The History of the Bakerloo Line

Clive D W Feather

• Publisher: Crowood
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781785007460
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Transportation & Navigation
• Index: Technology & Engineering

The Bakerloo is the dull brown line on London's iconic tube map. It doesn't have the multiple branches of the Northern or District Lines, the loops of the Piccadilly or the Central, or the puzzling shape of the non-circular Circle. But its nondescript appearance belies a history encompassing fraud in the boardroom and drama in the courtroom for a line first conceived by sports enthusiasts and finished by Chicago gangsters. With over 120 photographs, this book provides a history of its development from obtaining Parliamentary permission and raising finance through to geology and construction techniques. It details its operation including rolling stock, signalling, stations and signage from the beginning to the current day. The impact of the two World Wars is revealed and it remembers some of the accidents and tragedies that befell the line. Finally, the book describes its evolution up to the present day and beyond.

CHAPTER 1

Before the Bakerloo

The Bakerloo Line opened in 1906 after a stormy fourteen-year period of planning, construction and crisis that we will see in later chapters. But to understand its origins and the reasons for its construction, we must first look back another forty to fifty years, to London in the middle of the nineteenth century.

In 1860, London had a population of just over 3 million, making it the largest city in the world (second was Beijing, at around 2.6 million); it would double before the end of the century. It had been a port since Roman times and still made much of its money from shipping, though financial services – initially shipping insurance, but then banking and stockbroking – were also important. The centre of London was the City, based around the original Pool of London (the part of the Thames between the modern London and Tower Bridges) and the Bank of England, but it had spread perhaps 5km (3 miles) east and west and 3km (around 2 miles) north and south. In the east, the various dock systems based around the Isle of Dogs had taken over most of the shipping trade, but most of the rest of the growth was residential. Ten or fifteen years earlier the houses of the West End marked London’s edge, though by now some tendrils of growth had reached villages like Hammersmith and Putney. To the north, there was continual housing to Kilburn, Camden and Hackney, while to the south Putney, Clapham and Camberwell marked the edge of the built-up area.

There were three major east–west arteries through western London. The ‘New Road’ had been built in 1756–7 to allow troops to march around London rather than through it, yet by the turn of the century development was already past it in places. Today we know it variously as Marylebone Road, Euston Road, Pentonville Road, and City Road as it marches from Paddington to Moorgate. The second was Oxford Street and its continuation eastwards as Holborn and Cheapside into the City. This had started life as the Via Trinobantina, a Roman road from Hampshire to Essex, and became a major coaching route as well as the path taken by prisoners from Newgate Prison to execution on the gallows at Tyburn. Finally, the Strand and Fleet Street linked the City to government at Whitehall, Westminster and Buckingham Palace.

By 1860, the railways were firmly settled in London. On the south of the river, London Bridge and Waterloo were well established, Victoria was about to open, and the river crossings to Charing Cross, Blackfriars and Cannon Street were all due to open within the next decade. On the north side, Paddington, Euston, King’s Cross and Fenchurch Street were all present, but the Gothic monstrosity of St Pancras would not open until 1868. The lines that now serve Liverpool Street were present, but until 1874 they would terminate 600m (3/8 of a mile) further north at Bishopsgate, on the now-abandoned viaduct just south of the present Shoreditch High Street station. But, though river crossings to both the City and West End were allowed, Parliament had refused since 1846 to allow the railways from the north to cross the New Road.

So how did travellers from Bristol, Birmingham or York get to their destinations in the City or across to catch the boat trains for Dover? How did those from Southampton, Brighton or Canterbury get to offices in Whitehall or houses beside Hyde Park? The answer was the horse-drawn omnibus.

WHY IS IT A ‘BUS’?

‘Bus’ is a contraction of ‘omnibus’, but where does that come from? Well, the first bus service was introduced by the mathematician Blaise Pascal in 1662, but it was in 1825 that one Stanislaus Baudry started running a bus service in Nantes. Allegedly one terminus was outside the shop of a M Omnès, who had put up a sign ‘Omnes omnibus’ – Latin for ‘everything for everyone’. More likely, however, is the 1892 claim that Baudry changed the name from ‘White Ladies’ to ‘omnibus cars’ (‘cars for all’) after complaints that the earlier name made no sense.

London had been served by stage coaches for centuries, but the first bus service started in 1829, running along the New Road to be outside the boundaries of the hackney ‘cab’ monopoly. Unlike the coaches, the new buses did not have passengers sitting outside on the roof: they were all inside, protected from the weather. But in order to fit in the fourteen passengers that were typical of these services, they were crammed together ‘like so many peas in a pod’. Within five years, following changes to the laws and the taxes imposed on them, there were 376 licensed buses in London and passengers were back on the roof again as well as inside.

Today we think of buses as being a cheap form of transport for everyone, but these buses were far from that. Competing with short-distance stage coaches and cabs, the fare was normally 6d for any distance and, as a result, they were far too expensive for the working man. Rather, the typical passenger was the businessman, civil servant or clerk living in Marylebone or Kensington and working near to the Bank or Westminster. It may be interesting to observe that ‘manspreading’ is not a new phenomenon; on 30 January 1836 The Times wrote, ‘Sit with your limbs straight, and do not with your legs describe an angle of 45, thereby occupying the room of two persons.’

By the middle of the century, there were around 1,000 buses in competition with each other. Together with perhaps 3,000 cabs and a huge number of vans taking goods between the railway stations on the outskirts and the markets in the middle, the traffic was the kind of continual jam that we think is the fault of the car. Writers complained that it was impossible to cross the road without either being run over or kidnapped by a bus conductor desperate to find fares. One leading businessman stated that he always walked from London Bridge to Trafalgar Square because it was quicker: the cab journey took longer than the train from Brighton had and he could not predict, within a quarter of an hour, how long it would take.

Tiles on a now-closed entrance to Trafalgar Square present a map of the Oxford Road.

Typical London horse bus in about 1900.

Despite Parliament’s ban on railways entering the City, it was obvious that a railway would take much of the strain off the roads and two practical schemes appeared in the early 1850s. The first was the City Terminus Company, headed by Charles Pearson, the City Solicitor. This would involve a road from King’s Cross to Holborn with, underneath it, a tunnel containing eight railway tracks. These would connect immediately to the Great Northern at King’s Cross, but given that two of the tracks were to be broad gauge it was clear that they were intended to extend to Euston and Paddington. While the Corporation (the government of the City of London) was enthusiastic, the line would be expensive – the route involved buying and then knocking down hundreds or thousands of houses in slums – and nobody was offering the necessary funds.

The second scheme was the North Metropolitan Railway. This solved the cost problem by proposing to dig up the New Road from Paddington to King’s Cross, build a tunnel underneath it, then put the road back; no properties to buy reduced the cost dramatically. At King’s Cross the line would join the City Terminus line to Holborn. The North Metropolitan was approved by Parliament in 1853, but the City Terminus was not. After further struggles over the next five years, partly due to opposition in Parliament and elsewhere, and partly because of financial problems, the North Metropolitan took over some of the City Terminus Company’s route as far as Farringdon, though on a much smaller scale, and renamed itself the Metropolitan Railway. Between October 1859 and December 1862, various contractors proceeded to build a railway almost completely under the ground and, on Saturday, 10 January 1863, London’s – and the world’s – first underground line opened for service.

This is not the place for a history of the Metropolitan Railway – though we will meet it again later – or of what is now the Hammersmith & City Line, but its creation showed the world, and in particular those interested in getting around London, three things. First, the ban on railways south of the New Road had been breached and it was possible in principle to build other railways in central London. Second, these railways would be popular and could make money for their creators. But third, and by far the most important, it showed that a new railway did not have to carve an expensive swathe through existing houses, business and shops, but could be built underground with much less disruption using the ‘cut and cover’ system.

The success of the Metropolitan Railway meant that it was not long before people decided to try other routes. Anyone who studied the bus services would know that north-west London to Westminster and then the Elephant & Castle was popular: even in 1839 there were nine different bus companies with twenty-nine buses between them on the route. And so in 1865 the Waterloo and Whitehall Railway was born.

The Waterloo and Whitehall Railway was planned as a pneumatic railway: a line without locomotives. Instead, trains would be blown through a pipe; to quote the description in The Times: ‘The tunnel admits a full-sized omnibus carriage, which is impelled by a pressure of the atmosphere behind the vehicle, produced by lessening the density of the air in front.’ In other words, an impeller was used to suck out some of the air at one end of the tunnel and normal atmospheric pressure would push the train through the tunnel; on the return journey, the impeller was reversed to generate higher pressure to push the train back.

Pneumatic railways of this kind were not completely new: the idea had been invented by one George Medhurst in around 1810 and a modified version was patented by Thomas Rammell in 1860. Rammell and Josiah Clark established the Pneumatic Dispatch Company, which was to build three lines. A first demonstration tube was built above ground in Battersea in 1861 and used to carry goods and a few hardy volunteers – who would have had to lie down as the tube was only about 75cm (30in) in diameter – at speeds of up to 65km/h (40mph). This gained the interest of the Post Office and the company was engaged to build two lines to carry post and parcels. The first ran from Euston station to the North West District Office, about 500m (1/3 mile) away; the second from Euston to Holborn and thence to the General Post Office (now the BT Centre) near St Paul’s Cathedral, a total of about 3.2km (2 miles). The first line operated from 1863 to 1866 and the second from 1865 to 1874 (though only from Euston to Holborn until 1869).

Rammell believed that the system could be used to carry passengers and, on 27 August 1864, he opened a demonstration line in – or rather under – the grounds of the Crystal Palace in Sydenham (now Crystal Palace Park). The line ran from the Sydenham Avenue entrance, probably along the eastern edge of the park, to a point near the eastern end of the Lower Lake. It consisted of a brick ‘tunnel’ 550m (1,800ft) long; ‘tunnel’ is in quotes because a 1989 excavation showed that the base of the tube was only 1.5m (5ft) below ground level, so must have sat in a trench with the top half sticking out, possibly disguised with earth. The train consisted of a single carriage containing thirty-five seats, with a ring of bristles at one end to provide a nearly airtight seal to the tunnel. Despite the sharp curves and the 1 in 15 (6.7 per cent) gradient, far more than a conventional steam train could cope with, the impeller (driven by a modified steam locomotive) only needed to produce a pressure of 2½oz to the square inch (11hPa, or about 1 per cent of atmospheric pressure) to push the train through in about 50 seconds, an average speed of 40km/h (25mph). The demonstration line operated for about two months.

Returning to the Waterloo and Whitehall itself, the idea was to build a pneumatic tube between the two places across the Thames, making the journey much quicker than a bus or cab, which would have to divert via Waterloo Bridge or Westminster Bridge, or a walk over Hungerford Bridge (which cost ½d each way). The proposed route started with an open station at the Whitehall end of Great Scotland Yard, then followed the latter to the river at a point roughly where, today, Whitehall Place meets Whitehall Court (this being before the planned Victoria Embankment had been built). It then crossed the river before running under College Street (now underneath Jubilee Gardens) and Vine Street (destroyed to make way for the 1951 Festival of Britain and now under various buildings) to the edge of Waterloo Station, at a point that is now part of the erstwhile Eurostar platforms. The total length would have been about 950m (0.6 miles) (most sources quote the length as 1,200m [3/4 mile], but this is not consistent with the route given in the prospectus) and the steepest gradient on the line would be about 1 in 30 (3.3 per cent), significantly less than on the demonstration line. On land, the tunnel would have been cut-and-cover brick construction, while to cross the river it would use an iron tube 12ft 6in (3.81m) in diameter coated in concrete. A trench would be dredged across the river and four brick piers would be sunk into the bed down to the solid clay beneath, each with a chamber at the top. The five tube pieces, sealed at each end, would be lowered into place and inserted into these chambers; it is not clear how they would be fixed together, but possibly by divers. Once all joined up, the seals in the ends could be broken through to give a continuous tunnel. In effect, the result would be a bridge sitting in the riverbed, rather than a pipe sitting on it.

Hungerford footbridge – linking Whitehall to Waterloo – in 1859. JAMES ABBOTT MCNEIL WHISTLER

The six initial directors of the company included two directors of the London and South Western Railway (LSWR), which terminated at Waterloo station, and the chairman of the Metropolitan Railway. The former was no doubt attracted by the idea of a good connection to the north side of the river (unlike the other main railways south of the Thames, the LSWR never had a terminus on the north side), while the Metropolitan was probably interested in the technology: despite the usefulness of its line, there were a lot of complaints about the smoke and fug generated by steam engines in the long tunnels. The capital of the company was £135,000 and, as was usual at the time, only a proportion had to be paid up front to buy shares (20 per cent in this case), with the rest being demanded as construction costs required. Some press reports suggested that, if the line was successful, it would become the core of a route from Elephant & Castle to Tottenham Court Road.

The prospectus claimed that a train would run every 4 minutes from each terminus and that trains would alternate in direction. Even if there were two platforms at each end (unlike the demonstration line), so that one train could enter the tunnel as soon as the previous one exited, that would mean a travel time of under 2 minutes, so an average speed of about 31km/h (19mph) with a top speed in the Thames tunnel perhaps 50 per cent greater. Services would run from 07:00 to midnight daily. The company expected trains to carry an average of twenty-five passengers each; 80 per cent would pay 1d for a second-class seat, while the remaining 20 per cent would sit in first class at twice the price. This makes a very exact £23,268 per annum, which would ...