TWO
THE BRIGHTON BELLE
A PARADOXICAL TRAIN
The Brighton Belle also left from Victoria, as does its nearest modern equivalent. Just as the Arrow was the star of the eastern side – which was all about serving the Kentish ports – so the Belle was the star of the central side, where the emphasis was on moving people, and moving them especially to Brighton. Each train left from the most easterly platform of its side: number 8 for the Arrow; number 17 for the Belle, above the gateway for which a yellow and black arch proclaimed the name of the train.
The Belle being the ultimate party train, I might – if it hadn’t been 10 a.m. – have prepared for my journey with a Bloody Mary in the sparkly bar of the Grosvenor Hotel, which overlooks the circulating area of Victoria (central side). The Grosvenor used to boast that it ‘connected by private entrance with Victoria Station’, and ‘hotel porters meet all trains.’ Today you can still access the hotel from the station by a humble back door, but you have to know where to look.
As I took my place in the ticket queue, I was resigned to paying for first-class. Unlike the early Golden Arrow, the Belle always offered both first- and third-class accommodation. The operator liked to boast that passengers, on boarding, would enquire in wonderment, ‘Are we in first or third?’ In fact, third on the Belle was slightly cramped, since the 2+2 seats were bench-like rather than armchairs. But the sheer Art Deco exuberance of the Belle’s third so exceed the modern standard class that I would have to go first on the present-day train to get anywhere near it.
… I say ‘I’, but I was taking my wife to Brighton. This is bad form, I know. You should take someone else’s wife to Brighton. She was only vaguely aware of my book’s conceit, and when I told her we would be going first-class, she looked at me blankly. Eventually, she said, ‘Well, all right, if you’re paying.’ When I put my Prince of Wales check suit on for the trip, she said, ‘Why are you wearing that? It’s ridiculously formal for a day at the seaside.’ I said, ‘Because it’s the sort of thing men would have worn on the Brighton Belle,’ short-form for what had really inspired me: a quote from Antony Ford’s book Pullman Profile No. 4: The Southern Belle and Southern Electric Pullmans, about how the Belle interiors were ‘ideally suited for Bertie Wooster and his entourage … and the racy gents in spats and ladies whose cigarette holders glinted over the bubbly; men who were good judges of port and the 2.30 at Goodwood and ladies who were not afraid to giggle and join in the judging’. My wife was not giggling, but she was judging. ‘There’s a stain on the lapel,’ she said. I didn’t bother saying so, but the stain made the suit still more appropriate, given the decadent reputation of both Brighton and the Belle.
Between 1933 and 1972 the Brighton Belle ran half a dozen times on weekdays, and four times on Sundays, between London and Brighton. The original weekday timings were as follows: the Belle departed from Victoria at 11.00, 3.00 and 7.00; it departed from Brighton at 1.25, 5.25, 8.25. Fixed and memorable departure times like that are called ‘clock-face’, and they are designed to make automata out of commuters. The Belle ran non-stop, and the headline was that the journey took an hour. Throughout its history that eleven o’clock departure from Victoria was a constant. In other words, one running of the Belle coincided with the departure of the Golden Arrow from the other side of the station. But the Belle was an electrical train, therefore quicker off the mark, and it would soon overtake the Arrow as it wheezed its way up the 1-in-61 to Grosvenor Bridge.
That is one of the virtues of electrical trains. You can get them away quickly from stations. This is why they’re suited to the intensive commuter traffic that was the main business of the Southern Railway. Electrical trains are also cheaper to run. They require only a driver – depressingly styled a ‘motorman’ – rather than a driver and a fireman, and they are easier to keep clean, and to reverse out of a terminus. (The in-house Pullman magazine, The Golden Way, conceded that ‘The motorman’s cab holds no thrills for the guest therein. The cheery coal-grimed fraternity of the footplate is absent … Instead, a grave mechanician sits in a little room, looking through plate glass windows. A couple of electric bulbs glow dully, telling him all he wants to know and you nothing.’)
We arrive now at the first of many paradoxes about the Belle. It was a glamorous express, yet it was an electrical multiple unit, a train – as explained – lacking a locomotive, resembling a series of carriages and therefore looking bereft. It ran over a relatively short distance, and, for all the racy reputation of the train and of Brighton, it was a product of one of the great suburb-making movements: the electrification of the Southern Railway. It was an individualistic train arising from a culture of conformity.
7. Platform 17 at Victoria, home – as it was difficult to avoid noticing – of the Brighton Belle.
In order to compete with predatory buses and trams, that predecessor of the Southern, the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway, had begun electrifying before the First World War. It had used overhead wires, but the Southern resolved on electrification from below, by means of a conductor rail. This had worked on the Underground; it was more aesthetic and, more importantly, cheaper. But the third rail has its disadvantages. Anyone who logs onto the websites of the modern-day southern operators in snowy weather will see a sprinkling of red exclamation marks, denoting services put out of action by snow and ice on the third rail. And electrical trains, being lighter, can’t ram their way through snowdrifts, as steam locomotives could do with a snowplough on the front. (You can see a locomotive doing just that in the famous British Transport Film of 1955 Snowdrift at Bleath Gill).
In his book The Brighton Line John Eddolls writes: ‘The Southern Railway did more to suburbanise Southern England than any other institution ever had, or probably ever will. The company worked hand-in-glove with the major property developers by encouraging families to set up homes in the south.’ In Semi-Detached London Alan A. Jackson speaks of ‘a marriage between the Southern and the speculative builder’, adding that ‘a third of the additional stations opened in the London area after 1919 were on the Southern Railway.’ Anyone who thinks London is a city for commuter drudges can put much of the blame on the Southern Railway, which advertised the generality of its electrical services with the image of a train heading towards a happy-ever-after sunset and the slogan ‘So swiftly home.’ The other main culprits would be the Great Eastern Railway, which in the late nineteenth century offered cheap fares for working men, so triggering a building boom in north-east London, and the London Underground.
Both the Southern and the Underground were encouraged to create homes for ‘small-c’ conservatives (as suburbanites are usually characterised) by a government policy that was almost socialistic. In the ’20s and ’30s the railway companies were offered financial incentives to generate economic activity and alleviate unemployment through line-laying, which in turn led to house-building, which in turn led to higher fare revenue. Sometimes their plans for spending this largesse brought them into conflict. In 1926 the Southern Railway opposed the extension of what became the Northern Line to Morden. It was appeased by being allowed to take over the Wimbledon-to-Sutton line, which had originally been an Underground project. In Underground to Everywhere Stephen Halliday describes how the legacy of the Southern Railway ‘is felt to this day as commuters south of the Thames are far more dependent on main line railways than are their fellows to the north, the incursions of the suburban Underground system being confined to Richmond, Wimbledon and Morden’.
The conflict between the Southern and the Underground might have been worse if the clay of central and north London had spread over more of the south, because that would have enabled the building of more Tubes south of the river. In effect, the Southern Railway was the continuation of the London Underground by other means. The Southern aspired to run its electrical trains almost as intensively as those on the Underground, so that timetables would not be required.
By 1927 the Southern had 300 miles of electrified line, extending 25 miles from south London. The first main line in Britain to be electrified was the line to Brighton, and the job was done by the Southern between 1929 and 1933. In persuading people to live near the newly electrified stations, the Southern took a leaf from the Underground’s book. Frank Pick, second-in-command on the Underground, promoted the Underground suburbs with posters showing bucolic idylls and slogans such as ‘A Place of Delightful Prospects’ – which was Golders Green. His counterpart on the Southern was that pioneer of PR John Elliot. He commissioned a watercolourist called (and only a watercolourist could be called this) Ethelbert White to depict similar bucolic scenes above the slogans ‘Live in Kent and be content’ and ‘Live in Surrey, free from worry’. Unlike Pick, Elliot had a sense of humour, and he disclosed that some joker had sent him a letter proposing a slogan beginning ‘Live in Bucks …’
There were also booklets in a series called Southern Homes, with long lists of ‘house agents’. The book for the towns growing up as a result of the Brighton-line electrification – Croydon, Purley, Coulsdon, Merstham, Redhill, Horley, Gatwick, Three Bridges, Haywards Heath, Brighton, Hove and Worthing – was called Southern Homes for City Men. The towns other than Brighton were given a harder sell than Brighton itself, which was already full of commuters. As electrification spread, other publications appeared, including Southern Homes in Kent and Southern Homes on the Conqueror’s Coast (East Sussex to Hastings). The Southern knew that people aspired to live where they’d been on holiday, and so these books ran in parallel with a series called Hints for Holidays, with spin-offs such as Hike for Health, Southern Rambles and Walking at Weekends. Attendant slogans included ‘In Southern Sunshine’, ‘There is Sunshine in the South’ and ‘South for Sunshine Holidays’. The accent was on health and longevity, and the Southern constantly quoted ‘a doctor’ who had conveniently declared, ‘So far as expectation of life is concerned, it is better to live in the Country than the town, and the south than the north.’ Again Brighton was a special case, acknowledged to be not so innocent and wholesome. The healthy message was more associated with places such as Bexhill, Seaford (‘most excellent for anaemia, debility, convalescence; for tuberculosis, chronic bronchitis and catarrh’) and Eastbourne (‘recommended by doctors’) than with Brighton, which was not recommended for anything in particular, health-wise. This was only right, since Brighton was the first of the original spa resorts to abandon the genteel quackery of taking the waters in favour of just having fun. It was more likely to be promoted for ‘Party Outings’ or ‘Evenings by the Sea’ – this particular poster showing a high-heeled vamp certainly not dressed for rambling.
A new fleet of electrical multiple units was built to serve the Southern electrification, and many of these would feature a single, luxury Pullman carriage. But a whole train of Pullmans? That would seem excessive for the utilitarian business of commuting. But while the ‘clock-face’ timing of the Belle reflects the pro-commuter, anti-timetable movement, it does not indicate a train for the normal sort of commuter. Here was a train for late-risers. The timings changed over the years, but no Belle ever left London or Brighton before 9.30 in the morning.
Brighton did not need its Belle for the many Brighton–London commuters. There were other electrical trains for them. It needed the Belle, as we will see, because Brighton had its upmarket populace, and also because it had its downmarket populace. I was beginning to explain something about the balancing role of the Belle as my wife and I boarded our modern-day equivalent …
BRIGHTON AND THE BELLE
It was a Saturday morning, but since the Belle experience was not a commuting experience that did not matter. I had selected the 11.06 to Brighton as being near to that regular 11 a.m. departure. The 11.06 – which awaited us at Platform 10 – was also fitting in that it is one of the fast trains to Brighton, meaning it stops only at Clapham Junction and East Croydon. There are no longer any non-stopping trains to Brighton, just as there are fewer non-stoppers generally.
The train was an Electrostar, like the one that took me to Dover, but whereas that had been a 375, this was a 377, a distinction unlikely to be of any interest to my wife. We boarded alongside five Brighton-bound women wearing pink bubble wigs, and T-shirts with their names on them. Ominously, one of them clutched a bottle of pink Lambrusco. I wondered whether the women – a hen party – would have got past the white-coated attendants guarding the doors of the Brighton Belle. It had been suggested to me there was a dress code on Pullmans. Sir Laurence Olivier, who lived in Brighton, was a regular on the Belle, and, when he became Baron Olivier of Brighton, he was about as eminent a customer as the train was ever likely to have, but he was a scruffy dresser, and in his book Pullman Julian Morel tells how an attendant new to the job in the late ’60s blocked Olivier from boarding his regular first-class carriage, and pointed him firmly down the train, saying, ‘Third-class is that way, sir.’
We all took our seats, the five women in standard, my wife and I in first. The woman holding the Lambrusco uncorked it. We heard the popping of the cork very clearly, being separated from it only symbolically, by a partial screen of toughened glass. ‘This is a right rip-off,’ my wife said, surveying our accommodation, and you’d almost think she’d paid the fare herself. I ought to have been warned by what the ticket clerk had said when I asked for a first-class ticket to Brighton: ‘Why?’ He had warned me there was very little difference between first and standard except the price: £37.90 as against £25.20. Standard seats had green-blue stripes, whereas ours in first had green-blue checks. And we had antimacassars, which as a matter of fact the Belle passengers did not have …
The Belle was one of the new, early 1930s’ breed of Southern Electric Pullmans. Its cars were not what are considered the ‘vintage’ Pullmans of the early Arrow. Such fusty words as ‘Renaissance’, ‘Pergolese’ or ‘Adam-Style’ did not apply. Words like ‘Art Deco’ and ‘Jazz-Modern’ were more appropriate. Yes, there was still elaborate marquetry in the wood panelling, but it displayed abstract forms, such as the sun-bursts appearing on the cocktail cabinets, radios or other mod-cons fashionable in the suburbs the Southern Railway promoted. Yes, there were still thick-pile carpets, but also linoleum on the car floors; and the marquetry was dyed yellow, violet and orange. The brass fittings of the earlier cars were replaced by oxidised silver. The famous table lamps now had celluloid rather than silk shades, but they had lost none of their totemic importance. (One observer of the Belle on the move referred to a ‘blur of table lamps’.) The colour schemes of the seat moquettes were positively futuristic: stolid reds, blues and greens were replaced by apparently wayward peaches, fawns, mauves, orangey browns and exotic reds, the continental-looking ‘autumnal shades’ favoured at the time. Anthony M. Ford quotes an ‘Art Deco historian’ called Alastair Duncan to the effect: ‘Tastes in colour changed more rapidly in the field of textile design than in any other medium … vivid, sometimes discordant shades of lanvin blue, tango and hot pink were juxtaposed with lime-greens and chrome yellows to generate a psychedelic palette rivalling that of the 1960s.’
We pulled away dead on time. It is depressing to leave from the central side of Victoria these days, since a glass office block sits atop Platforms 9 and upwards. It is said that one’s first impression on boarding the Belle was one of silence, so solidly built and closely muffled was the train. I, by contrast, contended with shouts from standard of ‘Drop more fizz, Tray?’ as I attempted to interest my wife in the above-mentioned social-paradox of the Belle …
Brighton was put on the map by the patronage of the Prince Regent, later George IV, but that’s not to say it was made respectable thereby. He went there to consort with his mistress, Maria Fitzherbert, to whom it turned out he was secretly married, which might have been to his credit had he not also been married to Caroline of Brunswick. So began the association of Brighton with dirty weekends. Even in those pre-railway days there was a rackety element. In Rural Rides, written in the 1820s, William Cobbett described Brighton as
naturally a place of resort for ‘expectants’, and a shifty, ugly-looking swarm is, of course, assembled there … You may always know them by their lank jaws, the stiffeners around their necks, their hidden or no shirts, their stays, their false shoulders, hips and haunches, their half whiskers, and by their skins, colour of veal kidney suet, warmed a little, and then powdered with dirty dust.
These were the sorts of reprobates who used telescopes to watch women emerging from the bathing machines on the beach. An attraction of Brighton was that its bathing machines did not have the canvas awnings that screened bathers at other resorts as they entered the sea.
George IV set the town on a course of frivolity by blocking the building of a harbour, on the grounds that it would muddy the bathing waters. (Mud ought not to have been George’s main concern, given that the sewers of Brighton discharged directly into the sea.) Newhaven would become the Sussex port. Seaborne arrivals at Brighton would be confined to the few steamers arriving at the pier. Brighton was confirmed as a place for people rather than commerce, and I am reminded of a sentence in a history of the Southern Railway: ‘The railway had far less freight than the other companies and served hardly any coalfields.’ (There was one: near Dover.)
The town proceeded to sell out. What had been Brighthelmstone became the catchier Brighton (probably, it had always been pronounced that way), and moved on from being a spa resort. As Alain Corbin writes about Brighton in The Lure of the Sea: ‘for the first time, a shift took place from therapeutic aims to hedonistic ones, and this was to characterise all the great continental resorts during the Nineteenth Century.’
The railway from London arrived in 1841, which is an easy thing to write, and most people do think of London to Brighton as a well-trammelled groove. Before the railways, Brighton had been connected to London by particularly fast stage-coaches, which took five hours. In Rural Rides Cobbett described the town’s ‘stock jobbers … [who] skip backward and forward on the coaches and actually carry on stock-jobbing, in ’Change Alley, though they reside in Brighton’. Brighton is known as London-on-sea, and it was an early centre of commuting to London, but the connection is not as natural as it might seem. The railway had to work hard to get to Brighton.
The first engineer consulted on the project, Robert Stephenson, normally preached the ‘straight through’ doctrine, but came out against it in the case of Brighton because the chalk escarpments of the North and South Downs and the intervening sandstone ridges and clay valleys of the Weald were in the way. But Stephenson was brushed aside. ‘Straight through’ was adopted, and an engineer called John Rastrick, a friend of Stephenson’s, was brought in to build unprecedentedly long tunnels at Merstham (through the North Downs), Balcombe (The Weald) and Clayton (South Downs). A viaduct would also carry the line over the Ouse Valley in the Weald.
Within a year of the opening of Brighton station in 1841 the residential population of the town had increased from 7,000 to 47,000, and it has been estimated that the number of trippers visiting the town every year increased thirty-fold to 3 million. Cue the departure of Queen Victoria, who now preferred to take her holidays on the Isle of Wight, finding the expanded populace of Brighton ‘very indiscreet and troublesome’. The wealthier patrons hung on, but shifted their season, and their social round – conducted in the magnificent houses of the Royal Crescent – from summer to autumn, so as to avoid the excursionists. Here was the start of what John K. Walton in his book The English Seaside Resort called the ‘complicated informal system of internal social zoning’ that operated in the town, a function of its willingness to take all-comers.
The London, Brighton & South Coast Railway was a snobbish outfit, and did not want to be known solely as a carrier of third-class excursionists. It wanted to keep its prosperous clientele, whether they were commuting or not. This meant luxury trains.
In 1881 the LBSCR brought in what was unofficially called the Pullman Limited Express between London and Brighton. This was the first all-Pullman train in the UK. It operated only on weekdays, but the following year a Sunday service called the Pullman Drawing Room Car Train began running, known to its opponents as ‘the Sabbath Breaker’. (Brighton was something of a pioneer at Sabbath-breaking.) In 1898 these services were re-launched as an all-week service officially called the Pullman Limited Express.
In 1908 this became the Southern Belle, billed as ‘the most luxurious train in the world’. A return to London was 12 shillings – about half a week’s wages for an unskilled labourer. The LBSCR held a party at the Hotel Metropole in Brighton to celebrate, the earl of Bessborough, chairman of the railway, presiding. According to a report in the Daily Telegraph of 2 November 1908, he said the new train ‘showed the railway were doing their best to encourage first-class traffic to Brighton, and they hoped this would not be the only train of its kind’. The mayor of Brighton responded by saying he ‘hoped the new train would bring to Brighton the class of passengers the place wanted’.
Between 1929 and 1933 the Brighton line was electrified. It would have been possible to continue with the steam-hauled Southern Belle over the line, but you couldn’t creditably have a steam train as your flagship on a line you’d gone to all the trouble of electrifying. So the new Southern Belle would take the form of the other expresses being introduced on the Brighton line: it would be a five-car electrical multiple unit. But this EMU – or these three, because there would be three five-car Belle units – would be a Pullman. Two of the five-car units would be in operation at any one time, the third kept in reserve. Each unit featured two first-class carriages. These were in the form of kitchen cars, and were given names suggesting the sort of young lady that a young (or not so young) man might want to take to Brighton: Audrey, Doris, Gwen, Hazel, Mona and Vera.
In 1931 the Southern Railway had begun running a Bournemouth Belle, which left the newly electric Southern Belle sounding generic. So it was renamed the Brighton Belle, to the delight of Brighton Council. On 29 June 1934 the mayor of Brighton, Miss M. Hardy, christened the train. Of all the Belles of the Southern, the Brighton train was the Belle, and no train has ever been so closely associated with a single town.
The Belle suited Brighton in that it offered slightly decadent luxury, but with a demotic touch. The third-class fare (and supplement) was within the reach of the ordinary sort of passenger who thought he or she deserved a treat. In their book The Great Days of the Express Trains David St John Thomas and Patrick Whitehouse describe the Belle as ‘the only luxury service in Britain which the working man, if he could afford to travel at all, could for a small supplement use for a day out at the seaside’.
When visiting the preserved Bluebell Railway in Sussex, I met a man called Martin, a volunteer on the line. He told me he’d travelled on the Brighton Belle in 1971, needing to unwind after a harrowing interview for a place to read engineering at Sussex University. ‘They’d made me an offer of three Cs at “A” level. I knew it was a tall order.’ He paid 2s. 6d. for the third-class Pullman supplement, ‘about the price of a pint’. Once on board, he splurged. ‘I ordered a bottle of Double Diamond, plaice, chips, peas and tartare sauce.’ It was the tartare sauce that made the meal special. Martin told me that he believed there was ‘a certain amount of pressure’ on the Belle passenger to order something from the menu, and that the question was not so much, ‘Would sir require lunch?’ as ‘What would sir require for lunch?’ I asked whether a glass of tap water would have been complimentary. ‘Mmm … they might give you a funny look. They might expect a tip for that.’
FOO GO
Our Electrostar was gaining speed as we approached Wandsworth.
The inexorability of the old express run to Brighton was demonstrated by a film made in 1953 that was often used often to fill the ‘interludes’ that occurred in the days of black-and-white TV. London to Brighton in Four Minutes was a speeded up film of the Belle’s journey from London to Brighton. The train is seen to travel at the speed of sound. It was more exciting than The Potter’s Wheel, let’s put it like that. The BBC repeated the exercise in 1983 and 2013, but for this third film the current operator of the line, Southern Trains, had to lay on a special service in the absence of any Brighton non-stoppers. Paul Clifton, Transport Correspondent for BBC South, travelled on this ‘special’ and compared the trip to the earlier two for the BBC News website. Mr Clifton noted the less ethnically diverse railway staff of the past, and the fewer women. He also noted: ‘In the 1950s film passengers are soberly dressed. By the 1980s Brighton style has become more relaxed, but still most men wear suits and ties.’ In 2013, ‘as for fashion, well, anything goes. The Brighton passengers’, Mr Clifton concludes damningly, ‘are fatter and slower on their feet sixty years on.’
Being mentally on the Belle put me in a snobbish frame of mind, and when, at 11.12, we called in at Clapham Junction, I couldn’t help but think of it as a place the Belle wouldn’t have touched with a bargepole. Thereafter, it all looked so common: Wandsworth Common … Streatham Common. If I had been on the eleven o’clock Saturday Belle, I would by now have been studying the menu. And I would have been torn. Full meals were served at all times. It was a little too early for lunch, but was it too early for a quarter-bottle of something?
Since I was not actually on the Belle, I had to go looking for the ‘at-seat service of snacks, sandwiches and hot and cold drinks’ that would be ‘available for all or part of the journey’; or maybe not. Certainly the at-seat service had come nowhere near my seat. I asked my wife if she wanted anything. ‘Mineral water,’ she said automatically, from the depths of a novel.
My search for the trolley took me past the hen party. The women wore T- shirts with their names on, and it would have suited my ghostly purposes if six of them had been called Audrey, Doris, Gwen, Hazel, Mona and Vera, but I only noticed Tracy and Sue. Most of those Belle names seem quaint today, although I do know an Audrey who’s about my age. It is said that baby girls stopped being christened Mona because of Mona Lott, a depressed laundrywoman in the radio comedy It’s That Man Again (1939–49) whose catch-phrase was ‘It’s being so cheerful as keeps me going.’
I found the at-seat service in the next carriage along. A forthright, competent East European woman was in charge of it. Yes, there were quarter-bottles of white and red, but I decided it was too early. Food-wise, I could see only biscuits, crisps and snacks on the trolley. ‘Do you sell sandwiches?’ I asked. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘in fact, I have sold them all.’
‘What were they?’ I asked, ‘just out of interest?’
‘Egg and rocket, BLT, cheese and tomato and lettuce.’
I asked about hot food.
‘We have cheese toasties, pizza snacks and sausage roll – on Monday to Friday.’
‘They’re all hot, are they?’ I asked, the question purely academic since this was a Saturday.
‘They are hot in the mornings.’
Well, she didn’t have a kitchen, unlike the Brighton Belle, but the selection of hoot food did have something in common with the Belle fare, as described in a menu of 1966. Among the highlights were:
Deep fried fillet of fish tartare with French Fried
Potatoes 8s. 6d.Pan fried egg and grilled bacon: single 4s., double 8s.
Welsh rarebit 2s. 9d
Buck rarebit 4s.
Toasted bacon sandwich with pickles 4s.
Double-decker egg and bacon sandwich 5s. 6d.
In short, heart-attack-on-a-plate, and Southern Trains were carrying on the tradition with their cheese toasties and pizza. It must be admitted that the catering on the Belle declined over the years. A three-course Table d’Hôte (written in French until 1937) gave way to A la Carte, and then something more snack-like. One Belle regular told me of his dismay at discovering that the ‘mashed potato’ was Cadbury’s Smash.
The trolley-keeper waited patiently.
‘Perhaps I’ll have something to eat on the way back,’ I said.
‘The last train back with a trolley leaves at 17.49,’ she warned me … and she was eyeing my Prince of Wales check suit. ‘Are you from first-class?’
I proudly replied in the affirmative.
‘Then you are entitled to a free coffee.’
I graciously agreed to accept one, and as it was being poured, I thought about train dining.
On the earliest trains passengers could not dine, since they were trapped in their corridor-less compartments. Meals were taken in haste at refreshment stops. These were at York on the East Coast route to Scotland, at Normanton on the Midland route, at Preston on the West Coast. On the Great Western the stop was at Swindon, where the passing trains were obliged by a fateful deal, struck in 1842 between the railway and the proprietor of the refreshment rooms, to stop for ten minutes. The railway unchained itself from the dreaded Swindon Refreshment Rooms when it bought out the caterer in 1895.
Refreshment rooms in general had a terrible reputation, partly because of Charles Dickens. On 25 April 1866 the great – but rather touchy – author was travelling from Liverpool to Euston with two companions, including William Henry Wills, writer and sometime secretary to Dickens. At Rugby the carriage in which the three were sitting was discovered to be on fire. (This was barely a year after Dickens had nearly died in the Staplehurst smash.) They were turfed off the train, and Dickens and Wills went to the refreshment room, where a woman stood at the counter. What happened next is told in The Express Train and Other Railway Studies, by Jack Simmons:
[Dickens] and Wills had each asked for a cup of coffee, which was supplied to them. While Wills was feeling in his pocket for some small change with which to pay, Mr Dickens reached across the counter for the sugar and milk, when both articles were suddenly snatched away from him and placed beneath the counter, while his ears were greeted with the remark, made in shrill and shrewish tones, ‘You shan’t have any milk and sugar till you two fellows have paid for your coffee.’ The young page boy of the refreshment rooms was looking on, and he burst into laughter at seeing the two fellows confounded in this way.
And so the short story called The Boy at Mugby – one of three with a railway theme written by Dickens for the Christmas number of his magazine All the Year Round– begins, ‘I am the boy at what is called the refreshment room at Mugby Junction, and what’s proudest boast is, that it never yet refreshed a mortal being.’
Three years later, in his novel He Knew He Was Right, Anthony Trollope described the railway sandwich as ‘the real disgrace of England’. In his day sandwiches would curdle under a glass dome in a hot refreshment room. Later, they would do the same on the buffet counters of hot trains. It wasn’t so much the railway sandwich that was a disgrace as the sandwich-prepared-long-in-advance.
The first dining car with kitchen – it was a Pullman – was run on the Great Northern in 1879, between King’s Cross and Leeds. There were balconies at either end. Passengers boarded by one of these. The other balcony was a sort of backyard where a scullery boy would peel potatoes, scattering peel on the tracks as the train raced along. There was a central gangway, red plush armchairs and tables with white cloths on either side. But there was no through corridor to connect the dining car with the rest of the train. Once in the car, you stayed in it.
On most trains, compartments were the norm, and passengers had to be released from these to access a dining car. This required corridors alongside the compartments and gangways between the corridors. The first side-corridors came in during the 1870s. The first train fully gangwayed along its length was introduced by the Great Western in 1892, but, as one wit noted: ‘The paths of glory lead but to the luggage van.’ They also led to the lavatory, but they did not lead to any dining car. By 1893 there were dining cars for all classes on the East Coast, West Coast and Midland services from London to Scotland, but only one of these, a 2 p.m. Euston-to-Scotland service, was gangwayed throughout, so that passengers could return to their seats afterwards. As the Oxford Companion to British Railway History says, ‘The interior decor [of a dining car] is generally of a higher standard than other carriages.’ So why would any passenger want to leave after a meal, instead of lingering on with a cigarette and coffee? I remember Robert Robinson hosting a radio discussion about the morality of spending the entirety of a journey in the restaurant car (effectively first-class accommodation) while travelling on a second-class ticket.
The rule with most ‘de-classed’ diners was that first-class ticket-holders would be tipped off first about the service of a meal. They got priority, and I used to feel vaguely ashamed when, in the days of dining cars on the East Coast, I was beckoned from my seat by the announcement, ‘Will all passengers in standard class wishing to take their seats for dinner please come forward to the restaurant car now.’ When I arrived, all the diners from first would be well into their first courses. They would eye me beadily as I rolled up my jacket and put it on the rack.
Dining cars might be de-classed, or divided into first and third seating, or there might be separate carriages for each class. A third-class Midland Railway dining carriage from the late nineteenth century is displayed at the National Rail Museum in York. Examining its monogrammed silver plate cutlery, bone china and crystal glasses, visitors exclaim, ‘And you got all this in third-class!’
During the 1930s many restaurant cars were converted to buffet cars, which did not have a full kitchen and which provided snacks, including ‘grilled tea cakes’ or, for the delectation of post-war passengers on the East Coast Main Line, a ‘plain tea’. In the buffet car the essence of the appeal of the dining car was retained. You did not have to take the food away, in the manner once complained of by Victoria Wood: ‘I’m not a fan of the modern railway system. I strongly object to paying twenty-seven pounds fifty to walk the length of the train with a sausage in a plastic box.’ You sat down in the buffet; it provided a seat away from your own seat, and the accompanying sense of expansiveness.
Dining cars seemed luxurious partly because of contingencies imposed by the train. Breakfast was doled out by a poised waiter (braced against the shaking of the carriage), who picked the bacon and sausages from a silver salver with tweezers. You could point to the particular rasher of bacon you wanted; and the fried egg was lifted towards you on a triangle of fried bread. This seemed very refined, but the fact is there wasn’t space in the galley to lay out the breakfasts on plates.
Where once there had been many hundreds of trains with restaurant cars, by the end of BR days the number was down to about 250. These had survived the rise of snacking in preference to formal dining, the steep decline in rail use and the rise of the at-seat trolley. Today dining cars are deemed uneconomical. The carriages are needed for normal seating on trains that are once again crowded. The lure of first-class is increased by the way coffee, snacks and – at the right time of day – wine are brought to your seat at no extra cost. At the time of writing, dining cars survive only on the trains of First Great Western, as we will be seeing in the next chapter.
On the Brighton train I had to carry the coffee back to my seat in a paper bag. All ‘takeaway’ coffees must be served like this on British trains, but not on Eurostar, which is majority-owned by the French. The bag reduces the risk of spillage and scalding. You’d think there was no such danger on the Belle, but the cars were poorly suspended and rough-riding. The steam-hauled Southern Belle had been smoother. The trouble was something to do with the wrong sort of bogies. These were replaced in 1955, but the problem persisted. Attendants would know not to pour coffee at certain points on the route, and a napkin was always placed between cup and saucer. Belle menus included the disclaimer: ‘Our staff take every care and precaution in the service of refreshments, and the company cannot be held responsible for accidents or spillage etc., which may occur on account of excessive movement of the train.’
BEYOND CROYDON
I returned to my seat as we were approaching Croydon. I was thinking about kippers. A pair of grilled ones constituted the healthier options on the Belle menus. But in 1969 Laurence Olivier found no sign of the ‘marvellous, juicy and succulent’ kippers that he ordered every time he boarded. According to Julian Morel in his book Pullman, ‘An over-zealous official had streamlined the menu for “economic” reasons.’ The particular problem with the kippers was that ‘certain famous passengers’ (i.e., Lord Olivier) would order them late on during the 11 p.m. ‘down’ service that had been introduced in 1962, often ordering after Haywards Heath. Consequently, the end-of-shift cleaning of the kitchen was thrown late. Lord Olivier got up a petition, and the kippers were restored. On 24 March 1970 a man called Collie Knox wrote a letter to the Daily Telegraph outlining the story and concluding, ‘Not even when nightly strangling Desdemona at the National Theatre has Sir Laurence acted to more noble purpose.’
Collie Knox was a journalist and broadcaster, and his letter was addressed from the Garrick Club. This was a sort of annexe of the Brighton Belle, which was known as ‘the Equity express’. Max Miller, Terence Rattigan, Peter Jones, Jimmy Edwards and Dame Flora Robson were regulars on the train – also Dora Bryan, whom I actually saw approaching the Belle at Victoria in about 1971. My sister ran across the concourse and got her autograph.
Alan Melville, broadcaster and playwright, lived in Brighton and travelled on the Belle several times a week. In his autobiography, Merely Melville, he wrote about the train: ‘The most lethal of the Belle’s journeys is the 11 p.m. from Victoria … and you have to be very careful indeed if, after a long day’s grind, you don’t want to be trapped with a lot of gay chat about how fabulous the business was tonight, or how unreceptive the audience was all through Act One but how they brightened up after the interval.’ Before boarding, Melville would buy the Evening News rather than the Standard because the News was bigger and he could hide behind it on the train. ‘Not that this attempt at camouflage always works; Dora Bryan has an endearing habit of turning down the top of one’s Evening News and saying, “Oh it’s you, dear.”’
Celebrities were often seen on the Belle. It became, according to the Daily Telegraph, ‘an autograph album on wheels’. In September 1938 King Boris of Bulgaria, described in Life in Brighton, by Clifford Musgrave, as ‘one of the most engaging of the lesser monarchs of Europe’, travelled on the Belle. King Boris had two principal interests – butterflies and railways – and he combined them by taking the Belle (travelling some of the way in the driver’s cab) to inspect the collections of Lepidoptera in the Booth Museum of Natural History in Brighton.
According to Musgrave:
A luncheon was given for the king, together with the Mayor of Brighton and the Chairman of the Museum Committee, in the Central Saloon of the Royal Pavilion, which was undergoing restoration. A plumber who was working in the building accidentally blundered into the room, clutching a bag of clanking tools. Two members of the king’s retinue pulled automatic pistols and flung themselves in front of their master. The king thought it was all very funny: ‘That is the sort of thing that could only happen in England!’
It was big of him to find it funny, given that he had survived two assassination attempts by anarchists up to that point. When he died, in 1943, it was suspected that King Boris had been poisoned on Hitler’s orders for refusing to become more involved in the war.
A latter-day Belle might be serving its kippers to Julie Burchill, Zoe Ball, Simon Callow, Peter Andre, Julian Clary – all Brighton residents. About twenty years ago I was waiting to use the WC on an ordinary Brighton train, when the door opened and Elvis Costello stepped out to the sound of the lavatory flushing. I watched him as he retreated to a first-class seat, a much bigger man than you would have thought from his early, nerdish persona. But I could see no celebrities on the 11.06.
We called at East Croydon (11.23), another place the Belle used to cut dead. Well, Croydon was more ignorable then, a humble market town when the Belle was born rather than the mini-Manhattan of today. Before we departed, the guard announced, ‘This train will be calling at Brighton only’, and so from now on we would be more Belle-like.
After South Croydon, at Stoat’s Nest, I watched the older, and slower, line to Brighton wandering away to the left. A moment later, we would cross over it. The slow line goes through Redhill, the scene of rivalry between the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway and the South Eastern. The latter would design its operations so as to obstruct the former’s trains there. (Redhill station, a generally problematic spot, was known as Reigate station in those days, after the bigger town near by.) The LBSCR built a line avoiding Redhill; it was opened in 1900.
Being on that newer, faster line, we penetrated the North Downs through Quarry Hill Tunnel, whereas the slow train goes through Merstham Old Tunnel. The Belle was always on the fast line. After crossing over the M25, we rejoined the slow lines at Earlswood. Most of the slow trains running over the slow line to Brighton go from London Bridge.
We sped through Gatwick Airport station, 26 miles from London. The airport lay to the right, parked Easy Jet planes alarmingly proximate. On the tile map at Victoria, Gatwick is denoted by two benign symbols: a green ‘V’ meaning ‘golf links’ and a red horseshoe shape meaning ‘racecourse’, and the railway station at Gatwick was called Gatwick Racecourse until 1935. In their book The Brighton Belle: The Story of a Famous and Much-Loved Train Stephen Grant and Simon Jeffs write, ‘The Belle never called at Gatwick, even for special working.’ Gatwick was designated Britain’s second airport in 1952; it got a new station in 1958. The present station is being rebuilt at a cost of £50 million. Since 2008 Gatwick has trumped Brighton, in that some of the trains from Victoria dubbed ‘Gatwick Express’ run on to Brighton, as a sort of afterthought.
After Three Bridges, which serves Crawley new town, we were in the Weald, which is manicured like a giant golf course, but sufficiently rolling to require the Balcombe Tunnel and the graceful Ouse Valley Viaduct, with its Italianate pavilions at each end. After Haywards Heath the South Downs came into view ahead of the train – proper hills these, even to a northerner’s eye. We sped through Wivelsfield, Burgess Hill, Hassocks (the footstools on the Belle were called hassocks), then into the South Downs Tunnel – Clayton Tunnel – whereupon we broached what I, on my trips to Brighton, think of as the Vale of Death.
THE VALE OF DEATH
The north end of Clayton Tunnel looks like a medieval castle, but on top of the tunnel mouth, in between the mock turrets, sits a perfunctory single-storey house. The house was built at the same time as the tunnel, but its purpose is unclear. Most likely, it accommodated some functionary whose job related to the tunnel.
The Victorians were moles. They built 90 per cent of Britain’s railway tunnels, but they were also scared of them. Tunnels were often painted white so as to mitigate claustrophobia. The Clayton Tunnel was painted white. It was also illuminated by gas jets, and it is thought the house was built to accommodate the man who maintained the lighting. But illumination did not remove the real danger of railway tunnels, which lay not in suffocation or tunnel collapse, as Victorian travellers feared, but in the invisibility of the trains to signalmen.
On Sunday 25 August 1861 three trains left Brighton for London spaced at five-minute intervals, the minimum permitted at the time. The first two were excursions, the third an ordinary timetabled train. One train was not supposed to follow another into a tunnel until it was established that the first had cleared the tunnel. But the signal at the south end of the Clayton Tunnel was broken, so the first excursion did not change it to ‘danger’ when it entered the tunnel. The signalman in the box at the southern end, a man called Killick – who was working a twenty-four-hour shift in order to earn a day off on the Monday – tried to stop the second excursion by waving his red flag. He failed to do so. He then used his telegraph connection to ask the man in the north signal box, whose name was Brown, ‘Is the tunnel clear?’ Brown signalled back ‘Tunnel clear’, because he’d just seen the first excursion emerge. Killick took the reply to refer to the second excursion, which had in fact stopped in the tunnel and was now reversing, the driver intending to ask Killick what he’d meant by the red flag. The ordinary, timetabled train then entered the tunnel and smashed into the second excursion with such force that the chimney of that third engine hit the tunnel roof, twenty-four feet above the ground, an impact that must have resonated horribly in the house above. Twenty-one people died and 171 were injured in what was the worst railway accident up to that point. It was said by the pious to be a punishment for the railway’s willingness to run excursions on the Sabbath … and (the Sabbatarians might have added) for allowing a signalman to become exhausted through working a twenty-four-hour Sunday shift.
The Clayton smash was probably in Charles Dickens’s mind when he wrote his ghost story The Signalman, one of the three railway sketches of 1866. It concerns a terrible accident in a tunnel, and a signalman haunted by the telegraph bell that rings when the other unseen signalman, at the other end of the tunnel, warns of an approaching train. The eponymous character – a sallow, neurotic functionary – inhabits a signal box sunk in a dank cutting, where he is fixated on the adjacent tunnel mouth and a glimmering red signal light. The narrator observes: ‘So little sunlight ever found its way to this spot, that it had an earthy, deadly smell; and so much cold wind rushed through it, that it struck chill to me, as if I had left the natural world.’ The signalman is tormented by a precognitive vision of a railway accident, and in an essay called ‘Blood on the Tracks: Sensation Drama, the Railway and the Dark Face of Modernity’ Nicholas Daly sets the story in the context of Victorian railway accidents. Daly discovers in the popular perception of them something
qualitatively different … they occur in ‘machine time’ not human time. Human agency cannot usually move rapidly enough to intervene, and there are few rescues. In fact, such incidents are often too quick for the eye, and perception takes place after the event: if you see it, you are still alive.
It is this dimension that Dickens captures. The signalman sees the accident happen before it takes place.
Our Electrostar traversed the South Downs, before entering the less ominous Patcham Tunnel. We emerged at the Brighton suburb of Preston Park. On the afternoon of 27 June 1881 a bloodied man staggered out of a London Bridge-to-Brighton train at Preston Park. He was a dandified, thin, chinless, suspicious-looking man who announced himself as Percy Lefroy. He said he’d been attacked in his compartment when the train had been running through Merstham Tunnel by an assailant who had subsequently alighted. In fact, Lefroy, who was really called Mapleton, was found to have attacked and robbed another man – a Mr Gold – when the train had been running through another tunnel: Balcombe Tunnel. Mapleton had then pushed Gold’s body out of the train and into the tunnel. A murder would occur in Merstham Tunnel, but not until 1905, when the mutilated body of a Mary Money was found there. Her killer was never apprehended.
Both Gold and Money were trapped with their killers, as was the victim of the very first railway murder, a City clerk called Thomas Briggs, attacked in a first-class compartment of the North London Railway at Hackney on 9 July 1864. His killer was almost certainly the man hanged for the crime, Franz Muller. The Briggs murder led to the introduction of the communication cord, but not until 1868, too late for Gold and Money. Some companies also drilled apertures – peep-holes – between compartments. These were known as ‘Muller Lights’, and today there is a yoghurt with the same name. In the 1870s side-corridors began to appear on compartment coaches, as we have seen. But corridor-less compartments were still in use for short runs, especially on the slam-door trains of the Southern Region – including some Brighton trains – until the late 1980s.
Walter de La Mare wrote: ‘It is a fascinating experience, railway travelling … One is cast into a passing intimacy with a fellow stranger, and then it is gone.’ In his introduction to a collection of railway crime stores, Crime on the Lines, Bryan Morgan wrote, ‘There were times during my reading when it seemed that half the crime short stories published before the first world war began, “The stranger in the astrakhan coat leaned towards me across the first-class compartment.”’ Compartments marked ‘Ladies-Only’ – still to be found in the mid-1970s – were meant to keep the astrakhan-coated men at bay.
The Victorian sensationalist novels of Mary Elizabeth Braddon typically featured a middle-class woman sitting alone in a railway compartment. She is minding her own business when, in spite of the fact that the train is going at 60 m.p.h., a top-hatted stranger clambers into the compartment from the window, having been – for some reason he may or may not deign to explain – travelling on the roof of the carriage. Sealed-compartment murder occurs in various railway crime short stores by Canon Victor Lorenzo White-church, and in The Mysterious Death on the Underground Railway by Baroness Orczy. Alfred Hitchcock was alive to the dangerous intimacy of compartments, as shown in his film versions of The Thirty-Nine Steps (much better, and more railway-oriented, than the novel) and Strangers on a Train.
The fiction exaggerated the dangers. I have written a series of crime novels set on Britain’s railways in the early twentieth century: nine books, with an average of two murders per book, whereas in fact there were only seven murders on Britain’s railways between 1827 and 1929.
This talk of closeted death may also seem a long way from the festive, open carriages of the Brighton Belle … but not quite.
Between the 1890s and 1963 the aforementioned Preston Park was the location of the Brighton Pullman works (the half-derelict shell of the building survived until 2008). The works were a little way north of some others sidings and workshops called Lover’s Walk. Today Network Rail occupies part of this latter site, with something called the ‘ECR infrastructure and maintenance depot’. The Belle used to be stabled at Lover’s Walk between runs. At 5 p.m. on Friday 14 October 1960 the door of one of the third-class lavatories was found locked while the train was being cleaned and prepared after the 3 p.m. ‘down’ run from Victoria, and prior to the 5.25 ‘up’. A Pullman attendant opened the door with a master key, to find the blood-soaked body of a twenty-two-year-old woman. There was also a medical dissecting razor, and with this she had slit her throat. The dead woman was about to begin medical studies at Guy’s Hospital in London. Meanwhile she’d been working as a psychiatric nurse, and it was suggested at the inquest that this work had disturbed her. Some accounts have claimed the woman had been jilted – with no more evidence than the loose association of suicide and ‘Lover’s Walk’, which, in any event, ought to have been renamed long before 1960 …
In 1831, before it was a railway depot, the name denoted a small wood and picnic spot. In that year the torso of a woman called Celia Bashford was found in a trunk buried in the woods. She had been strangled in a house on Donkey Row, Brighton, by her husband, John Holloway, who had then chopped off her limbs, assisted by his other wife, Ann Kendall (Holloway being a bigamist). The limbs were dropped into an outside toilet in Margaret Street, Brighton. Celia Bashford was very short and had a misshapen head. It seems Holloway had never loved her, but merely impregnated and then reluctantly married her. (Four years earlier, she’d given birth to a still-born child.)
The killing of Celia Bashford has been called the first ‘trunk murder’. A series of subsequent ones took place a hundred years later, and one is somehow not surprised that two of these occurred in Brighton. The first in the series occurred in May 1927, and a man called John Robinson was executed for it. He had picked up a prostitute called Minnie Alice Bonati at Victoria station; he killed her in Rochester Row, put her body in a trunk and took it to left luggage at King’s Cross (so the whole thing is railway-haunted). The trunk began to smell …
The second London one came to light later in the same year, when the suspicious wife of a Patrick Mahon discovered a Waterloo station cloakroom ticket in one of his pockets. Given the events of the previous May, you’d have thought she would have left it where she found it. But she took it to Waterloo and was handed a Gladstone bag full of bloodstained female clothing. Mahon, it transpired, had killed and dismembered his mistress at their Sussex love nest.
On 17 June 1934 – the year after the inauguration of the Belle – an unclaimed trunk in Brighton station left luggage office began to smell. A female torso was found inside. The matching legs were found at King’s Cross after a general left luggage alert had been put out. The victim was about twenty-five and said to have had ‘pretty feet’. Neither her identity nor that of the murderer was ever discovered, although a Brighton abortionist called Massiah was suspected.
The investigation of this first Brighton trunk murder unearthed a second one. A search of premises near Brighton station discovered the remains of a Violette Kaye in a trunk in a house at 52 Kemp Street, an address recently vacated by one Toni Mancini. On 10 May 1934 Kaye had had a violent quarrel with Mancini at the Skylark Café on Brighton seafront, and she was never seen alive again. Mancini was tried and acquitted, but in 1976, shortly before his death, he confessed to a News of the World journalist.
In 1946 incriminating luggage was also found at Bournemouth West Station. It included a metal-tipped whip and a bloodstained scarf; it had been deposited by Neville Heath, the sadistic RAF officer who killed two women in that year.
The common denominator is not so much trunks as left luggage offices, towards which killers who might otherwise have gone undiscovered seem to have been fatally drawn. But this was a railway era, and the killers did not have cars in which to transport the bodies to some lonely spot. The left luggage office would not be so attractive today. If the attendant missed the tell-tale smell and ooze of blood, the X-ray machine (universal since 9/11) would probably discover the contents. And the CCTV camera would identify the luggage-leaver.
I once walked into the blandly named Travel Centre on the east side of Brighton station, and asked one of the men advising passengers there, ‘Which building used to be the left luggage office?’ He turned to me with a mournful expression: ‘I’m afraid this did.’ He knew what I was getting at, and the Travel Centre still has all the dimensions of a left luggage office.
The trunk murders earned Brighton the informal title ‘Queen of Slaughtering Places’, a modification of its claim to be ‘Queen of the Watering Places’. Brighton resented the slur, but in 1938 came further slurring, with the publication of Graham Greene’s novel of Brighton low life, Brighton Rock. One biographer of Greene suggested he was the Brighton Trunk Murderer. Specious, of course, but Green did spend a lot of time in Brighton, and a trunk murder does occur in his novel England Made Me (1934). The body is found at Paddington, in similar circumstances to the Brighton discovery, which Greene appeared to have prefigured, having made notes about his fictional Paddington crime as early as 1932. (He had dreamed it, he said.)
Incidentally, a plausible explanation of the unsolved Brighton trunk murder is given in Brighton resident Peter Guttridge’s teeming, cross-generational crime novel of a couple of years ago, City of Dreadful Night. Guttridge himself lives in Brighton, as do so many of the writers who have painted the place on felonious colours. The late Keith Waterhouse – for many years a Brighton resident – said the town ‘looked as though it was helping the police with their enquiries’. Waterhouse often used the Belle, which has not escaped being tarred with the same brush. Antony M. Ford quotes a certain Edward Woollard as follows: ‘Since the 1930s, people have made love on the Belle, jumped to their deaths from it, while theatre stars learned their lines, and crimes have been plotted on it.’ Chapter and verse are not given. The Belle does not feature in the principal Brighton horror, Brighton Rock, and Brighton Belle, a recent murder mystery by Sara Sheridan, is so-called because of the heroine’s name, Mirabelle Bevan. But I think the Belle does figure in Patrick Hamilton’s murder novel of 1941, Hangover Square. The traveller is the alcoholic George Harvey Bone, who is obsessed with a manipulative female called Netta. Bone is certainly in a third-class Pullman car, probably on the Belle, although that is not stated. (Most fast services to Brighton had at least a single Pullman car in those days.)
Bone intends to book a hotel room in Brighton, where Netta has promised to join him after he had visited her in London. Ecstatic at the news, he had begun drinking beer and gin in London, and continued drinking on the train, which is now travelling through Haywards Heath ‘in the sunny, sticky, streaming afternoon’.
He was in a Pullman car. He sat on the right facing Brighton, and there was no-one else at his table. There were only a few other people in the car. Lunch was over, but the lunch-spotted white cloths were still visible on the tables. He was drinking beer and he all at once became gloomy and saw that he had probably made a fool of himself again, after all.
He cannot believe that Netta will really come to Brighton, and as the thought settles upon him, the train stops. A blue-bottle buzzes in the carriage. ‘A bored fellow-passenger rattled a newspaper in turning it … And you could hear the clinking of crockery and the conversation of the attendants in the kitchen behind.’
I called the media office for Sussex police.
‘Does Brighton have a high murder rate?’
‘Crime across Sussex is falling,’ said the spokesman, not quite answering the question.
I rephrased it: ‘Is there anything alarming about the murder rate in Brighton?’
‘That’s a matter of opinion. I would say certainly not.’
‘Did it ever have a high rate?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
Let me stress that Brighton is booming as a commuter town, and often listed high among the most desirable places to live in Britain.
THE DEATH (AND RE-BIRTH) OF THE BELLE
As our train approached Brighton, I approached the loo. ‘We think it’s out of order,’ said one of the hens who, against all precedent, had become quieter rather than louder throughout the trip. I walked along to another loo – one of those with an electronic door. I don’t like these. I worry the door won’t lock; then I worry it won’t re-open. A sign said, ‘Press button when flashing’, which was somehow like a joke on a bawdy seaside postcard. And there was another comedy sign: ‘WARNING: Magnets fitted to toilet lid and seat.’ Everything was plastic, of course. There was just enough soap in the dispenser to make me worried there wouldn’t be enough water to wash it off with.
I have read accounts of the Belle WCs. They were at the ends of the cars, approached along a short mahogany passageway. The occluded window was a four-coloured oval with inset ventilation dial. Walls were polychrome panels coloured eaude-Nil, with black beading. The sinks were black porcelain, with vanity unit above and chromium-plated brush and comb racks. There was a basket for soiled towels, and a fixed ashtray. The floor was marble mosaic inlaid with mother-of-pearl.
As the Electrostar pulled into Brighton, I was dabbing water on the stain on my jacket, and only making it worse. I gave up, collected my wife, and we stepped down. I looked at the gilded clock that hangs from the elegant blue vault of Brighton station. We had arrived dead on time, at 11.57. The journey had taken fifty-one minutes, nine minutes faster than the Belle, even with the two stops. We approached the barrier, where the attendant looked to be in his sixties. I asked him if he remembered the Belle. He did. ‘The best-dressed passengers walking through the ticket gate had always come off the Belle.’ And he was eyeing the stain on my jacket.
But in its last years the Belle itself was not so well dressed. In 1968 it was repainted in the grim new BR livery of blue and grey. The interiors were also refurbished. The second-class seats were upholstered in what Grant and Jeffs call the ‘common or garden’ blue and green of all second-class at the time, while the first-class seats were also regularised with the BR fleet, so becoming black and grey. (This was called Inter-City 70 Moquette – the colour, in effect, of my childhood.) The carpets became uniformly mustard, but the marquetry was untouched. This redecoration may seem perverse, a case of tall poppy syndrome. But by the late ’60s the Belle resembled a museum on wheels. In effect, customers were paying a supplement to go back in time, and the supplement (‘the Pullman racket’) was resented.
The Belle was expensive to run, and in the recession of 1972 BR was keen to economise. So the Belle died in the same year as the Golden Arrow. The last run was on Sunday 30 April 1972, a final fit of Sabbath-breaking on the Brighton line. A sign was put up over the entrance to Platform 13 (which had become the Belle platform in 1971): ‘Farewell to the Brighton Belle on her last day of public service.’ A special commemorative tea tray was issued to mark the occasion – an inappropriately domestic object for the racy Belle, you would have thought. The long inscription was only perfunctorily apologetic about the decline of the Belle. Instead, the un-sentimentality that had seen off steam engines was now applied to the most famous electrical train. ‘It’s goodbye to Hazel, Doris, Audrey, Vera, Gwen and Mona. And their frilly lampshades and old world charm … We will miss them. But one can’t survive on nostalgia …’
The line-side was crowded on the last day. There were a number of special services, including an evening cheese-and-wine special from Brighton to Victoria. The still more alcoholic ‘Champagne Special’ then left Victoria at 22.30. The TV news cameras were present, and the film is on YouTube. Jimmy Edwards slavers over a beauty queen on the crowded Brighton platform (although he was in fact gay). On the train he doesn’t so much sip as quaff champagne in company with Moira Lister, Dame Flora Robson the DJ Alan Freeman and other famous people of the time that I can’t recognise. The train was seen off by a brass band, and long-haired people dancing in vaguely 1930s’ clobber, so that they looked like members of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, who combined the jazz age and the pop age in a way that the Belle no longer could. The train was greeted at Brighton by another brass band, and more dancing.
Brighton station suits festivity, even though one enters it through a Vale of Death, as I have mentioned. In 1841 the Brighton Gazette said, ‘The Brighton terminus is a beautiful structure [that] will not suffer from comparison with any railway in existence.’ The white chalk cutting rearing up on the western side is a foretaste of cliffs and the sea. The wooden platform on the east side is a foretaste of the pier. I own a book that contains a photograph of the concourse from 1900. A thin workman’s ladder ascends towards the pretty clock, and it’s like an allegory to do with aspiration and time. Such nearby locations as Terminus Road, Railway Street and (and the name of the pub opposite) The Railway Bell are testament to the power of the railway, which sucked the town up towards itself via Queen’s Road. Belle passengers would probably have taken a taxi from the station, but in Hangover Square George takes a tram along Queen’s Road, discovering the town packed with girls from the ‘Lucky Tip’ cigarette factory in London. ‘They looked boldly, nastily, and yet perhaps not uninvitingly at him as he passed on his way to the sea.’
8. The Belle at Victoria sometime after 1962, when the Pullman coat of arms seen here – bigger and even more florid than the old one – was applied to the cab fronts.
In 2013 my wife and I stood on the station forecourt amid a great lighting of fags and (with eyes on the Railway Bell) ‘Shall we have a pint first?’ Nobody batted an eyelid as two police cars went screaming past.
Fourteen of the fifteen Belle cars survive. One of the third-class cars was partially destroyed by fire at Carnforth in 1990, then finished off by vandals when it was moved to the East Lancs Railway. Like retired footballers, several of the cars went into the licensed trade, becoming restaurant annexes to public houses. One car, Hazel, became part of the Black Bull Public House at Moulton, North Yorkshire. (The publican had proposed to his wife on the Belle.) Venice Simplon Orient Express now owns some of the cars, and operates them in its ‘British Pullman’ railway cruises.
A charity called the 5BEL Trust has acquired six of the cars. At the time of writing, they are completing the restoration of the cars at their base in Barrow Hill, near Chester-field, and altering the ‘go-bits’ underneath, so they can run at 75 m.p.h. This is a requirement for main-line running, and the 5BEL Trust aims to do nothing less than restore the Belle as a regular, albeit Sunday-only (Sabbath-breaking!) service between Victoria and Brighton. Apparently much of the certification – known as the ‘grandfather rights’ – of the Belle remains in place so that, for example, passengers in 2015 will be allowed to sit in armchairs un-bolted to the carriage floor, just as they did on the original. Neil Marshall, who speaks for the Trust, says that, with the new bogies, the rough ride will finally be cured. ‘It will be possible to drink a cup of tea!’ If anything is spilled on the resuscitated Belle, which ought to be running from 2015, I trust it will be champagne.