Travelling in open carriages

Waiting for a train at Waterloo last Saturday, I thought of the scene in Hardy’s short story The Fiddler of the Reels which gave me the idea for my new novel ‘Mr Blackwood’s Fabularium’ in the first place.

In it a Wessex man waits for his girlfriend to arrive at Waterloo on a Great Exhibition ‘special’ from Dorchester. “The seats for the humbler class of travellers,” he wrote, “were open trucks, without any protection whatever from the wind and the rain; and damp weather having set in with the afternoon, the unfortunate occupants of these vehicles were, on the train drawing up at the London terminus, found to be in a pitiable condition – blue-faced, stiff-necked, sneezing, rain-beaten and chilled to the marrow. The women had in some degree protected themselves by turning up the skirts of their gowns over their heads…”

Many real-life Exhibition excursionists must have had similar experiences, for the summer of 1851 was an unusually wet one!

The Great Western Railway