XVIII
Darlington, to which we now come, is a very busy, very prosperous, very much rebuilt town, nursing a sub-Metropolitan swagger of architectural pretension in its chief streets infinitely unlike anything expected by the untravelled in these latitudes. There is a distinctly Holloway Road—plus Whitechapel Road—and Kennington Lane air about Darlington which does but add to the piquancy of those streets. Tumbledown houses of no great age and no conceivable interest are shouldered by flaunting shops; or rather, to speak by the card, by “stores” and “emporia”; these alternating with glittering public-houses and restaurants. The effect can be paralleled only by imagining a typical general servant dressed in a skirt and train for a Queen’s Drawing Room, with ploughboy’s boots, a cloth jacket, and ostrich-feathered hat to complete the costume. It is a town only now beginning to realise that prosperity must make some outward show of the fact, and it is accordingly going in for show in whole-hearted fashion, and emerging from the grime in which James the First found it in 1617. “Darneton!” he said when told its name; “I think it’s Darneton th’ Dirt.” Dirty indeed it must have been for James, fresh from his own capital, where they flung their sewage from the windows into the streets, to have found it remarkable. De Foe, fifty years later, said, “Darlington, a post-town, has nothing remarkable in it but dirt, and a high bridge over little or no water.” An odd contemporary commentary upon this seems to lurk in the fact that cloth was then brought to Darlington from all parts—even from Scotland—to be bleached!
More akin to those times than these are the names of the streets, which, like those of York, are chiefly “gates”:—High Northgate, Skinnergate, Bondgate, Blackwellgate, and Priestgate.
In vain will the pilgrim seek the “Black Bear,” the inn at Darlington to which Frank Osbaldistone, in the pages of Rob Roy, came. Scott describes the wayfarers whom the young squire met on his way from London to York and the North as “characters of a uniform and uninteresting description,” but they are interesting to us, belonging as they do to a time long past. “Country parsons, jogging homewards after a visitation; farmers, or graziers, returning from a distant market; clerks of traders, travelling to collect what was due to their masters in provincial towns; with now and then an officer going down into the country upon recruiting service.” These persons kept the tapsters and the turnpikes busy, and at night time, when they foregathered at the roadside inns, sandwiched their talk of cattle and the solvency of traders with terrifying tales of robbers. “At such tales, like children, closing their circle round the fire when the ghost-story draws to its climax, they drew near to each other, looked before and behind them, examined the priming of their pistols, and vowed to stand by each other in case of danger; an engagement which, like other offensive and defensive alliances, sometimes glided out of remembrance when there was an appearance of actual peril.”
This was about 1715. In those days, as Scott says, “journeys of any length being made on horseback, and, of course, by brief stages, it was usual always to make a halt on the Sunday in some town where the traveller might attend divine service, and his horse have the benefit of the day of rest. A counterpart to this decent practice, and a remnant of old English hospitality, was, that the landlord of a principal inn laid aside his character of publican on the seventh day and invited the guests who chanced to be within his walls to take a part of the family beef and pudding.”
The “Black Bear” at Darlington, as pictured by Scott, was such a place and the landlord as typical a host, and here Frank Osbaldistone met the first Scot he had ever seen, “a decentish hallion—as canny a North Briton as e’er crossed Berwick Bridge”—which was high praise from mine host, for innkeepers loved not Scottish folk and their thrifty ways. But, as already remarked, the “Black Bear” at Darlington does not exist, and coaching relics are rare in this town, whose modern prosperity derives from railways. It is, therefore, with singular appropriateness that Stephenson’s “Locomotion,” the first engine for that first of railways, the Stockton and Darlington, long since withdrawn from service, has been mounted on a pedestal at Darlington Station. In heathen lands this ancestor of the modern express locomotive would be worshipped as a fetich, and truly it is an ugly and uncanny-looking object.
The Stockton and Darlington Railway Act dates from 1821; the line to be worked by “men and horses, or otherwise,” steam not being contemplated. The construction was begun in May, 1822, and meanwhile the Rainhill experiments had proved the possibility of locomotive engines. The Act was therefore amended, to authorise the use of them and to permit the conveyance of passengers; a kind of traffic which, odd though it may seem now, was not contemplated by the projectors, whose original idea was a railway for the conveyance of coal. It was on September 27th, 1825, that the line was opened, a train of thirty-eight wagons travelling, as a contemporary newspaper breathlessly announced, “with such velocity that in some parts the speed was frequently twelve miles an hour.” Curiously enough, however, the first passengers, after the opening ceremony, were conveyed, not by steam, but by a rough coach, like a gipsy caravan, running on the rails and drawn by a horse. This odd contrivance was called the “Experiment,” and did the twelve miles in two hours. It was followed by other vehicles, consisting of old stage-coach bodies mounted on railway wheels, and it was not until some months had passed that passengers were intrusted to the locomotive. The first passenger train ran a spirited race with the coach over the twelve miles’ course, steam winning by a hundred and twenty yards, amid the cheers of excited crowds. After thirty-eight years of independent existence, the Stockton and Darlington line was, with its branches, finally absorbed into the North-Eastern system, in 1863.
Darlington is thus a place entirely inimical to coaching interests and memories. Here, on its pedestal, stands the first of the iron monsters that killed the coaches, and the town itself largely lives by manufacturing railway wagons and iron and steel bridges. But coaching had had its day, and did not die untimely. A few years longer and the great highroads, already inconveniently crowded, must have been widened to accommodate the increased traffic. Railways have been beneficent in many directions, and they have enabled many hundreds of thousands to live in the country who would otherwise have been pent in stuffy streets. Imagination fails in the task of endeavouring to picture what the roads would have been like to-day if road-travel had remained the only means of communication. Locomotion would have been immensely restricted, of course; but the mere increase of population must have brought huge crowds of additional passengers. Figures are commonly said to be dry, but they can occasionally be eloquent enough. For instance, when we compare the population of the United Kingdom in 1837, when the Queen came to the throne, and now, and consider the bearing of those figures on this question, they are more than eloquent, and are even startling. There were twenty-five and a half millions of persons in these islands in the first year of Victoria’s reign. There are now forty-nine millions. Over twenty-three millions of persons most of whom would have used the roads, added in eighty years! Of course, the opportunities for cheap and quick travel have made frequent travellers of those who otherwise would never or rarely have stirred from their homes; but railways have wrought greater changes than that. What, let us think, would have been the present-day position of the city of London without railways? It must needs have remained largely what it was when the “short stages” conveyed such citizens as did not live in the city to and from their residences in the suburbs, which then extended no further than Highgate, Chiswick, Norwood, and Stockwell. A stage-coach commonly held sixteen persons, twelve outside and four in; and allowing for those who might manage to walk into the city, how many of such coaches should we require nowadays, supposing railways suddenly abolished, to convey the city’s myriad day population? So many thousands that the task would be impossible. The impossibility of it gives us at once the measure of the railways’ might, and raises them from the mere carriers we generally think them to the height of all-powerful social forces whose effects may be sought in every detail of our lives. To them the wide-spreading suburbs directly owe their existence, equally as the deserted main roads of yester-year owed their loneliness to the same cause; and social scientists have it that they have performed what may at first sight seem a miracle: that, in fact, they have increased the population. If railways had not come to ease the growing pressure that began to be felt upon the roads in the early “twenties,” something else must have appeared to do the work of speedy conveyance, and that something would have been the Motor Car. Railway competition and the restrictive legislation that forbade locomotive carriages on highways served to keep motor cars under until recently; but away back to 1787, when the first steam-carriage was made, the problem of mechanical traction on roads was being grappled with, and many very good steam-cars made their appearance between 1820 and 1830. The caricaturists of the period were kept busily engaged making more or less pertinent fun of them; in itself a testimony to the interest they were exciting even then. Here is a typical skit of the period which takes a renewed interest now that we are on the threshold of an era of horseless traction.
Few things are more remarkable than the speed with which railways were constructed through the length and breadth of the country, but it was long before through communication between London and Edinburgh was established. It was a coach-guard on this road who, just before the last coach was run off it by the locomotive, sadly remarked that “railways were making a gridiron of England.” They were; but it was not until 1846 and 1848, twenty-one and twenty-three years after the initial success of the Stockton and Darlington line, that by the opening of the Edinburgh and Berwick Railway, and the building of the railway bridge across the Tweed, the last links of the railway journey between the two capitals were completed. Even now, it requires the united efforts of three entirely distinct and independent railway companies to convey the through traffic of under four hundred miles between the two capitals. The Great Northern territory ends at Shaftholme, near Doncaster, whence the North-Eastern’s system conducts to the Border at Berwick-upon-Tweed, the remaining fifty miles belonging to the North British Railway.
De Quincey, in his rhapsody on the “English Mail Coach,” says: “The modern modes of travelling cannot compare with the old mail-coach system in grandeur and power. They boast of more velocity, not, however, as a consciousness, but as a fact of our lifeless knowledge, resting upon alien evidence; as, for instance, because somebody says that we have gone fifty miles in the hour, though we are far from feeling it as a personal experience, or upon the evidence of a result, as that actually we find ourselves in York, four hours after leaving London. Apart from such an assertion, or such a result, I myself am little aware of the pace. But, seated on the old mail-coach, we needed no evidence out of ourselves to indicate the velocity. We heard our speed, we saw it, we felt it as a thrilling; and this speed was not the product of blind, insensate agencies, that had no sympathy to give, but was incarnated in the fiery eyeballs of the noblest amongst brutes, in his dilated nostrils, spasmodic muscles, and thunder-beating hoofs.”
But, in truth, railways and coaches have each their especial variety of the romance of speed. De Quincey missed the quickening rush and contact of the air quite as much as any other of the sights, sounds, and sensations he speaks of when travelling by railway; a method of progression which does not admit of outside passengers. Nothing in its special way can be more exhilarating than travelling by coach as an “outside”; few things so unsatisfactory as the position of an “inside”; and if a well-groomed coach is a thing of beauty, there is also a beautiful majesty in a locomotive engine that has been equally well looked after. One of the deep-chested Great Northern expresses puffing its irresistible way past the green eyes of the dropped semaphores of some busy junction at night-time, or coming as with the rush and certainty of Fate along the level stretches of line that characterise the route of the iron road to the North, is a sight calculated to rouse enthusiasm quite as much as a coach. Nor are railways always hideous objects. It is true that in and around the great centres of population where railway lines converge and run in filthy tunnels and along smoke-begrimed viaducts they sound the last note of squalor, but in the country it is a different matter. The embankments are in spring often covered with a myriad wild flowers; the viaducts give a human interest to coombe and gully. Lovers of the country can certainly point to places which, once remote and solitary, have been populated and spoiled by the readiness of railway access; but the locomotive has rendered more holidays possible, and has kept the roads in a decent solitude for the cyclist. Imagine, if you please, the Great North Road nowadays without the railway. A hundred coaches, more or less, raced along it in the last years of the coaching age, at all hours of the day and night. How many would suffice for the needs of the travelling public to-day? and what chance would be left to the tourist, afoot or awheel?