The Christmas shutdown just makes us drunker, fatter, lazier and lonelier
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Version 0 of 1. One of the great paradoxes of British life is our behaviour in the Christmas season. We are the least Christian country in Europe – quite possibly the least Christian of any country in the world that has a substantial Christian population – and yet we observe the anniversary of Christ’s birth with the kind of rigour last seen in the Hebridean Sabbaths of the 1950s. No public transport moves. To get from A to Z without a private car or an overpriced taxi is impossible. The rest of the world carries on much as it always does: trains carry Catholics from Paris to Frankfurt and Calvinists from Geneva to Milan; Lutherans sail on Baltic ferries; airliners fly Baptists across oceans and continents. But when these aircraft touch down at, say, Heathrow, their passengers find themselves marooned; the country beyond the airport is impenetrable unless they can afford its inflated cab fares. It lies there hushed and immobile, smelling faintly of roasts, quite unlike anywhere else. “Oh, but people need their Christmas,” the apologists for this tyranny say, meaning that to ask people to work on 25 December would be an offence against the natural order, imagining that British Christmases have been like this since Dickens was a boy. In fact, our immobility is relative recent: a late-20th-century phenomenon. London Transport ran its last Christmas tube in 1979, British Rail its last Christmas train in 1981. Presbyterianism’s complicated relationship with the festival meant that Scotland held out for some time against the English trend, preferring a closedown at New Year. My parents, for example, were married in Fife on Christmas Day, and in my childhood the railways were no quieter than they were on Sundays, which in those days meant quiet – signals wouldn’t betray the coming of a train for hours – but not dead. Now, engineering work can shut down important lines for the entire post-Christmas week. This year, for example, only the most intrepid traveller should try to reach Glasgow from southern England after the last train has left Euston on Christmas Eve; several days of closures are scheduled north of Watford and again north of Crewe. The contrast with the Victorian age couldn’t be sharper. When the Metropolitan Railway completed its branch to South Kensington in 1868, it arranged the opening for Christmas Eve so that company profits could benefit from the next day’s expected high passenger revenues. Elsewhere, cheap fares and special trains became a feature of the Christmas timetable – a growth in traffic that the railway historian David Turner dates from 1843, when Dickens published A Christmas Carol, the first Christmas cards appeared and the day began to assume its modern form as a popular holiday among all classes. The next year, a special ran from Shoreditch to Brentwood in Essex. By the end of the century, companies such as the London and North Western had Christmas Day expresses to augment their regular services over the long distances from London to Scotland and the West Country. Why did the festive public transport stop? The car is one answer – it’s easier to pile the presents into one and drive down the motorway to lunch. But the origins of our national closedown, longer and deeper than any other country’s – even France in August – are older than that, and more arcane. When railways began to spread across England in the 1830s, they operated at the same frequency six days a week, but on the seventh inserted a gap called the “church interval” to placate concerns about the damage travel might do to religious observance. Out of this act of church appeasement grew an entirely different Sunday schedule with many fewer trains – in Scotland, where Sabbatarianism was especially strong, hardly any ran at all. In the mid-19th century, this was perhaps to be expected. The odd thing was that, as the century wore on and the Sabbath became a little less holy, Sunday trains grew fewer, rather than more. According to Jack Simmons, the distinguished transport scholar, only 5.7% of the railway system in England and Wales was without Sunday trains in 1861, but by 1914 the figure had risen to 22.3%. Nothing similar happened in Europe, where the same timetable tended to apply every day of the week. In 1914 in Switzerland, for example, the only line that closed on Sundays was a mere 16 miles long. It was British economics rather than British religion that accounted for the country’s difference to mainland Europe. The railway mania had created too many lines and unprofitable rivalries, and by the 1860s many companies had become aware of the need to save money. Lightly used Sunday trains were an obvious target. “Economic considerations accounted for almost all these closures,” Simmonds writes. “Sabbatarianism had little to do with them … the railways were out to reduce losses, and here they wielded the axe.” That meant the chop for Christmas trains, too, because they followed the pattern of Sunday timetables from the beginning. But when, thanks to changes in social habits in the 1970s and 80s, trains on Sundays became almost as numerous as those on weekdays, the Christmas timetable was not revived accordingly. Television and unprecedented degrees of eating and drinking had by then pinned most of the nation to the couch for the duration. If there were to be trains, who would use them? In the meantime, tracks could be repaired and renewed more easily if they were free of traffic for a day or two – more cheaply, also. While it would be unreasonable to blame railways entirely for Britain’s prolonged sleep-in, the kernel of the cause surely lies in this history of piety, greed and cost-cutting. In 1830, the world’s first passenger railway, the Liverpool & Manchester, announced that on Sundays no trains would leave between 10 in the morning and four in the afternoon. Look where that decision has taken us! Drunker, fatter, lazier, lonelier. The atheist Richard Dawkins should add it to his charge sheet of religious calamity: Sunday Trains (lack of), somewhere in the alphabetical list below the Spanish Inquisition. What is it about Nigel’s coat? When Jeremy Thorpe died earlier this month, I remembered his coat: slim-fitting and light brown, with a velvet collar in a deeper shade, it made him look slightly bogus and unreliable, which he turned out to be. Nigel Farage wears exactly the same kind of coat to the same unintended effect. Crombie’s catalogue describes it, or something very like it, as the Lovat Covert – “the most iconic Crombie overcoat of all … a mainstay of any gentleman’s wardrobe”. It has that nice feature, a ticket pocket, and multiple stitching at the helms to enable the purchaser to adjust the size if Sir so wishes. The price is £795, though you can buy cheap copies online for less than a tenth of that. The Crombie firm still makes its coats in Britain from British-made cloth, and long may it continue. I don’t know why its coats make politicians look raffish, but perhaps it has something to do with the old idea that, for anything other than country pursuits, brown is not a colour for gentlemen. |