One other detail of the case should be mentioned, as it too anticipates the next chapter. There was an alarm fitted in the carriage, and Miss Dickinson managed to reach it at one point. Nothing happened: the bell that should have connected with her signal failed to ring.
Some of these cases of crime and accident involved locked doors, others did not. The third-class card sharper on the London & North Western scarpered through an unlocked door on the non-platform side and Miss Moody and Miss Dickinson were also able to escape through unlocked doors. On the other hand, it will be remembered that Dickens had to obtain a key from one of the guards before he could release fellow survivors from the tottering carriage at Staplehurst in 1865. And there is another telling detail of the Baker case: the colonel begged Miss Dickinson to come back inside the carriage, promising that he would get out on the opposite side at the next station, but she knew that the pledge was hollow, for the doors on that side had been locked when the train was at Guildford.
This locking or unlocking of doors while the train was in motion was one of the more intractable questions of railway operation. Should passengers be secured within their compartments, to save them from falling out, drunk or sober, or from reckless exits at improper places? Or were the risks associated with imprisoning them so great that they should be trusted to control the doors themselves? In which case, how to ensure that those without the correct class of ticket, or with no ticket at all, did not slip into compartments where they had no right to be?
There were strong arguments on both sides. In his Railway Economy (1850), Dionysius Lardner catalogued twenty-seven accidents between 1844 and 1848 involving improper exits from moving trains, eighteen of them fatal, and nineteen more (eleven fatal) in which passengers tried to board trains already in motion. These deaths could have been averted if doors were kept locked. But then there was troubling news from France, which suffered its first major railway disaster at Meudon in 1842, when at least fifty-two people perished; many might have survived if their burning carriages could have been unlocked in time.
This calamity put a brake on the locking of carriage doors across the Channel. It also prompted a withering sequence of letters to the Morning Chronicle from the Rev. Sydney Smith, a proponent of what would now be called the libertarian position and a regular traveller on the Great Western. This company in its early years refused to trust its passengers one bit, keeping all its carriage doors firmly fastened. Other lines left the doors unlocked, or secured them down the off-side of the train only, which made the Great Western’s policy difficult to defend. Smith wanted the doors on both sides to be unlocked, in case an accident made the unsecured side useless for the purposes of escape. Ridiculing the impulse to save passengers from themselves, he pointed out that ‘outside’ mail-coach passengers were never tied to the roof in case they fell off, nor sea voyagers locked into their cabins for their own protection.
Shortly afterwards, the Board of Trade ordered the Great Western to keep at least one door unlocked in each compartment, which the company applied to the side that would not normally open on to the platforms. The same practice was in force on five of the twenty-one railways that responded to the Board’s circular on the subject; the others did not lock their carriages at all. But the dilemma remained, as mishaps with unlocked doors continued to occur. Some had luckier outcomes than others. In 1844, a two-year-old child in a family party travelling south by express from Liverpool managed to tumble out through an unsecured door on the approach to Crewe, only to be found uninjured by the locomotive and carriage that were sent back to search the lineside. In those days the handle had to be twisted back in a certain way to secure the door after pulling it to, and it was all too easy to forget this requirement, so the child may simply have leant against a door that suddenly yielded.
Or there is the mysterious case of Isabella Lawrence, a factory girl who was found dead on the line near Horsforth, on one of the North Eastern Railway’s lines to Leeds, on an October morning in 1854. She had entered an unlit third-class carriage at Leeds on the evening before, and was joined there by Thomas Law, with whom she had been drinking earlier that day. Having arrived too late to buy a ticket, Law had agreed with the guard that his fare should be collected on arrival; but at Horsforth the guard found the compartment empty, with the far door hanging open. Law was traced, arrested and charged. His defence was that he had got off the train well before the point at which the body was found. Law had a good reason for making an early exit; having failed to persuade Isabella to come back to his place, he faced the prospect of paying the fare to Horsforth and back for nothing if he stayed on the train. A railway clerk testified that Law had indeed approached his lineside cabin out of the darkness while the train was held at a junction, and had asked the way back to Leeds. If both men spoke the truth, Isabella must have fallen of her own accord; perhaps Law had left the door swinging behind him, and she in her befuddled state had tumbled out when trying to close it. All the inquest jury could do was to censure the company for running unlit carriages with doors that could not be locked and secured, and to recommend that doors should always be locked on the side not in use.
Both arrangements seem to have been in force around 1850, sometimes on the same train, as recorded by Sir Francis Head’s detailed description of an arrival at Euston. Some of the station’s porters walked alongside the train as it slowed to a halt, holding the doors closed to prevent any hasty exits. Other doors were fastened shut, and those detained inside had time to hail familiar faces among the groups assembled to meet them on the platform while waiting for the porters to release them. F. L. Olmsted described having to call for release in this way at Bromborough on the Birkenhead line in 1850, struggling with his luggage, past ladies’ knees, to the platform side – all most unlike the spacious ways of the American saloon car.
The locking mechanism in its developed form was not usually integrated with the door-handles and catches, but was set higher up in the door frame, where it appeared as a hole with an inset spindle, rather like a giant domestic radiator lock. A standard key sufficed for all, allowing a single railwayman to secure or open all the doors of a carriage fairly quickly. Passengers had no business tampering with these locks, although ownership of the keys seems not to have been tightly controlled (given that they were a useful tool to the miscreant, it is a surprise to find the Army & Navy Stores Catalogue advertising them for sale, at 9d or 1s, in 1907). Rather, they opened and closed the doors by means of the handle below. This was placed on the outside, so that a window had to be lowered in order to reach it – a safeguard against too-easy opening while the train was in motion.
Opened doors on moving trains were still common enough in the mid 1860s for the Metropolitan Railway to introduce a design with rounded upper corners, profiled so as to keep clear of the incurving tunnel wall if the door began swinging to and fro between stations. The introduction of doors with sprung catches around 1900 eased the problem. Now, to close the door and to secure it became one action, and the vigorous slamming that triggered so many exasperated letters to the press could be justified on grounds of safety. And so the railway added to its repertoire of noises the thudding shut of hundreds of self-closing doors, a sound that reached its peak during the twentieth-century London rush hour. Its counterpart, once familiar from television news clips introducing fare increases or snowbound cancellations, was the decelerating train with doors already held partly open by impatient commuters, many of whom would spring on to the platform even before the train had stopped moving – as irresponsible and irresistible a way of saving time as the Londoner’s calculated jump between platform and pavement from a Routemaster bus.
These verbs are in the past tense because trains with automated sliding doors are now the rule, and the diminishing number of carriages with slam doors come equipped with central locking. So now passengers can neither tumble nor jump out between stations, nor slip gratefully away at a more convenient station when an unscheduled stop is made. The verdict
in favour of automatic locking was made in 1992, after a report by the Health and Safety Executive concluded that some carriage doors could open accidentally in rare circumstances. The decision put an end to a period in which the toll of falling passengers had been closely monitored by the newspapers, often with the exaggerated implication that No Door Was Safe. Off the record, old railway hands were liable to belittle the risk, or to treat it as an unforeseen consequence of getting foolishly drunk on the train – for many of the victims were thought to have lurched in the general direction of the lavatory only to tumble out through the unsecured door immediately alongside. This critical mistake is no longer possible on trains in normal service, although the doors of the High Speed Trains of the 1970s and 1980s still have windows that will slide down far enough to allow the stricken passenger to be sick out of them.
Lockable doors also helped the railways to address the concerns of female passengers. It was among the duties of porters and guards to help passengers to find a seat, and ladies could expect special attention. An empty compartment could be unlocked on their behalf, and a long-standing regulation required guards to place a single woman, on her request and where possible, in a compartment whose other occupants were also female. Formal designation of ladies-only compartments was an obvious next step, and some companies had already done this by the mid 1840s. Yet the practice never became a legal requirement to match the rule that provided for smokers. Some companies protested that it would seriously complicate their operations if ladies’ compartments were to be mandatory. When the Board of Trade investigated the question in 1887, it found that most railways would reserve a compartment for women if requested, but that compartments permanently marked as such tended to be under-used – partly because of fears that predators might home in on them. It was also necessary to stipulate when boys became too old to enter such a compartment; more than one railway played it safe by setting the onset of manhood at nine years.** Ladies’ compartments were latterly indicated by a green sticker on the window, easily distinguished from the red stickers for smokers and the blue ones for first class. The last few lingered until 1977, casualties of the Sex Discrimination Act passed two years previously – just too early to find advocates from within the radical feminist separatism of the 1980s.
From a feminist perspective, it would be easy to take all this as evidence that the Victorian era was a patriarchal nightmare, its public realm an oppressively masculine territory through which unaccompanied women ventured at risk of harassment or worse. By these lights, a woman who initiated anything more than the most distant and formal conversation with a stranger risked placing her own respectability under a cloud. Divulgence of a name or an address was understood on both sides as a form of encouragement; Nash, Williams and Baker all asked, and were rebuffed. Words apart, the very act of gazing freely was a male prerogative, so that a woman who dared to match a male stare risked committing an ambiguous transgression.
In all of these charges there is a measure of truth, but the full story is both more complicated and more interesting. In the first instance, it should never be forgotten that the arrival of the railways came to women, hardly less than to men, as a liberation. To travel cheaply over long distances, alone or in company, was an opportunity open to anyone of either sex who could afford the fare. The assaults described could not have happened if single women had been too afraid to take advantage of this. Charlotte Martin, the victim of the Shoreditch assault, can stand as an example: an orphan, she was making a visit to her sister at the ‘industrial’ or pauper school out at Brentwood in Essex, a return journey of thirty miles. Railway stations themselves were among the safer public places, staffed by men whose duties required them to attend to the needs of passengers, who were not afraid to intervene to preserve order and prevent annoyances, and who could themselves be reported for any faults or failings.
More unexpected, perhaps, were the ways in which women living on the fringes of the law could turn the confined space of the railway compartment to their own advantage. One well-known instance, barely mentionable at the time, concerned the services initiated in 1866 between the South Eastern Railway’s two London termini at Charing Cross and Cannon Street. These ran in an arc across the South Bank, a journey of seven minutes that usefully bypassed the congestion along the Strand and Fleet Street. But Charing Cross was also the West End’s epicentre of vice, and before long the company found itself selling tickets to suspicious-looking couples of recent acquaintance, eager to make use of the seven minutes of first-class seclusion offered by its carriages. This unwelcome traffic diminished once an intermediate stop was introduced in 1869, at the present Waterloo East station, and still more as the services themselves dwindled in the 1870s, after the Metropolitan District Railway’s shorter and cheaper underground route opened north of the river.
The Charing Cross traffic was a localised affair and a matter for consenting adults. Of broader significance was the possibility of entrapment or blackmail of male passengers by women, playing on the presumption that the man must have been the active party in any encounter. The scam also depended on the victim keeping his loss or humiliation to himself – which was not unlikely, especially if he had been bamboozled by a flirtatious approach, and felt his masculinity devalued by the deception. Even the raffish Wilkie Collins was wary of the risk; as he assured his mother, ‘I won’t travel alone with a woman – I promise you that.’
The apparent victim of one incident, on the Eastern Counties Railway in 1859, told his story anonymously in a warning letter to the Braintree and Bocking Advertiser. At Shoreditch station he had been addressed by a pretty young woman, who said that there was room in her second-class compartment. She then shut the door after his entry, as if to keep others out. He began reading his newspaper, aware that she was gradually edging closer, so that her dress began to press against him – which he admitted to having enjoyed. Nothing was said, nor did he drop the cover of his paper. At a later station another man entered, at which the woman at first seemed displeased. The new passenger seemed to observe them touching. The woman then sprang back, saying that she had been assaulted; at this point it became clear that the new arrival was known to her. At Braintree the train was met by a man claiming to be the woman’s brother, who was given a version of events by the other passenger. The men then turned on the letter-writer, roughing him up and ramming down his new hat over his eyes. He was too scrupulous to lay an accusation against the woman, who in turn declared herself too bashful to bring a charge. What was going on? Perhaps the three expected the man to offer money for their silence, but did not want to risk raising the subject first – or the whole thing was just a sadistic lark.
An Old Bailey case of 1866 shows how the blackmail trick could backfire, even when the victim’s behaviour fell short of absolute rectitude. Ellen Allen had laid a charge of assault and attempted rape against Alexander Moseley, a twenty-nine-year-old surgeon and dentist of Paddington, married and with children, who had shared her compartment between Watford and Euston. The charge had been thrown out by the magistrates, who heard her claim that Moseley had locked the compartment to prevent her escaping; also, that he had been smoking illicitly during the journey. Moseley then turned the tables on his accuser, who found herself charged with perjury before the higher court. He reported that it was she who had initiated conversation, asking him on the platform if the train was for London. She then followed him into an otherwise empty second-class compartment and began a conversation about her children. After a while, Moseley asked if she minded his smoking his pipe (she did not, although the practice was still forbidden on this line). Moseley then took out a book to read, not wanting to talk more. He admitted to having locked the compartment door at an intermediate stop, but explained that this was to keep out anyone who might object to the tobacco – a dodge he had used for four or five years, ever since he got hold of his own carriage door-key. Moseley also confessed to having given a false name on arrival at Euston, although he supplied the real
one when taken in charge to the police station. All of which showed a cavalier attitude to the regulations, not to mention the frankly selfish misuse of a carriage key. But Ellen Allen had a harder case to answer: a former prostitute with a history of bringing false charges, she was described as having been ‘molesting gentlemen’ at Victoria station over the previous eighteen months. Her perjury and conspiracy at Euston earned her five years’ imprisonment.
Another incident at a London terminus, heard at Southwark police court in the year following, looks less clear-cut. The Rev. George Capel of Carshalton was charged with having indecently assaulted a domestic servant, Mary Anne Fraser, as she and her mother made their exit from a third-class South Eastern Railway compartment at London Bridge station. The case hinged on exactly what had happened against or beneath the lady’s crinoline as she passed the minister, whose seat was next to the door on the platform side, in a space just 5ft wide between the seat backs. A railway porter who was sitting in the far corner of the compartment reported that he had seen Capel pressing his hand between the accuser’s legs. She had then turned round and called him a ‘nasty beast’. For the defence, witnesses of both sexes swore that any physical contact was innocent or inadvertent, Capel having merely directed her crinoline away from his person as she passed (‘he made no indentation in her dress’). The phrase ‘nasty beast’, recorded in a press report of a preliminary hearing, prompted another witness to come forward: an elderly man named Richards, who had been accused in similar circumstances at Charing Cross station a few weeks before. In this case, the woman had thrown her crinoline across his knees as she passed him in the compartment. Richards had shadowed his accuser, who had gone to the same address as the complainant in Capel’s case: a house in Cecil Court, off St Martin’s Lane. Cecil Court was then by no means respectable, and Richards’s evidence looks damning; but under cross-examination he could not say categorically that Mary Anne Fraser was the same person who had flung her dress in his direction.
The Railways Page 23