Sibthorp

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*Pathé News theme*

“The Foreign Secretary, Mrs Beckett, set off today on her trip to meet her new American counterpart. The journey is expected to last three weeks, during which time she hopes to improve her shuffleboard skills.”

In the interests of balance, and because the experience is such a novelty, it is only fair that I mark the occasion when I find myself standing four-square behind our Prime Minister. We can’t uninvent long-haul travel, and it’s unrealistic to expect us to try. Nor should we make it once again the preserve of the super-rich. We have to find a way to make this all work. The solution honestly shouldn’t be too hard to develop, either; it’s just that there’s never been an incentive before for manufacturers to try. Meanwhile, fair enough, we should be offsetting like crazy.

Bizarrely, there are proposals to price people off short-haul flights to get them on to the railways, which ignore the fact that people are already being priced—and physically jostled—off the railways into their cars. Car travel in turn will become unaffordable to most in time, if current plans for tolls on major roads eventually come into effect. Should we stop travelling significant distances at all? Fantastic news for xenophobes and hermits, but what about the rest of us?

Has someone quietly been carrying on the work of Colonel James Sibthorp?

The coming of the railways provided Sibthorp with the subject which grew obsessive during his later years. Beginning with the announcement that he had no intention of ever riding in the “steam humbug”, he opposed all railway bills in principle and detail. The new “degrading form of transport”, he foresaw, would bring all sorts of disasters to its patrons, from moral ruin to wholesale slaughter... One of his few successes was preventing the Great Northern Railway from extending its line through Lincoln, to the distress of the town’s more ambitious citizens.

Whenever Sibthorp spoke of railway proprietors it was to denounce them as “public frauds and private robbers”, but the day came when, for lack of alternative transport, he was forced to go back on his vow and travel in their humbugs. Yet he retained to the end of his life the firm conviction that railways were a mere nine-day wonder. In one of his later speeches he expressed himself “of the decided opinion that these nefarious schemes would ere long appear before the public in their true light—that all the railway companies would be bankrupt and that the old and happy mode of travelling the turnpike roads, in chaises carriages and stages, would be restored”.

John Michell, Eccentric Lives & Peculiar Notions