The Nightingale Shore Murder

by Rosemary Cook

  Behind this smart locomotive, the third class carriage that Florence travelled in was comfortable enough. Outside, it was painted in plain umber, with the company’s initials in gold-shaded black lettering. Inside, the upholstery was sprung or stuffed with horsehair, and buttoned. The walls were panelled with wood, heating was from steam pipes, and the carriage was lit by gaslight. There was a rack overhead for luggage, and a window in each side which could be opened by a leather strap. There was no door handle on the inside: passengers had to lower the window to reach the outside handle, or wait for the guard on the platform to open the door. There was a communication cord which ran between compartments to allow passengers to alert the guard to any problems. Seasoned travellers from this period described the smell of the train as a mix of the coal from the engine – with a different smell in different counties, depending where the coal came from – and gas from the carriage lights.

  In 1920, however, the railways were in a state of flux, the consequences of which may have had a direct effect on Florence’s journey. From the opening of the first railways – the Stockton to Darlington line in 1825, and the Liverpool to Manchester line in 1830 – to the early years of the 20th century, there had been decades of expansion, experimentation, competition and development. New technologies for engines, carriages and the wheeled ‘bogies’ on which they travelled, track building, braking systems and signalling had been invented, refined, introduced and replaced. Speed records were set and broken, and new forms of heating, lighting and furnishing of carriages were regularly introduced. All long distance express trains had corridors allowing all passengers – even in third class – access to toilets and the dining cars. From a dangerous if heroic novelty, the railways had become a huge industry, burgeoning with competing companies, advertising campaigns and related businesses such as hotels and omnibuses to complete the journey.

  Then, when war was declared in 1914, the Government took over the railways. Throughout the war, a Railway Executive Committee, made up of the general managers of the ten leading rail companies under the direction of the Board of Trade, managed the country’s rail system. Under the Committee’s direction, the railways played a major role in transporting troops and war goods from 1914 onwards. A report in The Railway Gazette in 1919 shows the staggering strain put on the LB&SCR by this work:

  ‘In common with other railways, the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway was called upon to do important service in connection with the war.

  The immediate selection of Newhaven, and some months later of Littlehampton (at one time used for the company’s Continental services) as ports of embarkation for munitions and war stores, brought a concentrated and continuous traffic over the railway from all parts of the country.

  All kinds of munitions, military stores and foodstuffs, coming for the most part from the places of production, were carried over the railway as goods traffic, and up to the present the quantity conveyed to these two ports amounts to 6,805,810 tons, while a substantial tonnage passed over the line to other places on the railway.

  The number of special trains which were run in connection with this traffic was 53,376. The largest number of loaded special trains dealt with in any one day was 64. The number of loaded wagons handled at Newhaven and Littlehampton was close on 1,000,000. A considerable quantity of war traffic was, of course, also conveyed by ordinary goods trains…

  The passenger train traffic, although it did not equal the goods traffic in volume, was considerable, and comprised the conveyance of troops to and from the Army camps on the system or to join the Armies abroad. A large number of horses, guns and stores were also conveyed. A substantial part of this business was dealt with by the ordinary passenger train services, but 27,366 special passenger trains were employed in addition. This makes an aggregate number of 80,742 special passenger and goods trains used for the purpose of the war, and if the running had been constant there would have been a train for every half hour from the day war broke out until the day the armistice was signed.’

  By the time the railways were handed back to the companies after the war, they had been working for many years at a rate, and in a role, which had never been anticipated. The railway companies complained that they were not adequately compensated for the impact of this war work on their rolling stock, and the lack of maintenance during this time. While they caught up with the backlog, a shortage of stock led to the withdrawal of restaurant cars, and the re-introduction of older forms of carriage, such as those with non-corridor compartments, especially on the suburban routes.

  Non-corridor compartments meant that passengers could not change compartments once the journey had started, except at station stops. Florence’s compartment had no corridor, and so no escape route. Her train was not the luxurious Brighton Belle, with its Pullman carriages and electric lighting. It was an ordinary gas-lit compartment, with a single door on each side leading only to the platform or the track. Perhaps if there had been a corridor on the train, Florence might have moved from her original compartment – or been able to escape from it when she needed to. Perhaps the person who attacked her would have been afraid to do so if he thought he could be discovered at any minute by passengers from a neighbouring carriage. For although the compartment had been empty when Florence and Mabel first joined the train at Victoria, just before the train left they were joined by another passenger.

  Mabel had stepped into the carriage with Florence to pass the time until the train was due to leave. They had arrived just after three o’clock in the afternoon, and the scheduled departure time was twenty past three. So after finding the compartment, Mabel put Florence’s suitcase under the seat, leaving her with a large dispatch box, her umbrella and a black silk handbag. Florence, still wearing her fur coat and hat, took the corner seat on the ‘offside’ – furthest from the platform – facing the engine. She and Mabel talked until a few minutes before twenty past three. That was when a man opened the train door and joined them in the compartment, closing the door behind him. He looked about 28 years old, and was five feet seven or eight inches tall, clean shaven and of slight build. He wore a brown suit of a light cloth, and, unusually on a cold January afternoon, he had no overcoat. He also appeared to have no luggage. Mabel said goodbye to Florence, opened the door and returned to the platform. This would be her last conversation with her friend of more than 25 years. Mabel waited on the platform, looking in at the window, which was open, until the train moved away.

  The train leaving Victoria was a long one, made up of 10 carriages behind the steam locomotive. Although usually crowded, especially in mid-week and at weekends, on this Monday afternoon in January the train was not busy. The journey was non-stop to Lewes in East Sussex, though the train slowed to 30 miles per hour to pass through Gatwick and Three Bridges, to the north and east of Crawley. The route continued through the Balcombe Forest and over the Ouse Valley viaduct, through Hayward’s Heath, Burgess Hill and on down to Lewes. After Lewes, the next stop was Polegate Junction, where the train divided; four carriages would go on to Bexhill and then Hastings, from where Florence planned to continue her journey to Warrior Square station in St Leonards. The remainder of the train would travel on to Eastbourne. It was at Bexhill station, however, that the train staff were finally alerted to the fact that this journey was no longer routine. Something terrible had happened in one of the third class carriages.

  Chapter 2

  What happened at Bexhill

  Bexhill, a seaside town just 10 minutes from the journey’s end, was the last scheduled stop for the train before Hastings. The guard on the Hastings train was Henry James Duck, known as Harry, from the nearby town of St Leonards: Florence’s ultimate destination. Duck had been in charge of the train from Victoria, accompanied by Guard George Walters, and Guard Herriet. A photograph of the three men, who were to be key players in the events that followed, shows them each wearing the long dark jackets of the LB&SCR uniform, with a double row of brass buttons and the company’s initials on the
collar. Each wears a watch-chain across the front of the jacket, and a peaked cap with the company badge on the front. Duck and Herriet wear traditional neckties; Walters has a bow tie. Henry Duck has a heavy dark moustache and heavy eyebrows.

  When the train divided at Polegate Junction, Duck was in charge of the Hastings portion. He signalled to the guard on the Eastbourne train that all was well when his part of the train was ‘slipped’ just before Polegate, and stepped off the train at the station to check on his carriages. He saw nothing out of the ordinary during this stop. Although he did not notice it at the time, three railway workers – George Clout, Ernest Thomas and William Ransom, all platelayer’s labourers employed by the LB&SCR – had joined the train at Polegate. They had taken seats in the same third class compartment as Florence. Once on the move again, the train took another 15 minutes to reach its next stop, at Bexhill.

  It was twenty past five in the afternoon, two hours after leaving London, when the Hastings train pulled in to Bexhill station. On that early January afternoon, it was already nearly dark, and it was raining. The guard Harry Duck later described it as a ‘dark and dirty night’; and he inspected the train by the light of his hand-held lamp. There were no lamps at all at Lewes station, and unlikely to have been any at the smaller Bexhill station, where Harry Duck again stepped onto the platform to check on passengers leaving and joining the train, and to make sure that all the doors were shut for departure. This time, however, the stop was not routine. On the platform, the guard was approached by George Clout, one of the platelayers who had joined the train 15 minutes earlier at Polegate Junction. ‘Have you seen that woman back there?’ he asked Duck. ‘She is in a deplorable state.’ Duck looked into the carriage the man was referring to, and saw Florence alone inside, sitting in her corner seat facing the engine. When he got into the carriage, he could see immediately that she had terrible head injuries.

  The platelayers had not realised at first that the lady who they thought was asleep or reading was in fact barely conscious. The carriage was dimly lit, and they would have thought it impolite to stare at a lady passenger. George Clout, who came from Bexhill himself and was on his way home, said that he only began to think that something was wrong about a mile out of Polegate station, when he noticed blood on the lady passenger’s face. He mentioned it to William Ransom, saying he thought that the lady had had ‘a nasty knock’. But Ransom’s hearing was affected by a heavy cold and he did not hear the comment. The remark was heard by the other platelayer, Ernest Thomas: he looked across, but in the poor lighting, he could not tell whether the blood was wet or dry.

  Henry Duck made a hurried inspection of the carriage, and saw no obvious signs of a struggle. Florence was sitting in her corner seat with an open book on her lap, and her hat on the seat beside her on top of a small case. The only anomalies were a newspaper, partly on the seat and partly on the floor, which had blood on it; and Florence’s glasses, which were on the floor.

  Instinctively, Duck spoke to the injured woman, asking ‘However did you come by these injuries?’ – but he got no reply. He thought however that the injured woman had heard him, as he later gave evidence that ‘she turned her eyes round’. Other evidence given by the platelayers at the inquest would corroborate this, and raise the disturbing possibility that Florence was still partly conscious at that point, at least an hour after the attack, but unable to call for help. In view of the seriousness of her injuries, the guard made the decision not to remove Florence from the train at Bexhill. Instead, he took the train on to Hastings, while George Walters stayed with Florence in the compartment. At Hastings, she was carried from the train to an ambulance, and taken to the hospital in the town. According to one newspaper report, one of Florence’s friends from St Leonards was at Hastings station to meet her, and saw her carried unconscious from the train.

  It was only after the train had arrived at Hastings that Duck became aware of the blood spatters on the back of the seat, and some marks on the floor that he thought might also have been bloodstains. He also did not know at this stage that some of Florence’s clothing was torn, including her undergarments. Something appalling had obviously happened in the bloodstained carriage; and as a seasoned railwayman, Harry Duck must have immediately wondered if it had taken place while the train was in the Merstham Tunnel.

  Chapter 3

  The Merstham Tunnel

  If the Brighton Belle was one of LB&SCR’s proud claims to fame, the Merstham tunnel was a much less desirable one. It had already drawn the attention of the police on two separate occasions, because two other savage murders had taken place in trains on this same piece of track.

  The train passed through the Merstham tunnel in the early stages of the journey south, between Purley and Redhill in Surrey. The tunnel was completed in the late 1830s by the London and Brighton Railway company. It is 1 mile 71 yards (1.67km) long, and takes the track through part of the North Downs, north of the town of Merstham. A locomotive travelling at 60 miles per hour would spend just over one minute in the tunnel; at a more sedate 30 mph, little more than two. Time enough, however, for serious crimes to take place on trains passing through.

  The more recent of the two previous murder victims on the Brighton Line was Mary Sophia Money, whose body was discovered in the Merstham tunnel on 24 September, 1905. Her story is told on the town’s website:

  ‘In late September 1905 in the mile long tunnel just north of Merstham Station a horrific discovery was made when a member of the permanent way, William Peacock, found the mutilated body of a young woman, later identified as Mary Sophia Money, about 400 yards into the tunnel. This is thought to be the first recorded murder on a train in England. Finding the body was still warm Peacock hurried back to the station to report his discovery to the stationmaster. The police were called to the scene and when they examined the area they decided that the death was a suicide. They figured that the young woman had wandered into the tunnel and been hit by a passing train. This theory changed when the tunnel wall next to where the body lay was examined. A number of marks were found where the soot had been rubbed off. The highest of these marks was at about the level of a person standing up in a railway carriage. It seemed certain that Mary had fallen from a passing train. A discovery, which turned the theory from suicide into murder, was that forced firmly into the unfortunate Mary’s mouth was a white silk scarf. It became obvious that she had been pushed from the train and had not jumped. The body was removed to The Feathers Hotel in the High Street where a local doctor, Henry Crickett, examined it. Apart from the obvious injuries, Dr. Crickett’s examination revealed several bruises and scratches to body, arms and face which he considered may have been caused during a struggle with the murderer, prior to her being thrown from the carriage. No means of identification was found on the body. As the body was still warm when discovered, it was reasoned that she must have been thrown from the train within an hour of William Peacock finding her and the position of the body showed that she had come out of a southbound train. On the afternoon of the following day, Monday 25th September, the mystery of the girl’s identity was solved, when Robert Henry Money, a dairy farmer from Kingston Hill, viewed the body. The body was that of his sister, Mary Sophia Money, aged 22, a bookkeeper at Bridger’s Dairy, Clapham Junction. Mary Money had gone out at about seven o’clock that evening saying she would take a little walk and would not be long. Emma Hone, another employee at Bridger’s Dairy, had no knowledge of any male friends that Mary might have been going to meet. She said that Mary had taken her black knitted cotton purse, which Emma thought was well filled with money, for Mary had just been paid. The purse was never recovered. A few minutes after leaving home, Mary called at Frances Golding’s sweet shop at 2 Station Approach, Clapham Junction where bought some chocolates in a white cardboard box. She told Frances Golding that she was going to Victoria. She appeared happy and left the shop laughing. Suspicion fell on a number of possible admirers named by Mary’s brother Robert. He claimed to have last seen
his sister on that date but there seemed no question that he was involved in the crime. What really did happen to Mary Money on the evening of Sunday 24th September 1905? This is left only to supposition. She seems to have had every intention of keeping a rendezvous with someone, presumably of the opposite sex, at Victoria that evening. A signalman who was in charge of the Purley Oaks Signal Box north of Merstham Tunnel recalled that as the London Bridge train passed, he remembered seeing a couple standing up in a first class compartment. They appeared to be struggling. It seems possible that during this struggle, Mary Money began to scream, her attacker then pushed her scarf into her mouth to silence her and, when the train was in the tunnel, he opened the door and threw her out into the darkness and to her grisly death. The guard of the train reported that he had seen a couple in a first class compartment when his train stopped at East Croydon. His description of the woman fitted that of Mary Money. At Redhill the couple had gone and the guard thought he saw the man but not the woman leaving the station. Over 100 interviews were taken and many railway carriages examined but no arrest was ever made.

  The mystery remains unsolved but there is a postscript. Seven years later, in August 1912, at a house in Eastbourne, Mary Money’s brother, Robert, shot two sisters and their three children, of whom he was the father, poured petrol on the bodies, set light to them then turned the gun on himself. One of the women managed, however, to escape despite being wounded. Was this the result of a twisted mind turned by the memories of the earlier killing of his sister, Mary?’