Plymouth to Porthcurno 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 now completing my railway journey from Dover to Land's End.

These tracks over the years have brought millions of holiday makers

to beaches in Devon and Cornwall, but today, my focus is more strategic.

I want to know how we kept the navy supplied with rum,

and how Victorians shrank imperial connections from weeks to minutes.

Following my Bradshaw's, I'm travelling from east to west.

My journey started at the crossing point closest to France

and took me through military defences and seaside resorts

and across glorious countryside.

I'll end at the first

and last place in England.

My final leg starts in Plymouth.

I make a stop in Saltash and St Austell,

before travelling on to the last station in England.

'On this journey, I attempt to learn the difficult art of crimping...'

Don't think much of yours, Jason.

'..marvel at one of Brunel's finest feats...'

It's lovely to see a structure that's still here so long after

it was built, still in use for its original purpose.

'..discover how a small bay in Cornwall

'effectively controlled the British Empire...'

Cornwall is still the hub of communication.

They carry messages all over the world.

'..and pick up the essentials of the Cornish language.'

Yeghes da!

As I near the end of my journey, my first stop today will be Plymouth,

described by Bradshaw's as,

"a first-class fortress and dockyard in Devonshire.

"The dockyard and harbour are at Devonport,

"the victualling office is at Stonehouse,

and there are other establishments,

but Plymouth is the common name for all.

"Victualling" - that's an interesting word, bearing in mind

that a navy fights on its stomach.

Built up around the natural harbour of Plymouth Sound,

the city has forever been defined by its maritime location.

It's been home to the Royal Navy since the 17th century,

and today is the largest naval base in western Europe.

The vast site employs 2,500 personnel

and generates about 10% of Plymouth's income.

This railway station opened in 1877, connecting Plymouth to London.

Intrigued by how the navy kept itself in food and drink,

I'm at the Royal William Victualling Yard

to meet Bob Cook, a volunteer from the Naval Heritage Centre.

Bob, according to Bradshaw's, the victualling office is "a quadrangle

"which costs £1.5m and includes

"biscuit-making machinery, cooperage and immense provision stores."

Why was this built and when?

It started, the concept, from 1822, to centralise

much of their storage and their manufacturing processes,

instead of depending on local contractors

for their various supplies. In the Napoleonic Wars,

the Victualling Board was responsible for servicing at least

250,000 men - the population of Plymouth - all over the world.

Following the Napoleonic Wars, the Royal Navy

wanted to improve its logistics, ready for any future conflict.

Architect Sir John Rennie was commissioned to build

a fine collection of food-provisioning buildings.

How did the provisions move from here to the men o' war?

Basically, by being transported from the harbour here

on small sailing barges called hoys.

They could take them either up to the ships or else out towards

Plymouth Sound if anything was anchored in that direction.

What was the range of facilities here?

Range of provisions, basically, very simply, a pound of meat a day,

a gallon of beer, a pound, usually, of hardtack ship's biscuit,

things like this.

Rum was one of the things supplied from here.

The rum was supplied and, of course, that was one feature

of the building behind me, the brewhouse -

massive, very tall, rum vats.

Rum for the men and gin for the officers?

Not necessarily. Yes, it was one of the spirits available,

different strengths for different ranks of the sailors.

Only the officers could stand the hard stuff!

-Bob, thank you very much, indeed.

-Good to meet you.

-Bye-bye.

Spirits formed part of the daily ration up until 1970,

when the Admiralty Board decided that alcohol might be

incompatible with the safe operation of machinery and weapons.

Tots of rum and gin were staples on any outgoing ship.

I'm meeting master distiller Sean Harrison at Plymouth Gin,

founded in 1793.

-Hello, Sean.

-Hello, Michael, welcome to Plymouth Gin.

What an amazing building - what is the history?

It's very old and very interesting.

The oldest part is about 600 years old,

which was built by Blackfriars monks,

which is why we're called the Black Friars Distillery.

The bit we're in at the moment is about 400 years old,

and this is where every single drop

of Plymouth Gin has ever been made.

What about its relationship with the navy?

Because the navy went around the world, and the Empire grew

during the Victorian era, and everywhere the Royal Navy went,

-they took gin with them.

-What is navy-strength gin?

Navy-strength gin is gin at 57%.

A couple of hundred years ago, they couldn't work out how much

alcohol there was in the product, so they used to prove it,

mix it with gunpowder and light the gunpowder.

At 57% and above, the gunpowder would still fizzle and go bang,

so it proved there was alcohol in the product.

How did gin begin its happy marriage with tonic?

It goes all the way back to the Indian Raj.

The guys wanted to have their gin because they liked it,

and they wanted to have their tonic,

which was a quinine-based drink, to protect themselves against malaria.

So, the two just got brought together.

What's all this hubble-bubble here?

What we see here is a spirit safe, and this is gin.

And this is our first chance to see it,

and making sure that the still is doing what we hope it will do.

-It's raining gin.

-It's raining gin, yep.

In the 17th century, gin reached Britain from the Netherlands,

where it was prized for its medicinal properties.

It soon became a cheap tipple, taken up by the poor

and the cause of many social ills.

In the mid-18th century, laws regulated its manufacture and sale.

During the Victorian era, the quality of gin was improved

and it climbed the social ladder.

OK, Michael, here's a chance to make some gin.

-Whoopee!

-So what we have got in front of us is eight ingredients.

The one in the middle, which is juniper.

Right, junipers we've got to have.

That'll be fine. Slowly, slowly tip.

You've now made gin,

so now what we're going to do is massage the flavours a little bit.

What was newly popular at the time of my Bradshaw's Guide?

Well, the great thing about gin is, it's linked to the flavours

we discovered as we go through that 150-year period, from 1750 to 1900.

-So, liquorice was becoming quite popular at that time.

-No.

-Not good?

We've got orange and lemon, coriander seeds, angelica root.

So there's loads of different flavours you can play around with.

Being Spanish, a touch of lemon.

So you just need to rip it up so it goes through the hole. Quite small.

Think I might just have one more flavour. Coriander.

And if that's all your ingredients,

that's the makings of your gin. Now you need to pick it up

and we need to take it over to the heat source,

where we're going to boil it and create gin.

That's it, just put it into there, and then what we're going to do

is connect it from one side to the other with this piece of glass here.

And then we put on some water.

Effectively, what we are going to do is heat this up,

turn it into a vapour, it's going to come over here

to this water condenser, where we're going to take the heat

out of it and collect 100ml. And that will be your gin.

-That will be Portillo's Ruin.

-Yes.

As Royal Navy ships conveyed Plymouth Gin around the globe,

it became, by 1900, the world's largest volume brand of gin,

with 1,000 cases a week going to New York alone.

I wonder whether I've made an equally-appealing blend.

So, Michael, here's your gin that you made earlier.

Fantastic.

Ooh!

That is powerful.

So if we pour a little measure into each of the glasses.

-Those Spanish lemons are really coming through.

-They are.

Here goes the taste...

I...am a gin-ius.

I'm joining the Cornish Main Line, constructed by two railway companies

during the 1850s.

As I leave Devon behind, I pass into

my eighth county of this adventure,

and a moment I've been anticipating.

And now, one of the great treats of my journey,

the Royal Albert Bridge, crossing the River Tamar,

carrying us into Cornwall. Built by Isambard Kingdom Brunel,

one of his finest achievements and one of the most

beautiful pieces of infrastructure on all of the UK rail network.

'I'm alighting at Saltash, the nearest station,

'to meet local railway historian Paul Burkhalter.'

Hello, Paul, it's lovely to be in Cornwall, and what a way to arrive.

The Admiralty insisted on a bridge with a 100ft clearance.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel responded with an engineering masterpiece

which he called "the bowstring suspension bridge"

Paul, how complicated was it to build this bridge?

Well, you've got to remember, Michael, that this was

at the forefront of engineering intelligence of the time.

There was no big bridge building expertise in that era,

they had to evolve as they built.

-How long did the project take?

-This took six years to build.

They started in 1853, finished,

as the bridge says, 1859.

Is it really a suspension bridge?

Yes, suspension chains are holding the bridge deck, and the tubes,

the huge tubes at the top,

are forcing the piers outward,

so, yes, it is a form of suspension bridge.

What difference did it make having the bridge?

Oh, tremendous. It opened up Cornwall

to all sorts of new ventures,

particularly in the agricultural world.

So, the railway bridge was not built for the tourists?

No, it wasn't, but it came very soon after,

because the Great Western Railway was a great self-publicist

and promoted the tourist industry.

You had the posters, the artwork talking about the Cornish Riviera,

so yes, it came very quickly after that.

It's looking pristine and handsome at the moment.

It's just had a big restoration.

It has, Network Rail, £15m project, took them five years.

It's only just finished this year and, a few weeks ago,

they organised a celebration walk

across the bridge to mark the end of that project.

You sound quite emotional about this bridge. Would that be right?

It's lovely to see a structure still here

so long after it was built,

still in use for its original purpose.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel. He's just an amazing man.

Yes. And of course, he died not long after the bridge

was opened later that year, in 1859.

-So, it stands as his headstone.

-Yes.

Back on the rails, I head out of Saltash, with a last

backward glance at Brunel's work.

I'm travelling to my final destination of the day - St Austell.

Bradshaw's notes the tin and copper mines

being worked in his day.

But as that industry has been largely worked out,

I'm interested in a Cornish element that's on the rise.

Bradshaw's quotes what it claims is a well-known rhyme.

"By Tre, Pol and Pen, you may know Cornish men."

Then, it gives examples from place names -

Tregothnan, Polperro, Penryn,

and it strikes me that, now I'm in Cornwall,

I should learn a few words of Cornish.

The Cornish language was in decline for centuries.

It's undergone a revival in recent decades

and now, around 2,000 people are said to be fluent.

Matthew Clark, Jerry Jeffries and Loveday Jenkin

meet up regularly to keep their language alive.

SHE SPEAKS CORNISH

HE RESPONDS IN CORNISH

I hear you all speaking Cornish.

How unusual does that make you these days?

Not as unusual as it used to be.

-Is that right?

-Yeah, the language is expanding quite a lot.

Would it be an exaggeration to say it was once a dead language?

Well, it's quite interesting to think about that,

because actually, although it wasn't used as a means of communication

for about 70-80 years, it's never really died out,

the knowledge of Cornish, its just as a spoken language.

How closely related is it to other Celtic languages?

Strongest link, I suppose, is between Cornish and Breton.

And, in fact, up to the 1500s, it was mutually intelligible,

Cornish and Breton, at that time.

The three prefixes that people might know who know nothing of Cornish -

tre, pol and pen - what do they actually mean?

Tre, which is like a hamlet or a homestead.

Pol, which is a pool.

Pen, which is a headland or a hill.

And you find those in Brittany and all across the map in Wales

as well, that really makes a strong distinction of Celtic territory.

So, how do I say hello?

-Dydh da.

-Dydh da?

-Dydh da.

-Dydh da.

How do I say thank you?

-Meur ras dhis.

-Meur ras dhis.

How do I say please?

-Mar pleg.

-Mar pleg.

And how do you say cheers?

-Yeghes da.

-Yeghes da.

Yeghes da! Indeed, yeghes da.

It's the morning of my second day and I'm heading out of St Austell,

to enjoy my final stretches of track towards the end of the rail network.

My next stop will be Penzance.

Bradshaw's says, "This flourishing port is at the further end

"of Cornwall and the terminus of the West Cornwall Railway."

But surprisingly, in this region's spicy history,

there's been a strong influence from the east.

End of the line.

'Cornwall is the last county coming from London,

'but the first approaching from the Atlantic.'

'So its links across the sea have been as important as those

'with Britain's hinterland.'

"St Michael's Mount - a conspicuous granite rock. At the top,

"the remains of a priory founded before the Norman conquest

"and, for ages, resorted to by pilgrims.

"In olden times, this was called 'Ictis' and was a tin depot."

Hundreds of years before St Michael appeared as a vision

to fishermen, Greeks had been coming here with their ships, to carry

the tin to their own land, bringing with them saffron and pepper -

ingredients that have had a lasting effect on Cornish cuisine.

The pepper and spices came from afar, but the vegetables

came from the Cornish earth, as did the minerals hewn by the miners.

The miners' needs helped to shape the famous Cornish pasty.

I'm calling in on Jason Jobling, a master baker.

Jason, you, then, have your own very special -

and, I take it, secret - recipe for Cornish pasty?

Yeah, we have. We've been making pasties

since 1860 and we've developed the recipe over a number of years,

so we're quite proud of it, as well.

All right, so not everything is secret about it,

-because I know it's got potato, onion and swede.

-That's right.

And I think you've got some spicy secrets in that mixture there.

Definitely, we've got a long history of trading

-with the peppercorn spices.

-Aha. How do we begin?

So, if you can out roughly a quarter of that bowl of

sliced potatoes into the new bowl...

-One quarter exactly?

-Great.

Half as much swede in there, please.

Precisely one half of the quantity of swede.

And then, half as much of the onion as the swede.

Ooh! Lovely, fragrant, tear-jerking onion.

So, we need some salt. And then the special pepper.

Then, combine that together.

-Turning it through.

-What do we do with this now?

Just turn it through the same as the vegetables.

Oh, that chill of the meat.

Am I right in thinking the tin miners were great devotees

of the Cornish pasty?

Yes, the pasty suited the tin miners, they used to take it down

the mines and they used to eat it by the crimp edge,

and then, after eating it,

-throw the crimp edge down the mine.

-Why?

In the mining process, they had arsenic and other minerals on

their hands, and they didn't have

that touching the food, didn't eat it.

So, it's not just there for decoration?

No, there's a story behind it.

These pasties are made with skirt beef.

The miners would have been used to all sorts of fillings,

from rabbit to mackerel,

flavoured with wild lemon grass and garlic.

Put a handful of vegetables on your round.

-Some skirt beef over the top.

-Over the top.

Little tip, we want to create a nice little bit of gravy,

so we add a little bit of butter on top.

Such a simple idea, but I bet that is really effective.

So, the next stage is folding the pastry over to make a D shape.

-I fear that was the easy bit.

-That was the easy bit.

-So, now we take the corner and make a triangle.

-Make a triangle.

And then, another triangle, making this roping effect.

-Ooh.

-Everyone's got their own unique style. The staff in our bakery

can tell who's crimped each pasty, each crimp is that different.

I think they may be able to quite easily tell who crimped

THIS particular pasty.

OK, let's hold them up, for the sake of comparison.

They're similar.

THEY LAUGH

Don't think much of yours, Jason.

After cooking them in the oven for almost an hour,

I take my version of the Cornish pasty around town

to try it out on the locals.

I've been making some Cornish pasties.

Are you not put off by the fact it's not nicely crimped?

-You could do better.

-Well, with practise, with practise.

Hello. You're not put off by the way I've done them, are you?

It's not crimped properly at all, sorry.

I'm not very good at crimping. What do you think of that?

That looks better than I could do

and I've got an A in catering and hospitality, so...

Have you really?

-Did you make them?

-Yeah.

-That's nice.

-Oh, good, thank you very much.

-You've done a good job.

THEY LAUGH

The secret of a satisfactory pasty is, don't skimp on your crimp.

To end my coastal journey, it's fitting that the final destination

be at the end of Great Britain.

In Bradshaw's day, this headland protruding into the Atlantic

pointed to America and sea routes to the British Empire.

This is Porthcurno, about eight miles from Land's End.

But Land's End is just another way of saying "ocean's beginning"

and ,at the time of my Bradshaw's Guide, the challenge was

how to connect to the world beyond.

The telegraph system was developed in the early 19th century.

Railway companies established and expanded the network on land,

running cables alongside their tracks.

The next challenge was to take telegraph cables across the seas.

I'm meeting Gareth Parry, a volunteer at the Porthcurno Telegraph Museum.

Gareth, when did they first lay ocean cables

terminating here at Porthcurno?

That came in in 1870 and that was the first occasion

when people in this country could communicate

with any other part of the British Empire.

Prior to the cable arriving here at Porthcurno, any message

to Bombay, as it was called then,

could take six or seven weeks.

With a cable, that dropped down to nine minutes.

So, it dramatically changed the way in which this county

controlled the British Empire.

So, the cables that arrived from the Empire came later in history

than the first transatlantic cable - is that right?

Yes, the first successful transatlantic cable

would have been 1866.

These first cables across the Atlantic went from the west coast

of Ireland to a place called Heart's Content in Newfoundland.

Wealthy industrialist John Pender was the leading financier.

The epic undertaking faced major challenges.

Did they know that it was going to work?

No, the first attempt involved two ships having two sets of cable

and trying to connect up. And that failed.

Second attempt in 1858 did establish communication,

but the cable failed after a relatively short time - a few weeks.

A lot of effort went into improving

the purity of the copper in the cable.

The cable that had been manufactured was so heavy

there was only one ship that could carry it,

and that was Brunel's SS Great Eastern.

There was an attempt in 1865 and they lost the cable.

They returned and John Pender raised capital to get another cable made.

That was successful in 1866. It was primitive communication,

but it was communication.

Even after some very expensive failed attempts,

the backers persisted.

Once the technical obstacles had been overcome, the cable network

centred on Porthcurno spread rapidly.

By 1887, the undersea cable network

connected Britain, via relay stations,

to every corner of her Empire.

Porthcurno was the hub of communications

and the largest telegraph station in the world

What did the transatlantic cables look like?

I've got some samples here. You have a copper core,

which carries the signal, but you have to insulate it.

They used a material called gutta-percha,

which comes from a plant in the Far East, it's like rubber,

but more tolerant of sea conditions. Well, up to a point.

Certain sea creatures are rather partial to gutta-percha,

so you have to cover that.

The biggest concern for the cable manufacturers was

they would get damaged by busy shipping lanes.

If they were near the shore, you would have

a heavy armoured section, which is what you see on this one here.

-You can see, they're quite heavy.

-Ooph.

Imagine a couple of thousand miles of that.

Well, you can see why they needed the SS Great Eastern to carry it.

In telegraph stations across the globe,

operators sent and deciphered

messages that had been framed in Morse code.

Thousands of operators were trained at Porthcurno,

up until 1993,

when the original cables were replaced with modern fibres.

It's interesting to compare what we see here with...one of

today's optical fibre samples.

Now, if you hold that to the light

you can see very thin strands. They are about the thickness

of a human hair and this has dramatically changed communication.

Each one of these would be capable of carrying

several million telephone calls.

Interestingly, these are coming up on the beach here at Porthcurno.

Cornwall is still the hub of communication for fibre optics.

And these carry messages all over the world.

With foresight and ambition, this venture laid

the foundations for today's World Wide Web.

Since I began my excursion in Dover Harbour,

celebrating the achievements of the first cross-Channel swimmer,

I've come across several Victorian heroes.

From inventors to writers,

and not forgetting one nurse - Florence Nightingale.

As I travelled along the south coast of England,

defence was much on my mind.

I encountered the 19th-Century fortifications,

designed to keep the French at bay. And the Royal Navy,

whose dominance of the high seas guaranteed the citizens

of our island a century of peace, from John o'Groats to Land's End.

Next time... I have a blast in Birmingham...

WHISTLING

Brilliant. That is the sound of the railways, isn't it?

..pay homage to a magnificent organ that inspired a great composer...

The City Fathers were very proud of this instrument, so it was

a feather in their cap that somebody like Mendelssohn should deign

to play on it.

..and get a dose of quack doctors and their bizarre remedies.

"Mother Siegel's Curative Syrup." There is one here called simply

"The Ills Of Humanity".

And "Pink Pills For Pale People".