Great British Railway Journeys (2010–…): Season 7, Episode 11 - Birmingham to Worcester - full transcript
For Victorian Britons, George
Bradshaw was a household name.
At a time when railways were new,
Bradshaw's guidebook inspired them
to take to the tracks.
I'm using a Bradshaw's Guide
to understand how trains transformed
Britain, its landscape,
its industry, society and
leisure time.
As I crisscross the country
150 years later,
it helps me to discover the
Britain of today.
I'm embarking
on a journey that will take me
from England's Midlands
to moorlands,
beginning in a region that produced
reforms and new ideas
alongside manufactured goods.
Bradshaw will help me to understand
how the trains spread
not only the products of industry,
but arts and education too.
This week I'm starting my journey
in Britain's second-largest city,
before following the path
of the River Severn south
past great cathedrals to the ancient
spas and ports of the south-west,
ending up in one of Britain's
glorious national parks.
Today's leg starts in the mighty
metropolis of Birmingham
and continues to the carpet
town of Kidderminster,
before arriving in the Roman
city of Worcester.
On this journey
I have a blast in Brum...
[BLOWS WHISTLE]
Brilliant. That's the sound of the
railways, isn't it?
Pay homage to a magnificent organ
that inspired a great composer...
The city fathers were very
proud of this instrument
so it was a feather in their cap
that somebody like Mendelssohn
should deign to play on it.
And get a dose of quack doctors
and their bizarre remedies.
There's one here called simply
The Ills Of Humanity.
And Pink Pills For Pale People.
My journey will begin in Birmingham.
My guidebook remarks that "it's
the great centre of the metal trades,
"scarcely a street being Without
its manufactory,
"carried on in small workshops."
I'm on my Way and, as they say,
every rail journey begins with
a Whistle.
On its journey from Saxon village
to vast conurbation,
Birmingham underwent
its biggest growth spurt
during the 19th century,
when the population reached
half a million and it was granted
city status by Queen Victoria.
Its success as a manufacturing
centre was thanks in large pan
to its transport systems,
the network of canals
and Birmingham New Street station,
which opened in 1854.
As I arrive, it's being restructured
so I'm escaping the noise and dust
by heading to an area with
more sparkle.
Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter was
known traditionally
as the City of 1,000 Trades
and even today it's the
UK's largest centre
for the manufacture and
retail of jewellery.
It now has its own railway station
on the Birmingham Metro
and it's come to my ears that they
make whistles here,
which is worth a peep.
J Hudson and Company is the maker of
the world-famous Acme whistle
and has been manufacturing whistles
here in the Jewellery Quarter
since 1884.
Joseph Hudson, the founder,
was originally a farm worker
from Derbyshire who, like many others
during the Industrial Revolution,
moved to Birmingham
Where he trained as a toolmaker.
An inventor at heart, he
tinkered away in the
converted washroom of his
back-to-back terraced house
Where he came up with the idea for a
particularly powerful Whistle.
To find out more, I'm going
to meet Holly Occhipinti,
the company's development manager
and resident historian.
I imagine that whistles have
been around for ever and a day,
so how was it that Joseph Hudson made
a business of it in the 19th century?
Joseph Hudson managed to spot an
opportunity in the public sector,
Where a form of communication was
needed over long distances
and so he thought about sound
and how sound travels
and he came up with the Whistle.
Until then, whistles had been
used as toys or musical instruments
but Hudson spotted that a modernised
version could appeal
to a whole new market.
And I suppose one of the early
clients would have been the police force.
They were indeed. Here we actually
have an 1883 Metropolitan police Whistle.
This whistle is still produced in
exactly the same Way
and is used by
the police force today.
That's extraordinary.
Now What characteristics do you
need in a police Whistle?
It needs to be very easy to blow
because of picturing the Bobby
on the beat chasing after criminals.
It needs to travel over
long distances
and be heard over vehicle noise.
Well, I just walked up your stairs,
so I'm a little bit out of breath.
[BLOWS WHISTLE]
Splendid sound, isn't it?
Now, What about my favourite subject,
the railways.
Did they always know that they
needed whistles?
Joseph Hudson certainly made sure in
1860 they knew they needed Whistles.
Here we actually have an original
that would've been
handmade by Joseph Hudson
himself in his Workshop in 1860.
This is a buffalo horn
stationmaster's Whistle.
[BLOWS WHISTLE]
- Very shrill for a station.
- It certainly would startle you.
Afraid that people might fall onto
the tracks in fright,
Hudson produced a lower tone for his
railway whistle
by making the cavity larger.
The Thunderer whistle was born.
[WHISTLE]
- So that's an improvement, that one?
- This is.
This is a Thunderer from 1884,
and is now the most popular
stationmaster's whistle used today.
- We've produced around ten million.
- Ten million Whistles!
Let's give it a go.
[BLOWS WHISTLE]
Brilliant. That's the sound of the
railways, isn't it?
The manufacturing process of the
Thunderer has barely
changed in 100 years
and it remains the most used whistle
in the world,
beloved of sports referees,
partygoers and, of course,
railway officials.
So, I Want to make a whistle
and we start by stamping it.
- The name of the company there.
- Yeah.
And What do you put on the side here?
We do a Great Western Railway,
East African Railway
and we can pretty much put anyone
else's name on it.
- Maybe my name today?
- Your name, yeah?
We could do.
So What do I do?
- Pop it in there?
- Just place it in. Yeah.
- And give it a stamp?
- Yeah.
After the two halves of the whistle
have been assembled,
it's then soldered together...
Now, can you see the solder just
starting to melt on the side?
- I can see that.
- Just give it a slight shake and tilt it up.
Before being polished back
to a high shine.
- Already beginning to look very nice.
- Yep.
Ah, that's lovely.
- Colin. Hi, Michael.
- Hello.
Good to see you.
My whistle is taking shape
but it still doesn't sound right.
[BLOWS WHISTLE]
That's not going to start
a train, is it?
No, not really.
- So, we need to put something in it.
- Yep.
- A pea.
- A cork.
A cork?
Is that What's steaming
away over there?
Yes, it is, yeah.
So What you need to do is,
we take the dish,
put them in the dish because it's
really hot in there, to be honest.
Why do you heat these corks, Colin?
Just to make them soft
and it's just easier for them
to actually push
into the whistle itself.
So with any luck that is
going to go in there.
There we are. It's inside.
The 9.47 is about to go.
[BLOWS WHISTLE]
Brilliant.
Now I need to find a real train.
- Thank you, Colin.
- Thank you.
- All the best.
- Thank you, Michael.
But before I head back to
the station,
I'm following my Bradshaw's
past the 20th century brutalism
and the heavy Victorian civic
architecture
to one of Birmingham's most
remarkable buildings,
which has, at its heart,
a rare treasure.
"The Town Hall at the top of New
Street," says Bradshaw's,
"is a beautiful Grecian temple
"surrounded by rows of Corinthian
pillars 40-feet high.
"It is a splendid public hall at one
end of which
"is the most famous organ, one of the
finest in Europe."
Hoping for a glimpse of this
marvellous instrument,
I'm going inside the grand
auditorium to meet Richard Hawley,
head of artistic programming.
Richard, this fine building is called
the Town Hall,
but I think it was never intended to
be the seat of city government, was it?
No, not at all.
It was envisaged to be
the home of a music festival,
the Birmingham Triennial Festival,
that had been going since
the late 1700s,
mainly to generate funds to
build a hospital
and the spaces that the festival was
using never quite matched
the aspirations of the people
organising the festival,
and they championed for a specific
purpose-built hall to be built,
which is why we have Town Hall.
Is it successful musically?
Does it produce a fine acoustic?
It's a fantastic acoustic.
It was recognised immediately as one
of the significant halls in Europe.
With a World-class venue
at their disposal,
the organisers of the Triennial
Music Festival
set out to attract excellence.
One of the most popular
composers of the day
was the German Felix Mendelssohn,
a leading light of the Romantic
movement,
whose triumphant Wedding March
has been played
for many a happy bride and groom.
Joseph Moore, one of the leading
figures behind the Triennial Festival,
contacted Mendelssohn the instant
this building was open,
and Mendelssohn came to the festival
in 1837,
and over the course of
the next decade
he was convinced to premiere
a major work,
a commission of Elijah,
which took place here in 1846.
And was he swayed at all by
the presence of the organ, which
according to Bradshaw's,
was very, very exceptional?
He was. We are actually
fortunate for his insights.
You can see that the organ is
set back into an alcove.
That was Mendelssohn's idea.
The console juts out at
Mendelssohn's suggestion, so that
whatever organist is
performing can hear
the acoustics properly,
so Mendelssohn is very much part of
this building.
The last Triennial Festival
took place
just before the outbreak of the
First World War
but the organ is still regularly
played by Birmingham city organist,
Thomas Trotter.
Bradshaw's is quite enthusiastic
about this organ,
saying that it contains 4,000 pipes
acted upon by four sets of keys.
Now, here we seem to have
four sets of keys,
so What's the number of pipes now?
It's grown a bit since then.
It's now 6,000, so it's almost
double the size it was in the 1860s.
But the city fathers were very
proud of this instrument
so it was a feather in their cap
that somebody like Mendelssohn
should deign to play on it.
We know that the third
time that he was here was
when he came to conduct the
premiere of his oratorio, Elijah.
And how does Elijah go?
Well, it just so happens I have a
little bit of it here
so I'll give you a taste.
This is the final fugue, the sort
of culmination of the whole piece.
It's called Lord, Our Creator, How
Excellent Thy Name.
Only a year after the premiere
of Elijah,
Felix Mendelssohn
died at the age of 38.
But his great oratorio was
played at every subsequent festival,
sustaining the link between the
composer and Birmingham Town Hall.
You have set the Grecian
temple trembling
and me a-tingling.
Organ, organist and Town hall
at their finest.
Thank you very much.
It's time to bid farewell to
the city
and to make my Way to
Birmingham's Snow Hill station.
My next stop will be Kidderminster,
which the guidebook tells me
"is celebrated for its manufactures,
especially carpets,
"which have promoted the trade,
Wealth and population of the town."
I'm travelling there post-haste to
discover a native of the town
who left his stamp on the World.
Not every visitor to Kidderminster
shared Bradshaw's enthusiasm
for the place.
The famous architectural commentator
Sir Nikolaus Pevsner,
writing in the mid-20th century,
dismissed it as devoid of visual
pleasure.
But its old carpet factories
and fine churches give a strong
sense of its Victorian prosperity,
during which era Kidderminster's
most famous son
had a brilliant idea that
revolutionised the Royal Mail.
This is Sir Rowland Hill.
There had been a postage service
before him but people paid for
their letters on collection,
according to the distance that they
had travelled.
His innovation was that there should
be a flat rate
and that it should be prepaid
with a postage stamp.
The first bore the head
of Queen Victoria at the age of 21
and were known as Penny Blacks.
For the sheer simplicity of the idea,
it had all the others licked.
I'll Wait for the morning to
slice open his story.
The next day dawns bright and clear,
and with a spring in my step
I'm reporting for duty
at Kidderminster's delivery office.
- Good morning. Are you Rollo?
- I certainly am.
I'm Michael.
- How do you do?
- Pleased to meet you.
- So, it's sorting the morning's post?
- Yes.
Is there any Way I can give
you a hand with that?
- You're Welcome to if you Want to.
- All right. What do you have to do?
First of all, it's post-coded,
so obviously you've got coded areas.
- This is a DY10 frame.
- So now What do I do with the DY10s?
That one there is Cookley and rural,
that hole there.
Cookley, rural.
Again rural.
That's a rural area, Churchill.
Churchill.
- Vicar Street.
- That's Superdrug in the town centre.
How long does it take you to learn
all this stuff, Rollo?
Everybody says, that works here,
the best Way to learn the sorting
is by going out and doing
every delivery.
- Ah, yes.
- And that's how you pick it up.
Mind you, I'm born and bred
in Kidderminster, so you know.
The mail that Rollo and I are
sorting has been through a machine
that recognises postcodes
and groups the letters accordingly.
After Sir Rowland introduced uniform
penny postage in 1840,
the volume of mail doubled
every 20 years until 1920,
when a staggering six billion items
passed through the postal system.
Last night I visited the statue of
Rowland Hill.
Is he a bit of a hero
of the postmen?
Yeah - I mean, born and bred in
Kidderminster in Blackwell Street.
I know his remains, now, are in
Westminster Abbey,
which says a lot for the guy.
Can you imagine
the situation before his innovation,
that people used to go to their
local post office,
pick up the letter,
pay for it according to What distance
it had travelled.
And, apparently, sometimes people
used to put the message
on the outside of the envelope
and once they'd read the message
they'd say,
"Oh, no, I don't Want that. I'm not
going to pay for it."
Blimey.
[THEY LAUGH]
The next stage of the process
is delivery.
Rollo has invited me to join him
on his round,
provided that I'm properly attired.
Rollo, do you ever go to the railway
station to pick up mail these days?
No, that's a long time ago.
They did when I first
started on the job about, erm...
Well, I've been doing the job
32 years.
You used to have to meet the
mail bags,
pick them up in the old cloth bags
and I still think that was a quicker
system than the roads.
The first mail train started
running in 1838
with postal workers on board sorting
the letters in transit.
The railways transformed the speed
and efficiency of the Royal Mail
service,
crisscrossing the country
While the nation slept
and inspiring the great WH Auden to
write one of his most famous poems.
"This is the Night Mail crossing
the border,
"Bringing the cheque and the
postal order,
"Letters for the rich, letters for
the poor,
"The shop at the corner and the
girl next door,
"Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb,
"The gradient's against her
but she's on time."
NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER:
"Thousands are still asleep,
"dreaming of terrifying monsters."
The last mail train was
Withdrawn in 2004
but no substitute has been found for
the postman delivering to your home.
Here you go, Michael.
- The first one I've got is number four.
- That's it.
At the height of the
Victorian period,
there was a vast number of
uniformed postmen
working in the United Kingdom.
No dogs at that one so We're
all right.
In London there could be up
to 12 deliveries a day,
allowing correspondents to exchange
letters back and forth Within hours.
Morning. I'll pop it in the
letterbox for you.
- Morning, Rollo. All right?
- Yeah.
- Do I know you from somewhere?
- Yes, you do, I think.
- Where's that then?
- I was a train driver.
I picked you up at Derby one day and
brought you down to Burton on Trent.
- How nice to see you again.
- Nice to see you again.
- So have you left the railway?
- Three years ago, yeah.
What was it, the journey with me
that made you give it up?
No, no...!
[THEY LAUGH]
- Very nice to see you again.
- Nice to see you again.
Prepaid, flat-rate postage
revolutionised the United Kingdom
mail service
and the idea then spread
around the World.
A Victorian concept that remains
sacrosanct to this day.
Well, Rollo, I'll never forget
your name because it reminds me
of Sir Rowland Hill,
but I believe it is a serious crime
to hold up the Royal Mail.
I will hold you up no longer.
There are your letters.
Thanks ever so much, Michael. It's
been a pleasure.
- A great pleasure for me.
- Thank you.
Handing back my cap and bag,
it's time to return to the day job,
which means embarking on the next
stage of my journey.
I'm boarding a train that will
take me south through
the West Midlands to Worcester.
The Victorian age was a time of
great progress,
not least in the medical profession
and Bradshaw's notes that Worcester
was well provided for.
"I'm told that there are several
charitable institutions here
"amply endowed, such as Queen
Hospital for 29 women,
"St Oswald's for 28 women,
"Judge Barkley's for 12 persons,
"and the General Infirmary."
I'd like to investigate how
Victorians improved
and certified the standards
of doctors and their remedies.
Alighting at Worcester Foregate
Street,
I emerge in the heart of
the old city.
With my Bradshaw's to guide me
I take in the magnificent
brick-built Guildhall...
the 17th-century almshouses...
and, towering over everything,
the breathtaking Saxon cathedral.
But my focus is on Victorian
Worcester
and specifically matters medical.
So I'm heading to the
university campus,
which used to be the old Worcester
Infirmary,
to meet Caroline Rance, who is an
expert on quackery.
- Hello, Caroline.
- Hello.
We meet in somewhat macabre
surroundings.
Do you think in the 19th century,
patients were quite
susceptible to false remedies
and false doctors?
They were, much like they are today,
in fact.
There was a range of different quack
remedies, as they were called,
and sometimes people were What
we might now consider gullible,
but also, in a lot of occasions, it
was quite a logical choice to make
if you Wanted to go and buy a
patent remedy
from a newspaper advert or
from a chemist.
That was possibly much cheaper than
going to see a doctor
and so it was a reasonable
choice for many people.
Quacks got their name from an old
Dutch word "kwakzalver",
meaning a hawker of salve
or ointment.
In the Middle Ages "to quack" meant
to shout,
which was how many of these salesmen
advertised their wares in the
marketplace.
Although there were some that were
absolutely fraudulent,
there were others that did just about
manage to stay Within the law.
And one of those was
a company called Sequah in 1887.
This was started by somebody
called William Hartley,
who was born in 1857 in Liverpool,
but he pretended to be an American
who was bringing over the big
entertaining style
American medical shows to the UK.
He would initially just
go around with his wagon.
He would do very entertaining shows
that involved drawing people's teeth
very quickly.
At one point he claimed to be able
to draw eight teeth in a minute.
And he would get the crowd all very
excited and on his side
and he would then use that to do
a sales pitch to sell his medicines.
Hartley relied on showmanship
and evoked the Wild West to
whip up enthusiasm
for Sequah's cures.
Others trod an even more morally
dubious line.
I see there an advertisement
for "drunkenness cured",
which sounds very promising.
This sort of advert was
published in the very
early 20th century by a company
based in London.
The idea was that people Within
the family of an addict
would be able to use these powders.
They would slip it into his coffee
or into his whisky
and that was all done in secret.
He was not supposed to know
that he was being treated.
So it doesn't exactly match modern
ethical standards?
No, and in terms of informed consent
of the patient,
it certainly doesn't.
Eventually the general medical
profession asserted itself
to put down the charlatans
and their snake-oil remedies.
The leader of the campaign was
Worcester surgeon
and philanthropist Charles Hastings.
Just down the corridor is the place
Where it all started
and Where I'm meeting Andrew Dearden
of the British Medical Association.
- Andrew.
- Good morning, sir.
What is the significance of the old
boardroom of the Infirmary in Worcester?
Well, this is where, in 1832,
Sir Charles Hastings led a meeting
of about 50 doctors of his day
and established the Provincial
Medical and Surgical Association
that later became the
British Medical Association.
One of his concerns was that lots
of doctors were working independently
but individually, and What he Wanted
to do was to bring them together
to share and to expand their
medical knowledge and information.
And I expect the oratory was pretty
fine on that occasion.
"Gentleman, you will, at any rate,
admit, that the objects
"I have thus hastily introduced to
the notice of the meeting,
"are worthy of deep meditation.
"I cannot help indulging
the delightful thought
"that the Association must have a
direct tendency
"to extend the empire of knowledge
and to increase our power
over disease."
The new Association worked towards
the Medical Act of 1858,
which commenced the
end of quackery.
What that did for the very first
time
was to create a medical register.
So, when someone Went to
medical school, passed as a doctor,
they had to register themselves with
the General Medical Council,
so any member of the public could
see who was actually qualified
and could call themselves a doctor.
The other thing the British Medical
Association did
was to publish a book in 1909 called
Secret Remedies,
Where many of the lotions and
potions of the day were
examined by a Well-known
chemist
so that the public could actually see What
it was they were buying and taking.
Mother Seigel's Curative Syrup.
There's one here called simply
The Ills of Humanity.
And Pink Pills For Pale People.
They don't sound altogether
convincing, do they?
Not particularly.
I have to say the ingredients were
not particularly convincing either.
So, it all began with 50 people.
Where have you got to now?
Well, the British Medical Association
now has over 156,000 members
both here in the UK and overseas.
You couldn't fit all of them in
this room, could you?
Not any more.
The thunderous sound of the organ in
Birmingham Town Hall
reminds me that the city deserves to
be known as much for its music
as for its metal-bashing.
I thoroughly enjoyed my time
delivering letters
as a tribute to Sir Rowland Hill.
Other eminent Victorians made
improvements to the
standard of delivering health care,
giving quack doctors and quack
remedies the Whistle.
[BLOWS WHISTLE]
On the next part of my journey
I come eye-to-eye with a needle...
That one has got four punches in.
Two big ones, two small ones.
They are the eyes of the needle.
Get to grips with
some of Gloucester's finest...
That's a lovely feel, isn't it? Being
in contact with that gorgeous cheese.
Glorious Gloucester!
And raise the roof in tribute to
one of Britain's great composers.
[SINGING]
"And did those feet in ancient time"...
[END THEME]
Bradshaw was a household name.
At a time when railways were new,
Bradshaw's guidebook inspired them
to take to the tracks.
I'm using a Bradshaw's Guide
to understand how trains transformed
Britain, its landscape,
its industry, society and
leisure time.
As I crisscross the country
150 years later,
it helps me to discover the
Britain of today.
I'm embarking
on a journey that will take me
from England's Midlands
to moorlands,
beginning in a region that produced
reforms and new ideas
alongside manufactured goods.
Bradshaw will help me to understand
how the trains spread
not only the products of industry,
but arts and education too.
This week I'm starting my journey
in Britain's second-largest city,
before following the path
of the River Severn south
past great cathedrals to the ancient
spas and ports of the south-west,
ending up in one of Britain's
glorious national parks.
Today's leg starts in the mighty
metropolis of Birmingham
and continues to the carpet
town of Kidderminster,
before arriving in the Roman
city of Worcester.
On this journey
I have a blast in Brum...
[BLOWS WHISTLE]
Brilliant. That's the sound of the
railways, isn't it?
Pay homage to a magnificent organ
that inspired a great composer...
The city fathers were very
proud of this instrument
so it was a feather in their cap
that somebody like Mendelssohn
should deign to play on it.
And get a dose of quack doctors
and their bizarre remedies.
There's one here called simply
The Ills Of Humanity.
And Pink Pills For Pale People.
My journey will begin in Birmingham.
My guidebook remarks that "it's
the great centre of the metal trades,
"scarcely a street being Without
its manufactory,
"carried on in small workshops."
I'm on my Way and, as they say,
every rail journey begins with
a Whistle.
On its journey from Saxon village
to vast conurbation,
Birmingham underwent
its biggest growth spurt
during the 19th century,
when the population reached
half a million and it was granted
city status by Queen Victoria.
Its success as a manufacturing
centre was thanks in large pan
to its transport systems,
the network of canals
and Birmingham New Street station,
which opened in 1854.
As I arrive, it's being restructured
so I'm escaping the noise and dust
by heading to an area with
more sparkle.
Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter was
known traditionally
as the City of 1,000 Trades
and even today it's the
UK's largest centre
for the manufacture and
retail of jewellery.
It now has its own railway station
on the Birmingham Metro
and it's come to my ears that they
make whistles here,
which is worth a peep.
J Hudson and Company is the maker of
the world-famous Acme whistle
and has been manufacturing whistles
here in the Jewellery Quarter
since 1884.
Joseph Hudson, the founder,
was originally a farm worker
from Derbyshire who, like many others
during the Industrial Revolution,
moved to Birmingham
Where he trained as a toolmaker.
An inventor at heart, he
tinkered away in the
converted washroom of his
back-to-back terraced house
Where he came up with the idea for a
particularly powerful Whistle.
To find out more, I'm going
to meet Holly Occhipinti,
the company's development manager
and resident historian.
I imagine that whistles have
been around for ever and a day,
so how was it that Joseph Hudson made
a business of it in the 19th century?
Joseph Hudson managed to spot an
opportunity in the public sector,
Where a form of communication was
needed over long distances
and so he thought about sound
and how sound travels
and he came up with the Whistle.
Until then, whistles had been
used as toys or musical instruments
but Hudson spotted that a modernised
version could appeal
to a whole new market.
And I suppose one of the early
clients would have been the police force.
They were indeed. Here we actually
have an 1883 Metropolitan police Whistle.
This whistle is still produced in
exactly the same Way
and is used by
the police force today.
That's extraordinary.
Now What characteristics do you
need in a police Whistle?
It needs to be very easy to blow
because of picturing the Bobby
on the beat chasing after criminals.
It needs to travel over
long distances
and be heard over vehicle noise.
Well, I just walked up your stairs,
so I'm a little bit out of breath.
[BLOWS WHISTLE]
Splendid sound, isn't it?
Now, What about my favourite subject,
the railways.
Did they always know that they
needed whistles?
Joseph Hudson certainly made sure in
1860 they knew they needed Whistles.
Here we actually have an original
that would've been
handmade by Joseph Hudson
himself in his Workshop in 1860.
This is a buffalo horn
stationmaster's Whistle.
[BLOWS WHISTLE]
- Very shrill for a station.
- It certainly would startle you.
Afraid that people might fall onto
the tracks in fright,
Hudson produced a lower tone for his
railway whistle
by making the cavity larger.
The Thunderer whistle was born.
[WHISTLE]
- So that's an improvement, that one?
- This is.
This is a Thunderer from 1884,
and is now the most popular
stationmaster's whistle used today.
- We've produced around ten million.
- Ten million Whistles!
Let's give it a go.
[BLOWS WHISTLE]
Brilliant. That's the sound of the
railways, isn't it?
The manufacturing process of the
Thunderer has barely
changed in 100 years
and it remains the most used whistle
in the world,
beloved of sports referees,
partygoers and, of course,
railway officials.
So, I Want to make a whistle
and we start by stamping it.
- The name of the company there.
- Yeah.
And What do you put on the side here?
We do a Great Western Railway,
East African Railway
and we can pretty much put anyone
else's name on it.
- Maybe my name today?
- Your name, yeah?
We could do.
So What do I do?
- Pop it in there?
- Just place it in. Yeah.
- And give it a stamp?
- Yeah.
After the two halves of the whistle
have been assembled,
it's then soldered together...
Now, can you see the solder just
starting to melt on the side?
- I can see that.
- Just give it a slight shake and tilt it up.
Before being polished back
to a high shine.
- Already beginning to look very nice.
- Yep.
Ah, that's lovely.
- Colin. Hi, Michael.
- Hello.
Good to see you.
My whistle is taking shape
but it still doesn't sound right.
[BLOWS WHISTLE]
That's not going to start
a train, is it?
No, not really.
- So, we need to put something in it.
- Yep.
- A pea.
- A cork.
A cork?
Is that What's steaming
away over there?
Yes, it is, yeah.
So What you need to do is,
we take the dish,
put them in the dish because it's
really hot in there, to be honest.
Why do you heat these corks, Colin?
Just to make them soft
and it's just easier for them
to actually push
into the whistle itself.
So with any luck that is
going to go in there.
There we are. It's inside.
The 9.47 is about to go.
[BLOWS WHISTLE]
Brilliant.
Now I need to find a real train.
- Thank you, Colin.
- Thank you.
- All the best.
- Thank you, Michael.
But before I head back to
the station,
I'm following my Bradshaw's
past the 20th century brutalism
and the heavy Victorian civic
architecture
to one of Birmingham's most
remarkable buildings,
which has, at its heart,
a rare treasure.
"The Town Hall at the top of New
Street," says Bradshaw's,
"is a beautiful Grecian temple
"surrounded by rows of Corinthian
pillars 40-feet high.
"It is a splendid public hall at one
end of which
"is the most famous organ, one of the
finest in Europe."
Hoping for a glimpse of this
marvellous instrument,
I'm going inside the grand
auditorium to meet Richard Hawley,
head of artistic programming.
Richard, this fine building is called
the Town Hall,
but I think it was never intended to
be the seat of city government, was it?
No, not at all.
It was envisaged to be
the home of a music festival,
the Birmingham Triennial Festival,
that had been going since
the late 1700s,
mainly to generate funds to
build a hospital
and the spaces that the festival was
using never quite matched
the aspirations of the people
organising the festival,
and they championed for a specific
purpose-built hall to be built,
which is why we have Town Hall.
Is it successful musically?
Does it produce a fine acoustic?
It's a fantastic acoustic.
It was recognised immediately as one
of the significant halls in Europe.
With a World-class venue
at their disposal,
the organisers of the Triennial
Music Festival
set out to attract excellence.
One of the most popular
composers of the day
was the German Felix Mendelssohn,
a leading light of the Romantic
movement,
whose triumphant Wedding March
has been played
for many a happy bride and groom.
Joseph Moore, one of the leading
figures behind the Triennial Festival,
contacted Mendelssohn the instant
this building was open,
and Mendelssohn came to the festival
in 1837,
and over the course of
the next decade
he was convinced to premiere
a major work,
a commission of Elijah,
which took place here in 1846.
And was he swayed at all by
the presence of the organ, which
according to Bradshaw's,
was very, very exceptional?
He was. We are actually
fortunate for his insights.
You can see that the organ is
set back into an alcove.
That was Mendelssohn's idea.
The console juts out at
Mendelssohn's suggestion, so that
whatever organist is
performing can hear
the acoustics properly,
so Mendelssohn is very much part of
this building.
The last Triennial Festival
took place
just before the outbreak of the
First World War
but the organ is still regularly
played by Birmingham city organist,
Thomas Trotter.
Bradshaw's is quite enthusiastic
about this organ,
saying that it contains 4,000 pipes
acted upon by four sets of keys.
Now, here we seem to have
four sets of keys,
so What's the number of pipes now?
It's grown a bit since then.
It's now 6,000, so it's almost
double the size it was in the 1860s.
But the city fathers were very
proud of this instrument
so it was a feather in their cap
that somebody like Mendelssohn
should deign to play on it.
We know that the third
time that he was here was
when he came to conduct the
premiere of his oratorio, Elijah.
And how does Elijah go?
Well, it just so happens I have a
little bit of it here
so I'll give you a taste.
This is the final fugue, the sort
of culmination of the whole piece.
It's called Lord, Our Creator, How
Excellent Thy Name.
Only a year after the premiere
of Elijah,
Felix Mendelssohn
died at the age of 38.
But his great oratorio was
played at every subsequent festival,
sustaining the link between the
composer and Birmingham Town Hall.
You have set the Grecian
temple trembling
and me a-tingling.
Organ, organist and Town hall
at their finest.
Thank you very much.
It's time to bid farewell to
the city
and to make my Way to
Birmingham's Snow Hill station.
My next stop will be Kidderminster,
which the guidebook tells me
"is celebrated for its manufactures,
especially carpets,
"which have promoted the trade,
Wealth and population of the town."
I'm travelling there post-haste to
discover a native of the town
who left his stamp on the World.
Not every visitor to Kidderminster
shared Bradshaw's enthusiasm
for the place.
The famous architectural commentator
Sir Nikolaus Pevsner,
writing in the mid-20th century,
dismissed it as devoid of visual
pleasure.
But its old carpet factories
and fine churches give a strong
sense of its Victorian prosperity,
during which era Kidderminster's
most famous son
had a brilliant idea that
revolutionised the Royal Mail.
This is Sir Rowland Hill.
There had been a postage service
before him but people paid for
their letters on collection,
according to the distance that they
had travelled.
His innovation was that there should
be a flat rate
and that it should be prepaid
with a postage stamp.
The first bore the head
of Queen Victoria at the age of 21
and were known as Penny Blacks.
For the sheer simplicity of the idea,
it had all the others licked.
I'll Wait for the morning to
slice open his story.
The next day dawns bright and clear,
and with a spring in my step
I'm reporting for duty
at Kidderminster's delivery office.
- Good morning. Are you Rollo?
- I certainly am.
I'm Michael.
- How do you do?
- Pleased to meet you.
- So, it's sorting the morning's post?
- Yes.
Is there any Way I can give
you a hand with that?
- You're Welcome to if you Want to.
- All right. What do you have to do?
First of all, it's post-coded,
so obviously you've got coded areas.
- This is a DY10 frame.
- So now What do I do with the DY10s?
That one there is Cookley and rural,
that hole there.
Cookley, rural.
Again rural.
That's a rural area, Churchill.
Churchill.
- Vicar Street.
- That's Superdrug in the town centre.
How long does it take you to learn
all this stuff, Rollo?
Everybody says, that works here,
the best Way to learn the sorting
is by going out and doing
every delivery.
- Ah, yes.
- And that's how you pick it up.
Mind you, I'm born and bred
in Kidderminster, so you know.
The mail that Rollo and I are
sorting has been through a machine
that recognises postcodes
and groups the letters accordingly.
After Sir Rowland introduced uniform
penny postage in 1840,
the volume of mail doubled
every 20 years until 1920,
when a staggering six billion items
passed through the postal system.
Last night I visited the statue of
Rowland Hill.
Is he a bit of a hero
of the postmen?
Yeah - I mean, born and bred in
Kidderminster in Blackwell Street.
I know his remains, now, are in
Westminster Abbey,
which says a lot for the guy.
Can you imagine
the situation before his innovation,
that people used to go to their
local post office,
pick up the letter,
pay for it according to What distance
it had travelled.
And, apparently, sometimes people
used to put the message
on the outside of the envelope
and once they'd read the message
they'd say,
"Oh, no, I don't Want that. I'm not
going to pay for it."
Blimey.
[THEY LAUGH]
The next stage of the process
is delivery.
Rollo has invited me to join him
on his round,
provided that I'm properly attired.
Rollo, do you ever go to the railway
station to pick up mail these days?
No, that's a long time ago.
They did when I first
started on the job about, erm...
Well, I've been doing the job
32 years.
You used to have to meet the
mail bags,
pick them up in the old cloth bags
and I still think that was a quicker
system than the roads.
The first mail train started
running in 1838
with postal workers on board sorting
the letters in transit.
The railways transformed the speed
and efficiency of the Royal Mail
service,
crisscrossing the country
While the nation slept
and inspiring the great WH Auden to
write one of his most famous poems.
"This is the Night Mail crossing
the border,
"Bringing the cheque and the
postal order,
"Letters for the rich, letters for
the poor,
"The shop at the corner and the
girl next door,
"Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb,
"The gradient's against her
but she's on time."
NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER:
"Thousands are still asleep,
"dreaming of terrifying monsters."
The last mail train was
Withdrawn in 2004
but no substitute has been found for
the postman delivering to your home.
Here you go, Michael.
- The first one I've got is number four.
- That's it.
At the height of the
Victorian period,
there was a vast number of
uniformed postmen
working in the United Kingdom.
No dogs at that one so We're
all right.
In London there could be up
to 12 deliveries a day,
allowing correspondents to exchange
letters back and forth Within hours.
Morning. I'll pop it in the
letterbox for you.
- Morning, Rollo. All right?
- Yeah.
- Do I know you from somewhere?
- Yes, you do, I think.
- Where's that then?
- I was a train driver.
I picked you up at Derby one day and
brought you down to Burton on Trent.
- How nice to see you again.
- Nice to see you again.
- So have you left the railway?
- Three years ago, yeah.
What was it, the journey with me
that made you give it up?
No, no...!
[THEY LAUGH]
- Very nice to see you again.
- Nice to see you again.
Prepaid, flat-rate postage
revolutionised the United Kingdom
mail service
and the idea then spread
around the World.
A Victorian concept that remains
sacrosanct to this day.
Well, Rollo, I'll never forget
your name because it reminds me
of Sir Rowland Hill,
but I believe it is a serious crime
to hold up the Royal Mail.
I will hold you up no longer.
There are your letters.
Thanks ever so much, Michael. It's
been a pleasure.
- A great pleasure for me.
- Thank you.
Handing back my cap and bag,
it's time to return to the day job,
which means embarking on the next
stage of my journey.
I'm boarding a train that will
take me south through
the West Midlands to Worcester.
The Victorian age was a time of
great progress,
not least in the medical profession
and Bradshaw's notes that Worcester
was well provided for.
"I'm told that there are several
charitable institutions here
"amply endowed, such as Queen
Hospital for 29 women,
"St Oswald's for 28 women,
"Judge Barkley's for 12 persons,
"and the General Infirmary."
I'd like to investigate how
Victorians improved
and certified the standards
of doctors and their remedies.
Alighting at Worcester Foregate
Street,
I emerge in the heart of
the old city.
With my Bradshaw's to guide me
I take in the magnificent
brick-built Guildhall...
the 17th-century almshouses...
and, towering over everything,
the breathtaking Saxon cathedral.
But my focus is on Victorian
Worcester
and specifically matters medical.
So I'm heading to the
university campus,
which used to be the old Worcester
Infirmary,
to meet Caroline Rance, who is an
expert on quackery.
- Hello, Caroline.
- Hello.
We meet in somewhat macabre
surroundings.
Do you think in the 19th century,
patients were quite
susceptible to false remedies
and false doctors?
They were, much like they are today,
in fact.
There was a range of different quack
remedies, as they were called,
and sometimes people were What
we might now consider gullible,
but also, in a lot of occasions, it
was quite a logical choice to make
if you Wanted to go and buy a
patent remedy
from a newspaper advert or
from a chemist.
That was possibly much cheaper than
going to see a doctor
and so it was a reasonable
choice for many people.
Quacks got their name from an old
Dutch word "kwakzalver",
meaning a hawker of salve
or ointment.
In the Middle Ages "to quack" meant
to shout,
which was how many of these salesmen
advertised their wares in the
marketplace.
Although there were some that were
absolutely fraudulent,
there were others that did just about
manage to stay Within the law.
And one of those was
a company called Sequah in 1887.
This was started by somebody
called William Hartley,
who was born in 1857 in Liverpool,
but he pretended to be an American
who was bringing over the big
entertaining style
American medical shows to the UK.
He would initially just
go around with his wagon.
He would do very entertaining shows
that involved drawing people's teeth
very quickly.
At one point he claimed to be able
to draw eight teeth in a minute.
And he would get the crowd all very
excited and on his side
and he would then use that to do
a sales pitch to sell his medicines.
Hartley relied on showmanship
and evoked the Wild West to
whip up enthusiasm
for Sequah's cures.
Others trod an even more morally
dubious line.
I see there an advertisement
for "drunkenness cured",
which sounds very promising.
This sort of advert was
published in the very
early 20th century by a company
based in London.
The idea was that people Within
the family of an addict
would be able to use these powders.
They would slip it into his coffee
or into his whisky
and that was all done in secret.
He was not supposed to know
that he was being treated.
So it doesn't exactly match modern
ethical standards?
No, and in terms of informed consent
of the patient,
it certainly doesn't.
Eventually the general medical
profession asserted itself
to put down the charlatans
and their snake-oil remedies.
The leader of the campaign was
Worcester surgeon
and philanthropist Charles Hastings.
Just down the corridor is the place
Where it all started
and Where I'm meeting Andrew Dearden
of the British Medical Association.
- Andrew.
- Good morning, sir.
What is the significance of the old
boardroom of the Infirmary in Worcester?
Well, this is where, in 1832,
Sir Charles Hastings led a meeting
of about 50 doctors of his day
and established the Provincial
Medical and Surgical Association
that later became the
British Medical Association.
One of his concerns was that lots
of doctors were working independently
but individually, and What he Wanted
to do was to bring them together
to share and to expand their
medical knowledge and information.
And I expect the oratory was pretty
fine on that occasion.
"Gentleman, you will, at any rate,
admit, that the objects
"I have thus hastily introduced to
the notice of the meeting,
"are worthy of deep meditation.
"I cannot help indulging
the delightful thought
"that the Association must have a
direct tendency
"to extend the empire of knowledge
and to increase our power
over disease."
The new Association worked towards
the Medical Act of 1858,
which commenced the
end of quackery.
What that did for the very first
time
was to create a medical register.
So, when someone Went to
medical school, passed as a doctor,
they had to register themselves with
the General Medical Council,
so any member of the public could
see who was actually qualified
and could call themselves a doctor.
The other thing the British Medical
Association did
was to publish a book in 1909 called
Secret Remedies,
Where many of the lotions and
potions of the day were
examined by a Well-known
chemist
so that the public could actually see What
it was they were buying and taking.
Mother Seigel's Curative Syrup.
There's one here called simply
The Ills of Humanity.
And Pink Pills For Pale People.
They don't sound altogether
convincing, do they?
Not particularly.
I have to say the ingredients were
not particularly convincing either.
So, it all began with 50 people.
Where have you got to now?
Well, the British Medical Association
now has over 156,000 members
both here in the UK and overseas.
You couldn't fit all of them in
this room, could you?
Not any more.
The thunderous sound of the organ in
Birmingham Town Hall
reminds me that the city deserves to
be known as much for its music
as for its metal-bashing.
I thoroughly enjoyed my time
delivering letters
as a tribute to Sir Rowland Hill.
Other eminent Victorians made
improvements to the
standard of delivering health care,
giving quack doctors and quack
remedies the Whistle.
[BLOWS WHISTLE]
On the next part of my journey
I come eye-to-eye with a needle...
That one has got four punches in.
Two big ones, two small ones.
They are the eyes of the needle.
Get to grips with
some of Gloucester's finest...
That's a lovely feel, isn't it? Being
in contact with that gorgeous cheese.
Glorious Gloucester!
And raise the roof in tribute to
one of Britain's great composers.
[SINGING]
"And did those feet in ancient time"...
[END THEME]