Railways
The Elham Valley ghost
'Jack Waterman
The Elham Valley curves in a shallow arc across the countryside from Canterbury to Folkestone. As elsewhere in so much of rural Kent, it is an area where, happily, the worst excesses of imagined "progress" have largely been contained. On either side of its erratic stream and winding road are the Downs, rising in a pattern of fresh ploughland, sheep pastures and winter wheat, of isolated farms and cottages, and, through patches of woodland, occasional glimpses of grander houses. The villages are dotted throughout the valley: Lyminge, Elham itself (which used to be called a town, and at the centre remains a place of half-timber and Georgian facades), Barham, Bishopsbourne, Bridge.
Fcr transport, those without a motor car have to rely on the buses which ply up and down the valley, and across its margins. There are worse rural bus services. The dark red East Kent services, all the same, are the only means of getting about for many people: at Bishopsbourne, for instance, the nearest bus picks up and sets down nearly a mile up the hill outside the village. Yet such a Hobson's choice was not always enforced. Along the valley, in places only a hundred yards from the road, can be seen where the railway used to run.
In a book* published only last year, Michael Forwood has given a lively account of the history of the line. The economic factors in determining its building in the nineteenth century were a poor road, badly maintained and liable to flooding in the winter; expensive and irregular horse-drawn cartage of goods and transport of people; and the difficulties of getting livestock to market. Coal landed from sailing colliers on the beaches at Hythe would sell for half as much again at Elham, only eight miles inland. Improved farming methods in Georgian times resulted in increased produce and stock. The thousands of sheep reared in the Elham Valley in the middle of the century were driven to Ashford or Canterbury market.
These were good enough premises for the opening of a line in the era of "railway mania," but early proposals foundered in politics and mismanagement. Eventually it was the rivalry of the two main companies serving Kent, the South Eastern Railway, and the London, Chatham and Dover, that ensured the beginnings of the Elham Valley branch. Yet the work was not as simple as had at first appeared, and opposition by landowners holding out for high compensation delayed matters. Not until 1889 was the line completely open, with a fare for the sixteen miles end to end Is. 4d. third class. From 1890, for the next decade or so, there was a timetable of seven weekday and five Sunday trains in each direction. Apart from giving villagers transport much cheaper than the * The Elham Valley Railway: Phillimore, £3.50 horse stages and vans, the Sunday excursions were extremely popular, and a new pleasure to thousands who were enabled to see the countryside and visit the seaside.
But the life of the railway was to be short. The increased use of road transport, and the rise of the East Kent Road Car Company in the years following the 1914-18 war foreshadowed the end. Paradoxically, these were circumstances which the Southern Railway (the amalgamation including all the Kent lines) actively worked to foster rather than oppose. In a classic instance of boardroom decisions taking little heed of the needs and wishes of the people that, shareholders apart, they should serve, the railway company took a 49 per cent interest in the bus undertaking. The bus schedules were "weighted" at the expense of the train timetable, and the fate of the valley line was assured.
In 1931, the line was reduced to a single track, notwithstanding the flourishing state of Lyminge market which had grown up entirely because of the railway. Even with single-track operation more than 200 wagons were loaded from the market in a single day. In the 'thirties, too, Canterbury cricket week regularly provided the need for numerous "specials" from other parts of the county. But the bus service, with railway connivance, was the winner in the end. The only other events of note, before the branch finally closed in 1947, were during the war, when the Army were in charge of rail operations. At the instigation of Winston Churchill, who made a personal visit of inspection, an eighteen-inch railway howitzer was brought to the Elham Valley with other guns as anti-invasion measures. From time to time the "Boche-Buster," as it was nicknamed, was trundled out of the tunnel where it was kept, for practice firing into the Channel. On each occasion, windows were shattered for miles around, and the gun, though an object of local curiosity, did not enjoy great popularity.
The "Boche-Buster," nevertheless, was marginally more popular than the busting of the line itself. Villagers who remember speak with nostalgia of the line. Today there are still many sad reminders of its presence: I looked the other day at Bishopsbourne station from the rusting steel plate-girder bridge by which the road used to cross the line. There, in a cutting overgrown with weed, bramble and ivy are the platform and shelter, derelict, dank and rotting, whence in happier times the stationmaster used to ring a handbell to warn villagers of the approach of a train.
At Etchinghill, too, is a scene of decay. Here a tunnel had to be bored before the train could descend through steep woodlands and down a 1 'in 90 gradient to the sea. It is possible still to stand over the entrance and look eighty feet down the sheer, narrow approach cutting, and see, but only just, where the line was, amid overgrowing trees and thickets — a deep and dead place. At Lyminge, the station buildings are better cared for. The yard and station have been taken over, with appropriate irony by "Kent County Council Highways and Transportation Division 5" and a notice proclaims that this is their Lyminge depot. Oil drums and piles of concrete drains now occupy one platform, a building straddles where the track used to be, and a fence with rusting barbed wire stretches under the brick bridge where ivy has not yet obliterated its railway code number 2087. Beyond, the line disappears into a wilderness of thicket, rubble and junk.
Three miles away, all trace of station buildings at Elham have disappeared, but it is possible to see long humps overgrown with grass where the platforms were, and a coal dump where there were sidings. Where the line went beyond the level crossing is now an expanse of ploughland into the far distance, and on the site of the old ticket office is the beginning of an estate of new bungalows. But the stationmaster's house is alive and inhabited. It was bought by Mr Frank Creane, a gardening contractor. He and his wife Eileen live there among inescapable reminders of the railway past: their garage is where the buffers of a dead-end branch were, the stand-pipe where the locomotives were watered is buried a few inches below where daffodils are now showing through, and, not least, they say, there are the ghosts of a soldier and his girl-friend who walk the old platforms and line.
Nor are they the only Elham Valley ghosts. On the site of the old station at Bridge, there is still supposed to be the ghost pf a naval officer of the 1914-18 war who was killed on the line, while at Barham, the last two porter-signalmen, Jack Heathfield and Joe Fox, are commemorated in a rather more lively manner. Such was the regard villagers had for them, new roads have been named in their honour.
So, these are the witnesses to the baleful attrition of road against rail. The Elham Valley line was not the most important railway in the world. But it served the needs of a community, who are now worse served, and which has had its way of life changed at the stroke of a pen, by men in commercial power who chose to rig economic factors rather than face competition, and whose cupidity overcame any moral purpose they may have been born with.
This and a score of branch lines all over Britain were closed in similar circumstances, long before the wholesale cuts of Dr Beeching. His actions can now be seen as the most misguided and destructive measures, which have not only utterly and unnecessarily changed the lives of many people, but have ensured that the railways could not compete (just as the old companies would not compete) with the vastly less efficient and socially offensive road transport.
Now we may be faced with further savage rail cuts that would make the disastrous work of Dr Beechitig seem only a straw before the gale. The prospect, according to the unions, is of whole areas of the country without railways; of only main rail arteries, with hardly a vein, still less a capillary. The prospect, in fact, is of huge areas of the country with overgrown platforms, derelict ticket offices, weed-grown cuttings: a prospect of decay which will be not only physical, but which will surely damage the lives of the people and the economy of the nation. This must not be allowed to happen — and informed and vigorous opinion can prevent it .
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