London Underground's Strangest Tales
Other titles in the STRANGEST series
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Boxing’s Strangest Moments
Bridge’s Strangest Hands
Cinema’s Strangest Moments
Classical Music’s Strangest Concerts
Cricket’s Strangest Moments
Fishing’s Strangest Days
Flying’s Strangest Moments
Football’s Strangest Matches
Gambling’s Strangest Moments
Golf’s Strangest Rounds
Horse-racing’s Strangest Races
Law’s Strangest Cases
London’s Strangest Tales
Medicine’s Strangest Cases
The Military’s Strangest Campaigns
Motor-racing’s Strangest Races
The Olympics’ Strangest Moments
Poker’s Strangest Hands
Politics’ Strangest Characters
Railways’ Strangest Journeys
Rock ’n’ Roll’s Strangest Moments
Royalty’s Strangest Characters
Rugby’s Strangest Matches
Sailing’s Strangest Moments
Science’s Strangest Inventions
Shooting’s Strangest Days
Television’s Strangest Moments
Tennis’s Strangest Matches
Theatre’s Strangest Acts
World Cup’s Strangest Moments
Kent’s Strangest Tales
First published in the United Kingdom in 2013 by
Portico Books
10 Southcombe Street
London W14 0RA
An imprint of Anova Books Company Ltd
Copyright © Portico Books, 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.
First eBook publication in 2013
eBook ISBN 9781909396166
Also available in paperback Paperback
ISBN 9781907554971
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This book can be ordered direct from the publisher at www.anovabooks.com
CONTENTS
Introduction
Brunel, the Worm and a Tunnelling Revolution, 1843
Pearson the Unpaid Pioneer, 1845
Bye Bye Britain, G’Day Australia!, 1857
The Lonely Station with a Head for Heights, 1867
The Doors to Nowhere, 1868
A River Runs Through It, 1868
Travelling Light, 1873
The Ghost and the Near-death Experience, 1876
The Circle Line Wars, 1884
Smoke, Beards and the Wonder of Electricity, 1887
A French Revolution at Wembley, 1892
Murder on the District Line, 1897
The Final Journey, 1898
Shake, Rattle and Roll, 1900
Central Line Déjà-Vu for Twain, 1900
Wright Gets It All Wrong, 1904
The Stadium the Piccadilly Line Built, 1905
The Station That Never Was, 1906
The Tube Boss and the German U-Boat, 1906
Lights, Camera, Action!, 1907
Pick of the Bunch, 1907
Selfish Selfridge’s Name Game, 1909
The Mystery of the One-Legged Escalator King, 1911
Gas Trial Goes Wrong, 1912
The Female of the Species, 1915
Holden, Hitler and the New-Look Tube, 1923
Babies on Board, 1924
The Teenager in the Driver’s Cab, 1924
Parking at Morden Fails to Impress, 1926
Harry Potter, Harry Beck and the Tube Map, 1933
The Curse of the Egyptian Princess, 1933
Anyone for Cricket?, 1939
Underground Gets Royal Seal of Approval, 1939
Underground Entertainment as the Bombs Fell, 1940
The Forgotten Factory the Germans Never Found, 1942
It’s a Dirty Job But Someone’s Got to Do It, 1947
Ain’t No Sunshine Any More, 1948
Cattle Replace Commuters, 1960
FA Cup Takes the Tube, 1964
Victory for the Victoria Line, 1968
Please Mind the Gap, 1968
The Misplaced Pistols of Finsbury Park, 1968
The Dark Side of Tube Travel, 1972
Commuters Get a Culinary Surprise, 1979
A Quick Pint on the Platform, 1985
Animal Map Magic, 1988
Fare-dodging Pigeons, 1995
Beware the Tube’s New Breed of Biting Bug, 1998
The Water Holes That Save Lives, 1999
Cleaners with a Head for Heights, 1999
The Prime Minister’s Travel Conundrum, 1999
Madeleine Gets Up Commuters’ Noses, 2001
Music to Soothe the Savage Commuter, 2001
The Baby That Was Really a Monkey, 2001
Vasectomy Brings Circle Line to a Standstill, 2003
Post Office Goes Underground, 2003
The Tube’s Phantom Policeman, 2003
Perils of the Oyster Card, 2003
Who’d Travel in a Lift Like This?, 2004
The Holborn Faux Pas, 2005
Tube Carriages in the Sky, 2006
The Cadbury Chocolate Contradiction, 2007
Dynamic Don Lets His Feet Do the Talking, 2008
Love on the Northern Line, 2008
An Unwelcome Hole in the Trousers, 2008
A Terrible Tick-Tock, 2008
The Name’s Bond, Underground Bond, 2008
Too Rude for the Tube, 2008
Centenary Celebration for Iconic Logo, 2008
Legal Eagle on the Wrong Side of the Law, 2008
The Bizarre World of the LPO, 2009
The Most Boring Job in the World, 2009
The Station in the Sky, 2010
Upside Down at Whitechapel, 2010
No Underwear on the Underground, 2010
The Toaster That Nobody Turned Off, 2010
The Flash Mobs Who Flash, 2010
The Grapes of Wrath, 2011
For Sale, Disused Station – One Previous Owner, 2011
Beware Greedy Oyster Cards, 2011
Darwin Discovered at Liverpool Street, 2011
If You Want to Be a Record Breaker, 2011
The Underground’s Furry Friends, 2012
The Long and Short of It, 2012
Water, Water, Everywhere!, 2012
Sticky Guerilla Warfare, 2012
The Dangers of Falling Asleep on the Tube, 2012
Microphone Madness, 2012
Olympic Champion Keeps It Real, 2012
Underground Fails to Live Up to Its Name, 2012
Bond Back on the Underground
Evil Escalator Thwarts ‘Tired’ Businessman
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
INTRODUCTION
The largest subterranean railway in the world, the London Underground has been running relentlessly beneath the streets of the capital since 1863 and the network is now as iconic as Buckingham Palace and Beefeaters, Piccadilly Circus and the Houses of Parliament.
Without the Tube, London would be gridlocked, and each and every year a staggering 1.1 billion commuters and tourists descend on the system to navigate their way across the city, utilising every inch of the network’s 249 miles of track and 270 stations.
The mere statistics, however, tell only half the story and since the first train set off on the Metropolitan Railway – the forerunner of the modern Metropol
itan Line – back in the mid-nineteenth century, the Underground has become so much more than a prosaic collection of platforms, tracks and carriages. The Tube is now part of London’s DNA.
Most passengers, from the seasoned commuter to the Tube novice, experience a curious love-hate relationship with the network. The Underground is the quickest way to get around London but the inevitable service delays can test the patience of even the most phlegmatic passenger. It’s frequently the most direct route from A to B, but as all those who have been forced to fight their way into a crowded carriage will know, it’s not always the most comfortable journey.
And yet the public’s affection for the London Underground shows no signs of abating. It certainly has its faults, but it also has a unique character and it is impossible not to warm its considerable charms.
It undoubtedly boasts a colourful and frequently controversial history. In the pages that follow you will learn of the duplicitous financier behind the Bakerloo Line who took his own life with cyanide, and how a vasectomy brought the Circle Line to an a standstill.
There is the strange tale of the spectral Egyptian Princess believed to haunt the Central Line, and the abandoned station that now regularly appears in Hollywood blockbusters. The curious case of the Tube’s own answer to the Eiffel Tower and how a murderous work of fiction nearly ruined the District Line also make a welcome appearance.
My first experience of the Tube was back in 1990. I was 18 years old and en route to Heathrow for that milestone first foreign holiday with friends rather than the family. Lugging my bulging rucksack with me, I remember the looks of thinly disguised disdain from regular commuters on the Piccadilly Line as I clumsily buffeted my way onto their carriage.
I subsequently joined the ranks of the daily travellers when I got my first job in the Big Smoke; my transformation from clueless passenger to veteran commuter began and within months I was instinctively riding the Tube as if I’d been living in London all my life.
Over the years on the network, I have witnessed an impromptu poetry recital by an alarmingly confident drama student, been serenaded by an itinerant calypso quartet and spotted my fair share of celebrities slumming it with the masses.
Of course much has changed on the network since I took my first journey. The introduction of Oyster cards, automatic barriers and even Wi-Fi have dragged the network into the twenty-first century, but the truth is the Underground has constantly evolved ever since the first sub-surface steam-powered trains revolutionised the way Londoners travelled.
The electrification of the network, the introduction of Harry Beck’s iconic Tube map and the addition of the Victoria Line in the 1960s have all helped to keep the Tube at the forefront of subterranean travel over the years and, while other networks have tried to imitate it, the London Underground remains the world’s definitive subway system.
The Tube has had a profound impact on popular culture over the last 150 years. The network’s famous roundel – the ubiquitous red circle and blue rectangle logo – has been copied all over the world, while the legendary ‘Mind The Gap’ announcement has spawned various novels, a board game, a television show and even an American rock band. It has also been referenced in countless books, songs and films.
This book celebrates the network’s long, varied and frequently bizarre history. It answers the burning question of which is the most profitable song for buskers, investigates how many times HM the Queen has actually travelled on the Tube and reveals how a German U-boat landed one Underground grandee in hot water.
After all, the Tube really is much more than just a railway.
BRUNEL, THE WORM AND A TUNNELLING REVOLUTION
1843
Building an underground tunnel in the nineteenth century was a tricky and dangerous business. You painstakingly dug out one section only for it to collapse around your ears leaving you suddenly back to square one with your disgruntled workers demanding danger money, harder hats and regular tea breaks. With biscuits.
It was certainly a problem that vexed Marc Isambard Brunel, the legendary engineer and father of Isambard Kingdom. Brunel senior wanted to drive a tunnel beneath the Thames between Rotherhithe and Limehouse, but all previous attempts to safely navigate below the great river had ended in disaster. What, he mused, was the solution?
Bizarrely, the answer came to him in prison. Banged up for a stretch for failing to pay his debts, Brunel killed a bit of time watching Teredo navalis – or a shipworm to me and you – burrowing its way through a piece of wood. He noticed the wily worm avoided being crushed by secreting a slimy trail that quickly hardened as it inched forward to form a tough lining inside the tunnel.
It was Brunel’s Eureka moment and, inspired by his uninvited cellmate, he devised a system in which workers would graft away inside a huge protective cast-iron ring. The ring meant the miners could go about their business safe in the knowledge they wouldn’t be buried alive – as they made progress, it was shunted forward to the next section. The pristine length of new tunnel behind them was quickly secured with more cast-iron rings and a concrete lining.
In 1825, work on the Thames Tunnel began. Brunel’s revolutionary new digging technique worked a treat and after a few false starts, unfortunate floods and various mishaps, the tunnel was finally opened to the public in 1843. Prince Albert was so impressed with Brunel’s brilliance that he persuaded the missus to award him a knighthood.
Pedants will of course point out that the Thames Tunnel isn’t actually part of the London Underground. That’s true, it’s now part of the East London Line on the London Overground network, but its successful construction did at least prove it was possible to dig safely beneath London.
They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and future generations of engineers were so impressed by Brunel’s brilliant idea, they shamelessly copied it, and many of the Underground’s early lines were constructed using his protective ring method.
Which all means that had it not been for the industrious shipworm and Brunel’s little spell inside, the Underground as we know it might not exist.
PEARSON THE UNPAID PIONEER
1845
It’s hard to imagine London without the Underground but the capital could easily have been denied its subterranean transport system had it not been for the determination and drive of a man by the name of Charles Pearson, who was convinced the city needed to dig deep to guard against gridlock.
Ironically, Pearson was not a railway company employee. He didn’t make a fortune for his tireless efforts to make the Tube a reality and he didn’t even live to see the opening of the Metropolitan Line – the first part of the network – in 1863. But without him, the Underground may never have been built.
A lawyer by trade, Pearson was a radical social reformer. He campaigned against the ban on Jews becoming brokers in the City and for the universal right to vote; he lobbied for judicial reform and was a fierce opponent of capital punishment.
He was also preoccupied with the growing congestion that was blighting London’s streets. In 1845 he published a pamphlet calling for the construction of an underground railway through the Fleet Valley to Farringdon and the germ of the idea for the Tube had been born.
Critics dismissed his proposal as fanciful, arguing his trains propelled by compressed air would never work, but Pearson remained undaunted and over the next decade he kept making the case for a subterranean network to keep London on the move.
‘The overcrowding of the city is caused first by the natural increase in the population and area of the surrounding district,’ he wrote. ‘Secondly by the influx of provincial passengers by the great railways North of London and the obstruction experienced in the streets by omnibuses and cabs coming from their distant stations, to bring the provincial travellers to and from the heart of the city.
‘I point next to the vast increase of what I may term the migratory population, the population of the city who now oscillate between the country and the city, who leave the City of London
every afternoon and return every morning.’
In 1854 he finally started to make headway when a Royal Commission was set up to look at a number of new rail routes for the capital – Pearson once again argued vehemently for his sub-surface solution. Later the same year a private bill to build the Metropolitan Line between Paddington and Farringdon was passed by Parliament and the London Underground came a step closer to fruition.
The line finally opened on 10 January 1863 with much pomp and ceremony but Pearson was not there to see it, dying at his home in Wandsworth in September of the previous year without ever having ridden a train underneath the streets of London.
‘Without Pearson’s constant advocacy, his gadfly conduct,’ reads his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ‘which he managed to combine with holding high office in the City of London, the Metropolitan Railway, the first of its kind in the world, and the nucleus of London’s underground system, could not have come into existence when it did.’
BYE BYE BRITAIN, G’DAY AUSTRALIA!
1857
The Metropolitan Line was the very first piece of what was to become the frighteningly complex London Underground jigsaw, opening to the public in 1863 to usher in a new age of subterranean travel for anyone brave enough to venture into the depths of the network.
The whole project, however, was almost ‘derailed’ more than a decade earlier when Charles Pearson, the man chiefly responsible for getting the line funded and built, decided to appoint Leopold Redpath as the registrar of his fledgling company and give him access to the petty cash, cheque book and keys to the vault.
Unfortunately, our Leo turned out to be a little light-fingered, and over an eight-year period he managed to embezzle a staggering £250,000 (or £20 million in today’s money) from the funds raised to make the Metropolitan Line a reality, depositing his ill-gotten gains in the Union Bank of London.
Pearson and other senior executives at his Great Northern Railway Company were none the wiser until a routine audit of the books in late 1856 rang the alarm bells and they gradually became aware that Redpath was wearing too many Savile Row suits for a man who was supposed to earn only a modest £250 a year.