The history of the underground can be divided very neatly into two completely distinct periods - before King's Cross and after King's Cross. With the exception of the creeping privatisation, most of the changes in working life underground can be related to the fire at King's Cross underground station on 18th November 1987, in which 31 people died. The Fennel report on the disaster made over 100 recommendations, nearly all of which were adopted. The underground is almost certainly never going to have a severe fire again and even if one were to break out, the staff will not make the terrible mistakes that led to so many deaths at King's Cross. There is a lot of rhetoric about safety spouted by LUL nowadays, some of which is not exactly true, but to understand how much safer it is now it is vital to understand just how unsafe it was then.
For a start, there were no fire plans kept on the station, the staff were not properly uniformed, there were no detailed evacuation plans or practices, there were no records of which staff and contractors were present at a station at any time, the emergency chain of command was unclear, and the fire brigade's radios didn't work underground. That is all aside from the most glaring faults of allowing piles of flammable litter to build up under wooden escalators, and then permitting people to smoke on them without any sprinkler system, let alone a fire alarm system. All this has been fixed, but none of the reforms would really count if it were not for the fact that workplace drunkenness is now frowned upon.
In the old days, managers visiting stations would be greeted with a bottle of whisky, and station staff would frequently repair to the pub during their meal breaks and the rest of their duty as well. If that seems insane, it is because it was. The magic hex which protected the underground from burning down every day clearly ran out in November 1987, but until then it had worked admirably. After that, of course, things had to change.
A lot of people cleaned up their act after parliament required the underground management to bring in random drugs and alcohol testing in 1992, but an awful lot of others were sacked or couldn't hack it. If ever a job could drive you to drink, the underground is it. Boredom punctuated with stress - mine's a large whisky. To be sure, the underground still employs a number of alcoholics, some of whom survive by the skin of their teeth, many of whom eventually trip up. There is help for those who confess before they get caught, but almost none for those who get caught.
Over the years this means that the underground has got safer but the staff have become much less interesting. It is not so much that alcohol makes people interesting, even though it can, but that the discipline involved in never coming to work with any alcohol in your bloodstream at all (which means no drink at all in the eight hours before booking on and only three pints of average lager in the previous 24 hours) robs people of some of their verve. The characters are still around, but they are muted and increasingly outnumbered by the kind of dull, worthy, reliable types that you would actually want to be driving your train and manning your station.
Apart from drinking (or taking drugs) there is only one other surefire way of getting sacked on the underground. Not incompetence - let us not be absurd. Certainly not rudeness, as I can well attest. The answer is fiddling: and here again there is a chasm between the old days and today. The difference is not so much to do with King's Cross but instead the company plan of the early 1990s, which was sparked by King's Cross and which transformed the underground from a ramshackle railway run by halfwits to, well...
There were myriad changes, but the most important was that somebody finally decided to do something about the absurd amount of money getting pilfered by the gateline staff from excess fares. In the old days it was impossible to get people off the barrier, a situation that has been well and truly put right. Legends abound of station staff buying houses from the proceeds (1980s prices) and one popular tale is of the guy who died and left a locker stuffed with unopened pay packets, having been living on the £40 a day he scalped from the public. Guys would go home with their trousers bulging with loose change. One supervisor told me that when he started the job he filled in his excess fares sheet diligently, noting every fare, and was called into the manager's office a few days later to explain himself.
The simple institution of decoys sent out to entice staff into modest fiddling has more or less put paid to the traditional scams. The fact that the wages are so much better than they were in the old days also helps. Staff rarely even bother to keep up the old custom of collecting used travelcards and reselling them over the ticket window, which I have seen account for a few people's jobs. Fleecing tourists, of course, is still a favourite. The clerks justify it on the grounds that they deserve a little extra for all the effort it takes to understand them. But now it's just dull old wages and occasional tea money.
