The Victorian City Read online

  From 1849, there was also seating on top of the bus, reached by a set of iron rungs at the back, which led to a knifeboard, a T-shaped bench where passengers sat back-to-back, facing outwards (see Plate 2). The outside was the preserve of men: no woman in skirts could have managed the ascent to the seat beside the driver, and even if their clothing had permitted them to climb the iron rungs to the top – and there was no rail to hold on to on the way up, only a leather strap – once they were aloft there were no panels along the side, so their legs would have been exposed to passers-by below. The inside was low-roofed, and so narrow ‘that the knees of the passengers, near the door, almost effectually prevent their comrades from entering and departing’. Straw was laid on the floor, to keep out the damp and cold, but it was ineffective, and usually filthy. In the 1850s, the ladders were replaced by a little iron staircase and what were called decency boards were placed along the length of the roof. After that, said one Frenchman appalled by the ‘narrow, rickety, jolting, dusty and extremely dirty’ interiors, no one rode inside ‘if there is an inch of space unoccupied outside; women, children, even old people, fight to gain access to the top’.

  The driver surveyed the world from his perch, wearing a white top hat, ‘a blue, white-spotted cravat, with a corresponding display of very clean shirt-collar, coat of dark green cloth...his boots well polished...There is...an easy familiar carelessness...a strange mixture of hauteur and condescension, as much as to say: “You may keep your hats on, gentlemen.”’ According to Alfred Bennett, at least in the 1850s, the drivers always wore a rose in their buttonholes, too. In the rain, they shared with the box-seat passengers a leather covering that went over their laps, while the remaining ‘outsides’, as the passengers on the top deck were known, took shelter under their own umbrellas.

  The buses devastated the short-stage business. By 1834, the number of short-stagecoaches had fallen by a quarter, to 293, matched by 232 buses. By 1849, buses ran from London Bridge to Paddington, and from the old coaching inn, the White Horse Cellar in Piccadilly, to Fulham; the New Conveyance Office in Paddington had an hourly bus service leaving from coaching inns on the New Road and Oxford Street, and from the Bank via Oxford Street among others. At first they were no more for the working classes than the short-stages had been, as none ran first thing in the morning: until the early 1850s, no bus reached the City before 9.30. They were, said the Penny Magazine in 1837, for those ‘whose incomes vary from £150 to £400 or £600 and whose business does not require their presence till nine or ten in the mornings, and who can leave it at five or six in the evening’. But soon their popularity meant that routes from the suburbs started earlier and ran later, as well as more frequently. In 1856–7 the London General Omnibus Company, an amalgam of many of the early companies, carried 37.5 million passengers, and Gracechurch Street, equidistant between the Bank and London Bridge in the City, had become a hub for buses running south of the river to the suburbs.

  The stops were then, as they had been for the stagecoaches before them, at a series of inns. In their sometimes days-long journeys, stagecoaches had stopped at coaching inns and public houses for their passengers’ comfort. When short-stages appeared, they continued to wait at inns and taverns, in great part because of the availability of stabling for the horses and, to a lesser degree, for the convenience of the drivers and conductors; by the time buses arrived, it simply seemed to be the order of things that public transport stops were near hostelries.35

  While no one knew any longer how they had managed without this splendid system of transportation, they found plenty to complain about nonetheless. The bus conductor, in top hat and with a flower in his buttonhole, stood one-footed on a tiny step beside the door at the rear, raised about a third of the way up the bus so that he could see whether seats were vacant on top, and could tell new passengers which side to climb up. He also leant over, when crinolines were in fashion, to hold down the women’s hoops as they squeezed through the narrow doorway. Otherwise he swayed in place, holding on to a leather strap hanging by his shoulder and taking fares from departing passengers, his eyes always darting to find the next, as passengers hailed the buses anywhere along their routes.

  Initially, there were no tickets and thus no check on the takings, apart from the word of the cad and the driver; they both therefore had a great incentive to stop for as many passengers as possible while admitting to the bare minimum at the end of the day. Wits claimed that perfectly innocent pedestrians were virtually kidnapped by the cads: they could, said a character in Sketches by Boz, ‘chuck an old gen’lm’n into the buss, shut him in, and rattle off, afore he knows where it’s a-going to’. For the same reason, no cads ever admitted to being full up: ‘Plenty o’ room, sir,’ they cried jovially, shouting ‘All right,’ and thumping on the roof to signal the driver to move off so the passenger couldn’t jump down when he saw that he would more or less have to sit on someone’s lap. Or, as Sophia Beale, a doctor’s young daughter from Kensington, wrote in 1850, ‘he...shouts “Kilburne, Kilburne, come along mam, sixpence all the way” then he stops and runs back and pulls the lady along and stuffs her in and slams the door and begins to shout again “Kilburne, sixpence all the way”.’ That is, he did so until it rained, and then he charged passengers extra, from which he creamed off the surplus. A snowfall made matters even worse: an extra horse was needed for each bus, and that, together with the increased feed and hay prices in bad weather, sent fares up to 9d.

  The drivers also competed for fares. An ‘old gentleman elevates his cane in the air, and runs with all his might towards our omnibus; we watch his progress with great interest’, Dickens had a passenger report in Sketches by Boz; ‘the door is opened to receive him, he suddenly disappears – he has been spirited away by the opposition.’ This was comedy, but court records indicate that many drivers raced along the streets to get ahead of the other buses and increase their chance of finding passengers: reckless driving was a regular charge. In 1844, two drivers were sentenced to a month’s hard labour after a policeman testified to seeing them galloping down Regent Street; when they reached Pall Mall, one forced the other on to the pavement, where, nothing daunted, he continued at speed ‘for some time’. However, once a system of tickets was instituted, the complaints were the reverse: that the drivers dawdled along, while the cads became wilfully blind, ‘indifferent to shouts, threats, and entreaties of those who hail them from the road’, since they made no profit from the increased work.

  At places like Holborn Hill, before the Viaduct was built across the steep Fleet Valley, bus companies stabled extra horses to harness on to each bus before it began the ascent. Mud, ice, rain and snow all made accidents more likely.

  Even when drivers behaved responsibly, the streets of London, the weather and technology all made driving perilous. Holborn Hill, with its steep gradient across the Fleet Valley, was a well-known black spot for horses: extra horses were stabled at the bottom of the hill, to be harnessed on to each bus before it attempted the ascent. The bus companies also had men stationed at the top of the hill to thrust skids under the wheels of the buses as they started back down, slowing the motion of the wheels, both as a brake and to prevent the vehicle crashing against the horses’ heels. (As it was, bus drivers were strapped to a post behind their seat, which allowed them to throw their full weight on to the drag as they went downhill.) At the bottom of Holborn Hill more men were posted to dart into the road to remove the skids as the buses passed. And everywhere the rain and the mud routinely caused problems, making ‘horses sink slowly on their sides or knees, amid the greasy mud, and, having sunk, make fruitless endeavours to rise’. Accidents to the vehicles were so common that people wrote casually of an entire bus tipping over, as a matter of course. When there was a hard frost, no horse-drawn vehicles could go out at all (although small boys rejoiced, as they skated along the suddenly emptied roads).

  Even with these drawbacks, buses were one of London’s great conveniences. In the early days, they, like t
he short-stages, gave personal service. In Nicholas Nickleby, the omnibus calls for Miss La Creevy, who is visiting friends in Bow. She makes a protracted farewell, ‘during which proceedings, “the omnibus”, as Miss La Creevy protested, “swore so dreadfully, that it was quite awful to hear it”’ – but still it waits. For prosperous men with a workday routine, the bus went even further. The journalist Charles Manby Smith described a typical suburban street in the late 1840s, where at 8.30 and 9.30 every morning, two buses appeared to collect their regular passengers. After that the street saw no more buses until they returned in the evening: it was not a regular route, and ‘the vehicles diverge from their...course in order to pick them up at their own doors’.

  Methods of inner-city mass transit were increasing at a furious rate: after the steamers and the buses came the underground, confusingly also called the ‘railway’. It was long in the planning. In 1830, the first part of a new major north–south road, from Ludgate Circus to Holborn Viaduct, had been completed, and in 1838 the City Corporation obtained powers to extend this new Farringdon Street further, up to Clerkenwell Green. Partly it was to improve the flow of traffic across the Holborn area. More importantly, the aim was to clear the slum district of Clerkenwell, Saffron Hill and around the Fleet prison. (For more on slum clearance, see pp. 188–92.) A Clerkenwell Improvement Commission was established in 1840, which oversaw the relocation of the Fleet market and the demolition of the prison in 1848, but did nothing further, with the result that for decades the north end of what was to become Farringdon Road lay in a pockmarked, rubble-strewn landscape. Fresh impetus came in 1850 with the arrival of the Great Northern Railway at Euston. The following year, plans were presented to widen the road, finish it off and have a railway running underneath, from Farringdon Street to King’s Cross. Just when it appeared the project might actually move ahead, the Crimean War made its financing impossible. (All railways then were private enterprises.) It was not until, in despair, the Corporation of the City of London bought £200,000-worth of shares that building could begin in 1859.

  Although people had become used to the wasteland of Farringdon Road over the decades, the construction that followed proved even worse. One newspaper asserted that the word ‘underground’ implied an air of ‘mole-like secrecy’, but ‘Those who have had the misfortune to live, or whose business has called them frequently along the line of its operations, know too well that this is a great mistake. No railway works were ever more painfully plain...For the best part of three years a great public thoroughfare has been turned into a builders’ yard...Many long patches of what was once a broad open roadway were enclosed with boarding; filled with mountains of gravel, brick, and stone...temporary wooden footways, greasy with wet clay, were erected across echoing caverns.’ This was no exaggeration. A photograph of later excavations for the District Railway in Parliament Square shows what resembles a bomb site, London during the Blitz, perhaps, or some hideous natural disaster.

  Enough disasters, natural and man-made, did occur during the construction. In November 1860, a locomotive exploded, killing two people; in May 1861, there was a landslide; and in 1862, the River Fleet – long filled with sewage, covered over as the Fleet Ditch, and known as the ‘Black River of North London’ – ruptured. By this time, the work on the underground alongside the new Fleet sewer was moving into its final stages, with the train tunnel being laid parallel to it (see Plate 10). The first intimation of looming catastrophe came when water was discovered seeping into the cellars of houses in Clerkenwell; three days later when a rush of water was spotted beside the sewer, it became clear that the Fleet Ditch was going to burst. Most of the workmen were evacuated; several others were lowered in baskets on ropes, to breach the brickwork to allow the water to escape. But even as they descended, they saw the foundations give way. They were hauled to safety minutes before the wall supporting the western embankment of the railway, a massive brick structure over eight feet thick, ‘rose bodily from its foundations as the water [from the Fleet] forced its way beneath...breaking up into fragments’ and scattering down ‘scaffolding, roadway, lamps, pavement and “plant” of every description’. A hundred feet of wall was swept away, and through the next twelve hours the water rushed north and west to King’s Cross and Paddington, a distance of two and a half miles. The water also poured into a mausoleum that had been created to take the human remains from the churchyards that had been destroyed in the construction of Farringdon Road, washing the bodies out into the excavation. It was to be another ten days before the engineers, damming the railway tunnel and creating a trench to divert the water, regained control.

  Nonetheless, the Metropolitan Railway – the first line of the tube – opened on 10 January 1863, running between Paddington and Farringdon Street, with six intermediary stations. The previous day, a group of grandees had been transported along the track in open wagons, although Palmerston, the seventy-nine-year-old prime minister, had refused to go, on the grounds that at his age it was advisable to stay above ground as long as possible (or so it was said). A photograph of this preliminary voyage, with Gladstone sitting prominently at the front, is today often captioned to suggest these were the first-class passenger vehicles. In reality, the first-class carriages were ‘luxuriously fitted up’, with six compartments each seating ten. Even second- and third-class compartments were lit with gas stored ‘in long india-rubber bags, within wooden boxes’ that were located on top of the carriages. Fares were 6d, 4d and 3d. The first day 30,000 people took the opportunity to travel underground. That evening ‘the crush at the Farringdon-street station was as great at the doors of a theatre on the first night’, and in the following week another 200,000 passengers ventured underground.

  Such was the line’s success that extensions were planned westward and eastward, to South Kensington and to Blackfriars. Work on the Hammersmith and City line began in 1864, starting from Green Line (now Westbourne Park), travelling through Porto Bello (sic), Notting Barn (also sic) and ultimately to Hammersmith Broadway. The Circle line began excavations in 1868, the District line the following year (it used part of the old Kensington Canal as its tunnel). By the 1870s, the Metropolitan line alone was carrying 48 million passengers annually.

  Not that it was always, or even often, an enjoyable experience. An American visitor was at first disappointed with the reality of travelling under the surface of the earth: ‘It was to be nothing but going through a tunnel,’ he wrote. But soon he realized that, between the smoke and the lack of ventilation, travelling by underground ‘was more disagreeable than the longest tunnel the writer had ever passed through...With a taste of sulphur on his lips, a weight upon his chest, a difficulty of breathing as he climbed out of the station at which he stopped, and with a firm determination to encounter ten [traffic] jams on Ludgate Hill, rather than make another trip on the underground rail of London, the writer got into the open air, and found the smoky atmosphere of London equal by comparison to that of Interlachen.’ Yet such was the convenience that soon everyone was travelling that way. In 1875, in Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, even Hetta Carbury, an upper-class girl, ‘trusted herself all alone to the mysteries of the Marylebone underground railway, and emerged with accuracy at King’s Cross’.

  Such were the numbers of new lines and stations, and the complexities of changing, that even local residents got lost: ‘How many Kensington stations there may be...I do not know; but I know...that the officials always send you to the wrong one...All very well to say that we should look at the map at home and ascertain our route: firstly, there is no map.’ (After that ‘firstly’, surely the writer needed no other objections.) Even the station staff were bewildered: ‘The folk at the booking-offices are not...uncivil; but...I f they do attempt to advise you, take some other ticket than the one recommended, and the chances against you are reduced.’

  For those who could afford it, the century had brought with it a new form of city transport that was neither entirely public nor completely private: the cab. Ha
ckney coaches had operated in the early decades of the century. These were four-wheeled carriages, usually second-hand private carriages repurposed as hackneys, with the driver’s seat moved to a little outcropping on the side, beside the passengers’ seats. Only 1,100 were licensed until the monopoly was broken in 1832. The fare in the 1820s was 1s a mile per passenger, and the carriages seated four with a squeeze. From 1836, four-wheeled broughams appeared too, which could carry ‘a large quantity of luggage on the roof, besides six persons’.

  It is hard to overstate how poor the hackneys’ reputation was. An American tourist in 1832 was appalled at the condition of his hackney: ‘all tattered and torn – dirty straw...[on the floor]...amidst greased and filthy rags of lining within, and broken panels, broken springs, and broken pole...for horses, two miserably jaded beasts...every limb presenting a skeleton of bone, with the skin here and there rubbed off’. The coaches were also difficult to get into and out of, because of the peculiar, add-on configuration of the driver. It was easy, Dickens joked: ‘One bound, and you are on the first step; turn your body lightly round to the right, and you are on the second; bend gracefully beneath the reins, working round to the left at the same time, and you are in the cab.’ And as to getting out, it is ‘rather more complicated in theory, and a shade more difficult in its execution’. But, he added as consolation, there was no point worrying about how to get out, because in all likelihood the cab would overturn and the passengers would be pitched into the street. In Holborn and Fleet Street, he solemnly declared, one saw ‘a hat-box, a portmanteau, and a carpet-bag, strewed around’ every few yards and, on asking if anybody was hurt, one would be given the reassuring response, ‘O’ny the fare, sir.’ Even without accidents, the experience was generally miserable. If the passenger wanted the window open, it was invariably stuck shut; if the passenger wanted it closed, the glass was broken; the doors refused either to close or to open; the check-string, used to tell the driver to stop, never worked, which meant that to do so the passenger had to lean out of the window instead, whereupon the driver was so close that if he ‘had been indulging in liquor, onions, tobacco, &c., you had the full benefit’. The carriages were known as growlers, for the bad temper of the drivers.