Haviland’s evidence was little better than anecdotal, and lacked the medico-legal weight of the investigations into ‘railway spine’. Indeed, the effects of railway travel on health was a territory over which many hobbyhorses were ridden in contradictory directions – so much so that Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s study of the subject found it ultimately ‘impossible to consider them as serious scientific investigation’. But this very incoherence indicates the unfocused disquiet the subject aroused, and it was possible to be sceptical of individual theories without escaping the general mood of concern. ‘How fast we live!’, as the Church Builder magazine put it in 1871. It was a familiar sentiment: looking back over the course of his long life, Sir Henry Holland (1788–1873) marvelled at ‘the increased fastness of living, incident to all classes and occupations of men’; he even thought that people now walked more quickly in London’s streets. Surely there was a catch somewhere; surely all this dashing about would have to be paid for one day …
In parting, it is notable how this pattern of diffused anxiety tends to recur when new activities take hold of the population: bicycling in the late-Victorian decades, when ‘bicycle face’, ‘bicycle hand’, ‘bicycle foot’ and ‘cyclist hump’ hovered just beyond the fringes of medical diagnosis; or television in the years after the Second World War, when the risks of ‘TV Neck’, ‘TV Crouch’, ‘TV Dyspepsia’ and ‘TV Stutter’ gave medics and journalists something new to talk about. Mobile phones and computer screens have since generated their own flurries of anxiety. Yet all these perils are now routinely combined by the thousands who cycle in a dash to their local stations to catch the train to work, then pass the time in the carriage by making phone calls and catching old television shows on a tablet computer. Which may suggest that the risks of new technologies will always tend to be exaggerated, partly because danger makes a better story than safety, partly perhaps as a sort of displacement activity to avoid engaging with less far-fetched risks to health, such as those arising (say) from tempting things to eat and drink, or from a failure to take exercise at all.
Footnote
* Close behind the RPAC was the Accidental Death Indemnity Association, also founded in 1849 and renamed the Accidental Death Insurance Company the year after.
– 6 –
CRIMES AND MISDEMEANOURS
Let us for now set aside concerns that the railways were operationally unsafe, or that train travel was damaging to mental or physical health. What did that leave passengers to worry about? The answer is plenty, if fellow passengers were considered not merely as bores, nuisances or seat-hoggers, but as potential sources of peril and harm.
The phenomenon of crime was most conspicuous on the railways not in any red-handed way, but as a form of human spectacle. The reason was simple: trains were the easiest, cheapest and most secure way to transport prisoners over long distances. The railways did not begin the practice of dispersing captives to remote locations; lonely Dartmoor, for instance, began life as a Napoleonic prisoner-of-war camp. Even so, the trend towards fewer, larger and more modern gaols required many prisoners to travel further than they would have done in late-Georgian days, when every county and many large towns maintained their own penal establishments. One decisive event was the Prison Act of 1877, which effectively nationalised the remaining local prisons and initiated the closure of many; all convicts became ‘guests of Her Majesty’. The practice of transportation to Australia – scaled down in 1857 and done away with ten years later – also required lengthy cross-country journeys in custody, as did the growing tendency to concentrate prisoners in specialist institutions for women, juveniles, invalids, inebriates, naval and military offenders and so on.
Some railways constructed or adapted special prison vans for this traffic; the London & North Western had one on its books as early as 1850. More usually, prisoners travelled in ordinary carriages, handcuffed and accompanied by their guards. Lady Laura and Lady Vanilla, in Disraeli’s novel Sybil (1845), find themselves travelling from Birmingham with two intelligent and gentlemanly characters; at Wolverhampton, the plausible pair turn out to be chained together: ‘Two of the swell mob, sent to town for picking a pocket at Shrewsbury races.’ Disraeli implies a first-class journey, but this looks like artistic licence. More plausible is an item in Punch for 1844, noting among the drawbacks of second class the chance of travelling with ‘a ragamuffin in handcuffs, with a policeman next [to] him’. Once third-class carriages were roofed and enclosed securely, penal traffic could be handled at the cheaper rate. Among the menagerie of human types squeezed onto the third-class benches in G. A. Sala’s account of the 7 a.m. Parliamentary departure from Euston in 1859 is a ‘low-browed, bull-necked’ man sitting between two guards and striving to pull his coat-cuffs down to conceal a ‘pair of neat shining handcuffs’. A later regulation, enshrined as the railways’ Rule 166, dictated the use of a reserved compartment for ‘prisoners or insane persons’ and their escorts.
Government prisoners wore the familiar broad-arrow uniform even when in transit between gaols. They were easy to spot. This exposure to public scrutiny added its own weight of humiliation to the other burdens of punishment – an echo of the stocks and the pillory.
On November 13th, 1895, I was brought down here from London. From two o’clock until half-past two on that day I had to stand on the centre platform of Clapham Junction in convict dress, and handcuffed, for the world to look at. […] Of all possible objects I was the most grotesque. When people saw me they laughed. Each train as it came up swelled the audience. Nothing could exceed their amusement. That was, of course, before they knew who I was. As soon as they had been informed they laughed still more. For half an hour I stood there in the grey November rain surrounded by a jeering mob.
Thus Oscar Wilde in De Profundis, written after his arrival at Reading gaol and published posthumously in 1905. The half-hour at Clapham Junction occurred during Wilde’s transfer from HMP Wandsworth, after his conviction for gross indecency earlier in the same year. His two trials had made him briefly the most notorious man in Britain; Wilde omits to mention that members of the Clapham crowd were spitting as well as jeering at him. But not everyone was so unkind. Thomas Hardy wrote an affecting poem after witnessing a boy play his violin for a handcuffed prisoner and his guard as they awaited a train in Dorset, late in the century; the prisoner begins to sing along ‘With grimful glee: / “This life so free / Is the thing for me!”’
By that time the sight of prisoners in charge on the railway was less common, their numbers dwindling as levels of crime and conviction declined astonishingly through the later Victorian and Edwardian period. Sentences to penal servitude in 1914 were at a mere one-fifth of the number fifty years before. The First World War pushed the graph back the other way; for example, the Highland Railway found it necessary to convert some compartments on its naval specials into secure cells for miscreant sailors from Invergordon or Scapa Flow. Sometimes there were as many as thirty-five such prisoners on a single train. For civilian prisoners, the requirement that the broad arrow should be worn in transit was abolished in 1921. When road vehicles took the traffic away from the railways, the imprisoned and convicted effectively vanished from public view altogether.
For desperate or headstrong prisoners, a railway journey raised the prospect of escape. These incidents made good copy, especially when a struggle was involved. The case of Samuel Robinson, editor and proprietor of the Fifeshire Journal, offered the press in 1862 the rare chance to turn on one of their own.
Robinson had perpetrated a series of frauds on a local bank. When these came to light, he promptly absconded. Seeking refuge in London, he was arrested thanks to the celebrated Inspector Whicher of Scotland Yard. A report was received that a guest answering to Robinson’s description had been observed accidentally breaking a gold pencil case at breakfast in a hotel near King’s Cross, where he had registered as ‘Mr Chester’; Whicher’s men circulated a request for information to the jewellers of London, anticipating that t
he article might have been sent for repair; the recipient gave notice and the owner of the case was arrested when he came to collect it.
Robinson’s journey back to Scotland was made overnight in a locked first-class compartment, escorted by an acquaintance from happier days, Fifeshire’s Chief Constable William Bell. But as the train passed north of York not long after 3 a.m., Robinson suddenly exclaimed, ‘You may take me to Cupar, but you will never take me there alive,’ and threw himself backwards out of the compartment window: unobserved, he had stealthily worked his hand free of the cuffs that joined the two men (some accounts claimed that Bell had nodded off). A desperate half-hour of wrestling followed, the Chief Constable restraining an increasingly bloodied Robinson by the collar as he dangled by the crook of his knees from the window-sill, pleading to be left to fall and die. As the lights of Darlington came into view, Robinson kicked Bell hard in the side and jerked free, bouncing off the footboard and rolling down the embankment to liberty.
The bruised and hatless editor next turned up at a pub in a nearby village, where he sold a shirt-stud to pay his way. Subsistence and lodgings after that were obtained by spinning a line about having been assaulted and robbed, with the promise that he would send postage stamps to reimburse any costs when he ‘got home to Brighton’. The authorities finally caught up with Robinson two days later at the village of Stokesley in the north of Yorkshire, thirty-three miles from his place of escape, and sent him on to Scotland for trial. Such was the ferment in Fife by that time that large crowds greeted every train entering Cupar from the south for days after the arrest, until their rogue editor and Chief Constable at last stepped together on to the heavily policed platform.
Quite a few of those who found themselves on the platform in handcuffs got there by misbehaving on the railways in the first place. The network offered enormous opportunities for pilfering, vandalism and fraud. It also extended the operational range for crimes such as housebreaking, by allowing easy transport of tools and swift disappearance with the loot. We are concerned for now only with offences committed within the carriage.
In the first instance, the railway compartment was a great gift to card sharpers, thimble riggers and other con men. Potential victims could be assessed at close range without arousing suspicion, conversations could begin in apparent innocence, routines could be planned to fit the time available before the journey’s end. Strictly speaking it was illegal to gamble in public places, although cards were a common enough pastime on trains to leave the way half-open to playing for gain. An exasperated letter of 1854 to The Times came from a passenger who had reported a card sharper on the London & North Western; the guard had replied that he could see no harm in it, had no particular orders on the subject (something promptly denied in a letter to the paper from the line’s general manager), and that the company even permitted playing boards and packs of cards to be hired out at Euston.
In this case the con artist was acting alone and found no takers; but his routine was the well-worn three-card trick favoured by more organised gangs. Their modus operandi was exposed again and again in letters to the press in the 1850s and 1860s, under such signatures as ‘Not Swindled’ and ‘A Lucky Fellow’. The first letter on the subject published in The Times, on 30 October 1854, gives the essence of the sting.
The writer was travelling up to London from Dover, in company with his brother, two foreigners and a young English tourist. At Reigate* three smartly dressed men joined them, one of whom was eager to tell the company all about his two brothers serving as officers in the Crimea. ‘Always mistrusting suddenly volunteered conversation in public conveyances, I looked at our new companion; he had a brilliant pin in his black satin scarf, and a massive watch guard, but his hands were very coarse and his nails very grubby’ – not officer-class material, in other words. Another of the trio then offered cigars round and proposed to demonstrate a card game newly fashionable in the allies’ camps at Sebastopol. This appeal to patriotic curiosity was followed by the all too familiar throwing about of two kings and an ace. Satin Scarf promptly guessed which card was the ace, whereupon the third man – a respectable, curate-like figure, also keeping up the pretence that the Reigate passengers were strangers to one another – expressed doubt as to his choice. Satin Scarf vowed that he would bet a sovereign on it and invited the company to match his wager. That was enough to get the foreigners ‘fumbling among the five-franc pieces in their leathern bags’ and the tourist reaching for his porte-monnaie. Asked his own opinion, the writer replied curtly that he would give all three of them into custody as soon as the train reached London Bridge. (They had mistaken their man: a regular traveller on the line, who was known personally to the guard of the train.) A pregnant pause, broken by ‘a terrible oath from the curate’; silence from the card man, a huffy display of wounded honour from Satin Scarf, then an hour of ‘an amusement quite different from that which they had proposed’, as the writer watched the three squirming under the idea of what might await them. In the end, the writer let them go on their way, on the grounds that no bet had actually been placed; but his letter ended with a warning that such trickery on the railways had reached disturbing levels.
Other correspondents had similar stories to tell. A Mr Cooke of New Cross thought that the description of the Reigate gang matched three men he had encountered in Ireland, where their make-believe gambling had stirred a commercial traveller in the compartment to lay and lose a bet; the gang then got off at different stations to preserve the illusion that they were unacquainted. ‘A Traveller’ lamented that the swindle was rife on the Midland Railway, where he had witnessed it on a journey from Worcester to Ashchurch that same morning. Informed of what was afoot, the guard’s response was that there was nothing he could do.
In the same issue of The Times a third-class passenger described how the trick was performed in the cheap seats. He had observed a dubious-looking group travelling from Carlisle to Liverpool. The journey required a change of trains at Preston, at which point the group adopted the pretence of not knowing one another. The carriage was of a primitive type with inward-facing benches for seating and without any lamps. As the light faded one of the group lit a candle, fixed it to the back of a seat and commenced card-play with his accomplice (described as looking like the illustrations of Charley Bates, the Artful Dodger’s sidekick in Oliver Twist). Others joined the candlelit game and the losses began. At the next stop the writer called the guard in a loud voice, whereupon the sharper snuffed out the candle, bolted through the door on the side away from the platform and ‘rushed down the embankment and away into the darkness’.
The card-sharping menace even led indirectly to the deaths of four Ascot race-goers, in June 1864. A gang of sharpers was reported on one of the closely spaced and heavily laden trains returning to London at the end of the day. The men were removed at Egham station only after an altercation, which delayed the departure long enough for the following train to run into the rear carriages before they had cleared the platforms. The three-card trick was an age-old snare for the unwary at the racecourse; this particular gang may simply have been taking their work home with them, so to speak.
Visitors from abroad were especially attractive targets. Newly arrived Americans appear to have been fair game, as were any Irishmen away from their own country – ‘as green as the island they come from’, according to one Scottish rogue, in the dock for fleecing a traveller on the line from Port Glasgow. Hippolyte Taine found himself on the Dover service in the 1860s with a ‘semi-gentleman’ who was up to the old game, although it was only the Englishmen who were taken in.
One John Hamilton stands out from the published records for two especially elaborate plots to swindle foreigners. January 1862 brought him before the bench at Southwark on a fraud charge, having won the confidence of a Frenchman he had met at a London hotel. When the visitor returned to Paris, Hamilton went on the train with him. A third man, an accomplice, was of the party. A fourth joined them at Redhill. One of the men h
eld up a gold Spanish coin, which he claimed to have won at cards. Hamilton then produced a deck and suggested a game. Induced to begin gambling by his new friend, the Frenchman lost £580. The two other men got out at Ashford, Hamilton at Folkestone. The victim travelled on to Paris, but later returned to the London hotel. By good luck he encountered Hamilton again and could notify the police.
Hamilton turned up again at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court in 1868. A Turkish newspaper proprietor called Ali Suave had fallen into conversation with him at Charing Cross station, in French, on the subject of Parisian hotels. The two men took a compartment together. At the first stop three men joined them and soon the card-play began. Ali held back, but Hamilton joined in the betting, losing heavily. He then turned angrily on Ali with accusations that he had encouraged the venture; grabbing him by the throat, he demanded, ‘Pay me your share of the loss.’ The others did nothing to help Ali as Hamilton proceeded to rob him of gold, banknotes and a cheque. All four men got out before the train reached Dover, followed by Ali, whose attempts to send a telegraph to stop the cheque foundered on his lack of English. On the Continent he finally found help from a bilingual gentleman, and shortly after returned to London. Accompanied by a police sergeant, Ali tracked Hamilton down at Cannon Street, another terminus with services for the Channel Ports. The prosecution nailed Hamilton as one of a gang who had been travelling up and down the line by means of season tickets, attempting frauds. Passengers with imperfect English who fell in their way were easy targets. Hamilton may even have been one of the well-dressed gang of four who had latched on to a Swiss gentleman at Bletchley in the previous year, helping him into a carriage before suggesting a round of cards, then robbing him with violence when he declined to play. (He escaped further blows by a leap from the moving train.)
The Railways Page 21