Great British Railway Journeys (2010–…): Season 3, Episode 16 - Berwick-upon-Tweed to Morpeth - 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 a new journey
across northern England.
My Bradshaw's Guide has brought me
to the border lands
where, for hundreds of years, conflict
between the English and the Scots
shaped the identities of both peoples.
In the 19th century, railway engineers
played their part in bridging the gulf.
On the first part of my new journey,
I'll be seeing how the railway
joined those two restless kingdoms...
This really is
the most beautiful bridge.
Discovering an exceptional art class
that illustrates a bygone way of life...
It's something which nobody
would have thought of recording,
nobody has ever recorded or will
record now because it's all vanished.
And hearing just how perilous work was
on the industrial railways
of the north east.
So if it's your job to get that rope off
and you happen to trip,
- what's the consequence?
- You're dead.
Starting in the border lands,
this journey takes me south
through some of northern England's
most dramatic scenery
to cross the Pennines and finish up on
the beautiful and unique Isle of Man.
Today's stretch begins in
Berwick-upon-Tweed.
Then I'll travel through the
Northumbrian countryside to Morpeth
and the Victorian heartlands
of the industrial north east.
My first stop will be
Berwick-upon-Tweed.
My Bradshaw's Guide says,
"Before the Act of Union,
it was an important frontier town."
"It is still a garrison town
having a military governor,
barracks and fortified walls."
Berwick is a stronghold that straddled
the fault line between warring peoples.
Just two-and-a-half mites
south of the Scottish border,
Berwick-upon-Tweed is
the northernmost town in England.
Astonishingly, its changed hands
between the English and the Scots
at least 13 times in its history.
But the coming of the railway
in the 19th century
helped to smooth across
the fault line of a fractious divide
to link two often antagonistic peoples.
It seems quite peaceful.
No sign of war today.
I'm heading off to
Berwick's Tudor ramparts
built in the 16th century
by Queen Elizabeth I.
With many Catholic enemies
in northern England
who wanted to see her replaced
by Mary Queen of Scots,
the Queen needed to control Berwick
and to contain Scotland.
Hence these colossal defences.
Local historian Derek Sherman
is my guide to one of the most complete
fortified towns in Europe.
Derek.
- Good morning. Welcome to Berwick.
- Hello.
It's been the scene of conflict
between the English and the Scots
for an awfully long time, hasn't it?
My Bradshaw's says that Edward I
barbarously exposed
the limbs of William Wallace here.
- It's been going on a long time.
- It has indeed.
In the 13th century, Berwick was the
biggest, most rich seaport in Scotland.
So when Edward I captured the place,
Wallace wanted it back.
Next year he recaptured Berwick
and began 300 years of warfare
between the two countries.
This conflict continued for centuries.
Berwick was the key to Scotland.
Its food supply, its population,
all its economy.
So holding Berwick was
holding the keys to Scotland.
One of the things
that really surprised me
was that Bradshaw's Guide,
talking about the 1860s,
says that it's still a garrison town.
Can that possibly be true'?
Oh, yes. Berwick has the first
infantry barracks in the country,
built at the beginning
of the 18th century,
and right through until 1964
this was still a garrison town.
As an important military town,
soldiers had been stationed
in Berwick for centuries,
billeted in people's homes.
But the burden of this standing army
weighed heavily on the town,
and as a result of complaints, the
government built the barracks in 1719.
It was the model for subsequent barracks
across Britain and indeed the Empire.
And my "Bradshaw's" of the 1860s
records that the town
still had its own military governor.
What pan did the railways play?
It finally cemented the two countries
together.
It also made a great improvement
to the town's economy.
By then, we'd settled into a normal,
everyday sort of market town.
The railway brought great wealth
to the town again.
(Michael) So you think the railway
has a symbolic or cultural effect?
It certainly does. The town itself
had been a ping-pong ball for centuries
And now it's just
the centre of two great nations.
A railway line from Edinburgh to Berwick
was built by Scottish engineers in 1846.
The line from London reached Tweedmouth
on the opposite bank of the River Tweed
a year later.
But finally to unite
England and Scotland
required a monumental piece of Victorian
engineering by Robert Stephenson.
The Royal Border Bridge.
Derek, this really is
the most beautiful bridge.
My Bradshaw's says it's
"Stephenson's Royal Border Bridge
or viaduct for the railway."
"216ft long on 28 brick arches."
It is a wonderful thing, isn't it?
What was the history of
the building of this bridge?
(Derek) It's the last link in what is
now the East Coast Main Line.
It was finished in 1850,
opened officially by Queen Victoria.
She only spent 12 minutes here.
She opened the central station
in Newcastle the same day.
The festivities there were so great
that she only had 12 minutes left.
But nonetheless, she opened the bridge
and from this time you could say
genuinely it was a United Kingdom.
The building of this majestic structure,
38 metres above the River Tweed,
was the catalyst for stronger
political and cultural ties
with a line directly linking
London to Edinburgh for the first time.
Escaping from the past was evidently
a conscious feature of the project.
Derek, what's amazing to me here
is I can see the castle wall
on either side of the railway.
Clearly, the railway was just punched
straight through the old walls.
(Derek) Yes. The Victorians wanted
progress, not historic buildings.
They had plenty of castles and
this was just one more, so it went.
We're looking at a wall that runs down
to the river side called the White Wall.
That was built by Edward I in 1296
when the English captured the place
and began these centuries of warfare.
The castle had featured in war between
the English and Scots over centuries.
Its fortifications had been repaired and
improved after each devastating battle.
But the advent of the railway
finally demolished it,
symbolically sweeping away
centuries of conflict.
Very typical of the Victorians.
You find it all the time in Bradshaw's.
This absolute confidence in progress.
And therefore, perhaps,
a little bit of disrespect for history.
Berwick's very singular history has left
its mark not just on the landscape
but also on its inhabitants.
So often under siege in their history,
Berwickers have developed
a strong and distinctive identity.
- Hello. Are you from Berwick?
- I am.
I'm very interested to know.
Would you regard yourself as English,
Scottish or Berwicker?
Berwicker.
Tell me, do you regard yourself
as English, Scottish or Berwickers?
- Berwickers.
- Berwickers? Now, why would that be?
Because we're neither one nor the other.
- Hello, are you from Berwick?
- Hi.
Yeah. I've lived here all my life.
Do you regard yourself as
English, Scottish or Berwicker?
Erm... English, but I would call myself
Berwicker if people ask.
(Michael) Do you think people who
live here have to be pretty tough?
You do take quite a bit of beating
because you go up to Scotland
you get called a Geordie,
you go further down south in England,
you get called a Soot, but you're not.
You're on the English border.
That's the way it is
and the way it's always been.
Berwick is clearly shaped
by its tumultuous past.
As I leave on the railway that
tied together these old waning foes,
Scotland and England,
there's one more exhilarating sight.
I'm really looking forward to this
because as soon as the train leaves
Berwick-upon-Tweed station,
it's going to pass over Stephenson's
magnificent Royal Border Bridge.
What a sensational view.
Just beautiful.
I'm now heading due south on
Stephenson's East Coast Main Line
through the stunning
Northumbrian countryside.
My next stop is Alnmouth.
I'm disembarking there for Alnwick,
another garrison town.
Another wonderful castle,
as recommended by my Bradshaw's Guide.
Alnwick Castle is
the second largest in England,
and in Bradshaw's day,
the Dowager Duchess was distinguished by
being Queen Victoria's former governess.
The town was nicknamed
the Windsor of the North
because of the sheer deluge
of royalty arriving by train.
The Duke of Northumberland was built
a suitably grand twin barrelled
32,000 square foot railway station.
Sadly, Alnwick was closed
in the late 1960s.
But wonderfully for me,
a second-hand bookshop saved
some of the rooms of the old station.
And so, to my delight, I can step back
in time with co-owner Mary Manley.
Michael, please come in.
- Thank you very much. It's lovely.
- Thank you.
I love the open fire here.
(Mary) That is one of the most popular
pans of the shop.
It's real and it's coal.
It was remarked in the paper at the time
that the station was
“a model or' completeness and none
superior in regard to construction
or furnishing is to be met with
on the north-eastern section“.
The fine features of this
Victorian railway station
have been affectionately restored
to the joy of both book lovers
and railway enthusiasts.
I can't help noticing that you've got
a very beautiful train, as well.
What's the story of that?
When we put up these book columns, I had
to have some way of connecting them,
otherwise they looked like they
were free-standing and rather lonely.
So I thought having a model train circle
around them might be an effective idea.
I have to say, people love it.
Not just children, but grown-ups.
No, I'm a grown-up and I love it, too.
It's just so completely in character
with what the building used to be.
As we" as bringing love and tight
back to Alnwick Station,
Mary's added her own touches
to honour the railway staff.
All these names on the wall,
what does that represent?
(Mary) They're all the names of
people who we could find
who worked in Alnwick Station
from 1858 till its closure in 1968.
It's a family. It's like coalminers,
really, the railway men.
We were very aware of the voices
that go unheard in the station.
It's their voices.
(Michael) So even though
you've established a bookshop,
you're very aware
that it's in a station.
We're very aware of the station
and wanted to restore everything
we could to keep it alive as that.
In fact, our bookshop has
the same resonance, I think,
as a railway station.
All classes, all ages,
stories, hellos and goodbyes.
In the railway books section,
which has become a magnet for rail
enthusiasts from all over the world,
Mary's husband Stuart
has something of interest.
- Hello, Stuart.
- Hello.
What are you reading there?
We have here a very early rail book
of the Newcastle to Carlisle line
built in 1836,
and it has these wonderful pictures in
it of the line just after it was built.
- (Michael) These are stunning.
- (Stuart) The quality is terrific.
- Is the book dated?
- The book is dated 1836.
(Michael) So immediately
the line has been built
they bring out this beautiful book
showing that from the earliest days
they understood that the railways were
a thing of beauty to be celebrated.
(Stuart) That's self-evident.
It's not just the railway viaducts,
which are beautiful,
but they put the scenery around them
to really show this is part of
the countryside now and isn't it great'?
(Michael)
From one railway book to another,
do you have many Bradshaw's Handbooks?
Curiously enough,
you're entirely to blame for this.
There's hardly a Bradshaw's Handbook
to be had anywhere in the country.
Not only have we sold out,
but so has virtually everyone else.
It's amazing.
I think George Bradshaw would have been
humbled and rather amused to know
that over 170 years
since its first publication
his railway guides
are flying off the shelf once more.
After a glorious day, I'm heading off
to find my bed for the night
courtesy, of course, of good old George.
For my hotel tonight,
Bradshaw's mentions the White Swan.
After all these decades,
it's still here.
Wealthy Victorian
and early 20th-century travellers
demanded luxury and opulence
on a grand scale.
And not just on the railways.
One of the most ostentatious examples
of this
was the Titanic's sister ship,
the Olympic.
It was unsurpassed in grandeur,
having the first swimming pool
on a transatlantic liner
and a staircase that was said to be
something beyond beautiful.
Unusually, after she was withdrawn
from service in 1935,
her fittings and fixtures
weren't scrapped but sold at auction.
The first class lounge was bought
for the White Swan Hotel
for its patrons' indulgence.
What a wonderfully elegant dining room.
Tonight I can swap the pleasures
of railway travel standard class
for the luxury of
transatlantic cruising first class.
A new day, and I'm up early,
leaving behind the disputed
territories of the border
of travel south to the industrial
heartlands of north-eastern England.
The progress of
the Industrial Revolution
from the end of the 18th century
saw large-scale use of coal as
steam engines supplanted water wheels.
In the Victorian era,
steam-powered ships and railways
spread across the world,
and the demand for coal
was at its zenith.
My Bradshaw's says,
"within a circle of eight or ten miles,
more than 50 important collieries
are open,
employing between
10,000 to 15,000 hands."
"The great northern field covers about
500 square miles of Northumberland
and Durham and may be 1,800ft deep."
The railways helped to convert hamlets
into villages, pit villages.
This economic growth based on coal
converted parts of Northumberland
from agriculture
to create one of the first
19th-century industrial landscapes.
(announcement) Ladies and gentlemen,
service now arriving at Morpeth.
I've left the train at Morpeth
to make an excursion to the centre
of the Northumberland collieries,
the town of Ashington.
By the late 1840s, as a result of
the coal-mining industry,
Ashington had developed
from a rural backwater
to a population of over 25,000.
The railways also grew exponentially,
carrying the coal to the expanding docks
of Newcastle, Sunder/and and Jarrow
on the Northumberland and Durham coasts.
In these former pit villages, you can
taste the history of the coal industry.
These were very tightly-knit
communities.
Miners and their families
living cheek-by-jowl
with other miners and their families.
I'm interested to discover what
these pitmen did in their spare time
to escape their often dangerous and
grimy working lives at the coalface.
We come to the Woodhorn Colliery
Museum to meet author William Feaver.
- Bill, hello.
- Hello, Michael.
So here we are at Woodhorn Colliery,
which is now a museum.
But describe it to me in
its heyday of production.
Well, trains of convoys of coal wagons
going up and down,
backwards and forwards.
It was like a great traffic junction.
This was the middle of the coal yard.
Pithead above us where everything
went down, everything came up.
Remember, coal ran the country.
Without coal, there wouldn't have been
any trains and nothing else.
No power, in effect.
So this was an industrial hub.
How would you describe
the life of the miners in those days?
The life of a pitman was very hard
at the best of times.
Apart from anything else, you spent most
of your working life in the dark.
Dangerous life. Death was a possibility.
One per cent fatalities per year
was considered rather a good statistic.
Think of that
with that number of people working.
It was not just a hard life but it was a
life in which there was no alternative.
Ashington was a one industry place.
Because of that,
both a great pride in the industry,
as it was a great skilled industry,
and a sense of, I think, being captive,
limited by this hard drudgery.
(Michael) The miners came together
with this sense of camaraderie,
this idea that they had
to put their leisure time to good use.
And an idea that they wanted
to make something better of their lives.
There was a huge appetite
for self-improvement.
This is from the late-19th century
onwards.
The Workers' Educational Association,
which was a further education system,
set up classes wherever needed.
And here the classes
were particularly active.
There's one particular class which,
really, has now gone down in history.
The Ashington Group, or Pitmen Painters
as they're affectionately known,
are special because they offer us
a unique view of miners' lives.
The Pitmen first came together in 1934
to study something different.
Art appreciation.
Robert Lyon, a lecturer from Durham
University, became their tutor.
The results of those classes
now hang in the Woodhorn Museum.
Gosh.
How powerful, how... how extraordinary.
How very, very moving,
very, very sensitive, aren't they?
So... so real.
And these were done by pitmen.
(Bill) These were done by pitmen
and they were done starting in 1934
and going right through until the 1980s.
Initially, the men painted subjects
which reflected their pastimes.
Growing food on their allotments,
racing whippets and pigeons.
But it soon became clear that
the greatest art would spring
from their daily working lives
and increasingly they painted
how it was to work in the mines.
In those days, you hardly took
photographs underground.
If you did, they were big plate camera
type jobs and they were black and white.
This is underground in colour.
It wasn't black and white down there.
It was brown and russet
and shadowy and subtle.
Because they worked there
all their daily lives,
they could do images which were
completely unknown to people outside.
This is what it was like in the '30s
when the second stage of jobs
for someone going down the pit at age 13
would be to look after pit ponies.
Jimmy Floyd shows
a rather illicit thing going on,
which is feeding the pony in his break.
It's something which nobody else
would have thought of recording,
nobody has ever recorded or will
record now because it's all vanished.
The paintings that survived
were collected together by the miners
and stored in a small hut
for over 30 years.
(Bill) The pictures hung together
are exactly as I think the group is.
Not individuals.
It's a group that echoes and re-echoes,
talks among itselves, back chats,
laughs, shares the memories.
The amazing thing is that nowhere in
the world is there anything like this.
There's never been a working men's
movement that's kept its best pictures,
kept them together
and had such an extraordinary, touching,
and now historic subject.
The coal industry is virtually gone.
These pictures are here.
Sadly, the Ashington Pitmen Painters
are all dead now.
I'm moved by these paintings. An
unsentimental depiction of their lives
hewing the stubborn coal from the earth.
The very coal that powered
the mills and the locomotives.
To reach the last stop on this leg,
I must return to the main line
that runs south from Edinburgh.
To leave behind Northumberland
and enter Tyne and Wear.
A quick change at Newcastle
affords me a real treat.
Now, this is one of my favourite views
from a train in Britain.
Down the River Tyne
between Newcastle and Gateshead.
Isn't that fabulous?
I often mention how the railways
spurred the development of coal.
But, of course,
the converse was just as true.
Many of the important breakthroughs
in rail technology
were made by mining engineers.
The pits were using trucks on tracks
long before the invention of
the moving steam engine or locomotive.
As early as 1620,
mines were using rails and trucks
within the pits to move coat.
As the Industrial Revolution burgeoned,
the Victorians increasingly demanded
steam power for industry and railways,
requiring huge quantities of coal
to be moved from pithead to dock.
One of the earliest innovations for
this work was the rope-hauled railway.
We come to the Bowes Railway Museum
near Gateshead with engineer John Young
to see the only surviving example
in the world.
John, if I understand it, you have
brought me to this spectacular place
because this is one of George
Stephenson's early railway miracles?
We're on the site of
Springwell Colliery.
This is the top of the hill
where the full wagons going down
would pull empty wagons up
powered by gravity.
If I understand this correctly,
this is operating by gravity
and it's operating by balance.
You've got six full wagons going down
and they are pulling up six empty wagons
to the summit.
Yes. A very unique system.
Couldn't be bettered from 1826
to when it shut in '74.
Designed by George Stephenson
when he was a colliery engineer,
the rope haulage covered nine miles
from pithead to port.
Gravity alone allowed the full wagons
lo move downhill
and, as they descended,
to pull the empty ones up.
Where coal-laden trucks
had to travel uphill,
a stationary steam-powered winch
was used.
This system was said to be so efficient
that the first load of coal through
in the morning
would be enough to pay the wages
of every man working on the railway
that day.
This must have been
a dangerous place to work.
Very. The death list for this site
is in its hundreds.
Banksmen would have to run in front of
full wagons to take the ropes off
and other men to run alongside
to put brakes on.
So if it's your job to run down in front
of six fully-loaded wagons of coal
as they're gaining speed
to get that rope off
and you happen to trip,
what's the consequence?
You're dead.
Although the Bowes system
closed in 1974,
the technology was in operation
much as Stephenson had designed it
for just shy of 150 years.
So they're now running down
just on gravity, are they?
Gravity pulling them out. What I'm
having to do is control the rope speed.
As you can see,
the rope's jumping up and down.
If you let it pay out
under its own weight,
the wagons would just go out of control
and fly off down the yard.
All clear!
Without the ingenuity of engineers
working on mining and shipping coal,
its doubtful whether
the key developments of the locomotive
and the railway could have evolved with
the extraordinary speed that they did.
The railway was an awesome technology,
powerful enough to rub out borders
and link previously hostile cultures.
But as it stimulated
the industrial Revolution,
it created new communities
based on coal.
And they had their own distinct
and celebrated cultures.
On the next step of my journey,
I'll be getting down and dirty
in a Roman barracks...
- Well, I am your slave. Back to work.
- Back to work. Quite right, as well.
Discovering a small invention
that made a big difference
to the public...
Let me do the dog ticket first.
That's easy enough.
One dog ticket.
And drinking in spectacular
engineering triumphs
in the Cambrian countryside.
Thank you for going so slowly.
Isn't that a beautiful thing?
Aye.
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 a new journey
across northern England.
My Bradshaw's Guide has brought me
to the border lands
where, for hundreds of years, conflict
between the English and the Scots
shaped the identities of both peoples.
In the 19th century, railway engineers
played their part in bridging the gulf.
On the first part of my new journey,
I'll be seeing how the railway
joined those two restless kingdoms...
This really is
the most beautiful bridge.
Discovering an exceptional art class
that illustrates a bygone way of life...
It's something which nobody
would have thought of recording,
nobody has ever recorded or will
record now because it's all vanished.
And hearing just how perilous work was
on the industrial railways
of the north east.
So if it's your job to get that rope off
and you happen to trip,
- what's the consequence?
- You're dead.
Starting in the border lands,
this journey takes me south
through some of northern England's
most dramatic scenery
to cross the Pennines and finish up on
the beautiful and unique Isle of Man.
Today's stretch begins in
Berwick-upon-Tweed.
Then I'll travel through the
Northumbrian countryside to Morpeth
and the Victorian heartlands
of the industrial north east.
My first stop will be
Berwick-upon-Tweed.
My Bradshaw's Guide says,
"Before the Act of Union,
it was an important frontier town."
"It is still a garrison town
having a military governor,
barracks and fortified walls."
Berwick is a stronghold that straddled
the fault line between warring peoples.
Just two-and-a-half mites
south of the Scottish border,
Berwick-upon-Tweed is
the northernmost town in England.
Astonishingly, its changed hands
between the English and the Scots
at least 13 times in its history.
But the coming of the railway
in the 19th century
helped to smooth across
the fault line of a fractious divide
to link two often antagonistic peoples.
It seems quite peaceful.
No sign of war today.
I'm heading off to
Berwick's Tudor ramparts
built in the 16th century
by Queen Elizabeth I.
With many Catholic enemies
in northern England
who wanted to see her replaced
by Mary Queen of Scots,
the Queen needed to control Berwick
and to contain Scotland.
Hence these colossal defences.
Local historian Derek Sherman
is my guide to one of the most complete
fortified towns in Europe.
Derek.
- Good morning. Welcome to Berwick.
- Hello.
It's been the scene of conflict
between the English and the Scots
for an awfully long time, hasn't it?
My Bradshaw's says that Edward I
barbarously exposed
the limbs of William Wallace here.
- It's been going on a long time.
- It has indeed.
In the 13th century, Berwick was the
biggest, most rich seaport in Scotland.
So when Edward I captured the place,
Wallace wanted it back.
Next year he recaptured Berwick
and began 300 years of warfare
between the two countries.
This conflict continued for centuries.
Berwick was the key to Scotland.
Its food supply, its population,
all its economy.
So holding Berwick was
holding the keys to Scotland.
One of the things
that really surprised me
was that Bradshaw's Guide,
talking about the 1860s,
says that it's still a garrison town.
Can that possibly be true'?
Oh, yes. Berwick has the first
infantry barracks in the country,
built at the beginning
of the 18th century,
and right through until 1964
this was still a garrison town.
As an important military town,
soldiers had been stationed
in Berwick for centuries,
billeted in people's homes.
But the burden of this standing army
weighed heavily on the town,
and as a result of complaints, the
government built the barracks in 1719.
It was the model for subsequent barracks
across Britain and indeed the Empire.
And my "Bradshaw's" of the 1860s
records that the town
still had its own military governor.
What pan did the railways play?
It finally cemented the two countries
together.
It also made a great improvement
to the town's economy.
By then, we'd settled into a normal,
everyday sort of market town.
The railway brought great wealth
to the town again.
(Michael) So you think the railway
has a symbolic or cultural effect?
It certainly does. The town itself
had been a ping-pong ball for centuries
And now it's just
the centre of two great nations.
A railway line from Edinburgh to Berwick
was built by Scottish engineers in 1846.
The line from London reached Tweedmouth
on the opposite bank of the River Tweed
a year later.
But finally to unite
England and Scotland
required a monumental piece of Victorian
engineering by Robert Stephenson.
The Royal Border Bridge.
Derek, this really is
the most beautiful bridge.
My Bradshaw's says it's
"Stephenson's Royal Border Bridge
or viaduct for the railway."
"216ft long on 28 brick arches."
It is a wonderful thing, isn't it?
What was the history of
the building of this bridge?
(Derek) It's the last link in what is
now the East Coast Main Line.
It was finished in 1850,
opened officially by Queen Victoria.
She only spent 12 minutes here.
She opened the central station
in Newcastle the same day.
The festivities there were so great
that she only had 12 minutes left.
But nonetheless, she opened the bridge
and from this time you could say
genuinely it was a United Kingdom.
The building of this majestic structure,
38 metres above the River Tweed,
was the catalyst for stronger
political and cultural ties
with a line directly linking
London to Edinburgh for the first time.
Escaping from the past was evidently
a conscious feature of the project.
Derek, what's amazing to me here
is I can see the castle wall
on either side of the railway.
Clearly, the railway was just punched
straight through the old walls.
(Derek) Yes. The Victorians wanted
progress, not historic buildings.
They had plenty of castles and
this was just one more, so it went.
We're looking at a wall that runs down
to the river side called the White Wall.
That was built by Edward I in 1296
when the English captured the place
and began these centuries of warfare.
The castle had featured in war between
the English and Scots over centuries.
Its fortifications had been repaired and
improved after each devastating battle.
But the advent of the railway
finally demolished it,
symbolically sweeping away
centuries of conflict.
Very typical of the Victorians.
You find it all the time in Bradshaw's.
This absolute confidence in progress.
And therefore, perhaps,
a little bit of disrespect for history.
Berwick's very singular history has left
its mark not just on the landscape
but also on its inhabitants.
So often under siege in their history,
Berwickers have developed
a strong and distinctive identity.
- Hello. Are you from Berwick?
- I am.
I'm very interested to know.
Would you regard yourself as English,
Scottish or Berwicker?
Berwicker.
Tell me, do you regard yourself
as English, Scottish or Berwickers?
- Berwickers.
- Berwickers? Now, why would that be?
Because we're neither one nor the other.
- Hello, are you from Berwick?
- Hi.
Yeah. I've lived here all my life.
Do you regard yourself as
English, Scottish or Berwicker?
Erm... English, but I would call myself
Berwicker if people ask.
(Michael) Do you think people who
live here have to be pretty tough?
You do take quite a bit of beating
because you go up to Scotland
you get called a Geordie,
you go further down south in England,
you get called a Soot, but you're not.
You're on the English border.
That's the way it is
and the way it's always been.
Berwick is clearly shaped
by its tumultuous past.
As I leave on the railway that
tied together these old waning foes,
Scotland and England,
there's one more exhilarating sight.
I'm really looking forward to this
because as soon as the train leaves
Berwick-upon-Tweed station,
it's going to pass over Stephenson's
magnificent Royal Border Bridge.
What a sensational view.
Just beautiful.
I'm now heading due south on
Stephenson's East Coast Main Line
through the stunning
Northumbrian countryside.
My next stop is Alnmouth.
I'm disembarking there for Alnwick,
another garrison town.
Another wonderful castle,
as recommended by my Bradshaw's Guide.
Alnwick Castle is
the second largest in England,
and in Bradshaw's day,
the Dowager Duchess was distinguished by
being Queen Victoria's former governess.
The town was nicknamed
the Windsor of the North
because of the sheer deluge
of royalty arriving by train.
The Duke of Northumberland was built
a suitably grand twin barrelled
32,000 square foot railway station.
Sadly, Alnwick was closed
in the late 1960s.
But wonderfully for me,
a second-hand bookshop saved
some of the rooms of the old station.
And so, to my delight, I can step back
in time with co-owner Mary Manley.
Michael, please come in.
- Thank you very much. It's lovely.
- Thank you.
I love the open fire here.
(Mary) That is one of the most popular
pans of the shop.
It's real and it's coal.
It was remarked in the paper at the time
that the station was
“a model or' completeness and none
superior in regard to construction
or furnishing is to be met with
on the north-eastern section“.
The fine features of this
Victorian railway station
have been affectionately restored
to the joy of both book lovers
and railway enthusiasts.
I can't help noticing that you've got
a very beautiful train, as well.
What's the story of that?
When we put up these book columns, I had
to have some way of connecting them,
otherwise they looked like they
were free-standing and rather lonely.
So I thought having a model train circle
around them might be an effective idea.
I have to say, people love it.
Not just children, but grown-ups.
No, I'm a grown-up and I love it, too.
It's just so completely in character
with what the building used to be.
As we" as bringing love and tight
back to Alnwick Station,
Mary's added her own touches
to honour the railway staff.
All these names on the wall,
what does that represent?
(Mary) They're all the names of
people who we could find
who worked in Alnwick Station
from 1858 till its closure in 1968.
It's a family. It's like coalminers,
really, the railway men.
We were very aware of the voices
that go unheard in the station.
It's their voices.
(Michael) So even though
you've established a bookshop,
you're very aware
that it's in a station.
We're very aware of the station
and wanted to restore everything
we could to keep it alive as that.
In fact, our bookshop has
the same resonance, I think,
as a railway station.
All classes, all ages,
stories, hellos and goodbyes.
In the railway books section,
which has become a magnet for rail
enthusiasts from all over the world,
Mary's husband Stuart
has something of interest.
- Hello, Stuart.
- Hello.
What are you reading there?
We have here a very early rail book
of the Newcastle to Carlisle line
built in 1836,
and it has these wonderful pictures in
it of the line just after it was built.
- (Michael) These are stunning.
- (Stuart) The quality is terrific.
- Is the book dated?
- The book is dated 1836.
(Michael) So immediately
the line has been built
they bring out this beautiful book
showing that from the earliest days
they understood that the railways were
a thing of beauty to be celebrated.
(Stuart) That's self-evident.
It's not just the railway viaducts,
which are beautiful,
but they put the scenery around them
to really show this is part of
the countryside now and isn't it great'?
(Michael)
From one railway book to another,
do you have many Bradshaw's Handbooks?
Curiously enough,
you're entirely to blame for this.
There's hardly a Bradshaw's Handbook
to be had anywhere in the country.
Not only have we sold out,
but so has virtually everyone else.
It's amazing.
I think George Bradshaw would have been
humbled and rather amused to know
that over 170 years
since its first publication
his railway guides
are flying off the shelf once more.
After a glorious day, I'm heading off
to find my bed for the night
courtesy, of course, of good old George.
For my hotel tonight,
Bradshaw's mentions the White Swan.
After all these decades,
it's still here.
Wealthy Victorian
and early 20th-century travellers
demanded luxury and opulence
on a grand scale.
And not just on the railways.
One of the most ostentatious examples
of this
was the Titanic's sister ship,
the Olympic.
It was unsurpassed in grandeur,
having the first swimming pool
on a transatlantic liner
and a staircase that was said to be
something beyond beautiful.
Unusually, after she was withdrawn
from service in 1935,
her fittings and fixtures
weren't scrapped but sold at auction.
The first class lounge was bought
for the White Swan Hotel
for its patrons' indulgence.
What a wonderfully elegant dining room.
Tonight I can swap the pleasures
of railway travel standard class
for the luxury of
transatlantic cruising first class.
A new day, and I'm up early,
leaving behind the disputed
territories of the border
of travel south to the industrial
heartlands of north-eastern England.
The progress of
the Industrial Revolution
from the end of the 18th century
saw large-scale use of coal as
steam engines supplanted water wheels.
In the Victorian era,
steam-powered ships and railways
spread across the world,
and the demand for coal
was at its zenith.
My Bradshaw's says,
"within a circle of eight or ten miles,
more than 50 important collieries
are open,
employing between
10,000 to 15,000 hands."
"The great northern field covers about
500 square miles of Northumberland
and Durham and may be 1,800ft deep."
The railways helped to convert hamlets
into villages, pit villages.
This economic growth based on coal
converted parts of Northumberland
from agriculture
to create one of the first
19th-century industrial landscapes.
(announcement) Ladies and gentlemen,
service now arriving at Morpeth.
I've left the train at Morpeth
to make an excursion to the centre
of the Northumberland collieries,
the town of Ashington.
By the late 1840s, as a result of
the coal-mining industry,
Ashington had developed
from a rural backwater
to a population of over 25,000.
The railways also grew exponentially,
carrying the coal to the expanding docks
of Newcastle, Sunder/and and Jarrow
on the Northumberland and Durham coasts.
In these former pit villages, you can
taste the history of the coal industry.
These were very tightly-knit
communities.
Miners and their families
living cheek-by-jowl
with other miners and their families.
I'm interested to discover what
these pitmen did in their spare time
to escape their often dangerous and
grimy working lives at the coalface.
We come to the Woodhorn Colliery
Museum to meet author William Feaver.
- Bill, hello.
- Hello, Michael.
So here we are at Woodhorn Colliery,
which is now a museum.
But describe it to me in
its heyday of production.
Well, trains of convoys of coal wagons
going up and down,
backwards and forwards.
It was like a great traffic junction.
This was the middle of the coal yard.
Pithead above us where everything
went down, everything came up.
Remember, coal ran the country.
Without coal, there wouldn't have been
any trains and nothing else.
No power, in effect.
So this was an industrial hub.
How would you describe
the life of the miners in those days?
The life of a pitman was very hard
at the best of times.
Apart from anything else, you spent most
of your working life in the dark.
Dangerous life. Death was a possibility.
One per cent fatalities per year
was considered rather a good statistic.
Think of that
with that number of people working.
It was not just a hard life but it was a
life in which there was no alternative.
Ashington was a one industry place.
Because of that,
both a great pride in the industry,
as it was a great skilled industry,
and a sense of, I think, being captive,
limited by this hard drudgery.
(Michael) The miners came together
with this sense of camaraderie,
this idea that they had
to put their leisure time to good use.
And an idea that they wanted
to make something better of their lives.
There was a huge appetite
for self-improvement.
This is from the late-19th century
onwards.
The Workers' Educational Association,
which was a further education system,
set up classes wherever needed.
And here the classes
were particularly active.
There's one particular class which,
really, has now gone down in history.
The Ashington Group, or Pitmen Painters
as they're affectionately known,
are special because they offer us
a unique view of miners' lives.
The Pitmen first came together in 1934
to study something different.
Art appreciation.
Robert Lyon, a lecturer from Durham
University, became their tutor.
The results of those classes
now hang in the Woodhorn Museum.
Gosh.
How powerful, how... how extraordinary.
How very, very moving,
very, very sensitive, aren't they?
So... so real.
And these were done by pitmen.
(Bill) These were done by pitmen
and they were done starting in 1934
and going right through until the 1980s.
Initially, the men painted subjects
which reflected their pastimes.
Growing food on their allotments,
racing whippets and pigeons.
But it soon became clear that
the greatest art would spring
from their daily working lives
and increasingly they painted
how it was to work in the mines.
In those days, you hardly took
photographs underground.
If you did, they were big plate camera
type jobs and they were black and white.
This is underground in colour.
It wasn't black and white down there.
It was brown and russet
and shadowy and subtle.
Because they worked there
all their daily lives,
they could do images which were
completely unknown to people outside.
This is what it was like in the '30s
when the second stage of jobs
for someone going down the pit at age 13
would be to look after pit ponies.
Jimmy Floyd shows
a rather illicit thing going on,
which is feeding the pony in his break.
It's something which nobody else
would have thought of recording,
nobody has ever recorded or will
record now because it's all vanished.
The paintings that survived
were collected together by the miners
and stored in a small hut
for over 30 years.
(Bill) The pictures hung together
are exactly as I think the group is.
Not individuals.
It's a group that echoes and re-echoes,
talks among itselves, back chats,
laughs, shares the memories.
The amazing thing is that nowhere in
the world is there anything like this.
There's never been a working men's
movement that's kept its best pictures,
kept them together
and had such an extraordinary, touching,
and now historic subject.
The coal industry is virtually gone.
These pictures are here.
Sadly, the Ashington Pitmen Painters
are all dead now.
I'm moved by these paintings. An
unsentimental depiction of their lives
hewing the stubborn coal from the earth.
The very coal that powered
the mills and the locomotives.
To reach the last stop on this leg,
I must return to the main line
that runs south from Edinburgh.
To leave behind Northumberland
and enter Tyne and Wear.
A quick change at Newcastle
affords me a real treat.
Now, this is one of my favourite views
from a train in Britain.
Down the River Tyne
between Newcastle and Gateshead.
Isn't that fabulous?
I often mention how the railways
spurred the development of coal.
But, of course,
the converse was just as true.
Many of the important breakthroughs
in rail technology
were made by mining engineers.
The pits were using trucks on tracks
long before the invention of
the moving steam engine or locomotive.
As early as 1620,
mines were using rails and trucks
within the pits to move coat.
As the Industrial Revolution burgeoned,
the Victorians increasingly demanded
steam power for industry and railways,
requiring huge quantities of coal
to be moved from pithead to dock.
One of the earliest innovations for
this work was the rope-hauled railway.
We come to the Bowes Railway Museum
near Gateshead with engineer John Young
to see the only surviving example
in the world.
John, if I understand it, you have
brought me to this spectacular place
because this is one of George
Stephenson's early railway miracles?
We're on the site of
Springwell Colliery.
This is the top of the hill
where the full wagons going down
would pull empty wagons up
powered by gravity.
If I understand this correctly,
this is operating by gravity
and it's operating by balance.
You've got six full wagons going down
and they are pulling up six empty wagons
to the summit.
Yes. A very unique system.
Couldn't be bettered from 1826
to when it shut in '74.
Designed by George Stephenson
when he was a colliery engineer,
the rope haulage covered nine miles
from pithead to port.
Gravity alone allowed the full wagons
lo move downhill
and, as they descended,
to pull the empty ones up.
Where coal-laden trucks
had to travel uphill,
a stationary steam-powered winch
was used.
This system was said to be so efficient
that the first load of coal through
in the morning
would be enough to pay the wages
of every man working on the railway
that day.
This must have been
a dangerous place to work.
Very. The death list for this site
is in its hundreds.
Banksmen would have to run in front of
full wagons to take the ropes off
and other men to run alongside
to put brakes on.
So if it's your job to run down in front
of six fully-loaded wagons of coal
as they're gaining speed
to get that rope off
and you happen to trip,
what's the consequence?
You're dead.
Although the Bowes system
closed in 1974,
the technology was in operation
much as Stephenson had designed it
for just shy of 150 years.
So they're now running down
just on gravity, are they?
Gravity pulling them out. What I'm
having to do is control the rope speed.
As you can see,
the rope's jumping up and down.
If you let it pay out
under its own weight,
the wagons would just go out of control
and fly off down the yard.
All clear!
Without the ingenuity of engineers
working on mining and shipping coal,
its doubtful whether
the key developments of the locomotive
and the railway could have evolved with
the extraordinary speed that they did.
The railway was an awesome technology,
powerful enough to rub out borders
and link previously hostile cultures.
But as it stimulated
the industrial Revolution,
it created new communities
based on coal.
And they had their own distinct
and celebrated cultures.
On the next step of my journey,
I'll be getting down and dirty
in a Roman barracks...
- Well, I am your slave. Back to work.
- Back to work. Quite right, as well.
Discovering a small invention
that made a big difference
to the public...
Let me do the dog ticket first.
That's easy enough.
One dog ticket.
And drinking in spectacular
engineering triumphs
in the Cambrian countryside.
Thank you for going so slowly.
Isn't that a beautiful thing?
Aye.