INTRODUCING THE RAYNERS
On 30th October 1880, one of my great grandmothers, Helen Rebecca Rayner (19), married Charles Daniel Lubbock (23) at Christ Church, Bermondsey in London. Charles was a Solicitor’s Clerk, whose father William was a Mast and Block Maker running a business that contributed to building and repairing fishing boats and small ships in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk.
On the other hand, Helen’s father George Rayner was described as an Engineer.
This twitched my research nostrils.
Immediate progress was possible because George was easily found in the 1881 Census living in Tower Hamlets, Shoreditch. He was 58 years old at this time and had been born in Cambridge(shire). His wife Mary Ann was 50 years old and had been born in St Lukes, Middlesex (London). Living with then were Helen’s elder brother George Hawkins Rayner (30), Wine Merchant, and her two younger sisters Alice Maud Rayner (14) and Edith Mary Rayner (12).
His occupation was stated as ‘Engineer, South Eastern Railway’.
This suggested a degree of education and that George’s family had been fairly well established – which accentuated by gaps and ambiguities in the earlier censuses, created problems.
Recently, I obtained a copy of the certificate for George’s marriage at St John the Baptist Church, Hoxton, Middlesex on 7th October 1849. George married Mary Ann Henderson. He was 26 years old and she was 18 years old. He gave his name as George Hawkins Rayner and stated that his father James Elborne Rayner was a Labourer. Mary Ann’s father was a Cutler.
George described himself as a Labourer.
It seems then that George’s father James was an Agricultural Labourer living at Eltisley / Caxton with his wife Lettie in rural Cambridgeshire, at the time of the 1841 Census. At that time George was 15 years old and there were five siblings.
By 1861, George was in London married to Mary Ann (there may well already have been related ‘Hawkins Rayners’ in London from church birth records) and had established himself as a Warehouseman. Helen was recorded in the 1861 Census as being ¼ year-old.
By 1871, George was 48 years old and Mary Ann was 40 years old. George described himself as a Railway Engineer. At that time, Helen was 10 years old - and her older brother, also called 'George Hawkins' was 20 years old, working as a Clerk to Tea Merchant. So this was a family that was on the rise materially and socially.
How on earth did George move from being a Labourer to being an Engineer?
Well, I surmise that his warehousing experience led on to him running the spare parts and maintenance ‘Engine Sheds’ for the railways and that it was quite natural for him to then adopt a new occupational description – in an era and industry when practical skill was everything and there were few qualifications to aspire to.
THE SOUTH EASTERN RAILWAY
Another factor sadly, may have been that the South Eastern Railway was not the world’s best.
The South Eastern Railway was formed in 1836 to develop a route from London to Dover. Various other routes were opened over the years, during which time the SER absorbed several other railways, some of which were older; these included the Canterbury & Whitstable, which was purchased in 1853.
The SER also took over the working of some other railways (including the London & Greenwich) without actually absorbing them. Most of the company's routes were in Kent and eastern Sussex, with some in Surrey and a long route curving round to reach Reading, Berkshire.
One building block, the Canterbury and Whitstable Railway (known locally as the Crab and Winkle Line, from its initials and fact that Whitstable was a fishing port) opened on 3 May 1830 between Canterbury and Whitstable Harbour, a distance of 6 miles (9.7 km). It was the first regular passenger steam railway in the world.
It was built as part of a plan to improve the access of the city of Canterbury to the sea and involved much work improving Whitstable harbour, engineered by Thomas Telford. The line included the world's first passenger train tunnel, the 800-yard (731.5 m) Tyler Hill Tunnel, and both its portals are still visible. The line closed to passenger traffic on 1 January 1931, and entirely in 1953.
The SER original main line was sanctioned by Act of Parliament in 1836, running from London Bridge via Redhill, Tonbridge, Maidstone and Ashford to Folkestone and Dover. This circuitous route was the result of insistence on the part of Parliament that only one southerly route out of the capital was necessary; since the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway already had a line through Redhill.
This ignored the fact that the main London - Dover road had, since ancient times, followed a much more direct route, and the fact that the other great railway building projects took direct routes whenever feasible. A train passenger to Dover had a journey 20 miles (32 km) longer than by stagecoach.
By 1853 the SER had almost completed a network of lines encompassing mid-Kent, though much of the North Kent coast was still not served by rail. At this time, the rival East Kent Railway was formed, by various amalgamations and strategems, it gained access to the new Victoria station. Other extensions brought the railway to Dover and Ramsgate and this company changed its name to the London, Chatham and Dover Railway (LCDR) in 1859.
The LCDR therefore had a much more direct access to London than the SER, and it was imperative to the SER that this competition was challenged. The SER therefore constructed the direct line via Sevenoaks to Tonbridge. It involved huge earthworks, crossing the North Downs by means of summits and long tunnels at both Knockholt and Sevenoaks. The latter was the longest tunnel in southern England at 3,451 yards (3,156 m). This cut-off line, 24 miles (39 km) long, reached Chislehurst on 1 July 1865, but took three more years to reach Orpington and Sevenoaks (2 March 1868) and Tonbridge (1 May 1868).
However, the LCDR was always in financial difficulties, and for years the amalgamation of the two Kent companies was mooted. On 1 January 1899 this was achieved when the two companies were joined under a Management Committee. On 5 August 1899 the South Eastern and London, Chatham and Dover Railway Companies Act was passed, which resulted in the formation of the South Eastern and Chatham Railway.
Another series of railway wars involved the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway (LBSCR). The main battle sites were in London, Redhill and Hastings, the three locations where the two railway companies met.
In London, at both London Bridge and Victoria the rivalry between the two companies came to such a head that both stations even today show the existence of two separate stations at each location, with a wall between them.
At Redhill the two companies' stations were placed at an inconvenient distance for passenger exchange; when a new station was built, the SER gave preference to its own trains through the station. This led the LBSCR to build the Quarry Line, avoiding Redhill altogether.
At Hastings, where they joined for the final section through the town, the troubles were even more direct. In their desire to secure the business, the SER was determined to keep the LBSCR out. The latter had opened its line from Brighton on 13 February 1851, connecting with the SER at Bo-peep Junction.
After preventing some Brighton trains from passing the junction, the SER blocked in at Hastings those that had and removed track at the junction, putting up barriers to stop the LBSCR coach link from operating. An LBSCR injunction eventually put matters to rights but until the 1923 amalgamation relations were still bitter.
One of the most notable SER accidents occurred on June 9 1865, when the boat train from Folkestone ran onto a partly dismantled bridge near Staplehurst. The locomotive and tender ran across the timber baulks to reach the far side, but the carriages were derailed and fell into the river Beult.
The Staplehurst rail crash killed ten passengers and Charles Dickens narrowly avoided severe injury, or even death. He was travelling with Nelly Ternan and her mother at the front of the train in a first-class carriage, which escaped complete derailment when the locomotive and tender left the track as a result of repairs to the line.
Timber baulks under the track were being replaced but the foreman mis-read the timetable, and two lengths of rail were missing on the viaduct. As the lead vehicles left the line, the impact on the remaining beams caused the cast iron girders below to fracture, and most of the following vehicles left the viaduct and ended up in the river Beult some 15 feet (4.57 m) below.
The foreman was indicted and convicted of manslaughter, and served 6 months hard labour for his crime.
Putting aside all the problems, my ancestor George Rayner would have worked with a notable Victorian railway engineer, Richard Christopher Mansell (born October 1813, Liverpool, died 1904, Westmorland).
R.C. Mansell was carriage superintendent for the South Eastern Railway at Ashford by 1851, and later works manager for the SER. In 1877 he succeeded Alfred Mellor Watkin as locomotive superintendent of the SER. When James Stirling was appointed in 1878, Mansell resumed the post of works manager until his retirement from the SER in January 1882. On leaving, he was given an annual consultancy fee/pension of fifty guineas.
Mansell was the inventor of the Mansell wheel, a composite wood and metal carriage wheel, for which he obtained patents in 1848, 1862 and 1866. As locomotive superintendent, Mansell was responsible for the design of a dozen locomotives: 9 x 0-4-4T [1878] and 3 x 0-6-0 [completed 1879, 7 others cancelled]. Three 0-6-0Ts that had been designed by Cudworth were also completed under Mansell's supervision in 1877.
Apparently though, none of Mansell’s engines had a distinguished service life. The tanks lasted about 12 years and the 0-6-0s about twice that.
WIDER IMPACT OF THE RAILWAYS
Britain's basic rail network was completed very quickly during the investment manias of the later 1830s and 1840s - culminating in the boom of 1862-5. However, the main phase of railway building was over by 1870, by which time the network amounted to 15,500 miles (two-thirds of the final total of 23,400 miles).
By 1870 hundreds of individual railway companies had together raised and invested the then enormous sum of £570 million. They continued to be large consumers of materials and employers of labour throughout the 19th Century, still accounting for about 10 per cent of all investment at the end of the period.
By 1906 233 of the 351 companies existing in 1881 had lost their separate identity through competition and rationalization.
The impact of the railways on the economy and society was clearly dramatic. Even as early as the 1840s, with speeds in excess of 35mph compared with-the 10mph maximum by coach, the railways effectively shrank travel distances to between one-third and one-fifth of thei former scale.
By the 1880s it was possible to go from London to Edinburgh in about 10 hours whereas the journey had taken more than 69 hours in the coaching era. On average the cost of transportation by land was more than halved over the century.
Using 1865 as a datum, Gary Hawke (recently retired Professor in the School of Government at Victoria University, Wellington here in New Zealand) estimated that the railways led to savings on freight costs of just over 4 per cent of national income. Taking account of wider impacts, Hawke estimated that the total shortfall, in the absence of the railways, could have been as high as 11 percent of national income.
The railways expanded the hinterlands of cities, linked and fostered industries, and encouraged innovation, creating new mass markets ranging from inter-city soccer matches to seaside holidays. At the same time, they dissolved local differences, destroying village customs, handicraft industries and old marketing patterns.
As early as 1845 one local historian lamented the fact that the railway had robbed the seaside town of Scarborough of its “genteel exclusiveness and brought a new host of invaders who are the inhabitants of murky and densely populated cities seeking to restore their sickly frames to health and vigour by frequent immersions in the sea”.
And H.G. Wells, in his Experiment in Autobiography (1937), recalls how his father’s crockery shop at Bromley was undermined by the suburban railways which made it easier for customers to shop in London and for the larger London stores to compete with local traders.
GETTING BACK TO HELEN
Correspondence with one of my elderly Distant Cousins who lives in Toronto - ‘Lofty’ Grimshaw - has provided some lovely vignettes of Rebecca and her life.
Lofty describes the Lubbock family that included his mother ‘Bobbie’ (Phyllis Grace) and my grandmother Constance Maud Lubbock in the following terms (around 1895):
“I believe the father’s name was Charles. He was a CITY GENTLEMAN who worked in a Solicitor’s office in the City. When he came home from work in the evening, all his children had to line up and greet him, each saying “Good evening Papa” – with emphasis on the final ‘a’. My mother Bobbie seldom spoke of him.
After Charles died, Helen always dressed in black. On the day that she got her old age pension of ten shillings, she would go out to a pub and have one glass of Wincarnis Wine which cost about a shilling. Then she would go to Glassberg’s the confectioners and buy herself four ounces of Polar Mints. After that she would take herself off to the Tower Cinema to watch a film – this probably cost her sixpence. That was her weekly day out – and we always heard about it on her next visit.
We loved her and she loved us”.
So it is nice to have a lovely old lady (and her practical and enterprising father George) back in the family fold. And fun to have a link to the Great Age of Steam, particularly as all five of us boys (myself, Matt, Pete, Sam and Theo) have gone through obsessive Thomas the Tank Engine phases.
My youngest sons Sam and Theo have now sadly also moved though this transition and on to Ben 10, Battlegons and Pokemon. But there is still a poem in Sam’s Baby Book that commemorates those good old days – and one that I am sure Helen and her father George would have enjoyed:
TRAIN TIME
In the TV room
Trains on the floor
Down in the hallway
Trains by the door
Up on the bench
Engines galore
Pile on the table
More than before
Thomas is tugging
Troublesome trucks
Bill’s in the siding
And Douglas is stuck
Spencer needs water
But Gordon’s in luck
Salty loves fishing
And Percy hates muck
Daisy is smiling
And purring around
Settebello is cruising
With scarcely a sound
While Diesel is plotting
Tram Toby is found
And Harold is whizzing
Way off the ground
Steam in the funnel
Down at the zoo
Trains in the tunnel
Got to come through
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