London, Chatham and Dover, Travellers and Letters to the Editor c.1900

The Graphic, 1893

 

To say that the London, Chatham and Dover Railway had a poor reputation would be a little of an understatement. Despite having an enviable record for passenger safety, although not a perfect one as some railway historians have claimed, due to its adoption of Westinghouse Brakes and new signalling techniques, it was not a commuter favourite.

 

The London, Chatham and Dover Railway (henceforth LCDR) ran a series of lines, perhaps unsuprisingly given their name, down from London to the Kent coast. They also branched out across the eastern and central parts of South London, around Crystal Palace and Nunhead, and by the late 1860s had reached the Thames at Blackfriars and crossed to build Ludgate Hill station.

 

This positioned the LCDR as a primary provider for the growing commuter population south of the river but also put them in a prime position for capturing the continental traffic both to and from the port of Dover.

 

Given that this post is an early working piece the historigraphy of travelling is not complete here. Looking to my right reveals an enormous pile of books to climb. Instead, I want to address one significant voice on the topic - that of Wolfgang Schievelbusch.

 

I've long admired Schivelbusch's work, which takes a socio-cultural angle on various aspects of modern life. He's been most influential in the past when his work on night-time, the 1983 Disenchanted Light, is placed alongside Joachim Schlor's 1998 Nights in the Big City. But recently I've been dipping back into his The Railway Journey. Its a fantastic exploration of how the coming of the railways reshaped modern society, yet I do have some reflections on his discussion of the railway carriage and its effects that I want to discuss.

 

Much of my early research on this topic came from one of my favourite, and to my mind criminally underused sources, letters to the Editor of The Times. Now digitised and fully searchable, late nineteenth-century newspapers offer more and more titbits for the historian willing to comb them. I've used these multiple times (they are a great teaching resource too) but I was shocked by the extent of letters touching on the LCDR. Between 1870 and 1899 (when the line shifted to a joint working relationship with South Eastern Railway) no fewer than 79 entries in "letters to the Editor" touched on the subject. As a historian you are lucky if you get a dozen on any topic that isn't either enormously broad or a major national issue.

 

Almost all of these 79 entires, some of which contain multiple letters grouped due to similar content, were negative. 

'Why am I, and scores of others, to be constantly subjected to the annoyance and loss of time occasioned by the wretched unpunctuality, irregularity, and not infrequently, as was the case this morning, the failure of the train to put in an appearence at all?'

complained one letter, whose author chose to identify himself only as A Victim. (The Times,

4^th October 1871) 

 

Schivelbusch, in The Railway Journey, has some interesting points to make about the experience of the railway carriage. His main observation is that they disjointed older forms of familiarity whilst traveling, spelling the death of conversation in transit, and also representing 'the total optical and acoustical isolation' of the passenger from the form of transport in comparison to older horse-drawn carriages or riding (Shivelbusch, 1986, 75-79). To some extent these are present in the complaints. Delayed at Rainham a Mr Abraham sent his son out of the carriage to investigate the cause of the delay - it was only by breaching the isolation of the carriage that they were able to discover the nature of the stoppage ahead. (The Times, 7th September 1878).

 

Yet other passengers seemed to expect a connection to the outside world. Schivelbusch speaks of the fear, particularly with the emergence of railway murders in the middle of the century, that isolation provoked. The comments of travellers on the LCDR speak of anxiety only when the established lines of connection failed and isolation became an unwelcome, and unexpected, reality. One Indignant Traveller had a distressing journey when his wife was taken ill in the carriage in 1898.

'Between Chatham and Hearne Hill her condition grew so alarming that, as we lived at a town which has a station on the main line, I decided to stop the train there by means of the communicator fixed up in the carriage. This I pulled according to the printed instructions...but the train did not even slacken'

Upon confronting the driver and guard at the terminus the angry passenger was shocked to discover that the cable had simply not alerted the apologetic operators at all.

 

Scattered throughout the letters pages across this thirty year period are complaints about inabilities to contact guards, about poorly enforced ticket distinctions, about the lack of warmer foot covers and blankets at LCDR stations for ongoing passengers, about the intrusion of rowdy Bank-Holidayers into carriages where quiet conversations were happening, and, chiefly, about the rattling discomfort provoked by the unwillingness of the LCDR to invest in bogies to provide proper suspension for their carriages.

 

It is, I think, important to given credence to these sources but also to read them against the grain. Schivelbusch sees the move towards carriages with compartments offset from a corridor that ran the length of the vehicle as inevitable. A consequence of the 'quiet and isolation, experienced as both pleasurable and frightening'. (Schivelbusch, 1986, 88). Yet whilst these letters support a mixed view of isolation, that could be both enjoyed and feared, they also point to an appreciation amongst passengers that they were never truly isolated from the outside world. The regular rhythm of station stops, the coming and going of fellow passengers, and the interactions with staff that could (or at least should in LCDR's case) have taken place at stations and en route, suggest a much more subtle experience than Schivelbusch suggests, one which only provoked reactions when it was punctuated by error or failure. As the only positive commenter in the selection of letters pointed out, it was not that bad most of the time. Even if the condition of carriages left a little to be desired, he wrote,

 

'I must bear testimony to the uniform civility and courtesy which is meted out to travellers on the London and Chatham line...while the line is deficient in many things, on no other system is more civility extended to the passengers than on this'. (The Times, 24th September 1895)

 

Experiences on the LCDR, it seems, were for passengers a balancing of missed connections and personal ones.