An Appointment with Albert Pierrepoint
Railway ticket offices at small, quiet stations late at night used to be tempting targets for robbers. Nowadays most small, quiet stations do not have ticket offices at all, let alone ones that are open in the evenings.
Ash Vale, next station along the line after Aldershot going towards London Waterloo, was a small but busy station, though by eight in the evening most of the remaining passengers using the station were eagerly making their way home from London or wherever else they had been. Few of them wished to book tickets at that time of the night and so the Southern Region of British Railways as an economy measure in the 1950s closed the booking offices at stations like Ash Vale around eight in the evening. A porter then issued what few tickets might be required.
So it was that about eight in the evening on 22 August 1952 the clerk, whose name was Dean, locked up the office at Ash Vale leaving the porter the means of issuing tickets to any belated travellers who wanted them. The clerk told the porter that he would be staying in the office for an hour or more to catch up with some paperwork. About an hour later a soldier saw the light on in the office and knocked on the window whereupon the confused sounds coming from inside stopped abruptly. He knocked on the window again but received no response.
Another railwayman on his way to work saw the light on in the office, and thinking that it had been left on by mistake knocked on the door. He must have been the inquisitive sort because he then climbed up in order to look through a chink of space left by the blind. What he saw horrified him. A man’s body lay on its back in a pool of blood. He could even see that the door of the small safe was open.
The unfortunate Dean had been subjected to a ferocious attack in which he had received over twenty stab wounds on his body and elsewhere. The motive had clearly been robbery because the safe was empty. Many heavy coin bags lay on the floor but about £168 was missing. The railway police and the county constabulary immediately started a murder investigation. Aldershot was close by and the military personnel stationed there were quizzed and a search was undertaken of all hotels and boarding houses in the area. This proved to be unrewarding work until a tip-off persuaded two officers to make a return visit to a multi-occupied boarding house.
Here, in a rather seedy bed-sit, they found a number of blood-stained articles – clothing and money and a passport. They waited for the occupant of the room to turn up and promptly arrested him when they did. He was caught completely by surprise and could not take the pressure. He surrendered a knife secreted in the chimney, gave them some pieces of paperwork taken from the safe at Ash Vale station and showed them his wallet which contained rather more money than a man living in such a place would normally be expected to have legitimately on his person. He also had a set of new clothes which he had clearly bought to replace those stained with the blood of the unfortunate railway clerk. There could not have been much more obvious evidence of guilt. The attacker’s name was John James Alcott.
It was clear that the robbery had been some time in the planning. Alcott was a locomotive fireman and he used the fraternity so common among railway workers to make friends with and win the trust of the clerk in the ticket office at Ash Vale. His opening gambit had been to ask Dean about the times of boat trains from Victoria to Dover. He became a familiar face and in particular he used the relationship to get access to the office and, with the clerk’s permission, to make short telephone calls, always, at least so he said, to other railwaymen. Clearly this was his way of casing the joint.
Over a week or two he made repeated visits to the clerk, passing the time of day over a mug of tea until the fatal evening when, although the office had closed as we have heard, the luckless Dean was catching up with the backlog. Fatally he admitted Alcott who, after a few minutes, launched a savage attack. Dean put up a good, but not good enough, fight. Alcott was sentenced to death for what was described by the judge as a ‘cold-blooded murder’. Dean had been a married man with a young daughter.
It turned out that Alcott had been in trouble with the authorities before. In 1949 he was in the Coldstream Guards serving in Germany and had been sentenced to death for the murder of a German civilian but he had evaded execution on some technicality. His appointment with the famed public hangman Albert Pierrepoint was at Wandsworth Prison on Friday 2 June 1953 and was brief and one-sided.
A recent view of Ash Vale station, hardly an impressive building. It has, however, to be better than a bus shelter.
What happened at Gloucester Road Tube?
It is probably true to say that there have been remarkably few murders on the London Underground given the massive passenger usage of the system over what is now almost a century and a half since the first trains ran between Paddington and Farringdon. One twentieth-century murder has never been solved.
It occurred on 24 May 1957 at Gloucester Road on the deep-level Piccadilly Line part of the station. An aristocratic lady of Polish extraction, Teresa Lubienska, was seen by witnesses leaving a tube train but unfortunately before the day of CCTV; no one saw what happened next. She was evidently attacked and apparently stabbed many times by an unknown assailant who is thought to have escaped via the emergency staircase. Her body was found soon after she had died but no clue has ever been established as to the motive for the murder or to the identity of the murderer.
Frontage of the present-day Gloucester Road underground station. We should be pleased that some thoughtful restoration work has been carried out on this building.
Slam-door electric multiple-units of the type once so familiar in London’s southern suburbs. The picture is taken at Addiscombe which no longer sees ‘heavy-rail’ trains but is served by the very successful Croydon Tramlink.
More Recent Crimes
We chose not to enter into detail about the more recent serious crimes to take place on Britain’s railways, but crime has continued. In the 1980s, a number of young women were sexually assaulted, raped and sometimes murdered on or around railway property in the Greater London area. The reports of these attacks made many women reluctant to travel but the life of the metropolis had to go on and women of necessity continued to travel by themselves. The dual perpetrators of these crimes were apprehended and punished.
Another crime of the 1980s involved a woman travelling in the compartment of a slam-door electric multiple-unit. On the train’s arrival at its destination, the woman’s body was discovered having suffered multiple stab wounds. This case remains open.
The railway has also been used as a secondary tool in murder. It has been known for murderers, having killed their victims, to then place the body on a railway track in the hope that a passing train would make the death appear accidental.
In this chapter we take a brief look at some aspects of crime associated with the railways which are not dealt with elsewhere in the book.
A case could be made for saying that the navvies were the unsung heroes of Britain’s railway revolution. They laboured in huge numbers doing the most difficult and dangerous work when over 20,000 route miles of railways were being built in the nineteenth century. It was the navvies who hewed away at solid rock making cuttings and tunnels, and it was their skilled physical efforts that enabled the building of thousands of embankments, bridges and viaducts.
The names of the big contractors such as Peto and Brassey have lived on, but those of the navvies – many of them who died or were maimed while doing this heroic work – have largely been forgotten. That the role of the navvies has to some extent become better appreciated owes much to the pioneering work of Terry Coleman, whose book The Railway Navvies was first published in 1965. It was aptly subtitled ‘The history of the men who made the railways’. Other, later examples of this kind of history from below have expanded on and amplified what Coleman wrote.
These writers show that the blame for many of the accidents in which men died or were injured can be laid at the feet of those contractors who placed profit before the safety and welfare of their work
ers. They also demonstrate how the men were defrauded, often by subcontractors who frequently used the truck system to pay the men a substantial part of their wages in the form of tokens which were only redeemable at the subcontractors own shops. There they ripped the navvies off with high prices and poor-quality goods which were often underweight. Few contractors ever faced legal proceedings. There were some contractors, however, who treated their men decently.
The navvies, it has to be said, were no saints. They often came like an invading army and a large force of such men was bound to upset the relative tranquillity of remote rural settlements that were close to the path of such lines as the Settle & Carlisle and the Carlisle to Edinburgh ‘Waverley Route’. The navvies frequently boasted of their drinking, eating and fighting prowess and were shunned and feared by many for their apparent godlessness. They gambled, they poached, they swore, they blasphemed and they swaggered around in their distinctive clothes. They cared not one toss for the mores of middle-class Victorian society while they looked down loftily on the ordinary labourers who did the routine jobs on the construction sites and were not part of the elite. The navvies even had women with them in their encampments who were not their wives. This scandalised respectable Victorian society!
Many of the navvies were of Irish and Scottish origin. They had a marked antipathy to the English navvies, a feeling which was heartily reciprocated. When a reason could be found, and they did not have to look hard, then the Irish fought the Scots or the English, or two of the ethnic groups would combine to fight the third. Such groupings could change overnight. Inevitably the presence of large numbers of rough, tough itinerant alpha males led to trouble – with each other and with the local police. The latter were often hopelessly outnumbered and overawed by the presence of the navvies.
The disputes, which sometimes evolved into riots, were often about concrete issues facing the navvies in their everyday work. These might involve wage rates or complaints about the truck or ‘tommy-shops’ and in these cases ethnic considerations usually took second place to workers’ solidarity. Trouble was most frequent when the men were paid, which was sometimes only monthly and often in a pub – a mutually advantageous arrangement made between contractor and publican.
Temporarily flush with money, the navvies would embark on a monster drinking orgy which on at least one occasion ended when the pub ran out of beer and the navvies, who by this time were fighting mad, showed their disgust by literally pulling the building down. On occasions the railway contractors used navvies as soldiers in battles with landowners and their retainers, or even other contractors, a kind of strange reprise of the old days of feudalism. Examples include the ‘Battles’ of Saxby on the Rutland and Leicestershire border, Mickleton Tunnel in Worcestershire and Clifton Junction, north of Manchester.
It would be wrong to conclude that the navvies were a wholly lawless and nihilistic group of men. Most of their working hours and their leisure activities were, of course, carried out entirely unexceptionally. The vast majority of navvies were law-abiding for most of the time. As always from the point of view of the media the only good news was bad news, and the books written about them have made much of the activities that came to the attention of the authorities at the time. This has inevitably coloured popular perceptions of the navvies but the reality is that, collectively, they made an enormous contribution to the creation of Britain’s railway system and therefore to the revolutionary impact that the railways had on the economy and on society.
Barrow-runs in use during the building of a deep cutting, probably on the London & Birmingham Railway in the late 1830s. A horse at the top pulled the wooden barrow up the wooden ramp, steered by the navvy, an extremely hazardous operation especially when the ramp was slippery with mud.
Although the names of the individuals concerned have largely been forgotten, it is pleasant to record that at Otley in West Yorkshire and close to the parish church of All Saints there is a monument to twenty-three railway navvies. They lost their lives in the building of Bramhope Tunnel on what became known as the Leeds Northern Railway between Leeds and Northallerton. The line was opened throughout in 1849 and the tunnel was then the third longest in Britain. The monument, towards the cost of which the contractor made a substantial contribution, consists of a miniature railway tunnel with two splendidly castellated portals. Its maximum height is 6ft. It is inscribed with a number of biblical quotations but not with the names of any of those who had died.
Navvies of the 1890s, probably engaged on the building of the Great Central Railway’s London Extension.
Trespass
The total number of people killed while trespassing on the railways has never been computed but records suggest that in 1843 at least seventeen died and in 1903 the remarkable figure of 442 is given. Moving trains and railway installations provided a host of hazards, but despite notices to the effect that trespassers were liable to prosecution (under criminal rather than civil law), they have and indeed continue to take risks, including using the railway as a short cut.
The memorial in Otley churchyard to the navvies who died in the building of the nearby Bramhope Tunnel.
In the earliest days of the railways people seemed to find it hard to appreciate that if a train was bearing down on them it could not swerve to avoid hitting them unlike a horse and rider or a horse-drawn wagon or carriage. It would be futile to attempt to identify all the reasons why trespass has taken place, but it often occurred when some other offence was being perpetrated such as theft of railway property or poaching.
Drunks often took short cuts along railway lines, endangering themselves as well as others. In 1844 at Hebden Bridge in the old West Riding of Yorkshire a man was found asleep right by the railway track, his head only inches from the rail. Such was the depth of his drunken slumbers that at least two trains had passed on this particular track, one of which had knocked his hat off, without him awakening. The courts have not generally been very understanding where befuddled and confused passengers have trespassed, even if they did so unconsciously.
In 1864 a company generally known as the Solway Junction Railway was established with the intention of moving iron ore from West Cumberland to the iron and steel works in Lanarkshire in Scotland. To provide a short route independent of rival companies the decision was taken to build a viaduct from just south of Annan on the Scottish side to Bowness on the English shore across the notoriously dangerous waters of the Solway Firth. The Solway Viaduct was a rather flimsy-looking structure no less than 1,940yds long and carried on 193 cast-iron piers. It opened fully for traffic in 1870.
This long-forgotten viaduct proved to be something of a white elephant because the high-quality Cumberland haematite ore was mostly worked out by the end of the century. It also proved expensive to maintain because the piers were scoured by the unpredictable currents in the firth, and in cold winters substantial ice floes came down the Solway hitting and seriously damaging the structure.
The few remaining trains were withdrawn in 1921 and the viaduct was left to its own devices. It was demolished between 1933 and 1935 and the only traffic in the final years had been doughty, determined and thirsty Scotsmen who trespassed by walking across the increasingly decrepit viaduct so that they could enjoy a few drinks in the English pubs on a Sunday, their own being closed on that day.
To walk across the viaduct was no mean undertaking on account of its exposure to howling winds and spray thrown up by the turbulent waters of the firth and its increasingly unsafe condition. Eventually a watchman was employed at the southern end to stop trespass but it was found easy to bribe him with a bottle or two which made his lonely vigil a little more bearable. Generations of trainspotters systematically trespassed when entering locomotive sheds and works in pursuit of engine numbers. These places were quite extraordinarily hazardous and even more so at night when spotters felt they were less likely to be seen. Some sheds attracted spotters, or ‘gricers’ as they were sometimes known, in huge numbers and staff were f
orced to spend much of their time in a futile attempt to keep them out.
At some sheds this was like trying to plug a collapsing dam with a finger and staff simply gave up, disgusted by the antics of those who regarded themselves as railway enthusiasts. Occasionally they or the railway police caught a few youths and gave them a good talking to. In the 1950s and 1960s this might have given them sufficient enough a scare to act as a deterrent… until the next time. At some of the most sought-after and well-guarded sheds, Crewe North comes to mind, the spotters would gather in a group of thirty or more and storm their way into the shed on the basis that they could not all be caught, and that between them they would manage to note down all the numbers, including those in the shed’s inner recesses. Such a stampede was almost impossible to prevent.
The Solway Viaduct. The approach embankment to this lonely and ill-fated viaduct can be still seen on the English side of the Solway Firth not far from Bowness-on-Solway.
Elsewhere great ingenuity might be employed in gaining access to the hallowed portals of a shed. Spotters might squat down so that they could not be seen by the foreman as they shuffled surreptitiously past the office window at the entrance, or they might hide out of view behind a moving engine and gain access that way. Holes in fences, a scuttle across a convenient roof or even climbing a tree and dropping from a well-placed branch – these and a host of other methods were employed in the attempt to gain entry and secure some more ‘cops’ to put in the treasured ABC.
Notices warning against trespass were studiously ignored and it was known that few trespassing spotters were ever actually taken to court. Even live electric conductor rails such as those in the vicinity of a Gateshead shed on Tyneside were not enough to deter some of the more determined, or should we say foolhardy, spotters. It was a risk they were prepared to take to be able to enter those elusive numbers in their books.
Blood on the Tracks: A History of Railway Crime in Britain Page 17