Great Train Crimes: Murder and Robbery on the Railways

by Oates, Jonathan

  Dickman, then, gave his own account of what he had done that day.

  I knew Nisbet for many years. I saw him that morning. I booked at the ticket office after him, and went by the same train, but I didn’t see him after the train left. On Friday morning last I went to the central station and took a return ticket for Stannington. Nisbet, the deceased man, whom I knew, was at the ticket office before me, and so far as I know, had left the hall by the time I had got mine. I went to the bookstall and got a newspaper, The Manchester Sporting Chronicle. I then went to the refreshment room and had a pie and a pint of ale. I then went on the platform and took my seat in a third class carriage nearer the hinder end of the train than the front end. My recollection is, though I am not quite clear on the matter, that people entered and left the compartment at different stations on the journey. The train passed Stannington station without my noticing it, and I got out at Morpeth, and handed my ticket, and the excess fare of 2 ½d to the collector. I left Morpeth to walk to Stannington by the main road. I took ill of diarrheoa on the way, and had to return to Morpeth to catch the 1.12 train, but I missed it and I got the 1.40 at Morpeth. After missing the 1.12 train, I came out of the station on the east side and turned down towards the town. I met a man named Elliott and spoke to him. I did not get into the town but turned and went back to the station, and got the 1.40 slow train to Newcastle. I got a single ticket for Stannington and did not give it up.

  Apparently he made the journey because he wanted to see a William Hogg of Dovecote, near Stannington, about a new sinking operation that was to take place there soon. No appointment was made and Hogg did not see Dickman. Hogg had previously lent Dickman money. John Athley the ticket collector at Morpeth remembered taking an excess fare there and that the man who he dealt with resembled Dickman, but he could not be absolutely certain it was him.

  There were also physical clues. On 9 June, the money bag was found at the bottom of a mine shaft by Robert Spooner, a colliery manager, at Hepscott. This was a mile and a half from Morpeth. Dickman’s clothes were also examined. Bloodstains were found on his gloves and these had made marks in his trouser pockets. Dr Bolam, professor at Durham University College of Medicine, examined all these, and also Dickman’s overcoat. There was a smear of blood on the thumb on the left-hand glove. There were also recent stains on the trouser pocket, but it could not be ascertained what these were. There were also paraffin stains on his coat and these could have been the result of attempts to clear other substances from the coat. Dickman explained these away by saying he often had nose bleeds and the paraffin stains were the result of bicycle oil.

  A Newcastle newsagent recalled, in January 1910, that a parcel containing a revolver was handed in at her shop. It was addressed to Dickman, and had, she believed, been subsequently collected by him. This may have been the automatic magazine pistol which he had bought in 1907 from W H Pape & Co., gunsmiths of Newcastle. The nickel coated bullets could have been fired by one of this type of gun. Of course, such guns and ammunition could be purchased in any gunsmith’s shop.

  Some witnesses picked out Dickman from an identity parade. Hall was one and Spink was another. Yet doubt must be cast upon the veracity of their evidence. Apparently a policeman suggested that the two should look at Dickman as he was then being examined. They saw the back of his head and his coat. Hall said that this did not influence him in picking out Dickman from an identity parade. Dickman was wearing a light-coloured coat, and one of this colour had been worn by the man seen with Nisbet. There had also been conversation between detectives and the witnesses beforehand, though it did not, apparently, concern the identification of Dickman. Even so, this was all very irregular and reprehensible.

  When Mrs Nisbet saw Dickman in the magistrates’ court, he was in the same position and the same profile as the man who had been in the same compartment as her husband on that fatal Friday. Such was her emotion, she fainted.

  The police certainly thought that the case against Dickman was a strong one. Dickman was arrested and on 15 April, he was brought before Newcastle magistrates’ court. His defence stressed that, although there was much suspicion and suggestion against Dickman, there was a lack of hard evidence. All the witnesses had failed to state definitely that Dickman and Nisbet were together in the same compartment. It was demanded that Dickman be set free. A plea of not guilty was registered. After the magistrates left the court for half an hour, the chairman told the court that a case had been made against the accused and he would then be remanded until the Assizes in the summer. Dickman all along utterly refuted the charges against him. On one occasion he said, ‘I don’t understand the proceedings. It is absurd for me to deny the charge, because it is absurd to make it, but I absolutely deny it.’

  The actual trial began on 4 July at the Northumberland Assizes held at the Moot Hall, Newcastle, before Justice Coleridge. Mr Tindal Atkinson KC and Mr Lowenthal prosecuted and Dickman was defended by Mr Michael-Innes KC and Lord William Percy made the case for the accused. Atkinson admitted at the outset that the case rested entirely on circumstantial evidence. The evidence against Dickman has already been stated. Dickman gave evidence on behalf of himself, a relatively new procedure – first seen in the case of Robert Wood in 1907. On that earlier occasion, it worked in the accused’s favour (the case is told in the author’s Unsolved Murders in Victorian and Edwardian London). The judge summed up on 6 July. Dickman was found guilty and sentenced to death. Perhaps it is worth noting that the jury took almost three hours to deliver their verdict. It had not been an easy decision to make.

  Yet, thanks to another new legal innovation (the Criminal Appeal Act of 1907), anyone condemned to death could have their case referred to the Court of Criminal Appeal. This was the case here. It was heard on 22 July before the Lord Chief Justice and Mr Justice Phillmore. The same men appeared for prosecution and defence. Mr Mitchell-Innes, speaking for Dickman, said that Dickman’s wife had not been allowed to speak in his defence, that the judge had misdirected the jury and that some of the evidence had been withdrawn before the jury. His main argument was that the identity of the man with Nisbet could not be proved to have been Dickman and that the witness statements had been inconclusive. Attention was particularly drawn to the fact that there may have been an attempt made by the police to point out Dickman to the witnesses before trying to pick him out of an identity parade. It was not enough to prove motive; opportunity was also required, and for this, it had to be shown that Dickman and Nisbet had travelled together the same compartment on the train. He alleged that the prosecution had been unable to do so. The Lord Chief Justice admitted that any attempt by the police to undermine the independence of identity by witnesses was reprehensible, but he did not think that this wholly undermined the case against Dickman, and that circumstantial evidence in this case was strong enough to be conclusive. The appeal was quashed.

  Shortly afterwards, there was a petition for clemency forwarded to Winston Churchill, the Home Secretary, by Edward Clark. It received the following response:

  I am directed by the Home Secretary to inform you that he has given careful consideration to the petition submitted by you on behalf of John Alexander Dickman, now under sentence of death … and I have to express to you his regret that, after considering all the circumstances of the case, he has failed to discover any grounds which will justify him in advising His Majesty to interfere with the due course of the law.

  A few days later, while a batch of signatures were again despatched for a reprieve, a woman made a signed statement to Mr Clark to this effect. She had been in Leazes Park, Newcastle, on the day after Dickman’s arrest and heard two men discussing the disposal of a body under a railway seat. They then became quiet when they realized she could hear them. On being asked by them what she had heard, she replied in the negative for fear of what they might otherwise do to her. She eventually came forward, despite her fear that they might be following her, because it was on her conscience and she could not sleep.

 
Although many in Newcastle sympathised with Dickman, many did not. On one trip to see her husband in prison, Mrs Dickman was booed by a crowd outside the gaol, and letters in the local press hotly contested the issue. One wrote, ‘Dickman convicted! Who then is safe? No actual proof. Suspicion, if you like. He should have had the benefit of the doubt. The evidence was not strong enough to hang a dog on.’ Another wrote, ‘I venture to say that 9 persons out of every 10 are of the opinion that Dickman has been found guilty on evidence which, besides being circumstantial, is woefully inadequate.’ But other people thought that the verdict was safe, and one wrote:

  As another earnest student of the train murder, I, with the majority of others, consider the verdict passed on Dickman a very proper and fit one, and too good for such an undoubted scoundrel. Evidently we have a lot of unbalanced morbid sentimentalists amongst us. Anyone with a grain of commonsense would certainly agree that no other verdict was possible.

  Dickman never ceased to pronounce his own innocence. On the day before he died, he wrote a letter to his wife, which included the following sentences, ‘There is something still keeps telling me that everything will be made clear some day, when it is too late to benefit me. I can only repeat that I am innocent.’ Yet the course of the law was relentless. On 10 August, Dickman was executed, an inquest on his body discovering that death was instantaneous. When he was executed, about 1,500 people had gathered outside the prison. As a local newspaper observed, ‘Interest in the crime for which Dickman paid the extreme penalty of the law was maintained to the last.’

  The other side of the coin was that Mrs Nisbet applied under the Workmen’s Compensation Act, for any money the company might give her on behalf of her husband being killed under their employ. The Act was designed to compensate employees and their families for the loss of life and limb in factory or industrial accidents. The employers denied that Nisbet’s murder fell within this remit, but Mrs Nisbet’s case went her way because it was said that her husband had died whilst at work; he would not have been killed if he had not been carrying the firm’s wages. She was awarded £300. She also benefited by £302 11s 2d from her husband’s will.

  Train design was also commented on by a local newspaper:

  Thanks to the antiquated system which divides British railway coaches into a series of rigidly separated cells, there have been previous tragedies of a not dissimilar kind, but the menaces to public safety which lies in the possibility of such a crime being committed at almost any time, when the motive is sufficiently strong was never more clearly brought forward than in this instance.

  Yet, as in earlier cases, this type of remark went unheeded. Perhaps the desire for privacy overcame concerns for security.

  There was controversy over the verdict in this murder case both at the time and subsequently. Modern science would have been able to clarify it, by the use of testing of the substances on Dickman’s clothes. However, without such tests, we are in the realm of supposition. The killer was almost certainly someone who knew Nisbet and who was at Newcastle station in time to catch the 10.27 on 18 March 1910. He probably alighted at Morpeth. He had a revolver and was motivated by financial gain. He clearly was intent on murder and had planned his crime ahead of his travels that day. All this would fit in with Dickman. But, of course, there may well have been other men who fit this profile. Although Dickman’s guilt seems highly probable, it is not entirely proven beyond reasonable doubt. A recent study of the murder, however, concludes that it was planned out in advance and the stolen money well hidden by the killer – Dickman.

  Murder on the Brighton Line, 1914

  ‘If any of you had been treated in the same way you would have done the same.’

  It was Saturday night of 25 April 1914. Liverpool and Burnley had just played in the FA Cup Final at Crystal Palace (Burnley won, one goal to nil, with George V awarding the cup to the winning team). The train on the London Brighton and South Coast Railway had left London Bridge at 7.20 pm. It was scheduled to arrive at Brighton at 9.10 and its first stop was East Croydon. Thereafter, it was a stopping service at every station between there and its destination. At Horley station, two lovers boarded a third class compartment, and were apparently lively and were joking with each other, claimed a witness. They intended to travel to Horley, but bought tickets that would take them to the next station, which was Three Bridges, only a mile and a half away. The two had been drinking earlier that day, then had had tea in a restaurant. It is time we were introduced to them, but their short-lived journey was far from romantic.

  The man was Herbert Brooker, aged 32. He was born in Hove, Sussex, on 8 April 1882, and had joined the Royal Navy on 8 April 1900, after having worked as an errand boy. Brooker was five feet five inches tall, with grey eyes, a fresh complexion and had a scald mark on his face. He had served for twelve years, including spells on board thirteen ships, such as HMS Powerful, Cressy, Wellington, Hindustan and the Excellent. He left on 11 April 1912 as a leading seaman gunner with an excellent character and joined the Royal Naval Reserve. He had then served in other vessels, including the Lusitania (controversially sunk in 1915 by a German submarine) and various ocean-going tramps. More recently he had been working on shore, and by about March 1914 had been given a permanent post at the Port of London Authority, where he had been working on a temporary contract since August 1913. Things certainly seemed to be looking up for him. He was a well-known figure in Horley, because he lodged there with his brother-in-law at Mrs Mate’s, whenever he was around. He had told people there that his companion would soon be coming down to Crawley and that the two of them had had their banns already published, so marriage was imminent.

  His companion, and apparently soon to be wife, was Mrs Ada Stone. She was 29 and was five feet six in height, with brown hair and a sallow complexion. That day she was wearing a blue skirt and jacket, with a white blouse and a blue hat. There was a ring on the third finger of her right hand. Yet there was a difficulty in the way of Brooker’s marital intentions. On 15 February 1909 she had been married to a man who had left her at least by 1911, but she was, of course, still legally married. Oddly enough, the census entry of 1911 states she was a widow. Her husband had not been heard of for some time. The problem was to be resolved by Brooker by putting an advert in a newspaper for the missing man. She had once been the manageress at a Woolwich restaurant and then worked as a cook at the Royal Albert Docks there. In 1914 she was employed by Mrs Fitches in Woolwich High Street.

  She lived on the premises, but had last slept there on 19 April. On the following evening, she went to bed at 9. Brooker called for her then, rather worse for drink. Mrs Fitches woke up Mrs Stone, and the latter went with Brooker. She returned on 21 April and argued with Mrs Fitches. She then left and was last seen in a tramcar.

  Their journey on 25 April 1914 did not go as planned. Between a mile and half a mile from Three Bridges station, the communication cord was pulled. Not by either Brooker or his companion – it was rung three times by a young man who was two compartments away. This was Donald Palmer of Woodford Green. He heard a sound like a child’s cry, then a loud laugh and then a shriek. He looked through the window and saw a woman on the floor, with a man with a knife standing over her. However, the train’s guard, Albert Hillman, although he told the driver about this, he did not suggest that the train be stopped. He thought it would be safer if the train proceeded to Three Bridges and the matter, whatever it was, could be dealt with there.

  When the train arrived at Three Bridges station, Brooker stepped down from the compartment. He was described as being a well-set young man. He had a sailor’s knife in his hand. Hillman and Inspector Robbins, with other staff and passengers, apprehended him and took the knife from his hand. They found some rope and bound him, before taking him to the waiting room. The police were called and Superintendent Budgen of Crawley and two constables drove to the scene of the crime. Brooker asked ‘Is she dead?’ When Budgen asked him who he was, he replied, ‘I do not think I can tell you.’
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  Brooker was given some water and the ropes were removed. He appeared very agitated. He was found to have a small bottle of whisky on him, which was removed. Brooker said to Robbins, ‘You ought to have a Victoria Cross’ and then said, ‘Let me get at him’, but it is unclear to whom this referred. He also appeared fatalistic about his own fate:

  I hope I shall be strung up. I deserve it. She was a good girl. I did what I wanted, and am satisfied. It was a mad frenzy. If any of you had been treated in the same way you would have done the same.

  Meanwhile, Ronald Mackay, a local chauffeur, who had been waiting on the platform for his mother, stepped into the compartment from which Brooker had just alighted. He made a shocking discovery. There he saw a young woman lying dead. Her throat had been cut. Although he did not know who it was, this was the body of Mrs Stone.

  The corpse was taken to the stationmaster’s office. Here it was examined by Dr Matthews of Crawley. He found there were two deep wounds in the chest and one in her back. Both she and Brooker were wearing Burnley colours – they had been to the football match.

  Mrs Stone’s body was identified that night by her sister, Mrs Maud Newstead, also of Woolwich, who came down with her husband to perform this unpleasant duty. She had not seen her sister since Easter.

  What had happened in that third class compartment? Mrs Mackay gave her account:

  I was alone. When the train stopped at Horley I saw Brooker and a young woman looking into the carriage windows. When the train was approaching Three Bridges, I heard a bell ringing constantly, but no screaming. As the train drew into the station, I put my head out of the window and saw Brooker jump out of the next compartment with a large knife in his hand.