Great British Railway Journeys (2010–…): Season 5, Episode 8 - Northampton to Nuneaton - 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 go,
what to see and where to stay.
And now, 170 years later,
I'm aboard for a series of rail
adventures across the United Kingdom
to see what of Bradshaw's Britain
remains.
The British Empire reached its zenith
under Queen Victoria
and mechanisation
boosted its industrial output.
But as technology spread
to other countries,
no British industry
could rest on its laurels.
As I continue my journey north
towards Leeds across the Midlands,
I shall be interested to see
how British manufacturing
adapted to prosperity and competition.
All this week, I've been travelling
away from the capital
and its metropolitan sprawl,
heading north on Stephenson
London-to-Birmingham line.
I'll explore the Victorian
manufacturing hub of the East Midlands
before ending my journey
in the Yorkshire city of Leeds.
On this leg, I'm riding the tracks
into the Midlands,
to Northampton and Rugby,
and on to the city of Coventry
before changing fines for Nuneaton.
Today, I discover a tradition
unaltered since Victorian times...
It's like most things in life;
you can learn it in two weeks,
but it takes you a lifetime
to be any good at it.
I hear about the man who
changed education around the world...
These were people
capable of running the British Empire.
Very much so, and that was
pan of Arnold's great reform.
And I see how a city
rode out the economic cycles.
This is the forerunner of all modern
bicycles, known as a safety bicycle.
For the good reason that everything
that came before was not.
Exactly. Exactly.
My first stop today is Northampton,
which Bradshaw's tells me
has an industrious population,
some thousands of whom are engaged
in boot-and-shoe manufacture,
which has been here for centuries.
Northampton,
known as the land of the shoe makers,
has been producing shoes
since the 15th century,
thanks to a plentiful supply of wood,
water and cattle.
In 1642, a group of shoemakers
won a contract to supply the army,
and by 1841, fuelled by the arrival of
the London-to-Birmingham railway line,
the shoe industry had grown
to nearly 2,000 shoemakers.
Today, although the skills
have changed little over the centuries,
there are only five firms left.
Keeping traditions alive
is Crockett & Jones, founded in 1879.
The process starts
with the leather being cut
by a skilled cutter naked a clicker.
David Mains
oversees the factory's 21 clickers.
So clicking is cutting, is it?
It is cutting, yes. And it's not
the actual cutting that's the skill.
The skill is getting the sections
at the right areas of the leather.
- (Michael) Avoiding defects?
- Avoiding defects.
Anybody can come along
and cut things out.
It's knowing where to put the pieces,
that's where the skill is.
Cutting all the parts of a shoe
from the skins is done by hand,
using a pattern and a knife.
The key thing is to create
as little waste as possible.
In Victorian times,
the patterns would have been made
from cardboard edged with brass
and the knives
clicking against their wooden blocks
gave the cutters their name.
Ooh. I moved my pattern there.
You said this was the easy bit.
It isn't.
It's nice round the curve there.
Good. Now, I've got a little bit
of a rough edge there, haven't I?
Just missed a bit.
- How many years' practice have you had?
- I've been here 20 years, now.
I'll talk to you again in 20 years.
Thank you so much, David.
Bye-bye.
The striking thing about this factory
is that the process has stayed
essentially the same for 134 years.
One oi the managers, James Fox,
is taking me onto the factory floor
to the closing room where ah the
leather parts are stitched together.
This room seems to be
entirely filled with women.
Do you practise segregation here?
We don't.
It's more of a natural occurrence.
The skills that are involved
in the closing room
tend to be more delicate operations,
there's less manual labour involved.
Still extremely highly skilled.
And I think there's about 110 people
in here, 100 of which are women,
and about nine or ten gents that
you will see dotted around the room.
(Michael)
I have seen them dotted around.
But all the time I've been in your
factory, I've had this Victorian feel;
the wooden panelling and the shape
oi the windows and that sort oi thing,
and then to come into a room
that's entirely filled with one gender
is also a very Victorian feel.
And as in Victorian times,
many oi these workers are second-
or third-generation shoemakers.
- Hello. I'm Michael.
- Pleased to meet you.
- What's your name?
- My name's Lisa.
- What is it you're doing to the shoe?
- (Lisa) I'm eyeleting the shoe.
I've only done half a shoe. It's just
putting the holes in for the laces.
Quite a skilled job.
You've got to get it in the right place
or else that's that son of ruined
and it's got to be re-cut again.
- How long have you been here?
- I've been here 23 years now.
- Did you have any family in it before?
- My mother used to work here, yeah.
And my grandfather worked
in the clicking room upstairs.
Your mother,
how many years was she here?
- All her life as well. She's 15 now.
- Thank you, Lisa.
- You're welcome.
- Lovely to see you.
- Thank you. Bye.
- Bye.
It takes hearty three hours
of continuous hand stitching
to sew the leather uppers.
James wants to show me a machine
that radically reduced
how long it took to make them
and changed the way
in which they could be repaired.
The Goodyear wetting machine was
invented in America in the late 1860s,
mechanically fastening the sole
to the shoe.
A strip of leather, the welt,
was stitched to the upper.
Then the sole could be easily attached.
Michael, this is David,
our Goodyear welter.
- Hello, David.
- Pleased to meet you.
I've been hearing that this Goodyear
welting changed shoemaking. Why is that?
Before Goodyear welting
was actually introduced,
the bottom of the shoe was flat
and then you covered it
with a full sheet of leather
which had to be either riveted
or stapled right through.
So it used a lot more leather,
a lot more time, a lot more labour.
They came up with a process of putting
a rim round the bottom of the insole,
to which we then sew a welt.
That's approximately 80 stitches.
And how long did that take them
when they were doing it by hand?
- Two hours to a pair.
- No.
Yeah.
Still does in Scandinavian countries,
where they still do them by hand.
You have added his leather strip,
that's called the welt,
and then you're going
to put the sole on there
and you're going to sew through
the welt into the sole,
and that's going
to hold the whole shoe together?
Yes.
How many years did it take you
to achieve that level of skill?
I've been welt sewing
about 40 years, I suppose.
It's like most things in life;
you can learn it in two weeks,
but it takes a lifetime
to be any good at it.
Extraordinary.
Well, I take my hat off to you.
- Thank you very much.
- Thanks very much.
A hand-sewn pair of these quality shoes
could cost from £350 to £4,000.
What makes them so special is that
they're made in the traditional way,
which has never been bettered.
To step into this factory is to be
transported back through time.
A Victorian
could have seen similar tools
working the fine-smelling leather.
My journey from Northampton lo Rugby
is on the London Midland line
and takes 20 minutes.
As I approach Rugby, Bradshaw's
draws attention to the place of learning
that put the town on the map.
"By the exertions of successive masters,
especially the late Dr Arnold,
it ranks as one of the best
grammar schools in the country."
As a grammar school boy myself,
I'm anxious to learn more
about Thomas Arnold,
a man who left his fingerprints
on British education.
The school was founded in 1567
by a local philanthropist,
Lawrence Sheriff,
who wanted to provide an education
for the boys of Rugby.
400 years later, the school
retains a far-flung reputation
as one of the country's
leading public schools.
The buildings conjure up
the spirit of Dr Arnold.
I'm meeting the school's archivist,
Rusty McLean,
to find out more about
the school's most celebrated head.
- Hello, Rusty.
- Very pleased to meet you.
Now, Dr Thomas Arnold
has gone down in history
as a great educational reformer.
What was it that he was
reforming here at Rugby?
Well, when Arnold arrived here
in 1828,
he arrived at a school which, in common
with most other schools of the day,
was an institution where boys
were regarded as empty vessels
to be filled with facts
and then flung out into the world.
And Arnold, through his subtle reforms,
remodelling existing practices,
transformed the whole idea of education.
And, of course, his influence spread
not only through the rest of England,
but throughout the world.
Rusty is taking me to the classroom
where Arnold used to leach.
What were Arnold's
principles of education?
(Rusty) Well, in one of the first
meetings he had with his sixth form,
he laid out three principles.
First, religious and moral principles.
Second, gentlemanly conduct.
And third,
intellectual academic ability.
He was far more concerned
with educating the whole person.
It wasn't just about facts.
It was about developing character.
(Michael) So he was training these
young men at this school for what?
Well, he was training them
for just about everything.
And boys went out from here
into all walks of life,
the military, the Church,
politics, the ans.
(Michael)
But a big emphasis on administration.
These were people capable
of running the British Empire.
Very much so, and that was
pan of Arnold's great reform.
I see you've got
a handsome collection here of graffiti.
(Rusty) These are desk lids;
little table tops, they were called.
And this, in a sense, is not graffiti
because the boys were actually permitted
to carve their name on the desk lid
before they left school.
Anyone that I would recognise?
Well, you may recognise
the name Chamberlain.
(Michael) Neville, our Prime Minister
- at the beginning of World War ll.
- Ii is.
An intriguing reference
in my Bradshaw's.
"The tagging or monitor system prevails
at the school," this is the mid-1860s,
"but has been somewhat mitigated
by Dr Arnold." What does that mean?
Well, fagging originally
was a mentoring system.
If you think that boys as young as six
were entering this school,
probably the first time away from home,
into a completely alien environment,
senior boys would lake them under their
wing, show them where everything was,
and in return, the boys
would provide menial tasks,
perhaps popping across the road
to get a bowl of baked potatoes
or polishing the senior boys boots.
Trouble is,
by the time Arnold had arrived,
this had effectively become
institutionalised bullying.
(Michael) He made it
a somewhat kinder place, did he?
Very much so.
It was an environment of trust.
Dr Arnold most certainly left his mark
on Victorian schooling,
while one of his pupils
left his hoot print
on the sporting field of dreams.
Ah, William Webb Ellis,
the boy who invented rugby football.
And when were the rules
of rugby football formalised?
(Rusty) The sport was first
codified officially in August 1845
by a group of three Rugby schoolboys,
one of whom was one
of Thomas Arnold's sons.
When they were codified,
they were actually produced
and printed in a little book.
(Michael) Why so small?
In those days, there were no referees.
The boys didn't need them.
And so they would take this booklet
out on the pitch with them.
As the game developed,
the rules changed to allow faster play.
It made matches more exciting
for both players and fans.
It also meant that a referee on the
pitch eventually became compulsory
in order lo settle disputes.
The game's roots
have not been forgotten.
The Rugby World Cup
is known as the Webb Ellis Trophy.
If Webb Ellis were watching now,
I'm sure he'd be chuffed
to see how his game
is being played today
pretty much as he invented it.
I have to admit that I'm not
very sporty, hut in for a penny...
Crouch. Touch.
It's only a short trip up
the London-to-Birmingham main line
to my next stop, Coventry.
After a game of rugby,
an early bath is called for,
and Bradshaw's is ever helpful.
"Coombe Abbey, belonging to
the Earl of Craven, has abbey ruins,
with a gallery of paintings
by Van Dyck." Sounds perfect.
Coombe Abbey was founded
as a monastery by the Cistercian monks
in the 12th century.
Following the dissolution
of the monasteries in the 1530s,
in the early 17th century,
it became a royal property,
home to Elizabeth Stuart,
the daughter of King James I.
Today it's a hotel,
where I'll break my journey.
It may be my paranoia
as a former politician,
but I find that I sleep most soundly
when secure behind a moat.
There is a moat,
but I haven't found any Van Dycks.
Still, it's a good place to rest
my sporty legs.
A beautiful new day
sees me heading
into the manufacturing heartland
of Coventry.
As far back as Roman times,
its central location
made it ideally situated for trade.
And the arrival of the train helped
to fuel its commercial ambitions.
- Hello.
- Good morning.
I'm using this rather old
guidebook here, and...
- Bradshaw, yeah.
- Bradshaw. (chuckles)
It tells me that Coventry
is well known for watch making.
I didn't know that.
Is Coventry well known for watch making?
- Yes, it's known throughout the world.
- What sort of watches?
They do what they call half hunters.
You know, the big ones
that the chaps wore across here
with the Albert chain and that.
Yes, and they're very, very prized
and very expensive.
- (Michael) When does that go back to?
- In the 1800s.
- What do you know about watch making?
- They used to have top shops.
You know, they lived in the two floors,
then they'd got the top shops
with the big windows at the top.
That's where they used to do
the watches.
- Quite proud of all that, are you?
- Yeah, we are, aren't we?
All the industry
that we've had and lost.
- Aren't we?
- Yes.
At its peak in the 1850s,
Coventry's watch-making industry
employed 2,000 people.
And one of the biggest firms,
Rotherhams,
was producing 0,000 watches per year.
But by the 1860s,
the industry was in decline
because oi cheap imports
of Swiss and American watches.
So generations oi craftsmen learnt
to adapt their skills to survive.
I'm meeting Steve Bagley
from Coventry Transport Museum
at his rather special lock-up.
Steve, what an amazing sight.
An Aladdin's cave.
(Steve) Yeah, cars and bikes
made in Coventry.
(Michael) Absolutely glorious.
So how did Coventry get
from watches to bicycles?
Well, there was a slump
in the watch-making industry,
and a few entrepreneurs
opened up sewing-machine factories
because the skills of making a watch
were very similar
lo making a sewing machine.
And then, unfortunately,
there was a slump
in the sewing-machine
manufacturing industry.
Again, these entrepreneurs
decided to build some of these
French-built boneshakers;
velocipedes, as they were also known.
So, in 1868,
these were brought to Coventry
and this sewing-machine factory
began to manufacture these.
(Michael) What comes next?
What they began to do was make the
front wheel on the velocipede bigger,
so we ended up with what is
now known as the penny-farthing.
Or to call it its right name,
the ordinary.
(Michael) But it was
nicknamed penny-farthing
because we had a coin called a penny
and a much smaller coin
called a farthing.
(Steve) Exactly.
Getting on and off is an issue.
They were made
for athletic gentlemen to ride.
But the penny-fanning was lacking
one vital ingredient: a bicycle chain.
The eureka moment came in 1885
with the invention
of the Rover safety bicycle.
(Steve) And this is
the modern bicycle as we know it today.
A fella called John Kemp Slarley
in Coventry,
he owned the Rover cycle company
that became the Rover car company,
and still existed till very recently,
and he developed this bicycle
in the mid-1880s,
and it is the forerunner
of all modern bicycles.
And known as a safety bicycle.
For the good reason that
everything that came before was not.
Exactly. Exactly.
During the 1890s, Coventry
became the cycle capital of the world,
and companies like Rover were
producing thousands of these a year,
so much so that factories
grew up all over the city,
from about seven companies in the 1810s
to about 50-odd companies
by the 1890s.
It just exploded on the back
of this safety bicycle.
And yet, I think of Coventry
as being associated with motors.
That's right.
So, how was that transition made,
from bicycles to motors?
Again, same old story,
slump in the cycle industry,
so the businessmen and the entrepreneurs
who were making cycles
decided to try these newfangled
motor cars that were being developed
mainly in Germany and France
on the Continent.
The bicycle bubble burst
in the late 1890s.
Only 20 years later,
the car industry was booming.
By 1939, engineers had developed
superfast production lines
and 38,000 people were employed
in making cars.
The average price of a family car
was around £150.
This lock-up is an education to me.
I had no idea so many different
types of cars were made in Coventry.
Jaguar, Triumph, Standard, Alvis,
Hillman. It's incredible, isn't it?
It is, isn't it? And we've
actually recorded 142 car companies
that have been registered
in the city over the years,
ranging from, like you say,
the small companies like Hillman,
who made small... like the Hillman Minx,
to very large cars like this
fantastic Jaguar Mark VIII.
Top of the range.
(Michael)
What a lovely car that is, isn't it?
(Steve) It's beautiful, isn't it?
It's got a column gear change
so you could have a long
bench seal in the front.
It has nothing separating
the two seats.
Which, for safety, is not the best idea.
- Stick three people on the front bench.
- Exactly.
- And, of course, no seal belts.
- That's right.
- Are you going by the station?
- Why not?
- Give you a lift in this, if you like.
- Thank you.
By the 1960s and '70s, the glory days
of making cars in Coventry
like this Alvis were over,
and manufacturing was in decline.
Foreign imports swept the market.
But thanks once more
to the adaptability
and the tenacity
of the people of Coventry,
the re-invention continues.
Along with making London taxis,
Coventry's engineers
now make high-end parts
for Land Rover and Jaguar;
highly successful products
in the luxury car market.
- Thank you, Steve.
- See you.
Bye.
For the next part of my journey,
I'm leaving
Stephenson's London-to-Birmingham
mainline and heading east.
Tickets and passes, please.
- As far as Nuneaton.
- That's lovely. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much indeed.
I'm travelling across Warwickshire
towards Nuneaton
to visit the childhood home of a great
19th-century author, Mary Ann Evans,
who had one thing in common
with Bradshaw. By George, she did.
Mary Ann Evans or George Eliot,
as we know her,
lived in Nuneaton
for the first 21 years of he! life,
before moving lo London
to become an essayist.
Her success is the more remarkable
because women writers in the 1850s
were very rare.
And while Britain underwent
the industrial Revolution,
women's equality
was scarcely on the agenda.
I'm keen to find out from John Burton,
who's chairman
of the George Eliot Fellowship,
why Mary wanted to
keep her female identity a secret.
Why did she take a man's pen name?
Well, by the lime her first
work of fiction came out,
she was living, Victorians would have
said, in sin with George Henry Lewes.
She couldn't marry him
because he was already married.
And so, the first work of fiction,
I think they used "George Eliot"
in order to
perhaps cover the fact that the press
would have made a lot of the fact
that this was George Henry Lewes's
common-law wife
rather than concentrating
on the literary qualities of the novel.
What perception
does she bring to her work?
Why is it that she's so remembered?
I think she's so remembered
because of the wisdom
and the compassion,
actually, that she shows.
When you read her, she pulls you
up short with her pre-Freudian
but psychological insights
into human nature,
which I still find quite extraordinary.
I also feel that her humour
is wonderful.
It's not laugh-out-loud humour,
but it's wonderful, subtle,
very understanding human...
Human nature, really, I think is
at the core of what she's writing.
Eliot started writing in the 1850s.
I'd like to know what
today's generation thinks.
I'm joining readers
from a Nuneaton book club.
As a young person, do you think
George Elliot is very challenging?
Yes, definitely.
Although she's a challenging writer,
it doesn't mean it's impossible to read.
You've really got to persevere with it,
though,
because she does really go into detail.
When you can see it for what it is,
you then start to enjoy it
and appreciate what she's written.
How would you rank Middlemarch
amongst the novels that you've read?
It's up there. I actually prefer
some of her other novels.
I think Mill on the Floss
is one of her best.
When you read George Eliot, can you
tell that it's a woman who's writing?
(woman 2) Oh, I think so, yes.
When we read Silas Mamer,
the detail that she was putting in about
the emotion and describing the feelings.
(woman 3) She published anonymously
her very first work of fiction,
and people assumed,
a bit like the Brontës, really,
that it was a clergyman writing,
except Charles Dickens.
And he was the one person
who tumbled lo her identity.
And he commented on the range
oi emotional intelligence
we would say today.
Now, you've got a text open there.
What are you reading about?
It's a passage from Middlemarch
about when the railways came in.
"In the hundred to which
Middlemarch belonged,
railways were as exciting a topic
as the Reform Bill,
or the imminent horrors of Cholera,
and those who held
the most decided views on the subject
were women and landholders."
"Women both old and young
regarded travelling by steam
as presumptuous and dangerous,
and argued against it by saying
that nothing should induce them
to get into a railway carriage."
It's very good, that.
A lovely social observation.
Of course, I think it was largely true
until Queen Victoria was persuaded
by her husband to travel by train,
at which point it became
respectable for women.
So, George Eliot, George Bradshaw.
Two wonderful reflections
oi the Victorian age.
One difference is
George Bradshaw's got a train to catch.
Bye-bye.
Watchmakers in Coventry had to adapt
to manufacturing first bicycles
and then cars.
Shoemakers in Northampton
had to adapt to survive.
Thomas Arnold of Rugby School
believed in fashioning young gentlemen
with adaptable minds.
But George Eliot demonstrated
that an educated woman
could take her place
amongst the most eminent Victorians.
On the next leg of my journey,
I swap hats
and view life
from the other side of the tracks...
Rothley!
All aboard!
I discover an astronomical invention
that gave Hollywood a facelift...
- Am I on the dot?
- Yes, you are.
(cheers)
I never expected to get that right.
And my mettle is tested
at the world's largest bell foundry.
To say I'm out of my comfort zone
is to put it mildly.
There is molten metal
leaping around in the room.
transformed travel in Britain.
His name was George Bradshaw,
and his railway guides inspired
the Victorians to take to the tracks.
Stop by stop, he told them where to go,
what to see and where to stay.
And now, 170 years later,
I'm aboard for a series of rail
adventures across the United Kingdom
to see what of Bradshaw's Britain
remains.
The British Empire reached its zenith
under Queen Victoria
and mechanisation
boosted its industrial output.
But as technology spread
to other countries,
no British industry
could rest on its laurels.
As I continue my journey north
towards Leeds across the Midlands,
I shall be interested to see
how British manufacturing
adapted to prosperity and competition.
All this week, I've been travelling
away from the capital
and its metropolitan sprawl,
heading north on Stephenson
London-to-Birmingham line.
I'll explore the Victorian
manufacturing hub of the East Midlands
before ending my journey
in the Yorkshire city of Leeds.
On this leg, I'm riding the tracks
into the Midlands,
to Northampton and Rugby,
and on to the city of Coventry
before changing fines for Nuneaton.
Today, I discover a tradition
unaltered since Victorian times...
It's like most things in life;
you can learn it in two weeks,
but it takes you a lifetime
to be any good at it.
I hear about the man who
changed education around the world...
These were people
capable of running the British Empire.
Very much so, and that was
pan of Arnold's great reform.
And I see how a city
rode out the economic cycles.
This is the forerunner of all modern
bicycles, known as a safety bicycle.
For the good reason that everything
that came before was not.
Exactly. Exactly.
My first stop today is Northampton,
which Bradshaw's tells me
has an industrious population,
some thousands of whom are engaged
in boot-and-shoe manufacture,
which has been here for centuries.
Northampton,
known as the land of the shoe makers,
has been producing shoes
since the 15th century,
thanks to a plentiful supply of wood,
water and cattle.
In 1642, a group of shoemakers
won a contract to supply the army,
and by 1841, fuelled by the arrival of
the London-to-Birmingham railway line,
the shoe industry had grown
to nearly 2,000 shoemakers.
Today, although the skills
have changed little over the centuries,
there are only five firms left.
Keeping traditions alive
is Crockett & Jones, founded in 1879.
The process starts
with the leather being cut
by a skilled cutter naked a clicker.
David Mains
oversees the factory's 21 clickers.
So clicking is cutting, is it?
It is cutting, yes. And it's not
the actual cutting that's the skill.
The skill is getting the sections
at the right areas of the leather.
- (Michael) Avoiding defects?
- Avoiding defects.
Anybody can come along
and cut things out.
It's knowing where to put the pieces,
that's where the skill is.
Cutting all the parts of a shoe
from the skins is done by hand,
using a pattern and a knife.
The key thing is to create
as little waste as possible.
In Victorian times,
the patterns would have been made
from cardboard edged with brass
and the knives
clicking against their wooden blocks
gave the cutters their name.
Ooh. I moved my pattern there.
You said this was the easy bit.
It isn't.
It's nice round the curve there.
Good. Now, I've got a little bit
of a rough edge there, haven't I?
Just missed a bit.
- How many years' practice have you had?
- I've been here 20 years, now.
I'll talk to you again in 20 years.
Thank you so much, David.
Bye-bye.
The striking thing about this factory
is that the process has stayed
essentially the same for 134 years.
One oi the managers, James Fox,
is taking me onto the factory floor
to the closing room where ah the
leather parts are stitched together.
This room seems to be
entirely filled with women.
Do you practise segregation here?
We don't.
It's more of a natural occurrence.
The skills that are involved
in the closing room
tend to be more delicate operations,
there's less manual labour involved.
Still extremely highly skilled.
And I think there's about 110 people
in here, 100 of which are women,
and about nine or ten gents that
you will see dotted around the room.
(Michael)
I have seen them dotted around.
But all the time I've been in your
factory, I've had this Victorian feel;
the wooden panelling and the shape
oi the windows and that sort oi thing,
and then to come into a room
that's entirely filled with one gender
is also a very Victorian feel.
And as in Victorian times,
many oi these workers are second-
or third-generation shoemakers.
- Hello. I'm Michael.
- Pleased to meet you.
- What's your name?
- My name's Lisa.
- What is it you're doing to the shoe?
- (Lisa) I'm eyeleting the shoe.
I've only done half a shoe. It's just
putting the holes in for the laces.
Quite a skilled job.
You've got to get it in the right place
or else that's that son of ruined
and it's got to be re-cut again.
- How long have you been here?
- I've been here 23 years now.
- Did you have any family in it before?
- My mother used to work here, yeah.
And my grandfather worked
in the clicking room upstairs.
Your mother,
how many years was she here?
- All her life as well. She's 15 now.
- Thank you, Lisa.
- You're welcome.
- Lovely to see you.
- Thank you. Bye.
- Bye.
It takes hearty three hours
of continuous hand stitching
to sew the leather uppers.
James wants to show me a machine
that radically reduced
how long it took to make them
and changed the way
in which they could be repaired.
The Goodyear wetting machine was
invented in America in the late 1860s,
mechanically fastening the sole
to the shoe.
A strip of leather, the welt,
was stitched to the upper.
Then the sole could be easily attached.
Michael, this is David,
our Goodyear welter.
- Hello, David.
- Pleased to meet you.
I've been hearing that this Goodyear
welting changed shoemaking. Why is that?
Before Goodyear welting
was actually introduced,
the bottom of the shoe was flat
and then you covered it
with a full sheet of leather
which had to be either riveted
or stapled right through.
So it used a lot more leather,
a lot more time, a lot more labour.
They came up with a process of putting
a rim round the bottom of the insole,
to which we then sew a welt.
That's approximately 80 stitches.
And how long did that take them
when they were doing it by hand?
- Two hours to a pair.
- No.
Yeah.
Still does in Scandinavian countries,
where they still do them by hand.
You have added his leather strip,
that's called the welt,
and then you're going
to put the sole on there
and you're going to sew through
the welt into the sole,
and that's going
to hold the whole shoe together?
Yes.
How many years did it take you
to achieve that level of skill?
I've been welt sewing
about 40 years, I suppose.
It's like most things in life;
you can learn it in two weeks,
but it takes a lifetime
to be any good at it.
Extraordinary.
Well, I take my hat off to you.
- Thank you very much.
- Thanks very much.
A hand-sewn pair of these quality shoes
could cost from £350 to £4,000.
What makes them so special is that
they're made in the traditional way,
which has never been bettered.
To step into this factory is to be
transported back through time.
A Victorian
could have seen similar tools
working the fine-smelling leather.
My journey from Northampton lo Rugby
is on the London Midland line
and takes 20 minutes.
As I approach Rugby, Bradshaw's
draws attention to the place of learning
that put the town on the map.
"By the exertions of successive masters,
especially the late Dr Arnold,
it ranks as one of the best
grammar schools in the country."
As a grammar school boy myself,
I'm anxious to learn more
about Thomas Arnold,
a man who left his fingerprints
on British education.
The school was founded in 1567
by a local philanthropist,
Lawrence Sheriff,
who wanted to provide an education
for the boys of Rugby.
400 years later, the school
retains a far-flung reputation
as one of the country's
leading public schools.
The buildings conjure up
the spirit of Dr Arnold.
I'm meeting the school's archivist,
Rusty McLean,
to find out more about
the school's most celebrated head.
- Hello, Rusty.
- Very pleased to meet you.
Now, Dr Thomas Arnold
has gone down in history
as a great educational reformer.
What was it that he was
reforming here at Rugby?
Well, when Arnold arrived here
in 1828,
he arrived at a school which, in common
with most other schools of the day,
was an institution where boys
were regarded as empty vessels
to be filled with facts
and then flung out into the world.
And Arnold, through his subtle reforms,
remodelling existing practices,
transformed the whole idea of education.
And, of course, his influence spread
not only through the rest of England,
but throughout the world.
Rusty is taking me to the classroom
where Arnold used to leach.
What were Arnold's
principles of education?
(Rusty) Well, in one of the first
meetings he had with his sixth form,
he laid out three principles.
First, religious and moral principles.
Second, gentlemanly conduct.
And third,
intellectual academic ability.
He was far more concerned
with educating the whole person.
It wasn't just about facts.
It was about developing character.
(Michael) So he was training these
young men at this school for what?
Well, he was training them
for just about everything.
And boys went out from here
into all walks of life,
the military, the Church,
politics, the ans.
(Michael)
But a big emphasis on administration.
These were people capable
of running the British Empire.
Very much so, and that was
pan of Arnold's great reform.
I see you've got
a handsome collection here of graffiti.
(Rusty) These are desk lids;
little table tops, they were called.
And this, in a sense, is not graffiti
because the boys were actually permitted
to carve their name on the desk lid
before they left school.
Anyone that I would recognise?
Well, you may recognise
the name Chamberlain.
(Michael) Neville, our Prime Minister
- at the beginning of World War ll.
- Ii is.
An intriguing reference
in my Bradshaw's.
"The tagging or monitor system prevails
at the school," this is the mid-1860s,
"but has been somewhat mitigated
by Dr Arnold." What does that mean?
Well, fagging originally
was a mentoring system.
If you think that boys as young as six
were entering this school,
probably the first time away from home,
into a completely alien environment,
senior boys would lake them under their
wing, show them where everything was,
and in return, the boys
would provide menial tasks,
perhaps popping across the road
to get a bowl of baked potatoes
or polishing the senior boys boots.
Trouble is,
by the time Arnold had arrived,
this had effectively become
institutionalised bullying.
(Michael) He made it
a somewhat kinder place, did he?
Very much so.
It was an environment of trust.
Dr Arnold most certainly left his mark
on Victorian schooling,
while one of his pupils
left his hoot print
on the sporting field of dreams.
Ah, William Webb Ellis,
the boy who invented rugby football.
And when were the rules
of rugby football formalised?
(Rusty) The sport was first
codified officially in August 1845
by a group of three Rugby schoolboys,
one of whom was one
of Thomas Arnold's sons.
When they were codified,
they were actually produced
and printed in a little book.
(Michael) Why so small?
In those days, there were no referees.
The boys didn't need them.
And so they would take this booklet
out on the pitch with them.
As the game developed,
the rules changed to allow faster play.
It made matches more exciting
for both players and fans.
It also meant that a referee on the
pitch eventually became compulsory
in order lo settle disputes.
The game's roots
have not been forgotten.
The Rugby World Cup
is known as the Webb Ellis Trophy.
If Webb Ellis were watching now,
I'm sure he'd be chuffed
to see how his game
is being played today
pretty much as he invented it.
I have to admit that I'm not
very sporty, hut in for a penny...
Crouch. Touch.
It's only a short trip up
the London-to-Birmingham main line
to my next stop, Coventry.
After a game of rugby,
an early bath is called for,
and Bradshaw's is ever helpful.
"Coombe Abbey, belonging to
the Earl of Craven, has abbey ruins,
with a gallery of paintings
by Van Dyck." Sounds perfect.
Coombe Abbey was founded
as a monastery by the Cistercian monks
in the 12th century.
Following the dissolution
of the monasteries in the 1530s,
in the early 17th century,
it became a royal property,
home to Elizabeth Stuart,
the daughter of King James I.
Today it's a hotel,
where I'll break my journey.
It may be my paranoia
as a former politician,
but I find that I sleep most soundly
when secure behind a moat.
There is a moat,
but I haven't found any Van Dycks.
Still, it's a good place to rest
my sporty legs.
A beautiful new day
sees me heading
into the manufacturing heartland
of Coventry.
As far back as Roman times,
its central location
made it ideally situated for trade.
And the arrival of the train helped
to fuel its commercial ambitions.
- Hello.
- Good morning.
I'm using this rather old
guidebook here, and...
- Bradshaw, yeah.
- Bradshaw. (chuckles)
It tells me that Coventry
is well known for watch making.
I didn't know that.
Is Coventry well known for watch making?
- Yes, it's known throughout the world.
- What sort of watches?
They do what they call half hunters.
You know, the big ones
that the chaps wore across here
with the Albert chain and that.
Yes, and they're very, very prized
and very expensive.
- (Michael) When does that go back to?
- In the 1800s.
- What do you know about watch making?
- They used to have top shops.
You know, they lived in the two floors,
then they'd got the top shops
with the big windows at the top.
That's where they used to do
the watches.
- Quite proud of all that, are you?
- Yeah, we are, aren't we?
All the industry
that we've had and lost.
- Aren't we?
- Yes.
At its peak in the 1850s,
Coventry's watch-making industry
employed 2,000 people.
And one of the biggest firms,
Rotherhams,
was producing 0,000 watches per year.
But by the 1860s,
the industry was in decline
because oi cheap imports
of Swiss and American watches.
So generations oi craftsmen learnt
to adapt their skills to survive.
I'm meeting Steve Bagley
from Coventry Transport Museum
at his rather special lock-up.
Steve, what an amazing sight.
An Aladdin's cave.
(Steve) Yeah, cars and bikes
made in Coventry.
(Michael) Absolutely glorious.
So how did Coventry get
from watches to bicycles?
Well, there was a slump
in the watch-making industry,
and a few entrepreneurs
opened up sewing-machine factories
because the skills of making a watch
were very similar
lo making a sewing machine.
And then, unfortunately,
there was a slump
in the sewing-machine
manufacturing industry.
Again, these entrepreneurs
decided to build some of these
French-built boneshakers;
velocipedes, as they were also known.
So, in 1868,
these were brought to Coventry
and this sewing-machine factory
began to manufacture these.
(Michael) What comes next?
What they began to do was make the
front wheel on the velocipede bigger,
so we ended up with what is
now known as the penny-farthing.
Or to call it its right name,
the ordinary.
(Michael) But it was
nicknamed penny-farthing
because we had a coin called a penny
and a much smaller coin
called a farthing.
(Steve) Exactly.
Getting on and off is an issue.
They were made
for athletic gentlemen to ride.
But the penny-fanning was lacking
one vital ingredient: a bicycle chain.
The eureka moment came in 1885
with the invention
of the Rover safety bicycle.
(Steve) And this is
the modern bicycle as we know it today.
A fella called John Kemp Slarley
in Coventry,
he owned the Rover cycle company
that became the Rover car company,
and still existed till very recently,
and he developed this bicycle
in the mid-1880s,
and it is the forerunner
of all modern bicycles.
And known as a safety bicycle.
For the good reason that
everything that came before was not.
Exactly. Exactly.
During the 1890s, Coventry
became the cycle capital of the world,
and companies like Rover were
producing thousands of these a year,
so much so that factories
grew up all over the city,
from about seven companies in the 1810s
to about 50-odd companies
by the 1890s.
It just exploded on the back
of this safety bicycle.
And yet, I think of Coventry
as being associated with motors.
That's right.
So, how was that transition made,
from bicycles to motors?
Again, same old story,
slump in the cycle industry,
so the businessmen and the entrepreneurs
who were making cycles
decided to try these newfangled
motor cars that were being developed
mainly in Germany and France
on the Continent.
The bicycle bubble burst
in the late 1890s.
Only 20 years later,
the car industry was booming.
By 1939, engineers had developed
superfast production lines
and 38,000 people were employed
in making cars.
The average price of a family car
was around £150.
This lock-up is an education to me.
I had no idea so many different
types of cars were made in Coventry.
Jaguar, Triumph, Standard, Alvis,
Hillman. It's incredible, isn't it?
It is, isn't it? And we've
actually recorded 142 car companies
that have been registered
in the city over the years,
ranging from, like you say,
the small companies like Hillman,
who made small... like the Hillman Minx,
to very large cars like this
fantastic Jaguar Mark VIII.
Top of the range.
(Michael)
What a lovely car that is, isn't it?
(Steve) It's beautiful, isn't it?
It's got a column gear change
so you could have a long
bench seal in the front.
It has nothing separating
the two seats.
Which, for safety, is not the best idea.
- Stick three people on the front bench.
- Exactly.
- And, of course, no seal belts.
- That's right.
- Are you going by the station?
- Why not?
- Give you a lift in this, if you like.
- Thank you.
By the 1960s and '70s, the glory days
of making cars in Coventry
like this Alvis were over,
and manufacturing was in decline.
Foreign imports swept the market.
But thanks once more
to the adaptability
and the tenacity
of the people of Coventry,
the re-invention continues.
Along with making London taxis,
Coventry's engineers
now make high-end parts
for Land Rover and Jaguar;
highly successful products
in the luxury car market.
- Thank you, Steve.
- See you.
Bye.
For the next part of my journey,
I'm leaving
Stephenson's London-to-Birmingham
mainline and heading east.
Tickets and passes, please.
- As far as Nuneaton.
- That's lovely. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much indeed.
I'm travelling across Warwickshire
towards Nuneaton
to visit the childhood home of a great
19th-century author, Mary Ann Evans,
who had one thing in common
with Bradshaw. By George, she did.
Mary Ann Evans or George Eliot,
as we know her,
lived in Nuneaton
for the first 21 years of he! life,
before moving lo London
to become an essayist.
Her success is the more remarkable
because women writers in the 1850s
were very rare.
And while Britain underwent
the industrial Revolution,
women's equality
was scarcely on the agenda.
I'm keen to find out from John Burton,
who's chairman
of the George Eliot Fellowship,
why Mary wanted to
keep her female identity a secret.
Why did she take a man's pen name?
Well, by the lime her first
work of fiction came out,
she was living, Victorians would have
said, in sin with George Henry Lewes.
She couldn't marry him
because he was already married.
And so, the first work of fiction,
I think they used "George Eliot"
in order to
perhaps cover the fact that the press
would have made a lot of the fact
that this was George Henry Lewes's
common-law wife
rather than concentrating
on the literary qualities of the novel.
What perception
does she bring to her work?
Why is it that she's so remembered?
I think she's so remembered
because of the wisdom
and the compassion,
actually, that she shows.
When you read her, she pulls you
up short with her pre-Freudian
but psychological insights
into human nature,
which I still find quite extraordinary.
I also feel that her humour
is wonderful.
It's not laugh-out-loud humour,
but it's wonderful, subtle,
very understanding human...
Human nature, really, I think is
at the core of what she's writing.
Eliot started writing in the 1850s.
I'd like to know what
today's generation thinks.
I'm joining readers
from a Nuneaton book club.
As a young person, do you think
George Elliot is very challenging?
Yes, definitely.
Although she's a challenging writer,
it doesn't mean it's impossible to read.
You've really got to persevere with it,
though,
because she does really go into detail.
When you can see it for what it is,
you then start to enjoy it
and appreciate what she's written.
How would you rank Middlemarch
amongst the novels that you've read?
It's up there. I actually prefer
some of her other novels.
I think Mill on the Floss
is one of her best.
When you read George Eliot, can you
tell that it's a woman who's writing?
(woman 2) Oh, I think so, yes.
When we read Silas Mamer,
the detail that she was putting in about
the emotion and describing the feelings.
(woman 3) She published anonymously
her very first work of fiction,
and people assumed,
a bit like the Brontës, really,
that it was a clergyman writing,
except Charles Dickens.
And he was the one person
who tumbled lo her identity.
And he commented on the range
oi emotional intelligence
we would say today.
Now, you've got a text open there.
What are you reading about?
It's a passage from Middlemarch
about when the railways came in.
"In the hundred to which
Middlemarch belonged,
railways were as exciting a topic
as the Reform Bill,
or the imminent horrors of Cholera,
and those who held
the most decided views on the subject
were women and landholders."
"Women both old and young
regarded travelling by steam
as presumptuous and dangerous,
and argued against it by saying
that nothing should induce them
to get into a railway carriage."
It's very good, that.
A lovely social observation.
Of course, I think it was largely true
until Queen Victoria was persuaded
by her husband to travel by train,
at which point it became
respectable for women.
So, George Eliot, George Bradshaw.
Two wonderful reflections
oi the Victorian age.
One difference is
George Bradshaw's got a train to catch.
Bye-bye.
Watchmakers in Coventry had to adapt
to manufacturing first bicycles
and then cars.
Shoemakers in Northampton
had to adapt to survive.
Thomas Arnold of Rugby School
believed in fashioning young gentlemen
with adaptable minds.
But George Eliot demonstrated
that an educated woman
could take her place
amongst the most eminent Victorians.
On the next leg of my journey,
I swap hats
and view life
from the other side of the tracks...
Rothley!
All aboard!
I discover an astronomical invention
that gave Hollywood a facelift...
- Am I on the dot?
- Yes, you are.
(cheers)
I never expected to get that right.
And my mettle is tested
at the world's largest bell foundry.
To say I'm out of my comfort zone
is to put it mildly.
There is molten metal
leaping around in the room.