Blood on the Tracks: A History of Railway Crime in Britain

by Brandon, David

  Not all cases of sexual assault turned out to be that. A man entered a compartment on a train of the North Eastern Railway near Durham. The only other passenger was a plump and homely looking woman aged about forty who sat opposite him. The train was only just pulling out of the station when she suddenly jumped up and asked him what he meant by what he had just done. He protested that he had not done anything except sit and look out of the window. A few minutes later the same thing happened again. This scenario was re-enacted several more times before the train slowed for a station, by which time the man was convinced that his fellow traveller was totally mad and a public danger.

  Artistic licence is liberally employed in this view of Peterborough from the south. Crossing the bridge over the River Nene is a train on the Great Northern Railway, while another train can be seen on the tracks of the London & Birmingham Railway’s long cross-country line from Blisworth to Peterborough.

  As the train pulled into the station the woman leant out of the window shouting to the guard. The racket she was creating attracted that august official and a knot of bystanders. She angrily accused the man of trying to pinch her legs. He vehemently denied such intent. The man was beginning to feel a horrible black hole opening up in front of him when the guard suddenly recalled that he had placed a basket under the seat on which the woman was sitting. She suddenly cried out that it had happened again! Everyone crowding around could see that it could not possibly have been the accused. The culprit of the assault was revealed as a rather irascible goose which was occupying the basket under the seat and venting its spleen in the only way possible – by lashing out with its beak!

  Not long after the Muller case of 1864, a violent and deranged man joined passengers in a crowded train at King’s Cross. He proceeded to subject his fellow travellers on the 110-minute non-stop journey to Peterborough to a catalogue of horrifying experiences stopping short, however, of murder. In their compartment these passengers were literally captives, totally unable to alert the train crew to the activities of the maniac in their midst.

  Public concern about these and similar events led to the passing in 1868 of The Regulation of Railways Act. It required that all passenger trains travelling more than twenty miles without stopping must be equipped with a functioning system whereby passengers could communicate with ‘the servants of the company in charge of the train.’ The installation of such a system did not eliminate the possibility of attacks, but certainly helped to make passengers feel more secure.

  By this time the railway was becoming a very safe medium of travel. Incidentally, the above act also brought in a penalty for misuse of the communication cord. This was fixed at a maximum of £5 and remained the same for around 100 years. In doing so it staunchly avoided inflationary trends in the economy, to the point where to be fined under the act could almost be described as being good value for money.

  Passengers, being the quirky or sometimes stupid people they can be, sometimes misunderstood or misused the communication cord facility when there was nothing remotely approaching an emergency. Throughout the history of the railways there have been others for whom the very existence of the device and its ready accessibility was a source of wayward fascination. They obviously saw the cord as something of a challenge and many succumbed to its allure. They pulled it, they paid the penalty!

  Before the passing of the 1868 Act, anyone finding themselves in a compartment on fire, where an assault or other crime was taking place, or where someone had been taken ill, was advised to tie a brightly coloured handkerchief to the end of a stick and wave it as far out of the carriage as was commensurate with safety. Hopefully this cunning ploy would catch the attention of one of the railwaymen on board who would assume that there was an emergency and therefore would stop the train.

  Equally, the railwayman concerned might assume that the person waving the stick embellished with the hanky was simply using it to salute an acquaintance or relation by the side of the line, or just flourishing it out of a sense of joie de vivre. In such cases he might not stop the train. Of course he certainly would not stop the train if he had been looking in the opposite direction all the time.

  Some interesting suggestions were put forward for ways in which beleaguered passengers might make their plight known to members of the train crew. One earnest correspondent of the Morning Herald newspaper advocated a device he thought would do the trick. The guard of the train should wear a belt round his waist. Attached to this would be a long chain passing through every carriage and anyone who wished to summon the assistance of the guard would be able to alert him by simply tugging the belt. Such a device was worthy of Heath Robinson at his very best.

  Another suggestion, even more monstrously impractical, involved open parachutes above every carriage of a moving train. For any passenger needing to communicate urgently with the guard, it was simplicity itself. He or she merely tugged a string to close the parachute whereupon the lynx-eyed guard, having spotted the deflation, would bring the train to an immediate halt. Another ingenious solution involved a speaking tube running the length of the train. A passenger in dire straits would be able to summon instant succour simply by speaking into the mouthpiece. So long, presumably, that the guard did not have his attention distracted by any of the thousand and one other duties his post entailed.

  A professional railwayman who fancied himself as a serious, even groundbreaking, inventor, gave a public demonstration of an electrical apparatus which would set a bell ringing on the footplate when activated by a passenger needing assistance. He spent twenty minutes or so explaining the principles of physics that were involved in this cunning device. In doing this he bored his audience to the verge of insensibility but they perked up considerably when with a flourish he announced that he was now going to dazzle them by a demonstration of the capabilities of his failsafe apparatus.

  Failsafe it may have been, foolproof it was not! The proud inventor, who became increasingly flustered and pompous, tried again and again without success to elicit a response from his brainchild against the background of a rising crescendo of ribald and unhelpful comments from his uncharitable audience. Eventually they made their way home, still holding their sides with painful and uncontrollable mirth. For them the demonstration had been a huge success.

  In 1884 Captain John Preston of the Berkshire Militia, accompanied by his wife, entered a second-class compartment in a Great Western train. They joined it at Paddington. Its destination was Oxford. Two ladies already occupied the carriage. They were Mrs Frances de Windt and her sister, Miss Margaret Long. Mrs de Windt promptly informed them that the compartment was reserved for some friends she was expecting. Preston then told Mrs de Windt that the guard had pointed them to this particular compartment. Mrs de Windt then commented that this was just the sort of incident that occurred when one travelled with one’s social inferiors. Her next pronouncement was that she would have the guard dismissed. These kind words thankfully fell on deaf ears and Preston and his wife then attempted to sit down.

  This was difficult because the original occupants of the compartment had randomly scattered a large and antediluvian collection of parcels all over the seats. They made no attempt to move these and so the good captain and his wife had to make the best of a bad job and sit, uncomfortably, where they could. When Preston ventured to place one of the parcels on the floor Mrs de Windt flew into a tantrum, asked him for his name and said that her husband would be calling on him the next day. He refused to give his name.

  The journey continued in uneasy silence until the first stop at Reading where Mrs de Windt summoned the guard. She told him that the captain had grossly insulted her and she loudly demanded to be assisted to another carriage. A crowd quickly gathered, avid for some free entertainment. They pricked up their ears when the words ‘grossly insulted’ were voiced. This was taken to suggest that the captain had uttered salacious words or acted in a lewd way towards Mrs de Windt.

  Three days later Mr de Windt and a friend called Russel
l who was a retired army officer, arrived at Captain Preston’s home in Abingdon and handed him a note. It demanded an apology for his insulting behaviour towards Mrs de Windt on the train three days earlier. It questioned whether Captain Preston, despite being an officer, could properly be described as a gentleman since by definition no gentleman would insult a lady.

  When Captain Preston tried to give his side of the story and refused to apologise, de Windt called him a damned scoundrel and punched him on the shoulder. When he attempted to land another blow Preston parried it and gripped his hand tightly whereupon de Windt squealed with pain and, calling Preston a brute, told him that he had broken his finger. Clearly de Windt was beside himself with rage because he then spat out the words ‘I wouldn’t be seen with you at a pig fight, you white-livered scoundrel,’ and added menacingly that he would see to it that Preston was blackballed by his club.

  This instructive example of how certain members of the Victorian middle class exercised their interpersonal skills went to the courts for adjudication. Preston was vindicated because he was awarded £50 damages for assault. A counterclaim by de Windt for damages of £500 for his broken finger was contemptuously dismissed. It is obvious that oversensitivity and readiness to see insult ran in de Windt’s family. His father had once fought a duel with a man who had made disparaging remarks about the necktie he was wearing.

  Many courts had a considerable amount of their time taken up with cases of assault on the railways. The nature of these assaults was as varied as the people who committed them. What are we to make of the two students fined 30 shillings by Hammersmith magistrates for leaning over a division between two compartments and spitting onto the hat and a book belonging to a doctor?

  At Southport the magistrates fined a solicitor aged seventy just 5 shillings when he ran out of patience and used his umbrella to show his displeasure and knock off the hat belonging to a man who, for two whole years, had refused to admit him into the compartment he habitually shared with two other men. They spent their journeys playing whist and they clearly thought this gave them exclusive rights to the occupancy of the compartment. Such a paltry fine suggests that the court sympathised with the aged but feisty solicitor.

  It was possible to hire containers of hot coals for use as foot-warmers in unheated carriages on cold days. Fights were no means unknown when other passengers who could not, or would not, hire their own foot-warmers tried to place their feet so as to benefit from the heat generated by the foot-warmer hired by another passenger who had paid for the privilege. The latter would jealously guard their source of pedal comfort against others, using physical force if necessary. Passengers were earnestly encouraged not to engage in debates with strangers about religion or politics as a way of avoiding the likelihood of fisticuffs. That these contentious issues did frequently lead to disputes with violent outcomes is shown by the records of innumerable minor courts up and down the country.

  Probably for every petty case of assault or fighting that went as far as the courts and was therefore recorded, there were innumerable others where the victims or participants did not have recourse to the law. Clearly these have mostly been forgotten, but one that is still remembered occurred when four burly farmers were joined in their compartment by a large and well-built man who proceeded, without obvious provocation, to insult and curse each of them in turn and in the most scurrilous fashion.

  A request that he bridled his tongue evoked the man’s wrath, and he proceeded to crank up both the sound volume and the vituperative nature of the comments he was making. Having given the man one final chance, which only unleashed a further torrent of abuse, the four farmers then waited for the next station and seized the man who they then proceeded to throw into a duck pond close by the side of the line. Serves him right.

  Assault was not always intentional. A man had been attacked by footpads in the street near Willesden Junction but had scared them off when he took out his pistol and fired over their heads. So elated had he been by this robust defence of his own person and property that a few days later he was relating the event to a stranger on a train. He was warming to his theme and becoming highly excited, he decided to re-enact his reaction to the approach of the footpads. He took out his pistol and fired it. His aim was not as true as it should have been because instead of firing across his interlocutor’s head, the bullet literally made a neat parting in the latter’s hair!

  An obstreperous Welsh collier attracted a short custodial sentence after he climbed out the carriage window of a compartment on a moving train on the Taff Vale Railway and rode on the roof for some distance. Clearly a man of some acrobatic ability, he then swung entirely unexpectedly through the open window of another compartment and proceeded to pull one passenger’s hair and to punch another. Earlier in the same day he had managed to break a window and assault two railway officials at Aberdare station. After all this hyperactivity a couple of months cooling off in a cell hopefully gave him time to ponder on his foolishness.

  Assaults by members of the railway staff on members of the public were by no means unknown. In 1839 a Great Western Railway employee, out of uniform, became involved in a fracas going on in a compartment where two passengers were disputing the right to sit in the same seat. The Great Western Railwayman seems to have been overzealous and, seizing one of the passengers, deposited him in a heap on the platform, a piece of officiousness for which he was fined £25.

  It is well known that little love was lost between rival railway companies, but this usually remained on a corporate rather than a personal basis. However, in 1843 the long-standing mutual loathing between the chairman of the London & Croydon Railway and a former director of two other companies had seen a scrimmage on a station, when one hit the other with a cane only to get a neat uppercut for his efforts. A duel was arranged, but these by now had become illegal, and the would-be contestants were prosecuted and bound over to keep the peace.

  Ely is a small and quiet cathedral city but the tranquillity of the station was rudely shattered one day in 1847 when a male passenger made a maniacal attack on the other travellers in his compartment. He then hit the stationmaster and had to be locked up for the night. His defence was that he had a condition whereby he lost control of his actions after imbibing alcohol; on this occasion he had drunk one brandy. The court tended towards leniency and he was fined just £5!

  Two respectable ladies were in a London, Brighton & South Coast train heading for London one day in 1904 when they were joined by a man who immediately leant out of the window, shouting and gesticulating. Then, so the ladies claimed, he took out a knife and lunged at one of them, unexpectedly and without provocation. Nothing daunted, one of the ladies grabbed the knife, passing it to her friend who threw it out of the window. Perhaps the man did not expect such a doughty response because he quickly found himself pinioned in a corner of the carriage until East Croydon, where the station officials were alerted and he was arrested. His defence that he had simply taken the knife out to trim his cigar was rejected and he was sentenced to hard labour.

  Railways provided a host of new opportunities for Britain’s criminal elements. The environs of stations, goods depots and marshalling yards provided a myriad of opportunities for theft and robbery. One type of robbery which did not necessarily involve violence was that usually employed by small syndicates who lured unwary or credulous passengers into card games or other games of chance. The usual procedure was for a group, usually of three or four men, to enter a railway compartment on a train going a considerable distance. They did this when they had espied one or more likely marks, but they took their place on the train as if they did not know each other.

  A few minutes into the journey one of the men would take out a pack of cards and suggest a game or two to while away the time. His unacknowledged accomplices would agree and might then invite anyone else in the compartment to join them. If this happened, then the stranger would be allowed some useful initial wins and, as his enthusiasm and greed grew, the stakes
rose correspondingly. The card sharps, however, were often highly skilled at taking their victim along with them but the outcome was usually the same – the victim was fleeced, yet reluctant to inform friends or authority for fear of looking stupid.

  Satirical depiction of the type of public behaviour expected from, respectively, first, second and third-class early railway passengers. In reality the biggest rogues were probably in the first class.

  The activities of these robbers of the iron road caused a newspaper correspondent to call for the return of Dick Turpin who he thought a capital and upright fellow compared to these devious cowards who infested Britain’s railway carriages. Sometimes these crooks threatened their victims with a dusting-up if they did not join the card games.

  Pickpockets found rich reward for their efforts in densely packed railway stations and within crowded carriages. In the latter a common ploy was for a pickpocket with charm and plausibility to express concern for a wealthy looking traveller and offer to swap seats, away from a draught, for example. The thief would have already noted the disposition of likely valuables about his victim’s person, and in the minor melee created by changing seats in a crowded compartment would have deftly removed these items. We should not underestimate the skill required not only in taking the items without detection, but also in picking the right victim, obtaining agreement for the move, and for timing this just before a station stop where the pickpocket of course left the train and disappeared.

  An investigator for Tit-Bits interviewed an instructor in the art of picking pockets who declared proudly that it was every bit ‘as much a fine art as pianoforte-playing or high-class conjuring’. The experienced and successful thieves were members of the ‘swell mob’, prominent in the hierarchy of the criminal world, and always clean and respectably well dressed. Their resourcefulness and ingenuity could be quite extraordinary. Pickpockets, of course, still ply their trade on today’s railways, crowded trains on the London Underground being a favoured hunting ground. They work in small groups, and the villain who actually does the stealing quickly and surreptitiously passes the items on to others in the syndicate. Few victims realise that they have been robbed until later, by which time they may be far from the scene.