What happens if we think about railways
as a kind of consumption? Towards a new historiography of transport and
citizenship in early-twentieth-century
Historians of twentieth-century
Naturally
enough, historians of British transport have picked up on many of these themes.
They have shown that transport in
the first four decades of the last century should be of particular interest to
historians of consumption partly because it is not easy, particularly in the
inter-war period when new opportunities opened up, to draw a neat dividing line
between ‘necessitous’ and ‘aspirational’ consumption. Even the most apparently
utilitarian of journeys, such as the daily commute, might present choices that
extended far beyond a ‘rational’ calculation based on price alone.[5]
In line with the historiography of
other countries, notably the
Public transport
has not been nearly as well treated, despite the fact that before the second
world war trams, buses, coaches and trains played a greater role in making and
keeping
In this paper I
want to build on these studies by looking a little more widely at what it might
mean to take Britain’s railways as a kind of consumption in the early-twentieth
century, a period in which they for the first time faced serious competition
for passenger traffic (first, in the urban context, from the electric tram and
then, increasingly in all spheres, from the motor bus, coach and car). This is
partly just a matter of suggesting – in the final section of this paper – a
modest broadening of the kind of sources that we might look at in order to
deepen our grasp of the complexities of commercial cultures. But I also want to
attempt something which is a bit more ambitious conceptually, bearing in mind
calls such as those by Matthew
Hilton, Frank Trentmann and Frank Mort for a new approach to the study of
consumption in twentieth-century
This paper is very much an initial stab
in this direction, a report on work-in-progress which is itself part of the
much larger project. First I draw on a long-established body of work by railway
historians to review briefly the process by which in the nineteenth century the
railways came increasingly to be regarded in political discourse as a kind of
public service, and certain types of railway travel thus came to be thought of
as necessary for participation in civil society – ‘citizenship’ in the sense
that I shall understand that term. As part of this historical process, Timothy
Alborn has argued that ‘the organization and social relations of railways were
constitutively political, such that they could not ignore politics without
hampering economic performance’,[19]
which I take to mean partly that the railway companies themselves accepted that
their activities should be governed by a sense of public service as well as
commercial imperatives more narrowly conceived. I suggest that we should extend
this argument into the early-twentieth century, so that we acknowledge more
fully how the railway companies’ development of passenger transport helped to
shift historical conceptualizations of citizens’ mobility. I then go on to
sketch two complementary lines of research that might help us in this task.
First I look at attempts to secure the representation of passengers’ interests
in the regulatory machinery of the inter-war period. Then, and finally, I
return to commercial cultures, looking briefly at how the largest of the
inter-war ‘Big Four’ companies, the London, Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS),
represented, and thus helped to construct, the passenger as a consumer of
railway services and hence as a ‘mobile citizen’.
The
passenger as citizen and consumer: the state and railways to 1914
First I want to pick up Martin
Daunton’s analysis of the politics of regulation of consumption within natural
monopolies, including transport, in nineteenth-century
As Daunton notes, two issues centrally defined the nineteenth-century debate over natural monopolies: how best to ensure that consumers should be guarded against exploitation by utilities; and how to define consumers in a world where generally ‘the consumer was someone for whom others claimed to speak, rather than an interest with his or her own voice’.[22] This is not the place to rehearse all the twists and turns of government policy and practice with regard to the railways, which may be summarized by saying that by 1900 passengers’ interests were defined by a combination of government legislation, quasi-legalistic regulation, and the politico-commercial acumen of the companies themselves. Much of the raft of statutory requirements, backed up by a vigorous inspectorate, concerning railway operations (signalling, for instance) and working conditions addressed the concerns of passengers, most notably safety. There was, however, one piece of legislation that had a considerable bearing on everyday mobility among the working class, the Cheap Trains Act of 1883. I shall return to this shortly. Regulation of charges and general facilities was carried out through a legalistic body, the Railway and Canal Commission, although this had little jurisdiction over passenger fares, which were generally fixed, if at all, by each railways’ enabling act. This left the railway companies, which were trading in a highly concentrated industry where price competition was discouraged by increasing working costs, with a considerable, but not absolute, degree of freedom to provide passenger services and to charge fares based upon perceptions of what they thought was commercially viable.[23] But such considerations were alloyed with others regarding the wider political context in which the railways did their business. By 1900 railway managers had taken on board the rhetoric and even the practice of public service, partly as a defence against further state regulation or even nationalization.[24]
The argument that passenger services were at least in part a public service that should not be subject to the usual norms of trading had been developing since at least the 1840s. It would not be going too far to say that many Victorians saw a measure of access to the mobility afforded by the railway as something approaching a citizen’s right: disagreement lay increasingly with the methods by which this might be achieved than the goal itself. Thus much of the debate over nationalization during the 1860s was couched in terms of the supposed benefits to ‘the public’ conceived largely as passengers.[25] Reformers looked to the railways as a social service that would deliver improved passenger facilities, higher levels of safety and cheaper fares once government ownership and management replaced the defective combination of self-interested directors and passive shareholders. The benefits would not be felt just by those who travelled. The public-health reformer Edwin Chadwick, for example, argued for state ownership on the grounds that it would improve living conditions in the cities by allowing workers to live in new suburbs served by loss-making lines. Although nationalization was to prove several decades distant, the terms of the debate in the 1860s irrevocably marked future discussions about railway policy, such as the renewed debate over state ownership in the early 1900s and the detailed discussion in the run-up to the 1921 Railways Act about the representation of passengers’ interests.
By suggesting that mobility was increasingly seen as a right, I am not arguing that all passengers were taken as equal, nor that all ‘citizens’ (taking that term in a broad sense which goes beyond participation in formal politics) were to enjoy similar levels of access. Social class, filtered through the ability to pay, was a major determinant of the kind and quality of service that passengers could enjoy.[26] Nevertheless, on two occasions the state famously intervened to encourage the spread of mobility down the social scale, and thus defined particular kinds of railway travel as ‘necessaries’. Gladstone’s Railway Regulation Act (1844) and its ‘parliamentary’ trains for third-class passengers at a penny-a-mile did little to promote everyday mobility, being intended more as an aid to working-class migration to alleviate shortages of labour.[27] More relevant to everyday working-class travel was the response from the 1860s to the sort of concerns expressed by Chadwick. Acts enabling new works in urban areas generally required railways to run trains at low fares for workers displaced by construction. The 1883 Cheap Trains Act extended these rather ill-defined concessions to all workers in urban areas; its provisions largely governed the use of trains for the journey-to-work by the working-class up to, and indeed beyond, the first world war.[28] Cheap everyday travel was also in some measure gendered, since the assumption was that it would be largely workmen who would travel to and fro their place of work at the special rates. The railway companies recovered some of their additional costs by charging ordinary fares to others in the family travelling to the city centre.[29]
For the purposes of my argument that the railway companies themselves helped to shape nineteenth-century attitudes towards ‘necessary’ mobility, the spread of inter-urban travel down the social scale is of greater interest for it was not the result of state intervention. At one level the Midland Railway’s decision in 1872 to admit third-class passengers to all its long-distance trains, followed in 1875 by the abolition of second class (along with the gradual raising of the quality of accommodation in third) may be seen as a rational business response to the company’s unfavourable competitive position. Similar reasoning may be applied to the subsequent experiments by most of the other companies with this high-volume, low-margin market.[30] But all this can also be read as pre-empting calls for such action from middle-class reformers who assumed that state ownership would be needed.[31]
It is in this context that I think it would be worthwhile to undertake a more detailed examination of the third wave of debates over nationalization, from around the turn of the century up to 1914. Although much of this focussed on possible benefits to railway labour and even, if to a lesser degree and with less popular support, traders, some proponents continued to couch their arguments in terms of passengers’ interests.[32] Emil Davies, for example, who seems to have been a member of the Independent Labour Party, argued wrongly just before the first world war that the railway companies were only willing to grant improved facilities when forced by state intervention.[33] But he was on stronger ground when, in an adumbration of modern complaints, he directed his ire at the ‘mass of absurd anomalies’ represented by fares and their associated conditions of travel, a circumstance which he contrasted unfavourably with the situation on state-run railways in Europe. For Davies, British ‘passenger fares are fixed practically without any system at all’, whereas state administration at least had the benefit to the passenger of ensuring standardization.[34] But this apparent chaos was partly the result of individual companies trying to ‘grow the market’ for what we now call discretionary travel by, as Douglas Knoop, an academic contemporary, put matters, reducing fares so as ‘to induce people, who would otherwise not do so, to travel by rail, and to encourage such as would travel a little, to travel more’.[35] With this kind of consumption we are clearly crossing the permeable, and historically changing, boundary between the necessitous and aspirational consumption of mobility.
Thus in sum, citizens’ access to railway mobility in the period 1900-14 was largely defined by the companies’ various and varying pricing policies, based upon what managers thought passengers would pay for particular types of journey. But this is not to say that the railways operated in a manner which simply maximized financial returns. Their commitment, enforced or voluntary, to an ethos of public services meant that they had developed a range of services, facilities and fares which on average (always, of course, a potentially misleading concept) probably provided passengers with a greater measure of consumer-surplus than would have been the case if policies had not been constrained by the wider political context. For as Knoop argued in 1913:
the Prussian system of several classes, with very marked differences in comfort between the lower and the higher classes, and but few kinds of tickets available for each class, is much more successful in making people pay according to their ability than the English system of practically two classes, both with a high standard of comfort and many scales of fares.[36]
In short, British passengers could pay shockingly high fares, but when they got a bargain, which they often could, they did very well indeed.
Speaking for the consumer, 1919-1921: the
Ministry of Transport and the Railways Act, 1921
Although railway nationalization did not happen until 1948, it was very much on the mainstream political agenda inter-war.[37] Although more work remains to be done on the ideas of those groups which advocated a greater role for consumer organizations in the economy, it seems tolerably clear that none saw any real alternative to state ownership when it came to the railways. On the Left, Fabian thought as represented by the Webbs not surprisingly saw nationalization as the way forward, even though voluntary association might be more appropriate in other sectors. By 1928, Beatrice Webb even argued that state provision of transport, amongst other essential services, made the state an ‘Association of Consumers’[38] Filtered through the party’s policy-making, such ideas contributed to Labour’s commitment by the mid-1930s to nationalization by means of a public corporation, the solution most famously adopted in the London Passenger Transport Board of 1933. The National Transport Board was to run the railways free of party-political direction, and in particular was to have no formal representation of interest groups.[39] Whilst such ideas accorded broadly with ‘middle opinion’ in the decade, some such groups, such as PEP (Political and Economic Planning), pressed for a greater weight to be given to consumers’ interests.[40]
But other, more radical, ideas had briefly held sway on the Left. G.D.H. Cole’s guild socialism of the late 1910s and 1920s provide examples of models for the collective provision of transport (still predominantly the railways) in which consumers were to be represented on the key decision-making bodies. In 1917 he envisaged the railways being organized as a national guild of workers, with consumers’ interests articulated through a ‘functional parliament’ intended to resolve disputes between producers and consumers. Three years later the overall structure of guilds into which the railways were to fit had been somewhat simplified, but the general model of voicing consumers’ concerns remained the same.[41]
Fanciful though such notions might seem today, it is worth recalling not only the wave of political opinion in this period that favoured greatly extending consumer representation with regard to other areas of necessitous consumption but also the practical measures that were taken to achieve this. Much attention in the immediate aftermath of the war focussed on food, occasioned not least by its high cost, and found practical expression in the short-lived Consumers’ Council of 1918-21.[42] This embraced transport as one of the areas affecting the cost of living.[43] By the time of the Council’s demise in early 1921, a consequence of wider political currents, it was calling for a department of state to represent consumers’ interests, including those in the realm of transport.[44]
It is in this context that we must understand discussion in the early 1920s over the possibility of introducing a measure of passenger representation into the railways’ regulatory framework. Although nationalization was briefly seen as a practical way forward from the war-time regime of state control of the railways, by the early 1920s it was clear that some modification of the existing system of regulated private companies was the road to be followed. Debates over the provisions of the 1921 Railways Act which established the new structure[45] show the strength of opinion, particularly on the Left, in favour of such representation.
The 1921 act was described by one academic contemporary as ‘by far the most comprehensive statute which has ever been passed to regulate British railways’.[46] By extending regulation to passenger services and fares, it established a mechanism which had the potential to promote consumers’ interests through a renewed Railway and Canal Commission and a new Railway Rates Tribunal. The Tribunal was charged with ensuring ‘the maximum development and extension in the public interest of the carriage by railway of… passengers and their luggage’, and was thus required, for instance, to consider the probable effect of existing charges.[47] But the Tribunal, a quasi-legal entity of three persons, was not intended to be representative of particular interests. This principle was however compromised in some small measure by the fact that for particular cases it could appoint additional members drawn from either of two panels. One of these, the General Panel, included 12 members ‘representative of the interests of labour and of passengers’ among its membership of three dozen.[48] This was all that was left of attempts by the Labour Party to include a permanent representative of ‘general users’, based on the practice of the Rates Advisory Committee.
This body had been established in 1919 to advise the new Minister of Transport. Reflecting the more inclusive political outlook then current, the Minister had discretionary powers to add a single member to those who by statute represented traders (two), the transport industries and labour. Supporting the committee was a ‘panel of experts, and of impartial persons’ similarly charged with representing a wide range of interests.[49] These included, as one Labour member later noted in the parliamentary scrutiny of the Railways Bill, ‘a representative of the general users of railways’.[50] Indeed, it is suggestive of the weight of political opinion still in favour of consumer representation in 1921 that Labour’s attempts to have a representative of labour added to the Tribunal were couched more in terms of the railways’ impact on the cost of living, through fares, than working conditions.[51] Much was made subsequently in committee by other M.P.s of the issue of fares, particularly with regard to the so-called exceptional fares that the railways were to be permitted to charge below the standard ones set by the Tribunal.[52] But parliamentary opinion was by now swinging more generally against the principle of consumer representation – one government member argued in committee that ‘it is possible to push it so far that it becomes a fetish…’[53] – and the only concession was to enlarge a proposed Traders’ Panel into the General Panel.[54]
The workings of the Rates Tribunal with regard to passengers would probably repay additional study, [55] but it is clear that although some useful advances were made in areas that had long proved troublesome – for example, drawing up standard conditions of carriage determining the kinds and quantity of personal luggage that could be carried free of additional charge – in practice rather little was achieved by the new regulatory regime, either in terms of the fares charged or the quality of services provided.[56] Indeed, if anything strategic policy favoured the railways against passengers’ interests, particularly with the Commission’s decision in 1931 that a company could not be required to continue to provide an unprofitable service.[57] But in any case, by the late 1920s the meteoric growth of road competition was making the regulatory regime obsolescent. Maxima for fares were, as one authority presciently put it, from the start either ‘obsolete for practical purposes’ or ‘only registered what the companies had conceded of their own accord’.[58] The railway companies thus effectively retained their pre-war freedom to charge what they thought they could, but now in the context not only of a continuing commitment to public service but also of competition in many of their markets.[59] They therefore pursued with increasing vigour their earlier practices, tailoring fares and providing services to maximize revenue which they trusted would generate a return over and above direct costs. In the apparent absence of any systematically organized body representing passengers, it was left to the companies to judge which types of services would appeal to consumers and thus to construct notions of ‘railway mobility’.
Constructing the passenger on the
As Peter Butterfield has shown with
regard to the London & North Eastern Railway (LNER), an ethos of public
service continued to influence the companies’ commercial policies between the
wars, leading them to maintain many secondary passenger services that even the
rudimentary management accountancy of the time showed to be running at a loss.[60]
Whether or not as a matter of deliberate decision, the companies therefore
continued to define a certain level of access to railway services as necessary.
But, as I noted above, it is the railways’ attitudes towards those forms of
travel that showed prospects for growth by appealing to consumers’ social
aspirations that have started to excite the interest of historians. Chief
amongst these are leisure journeys, the focus of the published studies by David
Watts and Ralph Harrington, and of Alan Bennett’s doctoral study.[61]
These important works show how the railways’ sophisticated understanding of
their potential markets enabled them to appeal through their graphic
advertising (
But
as all these scholars acknowledge, the marketing of railway services was neither
targeted solely at the leisure market nor relied solely on books, pamphlets and
graphic posters. Other media were used: the likes of maps, handbills, timetable
books, newspaper advertisements and press announcements are well-known, if
rather too little studied, at least by academics,[62]
but radio broadcasts, lantern slides, photographs, films and illuminated
advertisements were among those that became increasingly important from the
1920s.[63]
Together these media constituted what I call the railways’ ‘official’
commercial culture – that which the companies deliberately sanctioned for
public consumption. In order to get a fuller appreciation of the railways’
understanding of their potential customers, we obviously need to embark upon a
more rounded analysis of these media. But I suggest that we also ought to take
more note of the fact that the companies themselves increasingly saw their
front-line staff as a means of selling transport. This leads me to wonder if
there might be scope for looking at what I call the railways’ ‘semi-official’
consumer culture; in other words, those values and attitudes prevalent amongst
its staff which a company was willing in some degree to sanction and encourage,
even if they did not align fully with those embedded in official publicity. All
these tasks remains to be done: what I suggest here is one possible avenue of
exploration, based upon a preliminary survey of the largest of the inter-war
companies, the
The importance the LMS accorded
marketing may be gathered from the two textbooks on different aspects it
published privately in the late 1930s[64]
as well as the increasing prominence given to the subject in its staff
periodical, the LMS Magazine. The
latter is an invaluable resource for understanding the company’s commercial
culture, both official and semi-official, for one of its functions was to
implicate staff at all grades in persuading people to travel by train. Launched
in November 1923, less than a year after the LMS came into existence, the
magazine was published monthly until the outbreak of war. It represented a
significantly increased degree of control by the railway’s management over
internal communications, being the officially sanctioned replacement for the LMSR Gazette which, as the LNWR Gazette, had been published since
1911 by staff themselves.[65]
Attractively produced, the new magazine was sold chiefly to staff through a
network (in 1938) of nearly 800 agents at the subsidized price of a penny (with
a twopenny edition offering insurance benefits), settling down to sales of
roughly 70 to 79 thousand in the second half of the 1930s.[66]
Readership was then estimated to be about three times this figure,[67]
which would suggest a penetration of something over three-quarters of the total
workforce, assuming that all readers were employees of the company. This was
highly unlikely though, for it is clear from the contents that a family
audience was an important segment of the readership. The magazine was also sold
to members of the public, something that was encouraged in the mid 1930s on the
grounds that it would ‘enable us to exert that influence to make people
rail-minded that is so necessary for the future well-being of every servant of
the Company’;[68]
‘school boys, university and professional men in all parts of the world’
merited particular mention, suggesting both the gendered and class dimensions
of this wider audience.[69]
Of course, we can no more assume the
success of the magazine in developing a favourable commercial culture among its
intended audiences than we can that of, say, graphic posters. High circulation
was almost certainly due to other aspects of the magazine (social news,
articles on travel, the work of the LMS’s departments, the history of its
predecessors, photographic competitions, ideas for holidays, insurance
benefits, the women’s page, humour, and so on). Yet both in the content
explicitly directed at commercial matters, such as the ‘quota system’ intended
to promote internal competition in pursuit of sales, and in that which more
tangentially and often informally addressed the way in which people thought
about transport (that is, aspects of semi-official culture), we do at least get
insights into the company’s thinking about commercial culture beyond the media
of its public advertising or the often bare statements of the business records.[70]
Here I can do no more than sketch some of my initial findings. Sheryl Kroen has recently noted the increasing prominence of gender in the political historiography of consumption in the early-twentieth century, tying this in with the historical (and historiographical) emergence of a more ‘positive appraisal of the consumer as an active agent of democratization’. Gender plays a major role in this analysis because in the first half of nineteenth century the supposedly virtuous world of the ‘ascetic’ male citizen was often contrasted to the ‘despised’ realm of female consumption. Thus the later conception of the person who becomes a citizen through acts of consumption represents in part the assertion of women’s rights to full political, economic and social status.[71] The content of the LMS Magazine suggests the ambivalence of the company’s semi-official culture in this regard.
I have already indicated the
gendered nature of the external audience sought by the magazine, and it is
worth recalling that the railways’ workforce, the primary audience, was also
largely, although not totally, male.[72]
We might therefore expect the magazine to reflect wider male uncertainties in
the face of women’s growing influence, not least in the sphere of consumption.
Nor are we disappointed. Take, for instance, this cartoon, ‘Nonplussed!’ from August
1928, which clearly expresses a sense of male unease at the disruptive effect
of changing fashions and behaviour on the railways’ conventions of social 
propriety.
The magazine was also wont, as in the cartoon ‘Management!’ from July 1934, to
draw upon archetypal images of older, grotesque women as representative of
domestic authority, an image that was conspicuously absent from the company’s
graphic advertising.[73]
Such women did not even have to make an appearance for their presence to be
felt, as the second cartoon, from June 1936, demonstrates.
Even when they were not represented as grotesque, the technological ineptitude of women was a fairly common theme, as in the first cartoon below, from September 1937. But the traffic was not all one way. In the second cartoon (November 1936), the humour turns on the young man’s wrongful assumption of his companion’s ignorance of railway engineering and operating.
In
the 1930s the magazine included several cartoons which drew in a more positive
way upon images of women to connote the desirability of rail travel, either
specifically to women or more generally to both sexes. Here I note two
categories, the first a series of cartoons (from the same hand, ‘Sinton’ )
depicting the railway carriage as a space permitting a degree of (hetero)sexual
licence. This in itself was a fairly well-worn trope, but the degree of control
asserted by these self-assured women was perhaps more novel (May 1936; May
1937). [74]
The second category employed women to connote the railway’s favourable
characteristics of, variously, speed, comfort and safety, sometimes by
deflating male obsessions with motoring (September 1935) or, on at least one 
occasion
(October 1937), by depicting the carriage interior, and 
more
particularly the compartment, as a quasi-domestic space. The latter kind of
representation was, of course, scarcely a novelty, and it is arguable that here
the cartoonist’s rendition of his (I assume – H.C. Walker) three middle-aged
characters did more to confirm than challenge a traditional view of women’s place
in the domestic sphere. Nonetheless, and to look finally at a visual rendition
of the LMS’s official commercial culture in the magazine, it is clear that the
company was keen to promote the idea of railway travel as something that could particularly
appeal to women.
Concluding remarks
In this paper I have skated quickly over a lot of ground, some of which has been researched more thoroughly than perhaps I have suggested. But my aim here is not so much to review the totality of the relevant literature on Britain’s railways – an impossibility in the assigned space – but more to indicate the potential that the combination of a re-working of existing historiography, plus an extension of the exciting lines of research being developed on the railways’ commercial cultures, could have for extending our understanding of ‘railway mobility’ in early-twentieth century Britain. More particularly, I have argued that by taking the railways seriously as a form of consumption, transport history will significantly enhance its appeal to historians who are working to develop a rounded understanding of the place of consumption in the formation of twentieth-century notions of citizenship. In short, this is one of the kinds of project that George Revill and I have recently argued, to the scepticism of some, should form an aspect of the future of transport historiography.[75]