The London clay ran almost without a break between the Bank and

Shepherd’s Bush, the only hiatus being at a point between Red Lion

Street and Berner’s Street, where the Woolwich and Reading strata

cropped up, which proved to consist of hard, red, streaky clay, some

beds of white sand, and, strangely enough, beds of hard limestone rock,

whose presence had not been anticipated.

Tube railways are carried out at considerably varying depths; the

Central running in places 100 feet (_i.e._ the height of Westminster

Abbey’s nave) below the road, and at the Bank only 65 feet.

Some of the proposed tubes burrow much deeper; for instance those of

Charing Cross and Hampstead Railway will be from 120 to 216 feet below

the surface. Apparently, there is no reasonable limit to the depth at

which engineers are prepared to lay their railway tubes.

THE TUBE MOLE AT WORK

By an instinct--the heritage of years--of a kind that prompts

gamekeepers to slaughter indiscriminately eagles, hawks, crows, magpies,

owls, and even squirrels, classing them with such vermin as pole-cats,

stoats, weasels, and rats, ignorant farmers and gardeners wage war

against the mole, asserting that in driving his tunnels he throws up

unsightly heaps of soil, and, worse still, loosens and destroys the

roots of plants and grass, totally ignoring the fact that Mr. _Talpa

Europæa_, though he may occasionally disturb the earth around, acts as a

very efficient surface drainer, and still better, is a persistent chaser

and devourer of his natural prey, the wire-worm, and other injurious

insects.

Our Tube mole throws up no hillocks, but he is accused of being the

source of much mischief, and of endangering the houses on the

surface--damaging, as it were, their roots--by the vibration arising

from the continual passage of trains along the iron galleries and the

consequent subsidence of the ground. This has given rise to numerous

complaints, so pronounced as to become the subject of an official

inquiry.

Some foolish objections have been raised to deep-level railways, and

equally unreasonable claims for injury done by them have been brought

into court. Where a vibration clause is inserted in any Tube Railway

Bill, there might be ingenious claims manufactured for compensation. For

instance, a watchmaker might come forward and say that the vibration

caused by the railway prevented him from setting his chronometers, or a

wine merchant might say that his wines were shaken up; and in this way

the company might be subject to endless litigation.

When it was proposed to bore tunnels 70 feet below the royal demesnes of

Hyde Park, St. James’s Park, and the Green Park, and as much as 216 feet

below Hampstead Heath, approximating in the former case to the height of

Queen Eleanor’s memorial at Charing Cross, and in the latter to that of

the twin towers of Westminster Abbey, it was at once urged by the

representatives of a certain Preservation Society that the trees,

plants, and flowers of the three parks would be detrimentally affected

by the Tube, and that the Hampstead Heath tunnels would “very probably

drain the upper surface of the soil and destroy vegetation all round.”

To which unthought-out contention Mr. R. E. Middleton, a well-known

civil engineer, replied that “at the depths proposed for the parks the

tunnels were to be constructed through a stratum, not of loose soil, but

of stiff London clay, so that any question of destroying trees, plants,

or flowers was rather absurd; in fact, vegetation would in no way be

affected.” He might have added the argument that, although ordinary

railway tunnels abound, no one had ever heard of the overlying fields

and woods being deleteriously affected by them.

CLAIMS FOR DAMAGE BY TUBING

Now, in dealing with the matter of alleged injuries to buildings from

vibration set up by Tube railways, I quote the following case to show

how visionary are some of the claims brought against Tube Companies.

On the 14th of October last, at the Lambeth County Court, an action was

brought against the Great Northern and City Railway Company by an

individual living in Hoxton for damage alleged to have been done to his

premises by the construction of the tunnels. The plaintiff stated that

in consequence of this the repairs of his house had cost him £62, and

that in another house of his, cracks had appeared. A photograph, taken

twelve months before the tunnels were made, which showed a crack in

front of one of the houses, was pointed out to the witness, who said

that he had never noticed it.

For the defence Mr. Douglas Young stated that he acted for the Company

when the tunnels were about to be constructed, and, anticipating claims

of this nature, he caused photographs to be taken of all houses which

showed cracks on the line of route. The cracks shown in the photos then

taken were practically in the same condition now. The repairs necessary

were not caused by damage done by the tunnels, and came entirely within

the repairing clauses of the leases. The jury returned a verdict for the

defendant Company on the ground that no damage had been done by them.

On the other hand, among the Tube Railway cases brought into court last

year and this, was the following, which illustrates the contention that

though there may be a certain amount of truth in the plaintiff’s

arguments, exaggerated ideas prevail as to the sums that can be claimed

for injury, present or prospective. It also shows the uncertain state of

the law on the subject of ownership of the subsoil--a hard legal nut.

In the London Sheriff’s Court, 17th April, 1902, Mr. Under-Sheriff

Burchell sat, with a special jury, to consider a claim for compensation

brought by Mr. William Howard, of 11, Cornwall Terrace, Regent’s Park,

against the Baker Street and Waterloo Electric Railway.

Mr. Morton, K.C., said that in August, 1900, Mr. Howard became aware

that a subsidence was taking place, and that the walls of his house were

cracking, this being unmistakably due to the borings for the railway

which were being made underneath the property. In the course of these

borings the Company had taken away part of the subsoil of the claimant’s

premises without having given notice to treat, and this, counsel

submitted, constituted a distinct trespass. The value of the property,

counsel contended, had been deteriorated to the extent of at least £50

per annum. Mr. Howard’s lease had ten years to run, the rental being

£200 a year.

After expert evidence had been given, the Hon. A. Lyttelton, K.C., for

the railway company, said it was ridiculous to assert that the Company

had committed an act of trespass. They disputed the claimant’s alleged

ownership to land sixty-five feet below his premises, and were

determined to fight the question in the courts, inasmuch as it was one

which affected the whole of the electric tube railways in London.

One witness called on behalf of the Company said that the damage to the

property could be remedied by the expenditure of a ten-pound note.

The Under-Sheriff said that an important feature of the case which the

jury had to decide was whether the claimant was the owner of the

subsoil. As such he would be entitled to compensation for any vibration

that might occur when the railway commenced to run in about two years’

time. He left it to the jury to decide their verdict under two heads,

namely, “what damages had at present been sustained,” and, “what damage

was likely to accrue through vibration.”

After a brief deliberation the jury awarded £357, in one sum, as

damages.

On the 6th of February of the present year, before Mr. Justice Ridley

and a special jury, the hearing was resumed of the case in which Mrs.

Dawson, a widow, carrying on the business of a draper at the junction of

City Road and East Street, sued the Great Northern and City Railway for

£10,000 damages, alleged to have been caused by the tunnelling

operations in the vicinity of her premises. The claim included some

£4,000 which it is estimated it would cost to put the buildings in a

proper state of repair, and £5,000 representing loss of business during

the time it would take to complete the work of reinstatement.

The jury returned a verdict for the plaintiff under the following heads:

Amount for taking the subsoil occupied by the tunnel, £50; structural

damage, £2,000; damage to trade and stock, £2,100; total, £4,150.

Mr. Dobb asked that judgment should be entered.

Mr. McCall thought the judge had no power to enter a judgment of the

High Court because the proceedings were in the form of an interpleader

action.

Mr. Justice Ridley said he would give judgment in the sense in which the

word was used in the Lands Clauses Act.

Judgment was given accordingly.

At a meeting of the Auctioneers’ Institute held last year, Mr. G. M.

Freeman, K.C., speaking on this subject, pertinently remarked that

various questions were likely to arise between the promotors of the new

order of underground railway and the owners of adjacent property, and he

gave it as his opinion that the assertion that no possible damage would

be caused, had not been wholly verified, and that the rights of

compensation to persons equally injured ought not to depend upon whether

a piece of the subsoil under the street was or was not appropriated. In

his judgment, all owners who could prove damage done by the construction

or working of an underground railway, should have the same title to

compensation.

VIBRATION

The outcome of the Board of Trade inquiry last year into the vexed

question of tube vibration was interesting. It showed that alleged

annoyance from vibration has not been altogether imaginary, and some

novel facts were produced. Fourteen meetings were held, and evidence was

given by some of the residents along the line of the Central Railway

route, their habitat ranging from Bucklersbury in the City to Kensington

Palace Gardens in the west. A large number of the witnesses represented

householders having “frontages,” and among others, the Holborn Borough

Council. They all deposed as to annoyance caused by the vibration, and

were of opinion that the shaking was most perceptible when the trains

first began running in the morning; between five and eight p.m.; and

shortly after midnight, just before the trains ceased running.

Had any of these gentlemen resided on the north side of Victoria Street,

near its western end, they would hardly have complained about mere

vibration. In that delectable locality the backs of the houses overlook

the Metropolitan District Railway, and if the dining-room happen to be

in the rear, as in many of the flats it is, every wine-glass and tumbler

on the table quivers in a fearful manner, all the ornaments tremble, and

the whole apartment is agitated as each train thunders by.

But even this is nothing, contrasted with the daily experience of

dwellers in suburban side streets, where passing of steam-rollers,

pantechnicon-vans, and other elephantine vehicles, not only shakes the

tenements to their basements, but forces out the mortar that is supposed

to bind together the brickwork, dislocates the window-frames, turns

askew the pictures on the walls, and would eventually, if not seen to,

reduce the “eligible villas” to ruin.

However, the Board of Trade Committee, as in duty bound, personally

investigated the Tube complaints and satisfied themselves that

vibrations, sufficient to cause vexation to the inmates, were really

felt in some of the houses near the Central, and the result of the

inquiry was as follows:--

That it was a matter of chance whether any given train caused a slight,

or a severe, vibration; also that trains which produced much _tremblór

de tiérra_ in one house, as likely as not caused but little in another,

and that apparently different apartments in the same residence were not

similarly affected by one and the same train. It was demonstrated that

the locomotives, and not the cars, were responsible for the greater part

of the disturbances, the reason assigned being that too great a

springless load was carried on each axle of the engines, a method of

construction adopted to obviate the necessity for gearing.

Acting upon the Committee’s representation, the Central Railway Company

ordered two new types of locomotives, in one of which the

“unspring-borne” load was much reduced by gearing. The other was not

distinct from but attached to the train, the motors being carried at one

end of two or more coaches--the motor-car system of electric traction in

fact. The difference in weight was remarkable; the original gearless

engines being 44 tons, the new geared pattern 33 tons, while the

motor-cars only came up to 20 tons.

Some novel experiments were made, and in order to identify the trains,

the houses in which the observers took their places with recording

instruments were connected by telephone with the signal-boxes at the

adjoining stations. Quite satisfactory were the results, and it was

found that, during some two hours, the passing of every train drawn by

the heavy gearless locomotive was distinctly felt, but was not

discernible when the new engines were attached. Therefore the Committee

concluded that, so far as the Central was concerned, the adoption of

motor-cars would so reduce the _tremblement de terre_ as to cause all

real annoyance to cease, though the sound of the trains, particularly at

night, might still be detected. As to the oscillation of the cars--a

rather marked feature in the Tube--it was attributed by the Committee’s

experts to the unevenness of the surface of the rails. As these leave

the rolling-mills they are usually slightly curved, and the process of

straightening them _in situ_, however skilfully carried out, inevitably

leaves a certain amount of waviness. When the speed is high, a condition

of things soon arises whereby the irregular impulses produced by the

uneven rail surfaces establishes a rocking movement of the rails and the

road-bed, converting both into an elastic instead of a rigid support.

This is increased and maintained by the pounding of the gearless

locomotives in the narrow tubes, intensified by the hard unyielding

material of which they are composed.

Another fact to which the Committee called attention was, that in

consequence of the small diameter of the tunnels (12 feet), the fit was

too close, and the pressure in front of the trains necessitated greater

power to overcome it than if more space had been left between the roofs

of the carriages and the tubes.

In the agitation respecting damage alleged to have been done by the

construction of the Tubes, it was proved that provided the apertures are

made of sufficient size, and suitable locomotives used, and the

permanent way properly laid with stiffer and deeper rails, the chance of

injury to houses by the _moviéndo la tiérra_, as the Spaniards call it,

can be reduced to a minimum.

Modern science tells us that earth tremblings are with us at all times

and in all places to an extent not realised. We are assured that, by

Professor J. Milne’s instruments, quiverings, and slopings of the

earth’s crust, insensible to the most delicate spirit-levels, can be

detected. It is now known that earthquake movements can be felt right

through the earth, and all round its surface. Latterly, Professor Milne

has also discovered that his observatory in the Isle of Wight sinks

slowly during a part of the year, and rises as slowly during another

part--as if the breast of the earth were heaving. For five months in the

year, the tall buildings in a city may be heeling over towards the west;

then they come back with extreme slowness to the perpendicular, and

finally cant a little to the east.

Surely, then, we need not complain about an occasional mild earth-shake

produced by the passing of the useful Underground, or Tube trains,

seeing that the good they do so far outweighs their defects.

CHAPTER VIII

_TOURING IN THE TUBES_

A SKETCH

“She doth stray about.”--SHAKESPEARE.

Mrs. Rosamond was a pleasant, chatty, little woman, and a universal

favourite. Her abundant hair was brown, her eyes, shaded by long dark

lashes, were deepest blue, and above them rose, not the “bar of Michael

Angelo,” but a low, smooth, and pretty forehead, where, however, a

phrenologist would have looked in vain for the faintest trace of the

“bump of locality.” She was a shrewd judge of character in men and

women, especially the former. She loved beautiful scenery and everything

refined in art and literature. She had great sympathy with the suffering

and distressed; but her ability to take mental notes of things and

places, and to find her way about towns and cities, as some do by

instinct, was utterly wanting in Lilian Rosamond; yet, with the strange

perversity that impels people with bad eyesight to drive dog-carts or

motor-cars, or to steer yachts, she persisted in going about strange

localities unaccompanied, and when any expedition was planned,

audaciously posed as an authority on quickest and best routes. But she

was a native of the fair “North countree,” and, lying _perdu_ beneath

her sweet disposition, was a vein--a thin one--of self-will.

“Why,” she argued, “should she not find her way about like other people?

Had she not from childhood lived at Lymm, Cheshire, and roamed about

that district without difficulty? Had she not frequently travelled to

the old county city? Had she not braved the terrors of the Great Central

Station at Manchester _en route_ for Halifax--changed carriages there,

in fact? And had she not once actually journeyed all by herself to

London on a visit, returning safely to her own town?” All of which was

perfectly true, but she omitted to add that, in going up to town, her

parents had, as it were, to see her “labelled and consigned” through the

medium of a fatherly guard, while her friends in town had been strictly

enjoined on no account to miss meeting her at Euston, and never to let

her go anywhere in the metropolis unaccompanied. In fact, her family

were in an agony of suspense until she was back again.

Mrs. Rosamond had married a gentleman-farmer of Welsh extraction, and

her life had fallen on pleasant lines in a remote Radnorshire village

bearing an unpronounceable name made up of consonants. The year 1902

arrived, and with it, in June, an invitation from her sister-in-law to

spend Coronation week with her in Edith Road, West Kensington; and off

she started, her easy-going husband, who had seldom tested his wife’s

sense (or absence) of locality, and had no suspicion of how much it was

lacking, merely remarking as he saw her into the train, “Now, my dear,

mind you wait at Paddington a reasonable time to see if Annie is there

to meet you. She is not always punctual, and if she does not turn up,

take a cab. Don’t attempt to get to Edith Road by omnibus or Underground

Railway. You don’t know London, and a four-wheeler will be cheaper in

the long run. Now, don’t forget this, there’s a dear little woman, or I

shall worry all day long about you.”

In the same carriage with her was a lady of uncertain age, whom Mrs.

Rosamond quickly guessed to be unmarried and an “organiser”--one of

those assertive, independent, “heel-less” women of the genus

_plantigrade_, who know everything and want no assistance from anybody.

Falling into conversation, Lilian Rosamond remarked that she hoped to

see the King’s procession to the Abbey, a seat having long ago been

secured for her, and that she had been told she would have to go a very

long distance from the West End and might have to start by the first

train on the Twopenny Tube to the Bank, and that then by _another_ Tube

she somehow would get to the Borough High Street (where her “stand” was

situated) by way of the “Elephant and Castle.”

This led to the subject of West Kensington, her destination, and how she

proposed reaching it from Paddington. “Why,” said the plantigrade lady,

“what on earth made your husband tell you to take a cab? It is two miles

off at least, and you are sure to be over-charged. Never mind what he

said. Men are always extravagant in these matters. Besides, you can

think for yourself; you are a woman, not a baby. Now, I’ll tell you what

to do. If your sister is not at the station, book your luggage--you say

you have not got much with you--to be sent on by the railway parcel van,

cross the road to the Praed Street District Railway Station, get out at

Notting Hill Gate, cross the road there to the Tube station, and for

twopence you will be at Shepherd’s Bush in a few minutes.”

This suggestion seemed to Mrs. Rosamond good and attractive, but she

bravely resisted the allurements of a journey by an unfamiliar route;

and, recalling her husband and his injunction, after waiting a quarter

of an hour at Euston and finding that no one came for her, she allowed

herself to be stowed away by an attentive and sympathetic porter into a

stale, straw-smelling four-wheeler, and arrived safely at No. 28, when

cabby promptly asked, and received, half a crown--a moderate

eighteenpence more than his legitimate fare; but cabmen, like

everybody else, must live somehow!

The longest day recorded in the almanac dawned clear and fair, and Mrs.

Rosamond, rising at an unearthly early hour, started for Islington,

where she had promised to breakfast with a relative--an unusual kind of

feat to attempt, but easy of accomplishment by leaving Shepherd’s Bush

very early for the Bank of England, where, as it was explained to her in

an off-hand, businesslike manner by her sister’s husband, all she had to

do was to hit the right subway, book afresh at the Bank Station of the

City and South London Electric Railway, and “in a jiffy, as easy as A B

C” (so he put it) she would find herself at the “Angel,” Islington, and

be with her aunt in time for the coffee and rolls.

Mrs. Rosamond was delighted at the prospect, and no happier woman than

she stood outside the Tube’s terminus that bright summer morning.

The booking-office was full of people--of the working class, thought

fair Mrs. Rosamond, who, observing that each person paid the sum of

three-halfpence through the glass partition that screened the clerks

from too close contact with the public, tendered that modest sum like

the others, without specifying her destination. But though plainly, she

was too daintily dressed and too self-evidently a lady to escape notice,

and was rather surprised at being asked if she wanted a workman’s

ticket. “Oh no!” she hastily exclaimed. “I am only going to the Bank,

and then to Islington on a visit.” “Well, then, your fare is twopence.”

And she received in return a small slip of paper and not the familiar

pasteboard ticket covered with undecipherable letters and figures.

Following the crowd, Mrs. Rosamond dropped the document into a sloping

box fixed at the side of the gate and presided over by a railway

official, the process suggesting to her lively imagination the method by

which votes are recorded at a School Board election.

Wide open stood the door of a gigantic lift, the like of which she had

never seen, which quickly filled with a compact mass of some fifty men

and a sprinkling of women. There were upholstered benches at the sides;

and a civil young artisan offered her his seat, but Lilian preferred to

stand and look about her. The electro-lighted apartment was not

æsthetic, and the unsightly advertisements, and notices warning

travellers against smoking, spitting, or standing too near the doors,

did not add to its beauty; and when the telescopic gates were clashed

together and fastened, the whole thing reminded Mrs. Rosamond of a great

cage full of specimens of the British _Homo Sapiens_ packed for

conveyance and exhibition to inhabitants of other regions.

Suddenly, gently, and noiselessly the lift began to descend, and it

seemed as if it would never stop. But stop it did, at a depth of seventy

feet, which might have been seven hundred so far as Mrs. Rosamond’s

sensations were concerned. Once again the iron gates clashed, and the

wild animals--I mean the passengers--streamed forth, our fair traveller

following, to the platform.

Was she dreaming? Had she, like Alice in Wonderland, suddenly become

diminutive, and was she waiting for a well-groomed little white rabbit,

with gold watch and chain, to emerge from what resembled a burrow at the

end of the station? It was so _very_ small. Everything was on a reduced

scale, the standing-room was a mere strip of planking, the tube like a

pea-shooter. Surely it would not take in the train! However, it was

deliciously cool and light, and the tiles that lined the station were,

as she found by touching them with her gloved hands, perfectly free from

smuts.

In a few moments, from the open cutting at the opposite end of the

platform, where lay the shunting tracks, a bright light and metallic

clattering heralded the strange-looking chimneyless locomotive. Behind

it came five attractive-looking cars joined together, and gleaming with

light. At their point of junction were telescopic gates, flung open as

soon as the train stopped, and Mrs. Rosamond, who had just time to

observe that there were not _two_ rails only on the track, but a _third_

in the middle, hurried into the first car she could find, and the

earliest train on the Tube glided into the tunnel _en route_ for the

Bank.

Lilian Rosamond at once discovered that the cars just fitted the Tube.

She would like to have touched the sides, but as the windows were sealed

up this was impossible.

Everything looked delightfully clean, and, considering the crowd, she

was lucky to find a seat next to an intelligent and quiet-looking,

middle-aged man, who turned out to be a foreman engaged upon great

building works proceeding in the City. The speed increased, and the

noise and the rattling of the cars increased in proportion--a condition

of things she had not expected, and it was a relief when the train

slowed down and made its first pause at Holland Park. Here a few workmen

got in, but not a soul got out! Mrs. Rosamond, looking about her,

noticed that her _companions de voyage_ were not in appearance such as

she had expected at so early an hour. It is true they nearly all

smoked--cigarettes mostly--some sticking to the old-fashioned short clay

pipe charged with most pungent tobacco; but they did not swear or use

strong language, they were not all dressed in corduroy, nor were their

clothes dirty, neither did they universally carry huge “bass-bags”

containing saws, and other sharp and nasty tools. Her neighbour, the

foreman, with whom she soon got into a lively conversation, told her

that most of the men (masons chiefly) were employed on a “big job” at

Finsbury, and would travel to the Bank. He also volunteered the

information that he lived in Caxton Road, close to the Shepherd’s Bush

Station of the Tube; that he had to get his own breakfast at 4.30 or

thereabouts, or wait until he got to the City, when he had it at a snug

little coffee-shop in Moorfields; that he had used the Tube ever since

its opening in 1900 day after day, starting by the first train in the

morning, and returning, as his place and work suited, along the route at

all hours, from five o’clock to eight, and sometimes (though seldom) by

the last train from the Bank at 12.30 p.m.; and that the cars between

the former hours--when people were leaving the City for the day--were

more crowded than in the early morning, in fact crammed, with not even

standing room.

At Notting Hill Gate there was a rush of operatives. By this time the

cars were packed, and the little woman perceived the uses of the sliding

leather straps suspended overhead, to which the unlucky seatless ones,

who filled up the whole of the gangway, held on like grim death, to

avoid tumbling about as the train oscillated.

At the Marble Arch some few persons, a dozen or so, tried to push in,

but the five cars were _complet_, and so they continued, until, at the

British Museum Station, a section of the passengers alighted, as also at

Chancery Lane and the General Post Office. Then, after a run of 6½ miles

from Shepherd’s Bush in twenty-four minutes, the Central “early workmen”

pulled up at the Bank terminus at a platform resembling the others all

along the line.

Mrs. Rosamond went up in a big lift, not to the surface as she expected,

but found herself landed in a broad asphalted, bewildering subway lined

with white bricks. Brilliantly lighted white passages seemed to stretch

away in all directions, full of people tearing about here, there, and

everywhere in the utmost confusion, some ascending steps that appeared

to lead to the daylight, others descending slopes that ended in more

brick-lined passages. At once she recalled her host’s injunction “to hit

the right subway” for the Islington Tube Line, but becoming a trifle

excited and confused, she went up the staircase that looked the

shortest, and found herself in Cornhill, along which she strayed a short

distance, and came to St. Michael’s, when she thought she had reached

the station, because she had been told it was underneath a church. But

there was no City and South London Railway, and her host had omitted to

say that the subway between it and the Bank was contemplated only. So

Lilian asked her way, and quickly found what she was seeking close by at

the corner of Lombard Street and King William Street. And now, growing

confident by experience, and perceiving that the booking-office and

general arrangements resembled those of the Two-penny Tube, though on a

smaller scale, she went to the booking-office window and tendered

twopence. The clerk politely inquired, “All the way, miss?” and on her

replying in the affirmative, demanded, and received, fourpence, giving

her an ordinary ticket in return. She thought this strange, being

different from the Tube system, the more so when she saw no glass box

wherein to drop it. But there was the lift, and so she descended. Alas!

when she got to the bottom, she forgot to make inquiries, being absorbed

in meditation about her husband. “What was he doing at that particular

hour?” she wondered. “Had he gone out fishing? Was he making the rounds

of his farm, and looking after his pet livestock, the pigs?” A train

came up, and without giving the matter a second thought, she got into

it, and found the cars pretty nearly empty. They were narrow and low,

and the atmosphere was close.

Away they sped, by London Bridge, the Borough, the “Elephant and

Castle,” Kennington Park Road, the Oval, and Stockwell, but the guard

did not call out the names of these stations, and only when the terminus

was reached did Lilian rouse herself from her reverie, and stepping out

of the station after giving up her ticket, gazed aghast, not at the

“Angel,” Islington, which she knew was a locality nearly all bricks and

mortar, but upon a large open space--Clapham Common! In fact, the poor

_voyageuse_ had gone down the wrong lift at the Bank Station, and had

failed to notice the names of the stations as she came along.

To recover her equanimity, Mrs. Rosamond thought she would stroll about

a little before going back to Islington, which, it was explained to

her, was at the other extremity of the line. Much refreshed by an hour’s

walk and the novelty of the _terra incognita_, she booked again, and

resumed her pilgrimage, determined that this time there should be no

mistake.

What was it? Was it fatality? or was it some mischievous whispering

spirit that caused her to keep mentally repeating the words, “Bank

Station”? An echo, perhaps, of the instructions received the evening

before. Anyhow, she did not go straight on, but as soon as the train

reached the City, she alighted at the Bank, and found herself once more

in the maze of subways branching off from the Central’s booking-office.

The little woman was in despair. What must she do? It was no use asking

her way, everybody seemed in too violent a hurry to attend to other

people; so she walked mechanically down a disagreeably steep asphalted

incline and along a wood-paved, white-tiled tunnel, and saw at the end

an electric Tube station. There was the usual narrow platform, the

glazed tunnel, the electric light, and the four-car train, but no

queer-shaped engine, and the carriages looked smaller than those of the

Central and of a different build, the glazed sides sloping inwards

towards the low roof. There was no booking-office, so she stepped into

the train, where, as in an omnibus, tickets were issued and punched for

the sum of two-pence. The cars were narrow and stuffy, and she did not

like them, but looking up, she caught sight of a brass plate giving the

name of the engineers at Preston, Lancashire, and this quite cheered

her.

In about five minutes the train stopped, and everybody got out and

streamed up stairways and along passages into what proved to be a vast

railway terminus--Waterloo; and she realised the dismal fact that by

inadvertence she had taken the Waterloo and City Railway, instead of the

City and South London! It was the word “City” running in her head that

had done the mischief.

Nothing was left but to return, and so, through lofty cavernous regions

beneath the terminus, over bridges, and down endless slopes of

wood-paving, she managed to reach the up-platform.

Now came the rush of early City-bound men, season-ticket holders, who

had travelled by the London and South Western line from all parts of

Surrey served by it. They came pelting down the inclines as if their

lives depended upon catching a particular train. Most of them carried

neat hand-bags, suggestive of legal documents or company prospectuses,

and nearly all had a morning paper. The bulk of them were well dressed,

with an indefinable air indicative of the suburban resident. Mrs.

Rosamond found them exceedingly pleasant, and was soon chatting with a

military-looking gentleman, irreproachably groomed, with a lined and

shrewd face, and old enough to be her father. He was, in fact, an

eminent solicitor in Tower Royal, Cannon Street, who, hearing of her

adventures, appeared to sympathise very deeply. “A little _too_ deeply,”

said her husband, on hearing her narrative, not that he was distrustful

or jealous, but he preferred to do most of the sympathising himself. The

man of law tried to be facetious, and in explaining at some length the

difference between metropolitan “tubes” and the “Underground,” so

confused Mrs. Rosamond that she ended by thinking they were one and the

same thing--a fatal error on her part, as we shall see. Dilating upon

the subject, and upon the trials she had endured that morning, he

remarked that he was sure her friends and the world in general would be

great losers were so pleasant and vivacious a lady as herself to remain

underground. At which fair Rosamond smiled--she had beautiful teeth, and

a smile became her; but she grew somewhat reserved in manner when he

insisted upon escorting her along the right subway, and felt decidedly

relieved when he courteously left her on the pavement at the “Poultry,”

by Mappin and Webb’s.

It was getting on towards eleven o’clock, and Mistress Rosamond, who,

beyond a cup of coffee hastily swallowed before she started, had tasted

nothing for six hours, began to feel faint, experiencing that

distressing sensation which makes one think the ground is about to rise

up and strike one, and that hearing and vision are about to fail. She

_must_ have something to eat and drink, but _where?_ Dimly she recalled

how in the old days a very dear brother, who knew his London well, was

fond of expatiating upon the merits of certain reliable places

in the City where the inner man could be most satisfactorily

refreshed--Birch’s, Sweeting’s, Pimm’s in the “Poultry.” Why, she was

actually standing in the “Poultry”! So, following the curt, but

respectful, directions of a civic policeman, who must have been at least

six feet two inches in his stockings, she, without crossing the road,

easily discovered the haven of refuge in question, and being shown up to

the ladies’ dining-room, sat down at a table near a window which looked

upon busy Cheapside.

Though rather too early in the day for the regular menu, consultation

with a grey-headed waiter--who strongly reminded her of some Church

dignitary (a dean for choice) in layman’s attire, and who became

immensely interested in his client, partly because her blue eyes

recalled to him those of a daughter “lost awhile”--resulted, within

twenty minutes, in a dainty repast, some scalloped oysters, a “portion”

of the choicest Scotch salmon cold, with cucumber, and dainty roll and

butter, followed by a cheese soufflé, and--by the “dean’s”

advice--neither tea, coffee, nor wine, but a glass, just one glass, of

Pimm’s “particular” stout, a beverage our traveller was unaccustomed to,

but found an admirable accompaniment to her fish luncheon. The bill was

paid with a handsome _douceur_, which the “dean” condescended to accept;

and refreshed, and with renewed determination to carry out her original

line of march, Mrs. Rosamond stepped out and walked along Cheapside.

There the shops at once attracted her attention: the jewellers, the

hosiers--in one of which latter she bought some neckties and collars for

her spouse--the print-sellers, and the London Stereoscopic Company’s

seductive window. Here she looked up at the church clock far above her

head, and finding the time getting on, and becoming just a little

flurried at the discovery, started at once to resume her wanderings. “If

you please, constable, can you tell me the nearest way to the

Underground Railway?” “Straight as you can go, miss, down the lane, Bow

Lane, in front of you, and you will find the station across the road at

the bottom.” “Thank you very much,” and, mentally, “What a fine set of

fellows the City policemen are! I wonder if they are all married; where

do they live, and what are their wages?”

Straight down the narrow lane she went, and at the Cannon Street end

asked another policeman the way to the Underground. He pointed to the

opposite side of the road, and, stopping the traffic, conveyed her

across, and she found herself in the Mansion House Station of the

District Railway.

There were no officials to be seen, only the booking-clerks, one of

whom, with the professional instinct for turning an honest penny for his

employers, instead of advising her to return to the Bank close by, up

Victoria Street, promptly recommended her to book by the District

Railway to Bishopsgate Street, get across Finsbury Circus to Moorgate

Street, and then take the City and South London Tube Railway to the

“Angel.”

By this time Mrs. Rosamond had become too tired to discuss the matter,

and was disinclined to go back by the way she had come. So she got into

a first-class carriage of a Circle train, and, with a sigh of relief,

settled down snugly into the far corner.

Whether it was the reaction, or the effect of the glass of stout, was

never known, but after passing Cannon Street Mrs. Rosamond began to feel

drowsy and dreamy, imagining she was nearing home in the local train,

and wondering if her husband had received her telegram, and would come

to meet her. She fell asleep, and a lovely picture she made, with lips

slightly parted, and her long, curved eyelashes resting, like a child’s,

on her soft cheeks. There was revealed just a few inches of well-fitting

black silk clocked stockings, neatly-turned ankles, and a charming pair

of very small dark tan shoes.

Time sped on, and, with it, the Circle train, past Bishopsgate,

Farringdon Street, and King’s Cross, with its maze of metropolitan

underground lines; through dismal tunnels, black with smoke; through

brick-lined cuttings, foul with sooty deposit; past stations, each one

hung, by way of adornment, with the same monotonous, highly-coloured

“works of art,” drawing attention to Colman’s Mustard, Reckitt’s Blue,

Nestle’s Milk, Bovril, Oxo, Lemco, Globe Polish, Ogden’s Cigarettes,

Bird’s Custards, and Stephen’s Inks, and provided with

penny-in-the-slot machines, with bookstalls bearing a strong family

likeness, and with here and there a refreshment bar, where buns and

sandwiches of the Mugby Junction type might be had.

At High Street, Kensington, where the engine was changed, the guard

looked in, admired the sleeping beauty, and discreetly withdrew in

silence.

In the middle of the tunnel between Sloane Square and Victoria, the

train pulled up with a jerk, the signal having been suddenly put against

it. Mrs. Rosamond woke, and looking at her watch, found that she must

have been slumbering nearly an hour, and a fellow-passenger told her

that by the time the train reached the Mansion House Station she would

have completely traversed the circle of the Underground! “Well, I _will_

see this matter through,” she said to herself, “and I will not go again

into that horrid Bank Subway. After all, I shall soon be at Bishopsgate

Street.” So she went on.

How, on her arrival there, she escaped having to pay the full fare, no

one knows. She kept her own counsel; but the ticket collector and the

guard probably thought she was too nice to be worried with

interrogations.

Her brief impressions of the Underground were that only in a few

respects was the Tube an improvement upon it. The Inner Circle Trains,

she thought, ran more smoothly; there was less rocking of the carriages,

and less rattling noise; but they were badly lighted; the banging of

doors was awful; the atmosphere sulphurous and stifling; and carriages,

stations, staircases, and tunnels looked as if they had not been cleaned

for months. Worse than all was the mode of pulling up the train with a

jerk, which, at each stopping-place, almost invariably threw the

alighting passengers into their fellow-travellers’ laps.

Resolved now to ask her way at every step, she contrived, by minutely

following directions, to find and to cross Finsbury Circus, whence she

was quickly in Moorgate Street, and at once discovered the City and

South London Railway Station. Continuing to seek information for the

Islington lift, the Islington platform, and the Islington train, she

would not budge an inch until she had been thoroughly posted up. Once

more in a Tube car, and by way of Old Street, and the City Road, she at

last arrived at the “Angel,” and felt as if she had indeed reached the

gates of heaven!

Milner Street was close by, and she was soon at her aunt’s house, but,

alas! not to breakfast, for it was nearing twelve o’clock. That

relation, an impatient woman, tired of waiting, had gone out for the

day, and had left no message! This was too much for the little woman, it

was the last straw, and flinging herself on the sofa, she thought

sympathetically of how in the past

“A north-country maid up to London had strayed,

Although with her nature it did not agree;

She wept and she sighed, and she bitterly cried,

I wish once again in the north I could be.”

Quickly she returned to Shepherd’s Bush, _viâ_ the Bank and the Twopenny

Tube, in the latter finding a totally different class of people from

those she had travelled with in the morning, and plenty of room for

everybody. She went back home the next day, sacrificing her seat for the

Coronation procession; and she registered a vow that if ever she came to

London again she would study closely the route for any proposed

expedition as carefully as if she were on an “unaccompanied” Continental

tour.

She kept her vow; and, I believe, eventually, her “bump of locality”

became considerably developed.

The moral of this practically true sketch is, that in view of the

complicated system of metropolitan Tubes and Undergrounds, no one

without an experienced escort, unless endowed with a talent for

locality, can hope to get about London without trouble and difficulty.

In fact, a _Metropolitan Bradshaw_, or _Metropolitan Guide to

Underground London_ is urgently needed.

CHAPTER IX

_LONDON’S TANGLED TUBES_

“Tangled in the fold of dire necessity.”--MILTON.

THE TANGLE

To inflict upon the readers of this book a map of existing and projected

railways in London would be cruel; and for them to try to master it

would be torture worthy of the Inquisition, with loss of reason as the

inevitable result.

Roughly speaking, the lines above and below ground stream inwards from

the outskirts, after the fashion of the tramways; with this marked

difference that there is a direct communication from east to west by the

Central Railway, and an Inner Circle route engirdling the middle portion

of Greater London.

As with the tramways, the routes of nearly all these lines appear to

have been adopted happy-go-luckily. “Here are Highgate, Walthamstow,

Beckenham, Kew, Hendon,” say the promoters; “what we have to do is to

make a railway from these suburbs, and, somehow or other, get as near

the metropolitan centres as possible, and dump down our passengers. The

problem of intercommunication is not our business. We leave that to

others.” So the lines of the various companies meander away, often by

the most indirect routes, and finally arrive more or less near their

objective destinations, Charing Cross, or the Bank of England.

If Napoleon the Great with prophetic glance could have foreseen London

linked to distant villages in every direction, these hamlets growing

into towns, and as population increased, being irresistibly drawn into

Greater London’s maelstrom of brick and mortar, even he would have been

appalled by the problem of how to give ready means of access from one

part to the other. Anticipating railways and electric tubes, he would

probably, with the marvellous fertility of resource that distinguished

him, have formulated a plan whereby a given circular space in the

metropolis would be divided into sections, a mile square, with a station

in the centre and at each corner, so that all within that area would

have access to a railway, at no point more than half a mile distant, the

tube railways below the surface, and others above, converging at a great

central depôt. On reaching the limit of the circle, the lines (that

would necessarily cross under and over one another) would, by means of

loops, return and keep up a continued circulation of traffic from rim to

rim of the circle, which, as the city grew bigger and bigger, could be

enlarged, and the lines extended, the process continuing _ad infinitum_.

This, of course, would have been an impossibility; the characteristic

British love of half measures and of temporising being opposed to any

really comprehensive and imperial scheme, and local jealousy would not

have tolerated the necessarily masterful, though wise, domination of a

One Man Power in carrying out the plan.

Therefore the great railways and the suburban railways were allowed to

do pretty much as they liked, as seen in the entire absence of system in

approaching London, and in dealing with its vast traffic.

To meet the difficulty a central station has often been mooted, and much

good would ensue therefrom if it accommodated _all_ the lines.

Recently, in connection with the Great Western Railway, the idea has

been revived, and the site of Christ’s Hospital suggested. In fact, it

is an open secret that overture upon overture has been made on the

subject, but the enormous price demanded by the old school authorities

has always been the bugbear.

The feasibility of an Inner Circle Tube, however, linking together all

the lines, with ramifications to serve the suburbs, worked jointly under

a pooling arrangement by the various companies, has commended itself to

certain experts.

It is true that four of the great trunk lines are already connected by

subways with the Inner Circle Railway--the Great Eastern at Liverpool

Street; the Great Western at Praed Street; the London, Brighton, and

South Coast at Victoria; and the South Eastern and Chatham at Cannon

Street, Blackfriars, and Victoria. The Brighton Company has already a

subway connection between London Bridge and the City and South London

Tube Station there, and the Mansion House subway will by-and-by be

similarly connected with the City and South London Bank Station.

Also there are the purely suburban lines to be considered, such as the

South London Railway, worked by the Brighton Company; the Metropolitan

Extension, a part of the Chatham Company’s local system; the West London

Railway, which gives a north-to-south connection at Chelsea for several

companies; the Hammersmith and City Railway; the Hampstead Junction

Railway (from Willesden to Tottenham); and the local services of the

London and North Western; the Great Northern Railway (already committed

to a tube); and the Midland Railway, which, with the Great Northern,

has access to the south of London, _viâ_ Ludgate Hill.

But the matter now engaging public attention is not Subways, but

Tubes--how to disentangle the different schemes, and evolve order out of

chaos.

The Tubes open for traffic are the Waterloo and City Railway; the City

and South London Railway; Clapham Common to the “Angel,” Islington; and

the Central London from the Bank to Shepherd’s Bush. While those in

progress more or less advanced, are the Great Northern and City Railway;

the Brompton and Piccadilly Circus Railway; the Bank to Finsbury Park;

the Baker Street and Waterloo Railway; Paddington to Waterloo, and

thence _viâ_ St. George’s Circus, Southwark, to the Elephant and Castle.

All last session members of the House of Commons were, so to speak,

overwhelmed with Tubes.

Tubes to the right of them,

Tubes to the left of them,

Tubes in front of them,

Volley’d and thundered!

But the Select Committees fared worse, the task before them being even

more arduous. There were promoters who sought for powers to construct

Tubes to cross and recross proposed and existing lines, and even to bore

parallel with others, while some wanted to create isolated and

disconnected sections, leading apparently nowhere. Petitions and

protests against the various schemes poured in from innumerable sources;

from every quarter petitions in favour were also laid down at their

feet. Truly, the members of the Committees found that of making many

Tubes (as of books) there was no end, and that much railway promoting

was a weariness of the flesh.

Long and loud waged the conflict of the various aspirants to bore

through the foundations of London. The smaller promoters’ attention

finally became fixed upon the financial and legislative duel of two

magnates, each representing a similar and important scheme for joining

together the existing unlinked metropolitan tube lines.

It was as if through some narrow gorge leading to desirable pasturage,

the smaller denizens of wood and forest tumultuously endeavoured to

force a passage, and falling out by the way, their strife was suddenly

arrested to watch the single combat of two rival antlered monarchs of

the glen, who fought to the death to obtain the sole right of way.

Out of the Parliamentary hurly-burly emerged triumphant the well-known

Yerkes group with its comprehensive scheme (the first in the list given

below) the only very important one sanctioned.

Thus closed the session of 1902, and in the Railway Committee Rooms, for

a time at least, the

“Fiery fight is heard no more,

And the storm has ceased to blow.”

The following Tube Railways were authorised:--Brompton and Piccadilly

Circus Railway (Acts 1897, 1899, 1902), that of 1902 authorising _inter

alia_ its amalgamation with the Great Northern and Strand. The Charing

Cross, Euston, and Hampstead Railway to be continued to Edgware by a

previously authorised line (Acts 1893 to 1900 and 1902). The City and

Brixton Railway, to cross the Thames independently of the City and South

London Tube, and to have stations at St. George’s Circus, Southwark, and

at Kennington Oval (Act 1897), with a new City station communicating

with the South London Railway (electric). The Great Northern and City

Railway, Finsbury Park to the Bank. The Metropolitan District Railway

(Act 1897), a Deep-level Electric to work with the Brompton and

Piccadilly Tube. The North West London Railway (Act 1899) from the

Marble Arch to Cricklewood.

THE ROYAL COMMISSION

For some time past it had been made clear that no Select Committee of

the Houses of Parliament, however efficient, could be expected to cope

with the problem of metropolitan combined tubes, tramways and vehicular

street traffic; and in view of the probability of other Tube Bills being

promoted during the session of 1903, it was strongly urged upon the

Government to consent to a Royal Commission on the matter.

So, before the meeting of this year’s Parliament, a Royal Commission was

appointed with a most comprehensive programme of arduous work.

General satisfaction seems to have been expressed with the composition

of the Commission. No better chairman could have been found than Sir

David M. Barbour, whose acquaintance with official inquiries is probably

greater than that of anyone else in Great Britain, he having been

associated with several Royal Commissions. Special knowledge bearing on

the peculiar problems to be solved, characterises most of the members.

Sir John Wolfe Barry is perhaps the best-known consulting railway

engineer in the country, having acted in this capacity to many of the

leading railway companies, and, in 1901, having taken part in the

inquiry respecting vibration on tube railways. Sir George Trout Bartley

has represented North Islington in the House of Commons for nearly

eighteen years, and from lifelong residence in London has a wide

knowledge of its needs. Earl Cawdor has been Chairman of the Great

Western Railway for the last eight years. Viscount Cobham has been a

Railway Commissioner since 1891, and prior to that, was temporarily

Deputy-Chairman of the Great Western Railway. Sir Joseph Dimsdale, being

a banker, has had wide experience as a financier. Ex-Lord Mayor, and

City Chamberlain, he represents in the House of Commons the City of

London, which is vitally concerned in the question of efficient transit.

Mr. G. S. Gibb, the General Manager of the North Eastern Railway for the

past twelve years, is a railway expert of great experience. As Permanent

Secretary of the Board of Trade, Sir Francis J. S. Hopwood has a

specially trained mind, and an intimate acquaintance with railway

matters, having been formerly Secretary of the Railway Department. Mr.

C. S. Murdoch, C.B., has been for many years in the Government service,

and has acted, since 1896, as Assistant Under-Secretary of the Home

Department. Sir John P. Dickson-Poynder is a member for the Chippenham

Division of Wiltshire, and represents St. George’s, Hanover Square, at

the County Council. Sir Robert T. Reid, K.C., member for Dumfries since

1886, was Attorney-General in the last Liberal Government, and may be

regarded as the official representative of the Opposition on the

Commission. Lord Ribblesdale, a member of the London County Council, was

Chairman of the Joint Committee of the Lords and Commons on Tube

Railways in 1901.

Soon after the appointment of the Commission it was suggested that the

labour would be considerably lightened if the subject of pedestrian and

vehicular traffic included in their programme were eliminated or, at any

rate, indefinitely postponed, and attention concentrated upon Tubes and

Railways, making--as they have the power to do--an interim report; and

thus avert disastrous delay in the realisation of the Tube Schemes

before the Parliament of 1903.

Early in the session a somewhat significant announcement was made in the

House of Commons, in reference to these schemes; only two of which were

very important, viz., the Central London’s proposal to complete the

circle; and the North-East London Railway scheme, which (if passed) will

embrace twenty-two miles--nine being in tubes--tapping the traffic

between the City and Leyton and Walthamstow, whose combined population

is over two hundred thousand people.

The following is the statement made on the 2nd of March by Mr. Jeffreys,

as Deputy-Chairman of Committees, who said he had had the advantage of a

conference with the Chairman of Committees in the House of Lords and the

President of the Board of Trade, and they had come to the conclusion

that certain of the bills connected with London traffic ought to be

postponed until the result of the Commission dealing with this matter

had been reported. The deep-level railways which they thought ought to

await the completion of this inquiry were the Central London Railway;

Great Northern, Piccadilly, and Brompton (New Lines and Extensions)

Bill; North-West London (Marble Arch to Victoria) Railway Bill; Clapham

Junction to Marble Arch Railway (Nos. 1 and 2) Bill; Metropolitan

District Railway Works Bill. There were certain other Bills which they

thought might go to Committees, viz.: Charing Cross, Euston, and

Hampstead Railway Bill; Great Northern, Piccadilly, and Brompton Railway

(Various Powers) Bill; Baker Street and Waterloo Railway Transfer Bill;

and the City and North-East Suburban Electric Railway Bill.

There were, besides, certain other railway measures which were doubtful,

and these, they thought, ought to be held over until the Chairman of

Committees of the House of Lords, the President of the Board of Trade,

and himself had considered them. These Bills were the City and South

London Railway (Angel and Islington) Bill, and the Metropolitan District

Railway (Various Powers Bill).

But the Royal Commission is, after all, only a temporary expedient; and

the question remains, as to what shall be the Governing Power of

London’s railway traffic; for it must be taken for granted that both the

City Corporation and the London County Council frankly admit that the

underground locomotion of the metropolis has become so complicated that

the general supervision of some great public department is necessary. Is

it to be the London County Council, the Board of Trade, some new body

resembling the Light Railways Commission, or a joint committee of

members of both Houses of Parliament, appointed each session, to

consider all questions affecting locomotion in or near London?

Here we are reminded that the London County Council has been considering

whether or not to apply for parliamentary powers to take over the burden

of linking together the various districts of London by a series of

tubes. A colossal undertaking, involving, it is said, a capital of fifty

millions!

Whether it be advisable for the Council, in addition to its other heavy

responsibilities, to extend its municipal trading on so vast a scale, is

doubtful; for it has the ratepayers to consider.

If it be the fact that mercantile enterprise cannot grapple with the

task, then there would be good and sufficient reason for the Council or

the Government to attempt it. But private capital is generally

obtainable for a really promising scheme.

Besides, such gigantic undertakings obviously require men of good

business capacity and considerable railway experience to devote their

time exclusively to the work. One would think that county councillors

(as such), efficient as they may be, have already as much work as they

can readily get through, from one week’s end to another.

CHAPTER X

_LONDON’S LATEST AND LONGEST TUBE_

“Green pastures and Piccadilly.”--W. BLACK.

Sanctioned by the Legislature as one of the most comprehensive schemes

laid before it last year for linking together existing underground, as

well as trunk, lines, the Great Northern, Piccadilly, and Brompton

Railway, now under construction, has attracted such universal attention,

and traverses such hitherto exclusive quarters, that it deserves more

than a passing reference.

From a traveller’s point of view, the effect of this new railway will be

far-reaching. Dwellers near District Railway termini, such as Wimbledon,

New Cross, Bow Road, South Harrow, Hounslow Barracks, Richmond, and

intermediate stations, will have, by means of exchange--at Earl’s Court

Station with the Metropolitan District Railway; at Gloucester Road and

South Kensington Station with the Metropolitan and Metropolitan District

Railway; at Piccadilly Circus Station with the Baker Street and Waterloo

Railway; at Cranbourn Street Station with the Charing Cross, Euston, and

Hampstead Railway; and at King’s Cross and Finsbury Park Stations with

the Great Northern Railway--ready access to practically all centres and

quarters of our big city; its own immediate objective from Earl’s Court

being Finsbury Park, a distance of 7½ miles. It is similar in

construction to the Central. The cars, built at Loughborough, will

resemble those of the new Inner Circle, and the driving force will come

from the Power House at Chelsea.

Truly, under pleasant scenes will the new Tube be carried--as

fashionable, romantic, and historical a route as any in London. Here is

Earl’s Court, where, in the midst of market gardens far away from town,

once stood John Hunter’s house, where the great anatomist kept a

menagerie of wild beasts to experiment upon, and in the dead of night

boiled down the body of O’Brien, the Irish giant, to obtain the

skeleton, which now adorns the museum of the College of Surgeons. The

well-known Edmund Tattersall lived close by for many years at Coleherne

Court, on the site of one of either Fairfax’s or Lord Essex’s redoubts

(they appear to have had a good many), thrown up after the battle of

Brentford, when the victorious Royalists were expected to cross the

river (which they never did) and besiege London.

Gloucester Road, the next station, recalls the fact that when the

District Railway came there, it was still a mere lane with hawthorn

hedges, a blacksmith’s forge somewhere near, while pleasant paths right

and left led to orchards, in the midst of which was St. Jude’s Church,

so famous later on for its fashionable congregation and its eloquent

preacher, the Rev. Dr. Forrest, now Dean of Worcester.

From Gloucester Road the Tube runs under pleasant Stanhope Gardens and

part of Harrington Road with its fine mansions, to South Kensington. The

ground about the Hoop and Toy Tavern close by was, so tradition says,

designated in the draft Parliamentary Bill for the Great Western

Railway terminus. At that time the site was sufficiently countrified to

satisfy those who would banish railway stations to Jericho or to the

uttermost verge of London, and remained so for a long time; and I have

been told by an old Bromptonian that he has seen a covey of partridges

put up where the Natural History Museum now stands.

At this point the new Tube--leaving its course parallel with, but at a

far deeper level than, the District Railway--proceeds unaccompanied to

Piccadilly, and, so to say, enters the Brompton Road at the Oratory of

St. Philip Neri, formerly a very plain brick edifice erected by the

Oratorian Fathers, who had begun their good work on a humble scale in

King William Street, Charing Cross, in a building subsequently occupied

by Woodin, the ventriloquist, and later on by Toole, as his own peculiar

theatre.

The present conspicuous basilica is at last completed, all but the

towers. Adjoining it, down an avenue of trees, recalling the approach to

Shakespeare’s last resting-place, is Holy Trinity Church, Brompton,

reminiscent of Dr. Irons, its vicar, who ultimately became Rector of St.

Mary Woolnoth, beneath which is the City station of the City and South

London Electric Railway.

Brompton Square is close by, associated by many of us with a once

popular song, “Ada with the golden hair,” composed and sung by G. W.

Moore, of the Christy Minstrels. In this Square have dwelt many actors

and actresses: Wigan, Buckstone, Robert Keeley, etc.; and also Shirley

Brooks. At one corner used to be a house standing a little back from the

road, occupied by an eccentric individual whose craze was to have

several clocks in every room, and the task of keeping them in order

encouraged a watch-and-clock-maker to settle down in a small shop next

door. Another feature of his craze was to present a watch of some kind

to every lady he knew; so that his neighbour must have done a fair

business. A bank now occupies this site, and the author recollects

watching the strong-room being built deep down in the gravelly soil

peculiar to South Kensington. Next door will be located the

unpretentious Brompton Station of the new railway. An official of the

bank was heard to remark facetiously that he trusted the Tube would not

bore into the strong-room aforesaid--a new possibility and grievance to

be duly noted.

Directly underneath Brompton Road goes London’s latest Tube, passing

“Harrod’s,” the most palatial General Store in the metropolis, if not in

the world. It originated some years ago in a narrow little shop, where

good tea, excellent butter, and, rumour says, jam made by Mr. Harrod’s

mother, were the chief articles sold to the customers, the bulk of whom

were of the working-class.

Now Knightsbridge is reached, in olden times called Kingsbridge, when it

was represented by a bridge only (on the site of the modern Albert

Gate), built by Edward the Confessor over a brook, or bourn, rising,

like the Tybourn and the Oldbourn, in the Hampstead Hills, and flowing

thence to the Thames.

No part of London has so completely changed in appearance as this; lofty

modern buildings having taken the place of small old-fashioned houses.

These improvements culminate at Sloane Street, where anyone approaching

town by way of Kensington, meets the first of the numerous metropolitan

“rond-points,” surrounded by mansions and shops so tall as to put into

the shade the French Embassy and the houses at Albert Gate, which for

many years were considered the highest in town. At the equestrian

statue of Field-Marshal Lord Strathnairn, four thoroughfares

converge--Kensington Road, Brompton Road, Sloane Street, and St.

George’s Place--pouring around it a continual stream of traffic day and

night. Three of these thoroughfares are perfect paradises to ladies who

delight in such alluring shops as Harrod’s, Harvey Nichols and Co., and

Woolland Brothers, whose prolonged and magnificent frontages are

unequalled in Modern Babylon.

A few doors from the “rond-point” in Brompton Road is a Tube station;

and the workmen, as they bore close to the triangular grass-covered

enclosure in front of Tattersall’s, are probably unaware that a

comparatively slight deviation would take them through a pit beneath the

enclosure, which, tradition avers, was used, during the Great Plague of

London, for the dead. It is likely enough; for centuries ago there

existed, a little to the east of Albert Gate, a hospital belonging to

the Dean and Chapter of Westminster, which in 1665 was given up for the

use of infected patients; and as this little piece of ground has never

been disturbed, it probably was originally the burying-place attached

to the hospital, and was converted into a plague-pit.

A house close to Hyde Park Court was once occupied by Charles Reade, the

novelist. At a house close by (long since pulled down), Horace Smith,

joint-author of _Rejected Addresses_, lived from 1810 to 1818, and drove

himself daily to and from the City--he was then a stockbroker--in a

vehicle called a “whisky.” A little farther on, where the London and

County Bank is dwarfed by the late Sir Herbert Naylor Leyland’s great

mansion, used to stand the “Fox and Bull,” a quaint old tavern dating

back to Queen Elizabeth’s time, and a favourite resort of Sir Joshua

Reynolds, George Morland, and other painters. Holy Trinity Chapel, St.

George’s Place, no longer wedged in between two public-houses, replaces

an old church where the celebrated Prime Minister--then plain Robert

Walpole--was married in 1700 to a Lord Mayor’s daughter, who became the

mother of Sir Horace Walpole. In St. George’s Place, where it faces the

Park--surely one of the most desirable of situations, the first

intimation that we are approaching “Green pastures and Piccadilly”--is

the Hyde Park Corner Station of the new railway, next door to No. 8,

conspicuous as the residence of the Baden-Powell family, on the site of

which house, in an old-fashioned tenement, lived for many years John

Liston, the comedian identified with the character of “Paul Pry.” Being

freehold--a unique feature in the neighbourhood--this small plot of

ground has cost the Company dear. It had to pay £30,750 for its

acquisition.

It is hard to believe that at this point London once terminated,

Lanesborough House, where St. George’s Hospital stands, being described

in Pennant’s days as a “country mansion,” and thus it remained until

little more than a century ago. While in the time of Charles the Second,

near Hamilton Place was an inn, bearing the sign of the “Hercules

Pillars,” signifying that, like the “First and Last House” at Land’s

End, no habitation existed beyond it.

All sorts and conditions of people, mostly distinguished, live, and have

lived, along this part of the route, which has its Tube stations at Down

Street and Dover Street. There is Apsley House, and next to it Baron

Rothschild’s mansion. At No. 1 Hamilton

[Illustration: FIG. 14. THE WESTERN APPROACH TO PICCADILLY.]

Place lived the great Lord Chancellor Eldon. From 139, Piccadilly (Lord

Glenesk’s) Lady Byron, after one of her quarrels with the poet, fled

with her infant daughter. At Nos. 138 and 139, formerly one building,

the Marquis of Queensbury (the notorious “Old Q.”) used, when an

octogenarian, to sit at a certain window for hours, and ogle the passing

fair sex. Gloucester House adjoining, is the residence of the Duke of

Cambridge, occupied, when it was Elgin House, by the Earl of Elgin, who

brought over to England the famous marbles that bear his name. Nearly

opposite Down Street, on the park side of Piccadilly, stands a curious

reminder that once upon a time, parcels and packages of all kinds had to

be conveyed all over London, not by train or by Carter Paterson’s speedy

vans, but on the shoulders of stalwart porters. It is a “bulk,”

replacing an old timber one. A “bulk,” it may be explained, is a kind of

shelf supported by two posts at a convenient height for the bearers of

burdens to temporarily dispose of them and rest awhile. On the site of

No. 106 (the St. James’s Club) was formerly the “Greyhound,” a very old

inn, which, with the “White Horse” close by, and the “Half Moon,” a

little further on, was a favourite pulling-up place for the numerous

carriers, tranters, and market-gardeners who were incessantly coming

from the country to town; for Piccadilly was one of London’s great

highways westward. In a house (now a club) at the corner of White Horse

Street, Sir Walter Scott sometimes stayed when in town. Cambridge House

(the Naval and Military Club) recalls Lord Palmerston and the notable

political receptions of his accomplished wife. At the corner of Clarges

Street, where lived Edmund Kean and also Lady Hamilton, is the Turf

Club, and at No. 84 the Imperial Service Club, the last of Piccadilly’s

line of clubs that, commencing with The Bachelors’, at the corner of

Hamilton Place, forms a kind of approach to the real club-land of St.

James’s Street and Pall Mall. Bath House, at the corner of Bolton

Street, was the residence of the late millionaire, Baron Hirsch. No. 80,

Piccadilly, and No. 1, Stratton Street together form the town house of

the Baroness Burdett-Coutts, and it was from No. 80 that her father, Sir

Francis Burdett, M.P., was, in 1810, amidst serious rioting, taken to

the Tower for having made use of bad language in the House of Commons.

From the roof can be obtained a splendid view of the Westminster and

Pimlico district, across the Park, rightly called “Green,” with its

beautiful stretches of turf and graceful trees, and far away to the

Surrey Hills and the Crystal Palace.

Devonshire House, seen through its fine old iron gates--brought here

from Chiswick--is plain enough externally, but its saloons are very

handsome, and here the lovely Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, reigned

as Queen of Fashion long ago. Arlington Street reminds us of the Marquis

of Salisbury, of Earl Nelson, who lodged here, and of Sir Horace Walpole

and his father. In Albemarle Street, Percy Bysshe Shelley once had

quarters at Cooke’s Hotel.

The Tube now carries its passengers ninety feet below the beautiful

Piccadilly shops, past St. James’s Street and Bond Street, the

Burlington Arcade and Burlington House, past the Egyptian Hall, past

Fortnum and Mason’s--so universally associated with hampers, long-necked

bottles, and race-meetings; past the Albany, where lived Byron, Lytton,

and Lord Macaulay; past the Prince’s Restaurant, and its neighbour, St.

James’s Church, where there are some splendid specimens of Grinling

Gibbons’ wood-carving, and where, in 1762, occurred a singular thing. In

some unexplained manner the vaults caught fire, and two hundred coffins

with their inmates underwent an uncontemplated process of cremation;

past St. James’s Hall opposite (eventually to be enlarged and converted

to purposes other than harmony only). And now Piccadilly Circus, where

six roads meet, and where, next to Spiers and Pond’s Restaurant, is the

Piccadilly Circus Station of this, the longest Tube. Subways should

certainly be arranged for access to this station, to avoid the very

dangerous crossings from each of the six roads. Why does not the London

County Council, emulating the City Fathers and their Mansion House

subterranean passages, undertake this beneficent work in the West End?

We are now in the region of music-halls, theatres, cafés, dining-places,

and Scott’s, the famous shell-fish shop.

“What is the origin of the name _Piccadilly_?” is a question asked again

and again. It is difficult to decide. Was it from the ruffs called

“peckadils” (from the Spanish _pica_), whose stiffened points were like

diminutive spearheads, worn by the mashers or dudes of the early

Carolean period, who gathered here at a gaming-house, Piccadilly Hall?

Or was it, as Pennant thought, from the “piccadills” (cakes) which may

have been sold in the surrounding fields? Who in the year 1903 can

decide?

Here I pause. The rest of the new Tube’s route to Stamford Hill is

useful but prosaic, and none of the remaining ten stations, except

Cranbourn Street, Covent Garden, and Holborn are surrounded with any

remarkably interesting associations, either historical or modern.

From South Kensington to Piccadilly this railway is certainly an

aristocratic one. Daintily-clad ladies will, doubtless, use it largely

for shopping and paying visits. The rank and fashion of London will

patronise it. Countesses, marchionesses, even duchesses, may condescend

to travel by it; nay, royalty may even give it a trial! Nobody would be

surprised to see its booking-office æsthetically designed; the officials

well-groomed and decorous as bank clerks; the lifts luxuriously

upholstered with seats for all; the _cars-de-luxe_ (for which an extra

charge would be made) beautifully decorated, warmed in winter and

delightfully cooled during summer heats, with fresh flowers provided,

and perfumes sprayed at intervals to remove the least trace of bad

smell; copies of the _Court Guide_ and the most fashionable magazines at

the disposal of the passengers; umbrella and parasol stands; special and

comfortable quarters for pet dogs; the smoking-cars models of elegance

and comfort; and the guards’ uniform scarlet and gold.

Seriously, however, is there or is there not, “one little rift within

the lute”? Will the size of the tunnels--11½ feet in diameter--suffice

for maintaining an equable and pure atmosphere throughout the year?

Doubtless it will; for special attention has been given to this matter

by the distinguished consulting engineer, and inlets for fresh, and

up-cast shafts for foul air, together with fans worked by machinery,

will be liberally provided.

CHAPTER XI

_ELECTRIC TRAMWAYS GENERALLY_

“And I have taken away your horses.”--AMOS iv. 10.

HISTORY OF TRAMWAYS

Nearly fifty years ago there arrived in this country an enterprising

citizen of the United States bearing the name of George Francis Train,

with whom will always be associated the first attempt to introduce

tramways into Great Britain.

Like many other innovators, Train was ahead of his time, and after

vainly struggling against indifference, and, in London, against the

strongest opposition voiced by the Chief Commissioner of Works, he

returned home a wiser and a sadder man, having failed to launch his

great enterprise.

Not unreasonably he complained that his system had not been given a fair

trial, and that his nationality was against him, pointing out that in

Ireland he had, on the contrary, received sympathy and encouragement

from the fact that he was an American.

The truth was, his ideas were immature, and his tram-lines utterly

unsuited to the street traffic of great cities.

His first attempt was at Birkenhead, in 1860; and three years later he

laid down a line, four miles long, from Hanley to Burslem, in

Staffordshire, and also a short one at Darlington. In the year 1861 he

constructed a line from the Marble Arch along the Uxbridge Road, and

another from Westminster Bridge to Kennington Park. The track was

ballasted, not paved, and the macadam very soon “rutted” on each side of

the rail; but the worst feature was that the tread of the rail being an

inch below the road surface, the wheels of vehicles were seriously

injured and sometimes wrenched clean off as they endeavoured to leave

the lines.

A tremendous agitation ensued against the tramway system. Train’s rails

were compulsorily taken up, and his ideas were dismissed as

impracticable.

Yet the bread had been cast upon the waters, destined to be found much

later on, but not by George Francis Train. For ten years after the

Birkenhead line was laid down, tramways remained in a very primitive

condition, the sole aim being to obtain a smooth track, and so lessen

the wear and tear caused by the uneven macadam. The rolling-stock was

crude in the extreme, and the rails were fastened down to longitudinal

sleepers, so that the spikes invariably worked up, but this defect was

remedied when steel girders came into use. The trams were, of course,

drawn by horses, for until 1880 no better means of traction appears to

have been thought of. Nobody was a bit interested in the tramways, and

carriage-folk detested them, so they were banished to the outskirts of

the City and “over the water.”

The West End recognised them not, except to sign petitions against their

introduction. The “poor man’s street railway,” it affirmed, must keep

its proper place in the south, the far north, and the far east of

London.

It was left to private enterprise to run the lines, and practically

four companies--the North Metropolitan, the London Street Tramways, the

South London Company, and the London Tramways Company--monopolised the

business, there being no enterprising London County Council to compete

with.

VARIOUS METHODS OF HAULAGE

For a decade--up to 1890--all kinds of improved methods of haulage were

tried: compressed air, coiled springs, underground cables (a well-known

example of which was the Highgate line, which was always breaking down),

and, lastly, gas traction and steam traction.

To all these methods there are serious objections. Horse traction is

expensive, besides being distressingly trying to the animals themselves.

It is necessary to keep up a large stud for each car, and the horses

when idle are eating their heads off. Their fullest speed with the heavy

cars is necessarily low. Starting is a slow process, and at the best the

rate of progress (including stoppages) does not exceed four miles an

hour.

Compressed air and coiled springs may both be consigned to pigeon-holes,

labelled respectively “doubtful” and “impossible,” there being of the

former scarcely half a dozen examples in Great Britain, though in

America it is said to have worked well and on an extensive scale.

Cable traction has many advantages, and for a long time was successfully

adopted in America, but is now abandoned. With the funicular system, in

vogue in Edinburgh, Birmingham, Paris, and Melbourne, travellers have

long been familiar. Where a large number of cars are employed, it has

the advantage of cheapness in working, and the machinery does not easily

get out of order. But the initial cost is very heavy, and it is not

suitable for complicated lines, or for tramways with several branches;

and therefore extensions, unless straight, are almost impracticable,

though it is superior to all others, save that of electricity, for very

severe gradients. As the cable moves at a uniform rate, a car can

neither vary its speed nor reverse its course. Then there is a

difficulty in dealing with the gas and water-pipes during construction

(that is, if they are near the surface), and the conduit forms a

receptacle for street refuse, and becomes insanitary. But the chief

defect is that three-fourths of the total power required to haul the

cars is absorbed in driving the cable.

On a small scale, and with but little success, gas traction has been

recently tried. There is a difficulty in starting the engines, therefore

they have to work continuously, which causes the unpleasant noise

familiarised to us by petrol-driven motor-cars when standing still.

There is a decided smell from the “exhaust” of the engine; the vibration

is considerable; and, as at present designed, the cars cannot mount a

moderately steep hill.

Steam traction has been in use for some time, but has not improved, and

is not popular. Great wear and tear of the track is caused by the weight

of the locomotive, and the public object to the long intervals of

service, consequent upon the necessity, for economical reasons, of using

large cars. Steam involves sulphurous gases and general dirtiness,

besides the apprehension, fanciful or real, of an occasional “blow up.”

VARIOUS METHODS OF ELECTRIC TRAMWAY TRACTION

Dismissing all these systems, we turn to electricity, as admittedly the

best agent for tramway traction, and, until some marvellous discovery

displaces it as a force, likely to remain and to become universally

adopted.

Blackpool was first in the field with an electric tramway in 1883.

Several other provincial districts followed suit, including Bristol and

Stockton-on-Tees. London, in 1900, welcomed the completion of Mr. J.

Clifton Robinson’s great scheme for electrifying that portion of the

London United Tramways running between Hammersmith and Kew.

The year 1903 sees metropolitan and suburban electric trams in every

direction; while in the provinces they will soon cover the face of the

land, so extraordinarily rapid has been their acceptance. On every hand

signs are evinced of the direct influence upon the general prosperity,

comfort, and pleasure of all classes of people by a cheap and rapid

electric tramway service.

The electric system admits of an easy extension of routes, and is of all

systems the simplest to work. The cars can be readily backed or diverted

in any direction. They are roomy, clean, well lighted and ventilated,

and, if necessary, can be heated; the seats are comfortable; and the

speed is double that of horses, while, without any fuss, gradients of 1

in 8 can be tackled. Of its popularity none can doubt, especially in hot

weather, when exhausted town-dwellers swarm on the roof of the cars for

a breath of fresh air as they travel merrily along at the rate of twelve

miles an hour.

Existing tramways can be adapted to this system with rapidity, and all

experts bear testimony to the fact that electric haulage is

comparatively so cheap, and the development of traffic on its adoption

so great, that horse traction has no chance against it.

There are four kinds of electric-tramway traction which, though

apparently rather puzzling, are readily explained. These are the

Conduit; the Surface Contact; the Overhead (or trolley); in each of

which the current is conveyed to the line--as in an electric

railway--from a power house; and the Accumulator, or Self-contained Car,

the motive power being obtained from storage batteries carried on the

car itself, and these supply the current direct to the motor on the car.

[Illustration: FIG. 15. TRAM-CAR IN PARIS EQUIPPED FOR COMBINED OVERHEAD

TROLLEY AND SURFACE CONTACT SYSTEM

_By permission of the_ _Dolter Electric Traction Co., Ltd., London_]

In the conduit system the main conductors (or feed-wire), always in this

country placed underground, are carried in a conduit or tube under the

track, which has a narrow longitudinal slit on its upper surface level

with the road. Through this slit passes a bracket carried by the car in

such a manner as to make contact with the two conduit-conductors. The

objections to this system are the heavy cost of construction, its

liability to derangement from floods, the expense of cleaning the

conduits, and its tendency to accumulate filth.

The closed conduit, or surface contact system, consists of a series of

plates or studs placed along the track a few feet apart and flush with

the road, and insulated from each other. Under ordinary circumstances

these are disconnected with the conductor, which is laid entirely below

the surface, but when a car passes over them they become, by means of

switches, automatically connected with it, so that the current can be

conveyed through them to the car motors. In other words, the studs are

“alive” while the car is over them, and “dead” as soon as it has passed.

This is a very practicable method, and in certain cases is preferable to

the open conduit. Defects, however, there are, but the Dolter apparatus

claims to have overcome them, and it is greatly in its favour that the

system has been successfully worked in Paris for more than two years. It

has the merit of readily lending itself to a combination with the

overhead trolley system.

Of all systems, by far the best known to the public is that of

“overhead,” recognised immediately by the tall iron poles inseparable

from its adoption. Ninety-five per cent. of the world’s electric

tramways are worked on the overhead principle. The distribution of

electric energy is by means of a wire, called the trolley wire, upheld

by insulated brackets on poles twenty feet above the ground, along the

entire track, which is divided into sections, each section taking its

current from the main conductor-wire, which is laid underground, through

the iron poles. Should any one section of the trolley wires meet with

mishap, only the cars working on that section are stopped; those on the

remaining divisions, having an independent source of current, continue

to run

[Illustration: FIG. 16. CROSS LANE JUNCTION, SALFORD. THE LARGEST AND

MOST COMPLICATED OVERHEAD TROLLEY CROSSING IN THE KINGDOM

_By permission of_ _Geo. Hill & Co., Manchester_]

without interruption. At the upper end is a small deeply grooved wheel

which, by means of springs at the base of the trolley pole, is pressed

against the under side of the trolley wire overhead, and in that

position remains as the car proceeds. From the wire the electric current

passes through the grooved wheel and down the trolley pole to the

motors, of which there is one at each end of the car.

In all three systems the motor itself is suspended from the axle, which

it turns; and the armature of the motor is parallel to the axle and

nearest to the centre of the car. On the end of the armature is a small

cogwheel which gears into the teeth of a larger wheel keyed to the axle,

and this turns round the wheels of the car. A coiled spring supports the

field-magnet of the motor, and when the driver turns the lever on to the

top of the controller (which is a high box in front of each platform

containing a series of wires connected with the motor), and switches on

the current, the motor is lifted up on the first revolution of the

armature, the coiled spring takes up the motion of the motor, and

prevents the car starting with a jerk. The current, when done with,

returns to the source of supply by the ordinary tram rails, which are

specially connected at the joints for this purpose. It is maintained

that for cheapness of construction, simplicity of operation, reliability

in action, and flexibility in adaptation, this method is superior to all

others.

There was at one time a certain objection to it on æsthetic grounds. The

earlier examples, when clumsy wooden posts and festoons of wire

obstructed the view and seemed to choke up the street, undoubtedly

justified the protest against the “overhead”; but now that slender iron

poles, ornamental rather than otherwise, and, in some cases, rosettes

attached to the houses, are used for the suspension of the trolley wire,

people have become reconciled to the appearance of the thoroughfares,

and no longer object to the apparatus.

One more system, an ideal one, remains to be considered. It is that of

the “Self-contained Car,” which carries a battery of secondary cells,

whence the current for working the motors is taken as required. But, for

the present, there are serious obstacles against its general

application. The great weight of the accumulators leads to a

disproportionate consumption of power, and involves heavy expenditure on

the permanent way and in rolling-stock. The batteries must be recharged

at frequent intervals, and must either be removed from the car--a

troublesome process--or the car must be kept idle while the cells are

revivified. Accumulators as a rule do not live long, and have to be

renewed.

Thus the working expenses are so heavy that, ideal as the system is, and

delightful the smooth running of the cars, it does not pay commercially

to adopt it, and we must wait patiently in the hope that one day a

perfect and practical secondary battery will appear on the scenes. Great

improvements in lightness and durability are in the air.

Tramcars have become luxurious compared with the makeshifts that did

duty in George Francis Train’s day, and each new line endeavours to make

its rolling-stock superior to the others. Some cars are double-decked,

_i.e._ have seats outside; some are single-decked, _i.e._ have no

outside seats. They are roomy and comfortably upholstered, and the

windows are curtained, or provided with louvre shutters to keep the sun

out. Those of the London United Tramways are models of comfort, and

people who recollect only the early examples, mostly of foreign

construction, would be surprised at the advance made. They seat thirty

inside and thirty-nine outside passengers, have spring cushions covered

with plush moquette, and ceilings panelled in bird’s-eye maple. There

are electric push-buttons for signalling the motor-man; electric light

is provided, and ventilators extend the whole length of the car,

ensuring an abundant supply of fresh air.

No cars, however, in Great Britain have reached the pitch of perfection

attained in America by the palace and parlour tramcars; the former

fitted up like a Pullman, with little tables and easy-chairs, and

windows prettily curtained. Of this type, perhaps the most superb is in

Buenos Ayres. Decorated in early French style, it is beautifully

finished; while inside it resembles a drawing-room, with windows

separated by carved pilasters and draperies of white silk and gold

damask. A fine Wilton carpet covers the parquetry floor, whereon stand

woven cane fauteuils with gold plush seats. At each end of the car is a

buffet, and one of the platforms is provided with an ice chest, while an

electric heater produces tea and coffee when required.

I cannot close this chapter introducing the subject of tramways, without

reference to the “Rush for the Trams” that attracted so much attention

last year. The rushes in the Blackfriars Bridge Road began shortly after

five o’clock and continued until seven p.m., and were described in the

daily journals as follows: “South London, thanks to the L.C.C., rejoices

in an excellent tram service. There are many trams going everywhere

within a reasonable distance--Streatham, Greenwich, Tooting, New Cross.

Now, however hard or however fast you rush at a tram, it is not to be

bullied into holding more than a certain number. If, however, you rush

sufficiently fiercely and with sufficient violence, you may either

knock or frighten out of the way a girl who has been waiting longer than

you. Some genius discovered this and rushed; others, not to be beaten,

rushed also. The result is that every evening the Blackfriars Road is

the scene of a savage fight for the incoming trams, where men and women

meet in unequal strife.... All notions of chivalry, of ‘ladies first,’

are thrown to the winds, apparently, on these occasions, with the result

that many young girls, weak women and children, rather than share in the

unequal strife, are content to walk all the way home.... Long before the

trams arrive at the starting-point, they are boarded at either end, and

a jovial crowd, knocking off one another’s hats, poking out one

another’s eyes, swarms on to them. As an entertainment, this is not

without merit; as an exhibition of the passions, it is undoubtedly

interesting. But if you happen to be weak or a woman and want to get on

one of these cars, it is possible you will fail to consider these

things. Only a day or two ago a fatal accident occurred in the rush for

the trams. Such a serious case is, no doubt, rare, but small injuries

must be of frequent occurrence, torn clothes and bruises part of the

daily round, the common talk of those who struggle for the trams. It is

unpleasantly common to see women knocked off their feet and dragged in

the road. Nor is the Blackfriars terminus the only battlefield. The

Westminster Bridge Road is no whit better, and there, with a roadway

somewhat narrower and a somewhat larger quantity of quick traffic, the

danger is even greater.”

The remedy for this state of affairs was thus significantly pointed

out:--

“When electricity is fully adopted the service will be able to deal with

a larger traffic, for, although the same number of cars will be

running, they will run faster, and each will carry 50 per cent. more

passengers, so that the carrying capacity of the line will be much

increased. Till then there is no hope of improvement. It is impossible

with horse traction to run more cars, or run them faster.”

CHAPTER XII

_LONDON’S TRAMWAYS_

“When all is done, the help of good counsel is that which setteth

business straight.”--BACON.

THE L.C.C. AND LONDON’S TRAFFIC

All tramways within the boundaries of the County of London--an area of

some 16½ by 12 miles--will eventually be controlled and worked by the

London County Council, who, under the Tramways Act of 1870, have the

power of purchasing, either compulsorily at the expiration of twenty-one

years from the passing of the Act, or by agreement, any tramway

undertaking within their official territory. A heavy responsibility

truly; but whether for good or for evil, municipal trading has come to

stay, and the principle as applied to tramways seems to be particularly

appropriate in this, our great metropolis, with whose locomotive system

none but a very powerful and experienced governing body can ever hope to

successfully cope.

Mr. J. Allen-Baker, the vice-chairman of the L.C.C.’s Highways

Committee, reporting on the subject of our congested highways, said:

“Even though there should be no future increase in street traffic, I

believe it to be the imperative duty of the Council to seek a remedy,

and how much more when we feel assured that London will keep growing,

and that within the next thirty years both a water and locomotive

service will have to be provided for an estimated population (in Greater

London) of probably not less than ten or twelve million people; and

whatever the growth _outwards_ may be, the best system of rapid transit

for the central districts will always become more and more essential.

If, therefore, we are to cope with either our present or our future

requirements, and prevent our streets from becoming really impassable,

it is, in my judgment, our duty to take up the subject at once, and seek

from His Majesty’s Government those additional powers and amendments to

existing Acts of Parliament that will enable the Council, as the central

authority, to carry out these improvements in the interests of the whole

metropolis.”

I doubt if anybody realises the gigantic scale of Greater London’s

street traffic, so much of it being hidden away. It is estimated that in

one year travellers by cabs and omnibuses number 580,000,000, and by

tramways 400,000,000. By Underground, Tube, and suburban railways

890,000,000 travel; and should the metropolis increase at the rate

expected by Mr. J. Allen-Baker, in thirty years’ time there will be

something like 4,000,000,000, or 11,000,000 human beings per diem,

moving about on wheels or on foot.

All these facts will doubtless be carefully considered, and, if

possible, the problem of London’s traffic solved, by the Royal

Commission--Sir David Miller Barbour, K.C.S.I., K.C.M.G., in the

chair--appointed in February last to deal with the subject. (_vide_

Chapter IX.). It is authorised to report:--

(1) As to the measures which they deem most effectual for the

improvement of the same (the street traffic) by the development and

interconnection of railways and tramways on or below the surface, by

increasing the facilities for other forms of mechanical locomotion, by

better provision for the organisation and regulation of vehicular and

pedestrian traffic or otherwise; and

(2) As to the desirability of establishing some authority or tribunal to

which all schemes of railway or tramway construction of a local

character should be referred, and the powers which it would be advisable

to confer upon such a body.

THE L.C.C. AND REHOUSING

The tramway policy of the L.C.C. is so connected with the housing, or,

rather, with the rehousing question, that although this book is purely

on the subject of electrical traction, I cannot avoid making some

reference to it.

For fifteen years, since, under the Local Government Act of 1888, the

Council was constituted, it has slowly been winning the confidence of

Londoners. Aggressive at first, it has relinquished the altruistic

theories of youth, and it now realises the fact that it is a body of

trustees acting not for one class only, but that it must administer its

heritage in the interests of the community at large. Jealousy of its

powers is dying out, and by comprehensive and energetic action it

justifies itself as the one central privileged body able to deal with

the highway, and with the housing problem of Modern Babylon.

One of its provinces, in fact its statutory obligation, is to provide

new accommodation--not necessarily in the same locality--in place of all

houses destroyed as unfit for human habitation. It also takes upon

itself voluntarily (where no such legal obligation exists) in certain

instances to provide for rehousing, and, wherever possible, this is

effected in the same districts. But this cannot as a rule be done when

rehousing is compulsory, and to meet the difficulty, estates have been

acquired, and blocks of houses and cottages erected at Croydon, Wood

Green, Brixton Hill, Holloway, Hammersmith, and other more or less

suburban spots. The Model Dwellings built on the site of Millbank

Prison, and inspected by the King and Queen on February 18th last,

accommodate 4,500 men, women, and children. At Tooting, the L.C.C.

scheme provides for 8,600 people; at Norbury, for 5,800; while at

Tottenham there will be quite a new town of 40,000 artisan inhabitants.

Encouragement is given by the Council to the idea that working-men and

women--since they cannot, in so many cases, live chock-a-block with

their employment--should be provided with homes upon, or a little

beyond, the Council’s boundaries, and be brought backwards and forwards

by train, for the popular 1_d._ Being practical men, the Councillors

know that any transference on a large scale of London factories to the

country, however desirable, cannot be effected yet awhile. And even if

they could acquire sites in the centres of industry, and erect gigantic

lodging-houses, the cost would be prohibitive. They have to deal with

the present necessity. Their ideal is probably the workshop as it exists

in London, with the heads of firms at Belsize Park, Bayswater, and

Dulwich, the clerks at Wandsworth, Chelsea, and Fulham, and the workmen

at Tottenham, Wood Green, and Hammersmith.

On the other hand, figures quoted by Mr. Troupe, of the Home Office,[5]

show to what a large extent it might be possible to relieve congestion

by the removal of factories to the country. He said that there were 748

factories in London classified, in the following proportions, viz. 50

for machine-making, 30 for bread and biscuit-baking, 14 for

cabinet-making, 11 for turning out fruit preserves, 16 breweries, 47

book-binding establishments, 72 printing houses (not including

newspapers), and 19 saw-mills. In these 748 factories close upon 200,000

people were employed, representing with their families some 600,000

human beings, and if, following the recent example of the largest

cabinet-makers in London, the bulk of these removed into the country,

which they might do if suitable railway arrangements could be made, a

considerable number of the 600,000 men, women, and children would be

rehoused amidst “fresh woods and pastures new,” greatly to their

benefit.

This is a dream at present, as factories cannot without great loss be

summarily transferred from suitable urban quarters where water-frontages

and locomotive facilities exist. They have grown up with, and in many

cases created the district in which they are situated. Bermondsey has

for years been the home of the leather trade, Lambeth of the pottery

industry, and although Mr. Justice Grantham instances Doulton’s as an

awful example of an uneconomical delinquent London manufactory--their

clay in Dorsetshire, their coal in the Midlands, their salt in Cheshire,

and their works on the banks of the Thames--it is no light matter to

break with long business ties and take up with fresh ones, not so easy

to leave the old love and take up with the new.

It will be granted, however, that Mr. William L. Magden was right when

he maintained that “no manufacturer about to commence business at the

present day would fix upon London as a suitable position. He would

choose rather a district in which land was cheap, and in which he could

obtain cheap power for his machinery and transport for his goods. He

should not in future be limited to the colliery districts or to the main

lines of railway. Light railways serving as feeders to the main lines,

and the supply of electrical energy over large areas from main power

stations, could provide for both these requirements, giving the

manufacturer ample assurance that his works could be run cheaply, and

that the raw material and manufactured products could be efficiently

handled. By such means electrical science is capable of opening up

thousands of square miles in England for manufacturing purposes, the

native population of which has been languishing under the chronic

complaint of agricultural depression.”

THE L.C.C.’S TRAMWAY SYSTEM

Whether, as regards tramways, the L.C.C. will be the central authority

recommended by the Royal Commissioners, time will show; but meanwhile it

has already established its tramway system, which can be seen at work in

our midst. In order to understand it the more easily, it should be

assumed that all the lines, including those of the London United

Tramways Company, are in the hands of the Council, that they are more or

less linked together, that powers for new lines have been granted, and

that electrical traction in some form has been adopted throughout.

On studying a tramway map, one is struck by the fact that, starting from

the central area of London, all the tram-lines meander towards the

Council’s boundaries, where they will eventually no doubt join and

interchange through traffic with the vast light railway or rural tramway

systems of various companies in the direction of north and south,

north-east, south-east, north-west, and south-west; but that “through”

(or cross-country) communication from west to east, practically does

not exist.

In the north-west there are huge areas of brick and mortar as destitute

of tram-lines as Central Australia, so that anyone living in the

Regent’s Park districts has to “train” it eastward, or, if he be bent on

“tramming” it, has to go by an inconvenient and awkward route to Hackney

or Bow.

Another notable feature of the map is that, although there are almost as

many tramways on the south as on the north side of the river, there is

no access from one to the other, the bridges being looked upon as sacred

thoroughfares, along which tramcars--certainly not as unæsthetic as

omnibuses, or waggons laden with vegetables--may not pass, although

Westminster is the widest bridge in the world, 85 feet; Blackfriars, 80

feet; and Vauxhall and Lambeth will be equally wide, and broad enough to

accommodate the trams without inconvenience.

At present the lines are painfully disunited, without starting-point or

terminus. The gaps in the lines require to be filled up, and where this

is impracticable, shallow underground tracks should be made use of. The

great defect, however, would at once disappear if the lines could cross

the Thames at Westminster and Blackfriars; but if this be persistently

refused, light bridges or tubes ought to be specially provided at

convenient points with four tracks for the use of tramways only.

The history of the London County Council’s work towards the improvement

of metropolitan highways dates back to the early nineties, when the

Council began to acquire tramway companies. A most important step was

taken in 1897, when the whole of the lines and depôts belonging to the

North Metropolitan and London Street Tramways Companies in the County of

London were purchased, the purchase-money being £800,000. In 1899 the

Council acquired the South London Tramways at a cost of £882,043, and

still more recently the control of the South Eastern Metropolitan

Tramways Company and the South London Company has been effected.

Negotiations for other acquisitions are pending, and, as a matter of

fact, there are now not a dozen miles of tramway lines within the county

which the Council has not already purchased.

The North Metropolitan lines have been leased by the Council to the

Company for fourteen years from 1896. The South London lines are worked

directly by the Council, and in the year 1901-2 no fewer than

119,880,559 passengers were carried over the system, 53,639,489 being at

halfpenny fares and 50,913,036 at penny ones. The traffic receipts for

the year amounted to over £439,000, and the mileage run was over

10,000,000. About 4,500,000 workmen’s tickets were issued during the

year.

Thus our metropolitan Councillors have, after due deliberation and much

searching of hearts, launched a prodigious undertaking. Whether it will

or will not prove too costly is another matter. Dr. Alexander B. W.

Kennedy, their consulting engineer, in his report, said: “I hope,

therefore, that the Committee will find themselves able to believe that

the enterprise in which they are about to embark is one which will not

only be for the benefit of Londoners generally, but one also which will

pay its way, and on which, therefore, there would seem to be no reason

for grudging such expenditure as to make the whole scheme one of a kind

suitable for and worthy of the greatest city in the world.”

Not long ago the Council decided to adopt electrical traction on all

their lines, involving an ultimate cost of £9,000,000 which will

include the necessary generating stations, rolling-stock, purchase of

smaller undertakings, and extensions. The result attained will be a

splendid system, equivalent in length to two hundred miles of single

track, though not larger than that of some big provincial cities.

Wherever possible the system will be that of the conduit underground;

more expensive than the trolley method, but in the crowded streets of

London--where every inch of space is valuable--advantageous, and from a

severely æsthetic point of view, preferable, because it dispenses with

poles and wires. But on lines acquired by the Council where already

exists the overhead principle, there will be no difficulty in arranging

the cars so that they can be run from one system to the other, either

with no stopping at all at the point of change, or with a delay of but a

second or two. The cars, except the trucks, will be made in England by

British firms, and are to be double-decked, double-bogied, and

thirty-two feet long; they are to hold twenty-eight passengers inside,

and forty-two on the roof, and will be in two compartments. They will

resemble the Liverpool cars, described in Chapter XIII, and will be

painted a chocolate colour. The speed will be a maximum of twelve miles

an hour, with an average of about seven.

Supposing, therefore, that all the L.C.C. parliamentary Bills are

carried through, and that all the disunited lines are properly and

harmoniously linked together, and through communication established in

every direction, it will be feasible to take some such day’s business

journey within the Council’s boundaries as that of Benjamin Short which

I am about to relate. But before doing so I think the very important

decision of the Lord Chancellor in an appeal case, November 27th, 1902,

on the subject of the maintenance of tramway tracks should be

recorded:--

THE MAINTENANCE OF TRAMWAY TRACKS

On March 4th, 1900, Mr. Fitzgerald was driving a horse and Ralli car in

Grafton Street, Dublin, when the horse stumbled and fell, and the

respondent was flung out of the cart and sustained serious injuries. On

the ground that the surface of the paving at the place where he was

driving was unsafe for horses and in a condition which was a danger and

annoyance to the ordinary traffic, he brought an action against the

tramway company, and was awarded £1,000 damages, the jury holding that

the part of the roadway for which the company was responsible was at the

time slippery and unsafe, and that this was the cause of the horse

falling. They, at the same time, found that the misfortune was not

caused by the fabric of the pavement being improperly constructed or

maintained.

The Lord Chancellor, at the conclusion of the arguments, moved that the

appeal should be dismissed. The tramway company had been permitted the

use of the public highway subject to certain obligations, which

practically meant that while they were to use it they must take care

that the safety and convenience of the public were consulted. They were

not to have a monopoly of the highway, and it was their duty to take

care of the public convenience in respect to that part of the roadway

over which they were permitted to exercise a kind of subordinate

dominion. It was not denied that the surface of the roadway became, in

certain states of the weather, a danger and a nuisance to the public,

and it was a strong contention to say that, having received

instructions from the road authority to do that which would have

prevented the accident, there should be no liability upon them. The

obligation, as he read the statute, was to keep the pavement in a fit

and proper condition for public traffic. How that was to be done was a

question of mechanical engineering, and neither the Legislature nor the

Court was called upon to enter into the question as to how it could best

be done. All the judges without exception seemed to agree that the best

and most proper mode of doing it was to do what the road authority

directed them to do, and that they had deliberately disobeyed.

A BUSINESS JOURNEY BY L.C.C. TRAMS

Benjamin Short was born and brought up in London, and if any man living

knew its ins and outs he did. He was a jovial-looking little man, always

called Ben, for, said his father, “We christened him Benjamin for long,

but as he grew so slowly, we called him Ben for short; for _short_ he

is, and short he always will be--except of cash!”

Short the elder was a small tobacconist in the days when the fragrant

weed was first put up and sold in packets--a paying idea, as he soon

discovered--and to effectually put it into practice, he used a

fast-trotting mare and a roomy, comfortable trap.

Ben, as he grew up, was allowed to accompany his father on these

journeys, and having abundant powers of observation and natural

quickness, he came to know more about Greater London than most men of

double his age. He was cut out for a commercial traveller’s career, and

a traveller, in due course, he became, inheriting from his father a snug

bit of capital.

At the time of which I am writing, Ben lived at Stamford Hill, close to

the London County Council boundary, in a well-built house with a bit of

land at the back, in which he had invested his inheritance. He called it

“The Watchmaker’s Rest,” and it faced the tramway line. Its front garden

was the envy and admiration of the neighbours. There appeared in their

season the choicest bulbous flowers, lovely annuals, herbaceous plants,

chrysanthemums, and asters, all of irreproachable quality, for Short,

being a sober and steady man, devoted his spare time to horticulture, at

which he was an adept.

Ben Short travelled for a large wholesale firm of watchmakers and

jewellers in Clerkenwell, whose ware-house was not far from the

junction of Goswell Road and Old Street. Thither Short went to business

every day at eight o’clock from Stamford Hill, not by a Tube (“Toob” he

called it), but by the tram which passed his door. He was a first-rate

salesman, working on salary and commission, as active and enduring as a

bee, but as no travelling expenses within the London district were

allowed him, he had to get about as cheaply as possible.

Hitherto he had been in the habit of working a single section of town

until it was exhausted, and then taking up another. But one July morning

the head of the firm asked him if he could vary the plan and take the

pick of several districts in one day as an experiment. This was done to

test Short’s capacity as against that of an English-speaking German

traveller, a protégé of his partner, who had already tried his best by

train and ’bus to cover a large area in one day, but had blundered over

the job. Ben Short, who had noticed a “foreigner” hanging about the

place a good deal, drew his own conclusions therefrom, and promptly

acquiesced in the proposition, and replied that he was quite willing to

show how much could be done in twelve hours by one who knew his London

well and how best to make use of its locomotive facilities. Ben intended

to make a record!

To save time he took home with him from the sample-room his bag, an

inconspicuous, well-worn old companion. It was easily carried, as the

contents, though valuable, were light. Next morning at 7.30 to the

minute he was at breakfast, clean as a new pin, thoroughly well groomed,

a man of peace, but if you had put your hand into the side pocket of his

coat you would have found a smooth ivory handle, suspiciously like that

of a neat six-shooter--in case of accidents! At eight o’clock he was in

a comfortable electric tram bound on his first stage to far-off

Hammersmith.

The route was _viâ_ Stamford Hill, High Street, Stoke Newington Road,

and Kingsland Road, and, branching off at Hackney Road, by way of Old

Street and Clerkenwell Road, to the western end of Theobald’s Road.

Thence, a long stretch by way of Hart Street, Bloomsbury, along part of

New Oxford Street, into Oxford Street, past the Marble Arch, along the

Uxbridge Road, past Notting Hill Gate, and down the beautifully paved,

broad incline towards Shepherd’s Bush, then to the left through Brook

Green, and so to the Broadway, Hammersmith--one of the most interesting

rides in London, and but recently added to the London County Council

system, after tremendous agitation and opposition on the part of the

“Tube” and others, but absolutely necessary to complete the linking of

other and disjointed sections.

Here, at Hammersmith, Ben Short transacted some very satisfactory

business in King Street. It was early; his “clients” had just finished

their breakfasts, their shops had been but a few minutes opened, and

they had leisure to attend to his persuasive arguments. He was a

favourite wherever he went, and as he carried exactly the kind of goods

to attract, he quickly booked orders and was free to proceed.

On board once more, at good speed Ben was rolled along Fulham Road,

leaving on the right the big convent jealously guarded by high walls,

which made Ben fall to wondering how any sane young woman could

voluntarily cut herself off from a world about which she probably knew

practically nothing. On went the tram, past the big buildings of the

Fulham Workhouse, past the entrance to Fulham Palace and the Bishop’s

Park, along the widened High Street of Fulham, over Putney Bridge, and

by way of Putney Bridge Road and West Hill, Wandsworth (a new route), to

Lower Tooting--altogether a pleasant trip at that time of the year, for

gardens, at which he critically and eagerly gazed, greeted Ben in every

direction.

Wasting no time, Short called upon all the most likely customers, and

again he was in luck, for whether they wanted watches and jewellery or

not, orders were booked.

Now the energetic little man had to get to the “Elephant and Castle.”

Along the Balham Hill Road, with its pleasant shops and lively

pedestrians, was plain sailing enough, past umbrageous Clapham Common on

the left, edged with sedate and comfortable mansions recalling the old

days when prosperous Evangelicism dwelt exclusively in Clapham; then by

way of Clapham Road and Kennington Park Road to the far-famed “Elephant

and Castle.” Here a less sharp-witted man than Short might well be

bewildered by the wonderful concentration of tram lines converging from

Walworth Road, New Kent Road, Newington Causeway, London Road, St.

George’s Road, and the road he had come by. Here, if anywhere, as at the

Mansion House, well-arranged passenger subways are needed.

Our “commercial” did much business round about, for it was one of his

best districts for cheap goods, and then he thought it was time to

refresh the inner man. In a neighbouring cool, clean little crib--“a

close borough of his own,” he called it--he rested, and made intimate

acquaintance with a noble piece of silver-side, some crisp lettuces, and

any amount of piccalilli--he was a lover of cold meat and pickles--but,

in accordance with a rule he never broke in business hours, he

restricted himself to coffee as a beverage.

Short, braced up by his luncheon, was now ready to set out for the wilds

of Plumstead--a somewhat long journey. He started by train from the

“Elephant and Castle” _viâ_ the New and the Old Kent Roads, New Cross

Road, Greenwich Road, Trafalgar Road, Greenwich and Woolwich Lower Roads

to Woolwich, and by the Plumstead Road to Plumstead itself. He worked

the two districts together, but his luck had deserted him, and orders

were fewer and farther between than he altogether liked; but he was not

going to “chuck the thing up” yet. He would do a bit of the East End,

and thus complete the circuit of London.

He took the same route back from Plumstead as far as Blackwall Lane,

then _viâ_ the Blackwall Tunnel to East India Dock Road, Burdett Road,

and Mile End Road to its junction with Cambridge Road. In this

neighbourhood he did his only extensive bit of walking. The district,

though poor, was large, and he did a fair amount of business, but as

time was getting on he decided to return home; so by Cambridge Road,

along Cambridge Heath, Mare Street, Lower and Upper Clapton Roads, he

got back to Stamford Hill, and was put down almost at his own house.

He had travelled by electric tramway some fifty miles at a cost of about

2_s._ 1_d._ (or a halfpenny a mile). He had done a lot of business, and

had been absent just twelve hours!

In the bosom of his family he found ample compensation for his

exertions. A hearty welcome and a savoury supper, accompanied by

something that was _not_ coffee, awaited him, and the following day the

firm received him with acclamation. The Teuton was not “in it,” and Ben

Short reigned supreme as its chief and highly appreciated traveller.

LONDON UNITED TRAMWAYS COMPANY

Want of space forbids more than the mere mention of the South

Metropolitan and the London Southern, the Woolwich and South Eastern,

the West Ham, and the Northern Middlesex Tramways. But this chapter

would be incomplete without some reference to the useful and popular

organisation, the London United Tramways Company, that takes up the

running at the London County Council’s boundary.

Forty million passengers were conveyed last year over its original route

of twenty-two miles, extending from Shepherds Bush and Hammersmith to

Southall, Hounslow, and Twickenham. In one week alone over a million

were carried.

Last April an important extension was inaugurated from Twickenham, which

brought the trams through Teddington and Hampton Wick right to the gates

of

[Illustration: FIG. 17. BOILER-ROOM, LONDON UNITED TRAMWAYS CO.’S POWER

HOUSE AT CHISWICK, FITTED WITH VICARS’ AUTOMATIC STOKERS

_By permission of T. and T. Vicars_, _Earlstown, Lancashire_]

Hampton Court Palace, and from Richmond Bridge to Hampton Court. In the

near future these extensions will be connected with new lines running to

Uxbridge, Thames Ditton, Surbiton, Hook, Kingston, New Malden,

Wimbledon, and Tooting; while eventually these western and southern

tracks will, by the system of tubes, rejuvenated underground railways,

and the L.C.C.’s electric tramways, be joined to those of northern and

eastern London. In three years’ time, when its extensions are completed,

the London United will have 100 miles of tram lines in operation.

The gauge is the standard 4 feet 8½ inches. Throughout the route the

overhead trolley system has been adopted. At Chiswick is the power

house, and the mains convey the electricity to sub-stations, six miles

apart, where rotary converters change the alternating into direct

current, and transform down the high voltage of 5,000 into the Board of

Trade limit of 500. In the fine boiler-room T. and T. Vicars’ automatic

stokers are used, and very interesting it is to watch the machines

continually pushing small charges of coal into the furnaces without any

direct human agency.