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

by Brandon, David

  The first railway company to employ men in a police role was the Stockton & Darlington which opened in 1825. Their brief was to guard the railway and its associated activities against theft and other crime, to patrol as a visible deterrent to potential criminal activity and to contribute to the safe working of the line. They were full-time paid employees and were dressed distinctively in a uniform of a non-military style.

  The more significant Liverpool & Manchester Railway opened in 1830 and had a police force with similar duties, except that additionally they acted as the predecessors of signalmen – or signallers as they are now called. It was this role, in combination with their uniforms which were modelled on those of the Metropolitan Police, that led to railway workers using the word ‘Bobby’ to refer to signalmen. The early railway policemen only had powers of arrest on railway property itself and were frequently left impotently cursing their ill luck when a suspect was sufficiently fleet of foot to evade their clutches and escape onto adjoining land.

  In 1838 railway companies were required by law to provide their own police forces instead of drawing on local constabularies. This had been something which ratepayers strongly resented because they did not see why they should subsidise the security needs of private companies. The boisterous and sometimes illegal activities of the railway navvies have been discussed elsewhere, but they required a lot of policing and local forces had often been called upon to keep order, the numbers of railway company police often being insufficient to cope with outbreaks of trouble.

  A number of towns, of which Crewe, Swindon and Wolverton are examples, were virtually created by the railways and were company towns in that sense. There the railway police in the early days carried out the functions of the county constabulary where such a force existed. One by one the railway companies established their own police forces and the men concerned were faced with an intimidating set of duties. Let us take the regulations of the Great Western Railway as an example.

  Apart from the overall requirement that the police officers be vigilant and watch over and preserve law and order on railway property, they had to receive and despatch signals, operate points and crossings, ensure there were no obstructions on the line, assist in the event of accidents, remove trespassers, patrol lines and installations to ensure that all the company workers were carrying out their duties satisfactorily, announce arrivals and departures, provide help and information for people requiring assistance, watch for such possibilities as land slips or bridge failures, make safety checks on the rails and sleepers and ensure that their superior officers were kept fully up-to-date with all developments and incidents.

  When required they were expected to carry passengers’ luggage and check tickets. In return for this they received a wage, in most cases unlikely to exceed one pound for a six-day week. Fortunately this range of duties gradually became curtailed as they tended to be taken over by specialist workers and the officers were able to concentrate on what Gilbert and Sullivan described as constabulary duties. Oh yes, they were also expected to salute passing trains!

  Another aspect of railway policing was detective work and, of course, you’ve guessed it, as if the poor old railway bobby was not busy enough already he was expected to do a spot of detecting as well. However, it was not long before specialist detectives began to be used. They worked in plain clothes and were often disguised as porters or similar staff and they worked inconspicuously on stations and in goods depots where thefts were regularly taking place.

  Perhaps a more interesting job was following and watching people who had made large claims for compensation from a railway company for personal injuries supposedly sustained on or around railway property. It was by no means unknown for such people to obtain the necessary medical certification and yet to be seen striding purposefully – and with a look of eager greedy anticipation – towards the courtroom where their case was about to be considered. They did not always have the sense to slow down and start limping when they came in sight of the court!

  One example of such a fraudster was a passenger aboard a train of the London & North Western Railway which received a slight bump during a shunting operation at Euston station. It really was only the slightest jolt and no one else bothered except this particular gentleman, who claimed that he had not only had an awful shock but he had also injured his back so severely that he was unable to carry on his lucrative private business. He demanded compensation. It was quickly discovered that the man had no business at all but was in serious debt and had chanced on the incident at Euston as a way of raising much-needed cash.

  A railway policeman indicating the ‘All Clear’. His general appearance is like the Metropolitan Police established around 1829 by Sir Robert Peel.

  He was trailed for several weeks by railway detectives who watched him as he heaved great pieces of furniture and heavy trunks and boxes around when helping a lady friend to move home. He was also seen romping energetically on the floor with the lady’s infant son. His case against the company was summarily dismissed by the court and the London & North Western Railway then took out a warrant for perjury. Our friend had managed to scrape together sufficient money for a ticket to the USA but he was arrested shortly before he was due to embark. His reward was nine months’ hard labour.

  Perhaps typical of the thousand and one seemingly mundane cases dealt with by the railway detectives was one which came to court at Birmingham in 1917. In the dock was James Hardwick, a shunter in the employment of the Great Western Railway and he was accused of having stolen half a pint of essence of lemonade to the value of one shilling from a box van at Hockley Goods Depot in the city. Two Great Western Railway detectives were on the night shift at the depot and heard someone moving around in the van. They squatted down and awaited developments.

  It was Hardwick in the van and he was apprehended carrying a drinking can containing lemonade, which he said he had been using to put under a leaking container of the drink. There was indeed a large stone jar containing essence of lemonade in the van but it was not leaking. There were also containers of whisky and the court took the somewhat uncharitable view that Hardwick, and perhaps others, were helping themselves to the odd whisky and lemonade to make the night shift a little more tolerable.

  Hardwick was fined but managed to avoid a custodial sentence. It is likely that he also lost his job. A very different incident occurred in the 1900s at what was then Cardiff general station. There a Great Western Railway detective intervened in the nick of time to prevent a dastardly Frenchman eloping with an eighteen-year-old Welsh girl described as being ‘of exceedingly attractive appearance’.

  Sometimes the activities of the railway police provided a bit of knockabout farce. Early in the 1980s plain-clothes officers were investigating a series of ingenious thefts of mail bags from railway property at Basingstoke. They kept watch on the platform and, to their surprise, saw what looked like a clerical gentleman making off with a number of mail bags. They gave chase and apprehended the man only to be set upon in turn by two robust elderly ladies who belaboured the officers with their umbrellas, convinced that the clergyman was being assaulted by cowardly thugs. The ‘clerical gentleman’ turned out to be a professional actor between jobs whose brief criminal career around Basingstoke station had garnered him about £100,000 of stolen mail.

  In the 1980s the police, including British Transport Police, were aware that a very dangerous vagrant was at large, with a string of convictions for drink-related offences and who had previously been tried and acquitted on a murder and attempted murder charge. He had confessed to an officer that he had killed at least nine people and attacked innumerable others, his victims always fellow vagrants for whom he had enormous contempt.

  A conviction was very hard to bring about, the vagrants being reluctant to help the police with enquiries, but eventually, after killing again, the perpetrator was charged and stood trial. He received two life sentences, the judge commenting that he showed no remorse and had to be kept behind walls b
ecause he posed such a danger to the public.

  The Transport Police were involved again in that decade when the body of a young man was found beside a railway line in south London. The man was known to be gay and so officers went undercover to investigate, assisted by a witness. Luckily, after the body of another man was found, this witness was able to identify the attacker. The man concerned confessed to these and further crimes and was convicted.

  Another criminal activity which British Transport Police or their predecessors have had to deal with is terrorism. It has a long history. In the 1860s and 1880s a number of incidents involved the Fenians who were Irish nationalists. Those in the 1880s were serious. In January 1883 some explosions caused damage at a number of locations around Glasgow including Buchanan Street Goods Depot. In October 1883 there were explosions on the London Underground at the then Praed Street station and later between Charing Cross and Westminster. Fortunately there were no fatalities.

  Various bomb scares caused considerable disruption and a large bomb caused significant damage at London’s Victoria station on 26 February 1884. A Metropolitan Railway train travelling from Aldgate to Hammersmith was bombed near Gower Street station (now Euston Square), but the damage was spectacular rather than lethal. Searches by railway police of the cloakrooms of all the main termini in London revealed three other bombs. Hidden in a case, each bomb consisted of a detonating device embedded in dynamite and primed to go off at a predetermined time. They were skilfully disarmed. A sustained campaign by the police led to many arrests and by 1885 it was clear that this particular bombing campaign was over.

  There have been sporadic outbreaks of terrorist activity on the railways since that time. Here are some examples. The Irish Republican Army (IRA) exploded a number of bombs mostly around London and Birmingham in 1939 and 1940, and the Provisional IRA gave notice of its intentions in 1973 when there were explosions at London’s King’s Cross and Euston stations which injured twenty-one people. 1976 saw a bomb demolish most of a carriage on a train leaving Cannon Street station in London. Fortunately this was an empty stock train and it suggests that whoever planted the bomb got the timing wrong.

  Only a few days later a terrorist got onto a train at West Ham underground station carrying a bomb secreted in a briefcase. It was not secreted very well because the briefcase began to emit smoke. The terrorist panicked and threw the briefcase down the carriage whereupon it exploded causing many injuries. The terrorist himself was hurt, but in trying to get away shot and killed a policeman before being shot himself.

  ‘Genuine’ warnings of bombs and hoaxes can also cause just the kind of confusion and disruption that warms the heart of a terrorist. Suspect packages left in strategic places can work wonders in bringing transport systems to a grinding halt. Thirty-nine potentially explosive and/or incendiary devices were found close to lines used by passenger trains between February 1991 and October 1994 alone. Most were in Greater London. Not all were actually capable of being detonated but in some cases were probably placed with the intention of causing disruption rather than destruction, injury or death.

  In 1990 there was a shooting at Lichfield City station when the IRA ‘executed’ one soldier and injured two others. In 1991 a bomb went off at Victoria and one person was killed while a bomb at London Bridge in 1992 caused twenty-nine to be injured. In July 2005 a gang of British-born Muslim suicide bombers detonated a number of bombs on the London Underground as a result of which fifty-six people died and 700 were injured.

  The main-line railways and the underground are very vulnerable to the activities of terrorists, either by causing disruption, damage or death and injury, but the Transport Police have a formidable array of security devices at their disposal which can help to counter the possibility of such atrocities being repeated. Even those fairly limited political rights enjoyed by the people of Britain did not come without hard-fought campaigns and struggles which often involved recourse to illegal activity.

  During the nineteenth century, and often as a result of extra-Parliamentary political methods, the majority of men gained the franchise in national and then local government elections. Many women saw no reason why they should not also be enfranchised and movements for votes and for other aspects of female emancipation built-up steadily during the nineteenth century and in the period leading up to the First World War. The attitude of many men to political rights for women was one of contemptuous dismissal and it was out of a feeling of continuing frustration with this rejection that some women turned to more extreme methods of persuasion.

  These activists, often termed ‘suffragettes’, were prepared to employ arson and other illegal methods to draw attention to their cause. Railways were among the institutions that were on the receiving end of suffragette action in the period between December 1912 and May 1914. Railway buildings and rolling stock were vandalised and set on fire, signalling equipment tampered with and even small home-made bombs were detonated. Some failed to explode. On most occasions items were found nearby left by the suffragettes announcing that such actions would only stop once women had won the vote.

  The locations of these incidents were genuinely nationwide and by no means restricted to London and the major urban areas. The furthest north incident was at Leuchars Junction on the North British Railway but the rural fastnesses of Monmouthshire were also involved. The terrorist activity ceased abruptly once war broke out because most of the suffragettes, perhaps to many people’s surprise, threw themselves into support of the war effort.

  A suffragette selling papers. The force-feeding of suffragettes in prison was an emotive issue which aroused both sympathy and antipathy.

  An issue that had exercised the attention of the railway police from earliest times is that of vandalism. No sooner had trains started running than people began to throw missiles at them or put obstructions on the line in order to see what happened when trains hit them. Within weeks of the opening of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway in 1830 a man was arrested and fined for having placed a sleeper on the line. Many small boys, and even indeed older men who should have known better, found they could not resist the idea of standing on bridges and trying to drop stones down the chimneys of steam locomotives passing underneath. Sometimes much heavier objects were dropped on trains such as coping stones dislodged from bridges across the track. As early as 1883 when Frederick S. Williams published Our Iron Roads he had noted:

  …the amount of loss which railway companies sustain from wilful and wanton damage is as great as it is inexcusable. A railway carriage is often so mutilated that it has to be upholstered de novo; and brainless fops who wear diamond rings consider it a display at once of their elegance and wit to scrape the glass in such a way as to interrupt the view, or even to outrage decency…

  People have even obtained ‘fun’ from shooting at trains. In 1963 at Keynsham on the line between Bristol and Bath a train was hit by a flaming arrow made of copper rod during a spate of such incidents involving other targets in the area. Obviously such activities not only endangered life but also frequently damaged rolling stock and caused serious disruption.

  The leather straps which were once used to close carriage windows or to adjust how far the window was open were attractive to thieves and vandals. They were made of high-quality leather and were very useful for stropping razors. Light bulbs have been removed, probably to the extent of millions over the years, and carriage seats slashed with sadistic glee. Trains have been set on fire and line-side installations such as signals, signal boxes, permanent way cabins, goods depots and passenger stations attacked and damaged. These installations have often been targeted at quiet times and have frequently been in remote locations and therefore detection by the railway police let alone prosecution has often been difficult.

  It has to be said that the railways have all too often provided vandals with tempting items to place on railway lines. These include rail chairs, sleepers, concrete blocks, trolley wheel sets and other items of infrastructure liberally scat
tered close to running lines. However, items used in an attempt to derail a train do not necessarily have to be close to hand. In 1957 on the London, Tilbury & Southend section of the Eastern Region near Pitsea, a tree trunk weighing three hundredweight had been dragged half a mile before being placed on the line.

  A cartoon of 1865. The guard pokes his head through the carriage window. ‘Smoking not allowed, gents.’ The swell replies, ‘What’s the fine?’ Guard: ‘A shilling, ready money to the guard, sir. Forty shillings to the company, payable by instalments at your own convenience.’ Victorian humour can seem heavy-handed.

  Fatalities have occurred as the result of obstructions being placed on the line deliberately. An early example was in 1851 when a train from Brighton to Lewes came off the track after hitting a sleeper which had been placed close to the line with malicious intent. The train hit a bridge parapet and tumbled down an embankment. Five people died.

  The work of the British Transport Police is continuous and every day brings surprises.

  ‘All sorts of comedy, tragedy, gallantry and melodrama of real life were often enacted in very ordinary railway compartments’ wrote C. Hamilton Ellis in Railway Carriages in the British Isles, from 1830 to 1914 (1965). The carriage was just one element of railways, but a particularly useful one that was employed widely in film and literary fiction. Additionally, railways offered a whole new range of locations such as waiting rooms, tunnels, signal boxes, sidings and stations, all of which could be readily adapted as the settings for foul and dastardly deeds. The arrival of the railway very quickly offered up a scenario with almost limitless possibilities for the writers of fiction and again for the early moving-picture makers. A relationship between the railways and the literary and cinematic arts developed which continues to this day.