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Waverley Station & Waverley Market, Edinburgh from the Scott Monument, 1847
In 1837 Sir Andrew Agnew, a loudly Sabbatarian MP, sought to insert into the Glasgow, Paisley, Kilmarnock & Ayr Railway Bill a general clause prohibiting Sunday trains. When the Whig Government bestirred themselves to have Agnew’s clause deleted at Third Reading, 80 members nevertheless stood by him. A dozen years later Joseph Locke, eminent railway engineer and MP, attacked Scotland’s anti-Sunday travel lobby. “The religious”, Locke alleged, had conducted an unscrupulous campaign by hinting at enhanced dividends for Sabbatarians who purchased shares in the Scottish Central Railway so as to influence the directors. He told how the Duchess of Sutherland, hastening south to her dying father, had been left in tears on the platform at Perth when Scottish Central officials barred her from the Sunday mail train prescribed by the Post Office. But the campaigners remained righteously resolute – while the Postmaster General must answer for himself, as he would answer on Judgement Day, it was their bounden duty to deter prospective passengers.
This sets the scene on either side of 1840, at which date the Edinburgh & Glasgow Railway had been under construction for two years. (Traffic would begin in 1842.) The importance of Scotland’s first inter-city rail route is obvious but the project had hung fire for a decade and the line retained some of the characteristics of a pioneering period that was speedily vanishing. More than a dozen small contractors were engaged. Over part of the route the rails were laid at first on stone blocks rather than wooden cross-sleepers, a practice already obsolete. It was debated whether to adopt Stephenson’s already ‘standard’ gauge of 4’8½” or the 4’6” ‘Scottish gauge’ used on our earliest local lines. Though a national rail network had become a measurable prospect, certain directors were indifferent to connection with other companies, whether in the Central Belt or across the border.
Also outdated was the division of the Edinburgh & Glasgow board into Edinburgh Committee and Glasgow Committee – a cumbersome arrangement tending to perpetuate disputes. And both Committees were beset, as completion of the line drew near, by petitions, memorials and deputations on the subject of Sunday working, with those in favour very much in the minority. A special shareholders’ vote would follow the regular half-yearly meeting in February 1842: “The propriety of opening the Railway partially on Sunday, by running morning and evening trains, has occupied much of the attention of your Directors who have resolved to leave the decision in your hands.”
Against a handful of “town memorials” seeking a Sunday timetable, the ‘antis’ brandished petitions from 41 towns, while 134 kirk sessions, 40 presbyteries, 29 individual congregations and 18 other bodies with church connection all weighed in. One director asserted that 150,000 individuals across Scotland were hostile, their signatures attested by clergymen. Other board members were not so sure: “Some of the petitions now on the table, not subscribed by the parties whose names appear below, are forgeries.”
Sir Andrew Agnew
Sir Andrew Agnew entered his own “Protest”, asserting that the law of God and the laws of Scotland alike forbad Sunday travel and “all labour connected therewith”. He threatened legal action to forestall a vote in favour. The motion which was eventually put forward read:
There shall be trains, one in the morning and one in the evening, despatched at hours which will not interfere with the ordinary period of divine service and they shall depart and arrive so as to allow full opportunity both to travellers and the Company’s servants to attend Church.
The shareholders present rejected this by 131 votes to 99 but proxies, with a large proportion English, made the result 1,334 in favour, 780 against. The defeated ‘antis’, who predicted “tumult and dissipation”, at once entered formal dissents, and some among them demanded separate Sunday accounts so that later they might forgo the proportion of their dividend attributable to Sunday traffic. Moderates hoped that tempers would cool if Sunday working were postponed until the Edinburgh & Glasgow’s Post Office contract was finalised.
However, the board resolved that the trains must begin. A Sunday timetable was introduced in March of 1842, with services in each direction at 7.30 a.m. and 5.30 p.m. The general manager was instructed to “employ an addition to the usual police, selected from the most respectable of the Company’s labourers”, and these men received uncompromising instructions:
No intoxicated or disorderly person shall be allowed to go upon the trains, or even on the platform or any part of the line or stations, but shall, if refusing to go away, be immediately removed.
Yet another consideration was the slack time between the Sunday trains. Though the drivers, firemen and guards awaiting their return shift might go to church, they would face the temptations of an idle afternoon. This applied especially, it was implied, to the Edinburgh railwaymen resting in Glasgow; vice versa was thought less hazardous. Might the train crews exchange at Falkirk, morning and evening, returning to their wives and families for the hours between? The locomotive superintendent insisted, however, that each driver remain with his own engine (the general practice at this date and long after). In the event, the first few Sundays passed without serious incident, save that a pointsman at Cowlairs, whiling away the long interval, was discovered drunk.
Sunday Music as Cant Would Have it, Punch 1856
If I have suggested that the Edinburgh & Glasgow opened for traffic as a rather parochial and inward-looking enterprise, that soon changed. The Company participated eagerly in the surge of competing railway schemes across the Lowlands in the middle 1840s, as the Sunday trains controversy gave way to Railway Mania. As with other companies, a reckoning came when shareholders called a halt, elected new directors and demanded retrenchment. And opinion on the reconstituted Edinburgh & Glasgow board was for a principled stand against Sunday working – though economy was a consideration too. Their solicitor found “no legal objection to the discontinuance of Sunday passenger trains”, despite the shareholders’ vote of 1842. The trains would cease after Sunday, 15 December 1846. To head off protest, the directors introduced a cheap Saturday-to-Monday return ticket, and “for the further convenience of such passengers as may be desirous of returning very early on the Monday”, added carriages to the goods trains which ran in each direction at 3 a.m. They also attempted (unsuccessfully) to modify their Sunday contract with the Post Office. Special trains for police or military in any Sunday emergency were an absolute obligation which could not be negotiated away.
It is unclear how far shareholder opinion had shifted against Sunday working. As in 1842 activists on both sides made conflicting accusations of sharp practice; and the “Glasgow Committee in favour of running Trains” complained that “memorials supporting discontinuance” contained many dubious signatures. From January 1847 the directors declined to receive more deputations from any quarter but promised that all written submissions would be recorded even-handedly.
A major factor was the Disruption of 1843 and the campaign now mounted by the Free Church. Free Kirkers were determined to make their mark. During the two months following the directors’ decision, memorials and petitions-in-support with a Church of Scotland provenance numbered 28, while the Free Church forwarded 149 (Other denominations, chiefly the Reformed Presbyterians and the United Original Seceders, produced 24). “Inhabitants’ Petitions” in favour of the ban are listed in page after page of the Edinburgh & Glasgow minute book. Some came from the Hebrides, Orkney and Shetland – as yet remote from any railhead! Several were updated more than once and re-submitted. At the board meeting on 9 February 1847, the secretary reported more than 70; the following week brought 150. These petitions were frequently Church-inspired, with the Free Kirk especially active. The 70-plus included towns such as Alloa, Arbroath, Dalmellington, Inverness, Falkirk and Montrose; lesser places from Crawfordjohn to Lairg, Laurencekirk and Yester; and far-flung rural districts – Appin with Kilmallie, Barras in Lewis, Glenorchy and Urquhart.
The Edinburgh & Glasgow directors received congratulatory messages from the presbyteries of Belfast and from congregations across Ulster. Backing came too from the Scotch Church of St Peters Square in Manchester, the Presbyterians of Liverpool, the Methodist New Connection in Stafford, and – exceptionally – the Episcopalian Clergymen of Somerset and Dorset. Scottish Episcopalians did not much involve themselves in the controversy and Roman Catholics hardly at all. Various Lord’s Day Societies, both north and south of the Border, added their weight. A handful of other bodies praised the board’s resolve, though not necessarily on religious grounds – for example, the Edinburgh Dialectic Society and the Literary Society of Kirriemuir, while certain English towns, including Chester, Penrith and Wigan, took the opportunity to declare against Sunday trains.
Edinburgh claimed that the Edinburgh & Glasgow Company had “violated their compact with Parliament”. The “Memorial of the Lord Provost, Magistrates and Town Council” was approved by 23 votes to 6, after a lengthy debate, fully reported in the Caledonian Mercury.
Councillor Faulkner asserted that railways were common carriers, obliged to accommodate any and all business offered. That “eight gentlemen” (the Edinburgh & Glasgow directors) should attempt “to stop communication between… two cities of such magnitude” was extremely presumptious – and the offence was all the greater when they ignored opinion contrary to their own and gave in to “organised agitation”. Councillor Cruikshank, supporting Falconer, argued that the law recognised a public need by licensing inns and taverns, though some misuse was inevitable. Sunday trains were a parallel case and personal liberty the crux. The Edinburgh & Glasgow board were taking on themselves to be “a court of conscience”; they had the option of resignation if their own consciences so dictated. Councillor Clerk noted “the extinction of every other mode of transport” by railway competition. De facto monopoly entailed corresponding obligations, whether or not specified in a railway company’s act.
Bailie Meek replied that the Edinburgh & Glasgow Company could not be called to account unless the directors explicitly breached their Act. People of means might hire post-chaises on Sundays, as they had always done. The poor had not travelled to any great extent before the railways were built. Councillor Cushie warned that Sunday trains would open the way to other commercial activities; workers risked losing their one day-of-rest. Councillor Melville agreed – the Edinburgh & Glasgow, he argued, were showing a proper concern for their own servants and for other “labouring men”. Sunday excursions indulged only “pleasure seekers”. The company were a private corporation and could not be compelled to provide a facility which they judged inappropriate or unprofitable.
Edinburgh & Glasgow Railway 0-4-2T, built 1846
Cruikshank retorted that pleas on behalf of railwaymen were specious. It had taken more men, working longer hours, and frequent horse-team changes to operate the Sunday mail coaches. With a limited timetable and a rota of infrequent Sunday duty, railway workers need only occasionally miss church: “Why not urge the same claim on behalf of apothecaries, domestic servants and other classes whose labour we avail ourselves of on Sunday to a much greater extent?
Baillie Duncan took the same tone. The preacher who attacked Sunday trains might have “fourteen or fifteen carriages” at his church door, all adding to the tally of coachmen, grooms and other servants effectively barred from worship. The engine driver, by contrast, might stable his “iron horse’ and attend church. Councillor Stott went further. Let the Edinburgh & Glasgow directors heed the Bible warning regarding behaving pharisaically! He also attacked the Sabbatarians’ logic – to convey a “delicate female” to God’s house in one’s private carriage was a worthy action, and many feeble or otherwise disadvantaged people might find their way there by train. Religious liberty was not threatened but positively enhanced: “Persons have been enabled to attend with regularity the place of worship of their choice, who must otherwise have remained at home or joined in a mode of worship uncongenial to their principles.” Councillor Renton, himself a doctor, asserted that he could produce “witnesses connected with the healing art” who would testify how they made country calls by Sunday trains – and without missing church themselves. The result of the new ban, Renton claimed, had been a chaotic rush to Edinburgh’s coach hirers: nearly 200 operators, large and small, along with their employees, had found their Sunday disrupted, and the unscrupulous among them had overcharged with impunity.
Councillor Whyte looked warily southward, noting that restricted Sunday working on the London & Greenwich Railway had soon expanded to an hourly service. All were careful to parade a proper respect for Scotland’s day-of-rest. Though vociferous against the Edinburgh & Glasgow, Cruikshank deplored the Sunday scenes he himself had witnessed “not only in France and Italy but in some parts of England.” No ‘pro-trains’ councillor would have it thought that he was pandering to irreligious day-trippers. A limited Sunday service had proved innocuous, even beneficial (“no crowds of idle people; no great influx of travellers; urgent works of mercy have been performed”) and limited it should remain! But the mails must run, and evidence from Falkirk, Linlithgow and other intermediate stations put respectable excursionists in the great majority. On the neighbouring North British Railway, which ran Sunday trains, Portobello and Prestonpans reported no disturbance; and the country clergy of East Lothian, though averse to “parties wandering about during Divine service”, acknowledged that the visitors were in the main respectable artisans or decorous family parties, not “urban residue”.
In popular accounts, 19th century material of this stamp is often wrenched out of context or illustrated by extreme cases. John Prebble found an easy target in the “God-fearing” Edinburgh & Glasgow Railway. The much-quoted minister who saw the hand of the Almighty in the Tay Bridge Disaster of 1879, when the Sunday mail train plunged into the Firth, was not typical. Another well-known story, which tells of rioting Highlanders at Strome Ferry, determined to prevent the departure of a Sunday “fish special”, has grown larger with the years. But it is striking to discover how, in an 1840s conflict, at least one argument resonated from more than a century earlier – if only for a determined few. The 1707 Union had betrayed a covenanted, Presbyterian people and left them at the mercy of a British Parliament where Scotland’s voice did not sufficiently count! This, by implication, was the position of Councillor Cushie – north of the border, the running of Sunday trains “set at defiance the law of God and man”, and the Edinburgh & Glasgow directors were being scrupulous, as they ought to be, for “the eternal happiness of all”. And Baillie Meek, likewise echoing the fundamentalist views of Sir Andrew Agnew, cited Court of Session actions back to the Act of Union and explicitly invoked the Solemn League and Covenant of the 1640s.
Revisionist historians have come to challenge the traditional view of modern Scotland’s firm “British” identity, and on this score at least the Sunday trains controversy which beset the Edinburgh & Glasgow has some wider significance.
