life. Afterwards the fundamentals of everyday living changed. In our 10 days’ travelling from Liverpool to Scarborough the enormous impact the railways had on almost every aspect of Victorian life became starkly apparent. In a matter of a few years everything changed in a revolution that then proceeded to sweep the world.
JOURNEY 2
THE HOLIDAY LINE
From Swindon to Penzance
Most of us take it for granted that we’ll take a holiday at some time. Indeed the number of Britons going abroad each year is now more than 56 million. Before the spread of trains, though, vacations at home or overseas were exclusively the province of the rich. For want of time and money, the majority could not dream of spending a week or even a day away – until the railway system spider-webbed the country and changed every thing. And no line was more instrumental in unshackling swathes of the population from their homes and employment for a short spell than a 300-mile stretch nicknamed the Holiday Line.
Initially the man behind this westward-bound railway was the far-sighted engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806–59), working for the Great Western Railway. His hallmark designs are still apparent today in the shape of Paddington station, the original Bristol Temple Meads station which stands disused next to the current station, and the Box tunnel, as well as all the bridges, viaducts and other tunnels along the line – engineering feats that doubtless concerned him more than fortnights away. The more westerly sections of the line were in fact not finished until after his death, and it wasn’t dubbed the Holiday Line until 1908 by GWR spin doctors.
The Holiday Line still runs between Paddington and Penzance. By the time of its completion, bucket-and-spade holidays had become the norm rather than the exception.
However, it wasn’t the spread of railways alone that sparked an explosion in the popularity of British seaside resorts. The Victorian era was the age of philanthropy, and crucially employers began to embrace the idea of holidays for the workers, none more so than those at the Great Western Railway.
The GWR was based in Swindon, our first stop along the holiday line. Its enormous works, constructed there in the early 1840s, were described by Bradshaw as being ‘one of the most extraordinary products of the railway enterprise of the present age. A colony of engineers and handicraft men.’ Soon Swindon, previously a small market town, was wholly reliant on the railway. Although buildings that once held bustling workshops are now empty shells, they are testament to the thriving industry that was once centred here.
When it first opened the GWR works employed 200 men. A decade later the number had risen to 2,000 men, and by the end of the century some three quarters of Swindon’s working population were employed by the railway company. There was no facet of train or track that could not be built or repaired at the vast complex, a fact that inspired pride among the workforce.
Better still from the workers’ point of view were the terms and conditions of the jobs. Not only did GWR build an entire village to house its workers, but with it came a school, a church, a hospital, hairdressers, swimming baths, a theatre and even a funeral director’s. Then, from 1848, it started to run free trains for employees and their families heading to the West Country every July, a tradition which continued until the 1970s.
These holidays, known simply as ‘Trip’, were extraordinary feats of organisation. Tens of thousands of people were transported to resorts all over the south-west, the largest recorded trip being organised on the cusp of the First World War. 0n 9 July 1914, with tensions rising in Europe, 25,616 people headed west on trains that started to leave at four o’clock in the morning.
Trip veterans Ron Glass and Mary Starley, whose fathers both worked for GWR, recall with fondness later trips and the company’s cradle-to-grave umbrella of care. ‘Virtually the whole town was coming to a standstill for a week,’ explains Ron, who was himself a GWR employee.
Dressed in their Sunday best for both travelling and the beach, trippers were assigned trains that left throughout a Friday so as not to disrupt weekend timetables for the rest of the travelling public. The journey itself had a smell, a taste and a rhythm of its own, as packed carriages towed by GWR steam engines painted in Brunswick green sashayed towards the seaside.
Although the train journey was free, families still had to finance their accommodation, which was a challenge when no one prior to the Second World War received holiday pay. The week after trip became known as the dry week, because workers had received no wages and therefore couldn’t afford a drink at the pub. Ron remembers his father giving up smoking for a spell each year to pay for the holiday. For Ron, Mary and the thousands of others, their holidays had started at Swindon station, famous in Bradshaw’s day for having had the first refreshment rooms in the country. At the time, there were no buffet cars or tea trolleys on trains, so every GWR train stopped at Swindon for a 10-minute break. According to Bradshaw, the rooms were ‘abundantly supplied with every article of fare to tempt the best as well as the most delicate appetites and the prices are moderate, considering the extortions to which travellers are occasionally exposed’.
THE JOURNEY ITSELF HAD A SMELL, A TASTE AND A RHYTHM OF ITS OWN, AS PACKED CARRIAGES SASHAYED TOWARDS THE SEASIDE
The story Bradshaw didn’t know, or at least didn’t tell, was that when Brunel was building the Swindon complex he was so short of money that he struck a deal with his contractors. They built the works, houses and the station in return for the rent revenue and a lease on the station refreshments, ‘with the obligation that Great Western stop all trains there for ten minutes for the next hundred years and refrain from offering alternative catering’. It was a deal that stayed in place until 1895, when the company finally bought itself out.
From Swindon, the train heads south-west to Bath, passing through one of Brunel’s most spectacular engineering achievements. Brunel knew that the straighter the route, the faster his trains would go, so Box Hill in Wiltshire, five miles east of Bath, posed a particular challenge. Rather than curve round it and lose speed and time, Brunel made the decision to go straight through it. It was to be the longest tunnel in the world.
ALMOST 100 MEN LOST THEIR LIVES AS A TUNNEL LENGTH OF ONE AND THREE-QUARTER MILES WAS FORGED
It took 4,000 men more than four years to carve a path through the limestone rock – also known as Bath stone. Almost 100 men lost their lives as a tunnel length of 1¾ miles was forged by two gangs, one each side of the hill, who successfully met in the middle thanks to Brunel’s astonishingly accurate calculations. In building Box Tunnel, Brunel acquired an adversary, one Dr Dionysius Lardner, who claimed that travelling at speed through a tunnel would render breathing impossible. Put simply, everyone using it would die. When the tunnel finally opened, publicity garnered by Dr Lardner meant that many passengers were too frightened to pass through it. Instead, they left the train prior to Box Hill and took a coach for the remaining distance to Bath. Impossible to know what, 170 years on, nervous passengers would have made of the new Gotthard base tunnel currently being built beneath the Alps, which will be more than 35 miles long.
If Swindon is a shadow of the place Bradshaw trumpeted, the Bath he describes is, for the most part, completely recognisable today: ‘Spacious streets, groves, and crescents lined with stately stone edifices and intersected by squares and gardens complete a view of the city scarcely surpassed by any other in the kingdom.’ Bath’s elegant streets, crescents and circuses remain stunning. The most eminent were designed in the eighteenth century by the renowned architect John Wood (1704–54) and his son, also John, whose genius was to create classical, uniform façades in Bath stone that gave terraced town houses the grandeur of stately homes. Intriguingly, behind the facade the houses are very different from one another, as the original owners were able to dictate the individual layout of their home.
The regimentation was a great success and turned
