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

by Brandon, David

  On this particular night, however, they spotted an intruder. He was a well-known old local lad with the good Lancastrian name of Halliwell. When he was challenged he ran off but Osbourne caught up with him and held him up against a wagon. Another man appeared out of the darkness and he blundered into Kidd and Osbourne who were restraining Halliwell. The newcomer also boasted a good Lancashire name, in this case Kearsley. He too was a regular habitué of the police cells and local courts.

  Osbourne had his truncheon at the ready to deal with Kearsley when a third man arrived. Osbourne thought that the new arrival had a weapon and so he aimed a heavy blow with his truncheon at the man’s hand. The sidings around goods yards were poorly lit, and in the confused melee that ensued the three men managed to get away, Halliwell running off triumphantly having grabbed Osbourne’s truncheon. Where was Kidd?

  Osbourne found him nearby on his knees with blood pouring down his face and clearly in a critical state. He tried to help Kidd by moving him but he cried out in pain. Osbourne was exhausted and shaken up but he managed to call for help before himself collapsing. Soon various railway workers and the local police were on the scene. Kidd was found to have appalling injuries. He had been stabbed nine times and had clearly been engaged in a life-and-death struggle.

  His assailant or assailants had not only stabbed him but had beaten him repeatedly on his body and his limbs. These injuries proved fatal, Kidd’s life ebbing away within the hour. Investigations at the scene produced two bloodstained caps of the sort worn by working men and also evidence that a wagon containing sweets had been broken into. It was unclear whether anything had actually been stolen. A hue-and-cry went out. The search was on for the three men, now wanted for murder.

  The Wigan citizenry seems to have been shaken and shocked by the murder of Sergeant Kidd who was well known and well liked, and the police were soon following a number of useful leads provided by the public. These resulted in the quick arrest of the three men. Kearsley and Halliwell have already been mentioned. The third member of this horrible triumvirate was Elijah Winstanley. Dare we say it but he was another with a deeply rooted Lancashire name and, like Halliwell, he was a pitman. The three of them were charged with the murder of Kidd and with assaulting and inflicting grievous bodily harm on Osbourne. Halliwell may have been a pitman, he may have been a recidivist, but he now revealed that he was also a grass. He sang like a canary. It was his attempt to escape the noose.

  When the case went to court, it quickly became evident that they were not the individuals or possibly the gang that had been systematically thieving from wagons in the sidings and which Sergeant Kidd had been instructed to investigate. The three men had spent an evening drinking in pubs in the Lower Ince area of Wigan and, probably in their cups, they had then decided to investigate the opportunities for a bit of casual theft offered by the large fan of railway sidings at Springs Branch, close by.

  The three ne’er-do-wells appeared before Wigan Magistrates and were then committed to Liverpool Assizes. Halliwell, having turned Queen’s evidence, was charged only with unlawful wounding. Curiously the case against him was dismissed on the basis of insufficient evidence. Kearsley and Winstanley appeared on capital charges but the court ruled that the former was only an accomplice to the murderous assault on Sergeant Kidd, and although he was found guilty he was sentenced only to a long term in prison. Winstanley, therefore, was left to face execution. His death was probably no great loss. However, questions could be asked as to why he was left to give up his life when his associates were every bit as guilty of the murder of Kidd. He left a young wife and seven children.

  Unrequited Love

  Ernest Keeling was a deeply frustrated young man. When he was a schoolboy, he had, metaphorically at least, carried the school satchel of Amy Lister. As an adult he retained more than fond memories of her, but their paths had parted. She was the headmistress of a school in Devizes, Wiltshire, and he was employed in Birmingham, where they had been brought up and attended school together. He was also a teacher. Such was Keeling’s passion for Amy that in 1889 he applied for a job at her school so as to be near her and to attempt to woo her.

  It is not known whether or not he got as far as an interview but he certainly got as far as Devizes. He wooed her for all he was worth but without even chipping away at her stony heart. She told him those words that all men dread to hear, ‘I like you but only as a friend.’ Lover was what Keeling had in mind. He was disappointed and more than a little put out. He hung around her for months hoping for a change of mind, but presumably did not pester her too much because she agreed to travel on a railway excursion with him.

  This proved to be an unfortunate decision because she had underestimated the depth of Keeling’s passion. They occupied an otherwise empty compartment and he sank to his knees, imploring her to agree to a more physical relationship. We shall never know whether or not she said that she would never have fancied him even if he had been the last man on earth, but whatever she did say stung him so much that he took out a gun and shot his loved one through the head and then pushed her dying body out of the moving carriage. A few seconds later he leapt out of the train and, landing safely, proceeded to blow his own brains out.

  Something to get your Teeth into

  Wilhelm Arnemann was a German who lived in Nottingham where he had a business making false teeth. He was a man it was difficult to ignore. Something of an eccentric, he insisted on sleeping on the roof of his house even in subzero temperatures. It was, however, his readiness to go to law that brought him the reputation of being a stormy petrel. Time and time again he took customers who defaulted on their payments to court, where he always lost the case because the false teeth he made never ever fitted the mouths of the customers concerned. This small technical snag meant that the courts ruled that people who had bought these ill-fitting dentures were perfectly entitled not to pay for such sub-standard items.

  A sense of grievance was building up in Arnemann’s bosom and it reached a peak when, in November 1889, a judge of the Nottingham Court yet again threw out his claim and presented him with a bill for legal expenses. You can only push a man so far and Arnemann was so piqued that he decided to settle the hash of Judge Bristowe who had made this ruling. He knew that Bristowe regularly caught an early evening train of the Great Northern Railway from the London Road station in Nottingham to his home at West Hallam on the line to Derby Friargate.

  On 19 November he shadowed him to London Road and shot the judge in the back at point-blank range as he was climbing into the train. Arnemann was quickly wrestled to the floor and disarmed. It did not mitigate his defence in the subsequent court case that while he was still lying on the platform being held in a vice-like grip he had said, ‘I hope I have done for the old man. I should like to drink his blood’. In fact he had not done for Bristowe, who survived, but his assailant received twenty years’ penal servitude for attempted murder.

  An Unsolved Mystery between Hounslow and Waterloo

  The public find murders fascinating. They find unsolved murders even more fascinating. It is likely that ‘Ripperology’ would never have assumed the proportions of an industry had Jack the Ripper been brought to justice – whoever he was. Certainly those who produce books and television programmes on the subject would not have found it such a lucrative trade. Of course, the fact that these ghastly crimes were perpetrated on prostitutes in the mean streets and labyrinthine alleys of London’s East End adds some desirable theatricality and sense of place. Now each year thousands of people who like to be safely scared pound the streets of Whitechapel, visiting the locations where these women had their wretched lives prematurely and bloodily ended. Far less well known was a murder on a suburban train of the London & South Western Railway bound for the company’s London terminus at Waterloo.

  The year was 1897. Elizabeth Camp was an attractive, intelligent working-class woman aged thirty-three years old. On a cold February day she had been extremely busy. In the morning she had g
one to Hammersmith to visit her younger sister and had then travelled on to Hounslow in the early evening for tea with her elder sister, a Mrs Haynes. Elizabeth was shortly to get married and she had been doing some shopping in anticipation of the happy day as well as spending time with her sisters of whom she was very fond. She was therefore feeling happy when she returned to Hounslow station to catch the 7.42 train to Waterloo.

  With her sister and a man euphemistically described as a ‘friend of the family’, she had even managed to fit in a quick drink in a pub not far from Hounslow station. The day was not over because Edward Barry, her fiancé, was going to meet her at Waterloo and they were intending to visit a music hall. She was somewhat encumbered by the parcels and packages containing the items she had bought as she selected and entered an empty second-class compartment. Unfortunately, she was never to leave the compartment alive.

  Her fiancé, Edward Berry, was a good-looking and steady young man but a bit of a worrier who tended to fuss and mother-hen Elizabeth. She probably found this mildly irritating since she was a very capable woman herself. She had tried her hand successfully in a number of trades but in 1897 she was the manageress of a busy pub in the Walworth district of south London. As was his way, Edward got to Waterloo in plenty of time to meet Elizabeth’s train which was due in at 8.23. He was more than a bit put out therefore when the train arrived but Elizabeth did not hurry through the throng of passengers to greet him. It was most unlike her not to be where and when she said she was going to be.

  He was in a bit of a flap. He did not know what to do for the best. What time was the next train from Hounslow due? Had she been on the train but they had somehow managed to miss each other? Was she also wandering around the station, looking for him? We easily forget the difficulties of contacting people in such circumstances before the age of mobile phones and text messaging. Edward fussed here and fussed there, getting more agitated by the minute, before deciding to return to the barrier at the platform where the train that Elizabeth should have been on had arrived. He could not help noticing a knot of agitated-looking railwaymen around the open door of a compartment of the train from Hounslow. The ever-anxious Edward suddenly became even more so. His anxiety intensified as two railway police officers made their way briskly towards the carriage.

  It was the custom for cleaners to service the train from Hounslow before it left for another foray into London’s burgeoning south-west suburbia. Elizabeth’s body was discovered by a cleaner as he opened the compartment door. Her head and torso were largely under the seat with her legs spread widely on the compartment floor. A growing pool of blood was oozing from the corpse. Nowadays the whole of Waterloo station would probably be sealed off and no train movements allowed for at least forty-eight hours.

  This was 1897, however, and with scant regard for evidence at the scene the body was lifted out onto the platform. It was a truly gruesome sight. The dead woman had clearly been the victim of an exceptionally brutal attack in which she had been beaten to death and her skull had been staved in. There was blood everywhere, and even to an unpractised eye it was clear that the victim had not gone to her death without a ferocious fight back. The body was removed to the mortuary at St Thomas’ Hospital. With his heart in his mouth, fearing the worst, Edward followed. He made it clear who he was and was called upon to identify the battered corpse. The worst-case scenario he could ever have anticipated lay in front of his horrified eyes.

  The police scoured the compartment for clues. Apart from it clearly having witnessed a furiously violent physical struggle, the only items that might possibly be of significance were a pair of bone cufflinks on the floor of the compartment near where the body had been lying. It was considered odd that there was no trace of Elizabeth’s train ticket but that might have been in the purse which she habitually carried and was nowhere to be found. If the motive was robbery, why had one or two jewellery items of minor value not been taken? Why should a would-be robber pick on a fit-looking youngish woman who was clearly of the working classes? Surely a more affluent but weaker victim could have been found by the unknown assailant had he only exercised some degree of patience.

  The salaciously minded quickly homed in on the idea that the motive of the attacker was sex. Cheap, sensational and melodramatic fiction of the Victorian period found a rich seam in the horrible fates that might befall innocent maidens at the hands of male malefactors travelling in the railway compartment carriages of the time. Any male over the age of puberty was a potential sex-fiend stalking railway stations in order to locate vulnerable women travelling alone. Having done so, they of course then subjected them to a fate worse than death.

  Those with salacious minds were therefore badly disappointed when it was made clear that Elizabeth had not been sexually assaulted. In fact, attack either for the purposes of robbery or sex seemed strange given that the train from Hounslow stopped at so many stations, hardly providing the time for a successful assault on a woman as fit and strong as Elizabeth had been. However, a murderous attack had clearly taken place. What was the motive of the murderer? Indeed who was the murderer?

  The railway police were supported by a team from Scotland Yard headed by Detective Chief Inspector Marshall. He was an old hand and he quickly concluded that since Elizabeth’s blood was still warm when her corpse was delivered to St Thomas’, she almost certainly had been killed towards the end of the journey from Hounslow and that her attacker had therefore probably left the train at one of the last three stops before Waterloo. These stations were not particularly busy at that time of the evening and Marshall hoped that questioning the staff concerned might provide information about anyone seen with blood-stained clothing or acting in any way suspiciously. The resulting enquiries produced nothing.

  The police were at their wits’ end and were coming in for something of a roasting from the public because of the lack of any significant developments. This brutal murder had excited widespread indignation and people wanted results. Marshall, in desperation, ordered a minute examination of the trackside on the route taken by the train as it approached London. Between Putney and Wandsworth a heavy porcelain pestle was found. It had blood and human hair adhering to it. The hair had belonged to Elizabeth Camp. The police now had the murder weapon. They issued handbills with a picture of the pestle and appeals to anyone who might recognise it. There was no useful response.

  Next they appealed for anyone who had been on the 7.42 train from Hounslow to come forward. The only possible lead was provided by a passenger who volunteered the information that he had seen a man leaving the carriage concerned at Wandsworth. A description was provided and soon afterwards a man who was a dead ringer for it walked into Wandsworth police station and told a startled desk sergeant that he need look no further. With an air of swagger and pride he then announced that he was the murderer. He turned out to be a hoaxer with the mental age of a child. No one else came forward.

  Gradually the furore over Elizabeth’s murder died down as the popular press found new horrors to feast upon. The police scaled down their enquiries but continued to follow a number of clues. They discovered that Elizabeth had formerly been engaged to a barman called Brown. The relationship had ended very acrimoniously and Brown still resented the way he thought he had been treated. Elizabeth had been receiving a number of anonymous and threatening letters and the police thought that Brown probably wrote them.

  One of the issues between the couple had been money. Elizabeth was clearly a very competent financial manager while Brown was a spendthrift. Apparently Brown still owed her money. This would have given him a motive for murder. Having thought that at last they were getting somewhere, the police then had their hopes dashed when Brown turned out to have a cast-iron alibi.

  There is a lot of sweat and often little glory in routine police enquiry work. It is their job to uncover information that may be relevant, and in the course of this particular enquiry they found that Elizabeth was something of a moneylender. Such people are, by the very n
ature of the service they provide, generally disliked. In addition, Berry told them that she frequently carried a substantial amount of money on her person. Could her murderer be someone who had noticed this and had waited for an opportunity to rob her when she was alone?

  It turned out that a number of people owed her money. Could it be a robber who was also a creditor? The police turned their attention to Elizabeth’s creditors. One of them turned out to be the ‘friend of the family’ who had joined Elizabeth and her sister for a drink at Hounslow before she had left for what turned out to be her terminal journey. His name was Stone. He explained that he had accompanied Elizabeth and her sister to the pub in Hounslow to celebrate the forthcoming nuptials and then left them to make their way to the station. He said that he had then gone off to do urgent business elsewhere and had not returned to Hounslow until at least four hours later.

  Knowing which train Elizabeth was going to travel on, had he doubled back to the station unseen and entered another carriage? Had he then alighted at an intermediate station and, intent on murdering the woman to whom he owed money, joined Elizabeth in her compartment and then committed the dreadful deed between stations? He had the motive and the opportunity. However, the means were something of a problem. It somewhat stretches the bounds of credibility to believe that he was in the habit of carrying a heavy pestle around with him. Or had he secreted it on his person in the foreknowledge that Elizabeth would be visiting Hounslow that day and returning to London on a little-used train?

  We will never know. Although Stone looked to have had the motive, the means and the opportunity, the police questioned him for some time and then let him go because they did not have enough evidence to charge him with anything, or so they said. The newspapers of the time were not satisfied and hinted that the public were being kept in the dark for undisclosed reasons. The story really ends there. The murder of Elizabeth Camp on the 7.42 from Hounslow to Waterloo was never solved and obviously never will be.