Greenock to Larkhall 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 industry,

society and leisure time.

As I crisscross the country 150 years later, it helps me

to discover the Britain of today.

My journey this week will take me across Scotland from west to east.

I began at the Firth of Clyde

and am now heading through the Scottish Lowlands towards Glasgow.

Then north to Stirling and Perth,

close to where the kings of Scotland were crowned.

I'll travel on east to Fife and the famous university town

of St Andrews, finally heading south to Scotland's capital,

where my journey ends.

This leg begins at Clydeside's westernmost industrial town...

crosses by paddle steamer

to the Victorian holiday resort of Helensburgh.

From there, it's on to the mighty city of Glasgow,

before heading south to the former mining town of Blantyre.

And my journey ends in Larkhall in South Lanarkshire.

I meet a seagoing beauty...

And she was the last of the Clydebuilt excursion

paddle steamers to work on the Clyde.

..discover how a Victorian hero nearly met his end...

LION ROARS AND WHIP CRACKS

RIFLE BLASTS

..and rise to a bake-off challenge.

There's always a point when a dough says to you that it's had enough.

-Oh.

-And I believe that was about two minutes ago.

MICHAEL LAUGHS

I'm continuing my journey across southern Scotland,

which has now brought me to the area of Glasgow.

A city which had a university in the 15th century,

was a centre of The Enlightenment in the 18th,

laid claim to being the second city of the British Empire

in the 19th and then led in design and fashion.

There's a clue in Bradshaw's

to Glasgow's success in industrialisation.

"At Bowling, near Dumbarton, is a pillar to the memory of Henry Bell,

"who ran the first steamer on the Clyde, The Comet, in 1812."

Incredibly early for a steam-powered vehicle,

before the Napoleonic Wars had run their course.

AUTOMATED VOICE: We are now approaching Greenock Central.

Please mind the gap when alighting from this train.

The impressive River Clyde is the heart of Glasgow.

In Victorian times,

the deepwater port was the centre of its great shipbuilding industry.

The city made some of the world's greatest vessels,

and also exported some of the finest railway rolling stock.

I'm meeting local historian Stewart Noble to

find out about the pioneering steamship Comet.

Stewart, for me, with my interest in railways,

it's kind of surprising that this took to the water in 1812!

Long before railway locomotion.

Because roads were in such bad condition

and the River Clyde was only just navigable and no more,

Henry Bell, the developer, the man who had the idea, he wanted to

bring his guests in comfort and speed from Glasgow

to his hotel in Helensburgh.

Born in 1767, Bell trained as a stonemason before

pioneering steampower in vessels.

How did Henry Bell have the idea of putting a steam engine into a ship?

Well, he was trained as a millwright,

so he had a good idea of how machinery worked.

He'd also seen steam engines working in industry and so on, and so because

transport was so difficult between Glasgow

and Helensburgh at that time,

he decided to put a steam engine into a ship and had it

built here in Port Glasgow, very close to where we're standing.

Bell commissioned a local shipbuilder to construct

a 25-ton wooden paddle steamer driven by

a then-mighty three-horsepower engine to transport his hotel guests

the 20 miles between Glasgow and Helensburgh.

How successful was it against its more old-fashioned competition?

It depends how you define success. It wasn't

much faster than it could be coming by coach, it depended partly

whether the tide and the wind were in favour of The Comet or not.

But it was certainly more comfortable.

Following Comet's maiden voyage in 1812, Bell inaugurated

a regular passenger service between Glasgow, Greenock and Helensburgh.

And in the following years,

The Comet spawned a range of other steamships sailing on the Clyde.

To celebrate The Comet, this replica was built.

NEWSREEL MUSIC

-NEWSREADER:

-At Lithgow's Yard, thoughts would turn back 150 years

to the day when Comet was launched.

That was the name given to the first practical steamship

to carry passengers.

I wouldn't want to wound your Glasgow pride,

but it's quite a small ship, why so?

Well, ships weren't very big in those days,

shipyards really were just places where people built boats

on beaches, they weren't the big modern items we think of nowadays.

While the replica is landlocked, happily, there is

a paddle steamer still plying the old route.

The Waverly has been crossing the Clyde for more than 60 years.

Bradshaw's remarks that, "Any traveller, for pleasure,

"who finds himself within Glasgow's smoky and dingy precincts in search

"of the picturesque, the beautiful and the romantic,

"has only to choose the first conveyance westward,

"whether it be a Greenock train or a Clyde steamboat,

"to find what he seeks and be gratified."

And on a day like today, you can see what the book means.

The industrial worker in the slums of Glasgow could escape to this

magnificent waterscape if he or she had the price of the fare.

PIPER PLAYS

But back in 1975, The Waverly seemed destined for the shipbreaker's,

until a charity rescued her in a deal that was sealed for £1.

What an exciting moment - boarding a wonderful, beautiful paddle steamer.

HORN BLARES

A moment to savour,

because she's the last seagoing paddle steamer in the world.

Magnificently restored, with towering funnels and timber decks,

it's a delight to feel the power of her steam engines beneath my feet.

For those of us whose image of the Clyde is of shipbuilding yards,

this vision is a great surprise.

As Bradshaw says,

"The scenery is remarkable for its picturesque beauty."

The hills, the valleys,

the mountains...and these wonderful skies.

Captain, what is the history of The Waverly?

Waverly was built in Glasgow by

The London and North Eastern Railway Company.

She was the last of the Clydebuilt excursion paddle steamers

to work on the Clyde, and indeed, anywhere in the UK and the world.

It's lovely to think that this old girl is still

pulling in the passengers.

-Hello, ladies.

-ALL: Hello!

-What's the attraction?

-It's a good day out.

Especially when you get lovely Scottish weather, as well.

-What made you come on today?

-My daughter.

-Yes.

Did you know the ship?

We know the ship, my father worked on the paddle steamers, so...

-Bit of a trip down memory lane, then?

-Exactly.

Helensburgh was founded in the 18th century by Sir James Colquhoun.

He planned the resort and built and named it after his wife Helen.

But I'm bound for Glasgow,

so it's back on the train for a short trip to the city.

"40 years ago, there were scores of towns within the kingdom

"superior to Glasgow in wealth, extent and population.

"Now, it has a larger population than Edinburgh, Dublin, Liverpool

"or Manchester, and combines within itself the advantages

"possessed by the last two mentioned."

But Glasgow didn't want to compete only in terms of industry

and size - but also for style.

Glasgow at the time of my guidebook was

the second city of the British Empire.

It was riding an industrial boom,

and its wealth and outlook were evident in its grand architecture.

Many of its most iconic buildings were designed by

the architect and artist Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

I'm meeting Alison Brown, an expert in the Glasgow Style.

-Hello, Alison.

-Hello, Michael, nice to meet you.

What a fantastic spread, and what a beautiful tearoom, tell me about it.

Well, this is the Willow Tearooms,

it was designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh for

tearoom entrepreneur Catherine Cranston,

and it opened on the 28th of October 1903.

Was Charles Rennie Mackintosh in the habit of designing tearooms?

He was, this was his fourth tearoom that he designed for Miss Cranston.

What distinguishes this tearoom was that Mackintosh designed

the whole tearoom in one go,

from the external facade to the tearoom interiors, and we are in the

Room de Luxe, and to come up here to have your tea you paid

a penny extra, because the design was extra special.

This innovative setting reflects Miss Cranston's personality.

At a time when few women were in business, she defied convention.

She cannily spotted a gap in the market for

respectable places for people of quality to meet.

She was ahead of her time.

She understood ideas of marketing

and branding before they became the terms that we now know today.

She championed the young artists and designers that were coming up,

emerging not just from Glasgow,

but from Edinburgh and elsewhere in Scotland.

Glasgow is the one industrial city in Britain that actually

created its own distinct version of Art Nouveau.

Slightly geometric, elongated sinuous forms.

Basically, the Glasgow style refers to the art that was coming

out of the Glasgow School of Art and from the pupils and teachers that

were working there from the period from 1890 through to about 1914.

Mackintosh, also a student,

developed his very distinctive trademark style.

The pierced square motif is instantly recognisable.

This is Mackintosh's most luxurious tearoom.

I think you can see by the quantity of mirrored glass

and stained-glass and metalwork and the furniture design.

And the reviews that were in the local newspapers today after

this building opened commented on this

being the sort of high point of his tearoom design.

But, fully to appreciate his genius,

I'm told that I must visit the Glasgow School of Art.

The School of Art is considered his masterwork.

It's an absolutely incredible building.

Purpose-built and still used for its original function

of being an art school.

Mackintosh was 28 years old and a junior draughtsman

at a Glasgow architecture firm

when he drew up the plans for the building.

The dramatic Art Nouveau design took about 12 years to build

and opened in 1909.

The use of heavy sandstone walls, combined with huge glass windows,

was bold for its time.

Even the decorative ironwork had a function,

as a support for the window cleaner's ladder.

Scotland almost lost its internationally celebrated treasure.

Fire crews from across the country

have spent the afternoon trying to douse the flames.

This, a school famous for its architecture,

and the artists it's produced.

It was full of students when the blaze broke out.

All were led to safety.

I'm meeting Douglas Anderson, former pupil,

now architect in charge of the restoration.

So, Douglas, given the severity of the fire,

I'm rather amazed to find so much of the building intact.

Yes, we were fortunate that the fire service was able to save

most of the building as it is.

Architecturally speaking, what was so special about this building?

Mackintosh was an innovator.

At his time, he dragged architecture in Glasgow away from

the Victorian styles and started looking at modern styles and efforts.

As Art Nouveau was coming in, he embraced Art Nouveau.

He understood what was happening on the Continent. And this was fresh.

But sometimes it was difficult for Glasgow to understand

what he was trying to achieve.

The building was criticised in its day when it opened

but, everybody, as the years went on, people embraced it, understood it

and really, looked upon it as an inspiration for new building.

The key to Mackintosh's approach was practicality.

Here, he created rooms for artists filled with light.

Mackintosh had a fantastic eye for detail.

If you can see round about you what he's developed here

in terms of timber engineering, the detail, the Art Nouveau details,

the carvings, this is what really made him very famous.

He couldn't pass by any detail, whether it was doors, trusses,

walls, panelling.

All this was magnificent.

What does the building mean to Glasgow?

Glasgow's in love with Mackintosh architecture.

This building is such a special place for Glaswegians

to understand, they visit it.

I grew up here, I studied here.

It was a very important part of my career,

as it was for many artists in Glasgow.

Throughout the whole century it's been here,

it's such an important building.

The architect introduced ingenious and innovative practical touches

to the Art School's bold design.

He added a frame to the director's studio, a portcullis to draw

and lower canvases too big for the director's stairs.

Mackintosh leaves nothing, however small, to chance.

This is the Mackintosh Room, which is our main meeting room.

But Mackintosh was a master of light.

This is what's so appealing about this space.

Natural light coming through these east windows, as well as

artificial light that he designed, uniquely, to illuminate the space.

Thankfully, much of Rennie Mackintosh's design

has survived, but the upper studios were destroyed

and the roof was left in a very poor condition.

Now, you were a student here.

Do you regard it as a great honour that you are charged with

the restoration of Mackintosh's work?

Absolutely. I loved my time here.

This is a good way to end a career the way I started it,

in the Mackintosh School.

At the end of another day led by Bradshaw's,

I'm staying at Glasgow Central Station's own hotel.

I'm up early to leave behind the city's grandeur and hurly-burly.

Bye.

I'm ten seconds from the lobby of my hotel and I'm in the heart

of the concourse of Glasgow Central Station,

I believe, one of the finest in the British Isles.

Built by the Victorians, amplified by the Edwardians,

with its very distinctive rounded shop fronts in dark wood.

It provides a magnificent gateway to Glasgow,

not least for intercity passengers arriving from England.

I'm negotiating the station's lower platforms

to head south to Lanarkshire.

In the 19th century, coal and iron manufacture took off,

and Scotland's boom began.

People flocked to open mines and set up furnaces to make their fortunes.

I'm headed now for Blantyre,

and an 1880s edition of my Bradshaw's reminds me

of the dark side of the Industrial Revolution.

"200 miners were killed here by an explosion in 1877,

"on Blantyre's blackest day."

The tragedy happened

when a flammable gas was ignited by a naked flame.

The explosion left 92 widows and 250 fatherless children

and was Scotland's worst-ever mining accident.

Blantyre.

Today, the colliery is long gone, but along the banks of the Clyde,

there are still traces of Blantyre's heyday as a cotton manufacturer.

It feels as though I'm crossing a bridge to another time.

Conditions in the mills were terrible.

Today I'm interested in a self-made,

working-class hero who clawed his way out of them,

out of poverty and on to help abolish slavery in Africa.

David Livingstone was one of the first medical missionaries to

enter southern and central Africa.

Alison Ritchie is the manager of the David Livingstone Museum.

This is the Livingstones' home.

It all seems very picturesque.

What was it actually like in their day?

Probably not so picturesque.

This room was the entire house. There were nine people that lived in here.

You had absolutely no privacy.

Everything was done in this room from the cooking, sleeping,

and under the bed is the toilet.

But not nearly enough beds for so many people.

No, we think his parents slept in this bed here.

The five children on the higher bed together and the grandparents

would have slept on this bed here, which would come sliding out.

The families must have been packed like sardines into these

tenement blocks, because the mill employed 2,000 workers.

And David Livingstone himself worked as a cotton hand.

He did, he worked as a piecer in the mills, from the age of ten.

He would have worked for 14 hours a day, six days a week,

in really horrendous conditions..

Lots of mill children suffered horrendous injuries

and illnesses from the strain and danger of their work.

So how on earth did this child break out from his background?

Education, really.

He went to school at eight o'clock after he finished work

and would go to school until ten o'clock at night.

After that, he would come back here and sit out in the hallway

and read books until midnight, even one in the morning,

when he would come back in and go to bed.

He would then have to get up at five o'clock the next morning

to do it all over again.

At age 19, Livingstone was promoted and his increased salary

enabled him to save to study medicine at University.

He became a missionary doctor and, in 1841,

was posted to the edge of the Kalahari desert.

He made it his mission

to fight against the evils of the slave trade.

This is a letter he wrote to his son. It's very religious in tone.

It starts, "I hope you're a good boy and remembering your Creator,

"and his son, Jesus, with love, every day of your life."

So religion is really what drove Livingstone in Africa.

Yes, although he later expanded this to both his crusade against

the slave trade and his ideas of how Africa could develop economically.

He believed that fair trade, along with the end of the slave trade,

could bring peace and prosperity to many regions of Africa.

In 1852, Livingstone began a four-year expedition to find

a route from the Upper Zambezi to the coast.

He travelled through swamps and nearly died from disease.

In 1965, naturalist David Attenborough retraced

the great man's footsteps.

And so he came to this spot

and looked right over the very edge of the falls.

The first white man ever to do so.

Even today, this spot is seldom visited

because in order to get to it, you have to weave your way through

the rapids just above the edge of the falls and when you contemplate

what lies immediately ahead this can be a little alarming.

Until then, Livingstone had used only local geographical

names for his discoveries, but here for the first time

he broke with tradition and called these the Victoria Falls.

-And this is how he found his way.

-This is his sextant.

So he used this to calculate latitude and longitude

and he was very accurate, despite having no formal training.

Because of the measurements he took we can actually trace his

position every day to within about half a mile.

But perhaps what sealed Livingstone's fame

in Victorian Britain was his escape from the jaws of a lion.

ROARING

When his body was examined years later, his identity was

verified by his damaged arm bone.

Livingstone died of malaria and dysentery in 1873.

His heart was buried in Africa,

but his body was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey.

David Livingstone was the perfect Victorian hero.

The Christian self-made man opposed to slavery with modern

ideas on economy.

A brave and ambitious explorer who took the British flag to the

darkest corners of the earth.

He was a lion amongst men.

My journey continues south,

this time for a short 15-minute hop to Larkhall

before carrying on to Strathaven.

Situated on the edge of the Avon Valley, Bradshaw's notes its

fine reputation for weavers and horses.

It's also a home to Scotland's oldest bakery.

And I'm meeting its baker, Barry Taylor.

Barry, in the mid-19th century, in the west of Scotland,

would the working man and woman have had access to good bread?

I believe so, yes, on a local basis,

little bakeries working on the corners.

As I came in the door I see that the business has been here from 1820.

-A family business?

-It is, yes.

I am the sixth generation of Taylors to take the helm here.

We have been in the same premises,

albeit it has changed over the years.

Our family were farmers outside Strathaven.

And one of the family decided to be a baker. And good on him.

It's a good decision.

And keeping up with the family, Barry makes a point of using

traditional unrefined grains, such as spelt.

We are going to get stuck into this as a Victorian baker would.

-That's a lovely sticky mess, isn't it?

-It is.

But hopefully by the end of all its manipulation it should be

a lovely smooth dough.

And this point you can perceive how hard making bread on a big

scale would be.

I am finding it pretty hard work now.

I think we can safely say that you have produced a sticky mess.

But one which we can make into something beautiful, I assure you.

Victorian bakers worked over 100 hours a week

in gruelling temperatures up to 90 degrees Fahrenheit.

Basically you need to fold and stretch,

but what you want to avoid is tearing the structure of it.

Yikes!

We are going to start, really gently, fold the dough.

You can repeatedly fold over a piece of dough, gently squeezing it,

but not tearing it

and you will end up with something that is a super-smooth-looking dough.

-Hmm!

-OK!

And there is always a point

when a dough says to you that it's had enough.

And I believe that was about two minutes ago.

Thankfully, I don't have to trust my bread to a Victorian

range with its fluctuating temperatures.

After 40 minutes, the loaves are ready.

'And that fantastic aroma helps me to understand

'the good odour in which each generation of Taylors was held.'

I had no idea that spelt smelt so good!

At the end of the 19th-century, Glasgow produced half Britain's

tonnage of shipping and a quarter of the world's locomotives.

As the second city of the British Empire, it became

a centre of culture and design.

With its art school and Charles Rennie Mackintosh,

pride in the city swelled as surely as a spelt loaf.

'Next time I meet the kings of molten metal...'

Oh, my goodness. That is an extraordinary sight.

-Absolutely vast, isn't it?

-Yeah.

-What a scale this was built on.

'..uncover the Victorian love affair with Scotland...'

Everybody came to the Falls of Clyde specifically to see Corra Linn,

the largest waterfall,

and the largest waterfall in Britain as well.

'..and visit the home of a mighty brew.'

It's still a family secret. I had passed down to me by my father

and I've now passed it through to my daughter.