Great Yarmouth to Beccles Great British Railway Journeys

In 1840, one man transformed travel in Britain.

His name was George Bradshaw,

and his Railway Guide inspired the Victorians to take to the tracks.

Stop by stop, he told them where to travel, what to see, and where to stay.

Now, 170 years later, I'm making a series of journeys across the length and breadth of the country

to see what of Bradshaw's Britain remains.

I've embarked on another railway journey,

confident that my trusty Bradshaw's guide will continue to give me insights

into the vast areas of the British Isles that I've yet to explore.

In today's journey, I'll be discovering a macabre side

to Great Yarmouth's railway history.

The railway negotiates a special rate with him,

and they move the body at so much per ton.

Operating an engineering triumph that opened East Anglia to rail traffic.

Pull the dog in. That's it.

Hand at the top, and a nice snappy movement. That's it.

-No, you've not had your Weetabix, you see.

-What, is that not in?

And learning how Bradshawing meant the difference

between death and life in the Second World War.

Ha! I really enjoyed it, I must say. It was very thrilling.

Starting on the East Coast, this journey takes me south

through Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex, finishing in the City of London.

I'll be travelling a route that,

in Bradshaw's day, opened up

inhospitable and isolated territory

and allowed the natural riches of the region to be exploited.

My stretch today begins in Great Yarmouth,

then takes me south through the village of Reedham,

and on to Beccles in Suffolk.

This journey takes me across East Anglia,

which has always seemed remote to a Londoner like me.

Certainly, its network of waterways made it difficult to cross

except by boat.

So railway building offered an enormous speculative opportunity

to Victorian investors.

But that railway mania brought bust as well as boom.

My first destination is the coastal town of Great Yarmouth.

-Bye-bye.

-Bye, now. It's a beautiful line, isn't it?

-Beautiful line. Beautiful!

-It's lovely, especially in the morning.

I have had the most delightful journey through meadows

grazed by sheep and cows, to this enormous station at Great Yarmouth.

So why did they build this branch line all the way to here?

Very fishy.

The railway reached Great Yarmouth in 1844,

and the line to London was completed two years later.

Famous for its herrings, the railways and this station enabled Great Yarmouth

to take full advantage of the fish stocks of the North Sea.

The catch could reach markets all over the country

and indeed abroad, and brought the town prosperity.

My Bradshaw's guide tells me that Great Yarmouth

"is situated on the east bank of the River Yare.

"The inhabitants are chiefly engaged in the mackerel, herring and deep-sea fisheries,

"which are prosecuted to a very great extent with much success."

Sadly, a decline in fish stocks means that today,

nothing remains of this once great fishing fleet.

To get an idea of the scale of the Great Yarmouth herring industry in its heyday,

I'm meeting local resident Ernie Childs.

So your family are fishermen?

Yeah, all my granddads and things like that, they were all to do with the sea.

The fishing was very big in Yarmouth, as the biggest port in the world,

you know, for catching, exporting...

The seas that surrounded Yarmouth just teemed with herring,

and we had a fleet of about 1,200.

-1,200?

-1,200. It takes believing, doesn't it?

-You could walk across the river...

-On boats?

-On boats, yeah.

Each boat had ten miles of nets.

A colossal amount of fish that was caught, you know, each night.

The huge shoals of herring

would arrive in the waters off Great Yarmouth in the autumn.

At its peak, the town was landing 125,000 tons a year.

The railways helped the fisheries to expand to such a degree

that an extensive rail system was built on the quays

to serve the fishermen's wharf.

And by the late 1800s, Great Yarmouth had not one, but three railway stations.

There's a railway line that went straight to the wharf

all the way from the Vauxhall over there.

And that was up and down all day long, you know. That was a busy line.

Without the railways, you know, this town wouldn't have been as big.

The main freights carried were said to be

"salt and coal in and loose fish out."

And the trains carried something of greater interest than coal or fish.

They imported masses of Scottish girls, who gutted the herrings,

following the shoals of fish as they migrated down the East Coast.

So it wasn't just the railways taking the fish out.

-They were bringing the fishery workers in?

-That's right, yeah.

But even in my day. When I... I grew up on the wharf,

and that was so busy, you know. The Scots girls were there, they were singing all the while,

and if they weren't singing, they were knitting. They were very, very quick.

They put a competition out once.

Who could gut the best, either a machine or a Scots girl.

And the Scots girls won.

They could gut a fish, one a second.

Now, it'd take me a bloody minute to do one.

Ernie paints a magnificent picture of a teeming port

in an era when fish and railways brought Great Yarmouth great wealth.

The railways declined alongside the fishing.

And now just one station serves the town.

Before I bid farewell to Yarmouth,

there's just one more entry in Bradshaw's that I want to investigate.

Its link to the railways is ghoulish.

My Bradshaw's guide says that "the old town

"contains about 150 narrow streets or passages

"locally called rows,

"in which many remains of antiquity may still be traced."

And talking of antiquity, I understand that this one,

number six, was known as "Snatch Body Row."

And I'm here to get a skeletal idea of why it got its name.

I've come to the graveyard of St Nicholas' Church

to pick over the bones of this story

with medical historian Dr Elizabeth Hurren.

-Hello. How nice to meet you!

-Very nice to see you indeed.

Now, I'm using my Bradshaw's guide and I've been looking at the rows,

and I understand that number six was called Snatch Body Row.

Now, why is that?

Well, this parish church was notorious for providing bodies

to anatomists in London

at the end of the 18th century.

And there were a couple of notorious resurrectionists

who dug up bodies from this graveyard.

They would have come at night into this churchyard,

and they would have used a wooden shovel, and put them in a sack.

And, in fact, their more common name was "sackmen".

And then, over the shoulder, and then they would have taken the body down to London

and sold it to one of the leading anatomists.

Before the advent of the railway in Great Yarmouth, the economy was unpredictable.

Abject poverty, allied with developments in medical science,

which provoked a need for corpses for dissection,

gave rise to the dark crime of body snatching.

A fast trade route to London by sea,

and access to the largest parish church in England

made St Nicholas' a favourite place for illicit exhumation.

Presumably, when this illegal trade in stealing bodies is under way,

families must get very worried that their loved ones' corpses have been stolen.

The paupers typically would have had to stay awake -

that's where the tradition of a wake comes from -

for three days, to watch the body going into the ground.

Then they would have stayed awake, come in to the graveyard very regularly,

and watched to make sure that no-one had dug up or interfered with the body.

Once the railways arrived in 1844, prosperity surged.

But far from being stopped in its tracks,

the body trade gathered steam,

fuelled by the Anatomy Act of 1832,

which legalised the use of pauper carcasses for dissection.

When that happens, then you don't have to resurrect them from a graveyard like this.

You simply buy them down the road,

at Yarmouth workhouse, at the back of it.

Or at a local pub.

These were paupers, and when they died, their bodies were just made available for science?

-Absolutely.

-So how did Bradshaw's come into it?

Well, Alexander Macalister, who was the Chair of Anatomy at Cambridge,

this was absolutely critical for him.

And when he arrived at Cambridge, he had a body supply problem,

because in the late 19th century,

the number of medical students quadruples.

And so he has to get on the train

with this book, and he has to start going along all the branch lines out of Cambridge,

and he has to get off the train and do a body deal with whoever he can.

And of course, he alights at Yarmouth, and realises

that they are very willing to make a number of deals with him.

And he pays up to £12 a body for each dissected pauper.

-Huge amount of money!

-Absolutely.

And he transports it on the railway out of Yarmouth.

And the railway negotiates a special rate with him,

and they move the body at so much per ton.

And they are in the back of the carriages, in what's known as the "dead carriage".

The railways enabled corpses to arrive in Cambridge or London

in a matter of hours, as fresh as new-caught herrings.

I know that in the book Dracula, Count Dracula uses a Bradshaw's plan

moving his coffins round Britain.

So, I mean, there was obviously more than a grain of truth in this.

Macalister and this book, he was the one that everybody else copied.

He was the one that, as I call him, he was a travelling anatomist.

He got on the railway, he made the deals, and in that way,

he was able to revive the whole medical school at Cambridge.

But, of course, there was a big social cost to the poor.

And so, as we have always in the history of medicine,

we owe the poor an enormous amount, actually, for where we are today in biomedicine.

Astonishingly, this trade in bodies continued

until the turn of the 20th century.

But after a popular outcry over the theft of a pauper's body

from Great Yarmouth in 1901,

an extensive public enquiry

finally brought the secretive trade in the town to an end.

The "death-box" had made its last journey from Great Yarmouth station.

Well, now I feel nervous about getting on a train.

I want to be sure that at the back here, it's entirely cadaver-less.

But luckily, most of these passengers look pretty alive to me.

I love these wide plains,

and the big skies that you get in Norfolk.

And Bradshaw refers to "extensive views of this flattish country

"between Norwich and the sea."

And this low-lying land provided many challenges

for Victorian railway engineers.

And now, I'm on my way to see one of the most spectacular examples

of how they overcame them.

In Bradshaw's day, a local railway entrepreneur,

Sir Samuel Morton Peto,

had designs on the riches of East Anglia.

His plan required him to conquer the tough landscape.

Part of the solution was a piece of Victorian engineering genius,

the swing bridge, that allowed rights of passage for traffic

on both the river and the railway.

-Bye-bye. Nice to see you.

-Thank you.

Reedham.

A name that's famous for its swing bridge.

Peto built the original swing bridge,

carrying the railway across the River Yare, in the 1840s.

He declared that it would "enable fresh fish from Lowestoft

"to arrive in Manchester in time for tea."

I've been granted special access to cross the bridge

and take a closer look.

This is so exciting,

to walk along a railway line

on this lovely ancient structure.

Always a bit nerve-wracking, of course, walking on a railway line.

But we have been assured that there are no trains coming.

Nonetheless, if you'll forgive me, I think I'll hurry along.

Waiting for me at the end of the swing bridge is signalman Alan English.

-That was so exciting, walking across the bridge.

-Was it?

That was fabulous! I really enjoyed that!

-I don't often get to walk on a railway line.

-Would you like to come in?

-I'll show you the...

-After you, after you.

Welcome to our small abode.

-Ha! Charming! Is it an old, old signal box?

-It was built in 1904.

It must have been thought a fantastic piece of engineering in those days.

They had to decide to do something to cross the river.

Not easy when the surrounding countryside was marshy

and intersected by navigable rivers,

which were then the arteries of trade.

A normal bridge would need an immense span to allow clearance

to the region's staple transport,

wherry boats with 40-foot-high masts.

Peto's swing bridge was an astonishing breakthrough.

It could pivot open to allow the wherrymen to ply their trade,

and rotate back so that trains could penetrate this watery landscape.

So when the original bridge was built, the waterway, of course,

was considered the most important means of transport?

Well, the waterway, when this line was built, was the only form

of transport for anything other than you could put in a horse and cart.

Yeah, so along comes the bridge, and the bridge has to, obviously,

it has to fit in with the traffic on the water.

Yes, I mean, that was a major consideration.

It's a new thing, no-one had seen the railways before.

Competition, obviously, the river users, or the wherrymen.

And they obviously wanted to ensure that they had free rights of passage through the bridge.

-Can we see how it works?

-Of course you can.

Do you want to get your hands dirty and help me?

-Ha-ha! Yes, please.

-OK, then.

The first lever I want you to pull, Michael, is number one.

If you'd like to use a cloth, so you don't dirty our lovely levers up.

Pull the dog in. That's it.

Hand at the top, and a nice snappy movement. That's it.

-No, you've not had your Weetabix, you see.

-What, is that not in?

No, no, you see, the indicator is still showing out, so back all the way in.

Pull the lever towards you slightly. That's it.

Push it back in.

-Same thing again.

-Right.

Hand at the top.

Hand on there, and a nice, snappy movement.

Yeah, well done, that's there!

And this is the best bit - the lever.

There's no cogs, there's no brakes.

What do I do with it?

-Gently, move it to the off position.

-Yes.

Which will start the wincher downstairs.

But it's a centrifugal clutch, it's nice and smooth, so just move it across.

Move it across, gently, that's it.

-You see, you've now got weight on it.

-Yes.

-Keep moving?

-If you look out the window now, you're now moving.

-Oh, my goodness!

-You see, so you're in charge now.

-Do I hold it in this position?

-Just hold it there for a little while.

-The bridge is swinging.

And now, I just want you to ease back a little bit on the lever.

-Here I go.

-Wow, that will do.

-You're doing it all by ear, are you?

All by ear, yeah. You're doing well, you're a professional. Natural!

She's an old lady. She'll start off nice and easy,

and then she'll get tired halfway through.

And now you've got your speed up again, just ease back a little bit again.

Because we must stop it in the middle, so ease back a bit. Whoa!

-Perfect! Do you want a job?

-Ha-ha-ha-ha!

I feel a huge sense of relief, actually.

You didn't break it, so that's the...

Yeah, I was thinking that all the time, when you were saying, "Go a bit more."

It certainly builds up your respect for this bit of engineering.

Last year, we swung this bridge 1,300 times in a year.

You old swingers!

I'm on my way to find out more about Peto,

one of the railway's great creators during the Industrial Revolution.

A 19th-century entrepreneur and civil engineer,

his innovative railways and bridges provided a Steam Age link

between East Anglia and the rest of Britain.

Yet few of us know anything about him.

I've arrived in Peto's home village of Somerleyton, in Suffolk.

My Bradshaw's tells me that this is "Somerleyton Hall,

"the old Elizabethan seat, now the residence

"of Sir Samuel M Peto Baronet,

"who has greatly enlarged the building."

And what a stunning place it is!

What you could do with a few railway millions!

And what a fantastic place to spend the evening.

I'm staggered by the scale and opulence of Peto's home.

As one of the richest men of his day,

he could afford to employ Prince Albert's architect,

who took seven years to remodel the Tudor mansion.

Sir Samuel Morton Peto was, by all accounts, a driven man.

I'm hoping that local historian Adrian Vaughan can tell me more.

-That's the great man, is it?

-Samuel Morton Peto.

The railways that Morton Peto was engaged in were really visionary.

He had, with Robert Stephenson and George Parker Bidder,

they were a trinity.

And they envisaged the trade across the Atlantic - New York, Liverpool.

Liverpool by rail, through to Lowestoft,

which was an open port, with no taxes on it.

And from Lowestoft, they set up a shipping line to go into Denmark, to Norway.

They built the railway lines in Norway and Denmark.

And then they had another shipping line on to Archangel, St Petersburg.

And Peto built the railways in Russia to connect the whole thing up.

Despite for many years being the largest employer of labour in the world,

Peto overreached himself, and in the banking collapse of 1866, he lost his fortune.

He had to sell the Somerleyton Estate

and give up his seat in Parliament, dying in obscurity in 1889.

But we should remember him for this house, and for the railways,

on which we still travel today.

It's been a wonderful day.

And it ends at a beautiful place.

And so I raise my glass to the memory of Sir Samuel Morton Peto.

Day two of my journey, and I'm taking another of the many lines

that sprang up across this region in Bradshaw's day.

Another day.

And I boarded the train at Somerleyton,

arrived at Lowestoft,

to change to Beccles from one colour train to another.

Beccles is not in my Bradshaw's guide.

But I'm headed there today because I believe that

if George Bradshaw had lived another hundred years,

he would have been gratified to know that the railways would provide

a technique that could make the difference between death and life.

And that technique would be forever associated

with the name of Bradshaw.

In the Second World War,

the railways were the arteries of Britain,

moving soldiers, tanks and evacuees up and down the country.

The railways were a highly visible target for German attacks,

but they were also invaluable to a special group of British heroes

doing an immensely important job.

I'm at Beccles Airfield to meet Joy Lofthouse,

one of the last surviving World War Two female aviators

of the Air Transport Auxiliary.

-Hello, Joy.

-Hello, Michael.

-How very good to see you.

-Nice to see you.

Beccles was an airfield used in World War Two. How was it that you came into flying?

Well, in 1943, I saw an advertisement in The Aeroplane,

and I had never even been in an aeroplane before.

I didn't even drive a car.

But that seemed an exciting thing to do,

as a lot of my boyfriends

were in the Air Force.

The men and women of the ATA

were hired to free other pilots for combat.

Their job was to fly aircraft from the factories to the squadrons

for operational duties.

And so what kinds of aircraft were you flying?

Cos probably, we would still know some of the names, wouldn't we?

Oh, absolutely, yes. All the trading aircraft.

But also single-seaters - Spitfire, Hurricane, Mustang...

A lot of the Fleet Air Arm things - Barracudas, etc.

Anything with one engine.

-You flew all those things?

-Yes, absolutely. Yes.

Now, forgive my ignorance, would they not be a little bit different, one from another, to fly?

Well, they would, but this was our Bible, the Ferry Pilot's Notes.

On each page, there's the particulars of every aircraft

in service with either the RAF or the Fleet Air Arm.

I assume it's just like you getting into a different make of car. Not very different.

Well, I don't think so. I'm simply amazed that you would just

jump in an aircraft, look up the proper page and off you go.

-That's just extraordinary!

-Well, we were very young, you know.

-Ha-ha-ha!

The railways of Britain were vital navigational aids

for Joy and her fellow pilots,

as all over the country, other key landmarks

had been concealed to thwart enemy bombers.

So how did you find your way around?

Because you didn't have modern navigational aids in those days, did you?

You drew a line on a map,

you set off your compass point to land through for whatever wind there was,

and you looked for checkpoints on the way.

And, of course, the railways were amongst the best things to follow.

No motorways in those days, no large roads to follow.

We called it Bradshawing, of course.

And that was a reference to my very own George Bradshaw.

-That was a reference to your Bradshaw, yes.

-Yeah.

-And the railways were a reliable guide?

-Oh, absolutely.

In fact, in one of the sentences in this book, we had...

I don't know whether you'd like to read it.

I think that's rather a sweet sentence.

"Finding a strange airfield.

"The golden rule is, don't look for it.

"Some camouflage expert has done his best to prevent your seeing it.

"So look instead for the landmarks which point to the airfield.

"Even the Air Ministry cannot camouflage them."

And that would refer to things like railways. They couldn't be camouflaged.

They couldn't do anything to the railways, no.

Now, tell me though, was this quite dangerous?

I mean, I know you weren't flying in combat, but did the ATA suffer many losses?

We had about 140-odd casualties, and I would say 80% of them were due to weather.

But we were warned, of course,

that...try not to be bleedin' heroes,

and if you get into bad weather,

then land and wait for it to be better.

And we were very, we ladies, anyway, were very cunning

that we knew where most of the American airfields were.

And if you knew you were into bad weather near an American airfield,

one would try and land there.

Because the food was good, and they would take you to the PX,

the equivalent of our NAAFI, and you could buy lipstick and chocolate,

and stockings, and things that were all rationed at home.

So it wasn't so unusual to get bad weather near an American airfield?

It wasn't too unusual to get bad weather there!

I don't expect my mission to lead me to a cache of lipstick or nylons.

But I want to get airborne to have a go at navigating.

Now, I'm going to a do a little Bradshawing myself this afternoon. Are you available to take me up?

Certainly not. I don't think you would be able to trust me now at my age.

I think I would trust her,

but instead, I put my life in pilot John Wignall's hands.

Apprentice Navigator Portillo reporting for duty, Sir.

-Well, jump aboard and we'll get flying.

-Thank you.

John is going to fly me a few miles away,

and I'll attempt to navigate back to the airfield,

using just a basic map and the railways as my guide.

I reckon we're going to head down this track here,

and I want you

to keep straight on.

I think Reedham must be there. We hope.

Ha-ha-ha-ha!

-You're navigating.

-This isn't navigating, this is Bradshawing.

It's very exciting. I can see the swing bridge where we were earlier.

Sorry, it's a long way around,

but I'm quite a novice at this Bradshawing business.

Er... Ha-ha-ha! OK...

Yes, I can see a railway line.

Please turn right, railway line ahoy!

It's absolutely fantastic.

According to my map, your airfield is going to lie

to the left of the railway line.

That worked pretty well, didn't it?

I really enjoyed it, I must say. It was very thrilling!

I've become used to travelling around Britain

with my trusted Bradshaw's guide.

But I would never have realised

that the same railways that George Bradshaw mapped in the 1830s,

just over a hundred years later

would prove the vital lifeline for RAF pilots in World War Two.

And that as those brave fliers found their way back to their airfields,

using the railway tracks as their guide,

they would call that activity Bradshawing.

Thank you, George.

On the next leg of my journey,

I'll be following Victorian tourists

to an English city that was lost like Atlantis.

It's not just the church ruins that go onto the beach,

it's also the bodies of the dead from the graveyard.

Meeting some gentle giants who were crucial

to the smooth running of the railways.

Face of an angel, middle like a beer barrel,

and a backside on it like a farmer's daughter.

That sums up the Suffolk horse.

And discovering how a 19th-century railway entrepreneur

started something that would grow beyond his wildest dreams.

I've never been this close to one of these container ships as this.

It's absolutely enormous!

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