Great British Railway Journeys (2010–…): Season 7, Episode 8 - Littlehampton to Beaulieu - 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 arias-cross
the country 150 years later,
it helps me to discover
the Britain of today.
I'm continuing my journey
along Britain's south coast,
Where defence is a recurring theme.
From the threat of invasion
by the French,
to the incursion of new disease,
Victorians along these shores fought
to maintain the upper hand.
With my Bradshaw's guide in hand,
I'm travelling the length
of this coast.
I started in Dover,
and travelled through important
coastal defences.
My journey continues
along seaside resorts
and through Thomas Hardy country
before ending at the foot
of the British Isles.
Today, I start in Littlehampton,
move on to Portsmouth Harbour
for an explosive excursion,
continue through Romsey...
to finish at Brockenhurst
in the New Forest.
On this leg of my journey,
I find out
how shells Went ballistic...
You're kidding! inflexible, which is
only 15 years after Warrior,
is firing this sort of ammunition.
Trace the inspiration
of a most-revered Victorian...
It's underneath this very tree that
Florence felt very strongly
that she was called by God to
serve her fellow man.
And abandon the tracks to check out
the railways' greatest competitor.
Tally-ho!
[ENGINE SPUTTERS]
Oh...
My next stop will be Littlehampton,
a small hamlet on the coast
which has some
admirers as a Watering place.
At the time of my Bradshaw's guide,
an increasing number of people
understood that
water carried cholera after
a series of epidemics
had killed tens of thousands of
people in Britain,
and at Littlehampton,
they realised that,
in order to obtain clean supplies,
you might need to plumb the depths.
The railways came to
Littlehampton in 1863,
and like the neighbouring
towns along the south coast,
its fresh sea air drew
Victorian tourists.
But even a salubrious resort
couldn't escape
the terrifying scourge of cholera.
Originating in India,
the disease swept across the Empire,
arriving on UK shores in 1831.
It caused panic,
but there was no practical proposal
to stem its spread.
An engineer in Littlehampton
offered a Way forward.
I'm meeting Martin Fitch-Roy,
managing director of the Dando
Drilling company, to find out more.
Martin, in 1866, there's yet another
outbreak of cholera in Britain.
Does it affect Littlehampton?
Yes, unfortunately, there were
18 deaths in Littlehampton.
But the trigger for the beginning
of our company
was the death of a lady called
Mrs Hogben.
The local physician realised
that the reason for the cholera
was the contamination of the well.
They had hand-dug wells
in those days,
which were very easy to contaminate,
because they also used pit latrines
in the same areas.
So, Mr Albion Ockenden,
an engineer, found a Way of drilling
through the bottom of the well
to access clean Water further down.
How much further
would he have had to go?
He probably Went another ten metres.
But that was sufficient, then,
to get down below the danger level?
Into another geological strata.
Using this simple principle, Ockenden
and his partner, Reginald Duke,
sank wells to reach a clean Water
supply for the whole of Littlehampton,
the neighbouring town of Wick,
and then Worthing,
halting the spread of the disease
and saving many lives.
Their method is known
as tube well drilling.
They used tubes from the boiler of
an old steam tug, which would have
been slightly smaller, but this is
a modern tube, we now call a casing.
You sink this down and this
is Where the Water passes up again?
The Water would come up
through the centre.
This would protect the geology
and the Water from any
contamination on the outside.
So, the first tube well was sunk
through the bottom of
a hand-dug well,
but now they would
start from the surface
and they would use a method
we call cable percussion drilling.
This is a cable percussion rig.
So, percussion means you just
keep banging?
There's no rotary component,
it's just,
there's a series of special tools
that goes down inside, because
you have to displace the geology
for the tube to move downwards.
So, the tools break and retrieve
the geology from the centre
and then drive the tube downwards.
The drills were used to access clean
Water across the British Empire.
After the outbreak in the 1860s,
cholera never again reached epidemic
proportions in the United Kingdom.
But it is still a significant
killer around the globe.
This water-well drill is destined
for villages in Africa.
So, really, identically to
What happened in Littlehampton
in 1866 is What you are replicating
in those villages?
Absolutely identically, yes.
The diseases that cause
most problems are cholera
and typhoid, still, in Africa.
I'm giving it a final test
before it's shipped out.
It's remarkable to think that what
the Victorian well drillers struck oh
here in Littlehampton is still saving
thousands of lives across the World.
From Littlehampton, I'm taking
the train to Portsmouth,
which on this journey means
a change at Barnham.
The next leg takes me
across the county border
from Sussex into Hampshire.
When I last visited
Portsmouth, I attended the
commissioning of HMS Dragon,
and indeed,
my guidebook says the town's
chief attraction
"consists in the fortifications,
the dockyard and the meh-o-war" -
an old-fashioned
expression for warships.
In the middle of the 19th century,
something that Worried everyone,
including the Bradshaw-wielding
tourist, was the French Peril.
I alight from the train at the
station of Portsmouth harbour.
Protected by the Isle of Wight,
Portsmouth has been
an important naval port
since the 12th century.
It's still the main dockyard for
the Royal Navy,
being home to two thirds
of its service fleet.
As an island city, Portsmouth
became densely populated
and in the 18th century,
locals campaigned for the Navy's
stores of gunpowder to be
moved across the water.
I'm on the ferry to Gosport.
According to Bradshaw's, "It rarely
takes more than eight minutes
"and the toll is one penny."
Some chance!
Today, as in Bradshaw's day,
visitors can marvel at the men-o-war,
including Nelson's flagship,
HMS Victory,
and the formidable HMS Warrior.
Imagine the impact that HMS Warrior
had when she first appeared in 1860.
Britain's first ironclad Warship,
built in response to France's
first ironclad warship -
but this one was much bigger.
And so, the two countries began
to leapfrog each other
in a Victorian arms race.
Warrior was the largest
warship in the world,
60% bigger than France's La Gloire.
It incorporated important advances in
armour and ammunition.
I'm heading to the historic
munitions store to meet
Andrew Baines of the National Museum
of the Royal Navy.
So, we have here a piece of
armour plate from World War ll,
which actually rather neatly
illustrates a point about the way
armour plating develops in
the Victorian period.
When Warrior's commissioned in 1861,
she has four and a half inches of
Wrought-iron armour plate
and 18 inches of teak
at the back of it.
No gun can get through it,
and that's the challenge, then,
someone's got to go and build a gun,
which happens, so then, somebody has
to come along with thicker
armour plating,
and that's the race we get,
back and forth.
15 years after Warrior,
in Portsmouth harbour, the Navy
launches the appropriately
named HMS inflexible.
Her armour plating is 41 inches
thick, about 1,100lb weight
for every square foot of armour
on the ship's side.
And so, the challenge to
the gunmakers is,
how do you penetrate it?
- It certainly is,
and that's something else
we can go and look at.
A most impressive display of
firepower over the ages.
Where shall we start?
Well, probably the best place
to start is with one of these.
A cannonball, solid shot.
This is What the Royal Navy has been
using for a couple of hundred years,
come the mid-Victorian period.
It smashes through an enemy's
wooden hull, creates splinters,
and those splinters kill
and maim the crew.
Once armour plate is introduced,
however, a small cannonball like that
isn't going to do very much, it's
going to bounce off the side.
So whatever you throw at the
opponent, you have to make heavier.
You can make a bigger sphere,
but that eventually pushes you
to the edge of gun founding.
Or, you can elongate the shape,
and that's What's happened here.
And this is actually the type
of projectile that inflexible
would have been firing.
- You're kidding.
Inflexible, which is only
15 years after Warrior...
Yeah.
- Is firing this sort of ammunition?
Yeah. Warrior's maximum
size of projectile is
about 100lb Weight, it's
seven inches wide.
This is 16 inches wide,
weighs in at 1,700lb.
And that change has been made
possible because no longer do we
have smoothbore guns,
but We've gone over to rifling.
Rifling was an important innovation.
Grooves in the barrel of a gun
made the projectile spin,
greatly improving aerodynamic
stability and accuracy.
In the 1860s, Warrior's guns had
a range of around 2,000 yards.
Just 15 years later,
guns could fire 8,000 yards.
That firepower provoked the next
development in the arms race,
the torpedo.
The torpedo, mid 1860s, the
Royal Navy adopts it from the 1870s,
it's cheap as chips to produce,
you can build small ships,
35 tonnes weight as opposed
to the 11,000 tonnes for inflexible,
and they can go in
and with a single-shot weapon
sink a battleship.
Now, if I've got your drift right,
you've got to develop a technology
to kill the torpedo?
Now you've got to develop
a technology to kill the torpedo,
and that's Where the 3lb
quick-firing Hotchkiss gun comes in.
Do you have one of those?
- We do indeed, just this Way.
Small, light and rapidly loaded,
the Hotchkiss gun was used
to defend warships against the
fast-moving torpedo attack boats.
Here's one that still fires.
OK, so, if you'd like to pop
the gloves and the ear defenders on.
And What we have here is a blank,
the projectile would have
sat in the top there.
If you'd like to take that, we can
come over to the Hotchkiss.
I am ready to defend my country!
Take that for defying
Her Majesty, Queen Victoria!
After France was crushed by
Prussia in 1870,
the United Kingdom became less
nervous about her closest neighbour.
But war technology had moved forward
dramatically and Britain would
then engage in a new arms race,
this time with Germany.
It's the start of a new day
and I'm picking up my journey
in Fareham to continue westwards.
Although in Bradshaw's day the French
were our traditional enemy,
for three years in the 1850s,
Britain and France
were allies against Russia in a
gruesome conflict far from home.
Over the years, I have been struck that
Bradshaw gives me
a very accurate impression
of the United Kingdom
in the mid-19th century,
with one exception -
it doesn't reflect the horror that the
country had felt over the
recent Crimean War,
one of the very few conflicts in
which Victorian Britain was involved.
In order to put that right,
a little bird tells me
that I should visit Romsey.
In 1847, the railway reached Romsey -
a beautiful market town
outside the New Forest.
Bradshaw's remarks that, "Like many
other places of great antiquity,
"Romsey owes its foundation to a
monastic establishment -
"a Benedictine abbey on a very
extensive scale."
So I'll look at that.
The Crimean War was characterised
by courage and carnage.
It shook public confidence
in the British establishment.
It led to army reforms,
the creation of the Victoria Cross
and big changes to military
medical services.
Those dark times were brightened
by the story of Florence Nightingale.
Here in Romsey is her family
home of Embley Park.
I'm meeting Natasha McEnroe,
the director of the
Florence Nightingale Museum.
Natasha, What sort of people
were the Nightingales?
They were rich.
They came from the industrialised
money of the Midlands.
So when they took over Embley, it was
quite a modest Georgian house.
It only had five bedrooms, and
so they drastically remodelled it.
What did the family consist of
when they came here?
Nightingale's parents had the
two daughters...
Parthenope, who was
Florence's older sister,
and then Florence,
who was just a year younger.
What sort of education did the
young Florence have?
It's quite an unusual
one for the time.
Florence's father believed that
Women should be educated
as well as men, so he ensured that
the girls were taught the sciences,
the classics, and Florence's own
passion - mathematics.
Embley Park was
a place for entertaining.
The fiercely intelligent Florence
encountered guests,
who were eminent scientists
or literary figures,
such as Charles Darwin
and Elizabeth Gaskell.
In the grounds of Embley Park,
the course of Florence's
life was set.
So this is a
hugely significant place
in the story
of Florence Nightingale,
because it's underneath
this very tree
that Florence felt very strongly
that she was called by God
to serve her fellow man
through nursing.
So how did she actually
become a nurse?
Well, it was something that was
very, very difficult.
Nursing was not a profession at
this time. It was
very much looked down on.
So she managed to pick up
various bits of experience
While travelling around Europe,
and then finally, in her late 20s,
became a superintendent of a
small charitable hospital.
So how was it that she
Went off to Crimea?
She was approached by
Sidney Herbert,
the Secretary at War,
and asked if she would lead
a group of 38 nurses
to go out to protect and to care
for the soldiers in the
appalling conditions
that they found themselves in.
The sanitation was non-existent,
so latrines were backed-up
and coming into the rooms.
The soldiers had no beds,
they were wearing their bloodstained
shirts from the battlefield.
So this was a huge challenge
for Florence and her nurses.
Nightingale referred to the facility
as the Kingdom of Hell.
The majority of the 25,000 British
deaths during the Crimean War
were caused by infection and disease
rather than battle wounds.
As a result of her
passion for statistics,
she recorded valuable
and persuasive data
and wrote countless reports in
support of her demands for change.
Florence became a
megastar very quickly.
Her name was all over
the British press,
and she Wanted use that fame
to ensure that the terrible
experiences of the
Crimean War shouldn't
be repeated,
and that public health should
be reformed and improved
as a result of her experience.
She basically campaigned
and lobbied
for health reform
for the rest of her life.
Amongst her many achievements,
she transformed nursing into a
respectable profession for women,
establishing in 1860 the first
professional training school
for nurses at St Thomas'
Hospital in London.
It might seem corny to place a candle
at the grave of Florence Nightingale,
the lady with a lamp, but during a
grim period in Victorian Britain,
her courageous deeds shone through
the darkness like a light.
From Romsey, the next leg
of my journey
takes me south to the New Forest,
which is served by
the station of Brockenhurst.
Tickets, please.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I'm changing at Southampton to
continue my journey
through Forest landscape to
Dorchester.
The straight lines of the railway
enabled trains to travel fast
and to avoid the slow
meanders of roads and canals.
At the time of my guidebook and
indeed throughout the 19th century,
travel by rail was superior
to travel by road
because tracks provided
stability and speed,
but improvements to roads
and to engine technology
tipped the balance in the other
direction during the 20th century.
Where better to find
out about those changes
than at the house
of the Montagus, Beaulieu?
Built on the site of
an old Cistercian abbey,
Beaulieu is the home of
the Montagu family
and, since 1972,
the National Motor Museum.
[CAR HORN HONKS]
Beaulieu's motoring heritage
originates from the
late 19th century,
with the second Lord Montagu,
who was an avid campaigner
for the motorist.
I'm meeting his grandson,
the current Lord Montagu.
So What was it that your grandfather
was able to do to make
the motor car more acceptable
in the United Kingdom?
He introduced motoring to royalty.
He took the Prince of Wales,
later Edward VII,
for his first drive in a car.
That then made motoring much
more acceptable to people.
He also took his car, as an MP,
to the House of Commons.
He Wanted to drive into the yard,
but was stopped by the policeman,
so he appealed to the Speaker
who said, "Yes, you can come in."
And so he was the first person
to bring a petrol car
into the yard at the
House of Commons, which
I'm sure at the time
was quite an excitement.
The Museum charts the history
of the automobile over the ages.
Volunteer John Richardson is going to
show me the early motoring machines,
which, like the railway locomotives
of the time, ran on steam.
Hello, John.
- Hello.
I think most people know how
locomotives developed
on the railways
during the 19th century,
but not much idea of What was
going on on the roads,
but I suppose that this
is part of the answer.
Well, this, yes.
This is the 1875 Grenville,
which really is the sort of
end of the steam development
of road-going vehicles.
How did it actually operate?
Well, you have the poor old
stoker at the back, here, who's
going to put coal into the
boiler here to make the steam,
which is going to work
the engine down here.
Additionally, you have two
men at the front.
One is the steersman, he's going to
point it in the right direction.
The other one is the driver.
So, you have a crew of three
for, what,
a maximum of three passengers,
by the look of it'?
You can get one passenger in the
front and three at the back here,
so it's not a very
large load-bearing vehicle.
The condition of the roads
is quite an issue, isn't it?
People who own roads are not
very favourably disposed
towards these large, heavy vehicles.
Oh, no. The roads were in a pretty
shocking state at the time.
Though they had the turnpike trusts,
who were empowered to raise tolls
and look after the roads,
there was a great resistance
to these steam vehicles,
so they introduced the
Red Flag Act,
which required a gentleman to Walk
60 yards in front with a red flag.
So how do we date the origins
of the internal combustion engine?
Well, we have to come to the
very early 1860s,
when Etienne Lenoir developed
his gas-powered engine,
and followed by Nikolaus Otto
with the four-stroke
cycle engine, as well.
And neither one of those British.
I'm afraid not.
No, they were German.
In Britain, as a result
of intense opposition
to anything other
than horse-drawn road transport,
Parliament imposed a
speed limit of 4mph.
While Britain had led the way
with the railways,
it fell far behind in early
automobile development.
France and Germany were
the pioneers of the motor car.
By the end of the 19th century,
are motor cars in Britain becoming
quite popular?
They're becoming very popular indeed,
and there's a groundswell of opinion
that wants to get cars onto the
road.
The removal of the
Red Flag Act in 1896
and the Emancipation Run,
when the cars were allowed to
drive on the roads
and they drove from London
to Brighton.
Then the public could see the cars,
and it even gained further popularity.
I am intrigued to try out
one of these early models,
perhaps to be enthralled
and terrified as Victorians were.
Engineer Ian Stanfield will
be my instructor.
Ian, hello.
- Hello, Michael.
What a splendid vehicle.
What is it?
It is an 1886 Benz replica.
Basically the first motor car.
- Really?
Are we able to take a spin in it?
- Yeah, for sure, yeah.
How do you get it going?
Well, I'll have to fiddle
around the back here, and
spin the flywheel
to get it going.
So if you Want to sit
up in the driving position...
OK. I'll do that.
I'll show you
Where the controls are.
So it's very simple.
This is your steering.
That's right, and that's left.
- That's clear enough.
This lever here, if you pull it all
the Way back on,
that is your brake.
And as you ease it forward,
that puts it into gear,
so you basically creep forward.
Let's see if I can get it to go.
[ENGINE CHUGS]
So, brake off...
push the lever forward,
ease it into gear, and off we go.
Tally-ho!
- Off we go.
We'll turn round
to the right here.
[CHUGGING CONTINUES]
I make this prediction:
the motor car will never catch oh
or be a threat to the railways.
The car Went on to challenge
the railway's pre-eminence.
And it is one of the many innovations
first seen in Victorian times
that dominate our world today.
Britain was rarely troubled by war
during the Victorian period,
partly because we were
so well-prepared,
matching every French improvement
in military technology
and then trumping it.
It's an irony that when war did break
out in the Crimea in the 1850s,
France was our ally.
We then rediscovered the
horrors of warfare,
and our national compassion was
personified by Florence Nightingale -
the most admired of all Victorians.
Next time, I investigate the ins and
outs of carpets...
This is how you Weave.
Discover the little-known
railway verse of Thomas Hardy...
"And the Wheels moved on.
"O could it but be
That I had alighted there!"
He missed his chance.
- He did indeed.
And brush up on a
forgotten artist...
You're doing a grand job, Michael.
I think Danby would be proud of you.
[MICHAEL LAUGHS]
You old flatterer!
[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 arias-cross
the country 150 years later,
it helps me to discover
the Britain of today.
I'm continuing my journey
along Britain's south coast,
Where defence is a recurring theme.
From the threat of invasion
by the French,
to the incursion of new disease,
Victorians along these shores fought
to maintain the upper hand.
With my Bradshaw's guide in hand,
I'm travelling the length
of this coast.
I started in Dover,
and travelled through important
coastal defences.
My journey continues
along seaside resorts
and through Thomas Hardy country
before ending at the foot
of the British Isles.
Today, I start in Littlehampton,
move on to Portsmouth Harbour
for an explosive excursion,
continue through Romsey...
to finish at Brockenhurst
in the New Forest.
On this leg of my journey,
I find out
how shells Went ballistic...
You're kidding! inflexible, which is
only 15 years after Warrior,
is firing this sort of ammunition.
Trace the inspiration
of a most-revered Victorian...
It's underneath this very tree that
Florence felt very strongly
that she was called by God to
serve her fellow man.
And abandon the tracks to check out
the railways' greatest competitor.
Tally-ho!
[ENGINE SPUTTERS]
Oh...
My next stop will be Littlehampton,
a small hamlet on the coast
which has some
admirers as a Watering place.
At the time of my Bradshaw's guide,
an increasing number of people
understood that
water carried cholera after
a series of epidemics
had killed tens of thousands of
people in Britain,
and at Littlehampton,
they realised that,
in order to obtain clean supplies,
you might need to plumb the depths.
The railways came to
Littlehampton in 1863,
and like the neighbouring
towns along the south coast,
its fresh sea air drew
Victorian tourists.
But even a salubrious resort
couldn't escape
the terrifying scourge of cholera.
Originating in India,
the disease swept across the Empire,
arriving on UK shores in 1831.
It caused panic,
but there was no practical proposal
to stem its spread.
An engineer in Littlehampton
offered a Way forward.
I'm meeting Martin Fitch-Roy,
managing director of the Dando
Drilling company, to find out more.
Martin, in 1866, there's yet another
outbreak of cholera in Britain.
Does it affect Littlehampton?
Yes, unfortunately, there were
18 deaths in Littlehampton.
But the trigger for the beginning
of our company
was the death of a lady called
Mrs Hogben.
The local physician realised
that the reason for the cholera
was the contamination of the well.
They had hand-dug wells
in those days,
which were very easy to contaminate,
because they also used pit latrines
in the same areas.
So, Mr Albion Ockenden,
an engineer, found a Way of drilling
through the bottom of the well
to access clean Water further down.
How much further
would he have had to go?
He probably Went another ten metres.
But that was sufficient, then,
to get down below the danger level?
Into another geological strata.
Using this simple principle, Ockenden
and his partner, Reginald Duke,
sank wells to reach a clean Water
supply for the whole of Littlehampton,
the neighbouring town of Wick,
and then Worthing,
halting the spread of the disease
and saving many lives.
Their method is known
as tube well drilling.
They used tubes from the boiler of
an old steam tug, which would have
been slightly smaller, but this is
a modern tube, we now call a casing.
You sink this down and this
is Where the Water passes up again?
The Water would come up
through the centre.
This would protect the geology
and the Water from any
contamination on the outside.
So, the first tube well was sunk
through the bottom of
a hand-dug well,
but now they would
start from the surface
and they would use a method
we call cable percussion drilling.
This is a cable percussion rig.
So, percussion means you just
keep banging?
There's no rotary component,
it's just,
there's a series of special tools
that goes down inside, because
you have to displace the geology
for the tube to move downwards.
So, the tools break and retrieve
the geology from the centre
and then drive the tube downwards.
The drills were used to access clean
Water across the British Empire.
After the outbreak in the 1860s,
cholera never again reached epidemic
proportions in the United Kingdom.
But it is still a significant
killer around the globe.
This water-well drill is destined
for villages in Africa.
So, really, identically to
What happened in Littlehampton
in 1866 is What you are replicating
in those villages?
Absolutely identically, yes.
The diseases that cause
most problems are cholera
and typhoid, still, in Africa.
I'm giving it a final test
before it's shipped out.
It's remarkable to think that what
the Victorian well drillers struck oh
here in Littlehampton is still saving
thousands of lives across the World.
From Littlehampton, I'm taking
the train to Portsmouth,
which on this journey means
a change at Barnham.
The next leg takes me
across the county border
from Sussex into Hampshire.
When I last visited
Portsmouth, I attended the
commissioning of HMS Dragon,
and indeed,
my guidebook says the town's
chief attraction
"consists in the fortifications,
the dockyard and the meh-o-war" -
an old-fashioned
expression for warships.
In the middle of the 19th century,
something that Worried everyone,
including the Bradshaw-wielding
tourist, was the French Peril.
I alight from the train at the
station of Portsmouth harbour.
Protected by the Isle of Wight,
Portsmouth has been
an important naval port
since the 12th century.
It's still the main dockyard for
the Royal Navy,
being home to two thirds
of its service fleet.
As an island city, Portsmouth
became densely populated
and in the 18th century,
locals campaigned for the Navy's
stores of gunpowder to be
moved across the water.
I'm on the ferry to Gosport.
According to Bradshaw's, "It rarely
takes more than eight minutes
"and the toll is one penny."
Some chance!
Today, as in Bradshaw's day,
visitors can marvel at the men-o-war,
including Nelson's flagship,
HMS Victory,
and the formidable HMS Warrior.
Imagine the impact that HMS Warrior
had when she first appeared in 1860.
Britain's first ironclad Warship,
built in response to France's
first ironclad warship -
but this one was much bigger.
And so, the two countries began
to leapfrog each other
in a Victorian arms race.
Warrior was the largest
warship in the world,
60% bigger than France's La Gloire.
It incorporated important advances in
armour and ammunition.
I'm heading to the historic
munitions store to meet
Andrew Baines of the National Museum
of the Royal Navy.
So, we have here a piece of
armour plate from World War ll,
which actually rather neatly
illustrates a point about the way
armour plating develops in
the Victorian period.
When Warrior's commissioned in 1861,
she has four and a half inches of
Wrought-iron armour plate
and 18 inches of teak
at the back of it.
No gun can get through it,
and that's the challenge, then,
someone's got to go and build a gun,
which happens, so then, somebody has
to come along with thicker
armour plating,
and that's the race we get,
back and forth.
15 years after Warrior,
in Portsmouth harbour, the Navy
launches the appropriately
named HMS inflexible.
Her armour plating is 41 inches
thick, about 1,100lb weight
for every square foot of armour
on the ship's side.
And so, the challenge to
the gunmakers is,
how do you penetrate it?
- It certainly is,
and that's something else
we can go and look at.
A most impressive display of
firepower over the ages.
Where shall we start?
Well, probably the best place
to start is with one of these.
A cannonball, solid shot.
This is What the Royal Navy has been
using for a couple of hundred years,
come the mid-Victorian period.
It smashes through an enemy's
wooden hull, creates splinters,
and those splinters kill
and maim the crew.
Once armour plate is introduced,
however, a small cannonball like that
isn't going to do very much, it's
going to bounce off the side.
So whatever you throw at the
opponent, you have to make heavier.
You can make a bigger sphere,
but that eventually pushes you
to the edge of gun founding.
Or, you can elongate the shape,
and that's What's happened here.
And this is actually the type
of projectile that inflexible
would have been firing.
- You're kidding.
Inflexible, which is only
15 years after Warrior...
Yeah.
- Is firing this sort of ammunition?
Yeah. Warrior's maximum
size of projectile is
about 100lb Weight, it's
seven inches wide.
This is 16 inches wide,
weighs in at 1,700lb.
And that change has been made
possible because no longer do we
have smoothbore guns,
but We've gone over to rifling.
Rifling was an important innovation.
Grooves in the barrel of a gun
made the projectile spin,
greatly improving aerodynamic
stability and accuracy.
In the 1860s, Warrior's guns had
a range of around 2,000 yards.
Just 15 years later,
guns could fire 8,000 yards.
That firepower provoked the next
development in the arms race,
the torpedo.
The torpedo, mid 1860s, the
Royal Navy adopts it from the 1870s,
it's cheap as chips to produce,
you can build small ships,
35 tonnes weight as opposed
to the 11,000 tonnes for inflexible,
and they can go in
and with a single-shot weapon
sink a battleship.
Now, if I've got your drift right,
you've got to develop a technology
to kill the torpedo?
Now you've got to develop
a technology to kill the torpedo,
and that's Where the 3lb
quick-firing Hotchkiss gun comes in.
Do you have one of those?
- We do indeed, just this Way.
Small, light and rapidly loaded,
the Hotchkiss gun was used
to defend warships against the
fast-moving torpedo attack boats.
Here's one that still fires.
OK, so, if you'd like to pop
the gloves and the ear defenders on.
And What we have here is a blank,
the projectile would have
sat in the top there.
If you'd like to take that, we can
come over to the Hotchkiss.
I am ready to defend my country!
Take that for defying
Her Majesty, Queen Victoria!
After France was crushed by
Prussia in 1870,
the United Kingdom became less
nervous about her closest neighbour.
But war technology had moved forward
dramatically and Britain would
then engage in a new arms race,
this time with Germany.
It's the start of a new day
and I'm picking up my journey
in Fareham to continue westwards.
Although in Bradshaw's day the French
were our traditional enemy,
for three years in the 1850s,
Britain and France
were allies against Russia in a
gruesome conflict far from home.
Over the years, I have been struck that
Bradshaw gives me
a very accurate impression
of the United Kingdom
in the mid-19th century,
with one exception -
it doesn't reflect the horror that the
country had felt over the
recent Crimean War,
one of the very few conflicts in
which Victorian Britain was involved.
In order to put that right,
a little bird tells me
that I should visit Romsey.
In 1847, the railway reached Romsey -
a beautiful market town
outside the New Forest.
Bradshaw's remarks that, "Like many
other places of great antiquity,
"Romsey owes its foundation to a
monastic establishment -
"a Benedictine abbey on a very
extensive scale."
So I'll look at that.
The Crimean War was characterised
by courage and carnage.
It shook public confidence
in the British establishment.
It led to army reforms,
the creation of the Victoria Cross
and big changes to military
medical services.
Those dark times were brightened
by the story of Florence Nightingale.
Here in Romsey is her family
home of Embley Park.
I'm meeting Natasha McEnroe,
the director of the
Florence Nightingale Museum.
Natasha, What sort of people
were the Nightingales?
They were rich.
They came from the industrialised
money of the Midlands.
So when they took over Embley, it was
quite a modest Georgian house.
It only had five bedrooms, and
so they drastically remodelled it.
What did the family consist of
when they came here?
Nightingale's parents had the
two daughters...
Parthenope, who was
Florence's older sister,
and then Florence,
who was just a year younger.
What sort of education did the
young Florence have?
It's quite an unusual
one for the time.
Florence's father believed that
Women should be educated
as well as men, so he ensured that
the girls were taught the sciences,
the classics, and Florence's own
passion - mathematics.
Embley Park was
a place for entertaining.
The fiercely intelligent Florence
encountered guests,
who were eminent scientists
or literary figures,
such as Charles Darwin
and Elizabeth Gaskell.
In the grounds of Embley Park,
the course of Florence's
life was set.
So this is a
hugely significant place
in the story
of Florence Nightingale,
because it's underneath
this very tree
that Florence felt very strongly
that she was called by God
to serve her fellow man
through nursing.
So how did she actually
become a nurse?
Well, it was something that was
very, very difficult.
Nursing was not a profession at
this time. It was
very much looked down on.
So she managed to pick up
various bits of experience
While travelling around Europe,
and then finally, in her late 20s,
became a superintendent of a
small charitable hospital.
So how was it that she
Went off to Crimea?
She was approached by
Sidney Herbert,
the Secretary at War,
and asked if she would lead
a group of 38 nurses
to go out to protect and to care
for the soldiers in the
appalling conditions
that they found themselves in.
The sanitation was non-existent,
so latrines were backed-up
and coming into the rooms.
The soldiers had no beds,
they were wearing their bloodstained
shirts from the battlefield.
So this was a huge challenge
for Florence and her nurses.
Nightingale referred to the facility
as the Kingdom of Hell.
The majority of the 25,000 British
deaths during the Crimean War
were caused by infection and disease
rather than battle wounds.
As a result of her
passion for statistics,
she recorded valuable
and persuasive data
and wrote countless reports in
support of her demands for change.
Florence became a
megastar very quickly.
Her name was all over
the British press,
and she Wanted use that fame
to ensure that the terrible
experiences of the
Crimean War shouldn't
be repeated,
and that public health should
be reformed and improved
as a result of her experience.
She basically campaigned
and lobbied
for health reform
for the rest of her life.
Amongst her many achievements,
she transformed nursing into a
respectable profession for women,
establishing in 1860 the first
professional training school
for nurses at St Thomas'
Hospital in London.
It might seem corny to place a candle
at the grave of Florence Nightingale,
the lady with a lamp, but during a
grim period in Victorian Britain,
her courageous deeds shone through
the darkness like a light.
From Romsey, the next leg
of my journey
takes me south to the New Forest,
which is served by
the station of Brockenhurst.
Tickets, please.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I'm changing at Southampton to
continue my journey
through Forest landscape to
Dorchester.
The straight lines of the railway
enabled trains to travel fast
and to avoid the slow
meanders of roads and canals.
At the time of my guidebook and
indeed throughout the 19th century,
travel by rail was superior
to travel by road
because tracks provided
stability and speed,
but improvements to roads
and to engine technology
tipped the balance in the other
direction during the 20th century.
Where better to find
out about those changes
than at the house
of the Montagus, Beaulieu?
Built on the site of
an old Cistercian abbey,
Beaulieu is the home of
the Montagu family
and, since 1972,
the National Motor Museum.
[CAR HORN HONKS]
Beaulieu's motoring heritage
originates from the
late 19th century,
with the second Lord Montagu,
who was an avid campaigner
for the motorist.
I'm meeting his grandson,
the current Lord Montagu.
So What was it that your grandfather
was able to do to make
the motor car more acceptable
in the United Kingdom?
He introduced motoring to royalty.
He took the Prince of Wales,
later Edward VII,
for his first drive in a car.
That then made motoring much
more acceptable to people.
He also took his car, as an MP,
to the House of Commons.
He Wanted to drive into the yard,
but was stopped by the policeman,
so he appealed to the Speaker
who said, "Yes, you can come in."
And so he was the first person
to bring a petrol car
into the yard at the
House of Commons, which
I'm sure at the time
was quite an excitement.
The Museum charts the history
of the automobile over the ages.
Volunteer John Richardson is going to
show me the early motoring machines,
which, like the railway locomotives
of the time, ran on steam.
Hello, John.
- Hello.
I think most people know how
locomotives developed
on the railways
during the 19th century,
but not much idea of What was
going on on the roads,
but I suppose that this
is part of the answer.
Well, this, yes.
This is the 1875 Grenville,
which really is the sort of
end of the steam development
of road-going vehicles.
How did it actually operate?
Well, you have the poor old
stoker at the back, here, who's
going to put coal into the
boiler here to make the steam,
which is going to work
the engine down here.
Additionally, you have two
men at the front.
One is the steersman, he's going to
point it in the right direction.
The other one is the driver.
So, you have a crew of three
for, what,
a maximum of three passengers,
by the look of it'?
You can get one passenger in the
front and three at the back here,
so it's not a very
large load-bearing vehicle.
The condition of the roads
is quite an issue, isn't it?
People who own roads are not
very favourably disposed
towards these large, heavy vehicles.
Oh, no. The roads were in a pretty
shocking state at the time.
Though they had the turnpike trusts,
who were empowered to raise tolls
and look after the roads,
there was a great resistance
to these steam vehicles,
so they introduced the
Red Flag Act,
which required a gentleman to Walk
60 yards in front with a red flag.
So how do we date the origins
of the internal combustion engine?
Well, we have to come to the
very early 1860s,
when Etienne Lenoir developed
his gas-powered engine,
and followed by Nikolaus Otto
with the four-stroke
cycle engine, as well.
And neither one of those British.
I'm afraid not.
No, they were German.
In Britain, as a result
of intense opposition
to anything other
than horse-drawn road transport,
Parliament imposed a
speed limit of 4mph.
While Britain had led the way
with the railways,
it fell far behind in early
automobile development.
France and Germany were
the pioneers of the motor car.
By the end of the 19th century,
are motor cars in Britain becoming
quite popular?
They're becoming very popular indeed,
and there's a groundswell of opinion
that wants to get cars onto the
road.
The removal of the
Red Flag Act in 1896
and the Emancipation Run,
when the cars were allowed to
drive on the roads
and they drove from London
to Brighton.
Then the public could see the cars,
and it even gained further popularity.
I am intrigued to try out
one of these early models,
perhaps to be enthralled
and terrified as Victorians were.
Engineer Ian Stanfield will
be my instructor.
Ian, hello.
- Hello, Michael.
What a splendid vehicle.
What is it?
It is an 1886 Benz replica.
Basically the first motor car.
- Really?
Are we able to take a spin in it?
- Yeah, for sure, yeah.
How do you get it going?
Well, I'll have to fiddle
around the back here, and
spin the flywheel
to get it going.
So if you Want to sit
up in the driving position...
OK. I'll do that.
I'll show you
Where the controls are.
So it's very simple.
This is your steering.
That's right, and that's left.
- That's clear enough.
This lever here, if you pull it all
the Way back on,
that is your brake.
And as you ease it forward,
that puts it into gear,
so you basically creep forward.
Let's see if I can get it to go.
[ENGINE CHUGS]
So, brake off...
push the lever forward,
ease it into gear, and off we go.
Tally-ho!
- Off we go.
We'll turn round
to the right here.
[CHUGGING CONTINUES]
I make this prediction:
the motor car will never catch oh
or be a threat to the railways.
The car Went on to challenge
the railway's pre-eminence.
And it is one of the many innovations
first seen in Victorian times
that dominate our world today.
Britain was rarely troubled by war
during the Victorian period,
partly because we were
so well-prepared,
matching every French improvement
in military technology
and then trumping it.
It's an irony that when war did break
out in the Crimea in the 1850s,
France was our ally.
We then rediscovered the
horrors of warfare,
and our national compassion was
personified by Florence Nightingale -
the most admired of all Victorians.
Next time, I investigate the ins and
outs of carpets...
This is how you Weave.
Discover the little-known
railway verse of Thomas Hardy...
"And the Wheels moved on.
"O could it but be
That I had alighted there!"
He missed his chance.
- He did indeed.
And brush up on a
forgotten artist...
You're doing a grand job, Michael.
I think Danby would be proud of you.
[MICHAEL LAUGHS]
You old flatterer!
[END THEME]