For Edwardian Britons, a Bradshaw's was an indispensable guide
to a railway network at its peak.
I'm using an early 20th century edition,
to navigate a vibrant and optimistic Britain at the height of its power
and influence in the world.
But a nation wrestling with political,
social, and industrial unrest at home.
It's easy to assume that it was the First World War
that changed Britain, equipping it for the 20th century.
And, on that view, the prewar period can seem like
a long, summer's afternoon of calm before the mayhem.
But, as I travel from the north-eastern coast of England,
using my prewar Bradshaw's guide,
I expect to discover that those were, in fact, tumultuous years.
My journey starts in East Yorkshire
and continues to the Roman city of York.
From there, I'll move inland across the industrial heartlands
of West and South Yorkshire, and Merseyside.
After exploring Edwardian Liverpool,
I'll wend my way through North Wales,
hugging its northern coast and finishing in Caernarfon.
The first leg of my travels
begins in East Yorkshire and the city of Hull.
Then I'll make my way north to the seaside resort of Scarborough.
From there I'll head south-west to the town of Malton,
on the River Derwent.
On this trip, the chips are down but I'm on the up.
Hee-hee!
Oh, let's play again!
LAUGHTER
I hear a tale of wartime resilience.
There was a rumble in the air, people thought it might be thunder,
but it wasn't. It was the shells from the German navy.
And I get a taste of Edwardian temperance.
"Not even a dipsomaniac would have touched this mixture
"of fungus and smelly liquid."
That's superb. She had a way with words.
My Bradshaw's lists the shipping services that were available
from my first stop, Hull.
And they ran almost everywhere, from Yarmouth to Bombay,
from Dundee to Montevideo.
I should be interested to know how the port of Kingston upon Hull,
advantageously situated on the Humber Estuary,
where the waters of the River Hull run into it,
became so important for fishing, cargoes and passengers.
At the turn of the 20th century, Hull was a prosperous harbour town.
It had been granted city status on Queen Victoria's Jubilee in 1897.
But, as the new century unfolded, the city's economy suffered.
In recent years, Hull might have appeared down on its luck.
But, today, it's experiencing a renaissance.
Hull was Britain's City Of Culture, 2017.
There was music and dance and theatre.
The Turner Art Prize was judged here.
A bit of money was spent on the place
and the city feels more optimistic about its future.
Ladies. Hello. Excuse me, I just wondering,
has the city of culture meant anything to you? Yeah, quite a lot.
I definitely think it's brought a lot to the area.
I remember right at the beginning of the year they had a light show
on these three buildings,
showing loads of different things throughout Hull's history,
and I honestly actually felt quite emotional watching it.
So, it has succeeded in making people think differently about Hull?
I would say so. Yeah, I think so, yeah.
I mean, I think it's changed the reputation quite a lot, actually.
I'm pleased to hear it. Thank you so much. Thank you. Bye-bye.
At the heart of Hull's history is its medieval harbour.
By the time of my Bradshaw's, Edwardian travellers
would have admired the more recent Alexandra Dock,
named after their queen, where I'm meeting history writer,
Robert Bell.
Rob, there's clearly an enormous growth in the Hull port
in the 19th century. What's driving it?
The initial driver was wool.
And, then, as we moved to the building
of this particular dock in 1885,
the Alexandra Dock, the big one's coal.
But perhaps the most surprising money earner was actually migration.
Hull was built on the money not of slavery, like Liverpool,
Bristol and the like, but actually on migration.
Migrants from Europe were attracted to land at Hull
because of its particularly good railway connections
that had originally been laid to transport goods and fish
all over Great Britain.
Two and a half million people,
including impoverished Scandinavians in search of a better life,
and Jews fleeing anti-Semitic persecution in Russia,
passed through the port.
From Hull, they took trains to Glasgow, Liverpool,
London and Southampton,
often to board steamships bound for the New World.
Why, then, does the great port of Hull suffer a decline
in the 20th century? My own view is that, actually, the First World War
was something that Hull did not, actually, recover from.
Because, ironically, in the run-up to the First World War,
the one port that was dealing with the Germans
and doing extremely well on their economy booming was Hull.
The docks are now getting a second wind,
with a £310 million joint investment from engineering company,
Siemens, and Associated British Ports.
The site's being transformed into a renewable energy factory.
Andy Sykes is head of quality here.
Andy, we're in the old Alexandra dock. How does all this relate?
Some of the land has been reclaimed,
some of the old dock is being used for the purposes of both
inward transportation and also moving blades offshore.
I've seen offshore wind turbine farms
but without any idea of the scale.
This is just one blade.
What dimensions is this? This is a 75-metre long blade.
So, if the blade is 75 metres, we must be talking about
a tower of what? Yeah, it's roughly 90 metres standing above the ocean.
Each giant blade weighs 28 tonnes
and is longer than the wingspan of an Airbus A380 aircraft.
And, at its base, wide enough to hold an elephant.
Andy, to my surprise, the construction of this enormous thing
is essentially a handmade process.
Yeah, it really is craft based.
It's made of fibreglass, balsa wood and epoxy resin.
You can see the lower packing team
down at the root end of the mould there, meticulously placing
each piece of fibreglass
to get the quality that we expect of the finished product.
Could I introduce you to Dave, one of our packing team?
Dave, I'm Michael. Hi, nice to meet you.
How do you do? What are you doing there?
I'm just making sure all the glass that we've laid previously
is all nice and smooth.
So, how are you able to work it, is the stuff hot?
No, it's not hot, it's very much like carpeting.
May I have a go at that? Of course, you can, yeah.
We're making sure there's no wrinkles, up to the top,
down to the bottom,
making sure it's completely flat.
So, making sure that it's nice and flat against the wall here.
Yeah, and it follows the shape.
Tucking it in, pushing all those...
Yeah. ..wrinkles and bumps out.
Quite a light pressure, yeah.
That's it.
There's quite a lot to do, isn't there?
There's a lot to do, and we've still got at least another
eight to 12 hours of work to get on with, so, yeah. Good luck.
The precision applied to the production of the blades
reflects the reliability expected from them.
Each blade will last 25 years,
performing tens of millions of rotations.
Stepping inside one of these extraordinary wind turbine blades
is another way of appreciating the scale.
There's light entering from the outside
and it seems to stretch away indefinitely,
like an infinite railway tunnel.
These things are a very far cry from windmills that we used to know.
These blades will be shipped to a site off the East Yorkshire coast
to form part of what will become the biggest wind farm in the world.
174 turbines will generate 1.2 gigawatts,
the equivalent of nearby Hartlepool Nuclear Power Station.
I continue my journey with a short trip north-west of Hull,
to the town of Cottingham.
I noticed from my Bradshaw's that almost every ship
sailing out of Hull is run by the Wilson Line,
a company of which I had never heard.
But it turns out that at the beginning of the 20th century
it was, in fact, the world's largest privately owned shipping company.
And this family of Hull entrepreneurs
must have made a pile and, certainly, they built one.
About four miles from Hull,
Cottingham was first connected by rail in 1846.
The Victorian middle class built their villas here,
away from the industrial grime of the city.
The grandest of them all was Tranby Croft.
The house is now used by Hull Collegiate School.
The Edwardian traveller would have known it
in an entirely different guise.
I'm meeting head of history, Claire Atkin.
Claire, this is now Hull Collegiate School, but, in its time,
the home of the Wilson family,
of the Wilson Line Shipping Company fame, is that right?
Yes, absolutely.
This is the ancestral home of the Wilson family.
This was built by Arthur Wilson and Mary Wilson.
They were massive entrepreneurs in the city of Hull,
and they wanted a mansion to entertain people.
So, built Tranby Croft. It was completed in 1876.
So, obviously, they had made their money in trade. Yes.
Did that mean that they were excluded
from aristocratic connections?
They were absolutely desperate to go up in the world.
Mary Wilson, particularly, is a social climber,
and they were keen to try and woo the upper classes.
In September 1890, the Wilsons' prayers were answered.
The Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII, stayed at Tranby Croft.
Unfortunately for them, his visit brought trouble.
He's already been associated with quite a few scandals,
usually involving women,
but at Tranby Croft it's something a little bit different.
It's the temptation to play a card game, which is illegal,
a baccarat game.
In 1886, baccarat had been made illegal, if played for money.
Although fortunes could be lost in a single night,
it didn't stop the aristocracy from playing behind closed doors.
So, Claire, their house has been quite well preserved.
They did live a grand life, didn't they?
Yes, they absolutely did. Tell me about the game of baccarat.
What goes wrong? Well, the Prince and some of his friends
are really rather addicted to playing cards
and they liked to gamble.
And the first night that they're staying here,
one of the gentlemen who's playing,
a decorated military man, Sir William Gordon-Cumming,
is seemingly adding £5 counters
every now and then to his stake and the Wilsons become suspicious.
The following day, they have a seating plan
so that no matter where Sir Gordon-Cumming sits,
he'll actually be sitting next to a member of the Wilson family
so they can see if there's any more of this suspicious
cheating going on. Is there? Definitely.
The press got wind of the scandal.
Reputations were at stake and a court case ensued.
For the first time in 500 years,
a British heir to the throne was called onto the witness stand.
The future King, or "Bertie" as he was known,
was a most reluctant witness.
But the evidence against his friend Gordon-Cumming was convincing.
Bertie suffers, certainly.
The Wilson family definitely suffer.
Mary Wilson must have just been in tatters.
That's the end of her social climbing.
And Gordon-Cumming is court-martialled,
dismissed from the Army for ungentlemanly behaviour.
He has to break off a wedding engagement,
and he disappears effectively from society and is ostracised.
Strictly in the cause of research,
Claire has organised for me to try my hand at playing baccarat,
in the room where it all happened.
My fellow players are all staff at Hull Collegiate School.
And Joanna Dunn is croupier for the occasion.
The only problem is I don't know how to play.
We can teach you. Please do.
OK, it's a very simple game.
It's a game of chance, there's no skill involved whatsoever.
Perfect. So, you just have to bet
on whether you want the player's cards to win,
the banker's cards to win, or a tie.
And it is two cards closest to nine that would win that deal.
So, we have the player's card on this side,
the banker's card on this side.
Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen.
Do you want the player's card, the banker's card
or place for a tie in the middle, please.
I think this one's going to win.
OK. So, on the player's card, we have nine, so that will stand,
that is a natural. On this side, it looks like we have 14
but we always knock off the first digit
so it's actually a four on this side.
So, player wins.
People that bet on the players, then you would double your money.
Hee-hee!
Oh, let's play again!
LAUGHTER
Having won, I see how the Prince of Wales
might have found the game attractive.
I expect to dream tonight of high society and winning hands.
I start the new day by heading due north to reach the coast.
Tickets, please.
There we go. Good morning.
Good to see you. How long have you been on the railway?
51 years and six months.
Wow! Is that a record? It probably is a record.
They're calling a man who works in Doncaster
who's got, I think, three months ahead of me.
So I'm just hoping that, at some stage, I can beat him.
Outlast him. Yeah. Well, a real privilege, thank you.
Privilege, thank you.
My next stop will be Scarborough, which, according to the guide book,
"has been an aristocratic resort for more than a century.
"The spa buildings are very handsome,
"containing theatre, picture gallery, promenade, etc,
"with excellent orchestra.
"The cliffs overlooking the South Bay are impressive in grandeur,
"terminating in the promontory of Scarborough Castle."
Now, that was published in 1913.
What could possibly interrupt the tranquillity of this holiday spot?
In its history, Scarborough has been invaded by Anglo-Saxons
and raided by Vikings.
Its 12th-century castle was besieged during the English Civil War,
and used in defence during the Jacobite rebellion
and the wars against Napoleon.
By the time of my Bradshaw's,
Edwardian travellers would have found a peaceful holiday resort.
But, before long, Scarborough became a casualty once more.
Mark Vesey, chairman of the Scarborough Maritime Heritage Centre,
can shed light on the period.
Mark, I've always had a soft spot for Scarborough
with its fantastic topography.
What was the place like just before the First World War?
It was doing very well. It was a busy resort.
A lot of people came at the weekends,
they were bathing and paddling,
having an ice cream, having a beer, similar to what we do today.
My Bradshaw's says, rather surprisingly, perhaps,
that it had been an aristocratic resort for a century.
What do you make of that? Yes, I think it was.
The South Cliff was a very aristocratic area,
more expensive hotels.
But, when the railways arrived, it did become more for the masses.
And what was it that interrupted the tranquillity of this idyllic spot?
Well, the 16th of December 1914, eight o'clock in the morning,
a bit of a misty day, there was a rumble in the air,
people thought it might be thunder but it wasn't.
It was the shells from the German Navy.
Less than five months into the First World War,
a British blockade of Germany's ports prevented its navy
from accessing the North Sea.
Frustrated, it found a gap in the minefields
intended for fishing vessels and struck England's north-east coast.
Scarborough was an easy target.
Mark, we have a good view of Scarborough here.
What was doing the shelling?
It was two of the biggest battle cruisers the German navy had,
the Derfflinger and the Von der Tann.
And what munitions did the battle cruisers throw at Scarborough?
Mostly six inch shells, over 770 of them in 30 minutes.
The first pass was along the seafront.
Then the German battle cruisers turned around
and fired further into the town so more of the centre of the town
was hit on the pass, on the way back.
That's an extraordinary level of attack.
How much damage did that create in Scarborough?
It did do a lot of damage, Michael.
And, sadly, 18 people were killed.
In addition to those who lost their lives,
over 100 people were injured.
And some of the most iconic buildings in Scarborough
were damaged.
What was the reaction of the British public to this attack?
Well, anger, at first, and shock.
I think people thought it could've been an invasion.
And we think the Germans really did it to try and shock the British
into keeping troops at home
instead of sending them to go and fight in France.
The German attack was counterproductive.
Photographs of the damage to this beautiful town
angered the British public.
Postcards of the atrocities circulated
and young men rushed to join Pals battalions
to fight alongside their friends and relatives,
encouraged by propaganda urging loyal citizens
to remember Scarborough.
Today, it feels apt, once more, to remember.
In Scarborough's very beautiful The Crescent,
some of the houses are still peppered with the shrapnel
of December 1914.
This population was one of the first civilian populations in the world
to be subjected to a terror bombardment.
During the course of the 20th century,
they would be joined by many millions of others,
and, of those, countless numbers would be slaughtered in their homes.
I'm on my way to one of Britain's great stately homes, Castle Howard.
I'm impressed that it was designed by Sir John Vanbrugh,
that it has 145 rooms,
that it's twice been used for adaptations
of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited,
but my Bradshaw's reveals
that it used to have its own railway station.
Now that has caught my attention.
PA: We will shortly be arriving at Malton.
Today, I'm alighting at the market town of Malton.
Castle Howard's station ceased to handle passengers in 1930,
but it was in service when Queen Victoria visited the castle in 1850.
Castle Howard's impressive Baroque architecture
was conceived by Sir John Vanbrugh,
who is also responsible for Blenheim Palace.
This magnificent estate includes rose gardens,
follies, 13 farms,
and 10,000 acres of land.
It took over 100 years and three generations of earls
before it was complete.
At the time of my Bradshaw's,
this was home to a fascinating figure in the campaign
for women's suffrage, which was gathering momentum
at the beginning of the 20th century.
Archivist Anna Louise Mason knows more.
Anna Louise, I've come in pursuit of a radical Countess,
who I believe was the lady of Castle Howard in the Edwardian era.
Who was she? That's right, you're referring to Rosalind Howard.
She was married to George Howard, the 9th Earl of Carlisle,
and together they raised a family of 11 children.
She actually managed the estates on behalf of her husband.
He was an artist and he wasn't really interested
in doing the typical earl duties.
There's a wonderful saying where she says,
"Worry kills, work does one good."
What made her radical?
Well, she did repeatedly show sympathy for striking workers.
In 1891, it was Scottish railway men, and in 1893, it was miners.
But her main passions were temperance
and also women's suffrage.
Rosalind Howard had had a political upbringing.
Her mother was a women's education campaigner
and her father served as a member of Parliament.
She used Castle Howard to put into practice her political convictions.
In her campaign against alcohol consumption,
she revoked the licence for the estate's pub,
turning it into a temperance guesthouse for women.
She was famous for her temperance. She certainly was.
Yes, she was. In fact, there's one of the most famous anecdotes
at Castle Howard is the story of when Rosalind, the Countess,
threw all the wine into a hole in the ground.
And this was actually reported in the press,
where she was accused of having destroyed 1,500 bottles
of perfectly good wine.
Now, Rosalind was very quick to respond to this.
"The so-called wine in the 800 bottles
"that have been thrown away was sour stuff,
"condemned as worthless and undrinkable.
"Not even a dipsomaniac under the influence of his worst drink craving
"would have touched this mixture of fungus and smelly liquid."
That gives us a feel for the woman, doesn't it?
She had a way with words. That's superb. Yes.
How would you summarise her?
The Times, when she died in 1921,
headed her obituary with "A fearless champion of causes,"
and that's how I like to think of her.
And however you view the Countess Rosalind,
she's an important figure in the history of Castle Howard.
Absolutely.
Castle Howard has remained in the hands of the Howard family
throughout its history. And, today, Rosalind Howard's direct descendent,
the Honourable Nicholas Howard, still lives here.
I've come to find out what it means to call this stunning place home.
Nick, how wonderful to see you. How nice to meet you, Michael.
And here we are in the wonderful Long Gallery,
one of the finest rooms, I suppose, in Castle Howard.
Now, what on earth was it like to grow up in a place like this?
Well, of course, at the beginning, I didn't know anything else.
But, as I became older,
I became more and more aware of how special it is.
But, I mean, in this room, we used to race up and down,
we had some ornamental wheelbarrows, and my brother and I used to
push each other up and down the room in it.
And, now, you are responsible for Castle Howard.
It's a responsibility that I'm so happy to be doing,
and even excited at times.
It is a gorgeous place to be.
Do you see visitors being amazed by what they see?
Oh, I think so. I do see people in various states of amazement.
There is a sense of wonder and awe as people approach down the drive.
Well, count me in on that.
The commitment of the radical Countess of Castle Howard
to women's suffrage and striking railway men
gives an idea of the turbulence of the Edwardian years.
Those political causes had to be set aside
for the duration of the Great War,
which had an enormous impact on the north-east of England.
It dealt a massive blow to the port of Hull,
while Scarborough and other coastal towns were shelled.
Meanwhile, North Eastern Railway workers had set out for the front
in Pals battalions to get the British war effort moving.
Next time, I do important research in an historic tearoom.
What shall we have? We should order some tea and some dainty cakes.
And some scones? Absolutely.
I get dressed down in Leeds.
How am I looking, Sir? Um... Gary, be truthful.
I would suggest you're wearing that slightly a bit tight,
especially around here. It's the size of my wallet, Gary. Yeah.
LAUGHTER
And attend a private Edwardian concert.
HE SINGS