Great British Railway Journeys (2010–…): Season 3, Episode 1 - Great Yarmouth to Beccles - full transcript
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 travel,
what to see, and where to stay.
Now, 170 years later,
I'm making a series of journeys across
the length and breadth of the country
to see what of
Bradshaw's Britain remains.
I've embarked on
another railway journey,
confident that my trusty Bradshaw's
Guide will continue to give me insights
into the vast areas of the British Isles
that I've yet to explore.
In today's journey,
I'll be discovering a macabre side
to Great Yarmouth's railway history...
The railway negotiates
a special rate with them
and they move the body
at so much per tonne.
...operating an engineering triumph that
opened East Anglia to rail traffic...
(man) Pull the dog in, that's it.
And at the top, a nice snappy movement.
- No. Not had your Weetabix, you see.
- Is that not in?
...and learning how Bradshawing
meant the difference between
death and life in the Second World War.
Ha! I really enjoyed that, I must say.
It was very thrilling.
Starting on the East Coast, this journey
takes me south through Norfolk,
Suffolk and Essex,
finishing in the City of London.
I'll be travelling a route that in
Bradshaw's day opened up
inhospitable and isolated territory
and allowed the natural riches
of the region to be exploited.
My stretch today
begins in Great Yarmouth,
then takes me south through the village
of Reedham and on to Beccles in Suffolk.
This journey
takes me across East Anglia,
which has always seemed remote
to a Londoner like me.
Certainly, its network of waterways made
it difficult to cross, except by boat.
So railway building offered an
enormous speculative opportunity
to Victorian investors,
but that railway mania
brought bust as well as boom.
My first destination is
the coastal town of Great Yarmouth.
- Bye-bye.
- Bye now.
- Beautiful line, isn't it?
- Beautiful line.
- Lovely.
- Beautiful.
I have had the most delightful journey
through meadows grazed by sheep and cows
to this enormous station
at Great Yarmouth.
So why did they build this branch line
all the way to here? Very fishy.
The railway reached Great Yarmouth
in 1844,
and the line to London was completed
two years later.
Famous for its herrings,
the railways and this station
enabled Great Yarmouth
to take full advantage of
the fish stocks of the North Sea.
The catch could reach markets
all over the country and indeed abroad
and brought the town prosperity.
My Bradshaw's Guide tells me
that Great Yarmouth is situated on
the east bank of the river Yare.
"The inhabitants are chiefly engaged
in the mackerel, herring
and deep sea fisheries,
which are prosecuted to a very
great extent with much success."
Sadly, a decline in fish stocks
means that today nothing remains
of this once great fishing fleet.
To get an idea of the scale of the Great
Yarmouth herring industry in its heyday,
I'm meeting local resident Ernie Childs.
So, your family are fishermen?
Yeah, all the granddads and things like
that, they're all to do with the sea
and the fishing was very big
in Yarmouth.
Biggest port in the world
for catching, exporting...
The seas what surrounded Yarmouth,
just teemed with herring
and we had a fleet of about 1200.
- 12007
- 1200. Takes believing, don't it?
- You could walk across the river...
- On boats?
Each boat had ten miles of nets.
Colossal amount of fish
was caught each night.
The huge shoals of herring
would arrive in the waters
off Great Yarmouth in the autumn.
At its peak, the town was landing
125,000 tonnes a year.
The railways helped the fisheries
to expand to such a degree
that an extensive rail system
was built on the quays
to serve the fisherman's wharf.
And by the late 1800s, Great Yarmouth
had not one but three railway stations.
A railway line
went straight to the wharf,
all the way from the Vauxhall there,
and that was up and down all day long.
That was a busy line.
Without the railways,
this town wouldn't have been as big.
The main freights carried were said to
be salt and coal in and loose fish out.
And the trains carried something of
greater interest than coal or fish.
They imported masses of Scottish girls
who gutted the herrings,
following the shoals of fish
as they migrated down the east coast.
It wasn't just railways taking fish out,
they were bringing fishery workers in.
That's right, yeah.
Even in my day...
I grew up on the wharf as it were.
That was so busy.
The Scots girls were there, singing.
If they weren't singing,
they were knitting. Very quick.
They put a competition up once,
who could gut the best,
either a machine or a Scots girl,
and the Scots girls won.
They could gut a fish one a second.
It'd take me a bloody minute to do one.
Ernie paints a magnificent
picture of a teeming port,
in an era when fish and railways
brought Great Yarmouth great wealth.
The railways declined
alongside the fishing
and now just one station
serves the town.
Before I bid farewell to Yarmouth, there
is just one more entry in "Bradshaw's"
that { want to investigate.
Its link to the railways is ghoulish.
My Bradshaw's Guide says that
"the old town contains
about 150 narrow streets or passages,
locally called rows,
in which many remains of antiquity
may still be traced."
And talking of antiquity, I understand
that this one, number six,
was known as Snatchy Body Row
and I'm here to get a skeletal idea
of why it got its name.
I've come to the graveyard of
St Nicholas's Church,
to pick over the bones of this story
with medical historian
Dr Elizabeth Hurren.
- Hello, how nice to meet you.
- Very nice to see you indeed.
Now, I'm using my Bradshaw's Guide.
I've been looking at the rows.
I understand that number six was called
Snatchy Body Row. Now, why is that?
Well, this parish church was notorious
for providing bodies
to anatomists in London
at the end of the 18th century.
And there were a couple of
notorious resurrectionists
who dug up bodies from this graveyard.
They would've come at night
into this church yard
and they would have used a wooden shovel
and put them in a sack.
In fact,
their more common name was sack men.
Then over the shoulder
and then they would have taken the body
down to London and sold it
to one of the leading anatomists.
Before the advent of the railway
in Great Yarmouth,
the economy was unpredictable.
Abject poverty, allied with
developments in medical science,
which provoked
a need for corpses for dissection,
gave rise to the dark crime of
body snatching.
A fast trade route to London by sea
and access to the largest
parish church in England
made St Nicholas's a favourite place
for illicit exhumation.
Presumably when this illegal trade
in stealing bodies was under way,
families must get very worried
that their loved ones' corpses
have been stolen?
The paupers typically
would have had to stay awake...
That's where the tradition
of a wake comes from.
.For three days, to watch the body
going into the ground.
Then they would have stayed awake,
come into the graveyard very regularly
and watched to make sure that no one
had dug up or interfered with the body.
Once the railways arrived in 1844,
prosperity surged,
but far from being stopped in its
tracks, the body trade gathered steam.
Fuelled by the Anatomy Act of 1832,
which legalised the use of
pauper carcasses for dissection.
When that happens,
you don't have to resurrect them
from a graveyard like this,
you simply buy them down the road
at Yarmouth workhouse,
at the back of it, or at a local pub.
Paupers, and when they died their bodies
were made available for science?
Absolutely.
So how did Bradshaw's come into it?
Alexander Macalister, who was
the chair of Anatomy at Cambridge,
this was absolutely critical for him.
When he arrived at Cambridge,
he had a body supply problem
because in the late 19th century, the
number of medical students quadruples.
So he has to get on the train,
with this book,
and he has to start going along
all the branch lines out of Cambridge,
and he has to get off the train
and do a body deal, with whoever he can.
And of course, he alights at Yarmouth
and realises they're very willing
to make a number of deals with him
and he pays up to £12 a body
for each dissected pauper.
- Huge amount of money.
- Absolutely.
And he transports it on the railway
out of Yarmouth
and the railway negotiates
a special rate with him
and they move the body
at so much per tonne
and they are
in the back of the carriages,
in what's known as the dead carriage.
The railways enabled corpses
to arrive in Cambridge or London
in a matter of hours,
as fresh as new caught herrings.
I know that in the book Dracula,
Count Dracula uses a Bradshaw to plan
moving his coffins around Britain.
So there was obviously
more than a grain of truth in this.
Macalister, in this book, he was
the one that everybody else copied.
He was the one, as I call him,
he was a travelling anatomist.
He got on the railway, he made the deals
and in that way, he was able to revive
the whole medical school at Cambridge.
But of course, there was
2 big social cost 10 the poor.
And so... as we have always,
in the history of medicine,
we owe the poor an enormous amount
for where we are today in biomedicine.
Astonishingly, this trade in bodies
continued until
the turn of the 20th century.
But after a popular outcry
over the theft of a pauper's body
from Great Yarmouth in 1901,
an extensive public inquiry
finally brought the secretive trade
in the town to an end.
The death box had made its last
Journey from Great Yarmouth Station.
Now I feel nervous about
getting on a train,
I want to be sure that at the back here
it's entirely cadaverless.
But luckily, most of these passengers
look pretty alive to me.
I love these wide plains and big skies
that you get in Norfolk.
And Bradshaw refers to "extensive
views of this flattish country
between Norwich and the sea".
And this low-lying land
provided many challenges
for Victorian railway engineers.
Now I'm on my way to see
one of the most spectacular examples
of how they overcame them.
In Bradshaw's day, a local railway
entrepreneur, Sir Samuel Morton Peto,
had designs on the riches
of East Anglia.
His plan required him to
conquer the tough landscape.
Part of the solution was
a piece of Victorian engineering genius,
the swing bridge,
that allowed rites-of-passage
for traffic
on both the river and the railway.
(announcement)
We are now arriving at Reedham.
Your next station stop is Reedham.
- Bye-bye. Nice to see you.
- Thank you very much.
Reedham.
A name that's famous
for its swing bridge.
Peto built the original swing bridge,
carrying the railway
across the river Yare, in the 1840s.
He declared that would enable
fresh fish from Lowestoft
to arrive Manchester in time for tea.
I've been granted special access to
cross the bridge and take a closer look.
This is so exciting,
to walk along a railway line
on this lovely ancient structure.
Always a bit nerve-racking,
walking on a railway line,
but we have been assured
there are no trains coming.
Nonetheless, if you'll forgive me,
I think I'll hurry along.
Waiting for me at the end of the
swing bridge is signalman Alan English.
That was so exciting,
walking across the bridge.
Was it?
I really enjoyed that. I don't
often get to walk on a railway line.
- If you'd like to come in...
- After you.
Welcome to our small abode.
Ha! Charming.
Is it an old, old signal box?
It was built in 1904.
It must have been a fantastic
piece of engineering in those days.
They had to decide to do something
to cross a river.
Not easy when the surrounding
countryside was marshy
and intersected by navigable rivers,
which were then the arteries of trade.
A normal bridge
would need an immense span
to allow clearance
to the region's staple transport,
wherry boats with 40ft-high masts.
Pete's swing bridge was
ah astonishing breakthrough.
It could pivot open to allow
the wherrymen to ply their trade,
and rotate back so that trains
could penetrate this watery landscape.
When the original bridge was built
the waterway was considered
the more important means of transport?
The waterway, when this line was built,
was the only form of transport
for anything other than
you could put in a horse and cart.
Yeah, so along comes the bridge
and the bridge has to fit in
with the traffic on the water.
Yes. I mean,
that was a major consideration.
It's a new thing,
no one had seen railways before.
Competition, obviously the river users
or the wherrymen,
and they wanted to ensure
that they had free rights
of passage through the bridge.
- Can we see how it works?
- Of course you can.
Do you want to get your hands dirty
and help me?
- Yes, please.
- OK then.
First lever I want you to pull
is number one.
If you'd like to use a cloth, so you
don't dirty our lovely levers up.
(Alan) Pull the dog in, that's it.
Hand at the top, with a nice
snappy movement. That's it.
- No. Not had your Weetabix, you see?
- Is that not in?
No, the indicator is still showing out.
So, back all the way in.
Pull the lever towards you slightly.
That it. Push it back in.
- Same thing again.
- Right.
Hand at the top, hand on there
and a nice snappy movement.
Yeah, well done! That's there.
And this is the best bit, the lever.
There's no cogs, there's no brakes.
What do I do with it?
Gently move it to the off position,
which will start the winch downstairs,
but it's a centrifugal clutch.
It's nice and smooth, so just
move it across, move it across. Gently.
- Listen, you now got weight on it.
- Yes.
(Michael) Keep moving?
(Alan) Look out the window,
you're now moving.
You see? So, you're in charge now.
- Do I hold it in this position?
- Hold it for a little while.
The bridge is swinging.
(Alan) Just ease back
a little bit on the lever.
- There I go.
- Whoa. That'll do.
- You're doing it all by ear?
- All by ear, yeah.
You're doing well,
you're 2 professional. Natural.
She's an old lady,
she'll start off nice and easy,
then she'll get tired halfway through.
And now you've got your speed up again
just ease back.
We must stop it in the middle.
Ease back a bit, whoa.
Off. Off. Perfect. Do you want a job?
(laughs)
I feel a huge sense of relief.
- You didn't break it.
- I was thinking that all the time.
When you were saying, "Go a bit more."
It certainly builds up your respect
for this engineering.
Last year, we swung this bridge
1,300 times in a year.
You old swingers.
I'm on my way
to find out more about Peto,
one of the railway's great creators
during the Industrial Revolution.
A 19th-century entrepreneur
and civil engineer,
his innovative railways and bridges
provided a steam-age link
between East Anglia
and the rest of Britain.
Yet few of us
know anything about him.
I've arrived in Pete's home village
of Somerleyton in Suffolk.
My Bradshaw's tells me
that this is Somerleyton Hall,
"the old Elizabethan seat,
now the residence of
Sir Samuel M Peto, Baronet,
who has greatly enlarged the building."
And what a stunning place it is.
What you could do
with a few railway millions
and what a fantastic place
to spend the evening.
I'm staggered by the scale and opulence
of Peto's home.
As one of the richest men of his day,
he could afford to employ
Prince Albert's architect,
who took seven years
to remodel the Tudor mansion.
Sir Samuel Morton Peto
was by all accounts a driven man.
I'm hoping that local historian
Adrian Vaughan can tell me more.
That's the great man, is it?
Samuel Morton Peto.
The railways that Morton Peto was
engaged in were really visionary.
He had, with Robert Stephenson
and George Parker Bidder,
they were a trinity,
and they envisaged a trade across
the Atlantic, New York, Liverpool.
Liverpool by rail, through to Lowestoft,
which was an open port
with no taxes on it,
and from Lowestoft
they set up a shipping line
to go into Denmark, to Norway.
They built the railway lines
in Norway and Denmark
and then they had another shipping line
on to Archangel, St Petersburg
and Peto built the railways in Russia
to connect the whole thing up.
Despite for many years being the
largest employer of labour in the world,
Peto overreached himself.
And in the banking collapse of 1866,
he lost his fortune.
He had to sell the Somerleyton estate
and give up his seat in parliament,
dying in obscurity in 1889.
But we should remember him
for this house
and for the railways
on which we still travel today.
It's been a wonderful day
and it ends in a beautiful place.
And so I raise my glass to the memory
of Sir Samuel Morton Peto.
Day two of my journey
and I'm taking another of the many lines
that sprang up across this region
in Bradshaw's day.
Another day.
And I boarded the train at Somerleyton,
arrived at Lowestoft...
...to change to Beccles,
from one colour train to another.
Beccles is not in my Bradshaw's Guide.
But I'm headed there today
because I believe
that if George Bradshaw
had lived another hundred years,
he would've been gratified to know
that the railways would provide
a technique that could make
the difference between death and life.
And that technique
would be forever associated
with the name of Bradshaw.
In the Second World War, the railways
were the arteries of Britain,
moving soldiers, tanks and evacuees
up and down the country.
The railways were a highly visible
target for German attacks,
but they were also invaluable
to a special group of British heroes
doing an immensely important job.
I'm at Beccles airfield
to meet Joy Lofthouse,
one of the last surviving
World War if female aviators
of the air transport auxiliary.
- Hello, Joy.
- Hello, Michael.
- How very good to see you.
- Nice to see you.
Beccles was an airfield
used in World War II.
How was it that you came into flying?
Well, in 1943 I saw an advertisement
in The Aeroplane.
I had never even been in an aeroplane
before, I didn't even drive a car,
but that seemed an exciting thing to do
as a lot of my boyfriends
were in the Air Force.
The men and women of the ATA were hired
to free other pilots for combat.
Their job was to fly aircraft
from the factories to the squadrons
for operational duties.
So what kinds of aircraft
were you flying?
Probably, we would still know
some of the names, wouldn't we?
Absolutely, yes.
All the trading aircraft and also
single-seater Spitfire, Hurricane,
Mustang, a lot of the
Fleet Air Arm things, Barracudas, etc.
Anything with one engine.
- You flew all those things?
- Absolutely, yes.
Forgive my ignorance, would they
not be a little bit different,
one from another, to fly?
Well, they would,
but this was our Bible,
The Ferry Pilot's Notes.
On each page, there's the particulars
of every aircraft in service,
with either the RAF
or the Fleet Air Arm.
I assume it's like you
getting into a different make of car.
Not very different.
Well, I don't think so. I'm amazed
that you would just jump in an aircraft,
look up the proper page and off you go.
That's just extraordinary.
Well, we were very young.
The railways of Britain
were vital navigational aids
for Joy and her fellow pilots,
as all over the country,
other key landmarks had been concealed
to thwart enemy bombers.
So how did you find your way around,
because you didn't have
modern navigational aids
in those days, did you?
You drew aline on a map,
you set off your compass point,
allowing for whatever wind there was
and you looked for checkpoints
on the way
and of course the railways
were amongst the best things to follow.
No motorways in those days,
no large roads to follow.
We called it Bradshawing, of course.
And that was a reference to
my very own George Bradshaw.
- Your Bradshaw, yes.
- Yes.
And the railways were a reliable guide?
Oh, absolutely.
In fact, in one of
the sentences in this book we have,
I don't know whether
you'd like to read it, Michael.
I think that's rather a sweet sentence.
"Finding a strange air field."
"The golden rule is, don't look for it."
"Some camouflage expert has done
his best to prevent your seeing it."
"Look instead for the landmarks
which point to the airfield."
"Even the Air Ministry
cannot camouflage them."
That would refer to
things like railways.
(Joy) They couldn't do anything
to the railways, no.
Tell me, though,
was this quite dangerous?
I know you weren't flying in combat,
but did the ATA suffer any losses?
We had about 140 odd casualties
and I would say 80% of them
were due to weather.
But we were warned, of course,
"Try not to be bleedin' heroes."
"If you get into bad weather, then
land and wait for it to be better."
We ladies were very cunning
that we knew where
most of the American airfields were
and if you knew you were into
bad weather near an American airfield,
one would try and land there.
Because not only was one feted,
but the food was good,
and they would take you to the PX,
the equivalent of our NAAFI,
and you could buy lipstick and chocolate
and stockings and things
that were all rationed at home.
So it wasn't so unusual to get
bad weather near an American airfield?
It wasn't too unusual
to get bad weather there.
[ Don't expect my mission to lead me
to a cache of lipstick or nylons,
but I want to get airborne
to have a go at navigating.
I'm going to do a little Bradshawing
myself. Are you available to take me up?
Certainly not. I don't think
you'd be able to trust me now at my age.
1 think I would trust her,
but instead { put my life in
pilot John Wignall's hands.
Apprentice Navigator Portillo
reporting for duty.
- Jump aboard and we'll get flying.
- Thank you.
John's going to fly me a few miles away
and I'll attempt to navigate
back to the airfield,
using just a basic map
and the railways as my guide.
I reckon we're gonna head down
this track here
and I want you to keep straight on.
I think Reedham must be there.
- We hope.
- (John laughs)
You're navigating.
This isn't navigating,
it's Bradshawing.
Very exciting for me, I can see
the swing bridge where we were earlier.
Sorry, it's the long way round.
But I'm quite a novice
at this Bradshawing business.
Er... (laughs)
OK.
Yes, I can see a railway line.
Please turn right.
Railway line ahoy!
That's absolutely fantastic.
According to my map,
your airfield is going to lie
to the left of the railway line.
That worked pretty well, didn't it?
I really enjoyed it, I must say.
It was very thrilling.
I've become used to
travelling around Britain
with my trusty Bradshaw's Guide,
but I would never have realised
that the same railways that
George Bradshaw mapped in the 1830s,
just over a hundred years later,
would prove the vital lifeline
for RAF pilots in World War II.
And as those brave flyers
found their way back to their airfields
using the railway tracks
as their guide,
they would call
that activity Bradshawing.
Thank you, George.
On the next leg of my journey,
I'll be following Victorian tourists
to an English city
that was lost like Atlantis...
It's not just the church ruins
that go on to the beach,
it's also the bodies of the dead
from the graveyard.
...meeting some gentle giants
who were crucial to
the smooth running of the railways...
Face of an angel,
middle like a beer barrel
and a backside on it
like a farmer's daughter.
That sums up the Suffolk horse.
...and discovering how
a 19th-century railway entrepreneur
started something that would grow
beyond his wildest dreams.
I've never been as close to
one of these container ships as this.
It's absolutely enormous.
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 travel,
what to see, and where to stay.
Now, 170 years later,
I'm making a series of journeys across
the length and breadth of the country
to see what of
Bradshaw's Britain remains.
I've embarked on
another railway journey,
confident that my trusty Bradshaw's
Guide will continue to give me insights
into the vast areas of the British Isles
that I've yet to explore.
In today's journey,
I'll be discovering a macabre side
to Great Yarmouth's railway history...
The railway negotiates
a special rate with them
and they move the body
at so much per tonne.
...operating an engineering triumph that
opened East Anglia to rail traffic...
(man) Pull the dog in, that's it.
And at the top, a nice snappy movement.
- No. Not had your Weetabix, you see.
- Is that not in?
...and learning how Bradshawing
meant the difference between
death and life in the Second World War.
Ha! I really enjoyed that, I must say.
It was very thrilling.
Starting on the East Coast, this journey
takes me south through Norfolk,
Suffolk and Essex,
finishing in the City of London.
I'll be travelling a route that in
Bradshaw's day opened up
inhospitable and isolated territory
and allowed the natural riches
of the region to be exploited.
My stretch today
begins in Great Yarmouth,
then takes me south through the village
of Reedham and on to Beccles in Suffolk.
This journey
takes me across East Anglia,
which has always seemed remote
to a Londoner like me.
Certainly, its network of waterways made
it difficult to cross, except by boat.
So railway building offered an
enormous speculative opportunity
to Victorian investors,
but that railway mania
brought bust as well as boom.
My first destination is
the coastal town of Great Yarmouth.
- Bye-bye.
- Bye now.
- Beautiful line, isn't it?
- Beautiful line.
- Lovely.
- Beautiful.
I have had the most delightful journey
through meadows grazed by sheep and cows
to this enormous station
at Great Yarmouth.
So why did they build this branch line
all the way to here? Very fishy.
The railway reached Great Yarmouth
in 1844,
and the line to London was completed
two years later.
Famous for its herrings,
the railways and this station
enabled Great Yarmouth
to take full advantage of
the fish stocks of the North Sea.
The catch could reach markets
all over the country and indeed abroad
and brought the town prosperity.
My Bradshaw's Guide tells me
that Great Yarmouth is situated on
the east bank of the river Yare.
"The inhabitants are chiefly engaged
in the mackerel, herring
and deep sea fisheries,
which are prosecuted to a very
great extent with much success."
Sadly, a decline in fish stocks
means that today nothing remains
of this once great fishing fleet.
To get an idea of the scale of the Great
Yarmouth herring industry in its heyday,
I'm meeting local resident Ernie Childs.
So, your family are fishermen?
Yeah, all the granddads and things like
that, they're all to do with the sea
and the fishing was very big
in Yarmouth.
Biggest port in the world
for catching, exporting...
The seas what surrounded Yarmouth,
just teemed with herring
and we had a fleet of about 1200.
- 12007
- 1200. Takes believing, don't it?
- You could walk across the river...
- On boats?
Each boat had ten miles of nets.
Colossal amount of fish
was caught each night.
The huge shoals of herring
would arrive in the waters
off Great Yarmouth in the autumn.
At its peak, the town was landing
125,000 tonnes a year.
The railways helped the fisheries
to expand to such a degree
that an extensive rail system
was built on the quays
to serve the fisherman's wharf.
And by the late 1800s, Great Yarmouth
had not one but three railway stations.
A railway line
went straight to the wharf,
all the way from the Vauxhall there,
and that was up and down all day long.
That was a busy line.
Without the railways,
this town wouldn't have been as big.
The main freights carried were said to
be salt and coal in and loose fish out.
And the trains carried something of
greater interest than coal or fish.
They imported masses of Scottish girls
who gutted the herrings,
following the shoals of fish
as they migrated down the east coast.
It wasn't just railways taking fish out,
they were bringing fishery workers in.
That's right, yeah.
Even in my day...
I grew up on the wharf as it were.
That was so busy.
The Scots girls were there, singing.
If they weren't singing,
they were knitting. Very quick.
They put a competition up once,
who could gut the best,
either a machine or a Scots girl,
and the Scots girls won.
They could gut a fish one a second.
It'd take me a bloody minute to do one.
Ernie paints a magnificent
picture of a teeming port,
in an era when fish and railways
brought Great Yarmouth great wealth.
The railways declined
alongside the fishing
and now just one station
serves the town.
Before I bid farewell to Yarmouth, there
is just one more entry in "Bradshaw's"
that { want to investigate.
Its link to the railways is ghoulish.
My Bradshaw's Guide says that
"the old town contains
about 150 narrow streets or passages,
locally called rows,
in which many remains of antiquity
may still be traced."
And talking of antiquity, I understand
that this one, number six,
was known as Snatchy Body Row
and I'm here to get a skeletal idea
of why it got its name.
I've come to the graveyard of
St Nicholas's Church,
to pick over the bones of this story
with medical historian
Dr Elizabeth Hurren.
- Hello, how nice to meet you.
- Very nice to see you indeed.
Now, I'm using my Bradshaw's Guide.
I've been looking at the rows.
I understand that number six was called
Snatchy Body Row. Now, why is that?
Well, this parish church was notorious
for providing bodies
to anatomists in London
at the end of the 18th century.
And there were a couple of
notorious resurrectionists
who dug up bodies from this graveyard.
They would've come at night
into this church yard
and they would have used a wooden shovel
and put them in a sack.
In fact,
their more common name was sack men.
Then over the shoulder
and then they would have taken the body
down to London and sold it
to one of the leading anatomists.
Before the advent of the railway
in Great Yarmouth,
the economy was unpredictable.
Abject poverty, allied with
developments in medical science,
which provoked
a need for corpses for dissection,
gave rise to the dark crime of
body snatching.
A fast trade route to London by sea
and access to the largest
parish church in England
made St Nicholas's a favourite place
for illicit exhumation.
Presumably when this illegal trade
in stealing bodies was under way,
families must get very worried
that their loved ones' corpses
have been stolen?
The paupers typically
would have had to stay awake...
That's where the tradition
of a wake comes from.
.For three days, to watch the body
going into the ground.
Then they would have stayed awake,
come into the graveyard very regularly
and watched to make sure that no one
had dug up or interfered with the body.
Once the railways arrived in 1844,
prosperity surged,
but far from being stopped in its
tracks, the body trade gathered steam.
Fuelled by the Anatomy Act of 1832,
which legalised the use of
pauper carcasses for dissection.
When that happens,
you don't have to resurrect them
from a graveyard like this,
you simply buy them down the road
at Yarmouth workhouse,
at the back of it, or at a local pub.
Paupers, and when they died their bodies
were made available for science?
Absolutely.
So how did Bradshaw's come into it?
Alexander Macalister, who was
the chair of Anatomy at Cambridge,
this was absolutely critical for him.
When he arrived at Cambridge,
he had a body supply problem
because in the late 19th century, the
number of medical students quadruples.
So he has to get on the train,
with this book,
and he has to start going along
all the branch lines out of Cambridge,
and he has to get off the train
and do a body deal, with whoever he can.
And of course, he alights at Yarmouth
and realises they're very willing
to make a number of deals with him
and he pays up to £12 a body
for each dissected pauper.
- Huge amount of money.
- Absolutely.
And he transports it on the railway
out of Yarmouth
and the railway negotiates
a special rate with him
and they move the body
at so much per tonne
and they are
in the back of the carriages,
in what's known as the dead carriage.
The railways enabled corpses
to arrive in Cambridge or London
in a matter of hours,
as fresh as new caught herrings.
I know that in the book Dracula,
Count Dracula uses a Bradshaw to plan
moving his coffins around Britain.
So there was obviously
more than a grain of truth in this.
Macalister, in this book, he was
the one that everybody else copied.
He was the one, as I call him,
he was a travelling anatomist.
He got on the railway, he made the deals
and in that way, he was able to revive
the whole medical school at Cambridge.
But of course, there was
2 big social cost 10 the poor.
And so... as we have always,
in the history of medicine,
we owe the poor an enormous amount
for where we are today in biomedicine.
Astonishingly, this trade in bodies
continued until
the turn of the 20th century.
But after a popular outcry
over the theft of a pauper's body
from Great Yarmouth in 1901,
an extensive public inquiry
finally brought the secretive trade
in the town to an end.
The death box had made its last
Journey from Great Yarmouth Station.
Now I feel nervous about
getting on a train,
I want to be sure that at the back here
it's entirely cadaverless.
But luckily, most of these passengers
look pretty alive to me.
I love these wide plains and big skies
that you get in Norfolk.
And Bradshaw refers to "extensive
views of this flattish country
between Norwich and the sea".
And this low-lying land
provided many challenges
for Victorian railway engineers.
Now I'm on my way to see
one of the most spectacular examples
of how they overcame them.
In Bradshaw's day, a local railway
entrepreneur, Sir Samuel Morton Peto,
had designs on the riches
of East Anglia.
His plan required him to
conquer the tough landscape.
Part of the solution was
a piece of Victorian engineering genius,
the swing bridge,
that allowed rites-of-passage
for traffic
on both the river and the railway.
(announcement)
We are now arriving at Reedham.
Your next station stop is Reedham.
- Bye-bye. Nice to see you.
- Thank you very much.
Reedham.
A name that's famous
for its swing bridge.
Peto built the original swing bridge,
carrying the railway
across the river Yare, in the 1840s.
He declared that would enable
fresh fish from Lowestoft
to arrive Manchester in time for tea.
I've been granted special access to
cross the bridge and take a closer look.
This is so exciting,
to walk along a railway line
on this lovely ancient structure.
Always a bit nerve-racking,
walking on a railway line,
but we have been assured
there are no trains coming.
Nonetheless, if you'll forgive me,
I think I'll hurry along.
Waiting for me at the end of the
swing bridge is signalman Alan English.
That was so exciting,
walking across the bridge.
Was it?
I really enjoyed that. I don't
often get to walk on a railway line.
- If you'd like to come in...
- After you.
Welcome to our small abode.
Ha! Charming.
Is it an old, old signal box?
It was built in 1904.
It must have been a fantastic
piece of engineering in those days.
They had to decide to do something
to cross a river.
Not easy when the surrounding
countryside was marshy
and intersected by navigable rivers,
which were then the arteries of trade.
A normal bridge
would need an immense span
to allow clearance
to the region's staple transport,
wherry boats with 40ft-high masts.
Pete's swing bridge was
ah astonishing breakthrough.
It could pivot open to allow
the wherrymen to ply their trade,
and rotate back so that trains
could penetrate this watery landscape.
When the original bridge was built
the waterway was considered
the more important means of transport?
The waterway, when this line was built,
was the only form of transport
for anything other than
you could put in a horse and cart.
Yeah, so along comes the bridge
and the bridge has to fit in
with the traffic on the water.
Yes. I mean,
that was a major consideration.
It's a new thing,
no one had seen railways before.
Competition, obviously the river users
or the wherrymen,
and they wanted to ensure
that they had free rights
of passage through the bridge.
- Can we see how it works?
- Of course you can.
Do you want to get your hands dirty
and help me?
- Yes, please.
- OK then.
First lever I want you to pull
is number one.
If you'd like to use a cloth, so you
don't dirty our lovely levers up.
(Alan) Pull the dog in, that's it.
Hand at the top, with a nice
snappy movement. That's it.
- No. Not had your Weetabix, you see?
- Is that not in?
No, the indicator is still showing out.
So, back all the way in.
Pull the lever towards you slightly.
That it. Push it back in.
- Same thing again.
- Right.
Hand at the top, hand on there
and a nice snappy movement.
Yeah, well done! That's there.
And this is the best bit, the lever.
There's no cogs, there's no brakes.
What do I do with it?
Gently move it to the off position,
which will start the winch downstairs,
but it's a centrifugal clutch.
It's nice and smooth, so just
move it across, move it across. Gently.
- Listen, you now got weight on it.
- Yes.
(Michael) Keep moving?
(Alan) Look out the window,
you're now moving.
You see? So, you're in charge now.
- Do I hold it in this position?
- Hold it for a little while.
The bridge is swinging.
(Alan) Just ease back
a little bit on the lever.
- There I go.
- Whoa. That'll do.
- You're doing it all by ear?
- All by ear, yeah.
You're doing well,
you're 2 professional. Natural.
She's an old lady,
she'll start off nice and easy,
then she'll get tired halfway through.
And now you've got your speed up again
just ease back.
We must stop it in the middle.
Ease back a bit, whoa.
Off. Off. Perfect. Do you want a job?
(laughs)
I feel a huge sense of relief.
- You didn't break it.
- I was thinking that all the time.
When you were saying, "Go a bit more."
It certainly builds up your respect
for this engineering.
Last year, we swung this bridge
1,300 times in a year.
You old swingers.
I'm on my way
to find out more about Peto,
one of the railway's great creators
during the Industrial Revolution.
A 19th-century entrepreneur
and civil engineer,
his innovative railways and bridges
provided a steam-age link
between East Anglia
and the rest of Britain.
Yet few of us
know anything about him.
I've arrived in Pete's home village
of Somerleyton in Suffolk.
My Bradshaw's tells me
that this is Somerleyton Hall,
"the old Elizabethan seat,
now the residence of
Sir Samuel M Peto, Baronet,
who has greatly enlarged the building."
And what a stunning place it is.
What you could do
with a few railway millions
and what a fantastic place
to spend the evening.
I'm staggered by the scale and opulence
of Peto's home.
As one of the richest men of his day,
he could afford to employ
Prince Albert's architect,
who took seven years
to remodel the Tudor mansion.
Sir Samuel Morton Peto
was by all accounts a driven man.
I'm hoping that local historian
Adrian Vaughan can tell me more.
That's the great man, is it?
Samuel Morton Peto.
The railways that Morton Peto was
engaged in were really visionary.
He had, with Robert Stephenson
and George Parker Bidder,
they were a trinity,
and they envisaged a trade across
the Atlantic, New York, Liverpool.
Liverpool by rail, through to Lowestoft,
which was an open port
with no taxes on it,
and from Lowestoft
they set up a shipping line
to go into Denmark, to Norway.
They built the railway lines
in Norway and Denmark
and then they had another shipping line
on to Archangel, St Petersburg
and Peto built the railways in Russia
to connect the whole thing up.
Despite for many years being the
largest employer of labour in the world,
Peto overreached himself.
And in the banking collapse of 1866,
he lost his fortune.
He had to sell the Somerleyton estate
and give up his seat in parliament,
dying in obscurity in 1889.
But we should remember him
for this house
and for the railways
on which we still travel today.
It's been a wonderful day
and it ends in a beautiful place.
And so I raise my glass to the memory
of Sir Samuel Morton Peto.
Day two of my journey
and I'm taking another of the many lines
that sprang up across this region
in Bradshaw's day.
Another day.
And I boarded the train at Somerleyton,
arrived at Lowestoft...
...to change to Beccles,
from one colour train to another.
Beccles is not in my Bradshaw's Guide.
But I'm headed there today
because I believe
that if George Bradshaw
had lived another hundred years,
he would've been gratified to know
that the railways would provide
a technique that could make
the difference between death and life.
And that technique
would be forever associated
with the name of Bradshaw.
In the Second World War, the railways
were the arteries of Britain,
moving soldiers, tanks and evacuees
up and down the country.
The railways were a highly visible
target for German attacks,
but they were also invaluable
to a special group of British heroes
doing an immensely important job.
I'm at Beccles airfield
to meet Joy Lofthouse,
one of the last surviving
World War if female aviators
of the air transport auxiliary.
- Hello, Joy.
- Hello, Michael.
- How very good to see you.
- Nice to see you.
Beccles was an airfield
used in World War II.
How was it that you came into flying?
Well, in 1943 I saw an advertisement
in The Aeroplane.
I had never even been in an aeroplane
before, I didn't even drive a car,
but that seemed an exciting thing to do
as a lot of my boyfriends
were in the Air Force.
The men and women of the ATA were hired
to free other pilots for combat.
Their job was to fly aircraft
from the factories to the squadrons
for operational duties.
So what kinds of aircraft
were you flying?
Probably, we would still know
some of the names, wouldn't we?
Absolutely, yes.
All the trading aircraft and also
single-seater Spitfire, Hurricane,
Mustang, a lot of the
Fleet Air Arm things, Barracudas, etc.
Anything with one engine.
- You flew all those things?
- Absolutely, yes.
Forgive my ignorance, would they
not be a little bit different,
one from another, to fly?
Well, they would,
but this was our Bible,
The Ferry Pilot's Notes.
On each page, there's the particulars
of every aircraft in service,
with either the RAF
or the Fleet Air Arm.
I assume it's like you
getting into a different make of car.
Not very different.
Well, I don't think so. I'm amazed
that you would just jump in an aircraft,
look up the proper page and off you go.
That's just extraordinary.
Well, we were very young.
The railways of Britain
were vital navigational aids
for Joy and her fellow pilots,
as all over the country,
other key landmarks had been concealed
to thwart enemy bombers.
So how did you find your way around,
because you didn't have
modern navigational aids
in those days, did you?
You drew aline on a map,
you set off your compass point,
allowing for whatever wind there was
and you looked for checkpoints
on the way
and of course the railways
were amongst the best things to follow.
No motorways in those days,
no large roads to follow.
We called it Bradshawing, of course.
And that was a reference to
my very own George Bradshaw.
- Your Bradshaw, yes.
- Yes.
And the railways were a reliable guide?
Oh, absolutely.
In fact, in one of
the sentences in this book we have,
I don't know whether
you'd like to read it, Michael.
I think that's rather a sweet sentence.
"Finding a strange air field."
"The golden rule is, don't look for it."
"Some camouflage expert has done
his best to prevent your seeing it."
"Look instead for the landmarks
which point to the airfield."
"Even the Air Ministry
cannot camouflage them."
That would refer to
things like railways.
(Joy) They couldn't do anything
to the railways, no.
Tell me, though,
was this quite dangerous?
I know you weren't flying in combat,
but did the ATA suffer any losses?
We had about 140 odd casualties
and I would say 80% of them
were due to weather.
But we were warned, of course,
"Try not to be bleedin' heroes."
"If you get into bad weather, then
land and wait for it to be better."
We ladies were very cunning
that we knew where
most of the American airfields were
and if you knew you were into
bad weather near an American airfield,
one would try and land there.
Because not only was one feted,
but the food was good,
and they would take you to the PX,
the equivalent of our NAAFI,
and you could buy lipstick and chocolate
and stockings and things
that were all rationed at home.
So it wasn't so unusual to get
bad weather near an American airfield?
It wasn't too unusual
to get bad weather there.
[ Don't expect my mission to lead me
to a cache of lipstick or nylons,
but I want to get airborne
to have a go at navigating.
I'm going to do a little Bradshawing
myself. Are you available to take me up?
Certainly not. I don't think
you'd be able to trust me now at my age.
1 think I would trust her,
but instead { put my life in
pilot John Wignall's hands.
Apprentice Navigator Portillo
reporting for duty.
- Jump aboard and we'll get flying.
- Thank you.
John's going to fly me a few miles away
and I'll attempt to navigate
back to the airfield,
using just a basic map
and the railways as my guide.
I reckon we're gonna head down
this track here
and I want you to keep straight on.
I think Reedham must be there.
- We hope.
- (John laughs)
You're navigating.
This isn't navigating,
it's Bradshawing.
Very exciting for me, I can see
the swing bridge where we were earlier.
Sorry, it's the long way round.
But I'm quite a novice
at this Bradshawing business.
Er... (laughs)
OK.
Yes, I can see a railway line.
Please turn right.
Railway line ahoy!
That's absolutely fantastic.
According to my map,
your airfield is going to lie
to the left of the railway line.
That worked pretty well, didn't it?
I really enjoyed it, I must say.
It was very thrilling.
I've become used to
travelling around Britain
with my trusty Bradshaw's Guide,
but I would never have realised
that the same railways that
George Bradshaw mapped in the 1830s,
just over a hundred years later,
would prove the vital lifeline
for RAF pilots in World War II.
And as those brave flyers
found their way back to their airfields
using the railway tracks
as their guide,
they would call
that activity Bradshawing.
Thank you, George.
On the next leg of my journey,
I'll be following Victorian tourists
to an English city
that was lost like Atlantis...
It's not just the church ruins
that go on to the beach,
it's also the bodies of the dead
from the graveyard.
...meeting some gentle giants
who were crucial to
the smooth running of the railways...
Face of an angel,
middle like a beer barrel
and a backside on it
like a farmer's daughter.
That sums up the Suffolk horse.
...and discovering how
a 19th-century railway entrepreneur
started something that would grow
beyond his wildest dreams.
I've never been as close to
one of these container ships as this.
It's absolutely enormous.