A Christmas Tale: The Guildford to Waterloo via Cobham Christmas Express

The Christmas Commuters

Usually I write something in the notes about where your gin has come from or retell a tale from history that relates to it. Clearly, today’s notes need to evoke the season so I’ve decided to instead tell you a story from the village I grew up in about one of my favourite Christmas traditions.

It’s not a story you can corroborate with google and I doubt it still happens today but it certainly used to happen. I give you the story of the 0725 Guildford to Waterloo via Cobham service.

Long before I became a submarine Captain, I grew up in the village of Cobham in Surrey. The kind of place that people used to refer to ‘sleepy’. It may have changed now but back then it was a ‘commuter’ town, where the workers of central London would move to when it was time to raise families. Quieter, less exciting and without the frisson of danger that big cities used to have. 

Every morning, the city workers would board the train in their pinstripe suits clutching their briefcases and broadsheet newspapers. The carriage was an unfriendly place. Not in the sense that there was hostility or a bad atmosphere; it simply wasn’t a social environment. Not a word would be spoken, and the eyes of the travellers would remain fixed upon the business pages of their Daily Telegraphs. Day after day, the same people, the same train, the same seats, but etiquette demanded they remain strangers. This was the time before mobile phones so the conductor’s was the only voice that would be heard.

All except for one day.

Most of the commuters’ jobs in the city or west end didn’t require them to work Christmas Eve but the alarm clocks next to their beds would still go off regardless, and the occupants would still make their way to the railway station. The only obvious difference was that their briefcase full of papers would be replaced with a shopping bag of booze.

As they boarded, they entered a very different train because on the 24th of December every year the previously silent carriage-mates would have a party. One day a year, the sound of laughter and popping corks would fill the train as they shared beer, wine and snacks and chatted all the way up to Waterloo then all the way back to their station, before bidding their farewells and heading back, slightly worse for wear, to their families. And then the next working day after Boxing Day, they would all go back to work, the old rules re-applied and order restored, on the 0725 Guildford to Waterloo via Cobham service.

Merry Christmas

The Captain.