Timekeepers. Simon Garfield

the world. Proposing the idea of the Liverpool and Manchester line to prospective backers and nervous crowds in the late 1820s (people thought their lungs would collapse, that cows would fail to milk, that the countryside would be set alight), the line’s secretary and treasurer Henry Booth spoke of how the passenger journey time between the cities, previously only possible by horse-drawn coach over turnpike roads, would be cut in half.⁴ ‘The man of business in Manchester will breakfast at home,’ Booth predicted, ‘proceed to Liverpool by the railway, transact his business, and return to Manchester before dinner.’ (In 1830, dinner was at lunchtime.) Booth, a man who should be more remembered than he is, foretold the impact of the railway far more eloquently than the Stephensons or Brunel. The railway, he correctly suggested, would change ‘our value of time’. ‘Our amended estimate of the occupation of an hour, or a day’ would affect ‘the duration of life itself’. Or, as Victor Hugo would later claim, ‘All the armies in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.’⁵

      The Liverpool and Manchester railway was the biggest mechanised engineering project the world had seen. It was, of course, at that time also the fastest railway in the world, covering the 31 miles in around 2 hours and 25 minutes.⁶ Within a few years of its opening, there were accidents all over the country, but also a huge sense of industrial adventure and release: the destiny of the world’s economies was now hurtling on iron wheels, and the minute hand had found its vital and indispensible purpose.

      British steam engines were being shipped throughout the world. In February 1832 a new publication called the American Rail-Road Journal carried news of a rail alongside the Erie and Hudson canal, and plans for imminent openings in New Jersey, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Virginia. Passenger railways opened in France in 1832, Ireland in 1834, Germany and Belgium in 1835, and Cuba in 1837. In 1846 the whole of Britain was being dug up or drilled through or laid upon: there were 272 railway acts that year.

      With the openings came another innovation – the passenger timetable. In January 1831, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway dared list only its departure times, although its journey time was shortening. The company now hoped that the trip between the cities ‘is usually accomplished by the First Class carriages [in] under two hours’. The first-class coaches did indeed seem to travel faster – more coal, perhaps a more efficient engine – and there were two distinct schedules: first class, costing 5 shillings each way, ran at 7 a.m., 10 a.m., 1 p.m. and 4.30 p.m., with late departures for Manchester tradesmen at 5.30 on Tuesdays and Saturdays; second class, costing 3 shillings and sixpence, left at 8 a.m. and 2.30 p.m.

      But what happened if you wished to travel further afield, perhaps from Lancashire to Birmingham or London? This was already possible by the late 1830s, although the competing rail companies – the Grand Junction Railway running north-west from the Midlands, the London and Birmingham Railway, the Leeds and Selby Railway, the York and North Midland Railway – failed to coordinate their schedules to oblige a passenger keen to use more than one line in a day.

      The first popular railway timetable combining several lines appeared in 1839, but carried an inbuilt flaw: clocks throughout Great Britain were not synchronised. Before the railway network few saw the need. If the clocks in Oxford ran 5 minutes and 2 seconds behind London time, or those in Bristol 10 minutes behind, and those in Exeter 14 minutes behind (this was indeed the case with all three westward cities in the 1830s, each enjoying a later sunrise and sunset than London) it was simply a matter of adjusting your timepiece when you arrived.⁷ The clock at the town hall or main church tended to be the master timekeeper for the local community, the time still set according to the midday sun; a relatively static populace cared little for the time elsewhere in the country so long as their own local timepieces ran at the same time. If road or waterway journeys were undertaken, the time differences would either be adjusted en route (some coaching companies provided adjustment lists), or be judged to be commensurate with the unreliability of a traveller’s pocket watch or carriage clock. But with railways, a new time consciousness affected all who travelled: the concept of ‘punctuality’ was born anew.

      Passengers who prided themselves on the accuracy of their watches (and as the century went on, there were many more of these) were joined by an entirely new watch-owning class – railwaymen. Neither would be satisfied with what they saw as unnecessary wrinkles in precision. If railway station clocks were left unsynchronised, composite and comparable timetables between destination and arrival points would not only cause confusion and frustration, but would be increasingly impossible and dangerous to maintain. As railways filled the countryside, a driver’s watch at variance with another’s would almost certainly end in collision. And then, a year later, a solution was found, at least in Britain. For the first time, timekeeping achieved nationwide standardisation: the railways began to imprint their own clock upon the world.

      In November 1840 the Great Western Railway was the first to adopt the idea that time along its route should be the same no matter where a passenger alighted or departed. This task was made possible with the advent of the electric telegraph the year before, with time signals from Greenwich being sent directly along trackside wires. ‘Railway time’ thus aligned itself with ‘London time’, and by 1847 it was running on the North Western Railway (where its greatest champion was Henry Booth), the London and South Western, the Lancaster and Carlisle, South Eastern, Caledonian, the Midland and the East Lancashire lines.

      There were other maverick champions too. In 1842, Abraham Follett Osler, a glassmaker and meteorologist from Birmingham, believed so strongly in the establishment of standardised time beyond the railways that he took matters into his own hands. Having raised funds for the erection of a new clock outside the Birmingham Philosophical Institution, he proceeded one evening to change its time from local to London time (moving it forward 7 minutes and 15 seconds). People noticed, but they also admired the clock’s accuracy; within the course of a year, local churches and shopkeepers changed their time to match it.

      By mid-century, about 90 per cent of Britain’s railways were running on London time, although the regulation met a little local opposition. Many city officials objected to any interference from London, and showed their disapproval by maintaining clocks with two minute hands – the later one usually denoting their local, older time. In an article titled ‘Railway-time Aggression’, a correspondent in Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal in 1851 offered comical disgust: ‘Time, our best and dearest possession, is in danger. [Inhabitants were] now obliged, in many of our British towns and villages, to bend before the will of a vapour, and to hasten on his pace in obedience to the laws of a railway company! Was ever tyranny more monstrous or more unbearable than this?’ The writer backs his disdain with many examples, including a dinner party and a wedding both ruined as a result of time discrepancies, before rallying the readership:

      Is it possible that this monster evil, with its insidious promises of good and its sure harvest of evil, will be tolerated by freeborn Englishmen? Surely not! Let us rather rally round Old Time with the determination to agitate, and, if needs be, to resist this arbitrary aggression. Let our rallying cry be ‘The Sun or the Railway!’ Englishmen! Beware of delay in opposing this dangerous innovation! No time is to be lost – ‘Awake, arise, or be forever fallen!’

      Railway time could kill you just by being there. In 1868, one Dr Alfred Haviland, an epidemiologist and author of the guide Scarborough as a Health Resort, published Hurried To Death: or, A Few Words of Advice on the Danger of Hurry and Excitement Especially Addressed to Railway Passengers, in which, in fairly breathless prose, he warned of the risks of over-studying a train timetable and running to catch a departure, and being overly concerned with the era’s new schedules. His evidence, which managed to be both conclusive and dubious, centred on research suggesting that those who ventured regularly on the Brighton to London line aged faster than those who didn’t.

      The new pressure of time was the cause of some amusement. In 1862, the Railway Traveller’s Handy Book, an indispensible guide to what to wear and how to comport oneself on the rails, and how to behave when going through a tunnel, contained a passage about the inexperienced traveller running to catch a train with time to spare:

      About five minutes before a train starts, a bell is rung as a signal to passengers to prepare for starting. Persons unaccustomed to travel