The problem of enveloping their passengers with suffocating smoke and steam in the tunnels was a very real one for the Metropolitan Railway. Their engineer, Sir John Fowler, came up with a novel idea for heating the locomotive’s boiler with hot bricks picked up at each station. This did not work, so Sir Daniel Gooch refined the idea and came up with something that did – the broad gauge GWR Metropolitan class condensing 2-4-0 tank engine depicted here at the Praed Street junction.
The Metropolitan Underground Railway – proudly presents its stations, interiors and tunnels as shown by the Illustrated London News (1862), five months before the line opened.
Its outstanding success ensured its expansion. A House of Lords’ select committee recommended an ‘inner circuit of railway that should abut, if not actually join, nearly all of the principal railway termini in the metropolis, and the Metropolitan District Railway (commonly known as the District Railway) was established in 1864 to make this happen. This was also a subterranean line using the same ‘cut-and cover’ method. However, its route was not so aligned to the roads and its costs were much higher (its first section from South Kensington to Westminster cost some £3 million – almost three times that of the whole of the much longer Metropolitan Railway’s original line) because it went through areas of higher land values and had more expensive compensation claims. It opened on 24 December 1868, from South Kensington with stations at Sloane Square, Victoria and St James’s Park, finishing at what was then called Westminster Bridge.
Initially, all services were run by the Metropolitan Railway until July 1871, when the District introduced its own trains and its ‘inner circle’ services, starting from Mansion House, travelling to Moorgate Street via South Kensington and Paddington, with trains running every ten minutes. Rivalry and personnel-wrangling between the two companies (who shared three directors and an engineer, Sir John Fowler), held up further development and it wasn’t until 1884 that the Circle line was eventually completed.
Whilst all of the Underground is now commonly known as the ‘Tube’, initially the Tube was something different. It was a deep-level line which was run in tunnels (tubes) dug under London, through its famous clay. It was the preferred option to avoid the costly buying of land and paying of compensation. The City & South London Railway dug two narrow diameter circular tunnels through which they ran the new, cleaner electric locomotives. It opened in 1890.
The Fenians
The nineteenth century was one of transformation. The Industrial Revolution had brought enormous changes in many spheres. New industry opened up new work opportunities, and the railway and the Underground offered new travel possibilities. All offered mobility, up the social scale and around the country and world. Now it was no longer easy for governments to keep the masses in their place – either socially, physically or philosophically – as mobility also enabled a quicker exchange of ideas and attitudes, as well as easier communication.
The world, at this time, was in a state of flux which deepened as the century progressed. ‘Troubles’, revolution and insurgence provided a hotbed of dangers as the oppressed rose up against their oppressors. Wars, uprisings, assassinations and savage reprisals had smouldered through the decades, but they ‘exploded’ in many ways in the 1880s and 1890s. During this time Britain, it could be said, was a sanctuary and refuge for those persecuted in their own countries for their beliefs and practice.
‘The Victorian public [were] proud of their national tradition of liberal policing and of Britain as a beacon of tolerance, the very idea of political police carried the stigma of foreign despotism’, writes Alex Butterworth in The World that Never Was. (It has to be said that this ‘liberal policing’ or laissez-faire attitude did not extend to the indigenous population.) This world of kindly or hostile subversives, of unrealised or potential plots, was a world where ‘fiction could so easily be confused with the truth and truth relegated to the realm of fiction’ (as in Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent, where truth is mixed with fiction); however, according to the Ambassadors of the countries troubled by these agents provocateur, it was an unwelcome situation – a ‘bolt-hole’ or an escape from the ‘Arm of the Law’. (It was also a very convenient place to which the same countries could deport all of their ‘unwantables’, most often without informing Britain beforehand!) London was the centre, not just for Britain, but, claimed the St James’s Gazette, it was the ‘preparing ground for the men who are spreading wounds and panic through the cities of the Continent.’6
Nineteenth-century Britain had been experiencing the effects of home grown ‘anarchistic’ activity for many years (Chartists, political reformers, Mutual Combinationists and Unionists amongst them). All this resulted in a heady and volatile mix, with a maelstrom of ideas swirling around. This spawned radical organisations and groups, often disguised as ‘educational societies’, all over the country; many of them dedicated to the aims and causes of anarchy. One such was the ‘Deptford Educational Society’, which held its meetings above a shop in New Cross Road, Lewisham. One of its members was to become notorious.
Despite his intention for good, Nobel’s discovery – dynamite – was to play an unimagined role in the provocative agitation by international anarchists (Irish, Irish-American, French, Spanish, Russian and British). Ironically, the ‘bomb’ became their weapon of choice. August Spies, the editor of an anarchist newspaper in Chicago, put it into words, ‘A pound of dynamite is worth a bushel of bullets’,7 whilst the Dynamite Monthly, based in New York, whose sole raison d’etre was the promotion of uses of dynamite, proclaimed it to be not only ‘the hope of the oppressed’ but ‘their salvation’.
One group who gained an identity (as well as notoriety) through their use of the bomb, in both America and Britain, were the Irish Republican Brotherhood, more commonly known as the ‘Fenians’. In May 1865, the Leeds Mercury wrote a long article addressing the topic, ‘Who and what are the Fenians?’ It said that there were Fenians in Ireland, America and in Canada and asked whether there were any Fenians in Britain. It answered that if there were it was of little consequence. In a very short time, they were to learn otherwise.
The Irish had had a long and troubled history with the English, and had persistently struggled against ‘the curse of Monarchical Government’, and all the impoverishment and humiliation imposed by foreigners on their land. They had many unsuccessful uprisings and rebellions. In 1858, the Irish Republican (sometimes Revolutionary) Brotherhood (IRB) was created, and in 1859 its American counterpart renamed itself the Fenian Brotherhood. In 1867, they made a declaration of intent ‘From the Irish People of the World’. They appealed to all oppressed people (the English workers included), ‘Republicans of the entire world, our cause is your cause. Our enemy is your enemy. Let your hearts be with us …’ they urged them to take up arms as, ‘force is our last resource’. They reassured the English workers, ‘… we declare in the face of our brethren, that we intend no war against the people of England – our war is … against the aristocratic leeches who drain alike our fields and theirs.’ They gave a rallying cry, ‘avenge yourselves by giving liberty to your children in the coming struggle for human liberty’ and signed off – ‘we proclaim the Irish Republic – The Provisional Government’.8
Fourteen years later, after acrimonious changes in leadership and fluctuating membership, with many more activists and starving families having fled to America, such ‘brothers-in-arms’ sentiments were to change drastically. The Irish-American Fenians, with their new sub sects, under new names, (such as ‘Clan na Gael’ and ‘Sons of Freedom’) unleashed their war of attrition on British cities and British people and the bomb became what Shane Kenna calls their ‘language of political grievance’. Now was the time ‘not only to scare, but to hurt England!’9
The 1880s have come to be known as the ‘Decade of Dynamite’, one has only to look at the pages of The Times to see that dynamite incidents of one type or another were constantly in the news. So much so, that in April 1883, the H
ome Office issued a directive to all local authorities and police under the heading, ‘The Dynamite Conspiracy’, reminding them of their responsibilities and how far their powers went. In his paper, ‘The Fenian Dynamite Campaign and the Irish American Impetus for Dynamite Terror, 1881–1885’, Kenna discusses the rationale and thinking behind this new wave of activism. It was not, he writes, met by universal acceptance by fellow Irish Fenians and he quotes James Stephens, the founder of the IRB, as finding the suggestion ‘the wildest, the lowest and the most wicked conception of the national movement’. Despite this, a ‘few bold and devoted heroes’ sprang up (as described and urged by Patrick Ford in the radical New York Irish World newspaper) to take the fight to Britain.
One such was the Irish born, American bred James Stephens; another, the terror extremist Harry Burton, believed to be head of the ‘Avengers Society’, whose members, it is said, would kill anyone, friend or foe, upon command – especially ‘traitors’ to their cause (i.e. spies and informers, particularly those from within their ranks). These men would not fight a battle but would ‘keep up without intermission a guerrilla warfare’ of skirmishes.10
Kenna also examines the influence that the American Civil war (1861–65) later had on the wider culture of warfare with respect to civilian involvement, and the rising role of technology which was, he believes, helped by the easy availability of cheap scientific journals, that instructed and assisted the common man to manufacture his own explosives, rather than have to rely on chemists and scientists. The homemade bomb characterised political attacks in Britain, America and in Europe, and, as such, its nature, performance and outcomes were never fully under control. This was the experience the first time the Fenians used the bomb in England.
Back in 1867, they had blown up part of Clerkenwell House of Detention in London, in an attempt to free an imprisoned leader, but such was their exuberance in the amount of explosive they used that they demolished a large part of the wall and the fronts of nearby houses killing twelve (some immediately, others died of their wounds later), and injuring over a hundred others in the process. It was a criminal (not of terrorist intention) act but still brought fear and alarm to Victorian society. Ironically by this ‘non-political’ act, the Fenians inadvertently achieved what they never had done before, when William Gladstone publicly remarked how the ‘explosion had convinced him to address the Irish question’. This would effectively result in the disestablishment of the minority Anglican Church of Ireland (1869), and the introduction of Gladstone’s first Land Act.11 It was a victory that, unhappily, showed that terror brought political results, and it paved the way for more of the same in later years.
The first known incident involving a bomb, a train and (probably) a Fenian, took place in America on 28 October 1876, when a time-delayed bomb exploded in the luggage carriage of the express train from Philadelphia to Jersey City. It is believed that the bomber(s) had sought to wreck the train and kill its passengers. It was an event that was to have significance in Britain some years later as the bomb (constructed ‘with a pistol tied to clockwork which, upon reaching a set time, would discharge the pistol and detonate the bomb’)12 bore a remarkable resemblance to other such devices found at London’s Charing Cross, Paddington and Ludgate Street stations. It was this device that would lend credence to the belief that the bombers had been trained at the same ‘dynamite school’ run by the ‘Skirmishers’ in Brooklyn, and that these ‘infernal machines’ were indeed the work of the Fenians. High-ranking Fenian, Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, one of the school’s founders, claimed its success stating, ‘young men have come over from England, Ireland and Scotland for instruction and … several of them have returned sufficiently instructed in the manufacture of the most powerful explosives.’13 Some of the students were found to be active in Britain during the 1880s. In April 1883, an extensive ‘Explosive Manufactory’ was discovered, by fortunate and zealous police work, in a small shop in Birmingham, and several Fenians including Albert Whitehead and Henry Dalton were apprehended.14 In this year, the ‘Special Irish Branch’ was formed as a temporary measure to deal with the ‘Irish problem’, but, after three years, the word ‘Irish’ was dropped and the department continues to this day.
Suspected Attempt to Wreck a Train15
On Monday evening, 13 September 1880, an attempt was made by a person or persons unknown to blow up the London & North Western Railway Company’s early express ‘down-train’ from Euston at 5.15 a.m.– or so it was initially thought. The bomb had been placed a few hundred yards from Bushy Station, which is about 16 miles (26km) from the Euston terminus, in the direction of Watford. At this section, there are four lines of rails, the express mainline trains having up and down lines of their own.16 Happily, the bomb did not explode and the ‘near miss’ was not discovered until nearly two hours later, when a plate layer gang went out to inspect and maintain the rails. Plate layer John Heath discovered that the fishplates (bars that hold down the rails) had been removed on both sides.17 Investigating further, he found a brown paper package, partly open and tied with strong cord, placed in a small hole which had been dug alongside the sleeper of the outside rail. Inside the parcel was something that looked like red lead. Heath did not think ‘bomb’, but rather that the package had something to do with telegraph workmen who had been there, presuming they had gone off to Watford to report the damage to the rails. He did his best to replace and tighten the fishplates without the aid of the necessary spanner, left the package, collected the signal lamps for which he had been sent, and made his way back to Bushey Station. Meeting his ‘ganger’, Joseph Holwood, on the way, he informed him of what he had found. Holwood immediately went to the spot, secured the fishplates, collected the parcel and the small jemmy lying alongside, and took them on to Watford Station.18
The deputy stationmaster’s report (the stationmaster was on holiday) to the Superintendent of the Line was clear and precise:
I have to report to you that platelayer Heath of 20 gang, who was going to fetch the up distance signal lamps, on Monday morning about 7.10 am, found a parcel of some explosive material of a reddish colour, in a hole which had been dug by the side of the sleeper at the joint. The two fish-plates had been taken off and an india-rubber tube filled with gunpowder and long gun-caps fixed at the end, was attached to the explosive material. A jemmy about 18inches long was also found beside it. Heath says that by the look of the tube when he found it, he thinks that the ‘jar’ of the train must have jolted the end with the gun-caps in it off the metals [rails] thus avoiding a terrible explosion. It (the explosive substance) was found on the down fast line. The ganger of Heath’s gang took the stuff to Watford and handed it to Inspector Keys.19
Inspector Keys wrote a corroborative report, which was passed on to the company’s own police department at Euston. Railway companies had had their own police working in a law enforcing capacity since 1838, and later also had ‘detective’ departments. The Great Western Railway was the first, forming their detective branch in 1867. On a case such as this they would have, and did, work hand-in-hand with the local police: Inspector Isgate of the Hertfordshire County Constabulary stationed at Watford; the Metropolitan Police; Detective Warne; and the Home Office Explosives Department. Under the ‘The Explosives Act 1875’ the Home Office became responsible for enforcing the law with respect to manufacturing, keeping, selling, carrying, and importing gunpowder, nitroglycerine, and other explosive substances. Their representative was, thereafter, part of every explosive investigation, and no coroner’s court, relating to explosive matters, could proceed without the presence of a member representing this department.
Superintendent Copping, of the L&NWR, and his detectives went down to make a ‘minute examination’ and conduct a ‘rigid examination of all who could throw any light on the subject’, namely, all company personnel. Alfred Boddy, a company employee (probably a lampman from his description of his duty), reported that, on the evening of the day before, he had proceeded at his usual time,
around 7 p.m., to attend the lights near the spot, ‘and there picked up a portion of lamp such as is used by engine drivers’. The lamp appeared to ‘have been recently cleaned and bore no traces of having been on the ground for a considerable time.’20
At first, it was thought that it might be the work of ‘a discharged or dissatisfied employee of the company’, but this notion was quickly discarded. Then it was suggested it might be ‘villains’ attempting to derail and then rob the passengers of the train (an imitation of American train hold-ups, perhaps) or more probably the work of ‘political conspirators’. 21 The most popular ‘conspiracy’ theory was that ‘Nihilist’ refugees had planned to blow up the train on which His Imperial Highness, Grand Duke Konstantin Nickolayevich, would return from Scotland. (The technique used was a close imitation of that used in the blowing up of a train in Russia, in an attempt on the life of the Emperor of Russia, on 4 December 1879.) Police inquiries were, for some time, directed to the Nihilist quarters in London. These enquires were dropped after a letter appeared in The Daily Telegraph sent in by Russian socialists who wrote of their gratitude to ‘their hosts’ (the British), insisting they would not ‘jeopardise the lives of their hosts’ (and by implication their own sanctuary), and pointing out that the Grand Duke ‘has so little political influence in Russia that he is quite safe even in his own country.’22
The direction of the enquiries changed after two ‘creditable’ witnesses came forward, and another theory involving the Fenians came to the fore. The men, one a watchman at the Sedgewick’s brewery almost alongside the spot, and the other, James Hart, employed at Messrs Rowe’s coal shed near the station, maintained that they had heard a very loud explosion ‘on the Sunday night between 9 and 10 just about the time when the Irish Mail, the Limited Mail, and an express train would be passing in rapid succession’.23
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