The treatment of Ali and of the brave Swiss traveller crossed the line dividing fraud from assault. To be set upon by a fellow passenger, with no immediate help to hand and no safe route of retreat, was a genuine hazard of railway travel. The Railway Traveller’s Handy Book even advised that hands and arms should be kept ‘disposed for defence’ when passing through the darkness of a tunnel in a stranger’s company. On the other hand, the offence seems never to have been common. The British Newspaper Archive can show relatively few reports for the period, and at least as many legal cases arising from tussles between passengers and railway staff, or the careless slamming of doors on passengers’ hands. That attacks on passengers in transit did not happen more often must owe much to high staffing levels: any potential robber knew that he would be observed at the stations by which he entered and left the railway network, and every station stop offered the victim a chance to raise the alarm via a guard or a porter. Theft by stealth was a better bet than open robbery by main force; emptied of their valuables, purses and wallets could be tossed from the carriage window (a practice mentioned in the confessions of one hard case, at Preston in 1851). Still easier game could be found on station platforms and station approaches, where unattended goods and half-distracted persons promised a rich harvest. Among the less predictable offenders was a renegade clergyman with the apposite surname of Holloway, sent down for bag-snatching and bag-swapping at London termini in 1861.
None of these episodes could rival the sensation caused by the Briggs case. Thomas Briggs, a sixty-nine-year-old chief clerk of a Lombard Street bank, was discovered lying on the track between Hackney Wick and Bow on 9 June 1864, on the route of his twenty-minute journey home to Hackney from the terminus at Fenchurch Street. Briggs died without recovering consciousness; that he had been assaulted before falling from the North London Railway’s train was established by the parallel discovery of a blood-smeared first-class compartment when the rolling stock was examined at the Hackney end. The compartment also contained a stick, a travelling bag and a flat-crowned beaver hat of unusual design – not Briggs’s own. Missing from Briggs’s person were his gold watch and its heavy chain.
The watch-chain proved to be the key to the story. After its details were published, a Cheapside jeweller came forward to report that a young man with a German accent had brought in a similar chain some thirty-six hours after the crime, taking in exchange a different chain and a five-shilling ring. The jeweller’s name was John Death (he preferred the less arresting pronunciation ‘Deeth’), and the little box containing the chain and ring had the name of Death marked within its lid. The watch-chain left in Death’s possession turned out to be Briggs’s own, and details of the suspect and the exchange were circulated. These caught the attention of a cab driver called James Matthews, eleven days after the murder. He remembered that his daughter had recently been given one of Death’s jewellery boxes as a plaything, by a family acquaintance called Franz Muller. The cab driver also remarked on the description of the hat: he had admired Muller’s headgear and had asked if the German could get him one like it to wear on his cab run.
Franz Muller was a gunsmith’s apprentice from Saxe-Weimar. Failing to prosper in his trade after coming to London, he had instead found work as a jobbing tailor. The trendy hat was doubly significant: he was vain of his appearance and desperate for money to keep up with the flash fashions. Matthews was able to supply a photograph, from which John Death confirmed the identification. But when the police called at Muller’s address, his landlord and landlady reported that their ‘affectionate and kind’ lodger had just emigrated to the United States. Among the possessions left behind was a hatbox from the shop that had supplied the by now notorious beaver hat.
Muller’s capture and return proved to be a fraught business. Within twelve hours of the identification of the hatbox, a Scotland Yard inspector was on his way to New York via the Liverpool train and a fast steamship, with the jeweller and the cabman as his witnesses. Muller was travelling under sail and was overtaken. He was arrested as soon as he reached the quay. Briggs’s hat and watch, sans chain, were in his luggage.
What should have been a straightforward extradition case then became snagged in international politics. The American Civil War was in its fourth year and the British government’s perceived partiality to the Confederate side had won few friends in the Unionist north. Muller’s defence attorney, an egregious rabble-rouser called Chauncey Schaffer, attempted to turn the proceedings into a patriotism test by means of irrelevant appeals to Anglo-American tensions and grievances. To no avail: Muller was taken back to London for trial, where the German Legal Protection Society paid for his (no less unavailing) defence. He was hanged outside Newgate gaol on 14 November, as a crowd estimated at 50,000 pushed and shoved for a view of what proved to be one of the last public executions in Britain.
This was the first accredited murder of a passenger on Britain’s railways, more than three decades after enclosed carriages began running. For a while, public fears of another such outrage pushed aside familiar anxieties over the more substantial dangers of accidental injury or death. As Muller’s prosecuting counsel put it, this was ‘a crime which affects the life of every man who travels upon the great iron ways of this country’. Those travelling alone faced an uneasy choice: should they keep away from uncertain company, or actively seek safe companionship as a way of warding off any evil-doers? (It must have been a good time for chatty old ladies to make new friends on the train.) Meanwhile the lack of communication between compartments, and between the passengers in the compartments and the crew operating the train, seemed more unsatisfactory than ever, although a long time passed before anything conclusive was done about it. That story is part of the next chapter.
In the end, seventeen years passed before another passenger was murdered by a stranger in a railway carriage. The victim was Mr Gold, a retired Brighton stockbroker, shot, stabbed and thrown dying from the train as it passed through Balcombe Tunnel on the run down from London on 27 June 1881. The perpetrator was a self-aggrandising figure not unlike Muller: born Percy Mapleton, he had adopted the name Arthur Lefroy, and went about claiming to have smart connections in the theatre world.
This time Scotland Yard failed to distinguish itself. Despite having stumbled from the fatal compartment caked in blood and with Gold’s gold watch and its broken chain stuffed down the side of his boot, Lefroy managed to postpone his arrest by relating a cock-and-bull story about a mysteriously absconding assailant who had been sharing the compartment and who had attacked both occupants under cover of the darkness of a tunnel. Later, on a visit to his lodgings, Lefroy was able to escape through a back entrance while his shadow Sergeant Holmes (no Sherlock, he) kept the house under useless surveillance from the street. He was finally taken a week or so later in lodgings in Stepney, where theatrical false whiskers and a moustache were found among his effects. Like the absconding Fifeshire editor, his journey back to face justice was widely anticipated and crowds jeered the prisoner and his escort when they changed trains at Haywards Heath – a railway town, where the case had caused dismay. After conviction, Lefroy was hanged at Maidstone Prison. With the newspaperman’s appreciation for making the punishment fit the crime, the Sussex Express reported that an improved gallows was used, built over a pit, so that the executioner had only to move a lever ‘such as those used in shifting the points on railway lines’.
Scenes from the Balcombe tunnel murder, from the Illustrated Police News, 1881
After the Balcombe Tunnel case, there were only three more proven murders of railway passengers in Britain up to 1914. If an unnamed source quoted in 1894 is to be believed, this number was roughly level with Italy, Russia and Turkey, with five, seven and seven murders respectively over thirty years. Germany, Switzerland and the Low Countries recorded no such crimes at all; the most dangerous country was France, with twenty-eight killings, mostly of first-class passengers, of which more than half reportedly remained unsolved.
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nbsp; Murders apart, there were also well-publicised horror stories involving near-fatal assaults by deranged fellow-passengers. A paranoid Irish schoolmaster on his way to London to take an examination in 1863 stabbed a passenger in the head, in the delusion that the man was about to launch an attack of his own. A drunken lunatic travelling with his elderly father between Runcorn and Chester in 1876 pulled a knife on a blameless lithographer sharing their compartment, then grappled with the man for miles in an attempt to throw him from the carriage. During the fracas he bit off his victim’s thumb and spat it through the window, having first broken the glass with his own head. Both cases involved long struggles, and both victims would probably have been rescued sooner if the alarm could have been given promptly.
All horrible, and all frightening; but none of these cases had anything like the impact of the murder of Mr Briggs. In journalistic terms, the twists and turns of the story were a dream come true. That the attack occurred in London also had something to do with it, as did the circumstance that the victim was on a routine journey home from work (though at the unorthodox time of 9.50 p.m. on a Saturday, or else the train would have been fuller and safer). Class, too, came into the picture: Briggs was a first-class passenger, his killer came from the precarious fringes of respectability. But the case also channelled something of the spirit of the times, especially the fascination with mystery and detection that created the taste for sensation novels. It was as if art and life had mysteriously converged.
In the absence of another murder following the Briggs case, popular anxieties about railway travel had latched on to an assault of a different kind. Just one week later, the eighteen-year-old Mary Anne Moody, daughter of the curator of Winchester Museum, was followed into a second-class compartment of the 1.10 p.m. departure from Waterloo by a middle-aged man named Henry Nash. He pestered her with personal questions and unsought offers of help with her luggage, to which she made the briefest responses. Another woman then entered the compartment, whereupon Nash appeared to go to sleep, only to perk up again after the extra traveller got out at Surbiton. He then stretched out at full length on the seat opposite Miss Moody, and repeated his questioning on the matter of her age and whether she had always worn spectacles, ‘in a very insulting manner’. Again declining to answer, she rose and turned away from him to look out of the window. Next came Nash’s hand on her shoulder, moving down to her waist, and the sensation that he was gently lifting her dress. Miss Moody then did a courageous thing: she opened the door, stepped out on to the running board of the moving train and began to edge along it. Her rescuer was a fellow passenger named Stokes, who leant out from the next-door compartment to clasp her against the side of the carriage. In this position she fainted and would have fallen but for the firmness of Stokes’s grasp (he was a military bootmaker by trade). Relief arrived after the train had gone some five miles further, some labourers in a field by the line having managed to alert the guard to apply the brakes. At the hearing for Nash’s committal, Miss Moody told the court that she understood the dangers of climbing from a moving train, even to the extent of incurring a possible fine – the standard charge in such cases was forty shillings – but ‘My character, my welfare, everything that is worth having in this world, is far dearer to me than my life, and therefore I jumped out of the carriage.’ Not words likely to win much sympathy for Nash, who received nine months with hard labour.
Press attention tended to be greater when one or both parties came from the prosperous classes. Nash was described as a yeoman of respectable appearance; the Briggs affair likewise offered the spice of a wealthy victim. The Penny Illustrated Paper eagerly linked the Moody case with Briggs’s murder as ‘evidence of the new impunity for crime afforded by our railway system’. In truth it was nothing of the kind, merely an unusually bad case of harassment of a single female passenger. The Norfolk Chronicle recorded an early instance, on the Great Eastern Railway in 1851. A Mrs Hicks was travelling in an unlit carriage between Yarmouth and Norwich. In the darkness she felt the hand of a male passenger moving in her direction. Assuming an attempted robbery, she warned him off. Later the groping hand returned, and the approach turned to an attempted kiss. The assailant, a drunk named Robert Ely, then ‘behaved in a manner not fit to be stated in print’. Mrs Hicks fainted, and was only rescued by the guard, who handed Ely over to the police. Darkness seems to have encouraged the assault; as the Pictorial Times put it in 1845, ‘the want of light at night converts the carriage into a den of infamy’. The story is all the more sinister in that the two were not alone: those also in the compartment included another woman passenger, who offered help to get Ely put in charge but did nothing to restrain him, and a male associate of his – evil-minded, or complicit – who told Mrs Hicks not to worry, as the man would not hurt her.
A later case, in 1866, was picked up by the national press. Robert Williams, a Shoreditch cabinet maker, followed a seventeen-year-old servant called Charlotte Martin into a third-class compartment on a Great Eastern train from Brentwood. She refused to answer his pestering questions and rejected his hopeful suggestion that she might wish to kiss him. Once the train was under way he kissed her by force, tried unsuccessfully to undo her frock, then moved to sit opposite her, ‘and acted in a most indecent and cowardly manner’. But it happened that the engine driver had noticed Williams’s approaches to Miss Martin on the platform, and during the thirteen-minute journey – this in the darkness of a January evening – he left the footplate of his engine three times, climbing along the side to a point from which he could see into the compartment. The suspicion that the driver was a peeping Tom is hard to shake off; either way, once the kissing went on to something worse he called out to Williams to stop. With the driver as witness there was no plausible defence, and the cabinet maker was fined £20 – close to three months’ salary for a London artisan, but less swingeing than the custodial sentence for Nash.
All such cases paled beside that of Colonel Valentine Baker and Miss Kate Dickinson, aged twenty-one and ‘of very prepossessing appearance’ (The Times), in 1875. The circumstances matched those of the Moody affair: a single young lady joined in a first-class compartment by an older man, unsought advances culminating in indecent assault, escape by climbing on to the running board of the speeding train, alarm-raising and rescue by the combined efforts of fellow passengers, onlookers and railway staff. Even the route – the London & South Western, between Waterloo and Woking – was the same. The extra ingredient was rank: Baker was colonel of the 10th Hussars, the smartest cavalry regiment of the line, and counted the Prince of Wales among his friends. He was also a reforming soldier of exceptional gifts, with a distinguished record in action and glittering prospects for advancement.
None of this did Baker much good at the Croydon Assizes. The jury heard how he had engaged Miss Dickinson in genteel discussion of the theatre, the Royal Academy and a military ball at Aldershot, before suddenly pulling the window shut at Woking. He then forced her into a corner, murmuring, ‘You must kiss me, darling.’ His exploring hand had got as far as her stocking when she managed to pull down the window to call for help, before escaping on to the perilously narrow step outside the door, and from there to the platform when the train stopped.
The trial stretched out over seven hours, not so much from its complexity but because of delays caused by noise from the crowds packing the streets outside – a higher turnout than for any murder trial in the county, it was noted – and by several attempts to rush the doors for a glimpse of the prisoner and his accuser. Baker was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment for his indecent assault and was heavily fined. Worse, he was dismissed from the army on the Queen’s personal intervention, quashing attempts by the broad-minded Prince of Wales to leave a way open for his rehabilitation.
Classified as a ‘first-class misdemeanant’, Baker was allowed to stay apart from other prisoners. His rooms at Horsemonger Road gaol were specially furnished, wine was permitted and friends could visit between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m.
This indulgent treatment did not escape notice in the popular press, and an artist’s impression was published showing the heavily moustached ex-colonel relaxing with friends, champagne and cigars. When visitors were away, Baker’s prison hours were put to use writing a memoir of his expedition to the frontiers of Persia and Turkestan.
Baker’s subsequent history was a matter for marvel; like the wretched Muller, his destiny took an international turn. Rumours had circulated that he was angling for a senior commission under the Czar, but on his release Baker went the other way, giving outstanding service as a general in the Ottoman army in the Russo-Turkish war of 1877–8. Back in London, his old clubs in St James’s discreetly re-elected him to membership. Rehabilitation of ‘Baker Pasha’ continued with his acceptance in 1882 of an invitation to organise and command the army of Egypt, then newly subject to a British protectorate. By 1887 steps were being taken towards his reinstatement as a soldier of the Queen, but Baker died suddenly before he could return to England, and was buried in Cairo. Full military honours were granted for his funeral.
The Railways Page 22