The Nightingale Shore Murder

by Rosemary Cook

  The earlier murder on the line, in June 1881, was also a brutal affair, this time involving a victim who was both stabbed and shot. And on this occasion, part of the crime was witnessed by a woman in a cottage close to the railway line, just before it entered the Merstham tunnel. William Owen Gay, former Chief Constable of British Transport Police, wrote up the story for the British Transport Police Journal:

  ‘When the 2pm train from London Bridge arrived at Preston Park Station just outside Brighton on the afternoon of Monday 27 June 1881, a ticket collector saw a man step unsteadily on to the platform from a first class carriage. He was covered in blood, hatless, without a collar and tie, and very distressed. The collector went to his assistance and he told the collector that he had been attacked just before the train entered Merstham Tunnel. He gave a description of two men who had travelled in the same compartment and said that after receiving a blow on the head he remembered nothing more until the train reached Preston Park. The collector saw nobody else alight from the compartment but he observed that a piece of watch chain was hanging from one of the man’s boots. He pointed this out and the passenger remarked that he had put it there for safety. The condition of this strange and somewhat battered passenger, who gave his name as Percy Mapleton Lefroy, was such that the station master arranged for the platform inspector to take him to the police station at the Town Hall, while the collector was sent to advise the railway police. Thereafter the situation developed in such a way that the obtuseness of the railway officials and of the borough and railway police became the subject of editorial comment in The Times while other newspapers said unkind things in less polite terms.

  Lefroy made an official complaint at the police station and was then taken to the county hospital for his injuries to be treated. The doctor wanted to detain him but Lefroy insisted upon returning to London where he had an important engagement (although he had only just arrived in Brighton). However, he went to the police station first (buying a collar and tie on the way) and was interviewed by several officers, including the chief constable. Lefroy made a statement and also generously offered a reward for the capture of his assailant. He then went to Brighton station and at this stage somebody seems to have been a little suspicious because he was taken into an office and searched. Two old (counterfeit) coins were found in his possession. He denied all knowledge of these.

  In the meantime the carriage was shunted into a siding and an examination made. Three bullet marks were found and there was blood everywhere – on the footboard, mat, door handle, and also on a handkerchief and newspaper left in the compartment. There was, in fact, every sign of a fierce struggle. There were also some coins similar to those found on Lefroy.

  In spite of obvious inconsistencies in his story and of the highly suspicious circumstances, neither the Brighton Police, nor the railway police considered it necessary to detain Lefroy. But they were uneasy and although Lefroy was permitted to join a London train, arrangements were made for him to be accompanied by a detective named George Holmes.

  At this period some of the railway undertakings, including the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway, supplemented their own police staff by the employment of Metropolitan Police officers who were seconded by Scotland Yard for the purpose. The salaries of these officers were paid to Scotland Yard by the railways concerned. Detective Sergeant George Holmes was one of these officers and the widespread criticism of his negligence in this case caused Scotland Yard to disown him by issuing a public statement to the effect that he had been a Metropolitan Police officer for eleven years but was now working for the railway. It is always easy to be wise after the event but perhaps poor Holmes was a little slow as will be seen.

  While Lefroy and Holmes were travelling back to London a search of the line was organised. In Balcombe Tunnel, railway staff found the body of an elderly man, later identified as a retired corn merchant named Gold, who lived in Brighton. Gold had been shot and stabbed and near his body was found a knife smeared with blood. It was soon learned that he had been robbed of his watch and chain and a considerable sum of money. The news of the finding of the body was passed along the line and at Three Bridges the station master told Holmes what had happened. Holmes was also instructed by telegram from Brighton not to let Lefroy out of his sight. Lefroy had recovered his balance by this time and on the pretext that he wanted to change his clothes he talked Holmes into accompanying him to an address at Wallington, Surrey where a relative kept a boarding house. They arrived at the house at 9.30pm and Holmes waited outside. He waited a long time because, while his attention was otherwise engaged, Lefroy left the house and disappeared.

  A countrywide search was made for Lefroy and his description was published in all the papers. The Daily Telegraph made newspaper history by publishing the portrait of a wanted man for the first time. As usual, men answering the description were seen all over the country and one man was arrested but later released. A conference was held at London Bridge Station and all the railway staff involved were questioned by detective officers. The inquest on Gold was opened on 29 June and lasted several days. Holmes and other officers had a bad time in the witness box and a verdict of wilful murder against Lefroy was returned. The railway company then offered a substantial reward for information leading to his arrest.

  Great interest was taken by the public in the daily hue and cry for the missing Lefroy and at last on 8 July he was found in a house at 32 Smith Street, Stepney, where he was lodging in the name of Park. He had kept the blinds down in his room all day and gone out only at night. Bloodstained clothing was found in his room and since he had already been identified as a man who had exchanged some counterfeit coins and also pawned a revolver, the evidence against him was overwhelming. He was a journalist by profession and a plausible type. When arrested, he said: “I am not obliged to say anything and I think it better not to make any answer.” The arresting officer wrote this down in his note book and read it over to Lefroy who added: “I will qualify that by saying I am not guilty.”

  Lefroy appeared at Cuckfield Police Court and in due course was tried at Maidstone Assizes before Lord Chief Justice Coleridge. The jury found him guilty after a retirement of ten minutes. Evidence was given by a number of railway witnesses including Holmes, the booking clerk who issued a ticket to Lefroy, the guard of the train, the ticket collector at Preston Park, and also by a woman living at Horley who saw two men struggling violently in a train as it passed her cottage.

  Lefroy (whose real name was Mapleton) was hanged at Lewes on 29 November, 1881. At the time of the murder he was desperately short of money and went to London Bridge for the purpose of robbing a passenger. He had hoped to find a lady who would yield to threats but he met a courageous old gentleman who compelled him to murder. Lefroy was a poor specimen and incredibly vain. He asked for permission to wear full evening dress in court because he thought it would impress the jury. He was allowed to take his silk hat and took more interest in this than he did in the proceedings.

  It was a long time before the press and public forgot the strange lapse of the officials concerned in the case. The LBSC railway was subjected to a great deal of ridicule and no doubt many police officers were urged to take greater care in future. But they had little cause to worry because it was sixteen years before the next murder on the railway.’

  It is impossible to know whether these two murderers deliberately chose the opportunity of the train passing through the Merstham tunnel to attack their victims. As railway carriages were lit, if only dimly, the tunnel could not provide the cover of darkness. But it would have provided cover for the noise of an assault and subsequent struggle, with the rattle of the bogies on the tracks and the roar of the steam engine in the confined space of the tunnel combining to drown out other sounds.

  Trains may only have spent a few minutes in the Merstham tunnel, but it was long enough for terrible crimes to be committed there. Later it would be suggested that the tunnel may also have been the scene of the assault on Florenc
e Shore.

  Chapter 4

  At Hastings hospital

  In Hastings, the circumstances of the attack on Florence were not yet under discussion: people were more concerned with saving her life.

  The hospital to which Florence had been taken was well-established in the town. It had opened 80 years before as the East Sussex, Hastings and St Leonards Infirmary, funded by subscriptions from local benefactors, and changed its name to the East Sussex Hospital in 1910. It stood in White Rock Road, less than a mile from the railway station. This was a bonus for the transfer of the seriously-injured woman from the railway station; but not a popular location with local people. The Hastings Mail in 1904 had written of the ‘egregious blunder made in erecting such a building in the very centre of a parade especially constructed to attract pleasure seekers … The discreditable wire-pulling and jealousies and rivalries which resulted in completing the adornment of the parade by erecting a hospital … out of place.’ The committee which ran the institution had been planning a new hospital on a new site for more than a decade; but building had been delayed by the First World War, and it would not open until 1923.

  The doctor who received Florence at the hospital was less well-established. Miss Annie Elizabeth Eveline Beattie – known as Bertha – was an Irishwoman from County Donegal, who had graduated from Queen’s College Belfast less than two years previously, in July 1918. She was one of a very small number of female doctors in practice at the time: a sample of the Medical Register for 1919 suggests that only around four per cent of doctors on the register in that year were women.

  The 1876 Medical Act had made it possible for women in the UK to train as doctors, after much pressure and persistence from women pioneers such as Elizabeth Blackwell from the United States, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson in London and Sophia Jex-Blake in Edinburgh. They had fought to be allowed to study medicine at University in the 1850s and 60s, either by attending lectures or receiving private tuition, but been unable to graduate or practice in the UK, as they were not allowed to work on the wards. Blackwell graduated from the Charleston Medical School in New York, and Anderson from the University of Paris; while Jex-Blake got her licence to practice from the Dublin College of Physicians after training in Edinburgh but being barred from practising on the wards. Even after the Medical Act became law, some Universities still refused to accept women as medical students. Where places were available, women continued to face prejudice and opposition in taking them up.

  Under these circumstances, it is no surprise that both Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Sophia Jex-Blake were instrumental in founding medical schools specifically for women in London and Edinburgh, in 1874 and 1886. Opposition to women as doctors persisted for many decades in spite of this: one University in London even reverted to banning women students, at the insistence of their male students, early in the 20th century. As late as 1922, the Daily Mail published a piece by a hospital lecturer casting doubt on the future for women doctors, under the headline ‘Is the woman doctor wanted?’

  ‘The problem of the woman medical student’ he wrote, ‘does not consist in questions of delicacy in lecturing. There is no embarrassment involved in the lecturing to mixed classes on the physiology of reproduction, nor on the diseases and accidents incidental to the reproductive functions, nor even in the demonstration of patients suffering from such diseases and accidents.

  A certain delicacy in thought and language is called for. Undoubtedly in the past some teachers have been prone to consider that audiences of men students were amused by a flavour of coarseness in the discussion of subjects which since the time of Rabelais had been thus flavoured. Times have changed; even the men students look upon lecturers of this kind as survivals from a less civilised past.

  Women students have compelled us teachers to abandon the rustic Rabelaisian humour as well as the leering suggestiveness of Stern. The teaching of medicine has not suffered, nor are the teachers or the taught a penny the worse off…

  But those problems of delicacy are not those that cause some of us our chief anxiety.

  There is no little difficulty in finding employment for newly qualified women.

  Rightly or wrongly they shrink from going into private practice. A few seek the mission field or work among the women of India. The majority however look to Government and municipal service to provide them with whole time appointments and fixed salaries. If they are successful in creating a demand for their services in anything like extent to which they are prepared to offer these services, the wages of a woman doctor will approximate to those of a well-trained stenographer-typist.

  Women students and their parents will be well advised carefully to consider the prospects that the medical profession offers before embarking on the long and costly training required for qualification.

  There is room for a few exceptional woman doctors. Is there a living for women of average ability? The difficulties my own students are encountering in finding work of any description at all makes me wonder.’

  Meanwhile, the Queen’s University of Belfast, under its previous name of Queen’s College Belfast (which gave degrees from the then Royal University of Ireland), admitted women to all faculties from the academic year 1889-90. The College President, Thomas Hamilton, noted in his Report for that year that medical classes ‘were this year for the first time thrown open to ladies, five of whom availed themselves of the opportunity thus afforded them of preparing for Medical degrees.’ With two women enrolled in art classes, the seven women pioneers at Queen’s University were Margaret Anderson, Eliza Bell (who would graduate with a medical degree in 1893), Rebecca Galway, Henriette Neill (graduated 1894), Lilian Powell (1895), Martha Stewart and Margaret Bell: University records do not show which were the other two medical students in the group.

  Dr Beattie was still a relatively new house surgeon when she was called on to admit Florence Shore into the East Sussex Hospital. She found the injured woman semi-conscious, and unresponsive to questions, with three separate head wounds, all lacerated, bruised and bleeding. One was on the top of her head, shaped like an H, and had passed completely through the scalp in places. A second triangular wound on the left side of the head was two and half inches long. An area of bone was exposed beneath this wound. The third wound was curved, one and a quarter inches long. There was a large fracture of the skull, which could be felt as an indented area under the torn scalp. These horrific injuries meant that, by the end of that evening, Florence was deeply unconscious. In the days that followed she would require the best medical and nursing care that the hospital could offer as the staff fought to save her life.

  Fortunately, medical care had made enormous strides in the early years of the twentieth century, transforming the nature of care that Florence could receive. One of the most significant developments was the identification of x-rays in 1896 (originally named ‘Roentgen rays’ after their discoverer Wilhelm Roentgen). They were rapidly developed as a diagnostic tool, and by 1913 were being used to try to spot breast cancer tumours, amongst other things. During the 1900s, optical microscopes and staining techniques were being used to look at the structures of organisms, particularly infective ones. The first successful blood transfusion took place in 1905, and nine years later, blood was being treated with citrates to prevent it clotting and allow it to be stored. Electrocardiograms to monitor the electrical activity of the heart were invented by the Dutchman Willem Einthoven in 1906. Blood pressure measurement was rare in most countries before 1910, but by 1915, a large study by an insurance company in the United States had set the ‘normal’ values for blood pressure.

  Blood tests had become routine by 1910, with samples centrifuged to separate out cells from plasma, allowing an estimation of the volume of red blood cells to identify anaemia and check volume following blood loss. At the beginning of the first World War, attempts were being made to design dressings which did not stick to wounds: pulling off dry dressings that had stuck to blood and pus was a sure way to damage the healing tissu
e underneath. Louis Lumiere, a French surgeon, invented ‘tulle gras’ in 1914 – a dressing made of cotton gauze coated with a mix of plant resin and paraffin wax to prevent adhesion – which would remain in use for another 50 years.

  All of these developments were at the disposal of Florence’s doctors in the East Sussex Hospital in 1920, and would have been routine steps in her care. She may have had skull x-rays to determine the extent of the head injury and blood tests to find out how much blood had been lost. Nurses would have constantly monitored her blood pressure and pulse to spot signs of rising pressure on her brain that could lead to further deterioration. Non-adhesive dressings would have been required, and changed regularly, on the bleeding scalp wounds that overlay her more serious head injuries. On that first evening, however, with Florence’s condition so obviously life-threatening, it was clear that there was an urgent need to summon a relative or friend to the bedside. The person they called was Mabel Rogers.

  Chapter 5

  Young Florence Shore

  Mabel Rogers was engaged in a different kind of tragedy on the evening of Monday 12th January: she was watching Hamlet at Covent Garden. There she was told, between acts, that a message had been received at Carnforth Lodge with news of the attack on Florence, and the terrible injuries that had left her in a coma in the East Sussex hospital. Mabel’s immediate reaction was to go to her friend, in spite of the hour and the difficulties of travelling alone at night. She caught the 11.20pm train from London, which could take her only as far as Tonbridge in Kent – the same town where Florence had visited her aunt the day before. From here, she drove to Hastings, arriving at the seaside town at three o’clock in the morning. She went straight to the hospital, where she was taken to see Florence, unconscious in bed. Mabel didn’t leave the hospital again until after Florence had died, four days later.