A city under siege

For more than six months, havoc reigned as all the main streets in the city centre were dug up for the removal of the old lines used by the horse-drawn Worcester tramcars and for the laying of the wider lines and overhead power cables for the new electric trams.

Such key thoroughfares as High Street, The Cross, Foregate Street, Broad Street, St Nicholas Street, Sidbury and Worcester Bridge were all transformed into frantic construction sites as virtually the whole of the city centre became a no-go area to traffic.

Excluded were horse-drawn carts, carriages and wagons, ponies and traps, bicycles and the "new-fangled" mode of transport, the automobile.

It was a tremendously traumatic time for the citizens of 100 years ago. They had to get around the central area entirely on foot to shop, some pushing prams or other makeshift two-wheeled trolleys to carry their goods.

The effect on the trade, commerce and industry of the Faithful City was clearly severe during the six months of total upheaval. Though six-feet high fences of cloth sheeting or timber were erected along the pavement edges of some of the main streets, there was obviously dust and noise everywhere to make shopping and shopkeeping far from a pleasant experience or retail therapy.

In all, a new five-and-a-half mile network of tram lines was laid through the city centre and out along the main approach routes into the heart of Worcester such as New Road, Bath Road, London Road, Rainbow Hill, Shrub Hill and Barbourne.

The greatest inconvenience was at The Cross, which was to be the hub and main terminal of the new electric tramway system. The very thing citizens couldn't do at The Cross for months was actually to cross it!

What became known locally and nationally as the Worcester Tramway Siege lasted from June 1903, when the horse-drawn trams ceased operating, until February 1904 when the new electric trams arrived on the scene.

I've been discovering more about the siege from two books - Old Worcester - People and Places by the late Bill Gwilliam, and A Short History of the Worcester Tramways by HH Grundy (same surname but no relation to me).

The delights of tramcar travel came to Worcester in 1881, when the first of the horse-drawn variety took to the city's streets on a three-and-a-half mile network of three feet gauge tracks.

The three main routes operated by the Worcester Tramway Trust Company were from The Cross to St John's, terminating at the Portobello Inn, Bransford Road; from the city centre out along Foregate Street and Barbourne to the Vine Inn at Ombersley Road, and from St Nicholas Street to Shrub Hill Station, where there were three or four pubs close by at the time.

In fact, the outer terminus for each of the tramway routes was an ale house, no doubt as an incentive to thirsty passengers, particularly on leisurely summer evenings.

The Tramway Depot for the entire city network was at the Bull Ring in St John's, on the site now occupied by the Co-op supermarket.

Alas, the Tramway Trust hit financial problems and was sold off by the Official Liquidator in 1889 to a new company, the City of Worcester Tramway Co Ltd, which lasted only three years before going into voluntary liquidation.

It was succeeded by the far more effective Worcester Tramways Company, whose operations involved more than 100 horses, seven double-deck trams, two single-deckers, and 11 horse buses.

However, in 1898 the British Electric Traction Company acquired a substantial interest in Worcester Tramways and presented the city council with a major scheme for the introduction of an electric tramcar network in Worcester.

This led to nearly five years of wrangling in the Guildhall Council Chamber over the question of " electrification," but after some stormy sessions, councillors eventually gave the go-ahead, and the massive construction operation began in mid-summer 1903.

The old three feet gauge tracks of the horse-drawn trams all had to be torn up to make way for the 3ft 6in tracks of the electric vehicles.

Possibly, the most complex task was the laying of the sharpest curve which was from The Cross into Broad Street, a radius of 45 feet, double track. The horse tramway depot at St John's also had to been extensively altered to accommodate a fleet of electric tramcars.

The official launch of the new system, operated by the Worcester Electric Tramway Company, was on February 6, 1904, when the Mayor and Corporation took a ride from Worcester Bridge to Barbourne aboard the first tramcar. Excited crowds of citizens also queued up for their first short trips that winter day.

There were eventually 17 electric double-decker tramcars operating in Worcester, their livery being of Brunswick Green and Light Buff.

Sadly, the life of the electric tramways in the Faithful City was comparatively short - just 24 years. By the mid-1920s, they had become an "obstruction and nuisance" to the fast-expanding new mode of transport - the motor car. Thus it was that at the end of May, 1928, that the trams ceased operating in Worcester and made way for the Midland Red's fleet of motor omnibuses.

For Worcester, however, the transition from tram to motor bus meant another siege as all the tramlines had to be ripped up and removed over a few months in 1928-29.

As Bill Gwilliam wrote: "Tramways had been very much part of life in Worcester for almost half-a-century, and there was some regret about the passing of these rumbling, awkward vehicles from the city's streets. In their heyday, they had carried a yearly average of three million passengers - an impressive figure for so small a system."

n The Worcester Tramway Siege was captured dramatically on camera a century ago by local professional photographers, T Bennett & Sons of Broad Street, who produced a set of picture postcard scenes of the huge upheaval.

n Some of these still survive in old photo albums, but Worcester vintage postcard collector Ron Shuard of Bilford Road believes he possesses the largest number of different postcard scenes issued then by Bennetts - 15.

n He has kindly allowed me to borrow eight of them for this Memory Lane feature. Ron is the current president of the Worcester and District Philatelic and Postcard Society which is staging a major fayre and exhibition, WORPEX 2003 at Oldbury Park Primary School, Worcester on Saturday, March 15, from 10 a.m. to 4.30 pm.

n The society has been doing much work in encouraging an interest in stamps in Worcester schools, and trophies will be presented to some pupils for award-winning entries to a stamps design competition.