Hessle to York Great British Railway Journeys

'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 industries,

society and leisure time.

As I crisscross the country 150 years later,

it helps me to discover the Britain of today.

I'm in the historic county of East Yorkshire,

continuing my journey towards Lindisfarne.

Building a bridge or tunnel across the mighty Humber estuary

defied even Victorian engineers.

But on this part of my journey,

I hope to learn about 19th-century figures of religious conviction

who toiled to tear down injustices

and to construct the rights of man.

My journey started in a significant centre of the Industrial Revolution,

continued on to Nottinghamshire

and wended its way to Wakefield.

It will now bear east to skirt a vast estuary

and turn back inland to be tempted in Yorkshire's county town.

Then it will then head up the coast

to the industrial cities of the north,

to end on Northumberland's Holy Island.

Today's leg begins in Hessle, on the north bank of the Humber,

makes a short hop to Hull,

learns the tale of a bandit in Beverley,

then takes in the sea air at Scarborough

and finishes with the sweet treats of York.

On this stretch, I step inside

a record-breaking feat of engineering.

Douglas, you people built a bridge on an extraordinary scale.

This is a massive chamber.

Learn of the conditions endured by a prisoner of conscience.

The soldiers stole his bread and his water.

He was treated something like an animal in a zoo.

And brew up a Quaker-approved Victorian cuppa.

Well, it looks as appetising as mud.

Bradshaw's tells me that,

"the River Humber, the main estuary into which the Ouse

"and the Yorkshire streams with the Trent flow,

"is here two-miles broad and widens to five or six miles

"before it joins the sea.

"The eastern portion of this elevated district

"commands a magnificent view of that vast estuary."

I wonder why it was that the Victorians, who conquered the Dee,

the Firth of Forth and the Severn,

were unable to master the Humber?

Covering an area of over 75,000 acres,

this is a tidal estuary on an epic scale.

For the Victorians, it formed a barrier

to effective trade and communication

and they campaigned hard to have something done about it.

But it wasn't until over 100 years later in 1973

that construction began on the extraordinary structure

that was finally to span the Humber's huge expanse.

'I'm hopping out at Hessle,

'which is a small town on the north bank of the estuary,

'and the closest stop to the magnificent bridge.

'With a dramatic view of it at the water's edge,

'I'm joining regional historian, Richard Clarke.'

Now, if I know my Victorians, they must have been itching

to build a crossing, either a bridge or a tunnel across the Humber.

There were schemes being talked about

from the railway-mania age of the 1840s onwards.

And so, by the late 19th century,

the idea was to build a cantilever bridge

and on the principle of the Forth Bridge, a rail bridge,

but the cantilever bridge would've needed

a lot of pillars into the bed of the estuary.

And, of course, we have to remember that the time we're talking about,

100 years ago, or so, this estuary would've had many,

many more craft on it crisscrossing out to the North Sea.

And so these pillars were always perceived

to be a potential hazard to navigation.

Now, evidently, you did eventually get a bridge.

-Yes.

-How did that come about?

Once you had the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco

and examples like that of a very wide-span suspension bridge,

it was realised that it was physically possible

to bridge the Humber without having all these pillars.

By the time work began

on the long-awaited bridge in the early 1970s,

the ascendancy of the car had put pay to Victorian dreams

of a bridge for both railway and road.

In 1981, when finally opened by Queen Elizabeth II,

it was the longest single-span suspension bridge in the world.

And remained so for 17 years,

until surpassed by the Akashi Kaikyo Bridge in Japan.

Douglas Strachan spent seven years as resident engineer

during the bridge's construction.

And today he's giving me the privilege

of accessing parts that very few get to see.

Douglas, I take it from the noise

that we are underneath the traffic crossing the bridge.

Yes. We're in the box girders.

There are 124 of these boxes,

and so you can walk from anchorage to anchorage

through this tunnel of steel boxes.

The anchorages at either end of a suspension bridge

secure vast cables slung between the two towers

to support the load-bearing deck below.

Although the Victorians did build suspension bridges

like Brunel's at Clifton,

they didn't have the technology to span the daunting distance

between the banks of the Humber.

Later ingenuity unravelled the solution.

Tell me about cable-spinning, which is the essence of this technology.

We're taking thousands of wires

five millimetres in diameter

across the river, back and forward,

and building up 15,000 parallel wires

and then compacting them into one round cable.

To see these cable-spun wires close up,

Douglas is taking me to the anchorage on the north bank,

constructed from a staggering 160,000 tonnes of concrete.

Douglas, you people built a bridge on an extraordinary scale.

This is a massive chamber.

And if I understand it, these are the wires that support

-the bridge arriving at their anchorage.

-Yes.

And you can see behind me where the round cable is then split up

into the strands that I've been talking about earlier.

And these wires, what sort of weight are they?

Well, the cables themselves are about 15,000 tonnes of wire

and it's 70,000 kilometres in length.

And that's about one-and-a-half times around the world.

And so, what is the innovation since Victorian times?

I suppose it's the stronger materials

and using the wires are a major step forward.

And so, cable-spinning was the technology

that enabled 20th-century engineers

to do what Victorians had not been able to achieve?

Exactly.

'Continuing my journey, I'm going to make a short trip

'further east along the Humber

'by re-boarding the train at Hessle.'

My next stop is Kingston upon Hull.

Bradshaw says that it's, "on the Yorkshire side of the Humber

"in a very flat and uninviting spot.

"But it is admirably fitted for trade."

To our national disgrace, well into the 19th century,

part of British trade involved a triangle

that carried rum and sugar from the Caribbean to Europe,

brandy and guns from Europe to Africa

and cargoes of slaves from Africa to the Caribbean.

Situated 25 miles from the North Sea,

where the River Hull meets the Humber,

Kingston upon Hull, from the 12th century,

grew as a significant trading and seafaring hub.

I love the station at Kingston upon Hull

with its massive spans of glass.

It's the end of the line

and the station has a way of saying to you,

"Why would you want to go any further, anyway?"

'One man with firmly-rooted local loyalties was William Wilberforce.

'Fervent social reformer and perhaps the city's most famous son.'

"The African slave trade is contrary

"to the principles of justice, humanity and sound policy."

So begins the Act of Parliament

carried by William Wilberforce in 1807.

And here stands his column, which, according to Bradshaw's,

"was erected on 1st August, 1834,

"the day of Negro emancipation.

"Wilberforce was born in Hull and died in 1833.

"But not until he had the happiness

"of knowing that the great work of his useful life was achieved."

The abolition of the slave trade and then of slavery itself

was the work of many decades

and I'm here in Hull to meet an old colleague

who well understands the tribulations of fighting

a reluctant parliament.

Born here in 1759 to a wealthy merchant family,

Wilberforce was just 20 when he entered politics.

His childhood home was opened as a museum in 1906

and that's where I'm meeting one of his successors as a Hull MP,

Alan Johnson, who also happens to be

a regular on-screen political sparring partner of mine.

-Alan.

-Michael.

-Good to see you.

-Welcome to Hull.

Thank you very much and here we are with the great man.

The great man himself.

Is he a hero of yours?

He is and he's a hero to the city.

The reason that not a single slave was traded through the port of Hull

was because of Wilberforce.

He is probably the greatest person ever born in this city.

Now, the abolition of the slave trade was a long old process,

so Wilberforce had to show a lot of commitment to it.

Yes, and from a very young age.

Everyone was against opposition to the slave trade, virtually.

It was a crucial part of the British economy,

so it was like trying to abolish the automotive industry today.

I read that at the height of the slave trade,

it was 80% of Britain's foreign earnings

and that's what Wilberforce was fighting against.

We all like to have done something, made a difference.

Wilberforce, above any other person sitting on the back benches

of Parliament over these hundreds of years,

can truly say he did that.

I think he had a moment of conversion, didn't he?

He did. He was a bit of a lad, was William. He liked his drinking,

he liked his gambling and then had this moment of conversion

when he decided that he would dedicate his life to greater,

more Christian, more moral purposes

and he did that for the rest of his life

and brought all the different religions together in this city.

For 30 years before Queen Victoria ascended the throne,

the Royal Navy patrolled the Atlantic,

stopping any ships suspected of what Parliament had decreed

an illegal trade.

Does the spirit of Wilberforce live on in Kingston upon Hull today?

It does. We have the Wilberforce Institute,

which is probably the world's leading expert in modern-day slavery.

Desmond Tutu is its patron and one of its founders

and Hull is in the lead in monitoring

and trying to do something about modern-day slavery,

because there are still 20-26 million people being traded for slavery,

for prostitution, children being traded for mining

all kinds of dangerous substances - it still goes on to this day.

Might William Wilberforce be dismayed that 200 years

after his achievement, we're discussing slavery again.

He would be dismayed,

but it doesn't detract one iota from his great achievement.

We need the spirit of Wilberforce to reawaken to actually deal

with modern slavery and I think if we do that, we do the great man justice.

After a long but very inspiring day,

I'm getting back on the train at the beautiful Hull Station

to find a handy place to rest

by wending my way north through the Yorkshire Wolds.

My next stop, Beverley, has, according to my guide book,

"a noble minster,

"built on the spot where St John of Beverley was buried,

"whose standard was carried by King Edward I

"in his invasion of Scotland to encourage his soldiers."

Those men stood and delivered,

which was the command given in a different context by highwaymen.

Intriguingly,

the establishment where I'm planning to rest my head for the night

has a connection to those infamous outlaws.

This former coaching inn played host

to one particularly notorious 18th-century bandit.

I'm meeting up with manager Mark Coubrough to find out more.

Well, now, the Beverley Arms is the only place

in my Bradshaw's Guide that is recommended, so here I am.

But I think it has a story to do with highwaymen, doesn't it?

Yes, I believe Dick Turpin stayed here at the hotel

and apparently checked in under an alias of the name Mr Palmer.

During the course of his stay,

there was an altercation with the landlord,

due to the landlord's cockerel making all these noises

in the early hours of the morning,

at which point, our Mr Palmer turns around

and shoots the landlord's cockerel,

so the landlord gets the constabulary involved,

who come and promptly arrest our Mr Palmer.

Mr Palmer, while sat in the Beverley jails,

decides he'll write to his brother

and ask for a sixpence to be able to get him out of prison.

Unfortunately, the postmaster is his headmaster from school,

recognises his handwriting,

then gets in touch with the Beverley constabulary and says,

"You've not arrested a Mr Palmer.

"You've actually arrested THE Dick Turpin."

So when they did realise they had the famous highwayman Dick Turpin,

what was his fate?

At that point, I think the magistrates got together

and said, "You know what, we'll get a much bigger audience

"if we send him to York,"

and that's where they eventually hung him

and did all the ghastly things that they needed to do to him.

Well, I hope it's not the fate of everyone

-who hangs out at The Beverley Arms.

-I hope not! No.

Well, after a thankfully uneventful night

without even so much as a cockerel to interrupt my sleep,

I've just enough time before I depart on my journey

to take in the town's most famous landmark.

According to my guide book, Beverley Minister is 333 feet long

and I can well believe it.

On this trip, I have seen some superb ecclesiastical buildings

and it's a reminder that for most of the last 2,000 years,

religion mattered to us much more than anything else.

To reach my first destination of the day,

I'm continuing north from Beverley and heading for the coast.

I'll be leaving the train at Scarborough,

about which Bradshaw's is enthusiastic.

"Its situation is extremely beautiful and romantic,

"being on the recess of a fine, open bay

"and the town consists of several spacious streets

"of handsome, well-built houses rising in successive tiers

"from the shore in the form of an amphitheatre."

But I'm going there to hear about one who was a prisoner of conscience

and who might be forgiven, therefore,

for not having very happy memories of Scarborough.

Tickets and passes, please.

Thank you very much, love.

I'm on my way to Scarborough.

-Does Scarborough still attract a lot of holidaymakers?

-Yes.

They go off into Scarborough for day trips and everything.

-And they're carrying picnic baskets?

-Yeah, everything.

We're always busy.

It's always nice to see all the kids being energetic and excited.

When they're coming back, they're great, cos they're tired,

and they're quiet on the train. Going there, they're loud.

The immense popularity of this buoyant beachside town

really took hold in 1845 when the Scarborough to York railway opened

and brought with it waves of Victorian tourists.

One of the attractions they flocked to

was the town's evocative 12th-century castle.

Built by a succession of medieval kings,

this royal fortress endured countless attacks.

In the middle of the 17th century,

it served briefly as a prison

and it's that period of the castle's history that interests me.

What a wonderful view.

Bradshaw's tells me that,

"Scarborough Castle crowns a precipitous rock

"about 300 feet above the waters.

"As this old feudal stronghold looks down upon the sea on one side,

"it has the town of Scarborough stretched below it.

"In 1666 George Fox, founder of the Society of Friends,

"was imprisoned in the castle,"

and so here we find the beauty of nature

and the ugliness of the conflicts of man in the name of God.

Born in 1624,

George Fox had a radical approach to Christianity

that gained him popularity and persecution in equal measure.

Society of Friends members, known as Quakers,

relied on conscience as the basis of morality

and believed in the equality of men and women.

Many of the slave trade abolitionists

who joined William Wilberforce's campaign were Quakers.

So was George Bradshaw, so I can imagine this Scarborough site

would have been significant for him.

Rachael Holland is an historic properties steward,

who I'm hoping will offer some more details

on how George Fox came to be incarcerated here.

What, as far as you know, was his crime?

As far as I'm aware, his main crime was refusing to swear

an oath of allegiance to Charles II.

At this point, we've just finished the Civil War, Cromwell's just died,

and we now have the Restoration. Charles II is now in power,

but this is a time when religion and politics

were very closely intertwined

so for George Fox to be refusing to swear allegiance to the king

and refusing to swear any allegiance to any sort of physical church,

it was seen as being very subversive.

What was Fox's objection to swearing an oath?

Basically, he says in his diaries that any hypocrite can swear an oath.

He says that loyalty is proven by deeds, not by words

and at that time, when everybody has already sworn one oath,

saying that they would uphold Cromwell's rule

and then to turn around and say,

"No, actually we are going to swear an oath to Charles,"

I can see where George Fox was coming from.

Their unconventional views

enraged the religious and political establishment

and between 1662 and 1670,

as many as 6,000 Quakers found themselves in jail.

Fox's spell at Scarborough Castle

was just one of eight prison sentences that he endured.

Rachael, I am trying to imagine the conditions of Fox's imprisonment.

Bradshaw's tells me that Fox speaks

of three different rooms that he successively occupied,

and "one of them faced the sea, and laying much open,

"the wind drove in the rain forcibly,

"so that water came over his head and ran about the room

"so that he was fain to skim it up with a platter."

Terrible conditions.

Very terrible conditions.

I believe as well that that was the last room that he was held in,

which many sources believe to be Cockhill Tower,

which he called "Purgatory".

Prolonged exposure to the elements caused Fox's fingers to swell

to double their size and his health suffered greatly,

but his faith never faltered.

In 1666, he was released from Scarborough Castle

and by the time of his death in 1691,

the Quaker movement had more than 50,000 followers.

How was he treated by those who were given charge of him?

It was atrocious.

The soldiers stole his bread and his water,

but worse was the fact that he was treated

something like an animal in a zoo.

They gawked at him, he says in his diaries,

and they tried to convert him back to the standard faith at the time,

but it seems that he converted more of them than they did of him.

I'd never thought of 16 months in Scarborough

as being the ultimate test of faith

My time here is measured in minutes,

because I have a train to catch,

taking me west to the final destination of today's journey,

which also has a Quaker connection.

SHE BLOWS WHISTLE

My next stop is what Bradshaw's calls

"the ancient capital of York and seat of the Primate of England.

"Situated at the junction of the three Ridings of Yorkshire

"on the River Ouse.

"Boots, shoes, combs and confectionary

"are the chief articles made here."

The men of chocolate, Joseph Rowntree -

who was a Quaker like George Bradshaw -

and Joseph Terry, have left sweet memories in York.

Its prime position on the rivers Ouse and Foss gave York easy access

to imported goods, including sugar and cocoa beans,

while the fertile Vale of York

provided many other essential confectionery ingredients.

When York also became a railway hub in the 19th century,

it had the perfect recipe for a lucrative sweet-making industry.

I'm here to meet Alex Hutchinson, who's the historian and archivist

for one of the companies that took full advantage.

Here we are surveying the vast estate that was Rowntree's.

How did this enormous business begin?

Well, in 1862, Henry Isaac Rowntree took over a local cocoa business

and he didn't do a very good job. His brother Joseph came to help him

and he turned it from a drinking cocoa business

into the huge sweet factory we know today.

That drinking cocoa, what was it like? Was it a good product?

Their first cocoa would have been quite unpalatable.

It was seen as a health food.

They were using very, very primitive manufacturing methods,

so it would have been quite astringent and gritty.

Quakers are strongly associated with chocolate making.

-Why?

-In 1860, we passed a law, the Food and Drugs Act,

which prevented people from putting anything poisonous

or hazardous into food.

Before that you could put in anything you liked

and so people tended to trust Quakers

if they were buying food. and with chocolate you would sometimes get

unscrupulous chocolate makers adding wax or paint. But a Quaker? Never.

At its peak, Rowntree's employed 14,000 people.

As Quakers given to philanthropy and social reform,

they built a public library, park and theatre for their workers,

and also created a model village,

providing affordable and decent homes

as an alternative to inner-city slums.

Known as New Earswick,

the village was built to include plenty of green space,

its own village hall...

but no pub, and it remains dry to this day.

There were three things that the Rowntrees really objected to,

which they called "concrete forms of sin"

and that was alcoholism, priestcraft and Toryism.

-Ah, in ascending order.

-Yes.

When the entrepreneurial Joseph stepped in to help his brother,

he set about expanding and modernising the company's output.

He developed a range of chocolate products

and his masterstroke was hiring a Frenchman to make fruit pastilles,

a trade dominated by the French.

Today, in the factory's development kitchen,

I'm going back to where it all began...

So we have the cocoa beans,

which are roasted and ground down into cocoa nibs.

..by helping head confectioner Vicky Geal

to try to replicate that original 1860s cocoa recipe.

Start grinding.

I'm just grinding these down,

-trying to get them into a powder, am I?

-Yep.

This takes quite a lot of effort, doesn't it?

It does, it's very labour intensive, which is why we're glad now

we've got the machinery to be able to do this

instead of doing it by hand.

You didn't tell me that!

Right, whoa!

What we need to do now is add your Icelandic moss.

Icelandic moss?

Why would you add moss?

In the 1860s, the Rowntrees added a kind of lichen called Icelandic moss

to their cocoa to improve the health benefits, also to absorb the fat.

Er...eurgh!

Bitter aftertaste.

For teetotal Quakers like the Rowntrees,

cocoa was a wholesome alternative to the alcoholic drinks

which they blamed for many of society's ills.

Well, it looks as appetising as mud.

How does it taste?

It's full of bits, but I don't know.

If you were a Victorian, it'd be new.

You'd probably be willing to pay for that.

If you thought it was doing you some good...

Yeah, well, it tastes bad enough

that you would think it was doing you some good.

Finishing today's journey with a nourishing Victorian elixir

seems rather fitting...even if it was a little lumpy and bitter.

During the course of my travels with Bradshaw's,

I've discovered how much we owe the Victorians

for our physical environment -

our railway network, our sewers, even our parliament in London,

but we also inherited many of their values.

By degrees, they built our parliamentary democracy,

abolished slavery and child labour, universalised education,

hugely enlarging the rights of man.

The rights of women, however,

in particular the right to vote,

were left over to be dealt with in the 20th century.

Next time, I'll feel the heat of a Victorian furnace...

Look at that, a nice little flambe for us.

..learn how investigative journalism was born...

He built the devil up, and just like any good newspaper man,

he took great delight in knocking the devil down.

..and hear how a remarkable Bible survived down the centuries.

-It's quite a large book to lose, actually.

-It certainly is!