very well indeed, partly through the workings of the Railway Clearing House,* which did more than simply balance inter-company tickets and freight receipts, and several companies did, collaborate, especially to ensure the smooth through running of the Anglo-Scottish expresses. Yet, state control did enable resources to be directed to wherever they might be most needed rather than some companies keeping their equipment to themselves while another part of the system suffered under wartime pressures. Many railwaymen had volunteered to join the armed forces while others were mobilised because of their reserve obligations, so that no less than 184,475 – 45 per cent of railwaymen of military age – enlisted. The military also helped itself to locomotives and rolling stock for service as far away as Mesopotamia: more than 600 locomotives were pressed into military service overseas and the ½ inch or so difference between the British and French track gauges mattered little.
There were increased pressures on the system over and above the obvious need for troop trains. Unforeseen by the planners on the outbreak of war was that the role of coastal shipping, in peacetime so important for the movement of bulk commodities such as coal, was severely restricted by enemy activity in the North Sea and the English Channel. Routine operations were severely affected as railway workshops were converted to help with the war effort, including the manufacture of armaments, while rolling stock was converted to provide ambulance trains. In the provinces, some minor railway lines were closed in wartime never to reopen.
Economy in manpower, fuel and materials all meant that services had to be reduced. There were fewer trains, and many were lengthened or combined, while overall speeds were reduced, although none of these measures was as restrictive as those imposed during the Second World War. First-class travel survived the war years, even on inner suburban lines and on the Metropolitan Railway, by this time the only part of the London Underground offering this facility.
New, rebuilt or reconditioned steam locomotives appeared in a drab grey colour scheme.
Despite it being a truly global war, the main centre of activity was in Europe, and the greatest pressure fell on the Channel Ports, with first Dover and then Folkestone closed to civilian traffic. The SECR became Britain’s frontline railway, with the heaviest responsibility for the movement of men and materials to the coast. In London, Charing Cross also had the role of being Westminster’s local station, and a special train, code-named Imperial A was held ready at all times for VIP journeys to the coast, being used for 283 journeys during the war years. Charing Cross was also the arrival point for many of the casualties of war: On 7 June 1917, after the start of the Battle of Messines at dawn, the first wounded arrived at Charing Cross at 2.15 pm that same day.
The state was to prove to be a short-sighted and improvident proprietor, so that financially, the war years were a disaster for the railway companies, despite compensation being based on pre-war earnings, ones of prosperity for the railways. Post-war, one general manager noted that the combined profits for the railway companies in 1913 had totalled £45m, but that by 1920, these had dropped to less than £7m, owing to improved rates of pay during the war when the railways were under direct government control. By 1921, immediately prior to government control ceasing, the railways were running at a loss overall of around £9 million. Part of the reason was almost certainly the cost of manpower. Railway wages in 1913 had totalled £47m, but by 1920 had risen to £160m.
On the roads
One of the great stories of the Great War was the use of London omnibuses to take troops to the front, and, of course, these were the famous ‘B’ class, but painted in drab British Army green. French troops, by contrast, were sent to the front in commandeered Parisian taxi cabs. In fact, no less than a thousand of the B type buses of the LGOC were requisitioned for war service, while another 233 were used on defence work around London and another fifty-two were used on a special air-raid service.
One vehicle that could not be whisked away from the streets of the capital to foreign parts, even those parts as close as France and Belgium, was the London tram. By the outbreak of war, in August 1914, the rapid expansion of the tramway network had virtually stopped and in Great Britain as a whole the total route mileage was 2,530, leaving just a few schemes to be completed between the wars.
The war brought an abrupt end to horse-bus operations in London for there were several short routes still in service in 1914 and the last ten horse buses for the LGOC had been completed as recently as 1905. The last route to be operated was that by Thomas Tilling between Peckham Rye and Honor Oak, but the British Army needed the horses, as well as the motor buses. As the war progressed, some horse buses were reinstated to compensate for the absence of so many B-type buses on war service.
For the traveller, the most noticeable effect of wartime was the appearance of women on buses and trams as conductresses, soon to be commonly known as ‘clippies’. To ensure that modesty was maintained, especially when climbing the open, and often breezy, stairs to the upper decks, trousers were worn. No doubt many women found this a liberating experience and it was certainly far better than working in a munitions factory where the hazard of handling explosives was in fact nothing compared to the effect of the chemicals on their health. The first women to work as bus conductors in London were on the Tilling service 37, where they started to appear in spring 1915.