CHAPTER 14International Luminary
It all began quite promisingly. Bursts of pride, enthusiasm, and optimism filled the first Pullman forays into Europe. The opportunity for growth outside North America arrived when the Midland Railway, a relatively new, medium-sized, and aggressively competitive English firm, agreed to operate Pullman cars on its lines. Contact with the Midland began during the European vacation George and Hattie took in 1870 while Albert was closing the deal on the Detroit works. George met with James Allport, the Midland's general manager, to discuss bringing Palace Cars to England.1 Two years later, on a trip around the United States, Allport stopped in Chicago, where Albert and George proudly showed off their wares, took him to the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy (CB&Q) Railroad's Aurora workshops, and explained the business of running luxury sleeping cars.2 For almost a year, Allport journeyed across the United States, gathering information on railroad operations and enjoying his time in the prairies and the mountains of the republic. Whenever possible, he rode in Pullmans, returning to Britain convinced that his fellow countrymen would pay a premium for such comfort.3
George and Albert Pullman had a global vision for Pullman's Palace Car Company (PPCC). The opening of the first American transcontinental railroad and Pullman's success in securing contracts across the United States convinced them of the viability of international expansion. Travel-writing Britons visiting America suggested there was demand for Pullman services in the United Kingdom. W. Fraser Rae, for example, demanded in 1869 that British railroads experiment with Pullmans, arguing that “five hours in a railway carriage need not necessarily be hours of torture.”4 Beginning in 1874, the company endeavored to transfer the “Pullman system” to Europe. Albert's work as an ambassador for the company, hosting excursions, wining and dining railroad officials, and supervising construction, complemented George's business expertise. Operating in Britain required negotiating with multiple firms because the railroad industry was fragmented into separate companies, as it was in the United States. The situation was similar on the continent of Europe, although government subsidies and state ownership complicated the picture there.
Invited by Allport to address the Midland Railway board of directors in England, George explained how Pullman cars eliminated the tedium of long-distance travel and expressed his hope the Midland would adopt them as it had “so many [other] great improvements.”5 Allport's board subsequently approved a fifteen-year contract to operate Pullman cars, mirroring PPCC agreements with American railroads. The Pullman Company built and owned the cars, hired conductors and porters, and took as income the extra fare passengers paid to ride in Pullman luxury plus a sizable cut from onboard sales of food and drink. It agreed to maintain and renew the internal fittings of the cars; the Midland would repair any damage caused by accidents. As an inducement to accept the offer, Midland executives received passes for complementary Pullman travel on both sides of the Atlantic.6 Pullman also agreed to release the Midland Railway from liability for any patent infringements that may have been built into Pullman cars.7
Pullman expansion in Europe began with one English railway and spread to others across Great Britain, though the continent proved less receptive and Pullman made almost no headway there during Albert's lifetime. Midland Railway managers initially planned to attach the cars to its regular services but, under pressure from George, agreed to run Pullman-only trains. George believed mixing the carriages would dilute the effect of the Pullman spectacle, and there were operational considerations because of the extra weight and length of Pullman cars. The Midland, in an echo of Pullman's early days in Bloomington, Illinois, gave the Americans access to erecting sheds in Derby, the location of its main workshops.8
The financial vehicle for carrying Pullman across the Atlantic was a group of British investors, known as the English subscribers, who financed The Pullman Company Limited and The Car Syndicate Limited.9 George hired British and French managers and lawyers to oversee the business in Europe, but he grew disenchanted with the lack of progress and moved the monthly board meetings to Chicago, usually attended only by he and a vice president.10 While this gave him firm control of the European operations, it slowed decision making considerably while telegrams using secret codes to thwart competitors and confuse telegraphers flew across the ocean.11
Albert laid the groundwork for operations. His first trip to Europe occurred in December 1872, when he, George, and newly hired PPCC vice president Horace Porter, formerly President Ulysses S. Grant's personal secretary, crossed the Atlantic together for a two-month visit. En route to the East Coast, they stopped at Jersey City, New Jersey, to examine the site for a new repair shop. In Europe, the men traveled first to Austria, where they checked on the status of four Pullmans sent to the Vienna International Exposition.12 These cars had been built in Detroit, disassembled, shipped “like ordinary merchandise” in prefabricated pieces across the ocean, and reassembled and put on display in Vienna. George hoped they would demonstrate American ingenuity and attract customers. Following the exposition, they were deconstructed and returned to the United States for service between New York and Washington, DC.13 The manufacturing process in this case presaged the technique the company would use to export its cars to Europe for the next two decades.14
It is odd that there is no record of Pullman's Palace cars in official Vienna Exposition reports. The only rolling stock mentioned in any detail were locomotives, with a firm emphasis on their power.15 Passenger transport was virtually absent, with the Austrian government seemingly demonstrating an exclusive interest in steam engines and freight wagons. Engineering marvels took precedence over passenger comfort. The collapse of the Vienna stock market in the wake of the Franco-Prussian war may account for the apparent lack of attention to the industry.16 Pullman might have exhibited its cars outside the exposition proper, taking advantage of the crowds and hoping potential customers would discover the vehicles, or it may have secured space in one of the buildings, but the exact location is unclear.
Less ambiguous is what happened next: the three Americans traveled from Vienna to London for George to finalize the Midland contract, Porter to hire the London office staff, and Albert to examine the Derby facilities. Operating Pullmans in England was close to becoming a reality, and Albert played a key role. What may not have been quite so grounded in reality were the stories Albert told journalists about the trip. Just as he did in the United States, Albert fed reporters narratives he hoped would become self-fulfilling prophecies. He told them Pullman would be at the Vienna Exposition and, following the exposition, he asserted that Pullman cars had proved so popular they would soon be operating on services from Vienna to London. The latter did not transpire. He floated similar rumors, complete with full descriptions of the cars supposedly involved, about Pullmans running in Scotland, again with no factual basis.17
Returning to the United States in January 1873, Albert met with Aaron Longstreet, Pullman Company mechanical superintendent, to supervise construction of the new Midland Railway cars. They were built in Detroit and broken down into sections for the journey to Derby. Only the wheels were British because of the need to accommodate the higher speeds of the Midland compared with American railroads.18 Longstreet served as witness for Albert's passport application and then accompanied him to Great Britain to oversee Pullman car reconstruction there.19 The two men departed for England in July 1873, accompanied by “a corps of men” from the Pullman factory in Detroit.20 In Derby, they started preparing the shops for the arrival of the car sections and stayed for two months. Albert spread the word, telling reporters his company planned to continue introducing its cars into Great Britain until it monopolized luxury travel there, while Longstreet directed the reassembly process. Albert also researched opportunities in Switzerland, but this reconnaissance came to nothing and he returned to Chicago in September.21
Albert left for Britain again in November 1873, staying this time for eight months. He and Longstreet supervised the final assembly of Pullman cars, tested them, and tried to convince other British railway companies to adopt them. Albert introduced a checked-baggage system, taught employees how to operate Pullman features, and demonstrated the cars to interested English railway executives.22 In December 1873, Albert's eldest daughter Nellie and his sister Emma—traveling as chaperone for her niece—arrived for a visit. Nellie, who was seventeen, wanted to see Europe before marrying. The three journeyed widely until Nellie and Aunt Emma departed just before Christmas and Albert returned to Derby.23
Albert did not neglect his networks while in England. In London, he dined with Chicago newspaperman Edwin H. Trafton, a meeting scheduled several months earlier and indicative of Albert's reputation as a bon vivant. Making his usual rounds of newspaper offices shortly before departing, Albert met with Trafton, at the time a reporter and editor for the Chicago Evening Journal. His newspaper circuit was how Albert planted “puff pieces” in the press, following the common practice of disguising advertisements as news.24 Trafton told Albert he would seek him at the Langham Hotel, where Albert would be staying, on July 1. Trafton arrived in England in late June 1874 and made his way to the capital. At the appointed hour, he found Albert “enjoying a tête-à-tête over a glass of brandy-and-soda” with some British business associates, startling Pullman with the precision of his arrival some four thousand miles and four months after their Chicago leave-taking. Recovering his equanimity, Albert led Trafton to the bar where he had taught the barmaid “the mysteries of a highly ornate Yankee cocktail.” As a raconteur, Trafton recalled, Albert had few equals, and his willingness to sing the praises of American culture was similarly without peer.25
But there was work to be done. Albert and Longstreet saw the first two cars, Midland and Excelsior, into service on the Midland Railway. Longer than the combined length of seven British coaches, they needed to be carefully tested in the confining dimensions of British railways. For Albert, this was another opportunity to network and to enjoy a convivial cocktail. He took pride in the distinctive vehicles with their “gaily-painted exterior and … sumptuous internal decorations and fittings,” including plush carpeting and swivel armchairs. The cars sat on a type of wheelset new to Britain's railways and conducive to smoothly traversing curves at high speed while special couplers were designed for fast movement and ease of use.26
The trial runs occurred in January and February 1874, proving the suitability of Pullmans on Midland tracks.27 Revenue runs followed. The first journey with passengers came on March 21, 1874, between St. Pancras, the Midland's magnificent Gothic-revival London terminus, and Bedford, a nondescript manufacturing town fifty miles north. This service, “the talk for some days of the railway world,” was memorable as the first British train to provide an onboard meal when luncheon was served. As it reached a dizzying top speed of fifty miles per hour, the eighty invited guests signed a commemorative book celebrating their adventure.28
The excursion garnered positive reviews. Reports asserted that the new cars were unrivaled “in costliness of material or in beauty of decoration or of fittings” and compared them favorably to coaches built for Queen Victoria's royal train.29 One passenger recalled, “Literally nothing seemed left to desire” because of “the thousand ingenious contrivances with which the whole train abounded,” including “some beautifully ornamented and finished panels overhead, that appeared to be merely part of the sloping roof of the salon.” Porters unfastened these fancy trapdoors and lowered “comfortable upper berths.”30 Also striking was the ability “to write without difficulty … at over fifty miles an hour,” facilitated by the cars’ gentle ride and smooth air brakes, operated under the watchful eye of their American inventor and patentee, George Westinghouse.31 This successful run, and many others like it on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, would help to cement Westinghouse's reputation for inventiveness.
Working with the Midland Railway to organize the demonstration runs allowed Albert to meet railway directors and managers, members of Parliament, and other grandees. He made the acquaintance of the Duke of Sutherland, a railway executive who would later visit the Pullmans in Chicago. Taking a dim view of the orthodox aristocratic attitude toward cold hard cash, Albert admiringly described Sutherland as “a good business man” who refused to “allow the ‘blue blood’ to stand in the way of money-making.”32 Sutherland, known by his contemporaries as “one of the most remarkable noblemen of his time,” enjoyed footplate rides and drove his own locomotive along “the Duke of Sutherland's railway,” a stretch of line across his estate. He was equally at home conversing with miners and navvies as he was with royalty, impressing Albert with his down-to-earth bearing.33 Not so quotidian were the cars Albert was promoting, whose open-plan design and ample light British passengers preferred, he asserted, to the small compartments in which they were “locked up … with no conveniences and plenty of discomforts.”34
Albert followed up implementation of the first European contract by traveling to France on the Midland for a test run from Paris to the northern railroad junction of Creil. French newspapers proclaimed Pullman cars “an innovation which supplies one of the most evident needs of society.”35 Pullmans did not quite live up to the fictional standard set by novelist Anatole France's luxury train of “restaurants, gaming rooms, athletic arenas, telegraphic, commercial, and financial offices, a Protestant Church, and the printing office of a great newspaper,” but they did impress the invited guests.36 The car embarked on a three-year tour of the continent, Albert bidding it farewell as it departed for Russia to demonstrate Pullman luxury, though with disappointing commercial results. It traveled from Ostend, on the Belgian coast, to St. Petersburg, Russia, and back again while he returned to England.37
Pullman efforts to monopolize Europe did not go uncontested. Competition for luxury rail travel meant the Pullman brothers’ desire to conquer the continent remained unfulfilled. Their principal rivals were the Belgian entrepreneur Georges Nagelmackers and Colonel William D’Alton Mann, the latter an American known for publishing Town Topics, a gossipy newspaper for which he was not above soliciting bribes to omit embarrassing tales of the rich and famous. The two men formed a partnership in 1873 to operate the International Sleeping Car Company, known across Europe as Wagons-Lits. This partnership dominated some of the principal international routes, including Paris to Berlin and Vienna. Attempting to proselytize the gospel according to Pullman, Albert and George negotiated unsuccessfully with German and Austrian railway officials. Albert also made noises about expanding to Istanbul and into South America, but again nothing of substance transpired despite persistent rumors in the press. Pullman did gain traction in Italy, putting cars into service on the line from Florence to Modane, on the French border, but a series of trial runs in France failed to dent the Wagons Lits stranglehold on overnight rail travel in Europe.38 As he had in England, Albert supervised the introduction of Pullman cars on a temporary service to Rome, but that initiative did not become permanent until the twentieth century.39
In July 1874, after almost a year in Europe, Albert returned to the United States. Feeling confident and accomplished, he gave an interview to Chicago journalists on his experiences.40 Albert was, in this rendering, “the very picture of robust health, his iron-gray hair cut rather close, his dark eyes radiant as a schoolboy's, and his magnificent beard falling in great waves upon his chest.” Calling the Midland the third most popular British railway, he labeled it “first in point of dash, pluck, and enterprise.” He explained how the excursions generated positive publicity for Pullman and for American inventiveness. He discussed taking a party of eighty notables from the textile town of Nottingham to the spa city of Cheltenham and repeated one passenger's observation: “Why, this is the best way to look at a fellow's country, you know.” He exaggerated his successes, claiming Pullman cars were to be introduced imminently on trains from London to Liverpool, Edinburgh, and Glasgow. His timing was off by a fair way: it would be two years before the last of those would see Pullmans, and many more before the first two did so.
In the first of what would become a series of complaints about Britain—a country George admired but Albert found inferior to the United States—Albert told reporters British laborers were so far behind American workers in skill and efficiency that the cost of building in Detroit, shipping across the Atlantic, and reassembling in Derby was lower than building from scratch in Great Britain. Comparing Britain with the United States, Albert reverted to conventional rhetoric about the superiority of free workers in a republic over those burdened by living under a monarchy. He asserted that the techniques used in British car building lagged behind those in the United States, adding to the cost. Even worse was how British railways treated passengers as an embarrassing necessity for whom luxury and consideration were unwarranted despite the English love of domestic comfort and good food. Here again, in Albert's eyes, the Midland stood out, but even there the tightly packed compartments, small windows, and stuffy air (literally and figuratively) of its carriages contrasted with the spacious and salubrious Pullmans. Using language frequently repeated in glowing articles about Pullman vehicles, Albert claimed one traveler told him, “Your company deserves the thanks of our people.”
Albert also criticized British trains for moving too quickly. He said they traveled at speeds of up to seventy miles per hour, claiming that “was altogether too fast” and increased the likelihood of accidents. He did concede that, unlike the mostly single-track lines of America, the double-tracking commonplace in Britain allowed trains to run in opposite directions simultaneously. The roadbeds onto which rails were laid in Britain were, he admitted, “solid as a rock” and the British used “the best rails in the world,” conducive to faster traffic at higher capacity than American tracks. Nevertheless, he felt safety had been sacrificed to speed. Albert's impressions of Britain overall were negative and influenced his political opinions into the next decade, especially on the issue of Irish land reform.
George, who did not deal with workers directly and proved less committed than his brother to supposedly American virtues, took a different view. He found Britons “courteous, honest, and enterprising” and wondered aloud if “there were after all a few things the Americans could learn from the English in the management and running of railroad companies.”41 Albert contradicted his brother, telling a reporter his British clients were “astonished to meet such gentlemanly employes [sic]” when they encountered the well-remunerated and thoughtfully treated (to his mind) Pullman conductors and porters, or “servants,” as the British press called the Black employees, brought over from America for trial runs.42 These men—“selected from among the most experienced in the employ of the Company”—stayed in England for a month to show their English counterparts how to operate the cars.43
Albert was not above a little self-congratulation. He praised himself for successfully inaugurating Pullman service in England and shared his optimism for the future. He asserted that Pullman trains were running full on the Midland Railway, not quite the truth. Acknowledging that only the Midland was operating Pullman cars in mid-1875, he claimed “such is the popular desire for them that all the principal lines [in England] will soon be compelled to adopt them.”44 Spurred by public acclaim and Pullman lobbying, the Great Northern Railway and the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway would indeed follow the Midland's lead. George and Albert visited Britain twice in 1875 and, by the end of the year, Pullman cars were added to trains from London to Brighton, a popular seaside town on the south coast of England.45
On his second visit of 1875, Albert traveled with American manufacturer Richard Allen, the paper-wheel magnate. They visited Derby and London, observing progress in the shops in the former and submitting patents for paper wheels in the latter. Albert shared newspaper clippings of his trip to England with Aunt Hannah, who summarized them succinctly to his mother (her sister) with the words “Albert is succeeding admirably with his cars.”46 Responding to an admonitory letter from his sister Emma, he then sent his mother a silk umbrella from Paris.47
Albert's optimism about the future of Pullman operations in Britain did have some justification. In 1876, the Midland Railway cooperated with connecting lines to run sleeping-car trains between London and Glasgow, necessitating new rolling stock and bringing the total Pullman inventory on the Midland to thirty-six vehicles. The Midland used Pullmans on trains from London to Bradford, Leeds, Liverpool, and Manchester, in addition to the Glasgow service.48 Another major English railway, the Great Northern, entered into negotiations to run trains along the three-company east coast route from London to Edinburgh. Despite some initial success, however, the Great Northern proved an obdurate and ultimately unwilling partner with Pullman, and the desired monopoly on British sleeping-car operations eluded the American firm.49
The expansion into Europe did provide PPCC with additional cachet to foreign travelers in the United States. Visitors requested, rode in, and extolled the decorative features and undoubted comforts of Pullman sleeping cars, often to the detriment of other railroad companies. The British author Therese Yelverton complained of the much-touted Silver Palace Cars of the Central Pacific Railroad, “I met with no silver whatever,” reporting her disappointment at finding that the silver-colored fittings were simply plate metal.50 Likewise, the poet Mary Blake rated Pullman cars ahead of Silver Palace Cars for being “roomier, brighter and fresher” and ranked the former “a long way behind” the Pullmans in which she rode.51 W. Fraser Rae called his first Pullman trip “an epoch in a traveler's life.”52 Pullman service exceeded passenger expectations. British journalist George Augustus Sala wrote approvingly of dinner service on a Pullman car, noting with particular surprise the fine texture of the linens used on Pullmans.53
Not everything was perfect, however. British writer Rudyard Kipling complained about ventilation systems overwhelmed by soot and sand; other commentators detailed with dismay the absence of a door to the small cupboard holding a sink in which water froze in winter.54 Contradicting Albert's reports that Pullman cars met with a universally favorable reception in England were stories warning Britons against adopting American innovations.55 An influential Liberal magazine, The Spectator, worried that Pullman carriages would marginalize first-class travel. The journal fretted that the Midland Railway would remove it completely as part of an ongoing reclassification of passenger facilities, making railway trips more expensive for wealthy clients.56 Despite these concerns, other British railways would eventually follow the Midland lead.
Albert spent a total of nineteen months in Europe between December 1872 and September 1878. His six visits left a deep impression on him, convincing him of the superiority of the United States, of the trap of venerating tradition, of the reactionary attitude toward enterprise taken by Britons, and of the need for reform in Ireland. He continued to demonstrate his value to the Pullman Company as an excursion host and as a construction supervisor. Despite setbacks, he proved his worth as a salesman whose convivial outlook found a receptive audience and whose compelling stories convinced British railways to consider American products. Albert's panache and brashness played a key role, and he doubtless felt great satisfaction in bringing Pullman luxury to Britain. This was a high point in his life: he was once again doing a job George could not and demonstrating his importance to the success of the Pullman Company.