Great Victorian Railway Journeys: How Modern Britain was Built by Victorian Steam Power

The North London Railway established a depot on a 10-acre site at Bow in 1853 where it built and repaired its own locomotives for the remainder of the Victorian era. At the time East London was assuming a reputation for poverty and moral decline. Most families lived in single rooms in largely insanitary conditions. Once, the area was the domain of weavers and their families. Now their cloth-making skills were largely obsolete, although a couple of silk factories remained.

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Franz Muller, a German tailor found guilty of the murder of Thomas Briggs and hanged ouside Newgate prison in 1864.

ANNIE BESANT AND THE MATCH GIRLS' STRIKE

Annie Besant, a campaigning social reformer, decided to investigate claims about the ill treatment of match workers at Bryant & May’s factory, dangerous conditions and the company’s system of fines for petty misdemeanours. She reported what she found after interviewing some of the ‘match girls’ in her journal, The Link, in June 1888 under the headline ‘WHITE SLAVERY IN LONDON’.

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Annie Besant (1847-1933).

The splendid salary of 4s. is subject to deductions in the shape of fines; if the feet are dirty, or the ground under the bench is left untidy, a fine of 3d. is inflicted; for putting ‘burnts’ — matches that have caught fire during the work — on the bench 1s. has been forfeited, and one unhappy girl was once fined 2s. 6d for some unknown crime. If a girl leaves four or five matches on her bench when she goes for a fresh ‘frame’ she is fined 3d., and in some departments a fine of 3d. is inflicted for talking. If a girl is late she is shut out for ‘half the day’, that is for the morning six hours, and 5d. is deducted out of her day’s 8d. One girl was fined 1s. for letting the web twist round a machine in the endeavour to save her fingers from being cut, and was sharply told to take care of the machine, ‘never mind your fingers’. Another, who carried out the instructions and lost a finger thereby, was left unsupported while she was helpless. The wage covers the duty of submitting to an occasional blow from a foreman; one, who appears to be a gentleman of variable temper, ‘clouts’ them ‘when he is mad’.

Besant was gravely concerned that working with phosphorus used at the factory – already banned in Sweden and the USA – was causing cancer. (The British government refused a ban on the grounds it would restrain free trade.)

The company’s owners, Quakers Francis May and William Bryant, were furious, branding Besant’s newspaper claims as lies and hounding those they believed were responsible for talking to her.

When the factory owners forced their employees to sign a statement saying they were happy with working conditions, 1,400 women went on strike with Besant at their head. Their campaign attracted some high-level support, including from the Pall Mall Gazette, Catherine Booth of the Salvation Army and the writer George Bernard Shaw. However, they were also lambasted by others, including The Times.

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The Bryant & May match factory.

Determined to beat the bosses, the strikers organised themselves as never before. There were marches in both the east and west end of London. There was a strike fund, with each contribution listed in an accounts book. For the first time the London Trades Council – formed in 1860 to represent skilled workers – lent its support, donating £20 to the strike fund and offered to mediate in talks.

A strike headquarters set up in Bow Road to coordinate action and maintain a register of everyone involved. The Strike Register reveals many of the women and girls were of Irish extraction and lived close to one another in nearby slums. Typically, the Irish already felt under attack by the British and British attitudes, and were more inclined to confront the Establishment than many English workers at the time.

After three weeks the company agreed to end the hated fines’ system. The strikers were triumphant and infant union movements nationwide were given a boost.

On 27 July 1888 the inaugural meeting of the Union of Women Match Makers was held, with Besant elected as the first secretary. With money left over from the strike fund – as well as the profits from a benefit show held at a London theatre – the union found itself premises and enrolled 666 women. Before the year was out it became known as the Matchmakers’ Union. Its story was short-lived as it folded in 1903, but its galvanising effect on the union movement continued for years afterwards.

Moreover, the Salvation Army went on to open its own match factory in East London, using a less harmful phosphorus and paying twice as much as Bryant & May. Bad publicity continued for the company, until in 1901 it announced an end to the use of harmful yellow phosphorus in its production process.

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A steam train on the North Norfolk Railway.

The strike by the match girls was not the only East End story to hit the headlines at the time. Between April 1888 and February 1891 11 women were murdered and mutilated by a man who became known as ‘Jack the Ripper’. Despite a massive operation the police failed even to arrest, let alone convict, anyone for the crime.

Staff at the Bow Infirmary Asylum, which stood opposite the Bryant & May factory, felt sure one of their patients, an East European immigrant butcher called Jacob Isenschmid, was the culprit. He had been released from the asylum in 1887, apparently cured. After the fourth murder he was seen with blood on his clothes in a pub close to the scene of the murder. Asylum staff contacted the police but, despite an interview, there was no evidence against him and he remained at large, although he does not appear on present-day lists of suspects.

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Horse-drawn trams and wagons outside the City of London Infirmary.

London’s transport systems were changing dramatically. There were new terminals built, usually in grand fashion, on the outskirts of the city centre to receive trains from all corners of the country. But for a while these stood in awkward isolation, although an ever-increasing number of lines were bolted on to the company or network they served, at the expense of London housing. Congestion on London’s roads as travellers went between one railway line and the next intensified.

In writing Dombey and Son, which appeared in instalments between 1846 and 1848, Dickens described railway building in London.

Houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up; buildings that were undermined and shaking, propped up with great beams of wood … Hot springs and fiery eruptions, the usual attendance upon earthquakes, lent their contribution of confusion to the scene…

In short, the yet unfinished and unopened railroad was in progress; and, from the very core of all this dire disorder, trailed smoothly away upon its mighty course of civilization and improvement.

In 1863 the notion of one mighty central terminus for all the capital’s railways was once again rejected by a House of Lords Select Committee, anxious that no more housing in an already overcrowded city should be sacrificed for the sake of the railways. The following excerpt from Hansard reveals the extent of railway schemes laid before the Select Committee the following year.

We found that those schemes were of vast magnitude for so limited an area as the metropolitan district. The new railways proposed to be constructed within that area extended over a length of 174 miles in the aggregate, and involved the raising of capital to the amount of about £44,000,000. It was, of course, impossible all that mileage could be constructed, or all that capital expended for metropolitan railways, because many of those schemes were necessarily competing schemes. At the same time, my Lords, it must be confessed that there was sufficient cause for considerable alarm among the holders of property in the metropolis, and much reason to apprehend that, if any large number of these lines were sanctioned, the traffic of many important public thoroughfares would be seriously interfered with during the construction of those works. Those schemes, as they came before us, included the construction of no less than four new railway bridges across the Thames, two of them – and these of a very large size – being intended to cross the river below London Bridge.

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Construction of the Arches of St Pancras Station's Cellars, London, by J .B. Pyne, c. 1867.

There was by now an undercurrent of public feeling against the railways as they deposited viaducts, tracks and tunnels at will, altering the complexion of the capital forever. London, perhaps more than any other city, was almost entirely remodelled by the converging transport companies.

As early as 1864 the satirical magazine Punch asked plaintively: ‘Are there no means of averting the imminent destruction of the little beauty that our capital possesses?’ The article went on to say that, given the railway frenzy existing at the time, St Paul’s Cathedral might just as well become a railway station.

The graveyard at St Pancras was removed for the sake of the railway. A coaching house that escaped the Great Fire of London in 1666 – in which about 13,500 homes and 87 parish churches were razed to the ground – lying in the shadow of St Paul’s was destroyed in 1875 to make way for lines and stations. Hundreds more buildings were flattened to make way for tracks, including Sir Paul Pindar’s house in Bishopsgate. Pindar, an ambassador to the Ottoman court for James I, owned a fine house with one of the most distinctive frontages in Victorian London that likewise escaped the Great Fire. In 1890 the house’s distinctive Jacobean façade was dismantled in favour of an extension to Liverpool Street Station. Fortunately, the wooden structure found a new home in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

London’s population was being squeezed into its outer reaches. Those houses that remained were smeared with smoke as steam trains brought dense and eerie pollution into the city. Only the very rich could resist the onward march of the railways.

CHRONOLOGY OF THE LONDON TERMINALS

1836 London Bridge Station was built in primitive form for the London & Greenwich Railway and was soon subject to a rebuild.

1837 Euston, operated by the London & North Western Railway.

1838 Paddington, still bearing the hallmarks of its designer Brunel, built to receive Great Western Railway services.

1841 Fenchurch Street, the smallest of the railway terminals in London, originally constructed for the London & Blackwall Railway, and rebuilt 13 years later in time to accommodate the London, Tilbury & Southend Railway. It was the site of the first station bookstall.

1848 Waterloo Bridge Station, as it was called, opened after being linked to the busy outer-city satellite at Nine Elms for the London & South Western Railway.

1852 King’s Cross opened for the Great Northern Railway on the site of smallpox and fever hospitals. It was designed by Lewis Cubitt along remarkably simple lines save for an Italianate clock turret. A hotel was built to accompany the station and opened two years later.

1858 Victoria, named for the nearby street, was the home of London, Brighton & South Coast Railway trains, although it was soon popular with other companies.

1864 Charing Cross, arguably the only London station to breach the West End, opened with six wooden platforms for what was initially a limited service to Greenwich and mid-Kent.

1866 Moorgate came into being in an extension to the Metropolitan Line and only became a main-line terminus in 1900.

1868 St Pancras was built by the Midland Railway after it found King’s Cross too expensive. It became remarkable for the railway hotel’s vast Gothic frontage.

1874 Liverpool Street was built to replace Bishopsgate Station, being closer to the city centre and more user friendly.

1899 Marylebone was home to the final main line to enter London, the Great Central, but plans by chairman Sir Edward Watkin to continue expansion with a channel tunnel were never realized.

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