Great British Railway Journeys Text Only. Michael Portillo
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to come maybe the fish in our fish and chips is more likely to be red mullet or sea bass than cod or haddock.
Winding our way up the coast, our next stop was Bempton, just four miles along the track. Bempton was the closest we could get by rail to the magnificent Flamborough Head, which turned out to be every bit as impressive today as it was in Bradshaw’s time, with its ‘lofty cliffs of nearly five hundred feet elevation, teeming in the spring and summer months with thousands of birds of every hue and species and exhibiting yawning caverns of stupendous size’.
GALES REGULARLY SMASHED FISHING BOATS ALL ALONG THIS COAST, BUT THE FISHERMEN FROM FILEY WERE PARTICULARLY AT RISK
Meeting Ian Kendall from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, Michael discovered that the beautiful, unchanging scenery belies a worrying decline in the North Sea bird population. The change in water temperature over the last 25 years has decimated the sand eel population which is a major food for the birds. The tragedy is that many species of bird are simply starving, leaving them unable to breed and threatening their future.
This coastline also boasts two lighthouses that are worth a mention and a visit. The Chalk Tower is an ancient beacon built around 1674 which lays claim to being England’s oldest lighthouse. Then there’s a far more recent one designed by architect Samuel Wyatt and built by John Matson in 1806 for the princely sum of £8,000. Wyatt’s lighthouse used red glass for the first time, giving the characteristic lighthouse flash of two white flashes followed by one red flash. The red flash was easier to see in thick fog and was quickly adopted in other lighthouses.
Another 15-minute hop up the coast lies Filey, which is described by Bradshaw simply as ‘modern’. When the railways arrived in 1846, Filey grew as a quieter alternative destination for visitors wanting to avoid its more lively neighbour, Scarborough.
Tourism wasn’t the only industry growing in Filey. Fishing was expanding too, and in 1870 there were 100 vessels manned by around 400 men. But it was a tough and dangerous job on the treacherous coast here, and many lost their lives. Bradshaw makes an oblique reference to the tragedy of fishing here, observing that ‘owing to a great number of men being drowned in 1851, the population of women is considerably greater than that of the men’.
It’s not clear exactly which disaster he’s referring to, or whether it was one or several, but it’s not difficult to believe. Gales regularly smashed fishing boats all along this coast, but the fishermen from Filey were particularly at risk. They used and still use boats known as cobles, which are flat bottomed with no keel, making them easy to launch and land at the beach. They also have high bows, which make them better for ploughing directly into the surf. They are very stable for their size, but the men of Filey used them for winter fishing. Whilst boats from neighbouring towns were laid up, the men of Filey were out long-line fishing at a time when gales were most likely.
It was so dangerous that the tradition of knitting jumpers took on a different, darker role. The style and pattern of these not only varied from town to town but also from family to family – to ensure that bodies of people lost at sea could be identified.
SCARBOROUGH, THE FINAL STOP ON OUR JOURNEY, HAS ALSO HAD ITS FAIR SHARE OF FISHING BOAT DISASTERS
In the neighbouring coastal towns fathers and sons worked on different boats to prevent whole families being killed. For the men of Filey, the tradition was for a man to be accompanied by his sons on his boat, this being the best way to pass on the necessary skills. But it meant that the cost to one family following a tragedy was immeasurable. It’s claimed by Filey people that, proportionately, no maritime community has lost so many men as their own.
Scarborough, the final stop on our journey, has also had its fair share of fishing boat disasters. But the town’s sons had other career options. Scarborough had long been a holiday destination for the rich, who were attracted to the spa and its iron-rich waters. Indeed, their beneficial effects were well known in the seventeenth century, and the town can claim to be England’s first seaside resort. Once the railways put the town on the map as a major holiday destination for the masses, the numbers increased dramatically. As Bradshaw writes, ‘There are thirty-three miles of coast which may be inspected at low water over a course of the finest sands in England.’
As the cotton mills across the north-west closed for a holiday called ‘wakes week’, the workers headed to the coast, and especially to Scarborough. Bradshaw describes many attractions in detail: the iron bridge, the twelfth-century castle and hilltop walks complete with panoramic views. But they also flocked to see a skeleton called Gristhorpe Man. On his discovery in July 1834, the remains of this Bronze Age man became a national sensation. It was thought to be the best-preserved example of an oak tree trunk burial – a coffin made from a hollowed-out tree usually reserved for a tribe’s elite – and Victorians travelled from far and wide to see him.
Gristhorpe Man is still on display in the town. In 2005 a team of experts arrived to take a closer look and were at first sceptical. He was so well preserved that they were convinced he was a fake. But after a close examination using the most modern forensic tests they concluded that he was in fact a genuine Bronze Age man who had died in his sixties, possibly from a brain tumour. Tests also revealed that he was likely to have lived locally, on a high-protein diet full of meat, and had kidney stones. Even after 2,000 years, modern methods were able to peel away Gristhorpe Man’s secrets.
Before the railways Gristhorpe Man might have recognised some aspects of English life. Afterwards the fundamentals of everyday living changed. In our 10 days’ travelling from Liverpool to Scarborough the enormous impact the railways had on almost every aspect of Victorian life became starkly apparent. In a matter of a few years everything changed in a revolution that then proceeded to sweep the world.
JOURNEY 2
THE HOLIDAY LINE
From Swindon to Penzance
Most of us take it for granted that we’ll take a holiday at some time. Indeed the number of Britons going abroad each year is now more than 56 million. Before the spread of trains, though, vacations at home or overseas were exclusively the province of the rich. For want of time and money, the majority could not dream of spending a week or even a day away – until the railway system spider-webbed the country and changed every thing. And no line was more instrumental in unshackling swathes of the population from their homes and employment for a short spell than a 300-mile stretch nicknamed the Holiday Line.
Initially the man behind this westward-bound railway was the far-sighted engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806–59), working for the Great Western Railway. His hallmark designs are still apparent today in the shape of Paddington station, the original Bristol Temple Meads station which stands disused next to the current station, and the Box tunnel, as well as all the bridges, viaducts and other tunnels along the line – engineering feats that doubtless concerned him more than fortnights away. The more westerly sections of the line were in fact not finished until after his death, and it wasn’t dubbed the Holiday Line until 1908 by GWR spin doctors.
The Holiday Line still runs between Paddington and Penzance. By the time of its completion, bucket-and-spade holidays had become the norm rather than the exception.
However, it wasn’t the spread of railways alone that sparked an explosion in the popularity of British seaside resorts. The Victorian era was the age of philanthropy, and crucially employers began to embrace the idea of holidays for the workers, none more so than those at the Great Western Railway.
The GWR was based in Swindon, our first stop along the holiday line. Its enormous works, constructed there in the early 1840s, were described by Bradshaw as being ‘one of the most extraordinary products of the railway enterprise of the present age. A colony of engineers and handicraft men.’ Soon Swindon, previously a small market town, was wholly reliant on the railway. Although buildings that once held bustling workshops are now empty shells, they are testament to the thriving industry that was once centred here.
When it first opened the GWR works employed 200 men. A decade later the number had risen to 2,000 men, and by the end of the century some three quarters of Swindon’s working population were employed by the railway company. There was no facet of train or track that could not