Commuters: The History of a British Way of Life

By Simon Webb

Before the Industrial Revolution, everyone lived within short walking distance of their workplace. However, all of this has now changed and many people commute large distances to work, often taking around one hour in each direction. We are now used to being stuck in traffic, crammed onto a train, rushing for connecting trains and searching for parking spaces close to the station or our workplace. Commuters explores both the history and present practice of commuting; examining how it has shaped our cities and given rise to buses, underground trains and suburban railways. Drawing upon both primary sources and modern research, Commuters tells the story of a way of life followed by millions of British workers. With sections on topics such as fictional commuters and the psychology of commuting;this is a book for everybody who has ever had to face that gruelling struggle to get to the office in time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 14, 2016
• ISBN: 9781473862920

Simon Webb

Simon Webb is the author of a number of non-fiction books, ranging from academic works on education to popular history. He works as a consultant on the subject of capital punishment to television companies and filmmakers and also writes for various magazines and newspapers; including the Times Educational Supplement, Daily Telegraph and the Guardian.

Book preview

First published in Great Britain in 2016 by

Pen & Sword History

an imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

47 Church Street

Barnsley

South Yorkshire

S70 2AS

Copyright (c) Simon Webb 2016

ISBN: 978 1 47386 290 6

PDF ISBN: 978 1 47386 293 7

EPUB ISBN: 978 1 47386 292 0

PRC ISBN: 978 1 47386 291 3

The right of Simon Webb to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the Publisher in writing.

Typeset in Ehrhardt by

Replika Press Pvt Ltd, India

Printed and bound in England

By CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

Pen & Sword Books Ltd incorporates the imprints of Pen & Sword Archaeology, Atlas, Aviation, Battleground, Discovery, Family History, History, Maritime, Military, Naval, Politics, Railways, Select, Social History, Transport, True Crime, and Claymore Press, Frontline Books, Leo Cooper, Praetorian Press, Remember When, Seaforth Publishing and Wharncliffe.

For a complete list of Pen & Sword titles please contact

PEN & SWORD BOOKS LIMITED

47 Church Street, (Barnsley: South Yorkshire, S70 2AS, England

E-mail: [e-mail]

Website: www.pen-and-sword.co.uk

Contents

List of Plates

Introduction

It is a way of life familiar to us all, if not from personal experience, then from television, books, films and newspapers. The rushed and frequently uncomfortable journey to work in the morning, undertaken on crowded trains or along gridlocked roads, followed by a similar ordeal when returning home at the end of the day. The daily grind of delays on the Tube, running to catch that vital train to the City or desperately seeking a parking space near the railway station or office. This then is all too often the typical lot and routine life of the British commuter. It is not today considered a particularly enviable or desirable lifestyle, certainly not one to which many people aspire. A large number of those caught up in it dream of the day that they can abandon what is sometimes called the ‘rat race’ for a calmer and less hectic existence. Little wonder that television comedies in the 1970s such as The Good Life and The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin enjoyed such popularity among commuters. This was Freudian wish fulfilment with a vengeance!

It is only relatively recently that people have regarded commuting as something from which they might wish to break free or escape. At one time, being a commuter was widely regarded as a worthy ambition. It was a respectable, stable and secure existence, with the prospect of owning a house in the suburbs and being able to tend a garden at the weekend. During the late nineteenth century, this comfortable way of life was, for many, the path to fulfilling their dreams. Even as late as the 1920s and 1930s, the suburban life of the commuter was held up as an admirable existence, one after which any right-thinking person might be expected to hanker. The Metropolitan Railway touted the dream of being a commuter between the wars, with a series of posters and booklets which have today more than a touch of bathos about them. One poster, advertising the supposed joys of what was known as Metro-land, depicted a bleak, monochrome streetscape. Below it was a rural scene of cottages and trees. Above the grim, serried ranks of city houses was the caption, ‘Leave this’, leading the eye down to the trees and grass. The slogan here was, ‘Move to Edgware’. This poster may be seen in Illustration 1.

It is easy to laugh today at the notion that one might find fulfilment in moving to a London suburb such as Edgware, but at that time the idea of getting a house in the suburbs and being able to commute via the Underground to a job in the City really was an attractive one for many people. The poster described above, featured a few lines of prose by the seventeenth-century poet and essayist, Abraham Cowley: ‘I never had any other desire so strong and so like to covetousness as that one which I have had always, that I might be Master of a small House and a Large garden, with moderate conveniences joined to them.’ This, in a nutshell, summed up the dream that was being sold; that one might have a house and garden of one’s own in a semi-rural location. That this idyll was being promoted by the Metropolitan Railway, meant by implication that part of the life being offered would entail regular journeys to work on the Underground. Edgware was essentially a commuters’ paradise.

In the years following the end of the Second World War, the perception of living in the suburbs and commuting gradually changed. Instead of something to aim for, it became for many people something to be mocked and derided; a straitjacket, rather than a comfortable and reassuring life of routine and certainty. The commuter began to be seen as a little ridiculous; a stuffy and conventional figure, whose life was humdrum and dull. From the 1950s onwards, the archetypal commuter, with his pinstripe suit, bowler hat, tightly-furled umbrella and copy of The Times under his arm became a stock comic character on television and in cartoons. He represented the past, and not in a good way. In 1966, a satirical television programme, The Frost Report, showed a sketch which poked fun at the British class system. It featured Ronnie Corbett as a working-class man, wearing a cloth cap and muffler, Ronnie Barker as a middle-class individual in a trilby and John Cleese as an upper-class commuter, with the traditional bowler hat and umbrella. A few years later, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, a ground-breaking comedy show, turned the bowler-hatted commuter into a comic stereotype. The programme also poked fun at suburban locations such as Surbiton and Purley. While this was going on on television, the magazine Private Eye was presenting the suburb of Neasden, in the heart of Metro-land, as another location full of commuters and deserving to be sneered at.

The typical view of commuters was that they were harried office workers, perpetually anxious about missing the train which will take them into town, men and women defined chiefly by their pattern of work. Not many people have seen the commuter as a significant figure in Britain’s history; they are traditionally regarded more as extras. This is odd, because the contribution that commuting and commuters have made to British culture is immense, although it is has now been almost wholly forgotten. It is no exaggeration to say that in many ways, commuting has fashioned this country and, for good or ill, made it what it now is. One or two examples will make this clearer.

When Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, it caused an uproar, being widely denounced as blasphemous and irreligious. The book’s general acceptance over the next few decades was greatly accelerated by the construction of railways and the building of suburbs for those who would be commuting by railway, both of which provided strong evidence for the veracity of Darwin’s claims. It might even be said that the practice of commuting was indirectly instrumental in promoting the approval of Darwin’s radical ideas. This ties in neatly with another instance of the way in which commuting has changed the intellectual life of the nation out of all recognition. In the early nineteenth century, books were an unaffordable luxury for all but the wealthiest men and women in Britain. Within a few decades, countless working-class men and women were not only buying books of their own or borrowing them from railway lending libraries, but had also acquired the leisure to read them for an hour or two each day. The consequences of this change in habits was momentous, leading to labourers educating themselves by reading Daniel Defoe, Charles Darwin and Karl Marx as they travelled to work each day. This too was a result of the increasing habit of commuting.

In this book, we shall be exploring the history of British commuters, seeing how and why this strange way of life developed and also the way in which the commuter became a risible figure; rather than a noble and heroic one. This concept will be examined in Chapter 3, as we look at fictional commuters and see how their portrayal in nineteenth-century fiction has shaped our view of commuters and commuting right up to the present day.

It is curious to note that there is no universally-accepted definition of what actually constitutes commuting or how we might identify a commuter and distinguish him from the man who walks to work a couple of streets from his home. Looking at the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, not very helpfully, that commuting is a matter of travelling ‘some distance between one’s home and place of work on a regular basis’. This is without a doubt true, but since all of us, other than those who work at home, are obliged to travel ‘some distance’ to work, it would seem to define commuters as being synonymous with employees. The Office for National Statistics is no more helpful, defining a ‘regular commuter’ as merely, ‘a worker for whom a distance to work value has been calculated’. Using this definition leads the Office for National Statistics to classify over 80 per cent of the British population as commuters. A more useful means of classification is the one sometimes used when analysing data from the 2011 Census, which identifies workers who live in one local authority area and work in another. For the purposes of this book, we shall be elastic in our definition of what actually makes a commuter, according to circumstance.

Until a few years ago, most people had a clear idea of what constituted a commuter. Essentially, this would be a person who lived on the outskirts of a city or in the surrounding countryside and travelled into the centre of the city and back again every day to work. Not only this, but many of us also had a mental image of the typical commuter; a middle-aged man in a white-collar job, wearing a collar and tie. Although there are, by any definition, more commuters now in Britain than has ever been the case, there are grounds for supposing that the traditional commuter is a dying breed. That is to say that with anybody who travels any distance at all to a workplace being described officially as a ‘regular commuter’, the very concept of commuters is perhaps fading away. This idea will be explored in detail throughout this book.

Commuting, in the sense of travelling a considerable distance between home and place of work on a routine and regular basis, was unknown in Britain until the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The roots of commuting though lie buried a good deal further back in the past than the Georgian, Regency or Victorian eras. To find out how and why commuting began in this country, it will be necessary to travel back many millions of years, to a time 70 million years before the first dinosaurs stalked the Earth.

Before delving back millions of years in search of the origins of commuting, we might look at the derivation of the word itself; which is an importation from the United States. During the early days of the railways in America, companies running lines into cities such as New York, Boston and Chicago would offer a reduction, or ‘commutation’, of fares for those who travelled between two destinations more than once a day. The advantages for those living a few miles outside a city were immediately apparent and the scheme both appealed to existing residents living in the suburbs and also helped to encourage the creation of new suburbs, a phenomenon which also became frequent in Britain during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These ‘commutation tickets’ are what we know today as ‘season tickets’. A process of back formation from the word ‘commutation’ gave rise to the expressions ‘commuting’ and ‘commuters’ being coined. In Britain, commuting has only been a commonly-used expression since the end of the Second World War.

Having established how the term ‘commuting’ arose, it is time to look into the origins of the practice itself, which are associated with a very early geological epoch; an age when insects and other invertebrates ruled the land and sky. Strange to relate, the pattern of commuting in Britain and the geographical locations in which the practice arose, were both directed by the conditions which existed on earth hundreds of millions of years ago.

Chapter 1

‘Walking Suburbs’: The Birth of Commuting

The evolution of the British custom of commuting to and from work each day is inextricably linked with events during the Carboniferous Era, over 300 million years ago. In the steamy swamps which covered the primeval continent of Gondwanaland at that time, both the temperature and the level of oxygen in the atmosphere were far higher than they are today. This allowed vast forests of towering club-moss, tree-ferns and horsetails to soar a hundred feet above the warm and waterlogged land below. The increased oxygen made it possible for insects too, to grow to enormous sizes. Millipedes two metres long scuttled around the detritus of the forest floor; competing for food with cockroaches the size of puppies. Overhead, dragonflies with wingspans which would rival that of a modern-day barn owl darted about. A forest of that era is shown in Illustration 2.

During the course of many millions of years, the giant mosses and ferns died and sank to the bottom of the shallow water which surrounded the soggy tracts of land. Layer upon layer accumulated in this way and in time, with the constant, restless shifting of the Earth’s tectonic plates, were buried deep beneath the planet’s surface. There, great heat and pressure wrought a miraculous transformation upon the decayed plant matter, turning it eventually into seams of brittle rock, consisting of between 80 and 90 per cent carbon. In the fullness of time, movements in the Earth’s crust brought some of these reefs of shiny, black material to light again. We know this substance today as coal.

Nobody knows precisely when or where coal was first found to be a useful fuel. Certainly, the Romans were using it in the second and third centuries of the Common Era and by the medieval period it was being burnt for warmth by both the Chinese and also some tribes of Native Americans. It was not, however, until the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, during the eighteenth century, that large-scale exploitation of coal began. Before this time, it had been quarried from shallow pits; now, proper shafts were excavated deep into the ground and mining began in earnest. The furnaces and steam engines of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries needed huge quantities of coal and it was only natural that industrialisation should have been closely associated with accessible deposits of this precious resource. Glancing at a geological survey of Britain shows that seams of coal found close enough to the surface to be readily available lie in the very areas where the Industrial Revolution was running at full speed; South Wales, Stoke, the Midlands, an arc stretching from Liverpool, through Manchester to Yorkshire, North East England and, in Scotland, around Glasgow and Edinburgh.

To understand what all this has to do with the first commuters, we need to look at the way of life in this country in the years preceding the Industrial Revolution. There have been settled communities in the British Isles since the beginning of the Neolithic Age some 6,000 years ago. These were either hamlets or villages; some of them approaching the size of small towns. There were no cities until the Roman conquest of Britain by Claudius in AD 43. Even after the building of the first cities, most people still lived in villages. Britain was to remain an agrarian society for another 2,000 years or so. Until as late as 1851, the majority of people in Britain lived in the countryside, there being few cities of any size until the nineteenth century. In 1790, only two English cities, London and Bristol, had populations greater than 50,000. Men and women worked on the land or made things in their own homes. Travel was undertaken rarely, because there was little public transport and the only way that the average person could get from one place to another was on foot. In such a society, people lived only a short walking distance from their place of work. The only reason most working people had to undertake longer journeys would be to move house or seek work. All this began to change irrevocably in the eighteenth century, when factories, foundries and blast furnaces began to spring up in certain areas of the country; principally those near to workable deposits of coal.

The manufacture of textiles was transformed within a few decades from a cottage industry into a large-scale operation powered by waterwheels and steam engines. The flying shuttle for looms, invented in 1733, the Spinning Jenny, devised thirty years later, along with various other developments in machinery such as steam engines, all tended towards the industrialisation of enterprises which had until that time been undertaken in people’s homes or within small workshops. The increased demand for iron consequent upon all this, led to the proliferation of blast furnaces and the need for a continuous supply of coal, in the form of coke, to fuel them. It was this which in turn brought about the industrialisation and subsequent urbanisation of small towns such as Birmingham, Newcastle and Manchester. People flocked to these places because of the opportunities for work. The wages were better than those for farm labourers and, best of all, the work was not seasonal. Coal mining, iron smelting and the production of textiles in factories continued all year round. In agriculture, there were slack periods when men and women were laid off and had no income for weeks, perhaps months, at a time. This was not the case with the new industries.

The industrial areas flourished and their populations increased exponentially. In the early eighteenth century, Manchester was a pretty market town with a population of around 10,000. By 1773, this had grown to 25,000 and then, within another fifteen years, had reached 42,000. By 1801, there were no fewer than 70,000 people living in Manchester and it had become one of the largest