Not so much a railway line, more a political slogan

Icringed a little at the names that the Mayor of London came up with for six Overground railway lines – Windrush, Suffragette and Lioness among them. Their uncritical agitprop implied everyone had signed up to an approved version of history.

Naming a line after the Suffragettes may have seemed an uncontroversial winner. All reasonable people support votes for women. But it must be remembered that the Suffragettes went around slashing paintings like Velázquez’s bombing Westminster Abbey (where the Coronation Chair was damaged) and even burning down Yarmouth pier.

The First World War brought a partial truce, or things would have got nastier. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of women backed the law-abiding National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, who weren’t Suffragettes, and the vote was won.

So next time Just Stop Oil protesters glue themselves on to the roof of a train at a station on the Suffragette line, whose side will the Mayor be on?

Naming a line Windrush isn’t a simple gesture either. The ship brought people from the Caribbean in 1948, under a Labour government, to do jobs Britons wouldn’t do. But it was built in Germany in 1930 (as the Monte Rosa), spending years taking Germans to South America on Nazi-approved cruises. Horribly, in 1942 Jews were deported from Norway in the ship to their murder in Germany.

I suspect, though, that the name Windrush was welcome since it labels the 2018 scandal under a Conservative government. If scandals make good names, why not the Groundnut line, after the Attlee administration’s blundering scheme to grow peanuts in Tanganyika?

The Overground choices sound like right-on names plucked out of the air by a committee. Perhaps they went for a fact-finding mission to the Mexico City metro, full of revolutionary station names: Insurgentes, Constitución de 1917, Patriotismo, and Revolución itself.

Even Mexico (ruled for 71 years by the Institutional Revolutionary Party) hasn’t rid its underground railway of all remnants of religion and colonialism. Each station in Mexico has a little picture, for the benefit of those who can’t read and for us foreigners. Isabel la Católica station, named after the queen of Spain in 1492, when the New World was discovered, is represented by a caravel of the kind that Christopher Columbus used.

But another is named 20 Noviembre, the outbreak of the Revolution of 1910. We’re lucky that an Overground line isn’t named the Fifth of May line after the day in 2016 that Sadiq Khan overthrew the puppet tyranny of Mayor Boris. The British, though, have never been fond of places named after dates. Even Trafalgar Day, which many know is October 21, does not find its way on to the map. The nearest it got was from 1906 to 1976, with a station called Trafalgar Square, which then reverted to the name Charing Cross, a pious note from royal history.

It’s surprising that the London Underground has so long resisted political exploitation. Instead of immortalising the deerstalker that Keir Hardie wore, it displays the silhouette of Sherlock Holmes at Baker Street. Baker Street is named after the obscure William Baker, who just happened to have built the street.

Baker’s name remains as half of the Bakerloo line, and the other half – Waterloo – isn’t quite so bellicose as it seems. Waterloo station was named after Waterloo bridge, and not directly after the battle. Waterloo bridge was the Strand bridge when designed by John Rennie before the battle had been thought of. Only a vote of Parliament changed it to Waterloo bridge.

Curiously, Napoleon, arriving a prisoner at Plymouth in 1815, had admired Rennie’s huge maritime engineering works there. Rennie was touchingly glad to hear of it.

The Mayor of London is outdoing the Mexico City metro in making commuters join in the revolution

If scandals make such good names then why don’t we have the Groundnut line?