Other later buccaneering entrepreneurs such as Horatio Bottomley, Robert Maxwell and John Dolorean, for example, could also do no wrong when the force was with them but they too were eventually caught out. When that happened those people, who only the previous day had been singing their praises and turning a blind eye to their business practices, started trilling a very different song.
There are parallels to be drawn between Hudson and those bankers and other supposed financial high-flyers whose self-seeking activities came to light in the ‘credit crunch’. The reality is that most people knew that their activities, if not actually illegal, were fuelling a speculative boom which would have disastrous effects when it eventually collapsed. One day such people had the Midas touch. The next day, when the inevitable collapse had happened, the bankers found themselves being almost universally excoriated for their ‘greed’.
William Gladstone, a leading figure on the British political scene in the second half of the nineteenth century, ruminated on Hudson’s fall from grace while exhibiting some talent as a poetaster. There was much that he admired about Hudson’s energy and vision but he also knew about the man’s sharp practice and he circulated friends with a little verse to that effect. Hudson, he said:
… bamboozled the mob; he bamboozled the quality;
He led both through the quagmire of gross immorality.2
With some vehemence Gladstone went on – rightly – to condemn the pious self-righteousness of those who apparently only discovered the man’s ethical shortcomings once he could no longer serve them up their unearned income.
The career of Hudson, his rise and fall, was the product of an economic and social system undergoing a particularly dynamic and volatile period in its evolution. The ‘Railway Mania’ encouraged human greed and fed off human gullibility. The railway promoters and managers of the nineteenth century were not noted for their moral scruples. They operated in a dog-eat-dog world and those who were successful – as Hudson was for many years – needed to be ahead of the field in the extent to which they were far-sighted, quick-thinking, ruthless, determined and decisive. If it is felt necessary to judge Hudson, it can only be within the context of the circumstances that produced him.
The Redpath Frauds
One of the most spectacular examples in the nineteenth century of fraud associated with the railways was the case of Leopold Redpath. In August 1856 Edmund Dennison, the chairman of the Great Northern Railway, had addressed a meeting of shareholders in a forthright, even bullish, fashion. Among other things he stated his utmost confidence in the honesty and probity of the company’s employees. In fact he was being somewhat economical with the truth, which was that a couple of years earlier some discrepancies had been discovered in the company’s books.
They related to differences, apparently not huge ones, between the amounts paid in dividends and the amount due to be paid on the stock registered. The company’s officer in charge of the share registration department was a lawyer by the name of Clerk who knew virtually nothing about this aspect of the company’s work. He was due to retire and before he did so he stated that he was confident that the matter could be safely left in the hands of his successor who just happened to be the aforementioned Redpath.
In fact Redpath had basically been doing Clerk’s job under the guise of helping him out and had become indispensable. He saw to it that he kept his knowledge of the department’s work to himself. He had arrived at the Great Northern with glowing references. These, in fact, were forged. Redpath, who had once been declared bankrupt, had in fact left his previous employment under a cloud. Not to put too fine a point on it he had had his fingers in the till.
So we have Leopold Redpath in charge of the entire GNR’s stock and share register while he was creating fraudulent stocks and printing numbered stock certificates which were not included in the company’s books but were being sold through stockbrokers to eager investors. He sold so much bogus scrip that the company was paying out increasingly large amounts of money as dividends when it had never received the capital used to buy the shares in the first place. One of his subordinates had pointed out some discrepancies.
Redpath thanked him for his vigilance and promised that he would carry out an investigation. Understandably this investigation proceeded extremely slowly, but suspicion was building up that something fishy was going on, and at the next shareholder’s meeting Dennison announced to an enraged audience that because an employee had been selling forged shares the state of the company finances meant that there would be no dividends for that half-year.
When the inevitable happened and the police called at his home with a request that he help them with their enquiries Redpath was consuming a large cooked breakfast as though he had not a care in the world. He had the sense to co-operate fully with the process of the law. His character puzzled the authorities. They expected such a big-time swindler to be brash and ostentatious. Instead he was charming, modest and almost self-effacing. His only extravagance was the ownership of two houses, one in London and one in what was once described as ‘the Surrey stockbroker belt’, and the throwing of fine dinner parties at which many of society’s so-called elite would appear. Most of his ill-gotten gains he gave away to charity! People simply could not understand why a swindler should take such risks in order to benefit those less fortunate than himself.
However, his charitable works cut no ice with the court when he appeared at the Old Bailey in 1857. Redpath was sentenced to transportation for life and his assets, to the tune of £25,000 – then a very considerable sum – were sequestered and paid to the Great Northern as partial compensation for the loss they had incurred, a far greater sum estimated at £250,000. What is remarkable is that the frauds were so simple and blatant that a few minutes inspection of the GNR’s register of stocks at any time between 1848 and 1856 would have revealed that fraud was taking place. It is small wonder then that Redpath had kept his cards, or rather the GNR books, so close to his chest and for so long.
The Redpath affair severely shook public confidence in the financial management of the railway companies in general and the Great Northern in particular. A concomitant of this was the emergence of the professional accountant as a replacement for the willing, but often blatantly ignorant, amateur auditor of company accounts. Over the years many railway employees found ways to embezzle the companies they worked for but their activities were small beer compared with those of Hudson and Redpath.
One of the courts in the Old Bailey. How many dramatic courtroom scenes have taken place in these surroundings?
Why Not Travel Free?
A consistent theme throughout the history of railway crime has been that of fare evasion. The Regulation of Railways Act of 1840 made travelling on the railway without a ticket a criminal offence. Additionally, railway companies could sue passengers in civil courts to recover the cost of the fares concerned. As early as 1905 at least one railway company displayed posters ‘naming and shaming’ passengers who had been successfully prosecuted for fare evasion. Some of the Train Operating Companies on the UK’s current scandalously denationalised railway ‘system’ have employed similar methods in recent years. Considerable ingenuity has been exercised by travellers in their attempts to avoid the cost of buying the appropriate ticket.
In the 1860s a most enterprising woman devised her own means of travelling around the British railway system largely free of charge. Her name seems to have been Nell and her first escapade was to be found apparently unconscious on a train at Strood in north Kent. A doctor pronounced her dead and she was taken to the morgue whereupon she amazed everyone by sitting up and gazing around in confusion. The bemused authorities then moved her to the workhouse but she had only been there a few minutes when she brought tears to their eyes by saying that she had been on her way to see her brother but had been drugged and robbed on the train. She was now penniless – but did not remain so for long. The kind-hearted stationmaster heard this tale of woe and promptly issued her with a comp
lementary ticket and gave her £5 from his own pocket.
Perhaps encouraged by her success as an actress and confidence-trickster, she later turned up pulling the same stunt and spinning a similar yarn at New Street station, Birmingham, at Shrewsbury and at Paddington. The latter was one stunt too many. The Great Western Railway police had heard about her and she was arrested. She served a three-month custodial sentence. It is amazing that she was able to feign death successfully and to pass examination by doctors so many times. Those privy to these actions agreed that she might have made a fortune on the stage.
Back in the 1890s a busker left a train carrying what was clearly a full-size harp, presumably his stock-in-trade, covered in green baize. Nothing wrong with that, you might say. An alert railway policeman thought that the man was making rather heavy weather of carrying the instrument. When the musician approached the barrier proffering the correct ticket for his journey, the officer decided to stop and question him, and in doing so discovered that the musician’s daughter, very small for her age but old enough to require a ticket, was huddling inside the package. The busker had not paid for her.
A group of young men travelling to Reading for the races did not bother to buy tickets but displayed some enterprise by jumping off at Reading while the train was slowing to a halt approaching the platform. Then they pretended to be ticket collectors and accosted passengers as they alighted from the train, demanding that they surrender their tickets. They did this brazenly enough to harvest more than enough tickets for all of them and then surrendered them as they passed through the barriers, leaving a sorry gaggle of bemused passengers to explain why they were without tickets. It all goes to show that if you have enough front, you can get away with anything.
In the early days of the railways a few enterprising characters tried forging their own railway tickets, not always successfully. It is said that nature abhors a vacuum and the railway industry owes an enormous debt of gratitude to Thomas Edmondson (1792–1851) who, around 1840, successfully filled a vacuum by developing a ticketing system which was very widely adopted, both at home and abroad. His invention rendered the forgery of railway tickets much more difficult.
Many early ‘authorities to travel’ had consisted of forms in which the relevant details were filled in by hand and were easy to forge. Edmondson was a clerk in the booking office of a wayside station on the Newcastle & Carlisle Railway. He invented a system of pre-printed card tickets containing all the necessary details of each journey booked. Each ticket had its own unique sequential number, distinguishing colours could be used for different classes or types of travel and each ticket was stamped with the relevant date by a machine into which the ticket was inserted. The ticket acted as a receipt which clearly denoted the journey involved and the numbering of each ticket assisted in the process of bookkeeping. These tickets remained in general use until well into the 1960s and their last use by British Railways was in 1990.
In 1875 a gentleman travelling on the Midland Railway from Leicester to St Pancras was arrested at Kentish Town when he was unable to produce a ticket. The staff concerned must have been somewhat heavy-handed and as a result the traveller hit one of them. Upon arrival at the police station the ticket, which the passenger had vehemently claimed he had bought in the normal way, was found. Cleared of the accusation of fare evasion, the focus then turned to the excessive use of force by the railwaymen involved and the magistrates chastised the Midland for employing people who used violence so freely.
In American hobo folklore there are all sorts of stories of people bumming free journeys by ‘riding the rods’, these being part of the appendages to be found under boxcars. This hair-raising way of avoiding the expense of a ticket was rare but not unknown in Britain. In the late nineteenth century there were a few cases, such as the man who had managed to travel under a carriage hanging on to its brake gear all the way from Holyhead to Chester, and another who did a similarly hazardous and uncomfortable trip from Euston to Rugby, in both cases on the London & North Western Railway.
In 1938 a passenger was prosecuted for riding on the roof of an overnight train to Scotland. He had been carousing with friends and was more than a little drunk before deciding to hitch a free ride. He quickly sobered up once he realised what a hazardous situation he had got himself into and indeed he almost fell off several times when the carriage gave a sudden lurch. Suitably chastened, he made his way down to the platform at the first stop only to face a hostile reception from station staff and the railway police. He was fined.
The printing of tickets by passengers is a fine example of self-help but one not approved of by the railway authorities. One man produced very high-quality tickets in the 1930s but was found out after the Second World War when he submitted a ticket bearing the company name ‘LNER’ when the railways had just been nationalised. Counterfeit and foreign coins have been used in ticket machines but technology has gradually reduced the possibilities of this kind of fraud. Providing the wrong name and address is also a criminal act. Railway-users have been prosecuted for doing so.
1 Beaumont, R. The Railway King, p.255.
2 Quoted in Bailey, B. George Hudson, The Rise and Fall of the Railway King, p.153.
A Murder on the train up to Town
It was just after midday on a January morning in 1901 when Mrs Rhoda King entered a third-class compartment of a train of the London & South Western Railway at the main station in Southampton. The train was bound for London Waterloo. It was due to stop only at Eastleigh, Winchester and at Vauxhall which was just short of Waterloo, and where all the passengers’ tickets were inspected. Vauxhall was ideal for Rhoda because it was much closer to Battersea – where she was going to visit her poorly sister – than Waterloo was.
Rhoda had a husband and children but she was a strong-minded sort and quite used to travelling long distances on her own at a time when some women at least were becoming more assertive and independent. She left Southampton as the only occupant of the compartment. Such single occupancy was viewed by most travellers with mixed feelings. Many of them enjoyed being on their own and they resented anyone else entering the compartment and intruding on their ‘territory’.
Many passengers, however, and not only women, were more unhappy about sharing a single compartment with just one other male stranger. He might make unwanted advances, or worse. He might be intent on robbery. He might simply be an incredible bore who would relentlessly inflict his life story on the captive audience so conveniently provided by the compartment type of carriage. If two or more passengers entered the compartment then these scenarios were immediately rendered much less likely.
Soon after leaving Southampton the train pulled into Eastleigh where a giant of a young fellow joined Rhoda. He gave her a friendly enough nod and she smiled back, rather admiring his height and his powerful build. He looked quite a man. She felt inclined to engage him in conversation but did not want to appear too forward. The opportunity to follow up their brief salutation passed and each remained silent as the train proceeded on its way. It was not far to Winchester, where a third person entered the compartment. This was a Mr William Pearson who looked just like a well-set-up farmer, which is not surprising because that is exactly what he was. He was clearly worth a bob or two and the young man’s eyes must have lit up.
Now our young man who had got in at Eastleigh went by the name of George Parker, and while there was much about his appearance that attracted women he was a thoroughly bad lot. He was twenty-three and had managed to cram a fair amount of skulduggery into his short life. He had been in the army but had been dishonourably discharged after a brief career punctuated by various unacceptable misdemeanours. He was wanted by the police in connection with an act of theft at the Lyceum Theatre in London’s West End where he had worked.
Now he was returning to London after enjoying several days of robust rumpy pumpy with an older married woman from the Eastleigh district. She had been at the station to see him off and observers were surprised by j
ust how passionate the couple’s embraces had been. This activity, of course, unlike the others, was not a disciplinary matter nor was it punishable by the law, but it does suggest that Parker was a young man who took his chances where he could find them.
He was chancing it now, being on the train with a ticket which authorised him to travel only as far as Winchester. For him this was a mere technicality. Living life according to his own standards – to the full – he was permanently strapped for cash. He was hanging around trains looking for someone to rob, and by doing so hoping to get at least short-term surcease from his money problems. He had bought a revolver with robbery in mind.
The three passengers sat in the compartment apparently studiously ignoring each other. In fact Rhoda kept sneaking admiring glances at the good-looking Parker. He in turn was eyeing up Pearson and had come to the conclusion that he looked just the kind of person who was worth robbing. Pearson for his part looked at no one in particular. He dozed and sporadically gazed out of the window.
Parker decided that he would rob the rustic-looking gentleman sitting opposite. If he resisted, then he would have to be shot and killed. Dead men tell no tales. Since dead women also tell no tales, he would have to do the same to the woman. This was a shame because he had spotted her eyeing him up and rather felt that he would like to take the acquaintance further. She did not look as if she was carrying much money though.
Parker noted that the train was passing Surbiton and that the deed would have to be done soon or not at all. As the train was approaching Clapham Junction Parker pulled out his gun and with no more ado shot Pearson, killing him instantly. Next he fired at Rhoda, winging her on her face, and then hurled the pistol out of the window at Nine Elms as the train was slowing for the Vauxhall stop.
Blood on the Tracks: A History of Railway Crime in Britain Page 11