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

by Brandon, David

  An Appointment at Newgate

  Louisa Masset lived in Bethune Road, Stoke Newington, London N16. She was half-French, half-English and aged thirty-three when she hit the headlines in 1899. Louisa was single and she lived with her married sister and her husband. She had a small boy named Manfred. He was illegitimate and Louisa had left France because of the stigma attached to the mothers of children born out of wedlock there. The child lived with and was looked after by a foster-mother in Tottenham and Louisa saw him regularly. The boy’s natural father apparently paid the cost of childcare.

  Having the child looked after meant that she worked as a governess, receiving a relatively good wage, and she also taught piano. Louisa had a mind of her own and little respect for conventional mores, truly a liberated ‘New Woman’ in that sense. A young Frenchman of nineteen called Eudor Lucas moved in next door. Soon the couple were engaged in a steamy sexual relationship, living entirely for the pleasures of the moment and with no romantic notions about loving each other until the day they died.

  Quite unexpectedly in October 1899 Manfred’s father contacted Louisa requesting that he should take over the job of looking after the boy. This seemed like a good idea for all concerned and she made arrangements to meet Helen, Manfred’s foster-mother, and to take him back into her own custody, albeit temporarily. She went out into the garden and took a brick, which she put into a bag, and then she picked the child up on the morning of 27 October and they travelled to London Bridge station. A witness came forward who said that she saw them together in the buffet at about three in the afternoon and the little boy seemed highly distressed. The same witness saw Louisa at around six. She was alone. It transpired that she then went off on a dirty weekend in Brighton with Eudor.

  It seems that in between the first and the second time that she was seen at London Bridge she had doubled back to north London. Two ladies entered the waiting room at Dalston Junction on the North London Railway and in the ladies’ lavatory they found the naked body of a small boy. Even to their untrained eye it appeared that he had been battered with a brick and then suffocated. The brick was close by in two pieces. The police were called. Statements were made to the press who regaled their readers with every gory detail, real and imagined, and a murder hunt was launched.

  On Monday 30 Helen received a letter from Louisa telling her that Manfred was now in France, safe and sound but missing her awfully. All London was buzzing with speculation about the dead boy found at Dalston Junction. Helen was suspicious that the child’s description matched that of Manfred and she went to the police. She provided a formal identification of the dead child. A bundle of little boy’s clothes had been found at Brighton station and Helen gave these a positive identification as well.

  A mass of further evidence was gathered and although Louisa concocted a cock-and-bull story that she had placed Manfred in the care of another foster-mother, the court at the Old Bailey found her guilty and she was hanged at Newgate on the early morning of 9 January 1900 after confessing to the crime. No real reason was adduced about why she murdered her three-year-old son. Perhaps she did it to save on childcare costs. Perhaps she did it because she found her responsibilities for him something of a burden. She clearly did not have a strong maternal streak. Louisa was the first person to be hanged in Britain in the twentieth century.

  Caught by the Telegraph

  Not a murder on a railway train, nor even a murder on railway premises, but a murder where the perpetrator used the railway in his attempt to escape. Also it was a murder where the telegraph, that new-fangled device used to help safety and communication on the railways, showed how effective it could also be in apprehending a suspect on the run. Let us briefly consider the genesis of the electric telegraph.

  Existing methods of communication used particularly in connection with warfare, such as flags and semaphores, were only effective if they could be seen and recognised, and there were many occasions such as darkness and fog, for example, where this was impossible. The earliest hesitant steps in the direction of using electricity for a high-speed form of communication over long distances did not occur in Britain but were on the European continent and also in the USA. By the early 1840s a modification of Samuel Morse’s Morse code was widely used on the American railroads when messages had to be sent at high-speed.

  In Britain William Fothergill-Cooke created an electrically operated telegraph system and early in 1837 obtained permission to conduct trials in a tunnel on the Liverpool & Manchester Railway. His Heath Robinson-like apparatus was not a great success. Greater results occurred when he teamed up with Charles Wheatstone. On 25 July 1837 messages were successfully sent and received on the section of line of the London & Birmingham Railway from Euston to Camden. Despite this success the London & Birmingham was not convinced of its efficiency over longer distances and was wary of the cost of installing this system along the whole length of its main line.

  Our heroes had been elated by the success of the apparatus on Camden Bank and then deflated by its rejection, but nothing loath they set to work to improve it. They did this so effectively that they were able to convince the directors of the Great Western Railway to install the modified system on their main line out of London, initially in 1839 to Hanwell and extended in 1842 to Slough. Now all kinds of messages could be transmitted to assist the safe and efficient running of the Great Western Railway’s main line to the west. Other railway companies adopted the Cooke and Wheatstone system and it soon became almost universal across Britain’s burgeoning railway system.

  Even those who had little interest in railways and no understanding of electricity could not have failed to prick up their ears in 1845 when the telegraph played a vital role in the apprehension of a suspected murderer. John Tawell was a highly intelligent, very personable, persuasive and resourceful man; a devoted worshipper and a social success whose business activities had provided the means for him to have a very comfortable lifestyle. However, as so often happens, behind the respectable veneer there lay a double life.

  Those acquaintances who thought they knew him were not aware that when he was scarcely out of his teens he had been sentenced to transportation on conviction for forgery. His behaviour in the Australian penal colony was exemplary and he managed to return to England as a ‘ticket-of-leave man’, essentially licensed to maintain good behaviour. He quickly insinuated himself into the affections of a rich widow, like him a Quaker, and after they married he had access to her large bank account.

  Tawell had a penchant for extra-marital affairs. One of these was with a woman called Sarah Hart who was a former servant of his. After she left his service he set her up in a cottage in Slough, discreetly out of the public eye. He fathered a couple of children with Sarah and accepted financial responsibility for them. He spent the night or occasional weekend at Slough and ensured that she had enough money to buy the things she wanted. The problem was that Sarah, like many kept women, enjoyed spending her keeper’s money, this being some compensation for the social ostracism that went with her way of life.

  This was all very well until Tawell retired from business and experienced a significant decline in his ready cash. His cash may have declined but Sarah’s desire to spend it showed no sign of waning. He thought it unreasonable that she should insist on living in the manner to which she had become accustomed when his own income had fallen. Very quickly their relationship went from tranquil to tempestuous.

  If Tawell had ever been in love with Sarah, he had now definitely fallen out of love with her. The relationship had become like an albatross and so he resolved to kill her. He made his preparations with care. On 1 January 1845 he bought some prussic acid at a chemist’s shop in the City of London and then cashed a cheque on one of his bank accounts, although he knew he did not have the funds to support it. He called in at a City coffee house where he was known to ascertain what time it closed in the evening. He then headed for Paddington and boarded the four o’clock local train to Slough.

 
He arrived at Sarah’s cottage about five o’clock. It seems that the couple were getting on reasonably well at the time because Sarah made a couple of visits to a local pub to buy some bottles of stout. Later in the evening the mood between Sarah and Tawell changed and neighbours heard them arguing about the children. Tawell wanted Sarah to agree to have them placed with a baby farmer. Shouts and screams of pain followed and Tawell was seen making his way from the cottage clearly in a state of great agitation. Another witness saw him running in the direction of the railway station.

  By this time the neighbour had tried to comfort Sarah, who she thought was dying, and had sent for a doctor. Sarah died just about as soon as the doctor arrived to examine her. A local priest was also called and he took his pony and trap to the station as fast as he could go. He realised that Tawell had been on the station and had left on the return train to Paddington. He persuaded the staff to telegraph to Paddington requesting that Tawell be arrested on arrival there. Police officers were waiting for him, but instead of arresting him they followed him to his lodgings.

  Obviously by the time Tawell returned to the coffee house in the morning the police had more information about him; they were there waiting for him and he was arrested. He initially denied having been in Slough on the previous day or even knowing anyone who lived there. In a rather patronising way he told them that his social status put him above suspicion. He was soon disabused on this matter because he was charged with murder.

  A Cooke and Wheatstone electric telegraph apparatus as used by the Great Western Railway around 1850.

  The trial began on 12 March 1845 at Aylesbury and it excited enormous interest. The evidence suggested that Tawell had somehow managed to place some prussic acid in the stout that Sarah was drinking and it was that poison which had caused her death. On the third day the jury retired to consider their verdict and they took just half an hour to make the decision that Tawell was guilty. Although this was not entirely unexpected the verdict was met with oohs and aahs, and it seems that Tawell, as has been the case with other male murderers, had elicited the adoration of some of the females present in the public area of the court who wept openly and loudly when the sentence of death was pronounced on their hero.

  On 28 March Tawell was hanged at Aylesbury. It is unlikely that he would have been found guilty in a modern court on the strength of the evidence presented. However, the case has retained some fame, less perhaps for the nature of the murder itself than for the fact that Tawell was the first murderer to be apprehended by the authorities using the high-speed communications capability which had just become available courtesy of Cooke and Wheatstone’s electric telegraph. Since the Great Western Railway played something of a pioneering role as far as the electric telegraph is concerned, if it had been another company that Tawell had used to make the journeys to and from the scene of the murder he might have got away with it.

  Plaque to William Terriss. He was a popular actor murdered by an insane and unemployed fellow actor outside Covent Garden underground station. His ghost is said to haunt the station itself.

  Whenever questions are raised concerning the thrusting entrepreneurs who pioneered the development of the major railway companies in the nineteenth century, the name of George Hudson invariably crops up. The popular perception is that he was an unscrupulous and unprincipled egomaniac who enriched himself and made paupers of others who invested their hopes and, of course, their money, in his various railway companies. The implication is that he did this through business activities which, if perhaps not always strictly illegal, were certainly unethical. Here we will outline the apparently inexorable rise of Hudson until the ‘kingdom’ he had created imploded and dragged him down, the fall as so often happens being far more rapid than the climb to wealth and fame.

  Hudson was born in 1800 at Howsham, a small settlement between York and Malton, the fifth son of the family. His father was a tenant farmer who was moderately well off. His father and mother died before he was ten and Hudson seems to have resented John, his eldest brother, taking over as head of the family. He probably found life at home uncongenial and he left and moved to York as soon as possible.

  He had no education to speak of but was remarkably confident and self-possessed. He quickly obtained employment at a draper’s shop in the city. He must have made a good impression because he was only twenty when he was invited to become a partner in the business and shortly after that he married his partner’s sister. The marriage was a happy one. His wife supported him by simply letting him get on with his business affairs and he therefore benefited by knowing that he had a solid domestic base for his life.

  In 1827 Hudson inherited a large amount of money from a great-uncle. This episode has excited the interest of Hudson’s biographers who have noted that he was never close to the man before, and indeed the suggestion has been made that he took advantage of his great-uncle’s mental confusion to have the will changed so that he became the main beneficiary. The sum involved was about £30,000, a princely figure and one which was of defining importance in Hudson’s life because he now had the kind of money which, if used astutely, would garner him further wealth. Now a couple of years shy of thirty, Hudson was among the richest men in York. It was about this time that he decided to become involved in the local politics of the city.

  There is little doubt that many people viewed Hudson as a bad-tempered, quarrelsome, boorish and opinionated upstart, poorly educated and inexperienced. He was on the receiving end of snide comments about his humble origins and especially about the money he had suddenly come into. If such behaviour needled him, which it probably did, he was canny enough not to show it.

  His response was to develop the persona of a plain-speaking, somewhat dogmatic Yorkshireman who valued common sense and hard work more highly than breeding and the sounding of his aitches. He developed very effective rhetorical skills which served him well in the rough and tumble of debate, both in the York political scene and later in the national Parliamentary political arena. He was a Conservative by party as well as being conservative by nature, and he spoke and voted consistently in opposition to proposals for social and political reform.

  Money, as we all know, speaks, and while Hudson may have engendered animosity in York he was able to number himself among a group of local businessmen who set up the York Union Bank, of which he became a director. This was a useful development because this bank was to provide the finance for some of Hudson’s railway schemes. The York Union Bank was associated with the prestigious Glyn’s Bank of London, the chairman of which was George Carr Glyn who was keen on the promotion of new railway schemes and who proved a powerful ally to Hudson over the years.

  Hudson had early learned the truth that it was who you knew and not what you knew that counted. He astutely developed relationships with some of those who would now be described as ‘movers and shakers’, including George and Robert Stephenson who by the mid-1830s were already prominent in railway circles for their developing skills in engineering.

  Two early lines had indicated to a waiting and watching public the potential of railways for moving goods and minerals, reducing transport costs and, to a lesser extent, carrying passengers as well as producing good dividends for those investing in them. These lines were the Stockton & Darlington which started operations in 1825 and even more so the Liverpool & Manchester which opened in 1830. The success of these led to the creation of great numbers of additional schemes and proposals over the next few decades.

  By no means did all of these proposals see the light of day, but those that did materialise did so in a largely unplanned and haphazard manner, and with no suggestion in the early days that the railways should be developed systematically even on a regional let alone a national basis. At this stage they were largely being built to further the interests of the business communities in the places they served, and were also often financed by the same people.

  Hudson was to be a major player in the process of creating large and strong compani
es which came to dominate the railway industry, and also in the associated process whereby investment in railway companies was opened out to embrace a far wider range of people. These investors often had no direct business or local interest in the railways concerned. Some were simply speculators wanting quick, high returns while others were looking for a regular and reliable source of income and were often prepared to invest their life savings in order to do so.

  Hudson wanted to make York into a major railway centre and in 1836 he became the largest subscriber to and chairman of a proposed York & North Midland Railway which, in conjunction with other lines in which he had an interest, would provide two possible through routes to London, albeit rather circuitous ones. York was somewhat in the doldrums at this time and Hudson reasoned that railways would provide the local economy with a much-needed fillip, not least because they would reduce the price of coal in the city and even possibly allow it to become a centre of manufacturing like the booming woollen towns in the West Riding. Obviously he saw business possibilities for himself in these developments.

  The following year saw Hudson become the first Tory Lord Mayor of York, arousing envy and vilification in equal quantities as he did so. His enemies were fond of referring to him as ‘the spouter of fustian’ thereby calling attention to his origins as a tradesman, but Hudson was on a roll and quite prepared to mix it verbally with any or all of his enemies. In fact his public attacks on political enemies were scurrilous even by the standards of the time, and he was happy to make his political differences personal ones as well.

  He surrounded himself with a clique of toadies and placemen who, because they owed their positions to his patronage, almost fell over themselves to do whatever he wanted them to do. There is an expression to the effect that the higher the monkey climbs the tree, the more it shows its bottom. His enemies would have been mindful of this charming old adage. Doubtless Hudson was as well, but at this time in his burgeoning career he probably thought he was fireproof.