Great British Railway Journeys

Eccles was the next destination for us too. Heading out towards Manchester through the sprawling housing estates, we wondered what Eccles had to offer the Victorian traveller and turned to Bradshaw to find: ‘The little village is prettily situated on the northern banks of the Irwell and environed by some of the most picturesque rambles.’

The railway changed all that. Within 30 years, Eccles had been swallowed up into the suburbs of Manchester. Even in Bradshaw’s day, though, Eccles’s claim to fame wasn’t so much about being a pretty village. It was about the cakes produced there.

Eccles cake making was big business.

Salford Local History Library

Nobody knows for certain when Eccles cakes were created, but they definitely predate the railway. In the seventeenth century Cromwell and his Puritans even banned them, on the grounds that they were too rich and sumptuous. Fortunately for Eccles and the rest of the Puritan-weary population, the ban was lifted during the Restoration. James Birch opened the first shop in the town to sell Eccles cakes on a commercial basis in 1796. There followed some rather ill-natured rivalry – and even today the townsfolk hold that a cake made outside of Eccles cannot truly be called an Eccles cake.

What the railways did was to make it quick and easy to ship the cakes all around the country. It has also been claimed that they were responsible for a change in ingredients. At the time the cakes were sold from station platforms and laced with brandy to help preserve them. But, the story goes, one driver enjoyed a generously laced Eccles cake too many and fell off his footplate, almost causing a crash. From then on, brandy was banned for the railway’s Eccles cakes, though it was still used to preserve cakes made for export to America and the West Indies.

Today the cake is as popular as ever. Ian Edmonds is the fourth generation of his family to produce Lancashire Eccles cakes. The secret of their success, he explained, lies in the ingredients. Ian uses only the very best currants money can buy. Called Vostizza A, they come from a Greek farmers’ co-op in a town near Corinth – from which we get the word currant. Ian’s team carefully wash 10 tonnes each week to quality-control the fruit. The plumped-up currants are then encased by hand in buttery pastry in a factory that produces 150,000 Eccles cakes a day for the domestic and export markets.

From Eccles the train brought us swiftly into Manchester, to discover more about cotton and the railway. It was clear from reading Bradshaw that the fortunes of the two were intertwined. By the 1830s Manchester was well established at the heart of the cotton industry, but the creation of the line to Liverpool and the subsequent lines that followed transformed its fortunes. At its peak in 1853, there were 108 mills in Manchester and it became known as Cottonopolis.

ECCLES’S CLAIM TO FAME WASN’T SO MUCH ABOUT BEING A PRETTY VILLAGE. IT WAS ABOUT THE CAKES

That history is still evident in the city’s buildings and streets. Local journalist-cum-tour guide Jonathan Schofield believes the only way to see the city so as to take it all in is to walk. From the Royal Exchange, where the cotton lords met each Tuesday almost 200 years ago, through the Godlee Observatory on Sackvillle Street, named after local mill owner Francis Godlee, to the iron street kerbs found around the city built to protect the pavements from the overloaded carts, cotton resonates on almost every route around Manchester. It was cotton that turned Manchester into the fastest-growing city of the nineteenth century.

The terrible congestion, squalid living conditions and harsh working conditions led to unrest, with strikes and food riots culminating in the Peterloo massacre, in which 11 people were killed and hundreds injured. Manchester was at the forefront of the movement towards reform that led to the Factory Acts.

Another of Manchester’s many claims to fame is that in 1801 George Bradshaw, author of our guide to Victorian Britain, was born here, in fact just outside the city in Pendleton, near Salford. Bradshaw was an engraver and cartographer who completed a detailed record of the canals of Lancashire and Yorkshire in 1830, known as Bradshaw’s Maps of Inland Navigation.

When the railways arrived he spotted a lucrative gap in the market and in 1839 started publishing one-off, then monthly timetables in a yellow wrapper which later graduated into a round-England and then a Continental guide. Within four years an eight-page pamphlet had grown to 32 pages, drawing together the times and services run by numerous rail companies. Without Bradshaw passengers were dependent on locally produced timetables that rarely extended beyond the often narrow boundaries of the rail company itself.

His name swiftly became a byword for timetables and featured in several Sherlock Holmes stories and in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, reflecting its hallowed place in society. Phineas Fogg began his adventure in Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days with a copy of Bradshaw under his arm.

An active Quaker, Bradshaw was also notable, if less well known, for his charitable works among the poor of Britain’s industrial heartlands. Bradshaw died of cholera in August 1853 during a visit to Norway, where he is buried. But his products continued to flourish, their popularity unabated despite their somewhat complex content. It wasn’t until the eve of the Second World War that Bradshaw stopped appearing in print. By this time rail companies were keen to publish timetables of their own.

Whilst much of what Bradshaw marvelled at still exists, today’s Manchester is a very different place. The decline of the cotton industry began with the American Civil War in the 1860s, when supplies faltered. The perils of an industry reliant on raw materials grown a vast distance away became starkly apparent. It was only a matter of time before other producers working with reduced costs, including America, Japan and India, began to challenge Manchester’s dominance. The mill owners were also slow to update their antiquated machinery, making them less competitive than ever. No amount of import tariffs could halt the inevitable. The Manchester mills were doomed.

Mill stacks loomed large by the river irwell in manchester by 1859.

The Art Archive

Whole families relied on mills for employment.

The Art Archive

Some mills made way for modern developments. Others have been transformed into flats and hotels. The cause of another great change to the city skyscape was the IRA bombing of the Arndale Centre in 1996, which injured more than 200 people and caused £1 billion of damage. Today the surviving mill buildings are surrounded by steel and glass in a city that looks firmly forward whilst still acknowledging the past.

There is no more eloquent memorial to that past than the former terminus of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, which now houses the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry. It is the oldest passenger railway station in the world.

THE PERILS OF AN INDUSTRY RELIANT ON RAW MATERIALS GROWN A VAST DISTANCE AWAY BECAME STARKLY APPARENT

The next leg of our journey took us on a short detour south-east to Denton to visit what was left of another Victorian success story, again driven by the railways – the hat industry. In Bradshaw’s Britain there were 90 hat factories around Denton, and at one point almost 40 per cent of the local population was employed in them. It’s claimed that the trilby, perhaps one of its finest creations, was born here.

In Denton we found a tale mirrored up and down the country – one of expansion during the second half of the nineteenth century followed by rapid contraction, leaving a few very specialist high-end producers. The period of growth was often tied in with the arrival of the railways, which allowed companies to move their goods further, faster and more cheaply. The contraction usually came as it became cheaper to produce the goods in alternative markets. In Denton, there was a twist.

Denton’s felt hat industry had already had a tough time at the hands of the whims of fashion, but its eventual demise was the result of another major invention in transportation – the motor car. After all, who needs a hat when all you have to do is jump in your car? The result is that the only factory remaining is Failsworth Hats.

At Failsworth’s, hats have been produced in much the same way since the company was established in 1903, using virtually original machinery. However, manager Karen Turner highlighted one significant change. Up until the twentieth century, mercury was used to separate rabbit hair from the hide used to make felt hats. Not surprisingly, many of workers in daily contact with rabbit hides suffered from poisoning. Symptoms included erratic behaviour and dementia, and it’s this, they say, that gave rise to the phrase ‘mad as a hatter’.

From Denton we headed north past Ilkley Moor, and back in time, to catch a steam train on the Embsay & Bolton Abbey Steam Railway just on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales. One of my great discoveries making the series was how many steam trains there are still in existence around the country carrying holidaymakers and even commuters. This railway, part of a branch line that was closed by the Beeching cuts in the 1960s, was reopened in stages as a heritage line from 1981 to 1998, when Bolton Abbey station was reopened.

Stephen Middleton, who met us at the station, is unusual even among those passionate about the railway. He doesn’t record their numbers or photograph them. He doesn’t even drive them. What he does is buy and restore old carriages which are then used, for example, on the Embsay & Bolton Abbey Steam Railway. His aim is to recreate the magic he felt as a boy, riding on a privileged ticket, thanks to his father’s job on the railway, in a first-class carriage. It was a boyhood sensation enjoyed by many and rarely bettered. And it was certainly the best way to travel in the age of steam.

Undoubtedly it sounds romantic today, but steam locomotive travel was dirty and smelly, particularly for third-class passengers in the early days who travelled in coaches that were little more than open-topped wagons lined with benches. As if being open to the elements wasn’t enough, there was also the hazard of burning sparks and soot spewing from the locomotive. But the idea that everyone could afford at least one trip a week on the railway was enshrined in law in the 1840s, after which all railway companies had to offer at least one ‘open to all’ ticket. Quick and cheap, a new phenomenon of day-tripping was created by the railway. Almost overnight, Bolton Abbey became a day-trip sensation.

The Abbey is on the 30,000-acre estate owned by the Dukes of Devonshire since 1755. In 1888 the then Duke realised the potential of turning it into a tourist destination and built a station to accommodate day-trippers who came there to marvel at the unspoilt views. Even Bradshaw was wowed by the Abbey and its stunning location, in his stiff sort of way: ‘The Abbey is … most charmingly situated on the banks of the river Wharfe. Indeed the picturesque character of this and surrounding districts in peculiarly striking and impressive.’

The Abbey has retained its magic and the journey by steam makes getting there a fantastic adventure, visitors experiencing it today in much the same way as Bradshaw did all those years ago.

For the next part of our eastward journey to York, we were lucky enough to take to the air, something that George Bradshaw would have loved. In his day the railways were kept safe by railway staff called policemen – although they were not part of any constabulary – who had positions at key points along the lines. There were no signals and the policemen’s job was to ensure that there was a 10-minute gap between the trains, holding them up if not. They also walked the lines to check for debris. Now, though, the Network Rail helicopter full of gadgets and gizmos does much of that work, including using infrared cameras that show whether the heating system on the points is working properly. The helicopter regularly surveys the 20,000 miles of Network Rail track, a feat that would have kept thousands of Victorian policemen busy.

Heritage lines like the embsay and bolton abbey steam railway have long been popular with young and old.

SSPL/Getty Images

Picturesque bolton abbey remains easily accessible by train.

Paul Thompson/Photolibrary

However you approach York, it is a beautiful city. Entering it by rail, though, there is the added beauty of the station itself. Designed by architects Thomas Prosser and William Peachey, it was built in 1877 and was the largest station in the world. It’s now one of the busiest, with 400 trains passing though it every day, bringing many of the 4 million visitors who come to York each year.

There’s plenty to see. Although best known as a medieval city, York started out in AD71 as a settlement beside a huge 50-acre Roman fortress which housed 6,000 soldiers. It was more than just an important military base: for a short time when the Emperor Severus lived there in 209 the entire Roman Empire was ruled from York.

The most enduring legacy of the Romans is the magnificent city walls, including the Multangular Tower. Although many of the walls were there for Bradshaw to see, since then the city has continued to yield up its Roman secrets, and excavations go on today.

From York our route took us towards Hull via Pontefract. We were in search of liquorice, because in Bradshaw’s day Pontefract was famous for the black sweet, with plants being farmed in the fields surrounding the town. It’s thought that monks had started to grow liquorice there some 600 years ago when they discovered that the area’s deep, loamy soil was perfect for the plant’s long roots. They used the roots for medicinal purposes, extracting the sap and using it to ease coughs and stomach complaints.

After the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the sixteenth century, local farmers continued to cultivate liquorice and a thriving cottage industry was established. Then, in 1760, Pontefract apothecary George Dunhill made a breakthrough. He added sugar to the recipe and created the liquorice cake sweet.

Before the railways, almost all the liquorice grown was used locally, but the arrival of the trains saw it transported nationwide. More of the surrounding land was turned over to growing it. There’s scant trace of it now, though.

Tom Dixon’s family grew liquorice for over 200 years, and in their heyday they supplied Boots – it was a chief ingredient for their throat sweets. Tom told us that his great-grandfather had even sent liquorice down to Queen Victoria, who was said to adore it. He did so without realising that liquorice brought on high blood pressure, which is what led to her demise.

York station with its bold lines and graceful roof was an object of pride for its staff.

Keasbury-Gordon Photograph Archive

The death of Pontefract liquorice came much later. It was grown in the fields around Tom’s house until the late 1960s, when the last harvests took place. Indeed, Tom is said to have Pontefract’s last liquorice bush. Like so many products that boomed for a while with the arrival of the railways, it had become cheaper to import it from elsewhere as travel costs fell across the board. For liquorice, the primary markets became Spain, Italy and Turkey. Curiously, liquorice was known locally as a stick of Spanish – it had originated in Spain.

After the short stop in Pontefract, we were back on the train heading east towards the city and North Sea port of Kingston upon Hull, better known today as Hull. Bradshaw explains that this was one of the earliest routes used for the popular day-trips which started in 1840 and were known as Monster Excursions.

Liquorice plants harvested in Yorkshire were turned into popular sweets until 50 years ago when competition from overseas made the industry unviable.

Wakefield Libraries/© Dunhills