Great British Railway Journeys Text Only. Michael Portillo
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Stephenson’s involvement.
On the line for the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, one of the first things Stephenson was tasked with was re-examining the route. What he came up with was a new plan which as much as possible skirted contested land. In this instance it wasn’t an easy option. It would require building no fewer than 64 bridges and viaducts along its 35-mile course and needed Parliamentary permission before it could begin.
It took four years of haggling before the Parliamentary Bill was passed in May 1826, enabling the compulsory purchase of land for the railway. Getting to this point had cost many compromises, however, one of which was that the line couldn’t go into Liverpool itself and instead had to halt outside the city centre. After the opening of the line in 1830 it was a further decade before it could be extended into the city and Lime Street station, one of Britain’s first railway stations, was opened.
In the middle of the nineteenth century Manchester was the centre of the cotton industry and Liverpool was a bustling dockyard. In fact, Bradshaw’s Descriptive Railway Hand-Book, the Victorian railway bible that we used throughout our travels around Britain, hails Manchester as ‘sending its goods to every corner of the world’. Liverpool had the port to facilitate doing just that. Bradshaw calls the docks ‘the grand lions of the town which extend in one magnificent range of five miles along the river from Toxteth Park to Kirkdale’. By 1850 – just 20 years after the Liverpool & Manchester line opened – Liverpool docks were the second most important port in Britain, handling 2 million tons of raw cotton every year destined for the Lancashire mills.
For Liverpool, it wasn’t all about freight. Moving people was also big business. Liverpool was one of the points on the notorious transatlantic slave trade triangle. Ships left the port with goods and headed for Africa, where the cargo was traded for slaves. The same ships then embarked on an often treacherous journey known as ‘the middle passage’ to America. Men, women and children who survived the crossing were consequently sold to work in plantations.
The slave trade – although not slavery itself – was finally abolished in Britain by an 1807 Act of Parliament, despite vociferous efforts by some Liverpool merchants keen to maintain it for financial reasons. Fortunately, there were more people waiting in the wings to fill Liverpool’s idle ships, this time willing passengers with an altogether brighter future in mind. It was the age of emigration to destinations such as America, Canada and Australia. Families looking for a new start came from across Britain, Ireland and Europe to Liverpool to take advantage of the numerous available passages and the relatively swift transatlantic journey. Consequently waves of people from many nations arriving or leaving Britain passed through the port. Apart from the wealth generated by ticket prices, there were associated benefits for the city in catering for this transient population. Accordingly businesses such as bars and boarding houses prospered, and as time went on so too did the railway system. In 1852 alone, almost 300,000 people left the Liverpool docks to start new lives in the Americas.
These peoples had an enormous impact on the city and its culture. Peter Grant, a local journalist, historian and specialist in all things Liverpudlian, was enlightening on the issue. ‘Scouse,’ he explained, ‘is an accent, a people and a dish.’
The first two are familiar, but the third is something of an unknown. Originally called Labskause, it turns out to be a mixed casserole dish of mutton and vegetables which had been brought to the city by Norwegian sailors. ‘The dish,’ said Peter, ‘is a perfect metaphor for Liverpool. You add a bit of this and a bit of that, then put in your spoon and mix. Much like the Scouse accent, which is made up of Scottish, Irish, Welsh, Lancashire and Cheshire accents, and according to where you are in the city it has its own distinct twang.’
From Liverpool we headed east to Rainhill, just 20 minutes down the tracks. Steam trains expert Christian Wolmar waited on the station platform. Although noisy and not that pretty, Rainhill station seemed the most appropriate place for him to talk about what is perhaps the most significant stretch of railway line in the world. As trains thundered past, Christian explained that the first competition between steam locomotives had taken place here in 1829, before train and track were inextricably linked. Indeed, rails had been in existence for years, usually extending between mines or quarries and nearby industrial centres. Loaded wagons were usually pulled by horses. At the time of the contest the notion of an independently powered engine doing the donkey work was still new.
GEORGE STEPHENSON’S ROCKET WON HANDS DOWN, HAVING ACHIEVED A TOP SPEED OF 30 M.P.H.
It seems extraordinary now, but the 1829 Rainhill trials were organised to enable the directors of the Liverpool & Manchester Line to decide whether the trains should be powered by locomotives or by stationary steam engines. Five locomotives took part, one of which was powered by a horse walking on a drive belt, and were timed over the same course, with and without carriages. There was a £500 prize for the victor, whether or not a locomotive was eventually chosen. George Stephenson’s Rocket won hands down, having achieved a top speed of 30 m.p.h., and set a steam locomotive agenda for the Liverpool & Manchester Line, and ultimately the rest of the country. The display was enough to convince any remaining doubters that locomotives were the way forward as far as rail travel was concerned.
A year later the line was opened by the Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington. But Stephenson’s day of triumph was marred by the death, not far from where we stood, of Merseyside MP William Huskisson, who became one of the first victims of the modern railway.
Huskisson accidentally opened a carriage door in front of the oncoming Rocket, was knocked off balance and fell beneath its wheels. Although the Conservative MP was rushed by train to the town of Eccles by Stephenson himself, he died there within a few hours. His untimely death gave ammunition to a stalwart band of nay-sayers who opposed the railway on the grounds that it was new, that it threatened long-established ways of life and that there were unknown dangers associated with it that had yet to become apparent. Iron roads were not welcome everywhere they went. But despite Huskisson’s demise it was apparent that the age of rail, indeed rail mania, was here to stay.
Eccles was the next destination for us too. Heading out towards Manchester through the sprawling housing estates, we wondered what Eccles had to offer the Victorian traveller and turned to Bradshaw to find: ‘The little village is prettily situated on the northern banks of the Irwell and environed by some of the most picturesque rambles.’
The railway changed all that. Within 30 years, Eccles had been swallowed up into the suburbs of Manchester. Even in Bradshaw’s day, though, Eccles’s claim to fame wasn’t so much about being a pretty village. It was about the cakes produced there.
Nobody knows for certain when Eccles cakes were created, but they definitely predate the railway. In the seventeenth century Cromwell and his Puritans even banned them, on the grounds that they were too rich and sumptuous. Fortunately for Eccles and the rest of the Puritan-weary population, the ban was lifted during the Restoration. James Birch opened the first shop in the town to sell Eccles cakes on a commercial basis in 1796. There followed some rather ill-natured rivalry – and even today the townsfolk hold that a cake made outside of Eccles cannot truly be called an Eccles cake.
What the railways did was to make it quick and easy to ship the cakes all around the country. It has also been claimed that they were responsible for a change in ingredients. At the time the cakes were sold from station platforms and laced with brandy to help preserve them. But, the story goes, one driver enjoyed a generously laced Eccles cake too many and fell off his footplate, almost causing a crash. From then on, brandy was banned for the railway’s Eccles cakes, though it was still used to preserve cakes made for export to America and the West Indies.
Today the cake is as popular as ever. Ian Edmonds is the fourth generation of his family to produce Lancashire Eccles cakes. The secret of their success, he explained, lies in the ingredients. Ian uses only the very best currants money can buy. Called Vostizza A, they come from a Greek farmers’ co-op in a town near Corinth – from which we get the word currant. Ian’s team carefully wash 10 tonnes each week to quality-control the fruit. The plumped-up currants are then encased by hand in buttery pastry in a factory that produces 150,000 Eccles cakes a day for the domestic and export markets.
From Eccles