Great British Railway Journeys Text Only. Michael Portillo
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workforce.
Better still from the workers’ point of view were the terms and conditions of the jobs. Not only did GWR build an entire village to house its workers, but with it came a school, a church, a hospital, hairdressers, swimming baths, a theatre and even a funeral director’s. Then, from 1848, it started to run free trains for employees and their families heading to the West Country every July, a tradition which continued until the 1970s.
These holidays, known simply as ‘Trip’, were extraordinary feats of organisation. Tens of thousands of people were transported to resorts all over the south-west, the largest recorded trip being organised on the cusp of the First World War. 0n 9 July 1914, with tensions rising in Europe, 25,616 people headed west on trains that started to leave at four o’clock in the morning.
Trip veterans Ron Glass and Mary Starley, whose fathers both worked for GWR, recall with fondness later trips and the company’s cradle-to-grave umbrella of care. ‘Virtually the whole town was coming to a standstill for a week,’ explains Ron, who was himself a GWR employee.
Dressed in their Sunday best for both travelling and the beach, trippers were assigned trains that left throughout a Friday so as not to disrupt weekend timetables for the rest of the travelling public. The journey itself had a smell, a taste and a rhythm of its own, as packed carriages towed by GWR steam engines painted in Brunswick green sashayed towards the seaside.
Although the train journey was free, families still had to finance their accommodation, which was a challenge when no one prior to the Second World War received holiday pay. The week after trip became known as the dry week, because workers had received no wages and therefore couldn’t afford a drink at the pub. Ron remembers his father giving up smoking for a spell each year to pay for the holiday. For Ron, Mary and the thousands of others, their holidays had started at Swindon station, famous in Bradshaw’s day for having had the first refreshment rooms in the country. At the time, there were no buffet cars or tea trolleys on trains, so every GWR train stopped at Swindon for a 10-minute break. According to Bradshaw, the rooms were ‘abundantly supplied with every article of fare to tempt the best as well as the most delicate appetites and the prices are moderate, considering the extortions to which travellers are occasionally exposed’.
THE JOURNEY ITSELF HAD A SMELL, A TASTE AND A RHYTHM OF ITS OWN, AS PACKED CARRIAGES SASHAYED TOWARDS THE SEASIDE
The story Bradshaw didn’t know, or at least didn’t tell, was that when Brunel was building the Swindon complex he was so short of money that he struck a deal with his contractors. They built the works, houses and the station in return for the rent revenue and a lease on the station refreshments, ‘with the obligation that Great Western stop all trains there for ten minutes for the next hundred years and refrain from offering alternative catering’. It was a deal that stayed in place until 1895, when the company finally bought itself out.
From Swindon, the train heads south-west to Bath, passing through one of Brunel’s most spectacular engineering achievements. Brunel knew that the straighter the route, the faster his trains would go, so Box Hill in Wiltshire, five miles east of Bath, posed a particular challenge. Rather than curve round it and lose speed and time, Brunel made the decision to go straight through it. It was to be the longest tunnel in the world.
ALMOST 100 MEN LOST THEIR LIVES AS A TUNNEL LENGTH OF ONE AND THREE-QUARTER MILES WAS FORGED
It took 4,000 men more than four years to carve a path through the limestone rock – also known as Bath stone. Almost 100 men lost their lives as a tunnel length of 1¾ miles was forged by two gangs, one each side of the hill, who successfully met in the middle thanks to Brunel’s astonishingly accurate calculations. In building Box Tunnel, Brunel acquired an adversary, one Dr Dionysius Lardner, who claimed that travelling at speed through a tunnel would render breathing impossible. Put simply, everyone using it would die. When the tunnel finally opened, publicity garnered by Dr Lardner meant that many passengers were too frightened to pass through it. Instead, they left the train prior to Box Hill and took a coach for the remaining distance to Bath. Impossible to know what, 170 years on, nervous passengers would have made of the new Gotthard base tunnel currently being built beneath the Alps, which will be more than 35 miles long.
If Swindon is a shadow of the place Bradshaw trumpeted, the Bath he describes is, for the most part, completely recognisable today: ‘Spacious streets, groves, and crescents lined with stately stone edifices and intersected by squares and gardens complete a view of the city scarcely surpassed by any other in the kingdom.’ Bath’s elegant streets, crescents and circuses remain stunning. The most eminent were designed in the eighteenth century by the renowned architect John Wood (1704–54) and his son, also John, whose genius was to create classical, uniform façades in Bath stone that gave terraced town houses the grandeur of stately homes. Intriguingly, behind the facade the houses are very different from one another, as the original owners were able to dictate the individual layout of their home.
The regimentation was a great success and turned Bath into the playground of high society. That was until the arrival of the railways when, for the first time, the middle and lower classes could afford to travel there and sample what the wealthy had been enjoying for centuries – the spas.
People had bathed here since Roman times, believing the waters – absorbed through skin pores – to be a cure for everything from infertility to gout. It turns out they were partially right, but for the wrong reasons. The minerals are not absorbed through the skin, but Dr Roger Rolls, a local GP, historian and author of The Medical Uses of the Spa, has studied the water’s medicinal properties and points out that it did have some benefits.
The Victorians drank an abundance of cider, port and Madeira, all contaminated by high quantities of lead from the fruit presses. As a result, many of Bath’s ‘fashionable invalids’, as Bradshaw terms them, had ailments arising from lead poisoning. Modern research has shown that immersion in hot water up to the neck increases pressure and makes the kidneys work harder, causing people with raised levels of lead to excrete it more quickly. So the spa water does help with poisoning.
THROUGHOUT THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY, THE RAILWAY BROUGHT ORDINARY PEOPLE TO THE SPAS IN THEIR THOUSANDS
Throughout the late nineteenth century, the railway brought ordinary people to the spas in their thousands, but by the mid-twentieth century the baths fell out of fashion and their doors finally closed in 1978. However, in 2006 – albeit behind schedule and over budget – the Thermae Bath Spa opened. It is a stunning piece of architecture, one that the Woods themselves might have approved. Once again people are flocking to Bath to take the waters, wallowing in a rooftop pool whilst gazing out over the majesty of the city.
From Bath the line heads west, along the valley of the meandering River Avon, to Bristol, where some of Brunel’s finest work can be seen, including the Clifton Suspension Bridge and his great steamship Great Britain, then the largest ship in the world, and the first large iron-hulled steamship powered by a screw-propeller.
In Bradshaw’s day Bristol lay in a different time zone from London. Victorian Britain enjoyed an assortment of times, as clocks were set locally according to the setting sun. London was 10 minutes ahead of Bristol, which was fine until, like Brunel, you were trying to create a timetable for a fast-moving steam train. Brunel’s solution was to standardise time across his network, using what he called railway time, and George Bradshaw ably assisted him. When he started putting his timetables together in 1840, Bradshaw also stuck to railway time and ultimately convinced all the other railways to follow suit. Within 10 years the whole country was in a single time zone. It was arguably Bradshaw’s most significant contribution to modern society.
The grand terminus, Bristol Temple Meads, designed by Brunel and opened in 1840, is today a ghost station. Changes made as Bristol became a major rail junction rendered Brunel’s great passenger shed obsolete. From 1999 it was the home of the British and Commonwealth Museum, until that was moved to London. It’s not about to be pulled down any time soon, however. The historic nature of the building means that it is still highly prized. What is a shame is that it is now closed, so few people are aware of it and no one steps inside to soak up the grand flavour of the architecture.
Our next stop was at Yatton in Somerset, another