London underground: trains and drains Almost as much goes on beneath the streets of London as above them. A network of tunnels, sewers and service ducts keeps Londoners supplied with services without which life in a great city would be dangerous or impossible. And the story of their creation is one of vivid personalities, controversy and occasionally crime. We'll start with the trains.

Transportation for life

Recent controversy over the financing and management of the London Underground is trivial compared with some of the episodes and personalities found in its early history. An early attempt to build an underground railway from the Great Northern railway terminus at Kings Cross to Farringdon, in the city of London, was frustrated when Leopold Redpath, an officer of the Great Northern, stole the £170,000 set aside for the project. Redpath was sentenced to transportation for life in 1857, one of the last convicts to be transported to Australia, but that didn't help to build the railway. Nevertheless six years later, on 9th January 1863, the Metropolitan Railway opened from Paddington to Farringdon despite the warnings of a fiery preacher called Dr Cuming that:

"The forthcoming end of the world would be hastened by the construction of underground railways burrowing into the infernal regions and thereby disturbing the devil".

Metropolitan Mixture

Much of the excavated earth was taken to a site on the edge of the built-up area called "Stamford Bridge" where it was later used for the first terraces at Chelsea football ground. The Metropolitan was the world's first underground railway, drawn by steam engines. The service was so popular that the number of trains increased to the point where the steam and smoke emitted by the locomotives turned the railway into a steaming, smoking, tunnel. A pharmacist near Euston earned a good living from selling "Metropolitan Mixture" to relieve the symptoms of passengers who emerged, choking, from the ordeal of underground travel. Nevertheless other underground lines swiftly followed, many of them struggling to make a reasonable return on the huge sums of money invested in building tunnels beneath the streets of the world's largest city.

"Buy up old junk"

In 1900 Charles Tyson Yerkes (rhymes with turkeys) arrived in London to take in hand the capital's underground railways. He had escaped from a complicated and adulterous private life in New York, a lynch mob of angry investors in Chicago and had served a prison sentence for fraud. Over the next five years he deployed his formidable persuasive skills and some very doubtful methods of raising finance to construct much of London's deep-level tube system using electric trains. Yerkes' motto was, in his own words, "Buy up old junk, fix it up a little and unload it upon other fellows".

Cyanide in the law courts

Yerkes also rescued the Bakerloo Line from the half-completed state in which it had been left when its founder, Whitaker Wright, fled to the U.S.A. to escape a fraud charge. Wright was brought back to England, found guilty and sentenced to seven years hard labour. He left the court protesting his innocence and then collapsed, dead from some cyanide capsules he had swallowed. Upon being searched Wright's coat pocket was found to contain a fully loaded revolver which he had evidently been carrying throughout the trial! Yerkes himself died in 1905 just in time to avoid bankruptcy. The task of dealing with his disastrous legacy fell upon a German-born banker, Sir Edgar Speyer, who rescued Yerkes' companies from liquidation at considerable personal expense. His reward was to be denounced by a spiteful MP called Pemberton Billing who accused Speyer of treachery during World War I simply on account of Speyer's German ancestry.

A tower and a tunnel

Yerkes was one of several vivid personalities who created London's underground railway. Marc Brunel, born in France and father of Isambard, built the Thames Tunnel, the world's first tunnel beneath a river, which carries the East London line between Wapping and Rotherhithe. Albert Stanley was brought from the U.S.A. in 1907 to manage the system following Yerkes' death. Stanley later became an M.P., a government minister and Lord Ashfield. In the 1950s Sir John Elliot, son of an American newspaperman, was the inspiration behind the Victoria line. But it wasn't all left to foreigners. The pugnacious Lancastrian, Sir Edward Watkin, was determined to make his Metropolitan Railway the pivot of a system which would take passengers from Manchester to Paris via London and a Channel Tunnel, which he actually began to build until Parliament, of which he was a Member, ordered him to stop. His tunnel was close to the site of the present one. He also began to erect a "superior" version of the Eiffel Tower on a site later occupied, more usefully, by Wembley football stadium.

Art and architecture

But the London Underground is more than a railway. In the twentieth century, under the management of Frank Pick, described by one commentator as the century's "Lorenzo the Magnificent", the Underground was responsible for some striking developments in industrial design. Bauhaus, Cubist and other innovatory ideas were applied to station architecture, advertising posters and even cutlery. The work of artists like Graham Sutherland, Len Deighton and Mabel Lucie Attwell was exposed to large audiences for the first time as well as Harry Beck's famous diagrammatic map of the underground network, for which he was paid the handsome sum of five guineas.

These pioneers struggled with the problem that vexes the Underground to this day. London undoubtedly needs it but has never really decided who should pay for it: passengers or taxpayers? public or private finance? Is it a profit-making enterprise or a social service? Underground to Everywhere places this unanswered question in its historical context as, in the twenty-first century, the Underground turns in a new direction, once again headed by an American under the direction of London's first elected mayor.

This material is based on Stephen Halliday's book "Underground To Everywhere: London's Underground Railway In The Life Of The Capital"

In The Times Richard Morrison described Underground to Everywhere as a "detailed history, full of wit, anecdote and fascinating social asides, a superbly even-handed portrait".

In Railway World Neil Howard wrote: "Every so often a book comes along that doesn't need a review - you just know it is going to be a stonking success. This is such a book. It combines the historian's appetite for facts with a fine skill as a storyteller and wordsmith - this complex story is told in a most readable style. Go and buy it."

Robert Kiley, London's Transport Commissioner, wrote in Management To-day "This succinct and entertaining account of the rollicking history of London's tube offers pointers for its future structure".

	Underground To Everywhere
Sutton Publishing
Hardback: 240 pgs, 23 Aug, 2001
ISBN:075092585X, List Price:£19.99
This new account of the often controversial history of the London Underground takes the reader from the earliest years to the current controversies over funding. It makes extensive use of original material from London's archives. It has been written by Dr Stephen Halliday of Buckinghamshire Business School and is available direct from the publisher at the special price of £17.99 (p.&p. free). Contact Haynes Publishing, Sparkford, Yeovil, Somerset, BA22 7JJ; tel. 01963 442030. Fax 01963 440001. Cheques or credit cards accepted. Quote reference UG. Normal price £19.99 Underground map copyright Transport for London

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