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.
I'm now on the last leg of a journey that began
in a Victorian Manchester slum
and will end at a stately home.
Today, I'll find out about a duke who changed his garden,
and about the son of an illiterate collier worker
who changed the world.
On this last leg, I'm given a Victorian music lesson.
EUPHONIUM SQUEAKS
LOUD NOTE SOUNDS
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!
My journey began in Manchester, headed west to Merseyside,
felt the sea breeze in Southport,
crossed Lancashire towards Bradford and Huddersfield,
and will finally head to steely south Yorkshire
to end in Derbyshire,
where the father of the railway, George Stephenson, is buried.
Today's leg tunes into Honley, surges into Holmfirth,
takes a break in Sheffield,
and ends in the elegant surrounds of Chesterfield.
My first stop will be Honley.
Bradshaw's tells me, "This place is the centre of the woollen trade
"and has a population of 4626."
Such wool towns had a strong sense of community,
and such communities make music.
To reach the musical mill town of Honley,
my train crosses the magnificent Victorian Lockwood Viaduct.
The houses in Honley cluster on the slopes of the Holme River Valley,
peaking up above each other, facing each other across narrow alleyways,
the washing spread across the street.
You get the impression of a wool community
set apart by its geography and closely knit.
The brass bands of such small towns
are a powerful metaphor for the harmonious communities
that grew up in response to industrialisation.
The invention of the piston valve made the notes on brass instruments
more uniform and easier to play,
and mass production made them more affordable.
By 1860, there were over 750 brass bands in England.
Often sponsored by a local employer,
they were attached to collieries, foundries and textile mills.
Places like Honley still have them.
Peter Marshall is a local historian.
Peter, hello. Good morning, welcome. What a lovely village.
Thank you. It is. We like it very much.
How did bands get going in villages like Honley?
People needed to find a way of entertaining themselves
in the few hours that they had when they weren't working in the mills
or weaving and spinning.
What was the music for, as it were?
Methodism was quite strong in this valley.
John Wesley preached here in the 1780s,
and they needed music to accompany themselves,
both in the chapels and outside, because they had famous sings
where they would sing in the open air -
Easter time, Whitsunday and so forth.
And the band playing became quite competitive, didn't it?
Yes, it did. Honley was able to travel by train
to a number of the competitions across the North,
and including the British Open Championship
which was held in Belle Vue in Manchester,
and in 1884 they became the British champions.
Hello, Honley Band. How are you all?
Who's been with the band the longest? I have.
When did you join the band?
1975. They turned me down in 1952.
Being a female, they said they'd only got big instruments like this one,
and that was no good for a girl.
So, did it take them 23 years to change their minds? Yeah. Wow.
You, sir, at the back, how long have you been in the band?
I have been in the band two years.
And what's your instrument? The drums.
I kind of guessed that! Give me a twirl.
You've been playing for longer than two years, haven't you?
I've been playing for five years.
And, you sir, you're in plain clothes,
but are you an old bandsman?
Yes, I've been involved with this band for 60 years.
60 years. Were you born here in Honley? Yes, I was.
What made you join the band? A man called Arnold Booth,
he said, "Would you like to join?"
And he said those magic words that make it difficult
for a Yorkshire lad to refuse.
He said, "And it will all be free."
MICHAEL LAUGHS
What could I do?
Can I tell you about a memory?
And I think it tells you about maybe the dedication to banding.
On 18th May 1959, I got married.
It was Whit Monday,
the busiest day of the year in the brass band calendar
and after the ceremony we went to my new wife's mother
and then I said goodbye to the guests, and, along with the best man
and the groomsmen, we went and joined our brass band colleagues.
I think she made a decision that day that it was,
"If you can't beat them, join them,"
and she's been a brass band enthusiast ever since.
Now, if I were to play, what would be the instrument that would,
I don't know, suit me?
To suit you? Well, I think a big lad like you would suit a euphonium.
That fits you like a glove.
Now, then, doesn't he look smart, eh?
Do I look the part? Yeah!
Don't think I'm going to sound it, somehow! Right.
To play on the instrument, you need to vibrate air,
cos that's what makes sound.
And the best way to do that is to buzz.
THEY BUZZ
That's right. And, at the same time, press on your tummy,
make your tummy hard.
EUPHONIUM SQUEAKS
EUPHONIUM SOUNDS LOUDER
Wow!
I'm very sorry to have insulted your ears with that noise.
Can we now hear some real music, please?
Maestro!
What a glorious sound! Now I believe I'm in Yorkshire.
Staying in Yorkshire, I'm continuing my journey southeast
on a branch line towards Sheffield.
I'll shortly be entering the Thurstonland tunnel
where, reputedly,
a Victorian film-maker made a film called Kiss In The Tunnel.
In 1899, pioneer Victorian film-maker James Bamforth
directed The Kiss in the Tunnel, an early example of narrative editing
using three shots to tell the story of a furtive moment
of passenger passion on a train in Thurstonland tunnel.
No such luck for me.
My next stop will be Stocksmoor.
I am interested by this reference in Bradshaw,
"Holmfirth, where the Ribble and Diggle brooks join,
"was dreadfully ravaged in 1852 by the bursting of the Bilberry Dam."
Despite the general excellence of Victorian engineering,
there were disasters, and this one was apparently appalling.
Holmfirth station was closed to passengers in 1959,
so I shall make my own way there from Stocksmoor.
Now surrounded by reservoirs,
Holmfirth is celebrated as the location
for Last of The Summer Wine.
By contrast, in Victorian times, the village was notorious.
Bradshaw's remarks that the "valley is about six miles long
"and only 100 yards broad at the widest,
"and the immense volume of water set free in this narrow gutter
"carried away 100 lives with houses and mills and other property.
"The bridge was entirely destroyed,
"and only the bare walls of the church left."
And standing here seeing how the town is wedged into the crevasse,
I begin to imagine that horrific wall of water
advancing upon its people.
In 1852, Bilberry Dam burst
and an unforgiving torrent swept through Holmfirth.
I'm meeting local historian David Cockman at the rebuilt dam.
Was the Victorian Bilberry Dam in this position?
Near enough, I think. We are standing almost at the spot
where at 1am on 5th February 1852,
this collapsed with a pop, with a bang -
80 million gallons, 400,000 tonnes
swept down the valley towards Holmfirth.
Had there been an engineering failure?
This was a Victorian structure, wasn't it? Very much so, Michael.
Coming out of this hillside there was a spring,
it was described as being as big as a man's arm.
And the water came down, flowed down through into the valley
where they wanted to build the retaining wall.
They should have put this spring into some kind of culvert
or conduit leading it away.
But they built the dam wall on top of the flowing spring
and gradually, over the years,
this water ate away at the base of the dam,
weakening it all the time,
until it began to leak and it just gave way.
It was one of the most serious civilian disasters
of Victorian England.
300 feet across and 70 feet at its deepest,
the reservoir's 86 million gallons of water weighed 300,000 tonnes.
The water rushed three and a half miles down the valley,
reaching the village in around 15 minutes.
And it was going so fast that even people who ran ahead to try
to warn the citizens that something was about to happen,
they were overtaken by the water.
Now, in one of these houses, there lived a weaver called
Joseph Halliwell with his family - wife and five children.
The water rose in his house almost up to the second floor.
He managed to get up to the second floor, into his weaving room,
and shout for help.
And he was heard by his neighbours who lived above him in the top house,
and they hacked a hole in the floor and dragged him to safety.
But unfortunately, his wife and the five children were drowned.
Appalling. Yes. Up the valley, it had wrecked at least three mills,
and it had uprooted boilers weighing 15, 20 tonnes,
and the whole centre of Holmfirth was hit by a battering ram.
The final death toll was about 81, of whom half were children.
Most, I think, were caught asleep in their beds
and drowned in their sleep.
Was there Victorian ghoulishness?
I think so. On the Sunday after the flood,
the railway reported that 16,000 tickets were collected
at Holmfirth station.
But, in the fortnight or so after, the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway
reported that they were selling 9,000 tickets a day
for people to come to Holmfirth.
I am sure it was just disaster tourism, basically.
Ghoulishness to come and walk through the rubble here.
I can't think what else it would be.
I'm heading back to Stocksmoor to travel to Sheffield,
where I shall break my journey.
Looking forward to the day ahead,
I'm taking an East Midlands service south.
My next stop will be Chesterfield, which, like so many places,
is associated by Bradshaw's with coal.
And there, I want to look at the career of one of my heroes,
a man who did so much to convert coal to steam to locomotion
and who made all of this possible.
Mr George Stephenson.
George Stephenson, perfector of locomotives,
builder of railways, whose inventions included
new sorts of rail and bridge and a miner's lamp.
Endlessly inventive, but illiterate until he was 18.
A man who dragged himself up by his bootstraps, the sort that I admire.
Having been born to a poor family near Newcastle upon Tyne,
George Stephenson came to Chesterfield
for the last ten years of his life.
Passionate about machines, back in 1804,
George had walked to Scotland in order to work with steam engines.
A decade later, Stephenson's locomotive,
the Blucher, hauled coal wagons along a wagon way and in 1825,
Stephenson's locomotion Number 1, seen here on its centenary,
ran between Stockton and Darlington, the first public railway on earth.
To learn more of this hero,
I'm visiting Chesterfield Borough Council Museum,
adjacent to the town's famous crooked spire,
to meet curator Anne-Marie Knowles by a Stephenson family portrait.
There's George, centre stage in this rather strange looking outfit,
which is what he used to wear as a younger man.
We're used to seeing George in the frock coat,
looking very Victorian and grand.
But here he is as a much humbler man
when he was the engine-wright at Killingworth colliery.
So this is a picture that says quite a lot about George's life.
The lady who's standing at the back with the churn on her head,
this is Mabel Carr, who was George's mother.
And standing next to her is her husband, George's father.
Then we've got George's first wife with a child,
who actually died in infancy.
Then we have George's second wife,
who is seated here in front of George.
And is George clutching the miner's lamp he invented?
He most certainly is.
Now, there was some controversy about this, wasn't there,
because he invented a miner's safety lamp and Davy invented one,
and there was a bit of argy-bargy
about whether there'd been some piracy of copyright, wasn't there?
Yes, certainly, and Davy actually accused George Stephenson
of stealing the idea from him.
And Stephenson went to a lot of trouble to prove
that he'd actually developed the miners' lamp prior to Davy.
I've heard it said that miners in the North East
used the George Stephenson miners' lamp,
miners elsewhere tended to use the Davy lamp?
That's right. I've even heard it said
that is why people in the North East are called Geordies,
I don't know whether that's true?
Well, I don't think anybody is very sure about that,
but certainly the lamp was referred to as the Geordie lamp
because it was made by Geordie, George.
One of George's lesser-known inventions
grew from his passion for gardening.
OK, so here it is, one of the famous cucumber straightening tubes
that was developed by George Stephenson.
Well...that looks like a fairly simple glass tube,
what's so special about it?
Well, when the fruit is very small
it is inserted at this end of the tube
and then it grows straight down the tube,
rather than curling as it grows, because this was always the problem
before modern hybrids, that cucumbers have this tendency to curl.
So that's how he did it.
It actually became a standard piece of kit
for all Victorian kitchen gardeners.
Since George Stephenson took such care to straighten cucumbers,
I wonder why he didn't apply his attention
to the twisted spire of Chesterfield?
That's a very good question, I have absolutely no idea.
Anne-Marie has brought me
to Chesterfield's Holy Trinity Church,
where George Stephenson is buried.
So no Westminster Abbey for George Stephenson? No.
Why was he buried in this church, particularly?
Holy Trinity was the church that his wife attended
and she too is buried here.
Is that the only memorial to George Stephenson in this church?
No, actually, it isn't.
If you look above, you can see that there's a rather magnificent
stained glass window which was donated to the church
by Robert Stephenson in memory of his father.
And if you look carefully,
you can see the "S" for Stephenson quite clearly.
It's very touching that it was given by the son.
Robert and George Stephenson are comparable geniuses,
but George Stephenson began without the benefit of any education.
Bradshaw's devotes a lot of space to Chatsworth, which it describes as
"the splendid seat of the Duke of Devonshire, ten miles from Chesterfield station."
Since there's no station closer,
for once, I'm going to have to take a taxi.
Having begun my journey investigating the squalid existence
of Manchester's 19th-century mill workers,
I'm concluding it at the other end of the Victorian social spectrum.
Home to the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire,
Chatsworth has been passed down through 16 generations
of the Cavendish family.
Its architecture and collection of art have developed over 500 years.
Bradshaw's has led me to this point,
says "The best view of the house is from a point near the bridge
"and Queen Mary's Bower, where the old hunting tower is seen on the hill."
And yes, this is a fantastic vista. One of the finest houses ever built.
Magnificent and beautiful.
The first Duke completed this Baroque palace in 1707.
It stands in the wilds of Derbyshire
and glows in its warm, buff-coloured stone.
In the 19th century, the sixth Duke built the north wing
and a sculpture gallery.
He added priceless works
to the family's already glorious collection of great masters.
Today it's curated by Matthew Hirst.
Matthew, hello. Hello, Michael.
My Bradshaw's is from the middle 1860s.
What recent changes would there have been to the house
just before the guide was written?
Well, quite substantial changes, actually,
because in the 19th century, the sixth Duke of Devonshire
and the Bachelor Duke, as we call him,
kept the Baroque house,
but built an enormous wing to the north, really for two reasons.
He was a great art collector and a great bibliophile,
so he needed space for his ever-growing library,
his new collection of sculpture.
He was a man of many different interests
and was very much at the apex of the social scene at the time.
He entertained Princess Victoria
in 1832 and then she came back again in 1846.
So it was a constant scene of high society and lavish entertaining.
Bradshaw's tells me
"The house may be seen daily from 11 to 5.
"Parties are let in by turns. Apply early if you want to save time."
So, apparently even by the middle 19th century,
this was a magnet for tourists?
Definitely. With the arrival of the railways,
that was made considerably easier.
By 1849 in the summer
we were getting 80,000 visitors a year,
which is staggering when you think about what that means
in the 19th century.
Was this superb dining room created by the sixth Duke?
It was, this was finished in 1832,
just in time for Princess Victoria's visit,
and she dined at this table for the first time in adult company.
And this is the room the sixth Duke referred to
as being like dining in a great treasure chest.
I think you can see that with the vaults,
as if it were about to be opened like a lid.
Magnificent barrel ceiling.
As well as portraits by old masters like Thomas Gainsborough,
Chatsworth's art collection includes the exceptional sculpture gallery,
augmented by the sixth Duke's acquisition of pieces
by the 19th century Venetian sculpture, Antonio Canova.
This sculpture gallery really is beautiful, isn't it? Bradshaw's says
"It's extremely rich in original works, cast busts, marble tables."
"Amongst others are Napoleon's mother, Madame Mere, as she was called,
"and Canova's large bust of Napoleon."
We know the sixth Duke was very passionate about Canova's work,
so much so that the giant bust of Napoleon,
when Candover died, the sixth Duke was so desperate to acquire it
that he immediately started to organise its acquisition.
Napoleon looking...almost like a Roman emperor.
The sixth Duke also played close attention
to the grounds of the house.
In 1826, the work of a young gardener near his property in Chiswick
impressed the Duke of Devonshire
and he appointed Joseph Paxton head gardener at Chatsworth
at the age of 23.
As soon as you set foot outside Chatsworth, it becomes clear
that the house is one of two wonders,
the other being the gardens.
Bradshaw's tells me of the work of Sir Joseph Paxton,
the late duke's celebrated gardener.
And I suspect these wonderful glasshouses
are just part of his work.
The present incumbent of Paxton's post
is head of gardens and landscape, Steve Porter.
What kind of man was Joseph Paxton?
He was an amazing guy, amazingly driven.
The story of his first day here just describes it perfectly.
He caught the coach from London to Chesterfield, arriving at 4.30am.
He then walked the 12 miles to Chatsworth,
climbing over the garden wall when he arrived
to be able to look round the garden
and see exactly what he was taking on
before coming back to the main house
to meet the housekeeper and have breakfast with the housekeeper.
He also met the housekeeper's niece, who he fell in love with
and she fell in love with him and they got married a year later.
That is an amazing story.
So, was the transformation of the garden as thorough
as the transformation of the house under the sixth Duke?
Yeah, absolutely. Paxton came along
and really laid out the garden as you see it today,
so most of the paths, most of the features,
certainly the glasshouses are all from that period.
So, a very important time for the garden.
Paxton achieved fame when his grand Crystal Palace in London's Hyde Park
housed the Great Exhibition of 1851.
It took 2000 men eight months
to build the innovative design in glass and cast iron.
And it was based upon his grand conservatory at Chatsworth.
So, Steve, it was here that the grand conservatory stood.
Bradshaw's says "It was 300 foot long and 65 foot high."
It must have been astonishing? Absolutely.
It was the biggest freestanding glasshouse in the world at the time
when it was built in 1836,
so before the Palm House at Kew and those sort of buildings.
He'd been playing with smaller glass houses,
trying out different systems of glazing and construction,
and designed this amazing spectacle full of exotic plants
most people wouldn't have seen before.
I can't help noticing it's not here any more? Sadly not.
No, during the First World War, it fell into disrepair.
It was a constant case of painting it as well.
So sadly, in 1920, it was actually blown up.
Leaving us with a maze.
Now, in a moment, you're going to need this.
LAUGHTER
What for?
This is the key to Paxton's greatest engineering feat at Chatsworth,
the Emperor Fountain.
Designed for a visit by Tzar Nicholas I.
When they turned it on in the early 1840s it went up to 296 feet high,
which was the tallest gravity-fed fountain in the world.
Unfortunately, Tsar Nicholas I never made it to Chatsworth,
so he never saw his fountain that they created for him.
I just need to locate this.
This is the biggest key I've ever turned.
Whoa!
For all my years in politics,
I never produced as big an impact as that!
No journey could be longer
than from the Victorian Manchester slum where I began
to the grandeur of Chatsworth, where I end.
Victorian society was characterised by extremes of poverty and wealth,
but also by social mobility.
The self-made man could win as much respect as a duke,
and there was no finer example of that than George Stephenson,
the Father of the Railways.
On my next adventure, I discover an underground warehouse
that once served the Empire.
So this was for the storage of beer, was it?
It's an amazing labyrinth, it goes on and on and on.
I hear about the millionaire eccentric
whose home was an exotic museum.
He would be seen driving around with his four zebras?
Both here and also Piccadilly in London.
And I visit the line where the railway's age of innocence ended.
There's quite a big gang, 15 guys, and they formed a human chain
down this embankment and passed the mailbag stand.
2.6 million in 120 mailbags.
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