The Whitsun Weddings: a railway ‘rhyme’ capsule
GREG MORSE considers Philip Larkin’s famous poem from a rail history perspective
It’s 1955, and a tall, thin man is hurrying to catch a train. The destination is London King’s Cross. The man is Philip Larkin. One can perhaps imagine the scene. Arriving at Hull Paragon station from his rooms in 200 Hallgate, Larkin would have stepped into what railway historians like to call a ‘cathedral of steam’ - a cavernous train shed where people would be bustling, porters would be wheeling trolleys, and small boys would be darting from platform to platform as they tried to note down as many engine numbers as they could.
Settling back into his seat, he might have seen latecomers racing, especially if they’d booked a place at the front of the train (it’s a long way from the Booking Office). He might also have seen the guard walk by as he made his last-minute checks before the off.
In the cab of the engine, the fireman would be filling up the back corners of the grate, his metal shovel clanging as he adds more coal. The driver would be checking his instruments and making one or two last-minute adjustments before looking at his watch.
Back on the platform, the guard, seeing the signal change from red to green, would blow his whistle and wave his green flag. The driver would look back and wave an acknowledgement before disappearing from view. He’d open the regulator, the engine would breathe low, and there’d be a gentle jolt as the journey began.
The train would make its way over the points at the station throat, slowly gaining momentum and rhythm before the first stop is made. From the very beginning, Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings successfully captures this very real sensation of train travel. Note the quickening pace, for example, in lines 4–7:
All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense Of being in a hurry gone. We ran
Behind the backs of houses, crossed a street Of blinding windscreens, smelt the fish-dock; […]
Here, Larkin lets the train take the strain, for once it has been caught one just has to sit back and be carried along. Read these lines aloud and you can almost hear the clicketyclack rhythm of wheel on rail joint - an aspect well understood by Larkin’s fellow poet (and admirer) John Betjeman, who recited the poem so frequently that his daughter, the late Candida Lycett Green, got to know it by heart.
For Larkin, Betjeman seemed to bring a new type of poetry into being - namely, ‘places in terms of people’, ‘people in terms of places’.
While admiring each other, both men also admired the verse of Thomas Hardy. Betjeman saw him as a “master of metre, local as his lanes” and “the poet of the small provincial town”.
Hardy taught Larkin “to feel rather than to write”, although (as he added) “of course, one has to use one’s own language and one’s own jargon and one’s own situations”.
The train journey is such a situation, with the narrative of The Whitsun Weddings capturing the view from the carriage window as it changes from urban to rural. Thus, the sun shines on the “blinding windscreens” of cars (possibly waiting at a level crossing) in
line 7, but a “uniquely” flashing hothouse in line 14.
Similarly, the “backs of houses” (l.6) become ‘“wide farms” (l.12) until the next town - “new and nondescript” (l.17) - hoves into view. All this can still be seen from a train, of course, although the flashing hothouses might be solar farms nowadays.
The Whitsun Weddings is a poem in three parts, in which the narrator (Larkin) settles
down in a train to read, comments with detachment (and some cynicism) on the noisy wedding parties he sees at each station stop, before going on to muse more seriously on life’s continuum.
At first, the parties are no better than a group of noisy porters. They are a distraction from the book being read… an irritant.
Later, as Larkin thinks on, more symbolism appears, so that the women share a secret
“like a happy funeral” (l.53), the girls gripping handbags stare as “at a religious wounding” (l.55), and so on.
The final image, of the arrow shower “sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain” (l.80) reflects the point in the journey beyond Peterborough, when the train hurtles on nonstop to London, with that feeling (as Larkin described it) of “being aimed like a bullet”.
It is a striking image and, though inspired by Olivier’s Henry V (1944), represents at once a ‘gathering emotional momentum’ and the imminent fecundity of the couples, who will doubtless soon be setting about making the postal districts of London even more packed than the poem describes.
For poet Andrew Motion, author of Larkin’s biography, the arrows (of Cupid, not Mars) demonstrate that “love wounds as well as inspires”.
For me, there’s something phallic about them (though that could just be me). There’s something downbeat about the rain, too, and the fact that we have reached the end of a journey. The train’s brakes have just come on, after all, and there is a “sense of falling” (l.79) as the terminus draws near.
Train journeys are a metaphor for life, in many ways. Life, like a train journey (and a poem) has a beginning, a middle, and an end. There are stopping points. There are “frail travelling coincidence[s]” (ll.74-75), where we meet people who seem tremendously important for a while, but who choose to alight at a different station from us along the way.
The reappearance of souls such as those who pepper Powell’s 12-volume A Dance to the Music of Time (1951-75) is not the experience of most people. In those three words, Larkin captures that which is. And life goes on station after station, junction after junction, until we run out of steam and pull up at the buffer stops, prevented from going on, as the ultimate destination has been reached.
From a purely railway point of view, though, The Whitsun Weddings is of interest because of the difference evident in the industry between the time in which it was written and the time in which it appeared in the book that bore its name.
FULCRUM OF CHANGE
For historian David Kynaston, the poem’s journey occurred on August 11 1955. Motion, however, recounts the idea that it took place on May 28 1955 - Whit Saturday.
Some see a problem here, in that a rail strike had been called from midnight on May 28, but ‘from midnight’ was used in the newspapers and union literature to mean between the Saturday and Sunday, not the
Friday and Saturday.
Thus, travel was perfectly possible on the Saturday. But while British Railways “were able to maintain a skeleton service in most areas”, Larkin might have chosen to avoid travelling if not coming back the same day, as a return journey on the Sunday (or thereafter for the next couple of weeks) would have been troublesome and irksome, to say the least…
For our purposes, of course, it doesn’t much matter. What’s more important here is the agreement that the trip occurred in 1955, as 1955 is a significant year in British railway history - the year when the traditional railway scene began to be broken up.
For Larkin’s generation (and Betjeman’s), the railway was the principal means of getting about a country which still relied on it to a great extent.
Sitting at your breakfast table in Bristol, Birmingham, Swansea or Stranraer, for example, the newspaper in front of you, the coal in the grate and the marmalade on your toast would still have been brought by train at least part of the way.
As a ‘common carrier’, BR could refuse no consignment, so even that grandfather clock from Aunt Dolly in Harrogate would have come by rail to your town and by road to your door.
And when the letters rattled through the letterbox, the morning post was possible because trains such as the Night Mail still crossed the border, its cargo still sorted en route by dedicated Royal Mail men. Here indeed are the mails for certain porters to ‘lark with’ (l.26) - something about the railway that you can no longer see.
As far as the poem goes, the train itself would also have been something you can no longer see. It would have been an older train, with Larkin’s sense of isolation heightened for the audience of his own time by being in a compartment, not an open carriage as we know today.
If that train was “three-quarters-empty” (l.3), then it is likely he was cocooned in its box-like confines alone, cut off save for the corridor.
But if that train was a slow-moving stopper, as it was, keeping its “slow and stopping curve” (l.11) at least until Peterborough, then he may even have been in a non-corridor train, with a door to the outside world on either side. If left alone here, he’d have been as cut off from his fellow passengers as he would have been the driver.
By 1955, however, rising living standards were driving more people towards the products of Morris, Ford and Austin, and the apparent freedom they brought. This - coupled with increasing operating costs, lagging fares, lagging charges, and the loss of freight to road - began to turn BR’s surplus into a deficit.
And with Britain now enjoying full employment (or something very like it), staff were also getting harder to find, as fewer and fewer men wanted to get covered in soot and grime cleaning, firing and maintaining locomotives - despite what some of them might have thought as boys.
Steam locomotives demanded a lot of looking after and could take a long time to prepare for traffic, even after the boiler had been filled and the fire lit. True, they were built from indigenous materials and powered by indigenous fuel, but recent coal shortages, price rises and concerns about quality had weakened this benefit considerably.
Add in growing concerns about pollution on top of all this, and it was clear that drastic measures were needed if the company was to
remain competitive.
The solution was presented in The Modernisation and Re-Equipment of British Railways - a plan supported by the government, which set aside £1,200 million of public money to be spent on it over 15 years. The aim was to “exploit the great natural advantages of railways as bulk transporters of passengers and goods, and to revolutionise the character of the services provided for both”.
With technology moving on, this ‘revolution’ would involve the substitution of steam by diesel and electric traction.
It would also mean a reduction in the number of carriages with compartments but no corridors (the last would live out their lives on suburban services out of King’s Cross, finally vanishing in 1978).
And there would be a reduction in corridor trains, as more open plan diesel multiple units came to be used on stopping services.
This means that the isolation evident in The Whitsun Weddings would have been easier to envisage for its original audience than a younger one today, who might have seen such things on ‘heritage’ railways (but then again, might not).
According to Motion, Larkin started writing the poem in March 1957. As it took shape in his mind, more and more of these modern trains began to appear across the country.
By the time he finished it in October 1958 (“after almost 30 pages of drafts”), a new class of main line diesel locomotive was also starting to make its presence felt on the East Coast Main Line, over which Larkin’s train would have travelled from Gilberdyke down to Doncaster and beyond.
These machines, and others like them, would not shuffle “gouts of steam” (l.57), but would throb, chug, drawl instead. Thus, the sound - and the atmosphere of the railway and the whole railway experience - was changing.
By the time The Whitsun Weddings had been published in 1964, there had been much more change… with much more to come.
OUT OF STEAM
British Railways released its last new steam locomotive to traffic - No. 92220 Evening Star, which emerged from Swindon Works - in March 1960.
There couldn’t have been a bigger contrast with the train of the moment - the ‘Blue Pullman’, which began whisking passengers between St Pancras and Manchester Central in complete luxury from July of that year.
Arguably the biggest change, however, came with the arrival of Dr Richard Beeching in 1961.
As a director of ICI, Beeching had exactly the sort of sharp business brain the government of the time was seeking, to solve a problem that had persisted since the 19th century: how can the railways make a profit?
Beeching knew this question could only be answered with deeper analysis. This was duly effected, and the results presented in
his infamous Reshaping of British Railways report, which set out his plan to put the railway into the red by 1970.
Beeching understood that the industry had “emerged from the war [...] in a poor physical state” and that its financial situation had steadily worsened since. He also understood that the Modernisation Plan failed because it did not predict “any basic changes in the scope of railway services or in the general mode of operation of the railway system”.
His solution was to suggest that the replacement of steam be accelerated, stopping passenger services be cut, and loss-making stations be shut.
There are, of course, arguments for and against these policies. On the one hand, it should be noted that Beeching’s income figures were based on receipts issued at a particular place, which painted a blacker picture for stations more likely to be journey’s end than journey’s source, such as a seaside resort.
He also failed to see that branch lines contributed traffic to the core network; overestimated the ability of rail to win general merchandise consignments from roads; and assumed that passengers who had lost their local station would simply drive to the nearest main line one, when in reality many would make their entire journey by car.
Despite this, the report included many constructive plans, such as the ‘liner train’ concept, which involved the movement of containerised goods in dedicated ‘express’ services, and the block movement of coal in wagons that could be loaded and unloaded in motion.
For all this, Beeching only managed to contain BR’s deficit. However, his legacy was wider and included new staff appraisal schemes, improved training programmes, and up-to-date management methods.
Yet the image of BR - with its dark greens, maroons and browns - belied its new business focus, and had started to look ‘old hat’ by 1964. As a result, Beeching gave the company’s design team a clear brief to create a sleek new identity which would help bring confidence and cohesion to the network.
That May, its initial efforts were revealed when the experimental ‘XP64’ train was released from Derby Works. Featuring new carriages with smarter interiors, better soundproofing, pressure ventilation and improved suspension, perhaps its most eyecatching element was the livery - a shade of turquoise blue matched with light grey, quite unlike anything that had gone before.
The train was hauled by a new locomotive, finished in the same blue, but with one important addition - beneath each cab, on a temporary red background, was a symbol that remains synonymous with the railway to this day.
The final version of the new scheme was revealed at an exhibition in London during January 1965, along with new uniforms, new signage, a new alphabet, and a new name. British Railways was now the past - the future belonged to British Rail.
In the television programme Larkin made with Betjeman, the former told the latter that he liked Hull as he liked living on “the edge of things”. In The Whitsun Weddings, he’s on the edge of other people’s lives. Written in the steam era, and published as diesel was taking hold, the poem was also “on the edge of things” in a railway sense.
The end of the poem is chiefly remembered for that captivating arrow shower. Yet that arrow is “loosed with all the power ⁄ That being changed can give” (ll.76-77).
Change comes in many forms - in lives, and in rail journeys… a clickety-clack to the music of time.
The ultra-luxurious Pullman carriages are “standing”, not moving (l.73). They were not much longer for the world by 1964.
Similarly, the “walls of blackened moss” (l.73) were black only because of the nowebbing “gouts of steam” (l.57).
You cannot see these transitions in the poem, of course - they come only with a particular reading of it. That said, you can get a sense of the transition in Rail, a ‘short’ made by Geoffrey Jones for British Transport Films in 1967.
To read The Whitsun Weddings, go to https:⁄⁄www.poetryfoundation.org⁄poems⁄48411⁄ the-whitsun-weddings