Rambles on Railways

by Sir Cusack P. Roney

In the early days of Wolverton, a reading-room, and a library, containing some 700 volumes, supplied the mental occupation and recreation then afforded to its residents. Now there is a Science and Art Institute, an off-shoot from South Kensington, which contributed £500 towards the erection of the building. Its library possesses nearly 3,000 volumes, almost all of which are contributions. The chief person in this work of kindness and goodness is Miss Burdett Coutts, that pre-eminently good lady whose name has but to be mentioned to ensure for it universal respect and admiration.

The institute has an enrolment of 350 members, a large number of whom attend the evening class, and it is a pleasurable fact to state that the pupils have been successful, more than on the average, in the science examinations which are annually held there. As at Crewe, the Government makes it free grants of patent specifications; many of these are closely studied, and all are highly appreciated by the students.

The directors and principal officers of the company, always mindful of the best interests of its staff, and ever keeping a paternal, but not obtrusive eye upon it, have recently erected a model lodging-house, solely for the convenience of single young men. Fifty of them are now accommodated in it; each has a separate bed-room, and the whole establishment is superintended by a very carefully selected manager, who is responsible, not only for the good conduct of the lodgers whilst under its roof, but also for their comfort. The system works well, and it will be extended.

In 1840, and for some few years afterwards, passengers ran a risk at Wolverton to which, happily, or, as we venture to think, very unhappily, they are no longer exposed—that is passengers who travelled chiefly in first-class carriages, and in the express trains of that period were accustomed to alight for ten railway minutes (anglice five) at the celebrated refreshment rooms, the fame of which was world-wide. It was not only that the soup was hot, and the coffee “super-heated,” but it was admitted by those who, by the process of blowing the former, and pouring the latter into saucers, were able to get a mouthful or two, it was admitted we say, that each of these beverages was excellent. But there was an attraction at these refreshment rooms that rose superior to all the hot soup, the hot coffee, the hot tea, the buns, the Banbury cakes, the pork pies, the brandy, whiskey, gin, and “rich compounds,” the ample statistics of which will be found in our foot-note.[79] Need we say that we refer to the charming young ladies, in whom were concentrated all the beauty and grace that should be corporated in modern Hebes. Our excellent friends, Messrs. Spiers & Pond, of well-earned and well-deserved “Buffet” celebrity, have worthily followed in the footsteps of the great inventress of the railway refreshment room, as it should be; and happy we are to record the fact, that go where we may, we are sure to see, under the magic words announcing that they are the caterers, sweet faces, worthy types of English beauty, all the more worthy because with them is combined the modest demeanour, emblem of purity, without which all is absent that adorns woman and renders her enchanting. Messrs. Spiers & Pond have—as the late Mrs. Hibbert had—but one rule for “tainted angels”—their expulsion.

At moments, however—they were only moments—female grace was at fault at the Wolverton refreshment rooms. The late Douglas Jerrold (father of one of the workman’s most real and truest friends—Blanchard by Christian name) had in his play of the “Housekeeper” one of the characters, a drunken wine-porter, who appears on the scene for only a few minutes, and all the language he gives utterance to is advice to his daughter and her companion, never to go anywhere without a cork-screw. No doubt this is good paternal advice, such as any good father of a family might give, but it is the use only of the instrument with which we are concerned. Wolverton had many stringent rules, and one of them was that “draught bitter” should not be “drunk on the premises”; pale ale, therefore, could only be furnished by means of the cork-screw. Now, we appeal to any father, husband, brother, cousin, or lover (the two latter often synonymous,—see all the dictionaries, classical and vulgate); Did you ever see a young lady draw, with grace, a cork out of a bottle in the old-fashioned way, that is, by placing it within the ample folds of her dress (all the more ample if crinoline were concealed behind it), and then tugging until the cork is extracted; if the cork be an easy, obedient, willing cork, the operation is not difficult, and woman’s want of grace is but for the moment, but it became momentous, to say nothing of bursting of tapes and wrenching of hooks and eyes, red face and perhaps disappointment, if main force must be resorted to. At all events, the late Mrs. Hibbert (known at Wolverton and elsewhere as Generalissima) appreciated the difficulty, and with woman’s tact transferred, by a wave of her sovereign sceptre, the beer bottle drawing department of the establishment to the hands of the young gentlemen with all the buttons, and thus released the young ladies from the duty. She never, however, could, to the day of her death, make up her mind that the young ladies ought to be relieved from ginger beer and soda water.

But before we quit for ever (scriptorially) the subject of bitter beer—of Bass, Ind, and Allsopp; of immortal Burton, that squeezes quart bottles into pints, pints into thimblefuls, of which three-fourths are froth; and of tap-tub measurement that, by a talisman, converts an imperial pint of the amber fluid into four half-pint glasses, let us ask permission to philosophise for a moment—for a moment only. Woman! You are never more charming, more feminine, more enchanting than when you are domestic. A magic circle of fascination then surrounds you. You are in your real mission, and being real, you are angelic. But, woman, be true to yourself; be domestic to the fullest extent that brightest imagination can picture or truth realise. But, sex most dear, most loveable of all things human that can be loved, hear the advice of one who believes you were sent on earth for the holy purpose of refining man, and of purifying him—never, oh, never be seen using a cork-screw!

Sir Francis Head, in a passage which we purposely omit because we want to have our own say, in our own way, on the subject, informs us that by 1849 four of the young ladies had managed to make excellent marriages. Sir Francis has greatly understated the number. It is quite true that the daily occupations of the young ladies, even without drawing the corks of beer bottles, were arduous and unceasing. Nevertheless, as with all busily occupied people, a time can be found for everything. Not four, but four times four of them found sixteen eligible husbands, and at the present time we know two of them, one not fat, but “fair and forty,” the other with slight disadvantage in point of age—forty-four (she confesses to forty[80])—but in every other respect at least as eligible, who have had each to exhibit the sable signs of sorrow, void, and bereavement, within the last eighteen months. Let us just pause for a moment, to shed a “pensive tear” to the memory of the two dear departed, just as in the days of our boyhood our sympathies were requested in memory of the celebrated bonnie lassie of “Kelvin Grove,” by the father of a lady of present times, who is worshipped by millions, and has been possessed of only by four. (May he of the strong shield endure for ever!) Our tear is shed; and now, like the military bands that accompany the remains of a departed comrade to the grave with the Dead March in Saul, and return to barracks with joyous and festive music, do we proclaim, by sound of wedding trumpet and cornet-à-piston, the probability that, ere long, each of the charming widows will make a second matrimonial venture. We can, in fact, go one step farther. One of the ladies has already purchased the grey silk dress, absolutely necessary on such occasion; the second has not gone so far as actual purchase, but she knows where to put her hand upon one at a moment’s notice. The dress-maker has already been consulted about the trimmings.[81]

It may probably be observed by any person who has been so venturous as to read the first hundred or so of our pages, that we are given to statistics. This is so, and it has also been alleged of us that we readily detect errors in them when prepared by others. Without taking to ourselves more than a decorous quantity of flattering unction, we believe we shall be able to show, in a work preparing for early publication, that, as regards Post Office statistics, at all events, none have been issued by the department for the last fifteen years that are not abounding in most egregious blunders, and that the logical dogmas of “contrariety, sub-contrariety, and contradiction” were never carried to greater extent than in these documents. Our statistics and contradictions are, at the present moment, however, of a different character. They refer to what, in the palmy days of Wolverton as a seat of learning and refreshment, formed an important part of the population of the colony; at least they are described as so being, both in an article of the Quarterly Review upon the London and North-Western Railway of 1849, and in Sir Francis Head’s “Stokers and Pokers,” published in the identical same year, and almost in the identical same month. Nevertheless the former names seventy-five pigs and piglings as members of the refreshment establishment; but Sir Francis disputes the figures, raises it ten higher, and not only insists that they were eighty-five in number, but that each was converted, in his or her turn every year, into pork pies and sausage roly-polies. But whichever amount be the correct one, let the pork pies and sausage roly-polies rest in peace. The indigestions of which they were, in their day, the teterimæ causæ, have long since passed away. Let no rude attempt be made to re-produce them.

Thanks to increased lines of railway at Wolverton, both “main” and “siding,” thanks also to signalling so improved in principle, and so minute in action—signalling which embraces the visible “arm” by day, the visible tri-coloured lamp at night, the audible “fog,” and never-failing, ever truthful Electricity—express and other trains can, and do dart past the fifty-two mile post placed at the eastern extremity of the station with celerity and certainty, the same as at any other part of the system.

Still the engine speeds onwards, untired, at undiminished pace. She and her train are near to Blisworth, 62½ miles from London, and it is four miles south of this station that she is allowed her first draught of water. Of solid food she has still enough, for of the four to five tons of coal with which she started on her journey, she has not consumed more than a ton and a-half. Not far from Roade Station, on each side of the railway, is a reservoir of pure water, and at this part of the line the gradient is as nearly as possible level. Within the rails, both “down” and “up” sides, are placed two narrow troughs, each about a quarter of a mile long. By means of syphons the water is conveyed from the reservoirs to the troughs, and just as the engine approaches, a small inclined plane with wooden sides, such as the inclines by which luggage is dashed from packet-piers to steamers, is lowered from the front of the engine. The inclined plane brought in contact with the water compels it, contrary to all hydraulic principles, to ascend along it, until the water is deposited in the tank of the tender. As the engine approaches the end of the trough, the inclined plane is, by the simplest possible means, drawn up, and the engine has a fresh supply of water that would enable her to go fully as long again as the distance she has already completed.