In 1840, one man transformed travel in Britain.
His name was George Bradshaw
and his railway guides inspired the Victorians to take to the tracks.
Stop by stop, he told them where to go, what to see and where to stay.
And now, 110 years later,
I'm aboard for a series of rail adventures across the United Kingdom
to see what of Bradshaw's Britain remains.
Ripped By mstoll
I'm embarked on a new railway journey from one cathedral city to another,
from Norwich to Chichester.
But even using my High Victorian guidebook,
this journey will be more secular than ecclesiastical.
Not so much heavenly, as earthy.
On this leg, I'll hang out with a notorious Victorian criminal...
This is a replica of James Rush's death mask.
It does show very, very clearly where the rope has cut directly into his neck.
Isn't that grim?
â€œMeet a polecat who's just a nipper...
Ooh!
(both laugh)
...and chip away at an age-old craft.
- Could you make a flint out of that? - Yeah, perfect.
Let's see how you did.
My journey begins in Norwich and continues southwest into Suffolk.
From Ipswich I'll head south to Chelmsford,
and travel across the Thames, through the Medway towns, to Dover.
After making my way back through Kent,
my journey will take me along the Sussex coast
and end in the cathedral city of Chichester.
This East Anglian leg begins in the ancient city of Norwich,
burrows southwest, deep into Thetford's rabbit warrens,
before turning northwest to finish in the flinty countryside of Brandon.
My first stop will be Norwich, which Bradshaw's tells me is
"an old cathedral town and the capital of Norfolk,
agreeably situated on the banks of the Wensum".
"The prospect of the city is imposing and beautiful."
Until the arrival of the railways in the 1840s,
the city depended on its river for communication with the outside world,
and even now it has that feeling of being the end of the line,
for worse and better.
Today I'm greeted by this grand terminus built in 1886,
but when the railways first arrived in the city in 1844,
the station was far more modest,
providing only a single-track line to the coast.
The rest of the country remained inaccessible by train
until the completion
of this impressive swing bridge over the River Wensum in 1845.
The line was extended down to London, opening the door to trade
and to fashionable tourists from the capital.
The first stop recommended in my "Bradshaw's Guide"
is a marvel of medieval architecture.
Bradshaw's comments that, "The lofty spire of Norwich Cathedral
gives it the air of great magnificence."
Lofty, yes, at 315 feet.
Begun shortly after the Norman conquest, completed within a century.
Imagine how important Norwich must have been in those days,
that they built here a structure
the like of which most people had never seen.
Built on the lucrative wool trade,
Norwich was so important in medieval times
that it ranked as England's second city.
It remains East Anglia 's largest city.
I'll start my visit by testing locals
on one of the city's most famous daughters.
She's immortalised in every purse and wallet.
Excuse me! I'm not trying to bribe you. I've got a five-pound note here.
I wonder if you know who that is?
- She is Elizabeth Fry. - Well done!
- Hello there! - Hello.
Who's this on the back of the five-pound note?
- (man) It's Elizabeth Fry. - And what's she doing here?
Well, I imagine she's in...
What was the name of that prison in London where she went to?
- New... - Newgate! That's it!
Well, I had to help you a bit, so I'll give you nine and a half out of ten.
- Thank you. - Bye-bye now.
- Pleasant to meet you. - Thank you. Bye.
Born in Norwich in 1780 to a wealthy Quaker family,
Elizabeth Fry moved to London aged 20.
There she visited the notorious Newgate Prison
and encountered cruel, squalid conditions,
particularly among women prisoners and their newborn babies.
Elizabeth Fry became formidable in the movement for prison reform,
and extraordinarily influential for a woman of her day.
Indeed, it's a former prison I'm going to visit next.
Originally a royal palace built for William the Conqueror,
it was used as a jail from the 14th until the 19th century.
"The great Norman keep and the barbican bridge
are incorporated with the county jail built in 1818 for 200 prisoners."
So elegant. I'm guessing that only the cream of the criminal fraternity
did their porridge here.
Nowadays, the castle is run as a museum.
I'm meeting Annie Perry, who knows more about its dark past.
- Annie. - Hello, Michael.
Bradshaw's talks about parts of the castle
being incorporated in the county jail in 1818,
but I suspect there have been dungeons here long before that.
There are parts of the castle, the original castle keep,
that we used as prison cells and dungeons
many hundreds of years before that.
(Michael) What sort of conditions in Victorian times
were the prisoners living in?
(Annie) Well, you have John Howard,
who's considered one of the very early, if not the first prison reformer,
visiting all of the jails and prisons in England in the 1770s.
He comes to Norwich Castle on a number of occasions
and reports that there are really quite bad conditions here.
Campaigners like John Howard and Elizabeth Fry
championed the redesign of prisons.
Their work achieved a gradual change in attitude towards prisoners
in the late-18th and early-19th centuries,
balancing punishment with rehabilitation.
And what kind of a prison does that give us?
The prison is based on a design called a radial jail.
There's a central area, which would be the governor's house,
which would also include the chapel and the school room,
and then different cells radiating out around the edges as well
with exercise yards in between.
They're looking to have individual cells for prisoners,
to be able to separate particular categories of prisoners
and to be able to separate male and female prisoners.
Interestingly, people would commit petty offences to actually get put into prison
because the conditions in the workhouses were actually worse.
As part of the restructuring of the jail,
a new courthouse was built at the base of the castle mound,
linked directly to the prison by an internal tunnel.
So, Michael, I've brought you here to our restored courtroom.
Judge behind us, dock just there, I imagine?
Yes. The dock is just up here.
The judge's seat, which is being restored at the moment,
will be here behind us.
One of the most notorious trials brought a local tenant farmer,
James Blomfield Rush, into the dock in April 1849.
It was a Victorian melodrama,
a sensation, reported widely in the newspapers at the time.
The public gallery up here was absolutely packed.
The judge, Justice Baron Rolfe, actually sold tickets
so people could get a front-row seat.
- (Michael) Accused of? - A double murder.
He was supposed to have sneaked into a building called Stanfield Hall
and shot and killed a father and son who he owed money to.
After conducting his own protracted defence,
Rush was eventually found guilty and sentenced to hang.
Until 1868, hangings were conducted in public .
And they were popular.
Was the hanging a notorious event?
Extra trains were put on to bring people from Great Yarmouth and London.
Possibly as many as 20,000 people actually witnessed the execution,
which would take place very publicly at the bottom of the bridge.
What a lovely day out. Bring a picnic!
Well, if you wanted to pay for a picnic, you could go to the Bell Hotel.
And if you rented the very top rooms
you got an excellent view, across the crowds, of the execution
and you could actually pay for a room and supper.
The hotels were not alone
in capitalising on the public's gory fascination.
Staffordshire Potteries produced collectable figurines
of the main characters in the Rush murders,
to take home and display on your mantelpiece.
(Michael) It's quite puzzling. The Victorians, who have this interest
in the connection between mental health and criminality,
who are prison reformers, are nonetheless so ghoulish!
It is that real sense of macabre.
This fascination with the sinister is borne out
by a collection hidden in the castle's dungeon.
Well, it's horribly damp and dank and thoroughly creepy down here.
Well, we are in the dungeons, Michael. And this is what I wanted you to see.
This is a replica of James's Rush's death mask.
Wow.
Prisoners' death masks were used
to study the contours of the criminal cranium.
Known as phrenology,
this practice examined the lumps and bumps on the surface of the head
in the belief that they could reveal distinctive criminal shapes.
Sometimes a phrenologist could be summoned before a wedding
to check the head of a fiancé for signs of bad character.
In James Rush's case,
they would be very interested in this area behind here.
This is your destructiveness area, your aggressive nature.
And his was said, in his report, to be most pronounced.
I don't want to be political, but he seems to be left-leaning.
That would be after the execution.
You are left suspended for one hour
to make sure there's no chance of you being revived or resuscitated.
And this mask does show very, very clearly
where the rope has cut directly into his neck.
(Michael) Isn't that grim?
Phrenology has long since been discredited and is now obsolete.
The legacy of prison reformers like Elizabeth Fry has been longer lasting.
While Norwich prison was improved,
in an area at the foot of the old Norman castle
another group was penned in.
"The cattle market, one of the largest out of London,
is held on a piece of ground to the south of the castle," says Bradshaw's.
It's not there any more. It's been moved. I'd better hoof it.
Norfolk has always been rich farming country.
Indeed, the considerable wealth of medieval Norwich
came from the wool trade
and the livestock market has always been important to the city's economy.
Originally situated in the city centre,
it moved to a more spacious plot two miles away in the 1960s.
It's one of the few livestock markets in Britain today.
David Ball knows more.
- Welcome to Norwich livestock market. - Thank you.
My Bradshaw's tells me that Norfolk is the biggest agricultural area,
and talks about Norwich as being one of the largest markets outside London.
I assume there's been a market here since time immemorial. ls that right?
(David) This one's been here for 50 years.
(Michael) The previous site of the market made use of the trains, did it?
(David) Without a doubt, especially to take the stock away from market.
It was the collection centre for a big area of Norfolk,
but then people came from all over the country.
A lot of people came from London and places like that
and into that part of the world for the meat, to take the meat away,
because it was still commutable,
where they could do the journey and slaughter them the next day.
(Michael) Do you think Victorian animal husbandry was quite good, actually?
(David) I think it was,
because it was on a much smaller scale, and more personal.
That's what I think makes a huge difference.
Things have changed so much that a townie like me might ask,
why do you still need a market?
Why do you need people to come to a single place to buy sheep and cattle?
Because it gives them an opportunity to know where they've come from,
how they're bred, what they're fed on and everything that goes with it.
The present market's fortnightly cattle auctions
draw scores of famers and traders from all over the region.
Hundreds of cattle and calves change hands,
with prime beasts selling for thousands of pounds.
I'm taking up my position next to local calf and cattle salesman Roger Long.
- (Michael) You want the tiny calves? - The smaller calves.
Something we can take home and produce into beef.
112,114...
As the auction gets underway, I've got little time
to watch and {earn the minute bidding gestures of the experts
before Roger lets me loose to buy on his behalf.
126, Hamish...
I'm hoping that a subtle twitch of the â€œBradshaw's"
will be enough to seal the deal.
(David) Five, ten, fifteen, twenty.
Come on, Michael, one more. 325...
Selling on my left. 325. Michael Portillo! 325.
That was absolutely thrilling!
My little gestures managed to get me a beautiful calf.
Ten, 12, 14...
I'd love to stay and perfect my bidding technique, but I have a train to catch.
I've retraced my steps to Norwich Station
and I'm heading 3D miles west on the main line across East Anglia.
Next stop, Thetford.
My guidebook tells me that it was "the ancient capital of East Anglia,
situated on the junction of the rivers Ouse and Thet".
After a long day, I'm going to rest my head there
in a house that was once thought fit for a monarch.
Situated a few miles from Thetford Station,
local landmark Lyniord Hall was commissioned in 1857
by Stephen Lyne-Stephens, a millionaire banker
considered the richest commoner in England at the time.
Not long after his death in 1860, it was put up for sale
and its lavish splendour came to the attention of Queen Victoria.
James Parry of the Breckland Society will tell me more.
- James. - Michael, hello.
I find you in semi-regal splendour.
What exactly is the connection between Lynford Hall and the royal family?
Queen Victoria was becoming increasingly concerned
by the behaviour of her son, the Prince of Wales.
There'd already been several scandals.
He was turning into a serial philanderer and she and Prince Albert decided
that they had to try and get some stability into his life.
And they thought that by buying a country estate
they could perhaps have a little bit more control over him,
keep him there a little bit, spend more family time together.
Located on one of the best shooting estates in East Anglia,
Lynford Hall was a serious contender for royal ownership.
A state-of-the-art, newly-built country estate,
it had 50 bedrooms with plumbed water
and modern lighting thanks to a pipe from a private gasworks.
It offered a mere 8,000 acres.
Nearby Sandringham had 20,000, and was bought instead.
It has remained a royal retreat ever since.
This could have been the place
where the royal family were sitting down for Christmas lunch
rather than Sandringham.
But instead, you and I can celebrate midsummer at Lynford Hall.
- Cheers. - Cheers.
After a restful night,
I'm striking out further into Thetford's surrounding countryside.
My "Bradshaw's" notes that, "The country consists of a sandy soil
and is peculiarly salubrious and pleasant in nature."
Such terrain isn't ideal for farming,
but it is favoured by a particular breed of burrowing creature.
Anne Mason of the Breckland Society
will tell me how the landscape of the Brecks
was ideal for a form of animal husbandry.
- Hello. - Hello.
(Michael) So what exactly is this building?
(Anne) It's known as Thetford Warren Lodge
and it was inhabited by a rabbit warrener.
It's the symbol of a 600-year-old industry of warrening
which once dominated this area of East Anglia.
And why is it built to look like a castle?
(Anne) It was built primarily as a defence against poachers,
because rabbits were highly-prized luxury items in the middle ages.
It was the job of a medieval warrener to nurture, protect and trap rabbits.
He was in effect a rabbit farmer.
Why were rabbits so valuable then?
Because they were a source of fresh meat in the winter
and also because their fur was used for robes and cloaks.
We know that Henry VII had a nightshirt that was lined with black rabbit fur.
When did the rabbit business reach its peak, do you think?
Oh. It was actually linked to the railways.
Once the railway came to Thetford in 1846,
it provided very quick and easy transport up to London.
And of course the meat could be then transported very freshly.
It was actually sold at Leadenhall Market
and it was really in response to growing demand
from centres of population such as London,
which had expanded so much in the 19th century.
On this warren of Thetford, from the 1850s onwards,
the average annual cull was 28,800 rabbits.
Rabbit meat became so popular
that Mrs Beeton's famous Victorian "Book of Household Management"
provided more than 20 recipes for its preparation.
And the demand for rabbit fur in Victorian England
was met by two large factories employing 200 people in nearby Brandon.
It was a significant source of employment,
with much of the community involved in processing thousands of rabbit skins
for the fur and felt-making industries.
So extensive and regular was that rabbit trade
that the early morning trains going up to London, carrying rabbits,
were known locally as bunny trains.
In the trade's heyday in the mid-19th century,
bunny trains transported 30,000 carcasses a year to the London markets
where they were sold by the hundredweight.
If you had your warren near a train station,
farming rabbits was a lucrative business.
With the passing of the Ground Game Act in the 1880s,
anyone was allowed to hunt wild rabbits
and the industry went into steady decline.
- Has it died out completely? - Not entirely, no.
And in fact I think it's seen a revival.
With so much emphasis on using local produce and naturally produced produce,
I think we are seeing more people eating rabbit meat.
The bunny trains and the rabbit fur trade have long since gone,
but a few warreners survive.
With lean, healthy and sustainable rabbit meat back on the menu,
there's a business in bunnies again.
Andy Simpson continues the tradition of the warrener.
He learned his trade from his father and is passing it on to his son Tim.
This ancient form of animal husbandry is important for another reason:
conservation of the natural environment and pest control.
What would happen if you were not controlling the rabbit population?
They'd destroy the countryside for cattle farmers and sheep farmers.
The rabbits are undermining the ground because they're tunnelling all the time.
The hole that you see, it's a bit like an iceberg.
The hole is the tip of it. The warren is expansive underneath.
Many years ago,
this park would have been full of cattle and sheep and the estate ponies.
They daren't put them in here now.
The cattle and ponies would break their legs walking over the rabbit warrens.
Now, I've been ignoring until now your box of tricks.
We've got a few little noses coming out of there.
Yeah. I've got a selection of these. Molly's my main working bitch.
This is a cross between a ferret and a polecat.
She won't bite.
- (Michael) Are you sure? - Yeah.
You are a sweet creature.
Where this one was a domesticated ferret,
these are captured wild polecats.
That's a little boy one.
Mm-hmm. Do they go rabbiting yet?
- Not yet, no. - Ooh!
(both laugh)
(Michael) GM ma'.!
You've got a claim to fame. You bit a politician.
With the two pesky polecats back in their cage,
it's time for me to hop back to Thetford Station
where I'm going to board my next train, northwest to Brandon.
This train is going to take me out of Norfolk,
over the border into Suffolk and the town of Brandon.
Bradshaw's tells me
that this place formerly supplied the government with gun flints.
Enough to spark anybody's interest.
Immediately I can see how important flint is to this area.
Even the buildings here are faced with the stone.
This place is blessed with some of the best quality flint in Britain
and flint was key to the local economy for a very long time.
I've come to Grime's Graves,
an ancient flint mine just outside Brandon.
I'd like to find out how old the area's flint business is
from archaeologist Dave Field.
- Hello, Dave. - Hello, Michael. Pleased to meet you.
My Bradshaw's tells me that Brandon supplied gunflints to the government.
- Tell me about that. - Yes, that's very true.
And particularly during the Napoleonic Wars.
An enormous quantity of gunflints were shipped out.
There are stories of something like a million per month at one time.
There was a particularly good seam of flint here.
Jet black, very few imperfections. Exceedingly good sparkability.
Sparking properties were of primary importance for musketry,
particularly for military purposes.
You can imagine, at the Battle of Waterloo,
you wouldn't want your musket to misfire too many times.
Was it ever possible to mass-produce gunflints?
No, this was a cottage industry.
The Brandon knappers had a five or six-year apprenticeship
before they could be set loose and set up their own business.
We're in an area which bears the scars of human activity,
but I assume this is nothing to do with the Napoleonic era, is it?
No, no, no, this is all prehistoric.
The Neolithic miners got here long before the gunflint miners.
It seems that flint knapping is a skill that's as old as the hills.
This site has now been dated to over 4,000 years ago.
Grime's Graves contains traces of 400 Neolithic mineshafts
and is one of the most important prehistoric sites in Britain.
What was Neolithic man using it for?
They were using it for a variety of things.
It's reckoned that enough flint was extracted from here
in the Neolithic period to make something like eight million stone axes.
Enormous quantities were shipped out.
Much more so in the Neolithic period than in the gunflint era.
I'm going to take a closer look.
You get a real sense of descending into the bowels of the earth, don't you?
The greenery peters out, the rock begins and the temperature falls.
It does indeed. It's pretty constant down here.
And it's a real labyrinth. All these little galleries interconnect.
Theoretically you could work your way across the site underground.
You can see the hollows here where a large nodule has been extracted.
The idea of course was to extract every available piece of good black flint
that you could do without the roof falling in.
So how did these Neolithic mines come to light, if that's the right expression?
Well, it was following the period of publication
oi Darwin's Origin of Species.
There was a new feeling of inquiry about.
It was during that period that Canon William Greenwell came to the site
and he dug one of the shafts
and found that it went down something like 12 metres.
He found this seam of black flint.
It was quite clear then what was going on,
that they were actually mining this material in prehistory.
And he used some of the gunflint miners from Brandon
to help him in that excavation.
So the gunflint miners had a big hand
in the discovery of the prehistoric mining.
Well, I'd like to find out more about flint knapping,
but for that I must return to the surface.
Yes, let's do.
The flint knapping workshops
that were so busy in Brandon in the early-19th century are no more,
but today, some enthusiasts have revived the craft.
Will Lord provides traditional flints for flintlock guns
used by historical re-enactment groups across the globe.
- Hello, Will. - Hello, Michael.
- Nice to meet you. - Good to see you.
I had no idea that flint would be such a big rock.
Yeah, we're really lucky.
We've got some of the best geology of flint in Britain around here.
What is it that you are trying to make? What's the end product?
- (Will) This is the final product. - It has to be very precise?
I notice not only that it's very square,
but you've shaved off one side of it here.
(Will) Yeah. That chamfer is really important.
It doesn't want to be too weak at the end of its journey.
First a suitable stone has to be selected
and quartered into a workable size.
(Michael) oh;
- (laughs) That's a surprise. - Look at that.
We have made an excellent choice in stone.
- Look at this pure black silica. - Isn't that absolutely glorious?
Then a workable-sized flake has to be created
and Will is letting me have a bash.
- Just lean it in a little bit. - Oh, damn.
It's all good. Just touch it on the flint...
- Perfect. - Could you make a flint out of that?
Yeah. That's great.
Only now can the flake be honed to the correct shape and size for a gunflint.
- Got a bit of a shape there. - You have.
But it doesn't really... let's face it.
(Will) No, look. You've got a really good serviceable gunflint there.
- Well done. - Thank you.
I'm no expert yet,
but I'm glad that We had a go at man's oldest profession.
When Norwich acquired its cathedral and castle
it was one of this country's most important cities,
using the river and the sea to export wool to the continent.
When railways became the main mode of transport,
Norfolk was left somewhat isolated from the capital, London.
In such tranquillity, rabbit warrening and flint knapping could survive,
unaffected by the Industrial Revolution transforming the rest of Britain.
On the next leg, I experience
19th-century cutting-edge technology,â€œ
And there it goes.
And a Victorian would recognise that because it was made in the same way.
...l shell out for sea food near Mersea Island...
So this is the sort of oyster that, once cleaned up, could appear on my plate?
It certainly is.
...and I'm tainted in an Essex orchard.
That's where the phrase "caught red-handed" comes from.
The indelible stain of crime.
Ripped By mstoll