In 1840, one man transformed travel in Britain.
His name was George Bradshaw
and his railway guides inspired the Victorians to take to the tracks.
Stop by stop, he told them where to go, what to see and where to stay.
And now, 170 years later, I'm aboard for a series of rail adventures
across the United Kingdom to see what of Bradshaw's Britain remains.
My journey around northern England
has taken me from the great mill towns of Lancashire
to the grandiose scenery of the Yorkshire moors
and the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway, opened in 1867,
closed to passengers in 1962,
gloriously reopened in 1968, and running steam.
'On this leg, I learn how Victorians marketed confectionery...'
On Saturday last, you were eating Mackintosh's Toffee at our expense.
Next Saturday, pay us another visit and eat it at your own expense.
That's brilliant. Brilliant.
Which was a very unusual way of advertising.
'I get a tailor-made fitting...'
Most people have got one shoulder lower than the other, and you have.
Where I've been writing over the years, yeah.
All them cheques. HE LAUGHS
'And I help revive a cinematic railway legend.'
Oakworth!
Oakworth Station!
CHEERING
Oakworth!
My journey began in Manchester, headed west to Port Sunlight,
took the sea air in Southport,
traversed Lancashire towards Bradford
and now goes south to steely South Yorkshire, ending in Derbyshire,
where the father of the railways, George Stephenson, lies buried.
Today's Yorkist chapter begins in Haworth,
goes to the cinema in Oakworth,
invests in Bradford,
moves stickily south to Halifax,
weaving its way finally to Huddersfield.
This landscape looks benign in sun.
But lashed by wind and rain,
it made the setting for a dark tale of passion, Wuthering Heights.
That and another love story, Jane Eyre,
are amongst my favourite novels
and they were written by sisters in a family of gifted siblings.
Yes, this is Bronte country.
I'm heading to Haworth, atop a hill in the Worth Valley
where novels of passion and genius
were created by three brilliant sisters.
I want to know what inspired them
and whether the railway played any role in their lives.
I'm meeting Professor Ann Sumner of the Bronte Society
at the parsonage provided for their father, the local curate.
Hello, Ann. Hello, Michael. Welcome to Haworth. Thank you very much indeed.
Who were this extraordinary family of Brontes?
Well, the Bronte sisters wrote some of the greatest novels
that we have in English literature of the 19th century.
Of course, Charlotte wrote Jane Eyre published in 1847,
Emily wrote Wuthering Heights in the same year,
and Anne, perhaps the least known of the three sisters,
she brought out Agnes Grey and The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall.
What were their circumstances?
Well, they were not a wealthy family.
Very sadly, the mother died just 18 months after arriving here in 1821.
And the sisters went out as governesses or as teachers,
and when they came back to write their famous novels,
they drew on that experience of life as well.
Before there had been Jane Austen,
but was it still quite rare to have a woman novelist?
It was unusual.
And pretty early on there was some rumour in London
that actually this was only one man writing the novels.
And so the two sisters, Charlotte and Anne,
walked to Keighley - by this time the railways were at Keighley -
five miles in a thunderstorm, and then they were whisked down overnight
to London and, of course, revealed themselves to the publisher
the next morning, who was somewhat surprised to find that they really were women.
Jane Eyre was an instant success.
Charlotte spent some of her new-found wealth buying shares
in an industry which already played a part in the lives of the sisters.
She and her siblings had inherited money from their Aunt Branwell,
£1,400, which had been divided between them
and they had invested in the railway.
And they actually had good - initially - good income
from the railways, and now she writes to her publisher George Smith.
She writes, "The little railway property I possessed,
"scarcely any portion of it can with security be calculated on."
This was a real boom and bust set of stocks, wasn't it?
This was like the dot-com bubble of the early 21st century.
The railways were tremendously exciting.
They were transforming the Brontes' lives.
Charlotte herself travelled for the first time in 1839.
She went on holiday to Bridlington.
Her sisters used the train, and indeed when Anne died,
it was very sad because Anne wanted to get to Scarborough,
she'd been there as a governess and she wanted to see the sea again, she thought that would make her well.
And sadly, just after she arrived in Scarborough, she did actually die.
So the trains were really important to the sisters.
And, in fact, Branwell, their brother, was very interested
in the railways, and he actually worked for the railways as well.
Branwell Bronte was the fourth child
and the only boy of the six Bronte siblings.
Partial to a drink and rumoured to take opium,
he was an aspiring portrait painter and poet
whose short but colourful life ended when he died of bronchitis
aged just 31.
So how was it that Branwell became a railwayman?
Well, his portraiture business was failing, so Branwell took
his own initiative and applied for a role as a clerk at Sowerby Bridge.
Here we actually have a notebook given to him,
so that he could keep a very close eye on what kind of goods trains
came through, and note the details down.
Most of it is around doodles, very good caricatures here of the men
he's working with, and a lovely caricature of himself, actually,
with his glasses on - he was very short-sighted with this pointy nose.
And then this list of his favourite poets
and there's some lovely drafts of poems in this book as well.
With his eye on the artistic,
Branwell's railway career hit the buffers
when his station's accounts failed to tally and he was sacked.
So these are by Branwell, are they?
Yes, they are. Branwell actually set up practice
and worked for over a year in Bradford,
but wasn't financially successful.
This has been a real eye-opener for me. I had no idea
there was a railwayman Bronte, the forgotten sibling,
and a man of some talent.
GUARD WHISTLES
Resuming my steam journey, I'm heading north towards Oakworth.
There's another literary connection with this railway.
A lady who was a child at the time of my Bradshaw's guide, E Nesbit.
And she wrote a book, which became a film
with which the British people are still in love.
Yes, it's The Railway Children.
Shot on location at Oakworth in 1970,
the film, directed by Lionel Jeffries,
tells Nesbit's Edwardian story of the adventures of three siblings.
Roberta, Peter and Phyllis move to live next to a Yorkshire railway
after their father is falsely accused of spying for the Russians
and imprisoned.
Former Members of Parliament Ann Cryer and her late husband Bob,
who were Keighley and Worth Valley committee members,
played a pivotal role
in securing this line's starring role in the production.
Nice to see you. Good to see you.
Now, what was your involvement and the involvement of your husband Bob?
On a particular day, the end of '69, I took a phone-call
on behalf of the railway, and this voice said,
"My name is Bob Lynn and I'm a friend of Lionel Jeffries
"and we want to make a film on your railway."
That was the beginning of it.
It was just so exciting. It was absolutely wonderful.
Bob had to organise the engines,
which way they were going to go, where they were going to be
and sometimes very early in the morning an engine would have to
go down to Shipley triangle to turn round,
so it was going in the other direction.
He was responsible for all that.
Did you actually get sucked into the making of the film?
Yes, we did. My son and daughter, John and Jane, and myself -
we became extras, and Lionel Jeffries was kind enough
to give them a close shot in the film, and that was how kind he was,
not to mention the fact that Lionel Jeffries also chose
to keep the name Oakworth. Whereas in the book it's Meadow Vale.
And it's been an absolute godsend to this railway,
the fact that Oakworth was used.
Today is Oakworth's annual Railway Children celebration,
when locals and members of the railway
re-enact scenes from the film.
Hello. Hello. May I congratulate you on your costumes?
You look absolutely wonderful. Thanks.
What are you playing today? What parts?
Roberta. Phyllis. And Peter. And which scenes are you playing?
We're doing the petticoat scene where we stop the train.
We come out of the station and jump off the platform,
run down the side of the grass and stop at the end
and wait for the train to come, and wave the petticoats and shout stop.
And hopefully with train will stop. Are you involved in that? Yes.
You haven't got a petticoat! No.
We'll lend you one. SHE LAUGHS
Have fun! Bye-bye.
Hello. Hello there.
Are you taking part in the recreation today?
I'm playing Mr Perks. Perks!
Hmm, I was rather hoping to play a part myself.
Is there a part that I can do? Well, you could take my role for the next train, if you like.
That would be fantastic, but I don't exactly look the part, do I?
Oh, that's all right. I can kit you out.
How's that looking? That looks all right on you. You can use my blazer.
That's really kind of you. It's all right, no problem.
Thank you very much.
What do I have to do?
When the train arrives, you shout "Oakworth, Oakworth Station,"
and this tells the passengers as the train arrives where they are.
Well, thank you. I must go and practise my line.
TRAIN WHISTLES
Oakworth! Oakworth Station!
CHEERING
Oakworth! Oakworth Station!
Oakworth!
Still awaiting my first call from a casting agent,
I'm taking the steam service to Keighley,
then changing onto a Northern Rail service heading southeast.
My next stop will be Bradford.
Bradshaw's tells me that it's the great seat of the worsted trade,
finely placed among the Yorkshire Hills, where three valleys meet.
I'm going there to find out how we became a nation of homeowners.
Because the names of Yorkshire towns - Bradford, Bingley, Halifax -
make me think of building societies.
Bradford is yet another northern town
transformed by the steam-powered mills of the Industrial Revolution.
Wealth poured in, but whilst the council built an opulent town hall,
many of Bradford's workers lived in abject squalor.
Some put their faith in self-improvement,
in particular by saving with the building society.
Liz McIvor is curator of social history
at Bradford Museum in Eccleshill, northeast of the city centre.
What were housing conditions like in a place like Bradford
in the early part of the 19th century?
Basically, very old buildings that were tenemented
to take a whole family in one room. Very, very poor access to facilities.
What did they do for sanitation?
Well, mostly a couple of streets might have a middenhead,
which was literally a hole in the ground
emptied by night soil men regularly,
but the problem with that is that the private landlords were supposed to
arrange that, and a lot of them were very unscrupulous and didn't,
so you would have build-up, and basically the pits would become too full
so cellar dwellings at the bottom of the tenement buildings
would fill with sewage.
And what opportunity did working men and women's have to save,
to buy a place of their own?
Well, at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution
not very much, but some of the better-off workers who might earn
that little bit might have just a little bit of cash
to put aside in savings.
So what was the principle of these building societies?
Well, the basic idea of a building society
that makes it different from the bank
is that all the people that invest in the building society
are basically like the shareholders, they all get some profit,
they all get a return on their investments.
Whereas a bank is a private limited company
where the shareholders make all the profits.
The first building society, formed in Birmingham in 1775,
was a terminating society,
which closed when all its members had been housed
in the property for which they'd jointly paid.
The 1836 Building Societies Act
made it easier to form the permanent building societies
that we know today.
And by 1860 there were almost 3,000.
These back-to-back houses were some of the first
to be built by a building society in Bradford.
So welcome to number 25 Gaythorne Row.
So obviously this is a huge improvement
on insanitary and crowded conditions.
Still quite tight, I must say.
What sort of a family would live here?
People would quite happily have lived here with maybe six children,
and yes, it is very cramped,
it's one room at the bottom, one room at the top,
but you have your own outside toilet, that's a massive improvement.
And where's the bathroom?
There isn't a bathroom unfortunately.
There's a tin bath on the wall on a hook, which you would bring in
in front of the fire and have your weekly bath.
So what stratum of society would be living in a house like this?
It would be a skilled worker or an artisan worker.
I'm going to show you an object.
This is a penny saving bank, and it looks like a book,
but it's actually got a hole in the back
for a penny or small coins to go into,
and then the idea was once you filled it up
you could take it to your building society officer,
he has the key, he unlocks it to put it into your savings account.
The building society movement really allowed for the first time
working people to think about saving and think about improving your life.
'It's been a long day.
'Hoping for the luxury of an inside bathroom,
'I'm heading back to the city centre.'
As so often, Bradshaw's provides the clue for my overnight stay.
Bradford, it says, is where three rail branch lines meet -
The Lancashire and Yorkshire, Great Northern, and the Midland mainline.
The Midland built a flagship hotel here,
and this opulently-tiled corridor led directly from the platform
to the elegance within.
'Opened in 1890, the hotel was designed with Renaissance grandeur.
'Today's general manager is Gary Peacock.'
It is a magnificent hotel. It must have superb history?
Absolutely. It was a significant part of the Victorian heritage of the city.
And I suppose in the 19th century great people were staying here?
The politicians, the celebrities, the actors,
the actresses of the day from all over the world.
Are there any stories around the hotel that I should know?
Probably the most significant is the death, right here at the foot of the main staircase,
of Sir Henry Irving, the famous Victorian actor.
Felt a bit ill on stage,
came back from the Theatre Royal having played Beckett,
was put into a chair,
and unfortunately he died at the foot of the main staircase.
And prophetically the last words he ever uttered on stage were,
"Into Thy hands, O Lord - into Thy hands!"
Thankful for an uneventful night, I'm heading to Bradford Interchange
from where I'm travelling southwest.
Bradshaw's tells me that four centuries ago my next stop, Halifax,
had but 13 houses. But the spirit of commercial enterprise
has recently manifested itself by the rapid growth of the town.
One enterprise filled the streets of the town
with the sweet smell of success.
The Piece Hall in Halifax is the sole survivor
of the great 18th century cloth markets of northern England.
During the 19th century, textiles were industrialised,
forcing domestic cloth-workers to find jobs elsewhere.
The enterprising John Mackintosh turned to toffee.
Alex Hutchinson is the Mackintosh company archivist.
Hello, Alex. Hello.
You have a lovely railway station. Why are we meeting just here?
Although this building says Halifax Flour Society,
right here is where the Mackintosh family of Halifax made their toffee.
How did it all start?
Violet Taylor, who later became Violet Mackintosh, who was born in 1866,
got an apprenticeship in a confectioner's shop where she learned to make a new type of toffee.
She invented it. Up until that point, all English toffee was brittle, hard butterscotch.
Tough stuff. And there was runny American caramel, and she worked out
how to blend the two and make a chewy toffee.
And she married a nice chap called John Mackintosh
and she and her husband, instead of having a honeymoon,
bought a little pastry cook shop where she sold it, and suddenly it
really took off, and then within a couple of years they had to
open a factory and were selling it nationwide and then internationally.
It was such an accessible purchase for working people.
It was bringing confectionery to every man.
The fact that the factory is next to the railway
leads me to hope that there's a railway connection.
Mackintosh's needed to be near the railway so their ingredients could come in by train
and they could send their finished goods out the same way.
Methodist teetotallers,
the Mackintosh family legacy is certainly something to chew over.
Bring home Quality Street, and you'll be a prince in her eyes.
Their most famous boxed confectionery assortment,
currently exported to 70 countries,
was created and first manufactured in this factory.
Their product was affordable for the working man,
but it was still a luxury product and they knew that it wasn't an essential
so to entice their new consumers, for the first week, they gave their product away for free.
And then the following week they put in this ad.
"On Saturday last, you were eating Mackintosh's Toffee at our expense.
"Next Saturday pay us another visit and eat it at your own expense."
That's brilliant. Brilliant.
Which was a very unusual way of advertising.
What else did they do to market the product?
We have an advertisement here,
and Mackintosh's are telling boys and girls everywhere on their holidays
to write the words Mackintosh's Toffee in the sand.
If they're seen by someone from Mackintosh's factory they'll be given a prize.
There must have been thousands of children up and down the nation
writing Mackintosh's Toffee everywhere you go.
Absolutely brilliant. What kind of people were they, the Mackintoshes?
John, I think, was what we would call now a little bit of a workaholic.
He really, really lived for the business. And she?
She loved wearing ermine. And looking glamorous.
Once she'd invented this new type of toffee,
she was more than happy for John to take all of the credit,
call himself the Toffee King and she took a back seat and enjoyed life.
The company, acquired by Nestle in 1988,
produces billions of toffees every year at its Halifax factory.
There is absolutely an unmistakable smell of toffee, isn't there?
And this here is our toffee machine.
It's making toffee to exactly the same recipe
that Violet would have been using.
That is a toffeeholic's dream, isn't it?
I'm tempted to linger and gorge myself on toffee,
but I must continue my journey south to this leg's final destination.
Huddersfield is my next stop. Bradshaw's tells me
it's the seat of the woollen trade in the West Riding of Yorkshire.
"Woollens, fancy Valencias, shawls are the staple articles
"of manufacture besides corduroy," which I am wearing at the moment.
Huddersfield had a reputation for quality.
I wonder whether it has it still.
As the town industrialised, the merchants who traded in it
and the Ramsden family, who owned most of it,
decided that Huddersfield
should retain the long-established reputation for upmarket cloth.
The neoclassical railway station, completed in 1850,
was clearly the result of burning civic pride.
I've never been to Huddersfield before, and I am overwhelmed.
This square is beautiful, and above all the railway station
is one of the best I've seen in Britain.
I believe someone once described it
as a stately home with trains passing through it.
And sadly, with his back to this architectural gem,
my childhood hero Prime Minister and Huddersfield boy Harold Wilson.
Wilson famously described 1960s Britain
as being forged in "the white heat of technology."
He could have been speaking of his home town a century before,
for in Victorian Huddersfield, new designs of looms and processes
produced the very finest cloth.
Established in 1883, Taylor & Lodge makes luxury fabric
for suits that can cost up to £25,000.
For more than a century, generations of skilled craftsmen
have toiled on the original looms
still operated by pattern weavers like Brendan Crowther.
Hello. Hello. Hiya.
What sort of cloth is this?
This here, this is a two and two twirl, this. It's a worsted.
A worsted. And I suppose you've got warp and weft. How does all that work?
Well, this is your warp. These go through here.
And your weft is sent across by the shuttles.
Now that is a good old-fashioned methodology, isn't it?
May we actually see the thing in action?
Yeah, I don't see why not.
And now we see the pattern building up.
That is mesmerising.
You know, Brendan, I often see machines
and I have no idea what is going on.
But this one, I suppose because it's quite an old technology,
it's perfectly clear how that is working.
Real Victorian engineering.
With 83 tailors in Huddersfield in Bradshaw's day,
it would be remiss not to meet one while I'm here.
I'm visiting Jon Fairweather at Carl Stuart.
Very good to see you.
I've often had suits made,
and tailors tend to be very polite, almost flattering.
If you assess me as a customer, what are you really thinking?
Firstly, you've got to make the customer relax
because you don't want to be stood shoulders out, stomach in.
Most people have got one shoulder lower than the other, and you have.
This one, right? Correct.
That's where I've been writing over the years, here.
All them cheques! HE LAUGHS
We can make you look normal.
OK, so you've measured me up, let's say, I've chosen my cloth.
Right. What do you do next?
We put all the figurations down on the cutting sheet,
and then it's all adjusted from the block patterns.
You're doing that just by eye now?
Yeah. So how many years has it taken you to learn those tricks?
I've been doing it 50 years.
It used to be a seven-year apprenticeship
to be a tailor and cutter when I started.
And it's only five years for brain surgeon, so...
We should be on a level.
So anything very different about what you're doing here
and what your Victorian predecessors would've done?
In the bespoke trade, doing this, it would be exactly the same.
So we've now made our adjustments here. What do you do next?
Right. When the whole suit's chalked in, then you start cutting.
You can have a go, if you want. Oh, thank you.
You start at that end and go around, if you wish.
This says Made in Huddersfield.
And is that still an important cache?
Oh, yeah. Made in England definitely.
Made in Huddersfield is cream on the top.
Where does that go then? That's the front.
That's your button.
That's your lapel.
Now where does this bit go? That's the other side.
You cut everything on the double. Two fronts, two backs, two sleeves.
How do I look? Amazing!
JON LAUGHS
I've been thinking,
how many more great novels the Bronte sisters might have written
had they not died aged 29, 30 and 38.
Tuberculosis stalked 19th century Britain
and cholera killed many in their prime, including George Bradshaw.
Fortunately, later in Queen Victoria's reign,
engineers and reformers made progress with sanitation and public health.
'On the next leg of my journey,
'I'm given a Victorian music lesson...'
HE PLAYS INSTRUMENT WITH DIFFICULTY
CHEERING Wow!
'I learn of a watery tragedy in the Peak District...'
The final death toll was about 81, of whom half were children.
'And I make a splash in Derbyshire.'
Whoa!
I never produced as big an impact as that!