Prospect commissioned this review but never printed it, without ever telling me why. Six months later the New Statesman commissioned the same review, and I was all ready to flog them this one, until they got cold feet when they realised it was the paperback run.
Christian Wolmar is the leading British authority on transport issues, most notably the politics of the Underground. There is a certain inevitability that at some point during a news report on the underground he will pop up to offer his independent and reliable account of what is actually going on. During the torturous PPP debacle he got tagged as the man who could explain it – or at least how inexplicable it was. That farce led to his book, “Down the Tube” which was essential reading for anyone seeking to understand at least a small part of the mess being created.
For his next trick Wolmar has alighted on a decidedly less essential theme, the history of the underground and especially how its growth affected the growth of London itself. As Wolmar notes, Peter Ackroyd, in his otherwise authoritative history of London, reduces the tube to a mere handful of mentions. Setting out to right this oversight, Wolmar lays out the history of the network from its days as more or less one covered ditch under Marylebone Road, through haphazard spurts of expansion, to the heyday of London Transport and the post-war decline.
Unfortunately for Wolmar the history of the underground is by no means the most immediately fascinating of topics and hamstrung, unlike Ackroyd, by a quite narrow remit, we are forced to wade through several episodes of dull material. I found reading, for instance, tales of Victorian political wrangling and corporate bickering a little too reminiscent of tunnelling through London clay. At an early stage I was forced to consider that whilst reading about the underground is not quite as boring as working there, it is of a piece.
This is certainly a bit of a hobbyist’s book, which although sporadically interesting, is not particularly of interest, or at least not to me. It may come as a surprise to some people that the underground is not staffed by railway enthusiasts, but that is the unfortunate truth. In fact, the underground is not staffed by enthusiasts of any sort. Wolmar, however, afflicted with an unlikely affection for the tube, not only effectively sets out why this is a shame but also conjures up a time when it was entirely untrue. The pre-war London Transport when Lord Ashfield and Frank Pick took great pride in establishing a world renowned and ground-breaking system.
It is his preface - in which he lays out just how remarkable the achievement of London’s underground is - which had me momentarily feeling a flush of pride that I should have ever donned the uniform of a system pioneered and developed by such visionaries. Not that I didn’t immediately snap out of it, but it was a novel feeling. Recounting the far-sighted thinking of Charles Pearson, the business acumen (and admirable crookedness) of Charles Yerkes, the canny Lord Ashfield and brilliance of Frank Pick, Wolmar does manage to convey something of the forceful personalities which gave the underground its sheen and states directly that the lack of decent descendents has played a large part its much reduced status. As Frank Pick stated, the corporate structures matter far less than the individuals in charge. Perhaps the arrival of Robert Kiley and Tim O’Toole can herald management the underground actually deserves. From reading this history we can see that, should they succeed, they would be in a long line of Americans who have played pivotal roles in the underground’s success.
Other great passages relate the absurd mess created when the Metropolitan railway company ran the inner track of the Circle Line and the District the outer, leading to passengers being told to take the long route round if they were unlucky enough to ask the wrong station staff and the birth pangs of London Transport were also absorbing. Unfortunately they are shrouded by less gripping sections. For example, the introduction of motor coaches on the Central Line grinds along slower than a Central Line train and the entire chapter on the spread of the suburbs along the Metropolitan’s further reaches is just as exciting as it sounds.
Wolmar does have an eye for the choice phrase, unearthing such Victorian gems as a description of the stations as “commodious”, the fetid underground air as like “crocodile’s breath” and a newspaper report about the under-used (and eventually closed) Aldwych branch which described a labourer who travelled “in lonely grandeur to the Strand”.
The situation for the underground staff did raise my interest – working 60 hour weeks in smoky and dusty tunnels for a wage of thirty shillings certainly sounds worse than nowadays. It appears, from letters written to newspapers, that customer complaints were much the same. Wolmar has dug up correspondence stretching back to 1900 bemoaning a lack of information in times of poor service and, astonishingly, discourteous staff.
Wolmar also picks out in the history the seeds of so many of today’s problems. From the outset, it appears, the underground has had severe financial problems and rarely seen a government foresighted enough to contribute significantly. Elsewhere he shows that the speed restrictions that bedevil the older lines are generally because of an unnecessary reticence in tunnelling, which tended to follow the highways, even 100 foot underground. And he notes that it was mainly London’s geology that allowed the underground to become so extensive, whilst restricting its growth south of the river.
As a history, however, it is somewhat unbalanced, heavily weighted towards the earlier periods. Half-way through the book we have only reached the turn of the twentieth century and the entire post-war period is crammed into the last chapter. Much of the more recent history was covered in his previous book but it still seems to me to be missing a trick, since beyond bemoaning the poor senior management and the lack of investment, the course of the sorry decline is not really examined. Neither do the post-King’s Cross fire upheavals get a mention, a serious oversight in an otherwise thorough – at times too thorough - history.