The Sudden Straight Face

It is strange that one of the saddest songs in the English language should have been written by two comedians.  Michael Flanders and Donald Swann are still best known for their light comic and satirical pieces — ‘The Hippopotamus’, ‘The Gnu’ or ‘The Gas-Man Cometh’ — but when they turned their satirical eye to the Beeching Axe, the mass closure from 1963 of about a third of the British passenger railway network, they produced, in ‘The Slow Train’, for many people the definitive lament for these mostly rural branch lines, and for the way of life that was lost with them.

The song bears all the Flanders and Swann hallmarks — the deft word-play, the affectionate satire, the sense of the ludicrous — but the mood is utterly different from usual.  Seing the damage that Beeching was doing, suddenly they were serious — and indeed, in the live recording, made sixty years ago when it was all actually happening, there is, apart from a few appreciative titters at a pun or a station name, no laughter at all, only rapt silence.

This complete change of key seems to me utterly audacious.  The audience had paid for comedy, after all, yet here suddenly was tragedy, an entirely sincere farewell to a familiar feature of the national landscape, to a distinctive characteristic of our society, destroyed by human folly, with only the word-play providing the thinnest veil of wit.  Audacious, but thoroughly effective: first we are puzzled that we can’t find anything to laugh at, disconcerted to think that we might have missed a joke.  Then the inverse feeling: surprise, in the pit of the stomach, as we realise that we really are being addressed seriously.  There is a sense of having had a narrow escape, as if one has nearly walked giggling into a full and silent church.   (They’re being serious, and we thought it was going to be a joke!).  

And yet it is still satire, for Flanders and Swann had noticed, along with others since, the totally inadvertent poetry of Section 1 Part 3 of Dr. Beeching’s report, the ‘List of Passenger Stations and Halts to be Closed’ (in England, though the destruction in Wales and Scotland was just as wanton).  Buried deep behind the oily bureaucratic euphemism of the report’s title, ‘The Reshaping of British Railways’, is a list that has been called some of the most moving poetry in the language — or are ‘like names on a war memorial’, as the satirist Ian Hislop has said:

Abbey Town

Acrow Halt 

Acton Central 

Addingham 

Adlestrop 

Ainsdale 

Airmyn 

Aldeburgh 

Aldermaston 

Aldridge 

Alford Town (Lincs.) 

Alfreton and South Normanton 

Alresford (Hants.) 

Alrewas 

Altofts and Whitwood 

Alton Towers 

Ambergate 

Andover Town 

Apperley Bridge …

Of course, it is bleakly amusing that those unable to perceive the true value of railways, their marriage of elegance and efficiency, had by their very tin ear betrayed themselves in accidentally producing such moving poetry — fifth on the list is Adlestrop itself! — and Flanders and Swann, simply by transforming it into a serious song, throw this irony into definition.  They are punning away as usual, ‘The sleepers sleep…’ but the music itself has all the pathos of a folk-song.

The British passenger railway network, 1963 (left) and 1984 (right)

The Sudden Straight Face had another strategic advantage in that particular era, and that was the strength it lent to anyone making a point that was easily mocked.  This was the age of the satire boom, satire far more biting than Michael Flanders’. Then, as now, mockery was one of the vandalisers’ chief weapons; anyone who objected to the sweeping away of old things was opening themselves up to a round of scoffing (“Backward!  Nostalgist!  Move with the times!”).  But by proving that they could make an audience laugh, and indeed by laughing at themselves, they could build up a kind of credit with their wit, to be expended in an outbreak of earnestness like ‘The Slow Train’.

The person who knew this as well as Flanders and Swann was, of course, the poet John Betjeman — the man who in some ways ought to have written ‘The Slow Train’.  (In fact, my friend Maolsheachlann justifiably said he was ‘flabbergasted’ I hadn’t mentioned it when I wrote a few years ago about Betjeman’s poem ‘Dilton Marsh Halt’).  Reading A. N. Wilson’s biography of Betjeman reminded me of the occasion in 2018 when I had passed through the Halt, a tiny station of two short platforms on the outskirts of Warminster in Wiltshire.  At the time I wrote that Betjeman’s poem seemed to capture a paradoxical seam that runs through all of his work: irrepressible humour on the one hand hand, and sincere, vulnerable sorrow on the other.  It applied to his life as well: Wilson paints a picture of a man distraught at the ruination of England, acutely conscious of his personal flaws and ‘afraid of being found out’, who nevertheless craved merriment and silliness, and would gleefully assign nicknames to his friends, or throw his table-napkin over his face and howl with glee.  

John Betjeman and Flanders and Swann knew that they were operating in a culture of heavy cynicism.  Sincerity alone, from a standing start, was no good: this was precisely the age in which anyone speaking in defence of old things or high ideals would bring clanging mockery down around his ears.  But the Sudden Straight Face was their secret weapon.  First Betjeman poked fun at this tiny station, answering his own rhetorical question, “Was it worth keeping the Halt open?”…

“…Yes, we said, for in summer the anglers use it,

Two and sometimes three

Will bring their catches of rods and poles and perches

To Westbury, home for tea.”

As many as three passengers for a mile’s journey!  Clearly a vital transport interchange, we chuckle; good old Betjeman, silly old England.  But then in the final stanza comes this outburst: 

And when all the horrible roads are finally done for,

And there’s no more petrol left in the world to burn,

Here to the Halt from Salisbury and from Bristol

Steam trains will return.

Betjeman’s work derives much of its poetic power from this contrast between the gleefully satirical and the ingenuous — in some circles embarrassing — earnestness.  The man is a great jester, as Wilson’s biography shows, but there are some things in this world so serious that they snuff out even the jester’s laughter.  This is why that plangent ‘horrible roads’ and the prophecy of the return of steam, a ripe, irresistible invitation for Sixties mockery, nevertheless withstands that mockery.  The Sixties Modernists stand primed to scoff at anyone avowing a sentimental attachment to this unprofitable station, but the poet has got there first — he has already laughed gently at its ridership of ‘two and sometimes three’ passengers, and has laughed at himself for loving it.  So the love, which is serious, has now been fired by clay; by pre-empting the jeers the poet has hardened his work to withstand and outlast hostility.

I think Betjeman employs this manoeuvre to greatest effect in his poem ‘St. Saviour’s, Aberdeen Park, Highbury, London, N’ (such a Betjemanian touch to give the postal district!).  Here he begins by relating a typical Betjeman church visit, beautifully written as always, but with a hint of self-deprecation of his own style:

With oh such peculiar branching and overreaching of wire

Trolley-bus standards pick their threads from the London sky

Diminishing up the perspective, Highbury-bound retire

Threads and buses and standards with plane trees volleying by

And, more peculiar still, that ever-increasing spire

Bulges over the housetops, polychromatic and high.

Stop the trolley-bus, stop! And here, where the roads unite

Of weariest worn-out London — no cigarettes, no beer,

No repairs undertaken, nothing in stock — alight;

But then the tone changes, and the poem more becomes earnest, and highly personal:

These were the streets they knew; and I, by descent, belong

To these tall neglected houses divided into flats.

Only the church remains, where carriages used to throng

And my mother stepped out in flounces and my father stepped out in spats

To shadowy stained-glass matins or gas-lit evensong

And back in a country quiet with doffing of chimney hats.

Still there is the typical Betjeman detail, the evocation of details of the vanished past.  But now he has made himself vulnerable by writing of his parents, of the deeper, more personal connection that he has to this church.  And then he goes further.  The church is not merely an architectural curiosity, nor even a relic of family history or of a bygone age, but the House of God in which Betjeman is no passing visitor but an invited guest:

Wonder beyond Time’s wonders, that Bread so white and small

Veiled in golden curtains, too mighty for men to see,

Is the Power that sends the shadows up this polychrome wall,

Is God who created the present, the chain-smoking millions and me;

Beyond the throb of the engines is the throbbing heart of all —

Christ, at this Highbury altar, I offer myself to Thee.

So it is that the Sudden Straight Face allows Betjeman to do what I believe he generally struggled with, to write straightforwardly about his faith, in perhaps the most confident proclamation of faith he ever made (and it is nice to think that some of these lines were chosen to accompany his statue at London St. Pancras station in 2007).  By the protective layer of his self-deprecation he pre-empts any mockery or satire of these most personal things, his memories of his parents and his vulnerable faith.  Thus he shows how, even in an age of cynicism, sincerity, once whetted to a blade, cuts cleanly through cynical clinker with a strange and unequalled power.

And we, the audience, cannot deny the sincerity even to ourselves; it is almost as infectious as laughter.  By our uproarious laughter of a moment ago we have proven to each other that we have hearts — at least it has with this open, wholehearted humour of Betjeman and Michael Flanders, as opposed to the sniggering of modern comics.   If we have hearts, we have no need to pretend to be unmoved by sorrow and loss.  So it is, first by laughter and then by sighs, that we find companionship in each other.

More on ‘St. Saviour’s, Aberdeen Park’  from the Rev. Malcolm Guite.

Ticket office closures — Beeching all over again

My friend M. down at the station thinks this has been in the offing for years, “We’re closing,” he said in a resigned way when the news first came out, though he has since become more defiant.  His impression was that the Government is moving to implement a long-held ambition (and it does seem to be the Government, the Department for Transport, which wants this change, rather than the railway companies).

And the scale of the proposed cuts is breath-taking: they want to leave only a handful of ticket offices in the larger stations.  It is Beeching all over again.  Only 12% of tickets are sold by ticket clerks, goes the claim, and so at my local station and thousands of others ‘it is proposed that all ticket office windows […] will close, with staff moving to other areas of the station, where there is customer demand’.  

This slippery language makes my blood boil.  Customer demand is directed precisely to the ticket office, the accepted place for buying tickets and obtaining information.  This is decline, but worse than decline; decline with a smirk on its face, the brazen cheek to speak of a ‘change’ to the ticket office when what is intended is its outright elimination.  So might Henry VIII have spoken of his ‘change’ to the monasteries, or Brutus of his ‘change’ to Caesar’s abdomen.  

The difficulties of financing the railways are not trivial.  Passenger numbers are currently somewhere between 94–100% of pre-pandemic figures, but, because the recovery has been stronger in cheaper off-peak leisure travel than in the traditional backbone of passenger railways’ finances, namely commuter traffic, overall revenue is not.  Even so, the answer is surely to grow that revenue, not, as here, to cut off streams of revenue merely because they seem to be less efficient.

But a broader point is to be made beyond the merely financial.  One of the great strengths of the railways is that they are able to say to the passenger, ‘We can look after you’.  The network is complicated; ticketing as presently arranged is confusing; plenty of people lack confidence in travelling.  The ticket clerk can offer passengers something intangible yet incredibly valuable — peace of mind.  And this extends to the atmosphere of the station — the sense of emptiness and alienation resulting from the decline, in recent decades and across all sorts of public realms, of staff ‘keeping a general eye on things’ should already have taught us this lesson.

The 0927 to Horsham draws into Ockley station in Surrey, 14th May 2018.

This development is poor reward for the sterling work M. and his colleagues have done over the years.  He told me yesterday that he isn’t interested in standing about in the wind and the rain; it isn’t worth risking his health and he will probably give up if the plans go ahead.  Another friendly face lost, and we will all be the poorer for it.

What does give me a degree of hope is that the response to the consultation — which which can be answered here until Friday 1st September  — seems to have been pretty robust.  Let’s hope it is enough to persuade the Department for Transport to change its mind.  Here is my own response:

Dear Sir / Madam,

I am writing in answer to the consultation on the proposed general closure of railway station ticket offices.  I am afraid I must express my strong opposition to these plans.  Of the many reasons for my opposition, I would like to emphasise three in particular.

The first is that this decision, if implemented, will result in discrimination against passengers unable to buy tickets via machine or online.  Not everybody owns a computer or smartphone; not everybody has Internet access; not everybody is able to use a ticket machine.  We would not withdraw assistance for disabled passengers on the grounds that only a minority uses a wheelchair; surely the same logic applies here.

The second is that the decision is simply impractical.  I cannot see how it would be easier, let alone more economical, to sell tickets in ‘other areas of the station’ as the consultation poster puts it — anywhere other than in a ticket office.  How would cash be handled?  How would tickets be printed?  How could anything work in bad weather?  Has the safety of railway staff been taken into account?  The current proposals leave the practicalities entirely unexplained.

The third reason has to do with the common good.  One tremendous advantage of the railways is that they can undertake to look after their passengers, including those less confident in travelling.  The railway can say, ‘We can look after you.’  The reassuring and knowledgeable presence of the ticket clerk, in an accepted location, is a vital part of this.  It seems unbelievable that this should be dismissed so lightly.  Removing ticket offices will make the station environment far less welcoming, lower the confidence of travellers, and ultimately harm the railway’s prospects.

I am a strong supporter of the railways and use them more or less daily both for work and leisure.  I understand that growth in revenue is an urgent priority and am sympathetic to the railways’ efforts to balance the books.  However, I am astonished and dismayed by the severity of these proposals, which risk doing deep and lasting damage.  Other measures, such as increasing ticket inspections, should be tried first (on the Sutton loop in south London, in spite of travelling more or less daily, I have had my ticket checked only once in the past two years).  Indeed, the railways should be making ticket offices more efficient by expanding the number of services they offer, such as by equipping them to sell advance fares, which are currently only available online.

I would be grateful if you would pass these points on to Govia Thameslink Railway and to urge them in the strongest terms to reconsider their plans.

Yours faithfully, &c.

Updated 26th July 2023 in the light of the extension of the consultation deadline from 26th July to 1st September. 

‘Flying Scotsman’ and the Poetry of the Footplate

An enjoyable recent read has been Andrew Roden’s history of the famous locomotive Flying Scotsman (‘Flying Scotsman: the extraordinary story of the world’s most famous train’, London: Aurum, 2007).  No. 4472 has had many adventures since her construction in 1923 for the London and North Eastern Railway’s express fleet.  She was the first steam locomotive officially verified to have reached a speed of 100mph, and was the L.N.E.R.’s show-piece at the British Empire exhibition at Wembley in 1924 and 1925.  Her profile was also raised during performance trials against locomotives of the Great Western Railway.  And she hauled the L.N.E.R.’s elite London–Edinburgh express — also named the Flying Scotsman; the engine had been named after the train — on the first day that the journey was made non-stop, with the aid of an ingenious corridor through the tender that permitted a change of crew.  She had a narrow escape from the scrapman in the 1960s, but was rescued by Alan Pegler, a businessman from Retford, and since then she has been on tour to Australia and to the United States as well as hauling excursion trains all over Britain.  While in Australia, Flying Scotsman set the record for the longest non-stop run ever undertaken by a steam locomotive, 422 miles.  In 2004 the National Railway Museum purchased her for the nation, and from York she still goes out regularly on excursion duties.

It’s always the 1960s, isn’t it?  It seems inconceivable that such a locomotive could ever have been in danger of the cutting-torch, but in those strange times of fanatical modernism it really had been a possibility.  Flying Scotsman was actually omitted from British Railways’ list of engines to be set aside for permanent preservation.  Many of the modernising changes made to the railways in the 1960s were certainly necessary, and it is true that Britain’s continued reliance on steam was at odds with the scene on the Continent, where the Second World War’s targeted destruction had cleared the ground for a fresh start and the renewed development of diesel and electric traction.  But, in those days, something other than a healthy competitive spirit was abroad in Britain; something else drove the wholesale destruction; it was enough to give the vandalism an official, respectable veneer.  Something else bred the atmosphere of sheer cold-bloodedness that hung over the railways, and Britain in general, in the 1960s.  Maybe it was the fate of the railways that first made me aware, when quite young, that something deep must have gone awry in that decade.  Roden’s description of the end of steam locomotion in Britain gives a good impression of the mood of the times:

By the early 1960s, steam was starting to leave the stage.  The planned phased replacement of steam under the Modernisation Plan [of 1955] was becoming outright slaughter.  Already, thousands of serviceable, economic locomotives had been sacrificed, and as the new diesels entered service the scrapman’s hunger became a feeding frenzy.  In 1947, the year before nationalisation, there had been around 20,000 steam locomotives in service on Britain’s main-line railways (a figure that doesn’t include the many thousands of locomotives used by industry).  A decade later, there were still almost 17,000, although diesels were starting to make an impact in places, but that 17,000 would all be gone by August 1968.  It was extinction on a cataclysmic scale. (p.88)

New steam locomotives were actually being built as late as the year 1960 (the last ever built was christened Evening Star; names with such pathos vanished with the engines) but, within a decade, the abolition of steam traction was total.  Even Dr. Richard Beeching, the man notorious for his recommendation, eagerly adopted, that the least-profitable third of the railway network should be closed outright, cannot claim all the credit for this, as the modernising momentum had gathered before he ever became Chairman of British Railways.  But he did throw his weight behind the project; he certainly wanted steam gone.  Even the sight of the old engines directly contradicted the new image he had in mind for the railways (slick, dynamic, progressive, unfussy, etc., etc.), and he was apparently furious to discover that Alan Pegler had secured the right to run Flying Scotsman on the national network.  Indeed, Roden notes that ‘Beeching’s insistence that no other operating deals like Flying Scotsman’s should be concluded meant that by 1967 she was the only privately owned locomotive allowed to run on British Railways’ (p. 113) and, a year later, the only steam locomotive at all.  The revolution was complete.

But Roden does not linger unduly on the depressing episodes in the story.  This paragraph in particular, on the subject of the speed records chased and broken by steam locomotives in the 1930s, struck me:

It seems odd, in the face of today’s youth-obsessed society, that the drivers who broke the speed records were all in their fifties, and looked nothing like the daredevil speed demons flying aeroplanes at the time.  But, while test pilots needed cat-like reflexes and fearlessness, the express engine driver needed experience.  He had to know every kink in the track, every curve, every hill, every approach to every station, where the signals and signal boxes were, and the speed limits too.  On top of that, he also had to know how to handle his train in conditions from snow and ice to the track-buckling heat of summer.  Trying to drive a train really fast without this knowledge was to court disaster, and, sensibly, the railways kept to their tried and tested ways [in normal service].  (p.60)

It is easy to joke that since trains have no steering, they must be easy to drive, but this is far from the truth.  For one thing, the stakes are higher than with cars: the speeds attained are generally higher, the traction is more powerful, the weight of everything involved far greater.  Starting and stopping take much longer, and the ability to stop in a precise position takes a great deal of skill.  The most important difference between rail and road traffic is that, on the main line at least, it is not possible to drive a train simply by sight.  The braking distance of a train is far greater than a car’s — from 100mph it can be a matter of miles — so, usually far beyond what can be seen round the next bend.  The skill, then, lies not so much in what is seen from the cab, but what the driver knows.  Stations and speed restrictions have to be anticipated before they appear; by the time they come into view it is too late to brake.  This is why signalling involves ‘distant aspects’ — the single or double yellow signals which give advance warning of the absolute bar of a red signal.  The driver’s mind makes the journey ahead of the train itself.  What comes next?  What is the line speed, and for which route at which junction; is the gradient rising or falling, and how steeply; are we stopping at the next station?  Route knowledge is a thread of names and numbers that must be learned by heart, and then altered according to the composition, length and weight of the train, as well as the weather.  Given all this, it stands to reason that drivers must know, or ‘sign’ a route, before they can drive it.

The video below, especially the first minute, must give a good idea of what it feels like to drive a train.  This is a British Rail Type 4 ‘Western’ class (built in the 1960s, later class 52) going up Brunel’s famous stretch of line along the sea wall between Teignmouth, Dawlish and Starcross in Devon.  A lot happens in the first sixty seconds in particular.  Clearly there cannot be a second’s lapse in concentration.

Now imagine trying to do the same thing in a steam engine, with the boiler’s hulk blocking most of the view and smoke and steam getting into the rest, at night, in the rain, with grit and soot and Pentecostal wind and fire in the eyes and ears…!  This video shows the driver’s view as West Country class no. 34046 Braunton storms through Wimbledon in south London:

One final clip, this time from an extraordinary 100mph speed run made in the middle of the night of the 15th May 2017 by the A1 Peppercorn class locomotive 60163 Tornado — which is incidentally a rather a special engine because she is newer than she looks, having been built from scratch by enthusiasts between 1994 and 2008.  All the time the men on the footplate are reading the signals and making judgements about the road ahead.  Hear what is said at the end in praise of the driver: “He’s been doing a lot of concentrating”f… He has thought his way from Newcastle to York.

Is railway route knowledge almost the last thing we have left that resembles an oral culture?  If daredevil pilots and racing-car drivers were great improvisers and virtuosi, the drivers who brought their engines to high speeds were bards, seeing the way to triumph in the mind’s eye, and then translating it into reality.  And to this day we depend on drivers to remember their routes by heart.  It is all part of the hidden poetry of railways, which I believe is still inherent to them, even in this more prosaic age of diesel and electric.

Betjeman the prophet

Highbridge Wharf, your hopes have died:

They flow like driftwood down the tide,

Out, out into the open sea —

O sad forgotten S. & D.

Any readers who feel like a laid-back half-hour might enjoy this film, ‘A Branch Line Railway’ with John Betjeman, broadcast by the B.B.C. in 1963 and now available indefinitely on the I-Player.  (Since this is the B.B.C.’s website I have a feeling it can be watched only in the U.K.).  It is a journey from Evercreech Junction to Burnham-on-Sea in Somerset, along part of the former Somerset and Dorset Joint Railway.  The ‘S. & D.’ was a line from the west Somerset coast to Bournemouth, with a long arm from Bath joining at Evercreech.  It was built in anticipation of a surge of goods traffic from South Wales and the Midlands to the English Channel and the Continent.  As Betjeman explains, this traffic never emerged; the line was a backwater all its life.  (The music accompanying the film is Percy Grainger’s ‘Lincolnshire Posy’, arrangements of folk-songs that he had collected in that county in the early 1900s).

Most of the Somerset & Dorset is no more: of course, 1963 was also the year of Dr. Beeching’s infamous report on ‘The Reshaping of British Railways’, in which he recommended the pruning of about a third of this country’s route mileage in the name of efficiency (see p. 109 for the renowned list of ‘Passenger Stations and Halts to be Closed’ and its unexpected pathos).  This was so vehemently the age of the motor-car and the motorway that Betjeman’s appeal to save the Doric arch at Euston station in London was a lonely and eventually unsuccessful one, and an era so eager to jettison the past that he, almost alone, deserves the credit for having preserved the splendour of St Pancras station from a modernisation scheme.  Against such a backdrop Betjeman’s nostalgic film gains a rather polemic quality.  His journey is an argument as much as a portrait, and every so often (for example at eight minutes in) there are flashes of rhetoric and rawer protests at the spirit of the age:

You know, I’m not just being nostalgic and sentimental and unpractical about railways.  Railways are bound to be used again.  They’re not a thing of the past. And it’s heart-breaking to see them left to rot and to see the fine men who’ve served them all their lives made uncertain about their own futures and about their jobs.  What’s more, it’s wrong in every way when we all of us know that road traffic is becoming increasingly hellish on this overcrowded island. […] I think it’s more than likely that we’ll deeply regret the branch lines we’ve torn up and the lines that we’ve let to go to rot.

It is easy to think of Betjeman more or less as a nostalgist par excellence, and it is true that the burden of much of his writing and many of his broadcasts was to cherish, to defend and, indeed, to mourn the past.  He was also a prophet, though, and I think rather a better prophet than his modernist, forward-thinking contemporaries.  He saw through the illusory freedom of the internal-combustion engine and the motorway to their fundamental soullessness, and likewise saw through the rust and soot of the post-war railways to their fundamental usefulness, wholesomeness and even moral superiority (about which I have tried to set down my own thoughts here).  So it is that we are slowly and expensively re-opening some of those lines too hastily closed and sold off by British Rail in the 1960s, and so it is that we struggle now to believe that such an idea as the demolition of George Gilbert Scott’s astonishing St. Pancras station, under whose seemingly weightless roof travellers by rail to and from Europe arrive and depart, ever even entered anybody’s mind.

The statue of John Betjeman at St. Pancras station, the building he defended against demolition and now a magnificent welcome for passengers from the Continent.