The World the Railways Made Read online

  For painters, as for writers, railways proved a universal inspiration. In the words of Louis Armand, ‘The Impressionists fixed on forms moving through the countryside and on the wisps of steam which provide movement in even the most tranquil sky. The Fauves discovered an imposing force in the railways which provided the effect of weightiness they were looking for. More modern artists have perceived in the railways an ensemble of lines and curves which responded to the new rules of painting. All of them have found something to take because the train, the station, the tracks themselves are all part of living reality.’20

  In the first days of railways a number of sometimes distinguished artists were employed by British railway promoters to provide an unfairly picturesque image of their activities. In Gareth Rees’s words, the railway prints:

  stressed the grace and order of the railway in the landscape … Bury’s prints, for example, always depict well-to-do people associating with trains in bright sunlight in excessively tidy stations. Animals near or on trains seem unfrightened by the experience. Cuttings and embankments are grassed over and station crowds well disciplined. Although the actual appearance of the railway in its first few years must have been as raw as a new motorway it never appears so … railway prints helped to subdue the alarms felt by ordinary people at the noise, smoke, danger to life, and the very sight of something that apparently moved without natural cause.21

  Richard Bourne produced the finest views of them all in his majestic series depicting the London to Birmingham Railway. In them he minimises the railway’s impact by presenting it from a distance, reducing its obtrusive nature, integrating it with the landscape. But the vision soon faded. A few years later, when Bourne came to celebrate the opening of the Great Western Railway, the prints were less dramatic and the volume sold less well. The line was less spectacular, and railways were no longer the exciting novelty they had been a few years earlier.

  After the financial crash of 1846 the companies no longer had time for such fripperies and the artists scattered. Bourne went off to Russia while Richard Tait produced equally romantic visions for Currier & Ives in the United States, where the railroads still had the funds to commission suitably idealised publicity material. One typical product, The Lackawanna Valley, by George Innes, was commissioned by the railroad to demonstrate its integration with the landscape. By then the relatively impersonal, ‘industrial’ art of the photograph was beginning to replace the individual, personally involved eye of the landscape artist.

  Luckily for lovers of railway art, in 1866 a group of Impressionists started to meet regularly at the Café Guerbois in the Grande Rue des Batignolles, on the approaches to the new Gare St Lazare. Other Impressionists soon followed, indeed became known as ‘La Groupe des Batignolles’. They became fascinated by everything about trains: their air of imprecision, the transitory nature of the train passing by, the steam – indeed the sheer power – of the locomotive, the bustle of the station, the train in the landscape on their favourite line from St Lazare to Rouen and the coast of Normandy.

  The Lackawanna Valley, by George Innes, an idealised vision of the railroad.

  One of Monet’s impressions of the Gare St Lazare.

  In 1876 –77 Monet spent a year painting the station, a perfect subject. As John Rewald put it,

  Monet felt attracted by the huge enclosure, with its glass roof against which the heavy locomotives threw their opaque vapour, the incoming trains, the crowds, the contrast between the limpid sky in the background and the steaming engines – all this offered unusual and exciting subjects, and Monet intriguingly put up his easel in different corners of the station. As Degas liked to do, he explored the same motif from a variety of angles, proceeding with both vigor and subtlety to seize the specific character of the place and its atmosphere.22

  But as Rewald goes on to say, Monet was no Ruskin; neither he nor the other Impressionists associated the station with its industrial purpose. Monet found it ‘a pretext rather than an end in itself; he discovered and probed the pictorial aspects of machinery but did not comment on its ugliness or usefulness or beauty, nor upon its relationship to man.’ Neither, of course, did J. M. W. Turner in his famous painting, Rain, Steam and Speed, which predated – and outdid – the Impressionists. Like their paintings, Turner’s was taken from real life. And, as Hamilton Ellis records in Railway Art, there was a witness, one Lady Simon, who happened to be travelling from Exeter to London in the same compartment as:

  an elderly gentleman, short and stout, with a red face, and a curious prominent nose. The weather was very wild, and by-and-by a violent storm swept over the country, blotting out the sunshine and the blue sky and hanging like a pall over the landscape. The old gentleman seemed strangely excited at this, jumping up to open the window, craning his head out, and finally calling to her to come and observe a curious effect of light. A train was coming in their direction, through the blackness, over one of Brunel’s bridges, and the effect of the locomotive, lit by the crimson flame and seen through driving rain and whirling tempest, gave a peculiar impression of power, speed and stress.23

  Lady Simon thought no more of the incident until she recognised the scene when she saw Turner – and the painting – at a private viewing at the Royal Academy. ‘Overhearing a critical bystander say, “Just like Turner, ain’t it? Whoever saw such a ridiculous conglomeration?”, she is reported to have contemplated the Philistine with an icy disdain, and to have replied, “I did.” ’

  Turner’s incomparable vision of crossing Maidenhead bridge in a rainstorm.

  Poets often tell more about themselves than about the subject when they use railways as a peg.

  DAWN

  by Rupert Brooke

  Opposite me two Germans snore and sweat.

  Through sullen swirling gloom we jolt and roar.

  We have been here for ever: even yet

  A dim watch tells two hours, two aeons, more

  The windows are tight shut and slimy-wet

  With a night’s foetor. There are two hours more;

  Two hours to dawn and Milan; two hours yet.

  Opposite me two Germans sweat and snore …

  One of them wakes, and spits, and sleeps again.

  The darkness shivers. A wan light through the rain

  Strikes on our faces, drawn and white. Somewhere

  A new day sprawls; and, inside, the foul air

  Is chill, and damp, and fouler than before …

  Opposite me two Germans sweat and snore.

  A FAT LADY AS SEEN FROM THE TRAIN

  A triolet by Frances Cornford

  O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,

  Missing so much and so much?

  O fat white woman whom nobody loves,

  Why do you walk through the fields in gloves,

  When the grass is soft as the breast of doves

  And shivering-sweet to the touch?

  O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,

  Missing so much and so much?

  THE FAT WHITE WOMAN SPEAKS

  by G. K. Chesterton

  Why do you rush through the field in trains,

  Guessing so much and so much.

  Why do you flash through the flowery meads,

  Fat-head poet that nobody reads;

  And why do you know such a frightful lot

  About people in gloves as such?

  And how the devil can you be sure,

  Guessing so much and so much,

  How do you know but what someone who loves

  Always to see me in nice white gloves

  At the end of the field you are rushing by,

  Is waiting for his Old Dutch?

  The First Nimby

  William Wordsworth had given railways a somewhat ambiguous welcome in his sonnet ‘Steamboats, Viaducts and Railways’, written in 1833.

  ‘In spite of all that beauty may disown

  In your harsh features, Nature doth embrace

  Her lawful offsprin
g in Man’s art.’

  Eleven years later he was up in arms, a vigorous seventy-five-year-old aghast at the idea of a railway penetrating as far as the shore of Lake Windermere. In October he dashed off a famous sonnet, which has since become the national anthem of Nimbies the world over:

  Is there no nook of English ground secure

  From rash assault? Schemes of retirement sown

  In youth, and ‘mid the busy world kept pure

  As when their earliest flowers of hope were blown

  Must perish; – how can they this blight endure?

  And must he too the ruthless change bemoan

  Who scorns a false utilitarian lure

  ’Mid his paternal fields at random thrown?

  Baffle the threat, bright Scene, from Orrest-head

  Given to the pausing traveller’s rapturous glance:

  Plead for thy peace, thou beautiful romance

  Of nature; and, if human hearts be dead,

  Speak, passing winds; ye torrents, with your strong

  And constant voice, protest against the wrong.

  He broadened his attack in a number of letters to the Morning Post, emphasising that love of the Natural and Picturesque was a relative novelty. It was ‘so far from being intuitive, that it can be produced only by a slow and gradual process of culture …’ Better to leave it to ‘those who have been in the habit of observing and studying the peculiar character of such scenes’. Instead of invading the Lake District ‘artisans and labourers, and the humbler classes of shopkeepers’ should be content with ‘little excursions … after having attended divine worship’.24

  The condescending tone of his attack made him wildly unpopular. The official report recommending the railway’s construction noted only one objection ‘which has been strongly urged’ that the comfort and privacy of existing inhabitants would be affected. To which the report gave the magnificently democratic response that:

  to deprive the artisan of the offered means of occasionally changing his narrow abode, his crowded streets, his wearisome task and his ungrateful toil, for the fresh air, and the healthful holiday which send him back to his work refreshed and invigorated – simply that individuals who object on the grounds above stated may retain to themselves the exclusive enjoyment of scenes which should be open alike to all … appears to us an argument wholly untenable.

  Even after the scheme had gone through Parliament Wordsworth addressed a protest meeting attended also by the young Matthew Arnold, whose father, Dr Arnold, had rapturously welcomed the railway when it passed by Rugby School, but who reacted very differently when his family house, Fox How, was threatened by the projected line. In the event more mundane considerations prevented the railway reaching the lake itself. The line ended, then as now, a mile away simply because of engineering difficulties and ‘a great deal of opposition from landowners such as the Earl of Bradford’. Nevertheless, as Wordsworth had feared, the hordes from Lancashire did descend on Windermere, and its peace was spoilt.25

  Thirty years later, following a new railway scare, John Ruskin immediately took up his pen, claiming that the scenery made accessible by the new railway would no longer be the same as before. While claiming that his interest was unselfish (by implication, unlike Wordsworth’s forty years earlier) he echoed his predecessor in recommending that the populace content themselves with paying for a chaise and pony and picnicking ‘on a mossy bank’ nearer home. He added that it was ‘precisely because I passionately wish to improve the minds of the populace, and because I am spending my own mind, strength and fortune, wholly on that object, that I don’t want to let them see Helvellyn while they are drunk.’26

  The episode led to the formation of the first-ever conservation society, the Lake District Defence Association. Inspired by its success – and a suggestion of Ruskin’s – its founders, including a local cleric, Canon Rawnsley, went on to help found the National Trust, oldest and most effective of the institutions designed to save Britain’s heritage.

  Thomas Hardy and the Gravediggers

  Building a railway through old St Pancras churchyard created a scandal when the contractor, the redoubtable Joseph Firbank, (see here) was asked to look for the bones of a French bishop, buried there as a refugee from the revolution. Firbank simply set aside the darkest set of bones he could find, reasoning that all foreigners, whatever their nationality, were dark.27

  Enter Thomas Hardy, apprentice architect. His master, Arthur Blomfield, son of the late Bishop of London, was considered the most suitable man to prevent any repetition of so unseemly an episode, and so the young Hardy was despatched every evening to supervise the removal of the bodies. According to his widow, ‘there after nightfall, within a high hoarding that could not be overlooked, and by the light of flare-lamps, the exhumation went on continuously of the coffins that had been uncovered during the day, new coffins being provided for those that came apart in lifting, and for loose skeletons.’28

  The episode obviously made a vivid impression on Hardy, as witness his evocative poem ‘The Levelled Churchyard’:

  O passenger, pray list and catch

  Our sighs and piteous groans,

  Half stifled in this humbled patch

  Of wrenched memorial stones!

  We late-lamented resting here,

  Are mixed to human jam,

  And each to each exclaims in fear,

  ‘I know not which I am.’

  Having got that off his chest, Hardy could afford to be jocular about the whole episode. As his widow recounts, ‘In one coffin that fell apart was a skeleton and two skulls. He used to tell that when, after some fifteen years of separation, he met Arthur Blomfield again and their friendship was fully renewed, among the latter’s first words were “Do you remember how we found the man with two heads at St Pancras?” ’

  * See pages 60–61.

  † ‘In the 3rd class seat sat the journeying boy,

  And the roof lamp’s oily flame

  played down on his listless form and face,

  Bewrapt past knowing to what he was going

  or whence he came’

  * The snobbery extends to any democratising invention – remember all the ‘intellectual’ sneers which accompanied the spread of television in Britain.

  * Quoted by Paul Theroux in The Patagonian Express. ‘How wrong he was,’ writes Theroux. But he proved susceptible to the same urge. In Lhasa he understood that ‘The Kun Lun range is a guarantee that the railway will never get to Lhasa. That is probably a good thing. I thought I liked railways until I saw Tibet, and then realised that I liked wilderness much more.’

  * Short for Not In My Back Yard.

  † In Schievelbusch’s words, the traveller ‘is experiencing industrial production, although from the consumer’s standpoint. The railway’s industrial product is transportation, change of locality. What makes this production fundamentally different from all other industrial production is exactly the simultaneity of production and consumption’.

  * I have to thank Rupert Wickham for the translation.

  * In L’Eve Future by Villiers de l’Isle Adam a certain Lord Ewald picks up a young innocent unable to find a seat in a crowded train by offering her a place in his reserved compartment.

  III

  RAILPOLITIK

  1

  Progressive, Modern, Democratic and above

  all National

  In early September, 1850, the great French historian Jules Michelet took his wife to Fontainebleau to recuperate from the death of their six-week-old son a few days earlier. He was naturally deeply troubled on his wife’s account, anguished that his attempts at sympathy were inarticulate, badly expressed.

  He took refuge in contemplating the grandeurs of the ancient site. In his strolls round the ramparts he reflected on the enormous contrast between

  old Fontainebleau, now simply a museum, a royal residence denuded of royalty, on the other side the railway line, inaugurated but yesterday, marked by the grandeur of its
elegant and powerful curves, seated on arches a hundred metres high. The whole is connected by a lovely hyphen, the canal and its deep and lengthy shadows, cold and majestic, which link man’s two worlds, the ancient and the modern, with nature’s fine impartiality. Unlike nature, I am not impartial: the chateau represents pleasure, the caprice of one man; the railway is for everyone’s use, bringing France together, bringing Lyons and Paris into communion with one another.1

  *

  He was not alone in associating railways with progress, modernity, a brighter future, liberation from ancient autocracies. As Dr Arnold watched a train thunder past Rugby School on its way from Birmingham to London he rejoiced ‘to see it and think that feudality has gone for ever. It is so great a blessing to think that any one evil is really extinct.’ John Stuart Mill wrote how ‘the more visible fruits of scientific progress … the mechanical improvements, the steam engines, the railroads, carry the feeling of admiration for modern, and disrespect for ancient times, down even to the most uneducated classes.’

  In Uruguay a progressive political journal, which had nothing specifically to do with railways was named Ferrocaril [railways]. When British engineers were completing the first railway bridge over the River Tiber, Pope Pius IX came down to look. When the chief engineer was presented to him as the ‘British Minister of Public Works’ the Pontiff told him, ‘now you can say that the Roman Pontiff is not always at prayer surrounded by incense, monks and priests. Tell the Queen that Her Majesty’s Minister of Public Works found the old Pope surrounded by his engineers while helping to finish a new bridge over the Tiber.’